End of Science vs End of History

End of Science: the death knell as sounded by the Royal Society (Part #2)

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In 1992 Francis Fukuyama produced a controversial study suggesting that history has reached a culminating point with the emergence of a perfection of social organizatiion represented by liberal democracy (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992). The advent of Western liberal democracy was seen as signalling the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government.

The end of science was the theme of the 25th Nobel Conference in 1989 (Richard Q. Elvee, et al. End of Science?: Attack and Defense, 1992). A different exercise was undertaken by the senior editor of Scientific American, John Hogan (The End of Science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the Scientific Age, 1997; Looking Back at the End of Science, Search, March/April 2008). Theodore Schick Jr (The End of Science? Skeptical Inquirer, 21, 2, 13 March 1997) reviewed the ussue in the light of the philosophical commentary on methodology by Paul Feyerabend (Against Method: outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge, 1975; Farewell to Reason, 1987).

Fukuyama's argument is of course questionable -- and has indeed been questioned -- but it is the questions that it raises, and the capacity to do so, that are more interesting than any particular answers. And in 2008, it is not clear that liberal democracy is the ultimate solution to the challenges that it readily assumes to be an aberration from that perfection. However, as perhaps demonstrated by the non-democratic institutional response to the Irish "No" vote (on the EU Reform Treaty) and the many instances of electoral manipulation in democracies, one might hope that democracy itself could evolve into a more appropriate process.

The point is not whether science has failed to be marvellous in many respects or to have revealed intellectual marvels which are much to be appreciated. The problem is whether these marvellous capacities are to some degree, deliberately or inadvertently, used as a "fig leaf" to disguise inadequacies which are systematically denied -- notably by the most eminent academic authorities..

The question then is whether the assumption that "science", or the "scientific method", has reached its culminating form is inherently problematic -- as with the assumption of the University of Paris in 1210 with respect to religion. Are there no inadequacies to science that call for innovations in its methodology or approach -- or imply their possibility? Is the future precluded from such innovation by a cognitive approach that is to be considered as having reached perfection? Is there a questionable pattern that underlies both the scientific method of today and that of the religious authorities of the period of the Declaration of Paris in 1210? By what method would this be determined?

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