I am puzzled by media reports of 'facts' about issues - many of these I find a bit like 'advertorials' in magazines - you read about some medical wonder treatment thinking that it represents scientifically proven fact but then read the fine print to find that its really an advertisement for the treatment.
But see even in that little sentence, I've mentioned a phrase that is frequently used to describe discoveries which can be believed because they are "scientifically proven" - but have you ever wondered what that really means? And what makes "scientifically proven" better than "common-sense proven" or "experience-proven"?
So it got me wondering a bit further about how do we
know things and how do we know when we know? I want to call this 'ways of seeing the world' and want to apply them to the current media-named "boat-people crisis".
Philosophically and epistemologically there are basically 3 ways of seeing the world:
- Objectively;
- Subjectively; and for want of a better term -
- Constructively.
Let's have a look at each.
Objectivism
This is the view that things exist as objects independently of consciousness and experience - so things exist even if we don't know that they do. This bit makes sense but what about this next bit - some methods for knowing the true meaning of an object independent of its context include:
- verification - (Ayer and Wittgenstein) - no statement is meaningful unless it can be verified through sense data like "seeing is believing". This is a central thought in what is called logical positivism. Therefore things that cannot be sensed are not meaningful eg. various forms of religion - if they don't have measurable size, shape, capacity then they cannot be verified 'objectively'.
- falsification - (Popper) - scientists make a guess and find themselves unable to prove it wrong
- uncertainty principle - (Heisenberg) which is the basis of quantum theory - he refers to the idea that the very act of observation changes the behaviour of the object under scrutiny.
- counterinduction - (Feyerabend) - examination of objects and theories through comparison with external standards as well as the 'scientific' method.
In the objectivist tradition, a researcher will posit a hypothesis about an object and then, depending on their theoretical perspective and methodology, will proceed to prove or disprove it using quantitative methods of data collection and verification. Generally a separate reality is created by the researcher in order to find the meaning of the object. The underlying theoretical perspective is essentially positivist using methodologies from the scientific tradition of experimentation in controlled contexts with dependent and independent variables of analysis.
The positivist Thomas Kuhn questions the usefulness of the scientific method because of a tendency towards convergent thinking that tends to say more about the method than it does about the object and how to ask good questions to elicit data.
Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 1974, p. 273) is more direct:
"Traditional scientific method unfortunately has never gotten around to saying exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. The scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past".
Let's see what might happen if we used objectivism as our reasoning guide in the "boat people crisis" as various newspapers are reporting the arrival of Afghan and Sri Lankan refugees by boat into Australian waters.
(As an aside - it is interesting to see the language being used - "boat people" has become objectified as a "crisis". In Marxist terms, this is called 'fetishising' ie. the story of the boats arriving have become a 'crisis' because the various media have written about it in that way, not because it really is a crisis, but because it suits their object of selling papers or stories given that it becomes a political issue if they fetishise it enough. Note this technique applies equally across all theoretical perspectives about knowing - not just objectivism).
But let's return to objectivism as our reasoning guide - in order to know about the "boat people crisis", objectivism would propose that the "boat people crisis" is a product or object with no social history, but with inherent meaning waiting to be discovered through experimentation. This would involve the researcher (or you as the curious person wanting to know about things) taking an objective view (ie. no prior assumptions about the object or what might happen) by isolating variables to control and measure. The "crisis" would need to be reconceived in such a way as to be represented by particular artefacts which can be more easily measured and which probably suit the purpose of the researcher eg.
- how many boats?
- how much accommodation is available?
- how many died on the voyage?
- how long does it take to process each person?
- how does this affect the popularity of the current government policy?
- and so on and so on...
You can see that the objectivist reasoning guide is represented by lots of 'how' type questions. This type of question makes it easy to quantify the representation of the "crisis" because numbers are easy to count and easy to report and make comparisons with. This type of analysis is most often reported by the media outlets because it can be presented as 'fact'. What the objectivist reasoning guide does is certainly useful in a limited way, but of course only represents part of the whole story. The representation of the "crisis" as a series of 'how' questions is reductionist and sacrifices the gifts of significance, relevance and complexity to the gods of the easily measured.
The objectivist treatment does not ask "why" questions because they cannot be verified or falsified using the tools of positivism. As a result, the types of 'solutions' offered by the objectivist treatment are limited in scope to answering the 'how' questions eg:
- "We can reduce the number of boats arriving by turning them back before they enter Australian waters"
- this has already been shown to be unrealistic with insufficient detection capacity
- easily verified
- "Christmas Island cannot provide sufficient accommodation to house the arriving people"
- no argument and easily verified
- "There is a need to move the people to mainland sites or create other off-shore processing centres"
- The mathematics of numbers makes this easily verified.
I could go on but you get the idea. As Pirsig points out above, the scientific method "...can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past..." ie. answering questions of 'how' does not allow scope for a change of thinking as it does not allow a challenge of the original thinking of:
- "the high numbers of boat people arriving in Australian waters is bad - how can we decrease the numbers arriving?"
It does not challenge that dictum by asking "why" type questions for example:
- why are such high numbers of people leaving their home country?
- why is Australia a seemingly preferred destination for at least some of the people?
Maybe a Subjectivist treatment might? The next post will look at how that might pan out.
