Part 1 is HERE
Part 2 is HERE

The problem of course has been that those undertaking this kind of analysis (aristocrats, industrialists, liberals, marxists, & continental philosophers) very rarely have a radical bone in their body, and so we see writers lazily claiming that certain popular scientific models or paradigms that emerged briefly and with attendant explicit qualifications are in fact the core driving ideology of science. And of course — if they even note them — the emergence of alternative scientific models is presented as science conceding defeat or pulling itself apart from within. But it’s not as though newtonian mechanics were some motivating religion, rather science’s drive for the roots ended up legitimately judging newtonian mechanics as overwhelmingly promising for an extended period of time.



This kind of rabid preoccupation with things like positivism, atomism, and determinism (although almost always wild strawmen thereof) is rife among those coming from an academic or political lineage whose contact with science is Nth-hand at best. See in particular the ongoing cringeworthy hazy-association-fest of lazy psychology leftists have formed around the the word “quantification.” (To be sure, as a physicist I make the obligatory sneers and jokes about the aesthetic inferiority of discrete math to continuous math, but come on.) There are clear reverberations of lingering PTSD motivating these defensive obsessions and in some sense that’s quite understandable. There has, afterall, been a good few centuries of those in power referencing or extending popular scientific frameworks or theories to prop up terrible ideologies. But to characterize ‘science’ in terms of those ideologies is akin to characterizing an elephant by the leeches, ticks and flies on its hide. They may have swallowed some tiny bits of it, but that doesn’t make them the elephant. And at the end of the day they don’t decide where the elephant roams.

Yes, the political, economic, social, and cultural commitments of scientists as a class have in many ways been largely captured and constrained by today’s most dominant power structures; just as those unions most critically situated at points of weakness in the system were long ago bought off, lumpenproles defanged with welfare, artists by commerce, etc. Although ‘pure science’ is constantly being whittled away as capitalism attempts to reshape and replace it by more easily predictable, controllable and overseeable fields of engineering — and basic science education is suppressed or replaced by tradeschool-style training — those who remain have been urged in a multitude of ways to identify with the status quo. It’s a simple fact that fewer scientists today face murderous repression from the establishment’s fear of disruptive effects. For a first in history the power structures ruling our societies have come to uneasily rely on certain predictable marches of development (although curveballs are still strongly discouraged). And since the creation of the modern academic system most scientists have come to rely on government funding in deeply problematic ways that impede a shift to alternatives. But once identified — less as a structured procedural commitment than a cognitive inclination or orientation of desire — science is exposed as having intense social or political inclinations almost entirely opposed to the interests of science’s current benefactors/enslavers.

This recognition is of profound import to anyone looking for allies and fecund frontiers of resistance, and presents a powerful way to push back against those corruptive or appropriative forces that have been exploiting the situation.

I’m interested in this restructuring of our language and narratives around science because as an anarchist I come at science from a stridently idealistic and radical perspective and thus am attracted to those currents within it. But also because — having consequently developed a background in high energy theoretical physics — it’s continually astonishing to me the vast disconnect between the analyses of “science” popular within the left and the actual reality in the many fields close to my own work. A lot of what I’m saying is mainstream in physics and has been for a long long time.

While “purity” within the sciences is a widely recognized dynamic and common joke fodder, somehow few philosophers or pundits of science have felt any need to build any recognition of this into their definitions of science, or even mention it. (Richard Dawid deserves special mention here for recently taking some rarely listened to perspectives on science not being equivalent to empiricism common among theoretical physicists and finally giving some of our perspectives a voice in philosophy departments.)

The abusive and unproductive wall erected after the erasure of “natural philosophy” between science (as any immediately testable hypothesis) and philosophy (as literally any theorizing) has pressured scientists to be shortsighted and shallow in their theorizing and given bad philosophical models sufficient buffer from rigor and the march of new discoveries. And when philosophy does come up with anything concrete it’s immediately no longer classified as philosophy! Not only is this unfair but obviously it has an terrible influence upon philosophy!

