Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 brain polar body
Today, science and technology, as the most unique and important human achievement, has become the driving force for social development. It is not an exaggeration to say that all humanities and social disciplines "either cater to science or oppose science."
There is no doubt that "science" is first and foremost a Western concept, born out of Western civilization. This also led to the famous "Needham problem", that is, "although ancient China made many important contributions to the development of human science and technology, why did not the scientific and industrial revolution take place in modern China?" "With the advancement of new technological revolutions such as the Internet, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing, we seem to have to answer similar questions: Will technological development still follow the unique path of the West?" If Chinese science and technology are going to go out of their own way, how can they give birth to a new scientific paradigm?
Admittedly, we are not yet in a position to answer such a huge proposition. But one fact is certain, that science and technology have taken different paths in the East and the West, and that cultural and religious values have played an important role.
For example, Chinese craftsmen in ancient and medieval Times invented steel smelting technology, gunpowder and papermaking, mechanical clocks, conveyor belts and other devices... Some scholars believe that these contributions are far more than Western mechanics and theorists who can speak the Tao. But why, after the Renaissance, modern science was first conceived in the West?
A very important reason is that at the beginning of the Renaissance, the transformation of the intellectual history and conceptual history of Western civilization led to the formation of a modern world outlook and the exponential development of science and technology, thus surpassing the slow and steady progress of China in various achievements.
In his book The Structure of the Scientific Revolution, the American philosopher of science Kuhn describes the importance of theory to technology this way: There is a conventional science dedicated to solving the puzzles posed by the existing paradigm, and as the problems that conventional science cannot explain accumulate, it eventually leads to a paradigm crisis. And this crisis was quelled by replacing the old paradigm with a new paradigm.
The development process of science and technology is to continuously absorb new perspectives, new trends of thought, and new explanations, and then produce new concepts, new contents, and new paradigms.
Therefore, without a deep understanding of the changes in civilization and ideas, it is difficult to see why modern science and technology have risen and why they have evolved. Today we will talk about the important ideological theories in history that have a far-reaching impact on modern science and technology.
Subjectivism: The Awakening of Man
To this day, the two basic methods that dominate the field of science and technology are still the Kepler paradigms and Newtonian paradigms born in the Renaissance. The former summarizes the rules from the data, and the latter seeks the basic principles to solve practical problems.
It is the subjectivist trend that has a profound influence on these two paradigms.
During the Middle Ages, the religious culture of the Church was shackled to social development and scientific progress for a long time, resulting in stagnation of development and widespread dissatisfaction among the public, and it was at this time that the Renaissance was ignited in European countries with the spiritual guidance of "reviving ancient Roman and Greek culture, reviving classicism, and centering on the spirit of humanism".
Many philosophers drew inspiration from classical culture, citing ancient Greek Hermetic texts, emphasizing the unity of humanity and divinity, proposing that "man is a great miracle, and all animals should pay homage to him", and opposing the empty and cumbersome scholastic philosophy and ecclesiastical creeds based on Aristotle's philosophy.
Both Kant and Hegel believed that the core of modernity lies in "subjectivity." That is, man is the owner and master of nature. Modern human subjectivism, which disintegrated the Aristotle universe, replaced the object subject of man in ancient and medieval times. At that time, some people described the despair and chaos that this spiritual revolution brought to the world: all the rules had disappeared, and the sky no longer showed the glory of God.
From the 14th to the 17th century, the expansion of individual subjectivity continued to push for a shift from the perspective of religious theology to man himself.
The awakening of subjectivity is both the cause and the result of science.
On the one hand, when science reaches a certain stage of development, if there is no further understanding of itself, it will be difficult for science itself to move forward. With the development of subjectivism and the rise of human-related disciplines, a new disciplinary system was constructed. Humanities and social sciences such as sociology and psychology have the cultural soil for rapid development into "explicit learning".
At the same time, subjectivism also made Europeans change the framework and mode of thinking, people as the subject to recognize nature, control nature, transform nature, mathematics and natural science began to flourish, put forward Kepler's three laws, Newton's law and a series of scientific laws summarizing natural phenomena, human beings gradually use telescopes, microscopes, barometers and other instruments to study the world more precisely, and constantly promote the scientific revolution.
