The Banana Peel Project

On the surface, science is all specialized vocabularies and inscrutable instrumentation. But a peak just beneath the surface tension reveals that it rests on an ocean of faith in symbols.

At one level, science is the whole mess of institutionalized structures–labs, journals, funding lines, paperwork, test tubes, universities, and scientists–that collectively structure practical knowledge about how to make and do things. At another level, science is a philosophy that attempts to describe how (and whether) those structures tell us about the nature of “reality.”

Because science and technology have become intimate parts of our daily experience, we need to pay attention to the assumptions that scientists and philosophers of science make about the correspondence problem–the question of the relationship between theory and observation and where theory falls along the spectrum of “totally faithful to reality” to “totally made up.” Here’s what some dead white guys said: In the 1930s, the logical positivists tried very hard to demonstrate with mathematical language that science could and should be made to conform precisely to what we see and hear with our eyes and ears. Karl Popper immediately jumped on the logical positivists, arguing that no valid knowledge about the world could be obtained through induction (the extrapolation of general theories from specific observations). Then, Pierre Duhem made it glaringly obvious that even observation was so loaded with theory that we couldn’t even trust our own eyes and ears.

Between the double bind of invalid induction and our insensitive senses, how the hell are we supposed to reach logically consistent judgments about the real world that also conform to intuition and common sense? (Despite what intuition would suggest, common sense is not synonymous with logic. For example, the sentence, “The moon is made of cheese” is a logically valid–”true”–proposition but is also downright stupid. Likewise, “Love is blind” is a truism in many cultures but it fails the test of logic since love doesn’t have any eyeballs.)

There’s two issues to hash out here, and probably only one answer. First, there’s the classically annoying problem of realism vs. idealism: Is there, ultimately, some reality out there that is external to our individual and collective experience? Second, if there is some external reality, can it be represented by symbols? Or, if we say that there is no external reality, then can symbols take its place? Can we live in a world of symbols?

Unlike Duhem, Popper, and lots of other philosophers of science, I’m going to start avoiding the word “abstraction.” It assumes that there is some definitive reality out there that can be twisted, perverted, or in some way generalized by human thought. Since I’m not prepared to make any claims about the existence or absence of “true” reality, I’m not comfortable talking about processes that alter it.

To what extent can symbols take the place of external reality? Clearly, human beings are semiotic beings: almost all of the worlds that we each inhabit are inundated with symbols, and we are very good at manipulating them. The native environment of the human species isn’t dry land, temperate climates, Earth, or even the Universe. It’s symbols and the technoculture they create.

And it’s in the realm of symbols that science meets with faith. In the entheogenic epistemology of Alan Watts:

Civilization is a very complex system in which we use symbols–words, numbers, figures, and concepts–to represent the real world of nature. We use money to represent wealth. We use the clock to represent time. We use yards and inches to represent space. These are very useful measures. But you can always have too much of a good thing. You can easily confuse the measurement with what you are measuring…You can become so enchanted with the symbols that you entirely confuse them with the reality…We are, therefore, in the position of eating the menu instead of the dinner, of living in a world of words and symbols.

So as delicious at it looks, take a minute to look it over. Don’t eat the menu.