Of course when philosophy and science aren’t defined in contrast to one another it’s much harder to present some kind of unified Scientist front. A definition of science centered on radical analysis would undermine the “we’re all in this together perspective” that a lot of science communicators have pushed to rally solidarity against attacks and to give disparate researchers a sense of ownership or investment in work beyond their own field. But honestly we shouldn’t have solidarity with many people in the STEM world. We could all do with more clarity about people’s varying underlying motivations and less fuzzy-wuzzy collective identity. If those STEM minds in conservative, religious or anti-intellectual contexts want to huddle around each other for warmth they can surely do so without obscuring important distinctions over motivations and degrees of rootedness. Our language should not be defined in reaction to the Kansas school board.
 
Tackling Militant Ignorance

Yes, in some immediate sense stepping back from the shallow litmus tests for science weakens our rhetorical toolbox when it comes to rejecting pseudoscience. But I don’t think it’s worth risking our clearheadedness by twisting our conceptual language just to more quickly win some short term battles. We can still grapple with these people directly. Not with “it was peer reviewed! 99% agree!” badgering appeals to democratic morality, but by directly calling out the intellectual laziness of denialists. It’s unfeasible to personally tackle each and every anti-vaxxer, chemtrailer, or cartesian dualist; the amount of energy necessary to generate bullshit is always orders of magnitude less than the amount of energy necessary to refute it. There are maybe ten thousand times more wingnuts with strong opinions about particle physics or neuroscience than there are particle physicists or neuroscientists in the world. We will never beat back all their diverse nonsenses one-on-one in Facebook comment sections, and implicit appeals to social pressure via arguments from ‘scientific consensus’ fail when a climate change denier or quantum mystic is already subject to social pressures of consensus within their more immediate community of fellow wingnuts.

The root problem with the people “contesting” evolution or the big bang or whatever isn’t that they’re doing it the wrong way or using the wrong tools of argumentation; it’s that they don’t actually care about understanding. They care about the sensation of knowing, or the appearance of iconoclasm, or a fantasy of the gold star they might wrest away from the establishment. Our pluralist liberal society obsesses over the equality of all opinions, in which my ignorance is as good as your knowledge, and consequently in which abusers can never be pinned down because “everything’s subjective.” We leap to find opinions and then raise them as identity-banners. And so we bristle at the notion of better or more objectively reachable accounts that might disrupt our most fond self-deceptions. The ugly reality is that if people put even the faintest effort into vigilant inquiry we wouldn’t be having these debates.

Tackling that means tackling a huge array of social ills.

First and foremost we should be focusing on making the models or arguments we’ve discovered more accessible. As we lower barriers dramatically there will cease to be any excuse for the smug 37 year old punk with a theory of gravitation as friction. Or the endless barrage of numbskulls in the anarchist milieu — from oogles rejecting treatment for scabies because “science is a religion” to Wolfi citing wildly off base secondhand misaccounts of quantum mechanics and getting lauded for it. Point them to the mappings. Quickly call out the particulars: “Okay, how do you account for __ ?” Scientists already do this by habit.

Often however we utilize existing barriers to entry as a kind of wall slam in people’s face. Someone repeats the well popularized woo that quantum mechanics has anything to do with conscious “observers” or the poorly defined notion of “consciousness” itself and we quickly snap that quantum mechanics is a just a theory of complex probabilities, of operators in a hilbert space, and continue rattling off mathematical context until the wingnuts feel sufficiently browbeaten or at least leave us be.

This is highly understandable, and often there’s no better tool available to make the frothy nutjob or haughtily ignorant continental philosopher go away, but it is unfortunate. Exploiting unfair existing barriers to scientific knowledge to harangue those on the outside is hardly in keeping with the core idealism of science.

Thankfully there are presently many projects on various levels to restructure every aspect of science as an institution. Peer review, journals, even colleges themselves are under constant criticism and attack in the core of science. And while physicists led the push decades ago to open source everything and bypass or abolish intellectual property, it’s well past time to make that material not just available but accessible. Doing this, replacing peer review with more organic, open, and situationally nuanced associative networks of trust and decentralized certification, is no simple task, but many are working on it. Just as many are working to replace the astonishingly primitive technology of pdfs with a richer more deeply tagged and accessible literature, ideally leading to fields of knowledge as mindmapped wikis where dependencies and sources are instantly visible. The solution to people with smugly uninformed opinions is to take away any excuse for their ignorance. To build a culture where our instincts are to just look something up if you’re interested in it rather than to try and accumulate ‘opinions’ from shallow data as though building a record collection.

