In 1927, Sir Arthur Eddington described the table before him as two tables. One was the table of everyday, ordinary experience: brown, solid, useful for holding other objects off the ground. This table was substantial and its qualities were readily available through casual inspection. The other table was that described by science: comprised mostly of void and empty space, between which there were billions of atomic particles whose charges and bonds aggregated to create the object we observe and call “table”. One was familiar and one foreign. Then Eddington asked, “Which is the real table?”
Scientism is the position that only the methods and products of scientific investigation have epistemic authority. Or, in other words, the scientific image of the table is truer, or more real, than the manifest (or apparent) image of the table. This updated version of the old appearance vs. reality debate from the time of Plato has been gaining popularity, both in academia and popular culture.
My dissertation argues against scientism, contending that our scientific and commonsense [read: everyday] renderings of the world are not epistemic rivals. Science is not merely an epistemic refinement or improvement on our everyday, habitual way of viewing the world, as though science and commonsense existed at different poles of the same spectrum of knowledge. Rather, the development of science marks the emergence of an entirely new realm of meaning, or discourse. Therefore, the difference between the scientific and commonsense, or ordinary, realms of meaning is one of kind, not of degree. This means that asking which table is the real table frames the issue incorrectly from the outset.
Following Bernard Lonergan, I argue that the oscillating needs of human life give rise to different modes of attending to the world, which in turn give rise to different realms of meaning, or discourse. Commonsense and science, then, regard the same objects, but from different standpoints as the situations warrants. More specifically, the advent of modern science demonstrates the rise of the systemic exigence, which fully abstracts from the concrete objects and persons of everyday life.
Commonsense and science differ in three respects:
- Practical and systemic exigencies are constitutive of the commonsense and scientific realms of meaning, respectively.
- Commonsense and science regard the same objects, though commonsense describes things in relation to us, while science describes things in their relations amongst themselves. (This is not the same distinction as subjective vs. objective, nor the same as the primary vs secondary quality distinction.)
- Scientific descriptions are fully abstract concepts or mathematical formulations that prescind entirely from physical bodies, while commonsense descriptions are those familiar to our everyday, ordinary experience.
Commonsense and science, then, are not contrasting images of the world, but are complementary modes of being in the world. They are not opposed whatnesses, but are reciprocal hownesses. I argue that viewing these two modes of experiencing the world as competing images, as advocates of scientism do, frames the matter improperly and I present an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between commonsense and scientific experience, one which recognizes the immense value and foundational importance of science in human knowing, but does not falsely refer to it as our sole epistemic authority.
Dissertating Outloud 