Science at the Crossroads: Are we at the End of the Galilean break?

Dr. Isabelle Stengers: Science at the Crossroads: Are we at the End of the Galilean Break ?

On the 15th of March 2006, at the McGill Medical Faculty, Dr. Isabelle Stengers, PhD in Chemistry, assisted by Goya’s Mudslingers, Michel Serres, Arthur Koestler and Alfred North Whitehead, the major inspirations for the historian of science she has become over the years, tried to inform her audience on the now fast-approaching end of the Galilean Break in constructivist philosophy in which science seems to be more and more facing philosophical and ideological absolutism.

In fact, since the 1980s, contemporary scientific research seems to have come ever more under pressure of the commercialization of science such as had been the case at the outset of the agricultural and industrial revolutions beginning with the Enclosure movement as a necessary prerequisite for privatization and capital-building. 


Can scientific discoveries be appropriated however ? Such seems to have become the case in Europe and the New World with the development of economies of knowledge under the pressure of the rising industrial power of Japan in the 1980s. By 1991, for instance, developments in molecular biology resulted in some 362 scientists sitting on the advisory board of major biotech firms. The same happened in the field of genetic research. Scientific attitudes have changed so much that the dichotomy between fundamental science, on the one hand, and applied science, on the other, has been profoundly blurred. Intellectual property rights have been anchored by patents and the commercialization of science is today making new inroads in nano-technology or in the development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) thereby exerting a major impact on the restructuring of macro-economies and the balance of power in geopolitics.

For Immanuel Kant, the development of positive knowledge had to be embedded in practical judgment (Cf.: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft - Critique of Practical Reason). However, like in Goya’s Mudfighters, the critic of science may be fighting himself while throwing mud at the scientist. As Michael Crichton, the expert in molecular biology, asks: "What differentiates scientific knowledge from cynicism?"

Have we then come at the end of the Galilean break, meaning: an uninterrupted period of scientific progress over several centuries? Is there a general loss of public interest in science because of controversial scientific developments and their appropriation such as GMOs by Monsanto explaining the public’s growing cynicism towards science?

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and the mud-engulfed fighters in Goya’s painting may be the symptoms of a break with Galileo, Boyd and Newton in an era where debates between Intelligent Design and Darwinian Evolution prevent the selfless acquisition of free knowledge through free thinking. With the end of the Galilean break, the power of experimental and empirical science has been substantially weakened and the surge of reason has been mitigated by a new obscurantism. The frictionless environment of Galileo’s falling bodies and the break in constructivist acquisition of objective knowledge have met with the obstacles of scepticism and subjectivist opinion. And that is very sad indeed, says Isabelle Stengers.

Question

Could it somehow be that what the world needs nowadays is exactly such a reprieve from the Galilean break to find answers to problems created by subjectivist and constructivist philosophies as well as uncontrolled value-free scientific development ? In other words, a reflexion on Fides et ratio…. ad majorem Dei gloriam !

Guido De Volder, Montreal, 15 April 2006