I’ve heard people in the left or the supposedly post-left milieu sneer and argue that the deplorable filters of pop science reporting are the fault of scientists, that we are complicit in the whole circus that leads to horrid phrases like “god particle” and all the narratives that get validated as a result. And there’s an ounce of truth to that. Not in the sense that we scientists presently feel anything other than murderous rage at the pop science media machine, but that there are still many wars for us to win. Thankfully we’re clearly up for the task. I will never forget the day the head of my old department discovered Wikipedia. With bags under his eyes from an all-nighter editing articles he animatedly and earnestly beseeched his statistical mechanics class “Did you all know about this? Why are you all here when you could be at home learning on your own? I wanna blow off my next class to adopt some of my lecture notes! Oh! I guess this means I’m out of a job.

Huh. Oh well! Good riddance actually.” All good scientists hunger for the death of academia, in the sense of our present institutional context, this gross distortion, this unnaturally frozen battlefront in the struggle to expand science to everyone. It is unfortunate our relatively recent treaty with the state and other appropriative forces led to an abrupt freeze in the previously exponentially increasing ranks of scientists. We don’t always appreciate this violent pruning of science, the prison signified by our still small numbers, but the loss is astonishing when you plot it out.

I delight at the inevitable accusations of “imperialism!” I will receive for the crime of desiring to persuade people or even make arguments more accessible, but outreach does have to be nuanced. Instead of outright declaring “you should want this” we need to go after the biggest traps people get themselves into. I find myself having to tackle the old “anyone can argue anything!” quite frequently: Well that’s quite a surprisingly strong statement! How do you know every possible perspective is perfectly and evenly mappable into all others? How can you be so certain that when considering every possible meta structure for ‘argumentation’ there are not emergently inferior and superior ones? You seem to be extrapolating very vigorous results from a very small dataset of personal experience!

But there are many more holes people dig themselves into, and some are quite relatable.
 
Who You Trust Is A Legit Question

The reality is that people not trusting scientists or scientific consensus is in many regards reasonable. What are you going to trust, your eyes and everyday lived experience or a single teacher in school and some nerds online?

Most arguments over catching people up to scientific knowledge usually come down to 1) how integrated a person is with a relevant culture, society and institutions, and 2) how unoppressed they are. There are many other logjams and twisted arguments that can occur, but these tend to be the most primal. If no one you know can in any meaningful way vouch for the stranger thumping on the Particle Data Group book their claims of peer review and the like will appear no different than a theologian claiming to be correct because other theologians have checked. And of course, if you’re locked in modern versions of chattel slavery, exploring the workings of the universe is not really a good strategy for survival; nor will your first instinct be to trust the claimed findings of those who do have that privilege.

Honestly the only reason a good number of folk these days would sneer at anyone saying sun goes round the earth, that Jesus rode dinosaurs, or that the universe is 6,000 years old, or that anthropogenic global warming isn’t real, is that they recognize these claims as cultural cues of being on ‘the wrong side.’ It’s a not-popular thing. A shun the “outgroup” thing. As such appealing to the spirit of social consensus and democratic moralism is a weapon that will almost always backfire on scientists.

To most of the kids that get shuffled into ‘radical politics’ or the like scientists are the outgroup. The cultural divide that takes root in college between STEM majors and humanities majors has been long cemented and reinforced. And the few scientists in this whole affair tend to sigh and keep their heads down rather than contest every nonsense. Meanwhile expecting someone whose gone through the theoretical and social conditioning of academic fields that practically define themselves by suspicion and hostility to science — someone whose social connections are almost certainly overwhelmingly in the same boat — to just cede before the overwhelming consensus within the scientific community is like telling a FOXnews troglodyte to adopt queer terminology because everyone in San Francisco is doing it. It’s just totally disconnected from the realities of social pressures, and it expects magic from human trust networks.

Why on earth should you trust what one teacher says? Or wikipedia the time you strayed over to it? You don’t have knowledge of the immense amount of work it would take to maintain a false belief within say mathematics journals, so both sides appear roughly equivalent. Science appears to most as just a codification of what’s popular in certain circles except with those people saying “it’s extra true because someone somewhere totally tested it, whatever that means.”

