entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 76 ] The Present
and inhuman objects not only doesn't explain how social knowledge is
constructed but implicitly supports the politics of science as it is.
A stronger and more useful way of explaining the importance of artifacts
is to see them as playing special roles within a discourse. In science, artifacts
and experiments are powerful metaphors, arguments, sometimes even rules, of
the discourse. They are never, however, acting subjects. Within the workings
of discourse, then, a machine or an experiment is not neutral—it has "politics,"
for example (Winner, 1986). It influences reality by influencing how people
think and decide (Aronowitz, 1988). In sum, then, science can be seen as both
a discourse and a practice mediating between human culture and the real world
on physical, psychological, and even emotional levels.
Seen in another way, however, science is a religion, an ideology, even a
cult. Although other social systems can manifest powers of demonstration
(miracles), prediction (prophesy), and experience (the subjective one of the
believers), none approach science in its demonstrative, predictive, and
experimental powers on the physical plane—that part of reality most easily
visited (captured?) by science. Science kills. Science saves. Science intervenes
continuously in our lives.
This stress on intervention as characterizing science is developed in the
philosopher Ian Hacking's work. He points out that the central characteristic
of science is the ability to make regular "interventions," which can be
experiments or observations that produce regular phenomena (1983). The
theoretical side of science, representation, not only tries to explain these
interventions, in some cases it can organize them as well. Thus the phenomena
are produced by both the theoretical and actual human intervention into
the material. The process continues as representations influence interventions
and vice versa.
This is the methodology of AI: proof by production not by repeatable
experiment. It is also, by necessity, the way a science of war must proceed,
for every battle is different. But what must be produced as proof? Victory?
Security? A strong military? War? The confusion is because experiments
don't produce proofs so much as definitions. The science of war defines wars,
but it can't promise to win them.
There is something potent in science. There is powerful magic in
the regularity with which science can mine (find, define) facts. The
power of nuclear weapons, moon trips, and open heart surgery has meant
a very special place for science in modern culture. This effectiveness of
science may well be integral to human nature and culture as they have
evolved up to this day, having more to do with survival than with truth.
Science works on more than it explains—which explains some of the
ways it has shaped war.
Even if a scientific (experimental, pragmatic, reductionistic) mentality
isn't a necessary part of being human today, science is just too central to be