So, as we anticipated,

what we call the Cartesian Dream was eventually

criticized by a number of thinkers and philosophers.

And the main question which we tackle in this section is the following: "If

science was an instrument of emancipation from religious superstition,

religion, and an instrument of betterment of human being as in the Doministic tradition,

how should we conceive science in the moment in which it's also

a very important element of our material progress and eventually,

also of private profit?"

This is a bit the root of the problem and Lyotard was the first one to note

very clearly that there is a kind of legitimacy arrangement between knowledge,

with science and power.

So that those in power are legitimate in their world because they do the right thing,

and they do the right things because they are informed by knowledge,

which is produced by science.

So this was the arrangement of modernity

and this is the arrangement which came under criticism,

in the moment, in which the same science,

which was supposed to inform the action of society,

was used for material goods,

were used for profit,

was used for the growth.

And for this reason,

Lyotard has in this book,"The Post-Modern Condition",

a chapter called "The Legitimation of Knowledge".

If you want another very beautiful book on the subject,

it is this book of Shapin and Schaffer,

discussing the very famous dispute between two thinkers,

Hobbes and Boyle, and this was about how to produce truth.

And for Boyle, you could produce truth by allowing the law of

nature to act under controlled laboratory condition before a witness.

And Hobbes thought that this was not the way to reach truth;

truth could only be reached by reasoning on

the first principle in the Cartesian tradition.

In fact, the approach of Boyle was, again,

meant to subtract knowledge from dispute of a theoretical of theological nature.

And Hobbes' criticism was that this operation was

nevertheless linked to the fact that those experiment could be watched,

could be witnessed and hence there was again

this element of inter-mediation in the production of knowledge.

This book of Shapin and Schaffer was also used very much by Bruno Latour,

which many have read, in a work which is entitled,

"We Have Never Been Modern".

And again in this modernity,

the modernity is seen as this separation between facts and values,

between norms and facts and what Latour says,

"We never manage to separate facts and values."

So the dream of Boyle was in a sense an impossible dream.

This book was very much hot during the "Science War",

of which you may have heard in which humanities and natural sciences fought.

Another book on the subject of modernity and its criticism is from Stephen Toulmin.

He contrasted Descartes with his rejection of

humanity with Montaigne which instead embraced

humanities and equals the idea of applying a Newtonian view of the world to society,

the hidden agenda of modernity.

[inaudible] mentioned that all this led today

to some kind of collapse of science and collapse is not too much an exaggerated word.

It was in a sense predicted already in the early sixties by

Solla Price which was considered to be the father of scientometrics.

And he said that science is so successful that it might

eventually collapse under its own weight and become senile.

It talks about the condition of senility.

We should consider that we have today something like two million scientific papers a

year published in about 30,000 journals.

And a more accurate prediction of the crisis was offered

by Jerome Ravetz in a book published in 1971 entitled,

"Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems" and in more recent times in

2011 by Philip Mirowski.

Let's hear now the argument produced by Ravetz and Mirowski.

For Ravetz, the point is with the quality control system.

He says, "Science has a quality control system which was

tuned to the age where science was small,

in a small community where each one knew everyone else and

which personal knowledge could be transferred and work could be tested for quality."

And he said, "I believe this arrangement will not

survive once science becomes mega science,

big science or techno science,

and this will have consequences for

the quality control apparatus which will be very serious indeed."

And if you want to see how serious,

you read Philip Mirowski which looks at the transformation in a space of a few decades,

where science became a commodity,

something you can pay for,

purchasing it on the market.

And if you are on the market,

then you want to buy science at the cheapest price.

And the story is that even the major corporations which were once

upon a time producing science in their own laboratory,

imagine Xerox for instance,

discovered that the same science could be

purchased for a lower price in the universities,

so they go to university.

And finally, they discovered that

even universities are expensive and we can have science for

an even lower price by small companies

called contract-based research organizations, CROs.

And then you are not surprised if the scientific results produced at

this level of price are not of the desired quality.

And then we come to the bank.

Now when eventually everyone discovered that something very bad is happening,

The Economist made a cover on I think 2013

to say that there is really something very worrying going on in the field of science.

Most of the article of The Economist is based on this paper by Loannidis in 2005,

which says that most published research findings are false,

a very strong statement.

And if you wish, this recent,

very recent book published last year where we take a snapshot of

the evolving crisis of science.

And this science affects all fields.

So it affects organic chemistry,

psychology, clinical research, pre-clinical research.

There is no field which is not affected by this crisis which is especially a crisis

in the possibility and the capacity of scientists to reproduce their own result.

And this crisis entails,

in a certain sense, a loss of skills.

So the scientists can no longer produce reproducible result,

and in quantification as well.

For instance, and this is also a point very much highlighted in the article of Loannidis,

those scientists no longer know how to use P test.

P test is a test you use to see whether what you find is

significant in a given experiment or only the result of science.

It appears that this test has been misused for decades.

The situation was so serious that the American Statistical Association felt the need to

produce a statement to rectify how the test should really be used.

But when they set about to do this,

they discovered that they could not agree amongst statistician,

so that this statement of

the American Statistical Association was published together

with 20 additional commentaries written by the top statisticians.

So in other words, there is a crisis in statistics in the use of methods.

All statisticians agree that there is a crisis,

but they don't agree on how this crisis developed and how it should be tackled.

And this is the end of the second lecture.

The undoing of the dream

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