Smart people come up to me and express derision or discomprehension of science all the time. A skilled hacker asks me bemusedly at a party, “so you actually think there’s like truth??” Brilliant girl in my high school chemistry explains why she doesn’t pay attention in class, “Theories in science are always changing, why bother learning one, it’ll be totally different in two hundred years anyway.”

These express themselves as philosophical critiques and sometimes develop into more challenging ones, but they’re grounded in a sense of social alienation and a rebellious dismissal of seemingly arbitrary authority.

It’s not for nothing that one of the most instinctive ways Leftists have interacted with science has been by critiquing sources or playing games of slander by association. “Don’t get me started about Game Theory, it was invented by a paranoid schizophrenic who worked for the government and feared communists.” (Nevermind its parallel discoverers or that game theory has ultimately provided some of the strongest arguments for anarchism and clearest insights into the landscape of challenges we face.) Similarly it’s quite popular today to talk about “cybernetics” and criticize anything that touches information theory by cherrypicking the ideologies and rhetoric of associated parties — an approach that quickly grows so disconnected from the actual reality of the material and field that it starts to sound like conservative rants about “cultural marxism.”

(Although quite a few authoritarians have spun out hopes that it would provide tools for absolute control, cybernetics’ objective success in grasping root dynamics has also revealed profound limits to the information processing capacity of power structures and computational neuroscience has enabled a much richer and more productive ethical discourse. “Cybernetics” in fact is a sweeping term mostly used by its critics. The actual fields bundled up in absurd polemics like Tiqqun’s do not easily fit in the grand ideological narratives claimed by these critics. Additionally, since every essay on how the ‘inherent logic’ of cybernetics somehow inexorably saddled us with our current surveillance state loves to point to the reactionary associations of a couple famous researchers, let me point out that one of computational neuroscience’s most influential early pioneers, Walter Pitts, was a homeless runaway from a poor family who’d joined a commune of radical supporters of the Spanish Revolution.)

There can be — of course — a sliver of relevance to who the original discoverers are and what assumptions or constrained perspectives may get subtly baked in, but an even remotely scientific field is quite a bit different from say endless discourses on the writings of Heidegger; models and paradigms in science are frequently replaced rather than merely appended with footnotes and there are a multitude of very strong pressures in scientific practice driving researchers toward the same underlying root dynamics. That’s the ideal at least. But it’s a coherent and substantive ideal that many discourses asymtotically approach and that we are all the better for having a term for.

When alleged ‘radicals’ these days rail against science what they’re typically arguing against — or at least what they get started rallying against — is having to integrate with the social and institutional structures mediating such ‘facts’. The semi-ironic embrace of mysticism and the occult among the queer community and twentysomethings more broadly is such a successful sociopolitical signalling game not just because of the boogeyman of Dawkinsite atheists and the broader STEM vs humanities culture war, but because it publicly demonstrates a rejection of the authorities and institutions that have positioned themselves between scientists and just about everyone else.

The error here isn’t not trusting the account of those with the right magic words. It’s — again — not investigating more thoroughly or proactively. A stark case of Gell-Mann Amnesia whereby people recognize when the institutions of power appropriate and drastically misrepresent one’s own team, but then immediately assume those same institutions and media gatekeepers are more or less honest about everyone else. Anarchists are happy to recognize how poorly “anarchy” is represented in the media and how many appropriators are out there, and yet so many of us embarassingly turn around and take representations and claimants of “science” at face value.

Modern liberalism asks us to wrap ourselves in as many flags as possible, to feel entitled to the sense of identity provided by a strong opinion. Doing due diligence by looking at depth into the subject is in no way seen as a prerequisite, and since the goal is social positioning there’s no impetus for such investigation.

However I don’t highly trust someone’s account of a mixing angle because it’s spoken in the magic tongue of science, but because I’ve done a lot of looking into the social and cultural context, because I have many points of contact with it, and thus I know how difficult it would be for a lie to propagate or persist. Further I’ve compared theories and considerations myself, followed them down into their nitty-gritty and seen just how elegant and more realistic an account is.

And yes there often really is an universally accessible or “objective” direction of “better theory.” Although it can be hard to precisely compare two theories roughly close to each other in virtues, a broad gradation between possible models is strongly apparent upon any fucking due diligence.

