"I wouldn't know anything about politics," my friend said the other day. "I'm only an engineer."
He happens to be a very good engineer, but he named his profession as if he were ashamed of it. I see this a lot. The social scientists are automatically assumed to know more about society and politics than the hard scientists--even when the subject matter is something like nuclear power.
I wouldn't be so sure.
Now go again to your typical university. Find an engineering students and a social science student. I'll bet you anything you like that the engineer will have read about as much history and literature and genuine liberal arts as the social scientist; while the social scientist will know nothing of engineering and physics, little of biology, and no mathematics. He may protest that he "took stat"; which will mean that he knows how to do cookbook calculations to produce the mean, median, and mode of a bunch of numbers. Given a little help he may also be able to compute the standard deviation; and with a textbook and a bit of luck he might even be able to do a "T" test, although the odds are that he won't have the foggiest notion of what the T test assumes.
Go now to a rally protesting a nuclear power plant. There'll be a lot of students here. How many will be engineers? And how many will be social scientists? Of the social scientists, how many will understand anything of nuclear physics? How many will know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation?
Engineering students may apologize for deficiencies in "culture." The man who started the People's Lobby, the first of
The fact is that engineers and scientists will have studied far more of the liberal arts than social scientists will have of physics or engineering. (And, alas, neither will know any history.)
1 comentario:
Je, me suena el debate.
Lo malo no es la ignorancia acerca de temas de ciencias duras por parte de los cientistas sociales, sino el no asumir tal ignorancia como una limitación. El pretender que hechos científicos con un significado bien definido dentro de una dada especialidad (y la fisica es la victima preferida) se pueden aplicar sin ni siquiera comprenderlos a un análisis politico. El principio de incerteza, el axioma de elección, el teorema de Goedel, la topología del toro, todos ellos enchastrados en el medio de una analisis sobre, digamos, el sujeto y la culpa en la guerra de Vietnam.
Por atreverme a decir que el psicoanálisis tiene poco de científico me vapulearon durante mas de 200 comments en mi blog, personas que honestamnte creen que el subconciente tiene la estructura del toro... Una discusión acerca del significado de la objetividad científica tuvo lugar en Mundo Perverso hace algún tiempo, donde quienes sugerimos definir objetividad (antes de juzgar si existe) fuimos tratados poco menos que de neofascistas agentes del establishment... Parece que exigirle al interlocutor que haga el esfuerzo de saber de que está hablando es un comportamiento de algún modo policial.
Respecto del movimiento antinuclear, me pregunto de donde piensa esa gente sacar energía para alimentar las grandes megalópolis ¿de molinos eólicos? ¿cuantos y puestos donde? Sentiría mas simpatía si además pidieran más fondos para investigación en, digamos, reactores de fusión o laguna alternativa seria.
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