Global Strategy - blog

Attending a talk last week about contingency in science (held as part of CPNSS project ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science) left me rather confused. As I found it, the concept of contingency, at least at the LSE, seems to be a name (or a subset-not in a strictly set-theoretical sense!) of the nowadays quite classical realism-antirealism debate. That is, I found no references to Rorty. Although quite understandable, it still seems odd to pass the ‘practical turn' of the 1980s in one sentence, just slightly overlooking some significant parts of more recent developments in philosophy. On the other hand, the bent is quite reasonable considering the institutional traditions.

Cutting corners, the two broad schools within the discussion are the ‘inevitabilists' and the ‘contingentists'. The former think that discoveries are necessary and inevitable, whereas the latter think that human history, initial conditions and possibilities for alternatives play crucial roles in the formation and development of science. We might agree that physics is a robust, inevitable and irreducible science, but what is the role of the social sciences?

This is also a question of legitimacy, at least in the eyes of personalities with background in natural sciences. I have seldom witnessed similar disdain than what a medical scientist shows towards the methods and practices of the ‘pseudo-sciences'. Applying for funding, as well as the more philosophical level of social acceptance and giving meaning through doing to the active community, show how significant this issue is. Even if the individuals themselves did not show great interest in the ‘scientific' level of the social sciences from a philosophical perspective, articulating this too openly to the uneducated audience might lead to detrimental results.

Another thing is the relevance of this contingency to the fictional nature of the models that are being used (as discussed in the ‘Models and Fiction' workshop). As this is an emerging topic in this blog as well, the interplay of fictional and representational layers of intriguing phenomena might be something worth looking at.