It can be said that subjectivism was carried forward and carried forward, so that mankind was freed from ignorance, and after the scientific revolution of the 17th century, modern science was truly born.
Positivism: Redefining Progress
Time has changed, and the development of science and technology has encountered a new crisis. On the one hand, the philosophy of subjectivism began to have a crisis, and the legitimacy of science needed to be further established. In his manuscript The Crisis of European Science and the Phenomenology of Transcendence, Husserl mentions that the paradigm of research from philosophy to specific disciplines began to change and become formalistic. At this time, for science to prove its worth, it must establish a new conception of progress, namely that science is progressive, but religion is not.
At the same time, many new theoretical discoveries, such as atomic matter theory, electromagnetic theory, quantum theory, evolution, etc., are no longer enough to explain the physical world with Newton's system alone, forcing scientists to see the world in a new way.
In the 19th century, human subjectivity began to shift to progressive, objective things, to define science more strictly, and to promote the rise of positivism in various Disciplines in the West.
Positivism rejects abstract "metaphysics", opposes hegelian speculative rationality, emphasizes empirical facts and the scientific method, and holds that facts, experiences, or phenomena are the objects of concern for knowledge and science.
Through positivist philosophy, modern science began to show what we were familiar with, observing facts, collecting various empirical data through experiments and sample surveys, and finally summarizing the laws of science.
Positivism has changed science in three ways: 1. Precision. Empirical data is used as the sole source and basis of knowledge, making scientific laws precise, quantifiable, and repeatable. 2. Facts. Abstract philosophical questions are ignored and not discussed; 3. Relative. Recognizing that the means, experiences, and knowledge are relatively limited, and that human beings can never attain absolute knowledge, contributes to the continuous evolution of science.
As historian Ben (A: W. Benn), a member of the Positivist Society of London, puts it: "The story of the Priesthood about an invisible universe was once revered, and now a large part of that reverence has been transferred to astronomers, geologists, doctors and engineers." ”
With the transformation of positivist philosophy, in the 19th century, the scientific system and professional characteristics began to take shape, and social prestige and power began to shift from religion to science, and the superiority of science was thus established.
Futurism and Postcolonialism: A Reflection on Modernity
Just as Newton could not have always led the way in physics, science based on positivism has been challenged over time.
First of all, the excessive pursuit of research methods and technical means by positivism does not match the actual needs of some disciplines. Cartwright argues that positivism's deliberate pursuit of methods has turned social psychology into a discipline divided according to method boundaries rather than substantive problems, and cannot prove anything but the skill of the researcher.
Secondly, the modern Western industrial civilization represented by scientific and technological progress has begun to expose more and more social problems, environmental pollution, the suppression of human nature by extreme efficiency, etc., and the ideas put forward by Kong De (the father of positivism) such as "using science to solve social problems" have begun to be reflected.
Thus, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, social theory was linked to technology and began to rethink the development of science and technology, as well as the ethical, political and social issues behind it.
For example, Karl Marx witnessed the poverty caused by rapid industrialization and urbanization in Manchester, England, in the mid-nineteenth century, and proposed the theory of the means of production. Some scholars have begun to study the impact of indigenous societies on the threat of technological change, while others have focused on how technology affects employment and leads to wealth systems and social stratification.
Among them, the two currents of thought show the different choices and tendencies of different groups for the future of science and technology with "one horizontal and one vertical":
Futurism, which advocates overspeed progress on the vertical axis of time.
At the beginning of the 20th century, inspired by technological determinism and postmodernism, a modernist literary and artistic genre - Futurism appeared in Italy. Proposition: science and technology is the decisive force of modern social development, the old culture has lost its value, the future of literature and art should reflect the modern machine civilization, speed, power and competition, we are familiar with the "cyberpunk" is under the influence of futurism.
