The Mote and the Beam

Abstract

This paper wishes to make the case that philosophers and sociologists are not alone in their sometimes questionable understanding of physical and mathematical sciences. As a matter of fact, physicists themselves have often led the way towards these abuses, as will be shown by a detailed study of the so-called ‘Uncertainty Principle’ and other examples taken from modern physics. Further, the lack of philosophical and humanistic culture on the part of scientists from the ‘hard’ disciplines, make them prone to pass as arrogant as poorly informed judgments on the endeavours of social and human sciences. In fact, the present socio-political conditions of science production lead scientific knowledge to a permanent state of immaturity, inhibiting its epistemological recasting and favouring a careless relation with language. Science needs to recognise the fecund ambiguities of ordinary parlance, and cannot shun away from metaphorical expression. More generally, no criticism coming from the hard sciences and addressed to the softer ones can be valid if it is not first of all an autocriticism.

„The boldness of physicists is highly praised. They have broken, so it is said, with ancestral habits of thought. (...) What makes me laugh is the manner in which these guys generalise their results — or refuse to do it. It is amusing to see how they invite the philosophers to draw the consequences of the crisis of causality, while assuring that this very phenomenon only happens in atomic physics and does not affect the cooking of steaks with petty bourgeois.“

Bertolt Brecht, 1943²

This text is an English version, somewhat enlarged, of an essay published in French under the title “La méprise et le mépris” in: Baudouin Jurdant (1998). It is a pleasure to thank Philippe Blanchard for offering me the opportunity to present these ideas in English, and to express my gratitude to George Morgan for his most precious linguistic help.