entire book - Chris Hables Gray

The Uses of Science [ 73 ]
In the military it has been named Digital Realism. Fred Reed likens it
to a species of Magic Bulletism, what he terms a belief in a perfect weapon.
He goes on to explain that
There is a powerful, almost universal desire to envision wars as predictable,
precise, and bloodless. Digital Realism is the chief intellectual tool for
doing this.
It consists in believing that the world is like the inside of a computer.
In programming a computer, all things are clean and certain. Each
instruction does one thing, precisely described in the manual, with only
one possible result, which can easily be ascertained. As long as a program
is quite small, it will run to a foreseeable end with no surprises, click, click,
click. This is a world of godlike certainty. (1987, p. 40)
Within the AI research community, there are strongly articulated alternative
viewpoints to this paradigm. They emphasize how complex thinking is, and
they argue that human language use is based on the existence of a discourse
community and on the interactional basis of communication. To reveal how
different this view is from the dominant AI mentality will take some
explaining. The first step is to look at science itself.
Definitions of Science
The man of science is not content with what is found on the
surface of the earth [He] has penetrated into her bosom .
.. for the purpose of allaying the restlessness of his desires or
of extending and increasing his power.... Science has
bestowed upon the natural philosopher powers which may be
called creative; which have enabled him ... by his
experiments to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a
scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her
operations, but rather as a master, active with his own
instruments.
—Sir Humprey Davy (quoted in Easlea, 1980, p. 248)
Any definition of science is now contested. There is more debate today
about the science question then there has been since the sixteenth
century. There isn't space here to give a full account of the various
perspectives; instead, this section will try to point out aspects of this
struggle over science's meanings that seem important to understanding
postmodern war.
The most important of these disagreements is the debate between,
to but it crudely, constructivists (sometimes called relativists) on the one
side and realists (who overlap a great deal with positivists) on the other.
There are those among the latter group who claim there is a direct and