At the same time, futurists believe that with the development of science and technology, social differences can be eliminated and the ills existing in all existing social systems can be solved. And scientific and technological experts should dominate and control the fate of mankind and become the rulers of society. Futurist scholar Nikola Danaylov has asserted that a range of problems in American society are caused by anti-science, such as anti-vaccines, denial of climate change, and the fact that the earth is not a circle.
Google, IBM and other technology companies have hired futurists to judge whether a person is a futurist, there are several characteristics: 1. whether they believe in singularity, believe in human-machine integration, machines will have super intelligence and self-awareness, and welcome the arrival of this future in the name of progress; 2. whether they accept human enhancement, willing to implant intelligent hardware in the brain, and promote science fiction concepts such as brain-computer interfaces, immortal medicine, and virtual reality; 3. Promote genius elitism, believing that technology can solve racial discrimination, Social issues such as sexism and class discrimination, as former Google engineers said, the new technology revolution will eliminate 98% of people, and what you have to do is to become in the top 2%.
Another trend of thought, post-colonialism, in the process of reflecting on Western colonialism, began to influence scientific thought, advocating the improvement of scientific diversity, pluralistic coexistence, and coordinated development on the horizontal axis of culture.
Postcolonialism was originally a study of the relationship between the cultural discourse power between the suzerainty and the colonies after the colonial period. Beginning in 1982, the American historian of science, Louis Person, conducted systematic research on "colonial science" as a specialized field. He believes that Westerners always regard modern science, which has been developed with the support of capitalists, as a sign of civilization and shows their own posture as a cultural person. In fact, for non-Western countries, physical laws such as Newton's theorem are not the only valid theories.
Postcolonialism has introduced new perspectives to technology, drawing attention to the history and research of science and technology in Third World countries.
If we define science as a series of scientific theories, experimental methods, and rules of judgment that appeared in modern Europe, then there was naturally no "science" in ancient China. However, from the perspective of post-colonialism, many things that were originally regarded as folk beliefs and witchcraft, such as acupuncture, herbalism, and female doctors, also have legitimacy and should be valued as much as mathematics, astronomy, physics and other knowledge, which also provides a new direction and method for us to re-understand Chinese science.
The post-colonial trend of thought also provides a solution to the "Needham problem" facing China. Since modern Western science is only a regional and non-universal scientific system, then Chinese science and technology do not need to take the Western scientific system as the only reference object, and the statement that "science did not exist in ancient China" is no longer a problem.
Feminism: The Search for alternative worlds
It is worth noting that since the 1960s, feminist ideas have begun to penetrate into the humanities, social sciences and other fields, becoming a wave that cannot be ignored in the field of science and technology.
Feminism borrows from technological developments because it offers two new interpretations of contemporary science:
1. Positivism regards science as a mirror response to nature, ignoring the subjective power of human beings in science, while feminism hopes to understand the objective power of science from the perspective of female subjects.
2. Postcolonialism advocates the pluralism of scientific culture, while the feminist view of science establishes a research method with a female perspective as a paradigm, so that neglected and marginalized scientific knowledge has the possibility of being seen and studied.
Donna Harawi believes that the history of feminist science should not be limited to the theme of women in science, but should be deeply analyzed from various perspectives on the patriarchal phenomenon that exists everywhere in science, such as "the oppression of students by teachers" is the embodiment of patriarchy, a social hierarchy.
As a new perspective on the world, society and humanity, feminism has become an important academic force in the development of science.
Through the history of cultural trends and scientific development, we will find that philosophy, religion and culture and other ideological origins are the soil for the continuous evolution and change of science and technology. Only a complete, clear and prosperous tree of thought can understand the logic of scientific and technological change and give birth to a brilliant scientific and technological civilization.
For China, the "imported products" of science and technology from the West to the East have completely changed the face of Chinese thought and culture and reconstructed Chinese civilization. Standing in front of the unprecedented changes in a hundred years, using the philosophical ideas and discourse systems of Chinese civilization to reorganize and create the laws of science and technology and grasp the direction of future scientific and technological evolution may be the mission and opportunity that contemporary Chinese cannot miss.