Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I am interested in what kind of value system you believe that science provides, though. Could you please outline the ways in which you believe science can be a value system?
Science obviously has an internal value system. It treats truth and objectivity as guiding values. And science certainly receives a lot of grief for doing that from the loony-left, from 'feminist standpoint epistemologists' and the like. Personally, I stand in solidarity with science in those increasingly bizarre academic controversies, I'm just pointing out that epistemological values are values and they are sometimes challenged.
But I don't think that MR was criticizing scientists or the values internal to science so much as he was addressing the role of science within the rest of society. That's the context of his suggesting that the role of truth and objectivity values in science can sometimes be more of an ideal than a reality. Scientists are motivated by funding and by careerism as well as by the 'higher' values.
MR's concerned about the naive and uncritical adulation of science and scientists that's seemingly expected from laymen. 'What should we think about X, Y or Z? The scientists know! They will tell us!' So to answer your question, I think that MR is concerned that giving science the social role of ultimate authority on everything in life promotes a 'just believe whatever you are told' system in which conformity and credulity become the primary values, justified by faith that the scientists can justify everything they say by employing their supposedly epistemologically infallible Scientific Method.
But never mind, you ignorant little laymen, if you are in no position to understand all the arcane reasoning and mathematical hieroglyphs for yourselves. All that people like you are called upon to do is believe.
Science is and can be a beautiful thing. But it can also turn very ugly if it is ever allowed to become The One True Church, where those who continue to express any skepticism about the catechism are burned at the stake as deniers.
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