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The Future of Science
There is a passage from Foucault that I have quoted many times, which is one of my favorites from this works:
“A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.”
It just occurred to me today that we might say that same about the future of science:
“A real science recognizes and accepts its own future without feeling attacked.”
A pure and thorough-going complementarity between past and future would only be possible if our knowledge of past and future were symmetrical, which it is not. But it should be pretty clear that contemporary science, in so far as it glimpses future iterations of the discipline, would feel profoundly inadequate in the face of what may come out of science, when sufficiently advanced.
It is a staple of pop-culture futurism that science a hundred years from now many be as different from contemporary science as contemporary science is different from science a hundred years ago – before the confirmation of relativity, before quantum theory, before plate tectonics, before the expansion of the universe, before genetics, and so on. In other words, science a hundred years ago is barely recognizable today as science, and the same may be true a hundred years’ hence.
But whenever dissecting pop-culture futurism one must keep in the forefront of one’s mind what the message is to the contemporary audience, which is the real target of futurism. Some of these claims about science becoming rapidly outdated are sincere, but some are based upon an implicit non-progressivism and the contemporary equivalent of a cyclical theory of history.
Having had the misfortune of being exposed to a lot of the looniest forms of conspiracy theory present in our culture today, I can tell you that the cyclical theory of history is alive and kicking in the popular mind, and there is no more familiar idea to the listeners of late night radio programs than the idea that civilization has emerged repeatedly on Earth and achieved a high level of technological development, only to be destroyed by its own hubris.
The idea of science being outdated in the future is related to this idea of cyclical history, because cyclical history maintains at bottom that there is no progress, and this must include the claim that there is no real scientific progress either. Therefore the falsification of past science by present science, and the eventual falsification of present science by future science, points to the idea that science does not better approximate truth over time, but only revolves in a vast cycle along with the rise and fall of civilizations, with no real progress being made.
In the context of a cyclical theory of history, science could recognize its past and future without feeling attacked, because all science is equal and no science is closer to the truth than any other science, because all science is eventually falsified.
The fact that science does feel attacked by being presented with its past, which now seems perverse and unworthy of being called “science,” and would feel attacked if presented with a future iteration of itself, is, in this sense, a hopeful sign, as it suggests that real progress is made in science, and that scientists know this so well that they feel both insulted and challenged when the painful history of the follies of science is spread out before them.
It would be an interesting exercise to develop the above idea in the context of Kuhnian paradigm shifts. I leave this as an exercise to the reader.
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