Review - Is Science Neurotic?
by Nicholas Maxwell
Imperial College Press, 2004
Review by Donald Stanley, M.D.
Jul 24th 2007 (Volume 11, Issue 30)

Nicholas Maxwell's Is Science Neurotic contains one very big revisionist vision: Science needs to make its aims explicit in an underlying scheme or set of principles. To paraphrase Aristotle, not the current heap of metaphysics, but a whole metaphysic so as to lead us to wisdom, not to more facts. This metaphysic should be  "Aim-Oriented Empiricism" (AOE), and, according to Maxwell AOE does not seek more facts, such as Standard Empiricism (SE) does, but wisdom: 'The central and basic task of rational inquiry... is to help us imbue our personal and social lives with vividly imagined and criticized possible actions so that we may discourse, and perform, where possible, those actions which enable us to realize what is of value: happiness, health, sanity, beauty, friendship . . . ". such  ‘that may it yield  "the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others."

AOE aims to discover how the universe is comprehensible by representing aims at 10 levels, from the specific observation e.g. atomic weight of gold is  196.967 and experimentation e.g. gold does not rust,  to the highly complex, unspecific and unproblematic e.g.. that the universe is comprehensible, thus creating a framework of fixed aims. Using these levels of understanding, we may act wisely in our scientific enquiry. 

The traditional aim of science has been standard empiricism (SE) and he accuses SE of a neurosis, a scientific misconstrual of what science ought to be doing and not just the discovery of facts based on experimental evidence. Maxwell does not discuss the success of inductive-statistical, nor statistical relevance successes, but claims Standard Empiricism is necessary but not sufficient because it does not presuppose an overarching principle of unity, of comprehensiveness, of completeness, but rather, a tentative view of the world that is open to revision and refutation, according e.g. to the falsificationist method of Karl Popper or the deductive-statistical. There is no wise justification for knowledge obtaining from SE: one verifiable fact is as good as another: facts need not serve any human purpose at all. Psychologists must maintain distance from the subject observed, not place values in the way of diagnosis, in the pursuit of more empirical observations, not to suggest something is rotten in the state. We must not press our values on others, so goes the mantra of science.

Instead Maxwell, like his fellow authors (see below) suggests a more comprehensive view of the aim of science: to postulate how science can better serve us. To make the world better. He wishes to humanize science so that we can act wisely in this world, and this is possible only if science is cured of its neurotic behavior: who does science serve, the funding agency or humanity?

In order to achieve this wisdom science needs to construct a scheme  consisting of a hierarchy of conceptual levels. Each ascending metaphysical level claims less and less about empirical data, at the very top (level 10) assuming only that the universe is at least partially knowable. Lacking this explicitness one can only guess to what aim, if any, the experiment, level 1, is ultimately directed, if it has any direction at all! SE offers no such ascending scale, but rather a heap of ad hoc hypotheses to account for the evidence. Contrarily a good example of AOE would be Einstein's Special and General Relativity that lead to further discoveries towards understanding a physical universe that is comprehensible (level 10)

The book is short, 150 pages, a technical appendix of 69 pages, 8 pages of references and an index. The message is in the first chapter. For some, the use of examples from physics may prove off-putting.

Chapter 2 contains Maxwell's desire for action to redefine the aim of science and is parallel to previous books urging public attention to other misdirections e.g. Rachel Carson's  Silent Spring, Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle, Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, and Ronald Higgins'  The Seventh Enemy.

His greatest debt is to Karl Popper who tried to solve the problem of induction by his notion of refutability. Maxwell gives a nuanced enhancement of Popper's conjecture and refutation approach to scientific knowledge: "problem solving rationality." In addition to Popper's criteria for hypothesis formation and rejection, Maxwell adds two rules:

1.      Break up the basic problem into preliminary, simpler, analogous, subordinate or specialized problems to work gradually toward a solution to the basic problem, and (thus work downwards in the scheme)

2.      Interconnect attempts to solve basic and specialized problems, so that basic problem solving may guide, and be guided by, specialized problem solving. Thus use the hierarchy of aims to proceed or to revert. (thus move between the schematic levels.)

Maxwell offers these additions because he believe that science makes progress by interim steps, rather than by sweeping away old hypotheses, styles, paradigms, and replacing them with entirely new concepts, and this is why Maxwell insists on science making explicit its aim in a hierarchy of metaphysical claims.

Assume at the base of the hierarchy the world is made of atoms (Richard Feynman said that this is the greatest scientific fact), add electromagnetic forces, unification of gravity; and look for unification of these assumptions at a higher level e.g. quantum theory; or yet a higher, level-string theory; up and up the hierarchy looking for the force that subsumes all underlying theories, perhaps by way of the Higgs boson? There may be one, two or many theories encompassing these assumptions. Maxwell here introduces his procedure:  make the fewest but most restrictive claims at the lowest level, and thus easiest to refute and as the assumptions become less restrictive (quantum theory or quarks) and contain more putative explanatory premises, they also accept fewer and less specific claims about the universe (that all is held together by some fifth or sixth force.) One may think of this as the inverse of Quine's web of knowledge: the center contains the most basic facts about the universe, while as we move outwards on the strands of the web, towards the anchoring in the natural world, the assumptions hold until empirical facts no longer sustain the central assumptions.

