Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
privileged social class from which he came, or to justify his supposed
prior atheism; and so on. Some of these claims are just. Some are
not. But why does it matter what biases and emotional predispositions
scientists bring to their studies, so long as they are scrupulously
honest and other people with different proclivities check their
results? Presumably no one would argue that the conservative view
on the sum of fourteen and twenty-seven differs from the liberal
view, or that the mathematical function that is its own derivative is
the exponential in the northern hemisphere but some other function
in the southern. Any regular periodic function can be represented to
arbitrary accuracy by a Fourier series in Muslim as well as in Hindu
mathematics. Non-commutative algebras (where A times B does not
equal B times A) are as self-consistent and meaningful for speakers
of Indo-European languages as for speakers of Finno-Ugric. Mathematics
might be prized or ignored, but it is equally true everywhere
- independent of ethnicity, culture, language, religion, ideology.
Towards the opposite extreme, there are questions such as
whether abstract expressionism can be 'great' art, or rap 'great'
music; whether it's more important to curb inflation or unemployment;
whether French culture is superior to German culture; or
whether prohibitions against murder should apply to the nation
state. Here the questions are oversimple, or the dichotomies false,
or the answers dependent on unspoken assumptions. Here local
biases might very well determine the answers.
Where in this subjective continuum, from almost fully independent
of cultural norms to almost wholly dependent on them,
does science lie? Although issues of bias and cultural chauvinism
certainly arise, and although its content is continually being
refined, science is clearly much closer to mathematics than it is to
fashion. The claim that its findings are in general arbitrary and
biased is not merely tendentious, but specious.
The historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob
(in Telling the Truth About History, 1994) criticize Isaac Newton:
he is said to have rejected the philosophical position of Descartes
because it might challenge conventional religion and lead to social
chaos and atheism. Such criticisms amount only to the charge that
scientists are human. How Newton was buffeted by the intellectual
currents of his time is of course of interest to the historian of
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