I got an essay assignment while we were doing these readings... bad deal. Either way, I think I'll kill two birds with one stone by talking about it a bit here.
In his book "Physics and Philosophy," Werner Heisenberg writes that "We know any understanding must be based finally upon the natural language because it is only there that we can begin to touch reality, and hence we must be skeptical about any skepticism with regard to this natural language and its essential concepts” (Heisenberg 176). In this passage, he's struggling with the effects of language on science; basically, the guy knows that there can never be a completely logical and objective scientific language, because language is intrinsically not objective. "Other structures may arise from associations between certain meanings of words; for instance, a secondary meaning of a word which passes only vaguely through the mind when the voice is heard… [contributing] essentially to the content of a sentence” (Heisenberg 144).
At this point, I almost wish he hadn't admitted to such a thing, because it reminded me immediately of what we are reading. At the most basic level, I suppose that I'm saying that this means that science is open to Derrida's ideas of play and différance. In his essay "Différance," he describes how all knowledge refers to other things, other words, other kinds of consciousness--there is no other way to imagine it.
I'd really like to know what this means for science. I've already come to understand why many writers describe it as a social construct (Kuhn), but describing it as a construct of language seems to be a much, much bigger jump. Kuhn wrote that scientists pretty much just have to accept their methods and their languages because there is no other way we know how to look for "facts," and Heisenberg seems to be willing to do the same thing. But once we understand science in this way, I think it raises questions about the nature of our knowledge and even our perception.
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I don't know what it means for the laboratory sciences, but the issue of language v. knowledge has already arisen in math. In 1931, Kurt Godel put out his two incompleteness theorems. These basically demonstrated that because of the language mathematics uses, it is a)impossible to prove all facts about numbers and b) for some statements that are true, we can never logically solve them. And all of this because of language.
ReplyDeleteAlso, interesting that the essay is by Heisenberg. Took a while to jog my memory, but this is the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" Heisenberg- we can't know the position and velocity of an electron simultaneously with any great degree of certainty. The more certainly we know one, the less certainly we know the other. We give these ideas names, and the names are language.
ReplyDeleteHeisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is perhaps one of the most influential ideas of the 20th Century and in some sense gives rise to what we call "postmodernism."
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