For if there are many, competing, conceptual schemes, and each is supported to a greater or lesser extent by reproducible evidence, then how do we choose among them the most valuable? Maxwell would like us to be realists, extreme realists in that we ought to accept that God does not play dice, that there is an overarching correct scheme, a metaphysic toward which scientists may confidently work, that the scheme will allow us to fit all scientific facts under one great tent. This is Maxwell's metaphysical claim, his a priori.

How to apply and do this? Chapter 2 dissects the question: How to distinguish between science as an encyclopedia of facts, partly linked, with cross-references and footnotes, and science as a societal concept incorporating value. Maxwell writes that we must have a scheme of society, similar to the scheme of metaphysics that describes the comprehensiveness of the universe, incorporating what society values: at the poles- life and love, death and suffering. And similar to the first scheme, each level of each scheme becomes less and less specific, more and more abstract cf. figure 3.1 and 3.2.

Chapters 3 & 4 discuss the implications for social science. Maxwell's critique of Enlightenment figures and their intellectual prodigies include Saint-Sainte, Comte, Mill, Durkheim, Marx and Weber as well as their foils, phenomenology, social anthropology, poststructuralism and continental philosophy leads to a long discussion of Karl Popper, especially his most important work of social critique The Open Society and Its Enemies. Instead of the Enlightenment's ideal vision of society Popper claimed that what was required was theoretical pluralism, and experiments designed to be crucial for rejecting any theory: the Berlin Wall fell because the theory of the state was tested by society and found wanting.

Maxwell finds Popper's approach worthy though still supervenient on standard empiricism SE because it lacks the girder Maxwell insists upon: a scheme or aim of science.

One additional problem, amongst several more, is Maxwell's physicalism, level 4, which he here translates into "a world with global democracy that puts the new Enlightenment into practice by encompassing: socialism, civilization and nationalism" to illustrate what he claims are the rival specific ideas for world civilization. These chapters are perhaps the least interesting because they are written enthusiastically but are not as motivating as one could wish in light of his ambitious scheme. Take level 1 (p. 96) where policies, projects, new laws, institutions and programs must be subject to testing at higher levels: the description and explanation of consciousness might occur here: what we would then require is a third person description of consciousness to move to level 2. Some would say we are close. I doubt it. The testing place is, as Popper required, an open society, but Maxwell says: ". . .  the damaging neurosis of social science commits the same sin: it is oriented towards knowledge, facts, pictures of the mind. "It is the fruitless task of rationalization, it is the philosophy of science, the neurotic face of science, . . . Fortunately, scientists have not taken the philosophy of science too seriously" p. 99.

If you accept Maxwell's chart illustrating the metaphysics, p.19, then all is clear; but you certainly can dispute the levels, especially level 4, physicalism -- many have questioned whether we can provide a complete explanation of the world in solely physical terms, even in principle . Indeed one might instead claim that the universe is comprehensible, but only in a probabilistic sense: randomness cannot be entirely discounted-Einstein's dice sometimes come up with snake eyes on 3 consecutive rolls.

All would benefit from reading chapters 1 and 2. Especially if you enjoyed Rachel Carson, or have read Henrik Svensmark's The Chilling Stars, or Björn Lomborg's Global Crises, Global Solutions

Note: If you cannot get this book to read, try Maxwell's earlier paper "Is Science Neurotic? Metaphilosophy. 33:3.2002 pp.259-299.

© 2007 Donald Stanley

Donald Stanley, MD, Associates in Pathology, Maine.

Nicholas Maxwell sent the following response to Donald Stanley's review, on 7/31/07.

I am grateful to Donald Stanley for writing his review of my book Is Science Neurotic?, and I am delighted and honored that he should put my book in the company of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle, Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, and Ronald Higgins' The Seventh Enemy.  There are however, in Stanley's review a few statements that seem to me rather misleading about my work, and I hope he will not think me ungracious if I point them out.

In the first paragraph of his review, Stanley says that I hold that Aim-Oriented Empiricism (AOE) "does not seek more facts, such Standard Empiricism (SE) does, but wisdom".  This is not correct.  SE and AOE are two rival views about what the aims and methods of natural science ought to be, two rival philosophies of natural science in other words.  Neither explicitly concerns wisdom. 

SE holds that the aim of science is to acquire knowledge of truth, the method being to assess claims to knowledge impartially with respect to evidence, considerations of simplicity or unity of theory being permitted to influence choice of theory but, crucially, no substantial thesis about the world being accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independent of empirical considerations. 

