The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [169]
The knowledge acquired through the use of any structure is selective. There are no standards or beliefs guiding the search for knowledge which are not dependent on the structure. Scientific knowledge, in sum, is not necessarily the clearest representation of what reality is; it is the artifact of each structure and its tool. Discovery is invention. Knowledge is man-made.
If this is so, then all views at all times are equally valid. There is no metaphysical, super-ordinary, final, absolute reality. There is no special direction to events. The universe is what we say it is. When theories change the universe changes. The truth is relative.
This relativist view is generally shunned. It is supposed by the Left to dilute commitment and by the Right to leave society defenceless. In fact it renders everybody equally responsible for the structure adopted by the group. If there is no privileged source of truth, all structures are equally worth assessment and equally worth toleration. Relativism neutralises the views of extremists of all kinds. It makes science accountable to the society from which its structure springs. It urges care in judgement through awareness of the contextual nature of the judgemental values themselves.
A relativist approach might well use the new electronic data systems to provide a structure unlike any which has gone before. If structural change occurs most often through the juxtaposition of so-called ‘facts’in a novel way, then the systems might offer the opportunity to evaluate not the facts which are, at the present rate of change, obsolete by the time they come to public consciousness, but the relationships between facts: the constants in the way they interact to produce change. Knowledge would then properly include the study of the structure itself.
Such a system would permit a type of ‘balanced anarchy’in which all interests could be represented in a continuous reappraisal of the social requirements for knowledge, and the value judgements to be applied in directing the search for that knowledge. The view that this would endanger the position of the expert by imposing on his work the judgement of the layman ignores the fact that science has always been the product of social needs, consciously expressed or not. Science may well be a vital part of human endeavour, but for it to retain the privilege which it has gained over the centuries of being in some measure unaccountable, would be to render both science itself and society a disservice. It is time that knowledge became more accessible to those to whom it properly belongs.
Bibliography
Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated, and in the case of university presses.
CHAPTER 1
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Campbell, Joe, Myths to Live By (Souvenir Press, 1973).
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Firth, Raymond, Symbols: Public and Private (Allen & Unwin, 1973).
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Leach, E., Culture and Communication (Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Leach, E., Social Anthropology (Fontana, 1982).
Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
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Neugebauer, O., The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Dover Publications: New York, 1969).
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CHAPTER 2
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Brooke,