A voice crying in the wilderness

I said I would post something about scientific debate vs political debate. These are some very ill-formed ideas which fit into a wider complex of ideas which I’ve been thinking about for a long time, well, more or less since I did my PhD. Maybe if I pull them all together they’ll make a book, who knows?
I’ve been inspired by recent debates round here (among other things) to think about the differences, and similarities, between these two modes of discourse – sorry, a bit of sociologese there, make that ‘ways of discussing the world’ – and how they overlap. Maybe there’s a spectrum, with at one end the classic scientific method, and at the other, oh, I don’t know, voting on the latest Big Brother, maybe. No, scrub that, I’m getting distracted.
Recent work that I’ve done – going back a couple of years now, because basically I haven’t done ANYTHING intellectual since last summer – has focused on analysing contributions to the public debate on GM, looking at what people base their ideas on, where they come from, and what are recognised as legitimate truth claims. In this work, I have used concepts developed by Geoffrey Vickers, a particular guru of mine. He talks about statements of fact and statements of value, and the differences between the two. Statements of fact are independently verifiable – so, ‘this box is red’ is a statement of fact (if we leave aside philosophical discussions about the definitions of ‘this’, ‘box’, ‘is’ and ‘red’), while ‘This box is beautiful’ is a statement of value. Statements of value are inherently subjective – they require an observer – although they can acquire a form of ‘objectivity’ if enough people agree with them – thus the statement ‘The Mona Lisa is beautiful’ is widely considered an objective statement, although it is not equivalent in its objectivity to a statement like: ‘the Mona Lisa is a painting in oils on canvas’.
Oh, sorry, now I’ve really got down into the nit-picking, and I can feel myself being drawn into discussions about objectivity and subjectivity and facts and values… and something someone said a few months back about beliefs and opinions… I love this stuff, I know, I’m a sick, sick woman…
But to get back to my original debate – because to be honest it’s time to get back to work and stop scribbling in cafes [Ed’s note: this was written on Wednesday, it’s just that I’m only typing it up now, on Saturday morning] – the distinction I wanted to make is that scientific debates ultimately rest on judgements of fact, not value. It is possible to settle a scientific debate by an appeal to the evidence – indeed, this is the only legitimate way of doing so. This is not to say that this is easy, far from it, for all sorts of reasons, which I will expand on if I ever get round to writing that book (or even any more papers). But the point I was trying to make is that political debates – at the opposite end of the spectrum – are entirely based on judgements of value. It is not philosophically possible to say that one argument is ‘better’ than another purely on the basis of its content. I can argue with you forever over whether Warhol’s Marilyn is more beautiful than the Mona Lisa, but we cannot settle this by an appeal to judgements of fact, only perhaps by canvassing the opinions of others and seeing where the balance of preference lies - a democratic approach, if you like. Damn, I seem to have wandered away into aesthetic rather than political debates, that gives me another category.
Political debates can, of course, be settled by an appeal to ethics, but this is also inherently subjective.
What I wanted to say was this (and I really DO have to get back to work now) is that with factual/scientific debates, it is possible to reach some kind of resolution in terms of an appeal to an external standard. Different arguments can be shown to have a stronger basis than others. They are not all of equal value, different opinions which should all be accorded equal respect. Thus, it is wrong to say that Creationism is equal in value to evolution because they are alternative ‘theories’. There exists an external standard against which they can both be compared – and one, evolution, has a huge body of objective evidence to support it, while belief in creationism rests only on faith.
And now I have spent long enough in this café and sadly I really have to get home and get some work done.