AOE, by contrast, holds that a basic aim of physics is the highly problematic one of discovering in what way the universe is physically comprehensible -- the universe being presupposed to be comprehensible in some way or other.  Because of the highly problematic character of this aim, this presupposition, physics needs to represent it in the form of a hierarchy of untestable (i.e. metaphysical) theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe.  As one goes up this hierarchy, the theses become less and less substantial, more and more nearly such that their truth is required for science to be possible at all, and thus less and less problematic, less and less likely to need revision.  As science proceeds, and our knowledge and understanding of the universe improve, so highly problematic theses low down in the hierarchy are improved.  Associated with each thesis there is a methodological principle which asserts: theses and theories, lower down in the hierarchy, must accord as far as possible with this thesis.  Thus, according to AOE, there is a two-way interaction between improving scientific knowledge on the one hand, and improving theses and associated methodological principles -- improving aims and methods -- on the other hand.  As our scientific knowledge and understanding improve, the aims and methods of science (associated with theses low down in the hierarchy of theses) improve as well.  Science adapts its nature to what it finds out about the nature of the universe.  Testable theories, according to AOE, in order to be acceptable, must satisfy empirical considerations, and must be as much in accord as possible with the lowest metaphysical thesis in the hierarchy of theses.

My basic argument against SE and for AOE is that, in physics, two considerations always govern choice of theory: (1) empirical considerations, and (2) considerations that have to do with the unity, simplicity, or explanatory character of the theory in question.  Given any accepted physical theory -- Newtonian theory, quantum theory, general relativity -- endlessly many empirically more successful but disunified rivals can always be concocted which, quite correctly, are never considered in scientific practice.  But this persistent rejection of empirically more successful disunified rivals means that physics makes a big, persistent, highly problematic, implicit assumption: disunified theories are false.  The universe has some kind of unified dynamic structure.  If physics (and hence natural science) is to be rigorous, this influential, highly problematic, implicit assumption needs to be made explicit, so that it can be critically assessed and improved.  AOE provides a meta-methodological framework for doing this.  SE incorrectly denies that any such problematic assumption is made by science.  SE provides a "neurotic" picture of science because it fails to acknowledge (or "represses") problematic assumptions associated with the aims of science.

None of this has anything to do with wisdom.  Where, then, does wisdom come in?  It arises in connection with the Enlightenment program of "learning from scientific progress how to make social progress towards an enlightened (or wise) world".   Properly implemented, this involves -- I argue -- getting clear about what the progress-achieving methods of science are, generalizing them so that they become fruitfully applicable to any problematic, worthwhile human endeavor, and then applying them to the task of making progress towards a wiser, more enlightened world.  It is crucially important that we begin with the evolving aims-and-methods view of AOE, and not the neurotic view of SE.  This is why AOE matters for the project of trying to create a better world.  But even more important, I argue, is developing social inquiry as social methodology or social philosophy, and not, fundamentally, as social science.  What emerges from my reinterpretation of the Enlightenment program is a new conception of academic inquiry -- which I call "wisdom-inquiry".  Wisdom-inquiry gives intellectual priority to problems of living over problems of knowledge.  It seeks to help get into the fabric of society progress-achieving methods generalized from those of AOE natural science.  Above all, wisdom-inquiry acknowledges the profoundly problematic character of the aim of creating a better world, and seeks to represent this aim in the form of a hierarchy of aims, on analogy with the hierarchy of AOE science.  According to wisdom-inquiry, the basic intellectual aim of academic inquiry is, not knowledge, but wisdom -- wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge, technological know-how and understanding, but much else besides.

I might just add that there are 7 levels, not 10 (as Stanley says), as depicted by AOE in Is Science Neurotic?, level 1 being evidence, and level 2 being testable scientific theory.  I might also add that I do not hold, as Stanley says I do, that "God does not play dice".  On the contrary, during the last 35 years I have devoted much time and energy to developing a fully realistic and fundamentally probabilistic version of quantum theory (as I make clear on pages 194-5), and I have argued that probabilism is the key to solving the problems of orthodox quantum theory.  Finally, the ostensible quotation from Is Science Neurotic? in the paragraph fourth from the end of Stanley's review contains some words from my book but is otherwise badly mangled, not from my book, and not coherent.

© 2007 Nicholas Maxwell

Donald Stanley send the following reply, received September 5, 2007, published September 22, 2007.

Maxwell again insists that the philosophy of science must become the same thing as the sociology of science. He insists that only by the full play of social input, critique, evaluation, will science play the crucial role adumbrated in difference vii p. 60, discussed above.

Although Maxwell disagrees with me for oversimplifying therefore distorting his view, I still believe that his objections are a result of his complex vision: chapter 3 discusses the implications for social inquiry: Maxwell's diagram on p. 87 demonstrates how words can hardly capture the implications of his vision and, I believe, leave the reader confused which arrows to follow.

Maxwell leads me to believe that his statement:

"The proper, un-neurotic way is to . . . tackle social problems employing methods generalized from the progress-achieving methods of science . . . But ultimately it involves employing aim-oriented rationality . . . generalized from aim oriented empiricism." (p 116)

is the summation of his concept of wisdom, complexly illustrated throughout chapter 3.

© 2007 Donald Stanley