All this is maddeningly hard to convey to people with a limited vocabulary of experiences to draw upon. You have to go digging around in the systemically impoverished lives of those deprived meaningful contact with science and find the one experience that will make such dynamics clear. Someone to whom all discussion of say ‘complexity’ is meaningless hot air with no connection to anything in their lives cannot really be expected to fathom any talk of scientific legitimacy outside of experimental validation, and even that is likely to be tough going. Many people in our world lack critical qualia, have never even experienced basic things we take for grated, and it is fiendishly difficult to catch them up. Try explaining turbulence to someone who has never played with water or watched clouds fly by. I’ve listened to multiple people in various contexts demonstrate that a system is non-linear in a trivial way and then promptly sit back under the impression that such equates unsolvability.

Part of the solution is obviously — as most scientists know and will angrily rant to you at length about — destroying the prison system masquerading as “education.” The “disgustingly boring gymnastics used only for punitive purposes,” as a mathematical physicist I’m friends with characterized them, that comprise all contact with supposed “mathematics” most students ever have bares as little relation to the actual practice as spelling bees do with literature or poetry. Of course to merely list the myriad failings of how we are “educated” would require the space of a book, so I won’t bother trying. But that is only one component of a wide array of ways our present society suffocates and denies access to deep and incredibly important concepts or experiences regarding how the world functions that are necessary to build better intuitions.

And even chucking those is not enough. It would not be enough to burn this horrid system to the ground because many of the monsters impeding access to or understanding of science have sown the ideological seeds of their own upkeep and reestablishment.

It is, after all, not just an education or accessibility problem, it’s also a vigilance problem.
 
So What’s The Hold Up?

So why do people fail to even set out on paths of exploration that would eventually lead them to catch up and recognize science? Why do people turn away from radicalism to reactionary perspectives?

What we must remind ourselves is that people will be prompted by their contexts to grow into different cognitive strategies. A child that’s beaten for exercising inquisitiveness will quite rationally decide that thinking is a bad strategy in life. It’s often quite rational to stop being rational, or at least to abandon intellectual vigilance. (There are many competing popular definitions of “rationality,” some expansive to the point where they describe literally all possible developments in a neural net and others far more specific and aspirational, I am not deeply wedded to any one.)

Sometimes when the goal is feeling smart rather than actually being right, the most optimal strategies are postmodern rationalizations that add more and more complications and slippery fallacies of association in a kind of fractal way until it’s turtles all the way down and your interlocutor can’t vanquish them as fast as you can generate them.

Particularly common in our society is the strategy of enforcing rituals and spectacles of public modesty that aggressively drag yourself and everyone else down to avoid any one of you ever being challenged. Obviously this is the case most of the time when the outraged howls start of “How can you claim to know anything? No one knows anything! You’re just a confused slob like the rest of us! How dare you put on airs!” Too frequently people in this situation start talking past each other with entirely different notions of humility.

People are deeply afraid of science’s potency. Scratch that, it’s much broader: People are deeply afraid of intellectual vigilance. They’re afraid of fields they haven’t studied. They’re afraid people will come at them one day with something from beyond their horizons that overturns and shakes up their core perspectives or narrative of self.

The reason commentators try to fence in science, make it trivial or incidental to our lives is because they can feel the magnitude of its philosophical impacts lurking. There are, after all, no a priori truths. Just deeply seeded priors that can be overruled by sufficient conditions. Physics might very well reveal that causality or time itself don’t work the way we develop a working assumption of at a very young age. Physicists are unafraid of overturning the kind of intuitions biology or our formulative experiences have built into us, but for lots of people there’s a catastrophic sense of vertigo — and soon after, rage. How dare you!

Yet all we humans ever do is model the world. Even logic and the most cherished axioms are just models that have to be chosen. We see patterns and look for stronger patterns. To discount the search for the strongest possible patterns is to cast oneself to the winds of happenstance. And ultimately it risks unmooring one from any good reason to even believe in other people’s existence. If you have some kind of deep assumption about the universe or even how you think and science reveals deep failures of your model or better alternatives you have to postulate an increasingly conspiratorially extended and implausible alternative explanation of how the scientific consensus is rife with somehow systematically unseen failures. Soon you’ve added piles and piles of redundant or unnecessary complexities, even magical interventions. You are pulled more and more towards solipsism.

