Modern science has been corrupted by naive empiricism, the epistemological belief that data presents its own interpretation. When science is conducted with a rigorous philosophical method, it generates an obscene amount of information without any scientific value. It does this because data is predicated on hypothetical methods, which themselves need to be vetted properly by the intellect. Modern empirical methods, due limitations inherent to institutions and humanity itself, are caught in a vicious circle where they are incapable of generating authoritative data, but instead must generate any data. As a result, most scientific fields have failed to meaningfully progress in the last few decades, particularly the social sciences and medicine.
Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!
Modern science is an intellectual tire fire. It continuously burns, never seems to end, although there is always some ‘new’ information that we must accumulate. The longer one stays with it however, a dyspepsia emerges for anyone that breathes it too deeply. Such is the result of naive empiricism. By ‘naive empiricism’, I understand a type of empirical study which believes that truths are found within the data itself, and that by virtue of that data, truth will be uncovered. Such a mode of scientific thinking is flawed. It results in a twisted, smoldering mess of confused thinking that leads to endless debates, but offers few definitive answers. Rather than come to an answer, one leaves with a sense of bewilderment. Much scholarship today, and most of the popularizers of scientific thinking (particularly journalists) suffer from this, and it leads to a fetishization, almost a type of tabloid science.
The problems of empirical dogmatism are both methodological and conceptual. Such error has a long pedigree, and can be easily dated back to the Greeks. The cure, for people like Aristotle and Plato was to ground empiricism in philosophy, and then use intellectual methods to set the agenda. Modern thinkers have recognized this problem as well, the best of which is Francis Bacon, the father of modern empirical science. Bacon, in his work Novum Organon (its title taken from Aristotle’s Organon) gives a metaphor of three different intellectual enterprises and describes them in terms of three different insects. “Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.”
The flaw of naive empiricism is that of the ant. Rather than digest the information and come to any conclusion, it merely ‘gathers’ and ‘lay[s] up’ information into a great whole, unable to process and digest it properly. This leads to a general fetish for information, like a bird collecting shiny objects without any purpose or end.
Immanuel Kant similarly recognized this problem and describes it in the last pages of his Critique of Pure Reason in terms of a ‘heaping’ problem. He describes an ‘architectonic’, a unified locus of understanding around a particular subject. This is what the Greeks understood ‘science’ to mean originally. It didn’t mean any technical or empirical study of the universe, but rather the unified system of understanding that would result from such study. Therefore, the Ancients had a science of justice, wisdom, or poetry etc. Such an architectonic is the ultimate goal of empirical study, indeed all of intellectual life. While Bacon was not the first person to see the need to unify the two, he was the most influential. He was also a good Christian, and believed that the dominion of man over the Earth included technology and reason. Thus he believed that God intended man to develop himself intellectually, and believed a shift towards empiricism was the answer. And rightly so, for the Scholastic systems of science and alchemy had run their course and a change was needed.
So he decided to develop a new methodology which would explore the world more generally, but loosen the grip of the spider that had strangled the Scholastics and alchemists. Unfortunately, his insights have been taken to extreme in recent centuries. A balanced empiricism, an empiricism of the bee, has given way to the empiricism of the ant. Naive empiricism loses sight of this balance. As Kant describes the flaw, already emergent in his day, he shows how a proper scientific method doesn’t heap knowledge, but instead begins with a form of the whole, and proceeds such that it is expanded properly. He uses the metaphor of an animal “whose growth does not add a limb but rather makes each limb stronger and fitter for its end without any alteration of proportion.” By this he means that a proper field of study will not look like a Frankenstein’s monster, with limbs added unnaturally. He, like Bacon and many others, have recognized that to merely heap information together isn’t conducive to knowledge, but instead leads to contorted and convoluted thinking. Naive empiricism fails by failing to conceptualize the form of the whole. It blindly searches for data, but has nothing to do once attained.
This error is based in a misunderstanding of the innate separation of data and its interpretation. The fallacy is that data can be heaped together and that some form or organization will eventually emerge therefrom. The error in this, is in the assumption that a theory can be created merely from the collection of data. This is backwards however. When one begins an experiment, it is impossible to know what type of information is actually ‘data’. For to interpret the entire manifold of sensible reality is impossible, and so one must begin at a finite point. But which point should be the beginning? Such a scientist would easily reply, “the data!”, but what is that data exactly? This is the problem of a hypothesis, and the contradiction that a direct, or naive realism. Because we must have a hypothesis to merely the collect the data at all!
So which of the two should come first? This is the problem that has led us to unsystematic science, because it believes that the chicken should come first – or that data should ‘just be collected’. But how can a chicken exist unless there is an egg?