And yes, sure, this can feel freeing. People with little agency in their world often find any sensation of ‘possibility’ freeing, even incorrect or deluded possibility. There’s an unlimited number of models incoherent internally or with one’s experiences, and they’re all relatively easily morphable into one another. This freedom of mind can be exhilarating, but it offers a false and limited freedom, because a failure to understand the world around you means an inability to move it.

The radical impulse is critical. It’s long been noted that people with some basic intelligence but no deep drive often realize they can “argue” anything and, upon such realization, stop, failing to examine the meta-characteristics and topologies to such expanses of possible “arguments.” Because the utility of vigilance is not immediately obvious their instinct to rigorously examine atrophies and they get away with it by simply upping the complexity until no one can manage to call out all their mistakes. I once heard an 80 year old professor sincerely argue that — never mind their individual persuasiveness or coherency — because he had more distinct arguments for creationism it was therefore correct.

We’re playing the “how can we use words to figure dynamics out” game, but so much of society is instinctively playing the “how can we use words to manipulate and get what we want” game, habits that have been adopted by the naive as well. That sort of thing is not a conversation and it’s certainly not worth bothering with. You can always arbitrarily increase the complexity of a stupid argument to fend off critique. The formula is simple: start with some loud populist appeals to common everyday abstractions, models, or language (however unfounded) and pour on supporting claims and excuses with increasing complexity until challenging them is too exhausting. Through this process you can marshal armies whenever you like.

There are infinite possibilities when you abandon coherence, simplicity and empiricism. But the infinite is boring, it’s a quagmire. What science represents is the winnowing down of the infinite, the pursuit of the most fascinatingly unique possibility (or possibilities).

The problem with Christian Science isn’t that it’s unfalsifiable; falsifiability, while certainly a useful indication, isn’t absolutely critical to science, and there’s nothing unscientific about postulating that the entire world might be an illusion. Even though we may label extensive thinking about it as unfruitful, we still note the possibility and are honest about it. And — as with Boltzmann brains — there are even fringe considerations that could have ramifications or relevance or testability. Thinking about models involving reality being simulated, for example, has prompted people to narrow down possible signatures given certain assumptions regarding the hidden reality that can be compared with experiment. The unscientific leap is just how wildly arbitrary the claims are once you get beyond the mere statement that our entire impression of material reality could be a lie. There’s a very large infinity of possible configurations of hidden realities, of which Christian Science’s claims about God etc are but one. They say suffering is an illusion but why not claim that non-suffering is the illusion? Why not postulate that we’re all in the dream of a cosmic green sheep? Etc.

A model with infinite arbitrary parameters is a bad model. Or at least it’s uninteresting, or a bad model on which to predicate communicating or collaborating with others. Hell, we need to find unique points within the space of possible models that everyone else can identify just to be able to meet each via those frameworks.

‘Christian Scientists’ love to claim that their conclusions follow from a priori introspection, but the more broadly and vigilantly one engages with the world the more one sees just how limited introspection can be and prone to confusion or accidental self delusion.

The language of subjective experience and introspection is riddled with errors that it alone is incapable or dramatically inefficient at recognizing. Whereas cognitive science provides us with another useful vantagepoint to integrate and rectify these mistakes. At the end of the day the presumption of fully a priori meditation is simply not as good a framework as the neurological model and any question you want answered in the former can be revealed through the later as either more efficiently and directly answerable or poorly posed and thus ultimately unanswerable in any model. Consciousness, the self, and the ideological edifices built in the language of of subjective experience are in many ways spooks, errors, narrative simplifications with fraying edges to their usefulness upon any close investigation, akin to when marxists talk in mystical ways about Capitalism or primitivists about Civilization as a moving spirit more than the sum of its parts. The entire cartesian assumption of an a priori vantagepoint is ultimately a faulty model when examined from all angles or pushed to its breaking points.

Of course someone could retort in a Zerzan-esque vein that the only real reality is immediate sensation and any conceptual processing of that — any modeling of any kind — is the “abstraction.” Nevermind how easy it is to verify things like our blind spots and optical processing defects, our immediate sensations or qualia are not just often wrong, they have to be heavily processed by neural columns for us to make sense of them in any way that corresponds to the world we interact with. Indeed the less “modeling” we do the less we’d be able to see or hear. And if you attempt to discount those wellworn insights of neuroscience the number of other things you must discount to do so spreads in effect quite rapidly and dramatically. Especially if you have any instinct towards intellectual vigilance.

There is a kind of circularity here, but it should really be viewed as an matter of feedback. If you’re interested in parsing through your sensations in pursuit of deeper relations, you’ll discover that any rigorous examination reveals the superficiality of “immediate impressions.” And conversely if you wall yourself off from such investigations, if you champion the reactionary ideology that immediatism is all that matters, you can ignore anything else. However there’s a difference between these two positions. Radicalism is a stable and attractive equilibrium, whereas reactionism is unstable under perturbation. Once you start investigating you’re quite likely to encounter evidence that your immediate impressions are wrong and that deeper dynamics exist, which increases your evaluation of how useful root-seeking is.

However the way from one equilibrium to the other is not always an easy slide. If one revolts at the thought of searching to clarify fundamental dynamics then one will revolt at the very idea of investigating a definition of “science” that isn’t all-inclusive of every association, every appropriating charlatan, and every rhetorically dressed up atrocity. What one might call the postmodern instinct has been to reject breaking apart conceptual bundles to identify separable sub-dynamics and instead speak of ‘real existing science’ — the entirety of everything its name gets slapped on — and look for fuzzy tendencies across this abstraction. This approach takes the macroscopic abstraction as foundational, certain rough commonalities as characteristic qualities, and then handles any exceptions or additional complexities by means of perpetually appending footnotes and excuses. Great for justifying people’s preexisting impressions, opinions, or allegiances. Terrible at better mapping the dynamics at play. As such it’s incapable of spurring progress or meaningful change.
 
Conclusion

It goes without saying that we shouldn’t waste our lives fighting a war over every preferred definition. Language is often fluid, and not every term can be redeemed. A “language” is often really forked into many simultaneous languages and there can be strategic and empathic virtues in swapping between them. But it’s also important to have our terms describe the most meaningful realities or distinct dynamics they can. Gaping conceptual holes, unspoken or unspeakable realities in a given language, can end up having a huge impact in our lives and impeding our capacity to fight. Language determines what we focus on by default, what gets left as awkward addendums, and thus what loops of debate we most frequently retread trying to get at realities outside the terms we have available.

When possible it’s good practice to shift our language to clearer and more conceptually distinct and workable definitions of terms, regardless of popular associations. This is after all the foundation of our redefinition of anarchy. “Anarchy” is a nebulous word whose use varies wildly. But its most widespread associations beyond the anarchist milieu bundle in the assumption that there can be no freedom from the oppressive dynamics of rulership, that our only speakable choice is between fractured or unified power structures. Anarchism was founded on a revolt against this Orwellianism, and it has retained enough distinctiveness to spur resistance to appropriation of that term by neonazis, capitalists, and maoists as our respect has risen.

The situation with science is similar. There is a sharply distinct subset within what gets called “science” who few would deny qualify as science. This subset is a lot more distinct in certain ways that matter than the “any empiricism” set and unfettered by its failings. The present widespread identification of science with the merely anything empirical or data-related consistently invalidates by association the valid work of this subset, for whom there is presently no other identifying term available besides “science.” Further this subset was who science was originally centered on, who it appropriated from, and it’s a subset that has vehemently and vocally resisted the wider definition. It has accumulated various social institutions, cultures, and other parasites around its practice but these are obviously distinct from the core idea.

The science that lies at the core of and drives anything one might call “science” is characterized by a radical impulse: to search for the most deeply rooted patterns, to push beyond the existing or the immediate, into extremes, to look for what can break and how, and to not be afraid of throwing everything out, all in order to better grasp what is possible.

We need to be humble about the complexity of our world, but audacious in searching for models anyway. We must reject the traumatized mewling that “you can’t ever know anything” or the abusive “how dare you compare things” but also shy away from accepting shallow impressions.

This is the beating heart of science and it is what has driven its rise, rectified its mistakes, and continually resisted its capture by power. It is what makes it the most fecund site for resistance in our world today.