I continue my quixotic fighting against obscurantism, old-fashioned ideas, legacies of the second millenium, conservative prejudices, and everything that could bridle progress.
After the laws of success, the mainstream, and keyword thinking let us see what happens to the philosophical concept in the highest sense of the word: the Truth.
Throughout the human history the prevailing sense of Truth has changed several times. During the European Middle Ages the Truth was what God said through the Holy Writ. However Plato had taught that the Truth was the project of the demiurge, the ideal model from which He created the world; this Truth cannot be discovered by mere observation and requires deep thought, called intellection. In the post-mediaeval period Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei, returning partially to Plato, taught that the Truth is what can be found by observing the material world, but with the eyes of mathematics, and this remained the dominant representation for the rest of the second millenium.
The extreme latter part of this second millenium has seen the birth of the fourth great sense of Truth, which will now dominate the third millenium. It is precisely the period we are living now. Historians and philosophers of our future will perhaps consider this change as the most important event in western civilization. It could be the prime cause of its death.
Such turning points in history can only be understood in relation to their social background; for example, the historians generally explain the dominance of the mediaeval conception of Truth in Europe by the dominance of the Christian Church, whereas the changeover from the religious conception of Middle Ages to the natural philosophy of Galileo and Newton was promoted by the progress of foreign trade that introduced other ideas (namely from Arabian civilization) and reduced the power of Christian Church.
During three centuries, however, the natural philosophy and its quest for the Truth was a matter of very few individuals, who are now considered as ``the great minds of the past''. These individuals discussed together but worked alone. Of course the principles of natural philosophy reflected the social fact that they were few and worked alone. The sense of Truth was for such men a very personal quest and what they called Truth could be experienced only in the inmost recesses of the mind.
In the middle of the twentieth century a considerable social change occured, that can be compared to the assumption of power by the Roman Church in the early Middle Ages or to the development of foreign exchange during the Renaissance: the accession of scientists to political power and the gigantic increase in scientific workers. The democratic society of free-trade is not governed by scientists, but scientists (in fact science managers) have a share in the government system. Moreover, the scientific workers have ceased to work alone: they are now working in teams, which are organized in big laboratories and scientific institutions. In such gigantic stuctures there is no place for individuals: each worker has only a partial and very narrow understanding of the work.
Therefore the personal and intimate relation to the Truth is now a thing of the past. It has not yet completely disappeared, some scientists can still experience it today. But it is on its way to vanishing.
The deep-seated conviction that the result of an experiment reveals a tiny little bit of Truth, as Galileo could feel when he saw the rocks on the Moon, can only be felt by individuals. For a scientific worker of today such feelings are simply poetic: they are useless and cannot make any scientific sense. People living in the third millenium will judge such visions like a French rationalist of the XIXth century would have judged the Christian mysticism.
The time where science was made by individuals who had such a heart-to-heart relation with the world is over. Individual thought will not longer exist. Therefore Galileo's sense of Truth will be cut off from its basis. Like the Middle Ages, where individual thought did not exist either and where every Christian subject was just a part of a collective mind (the Church), the new era will be that of a new collective mind: the Community. The Community plays to some extent the rôle of a church: the individuals are used to be the faithful subjects of their Community, they know that their salvation lies in the Community and that individual thinking leads to a kind of excommunication. Anyone who is excommunicated in the true sense of the word loses the hope to be appointed to a post or to obtain financing or service agreements; he or she has then no means for continuing a scientific activity. In the new era such a radical excommunication will certainly never happen, but it already exists in more subtle forms.
So we come to the conclusion: in the Middle Ages the depositary of Truth was the Roman Church, in the new era the depositary of Truth will be the Community.
At first sight this could seem irrational; to trust the Community [of specialists in some area] with Truth is what sect followers or fanatics are doing. The western civilization was built on the basis of rationalism and positive science; its success, its power, and its efficiency are due to the fact that it has replaced faith or intuition by computing and the minds have been moulded in this spirit for centuries. However there are rational grounds for entrusting the Community with such a responsibility: since individual scientific workers are too specialized and therefore too narrow-minded for understanding the Truth (which has become much more complicated than at the time of Galileo), only the Community can be in a position that allows accurate estimation of Truth. The precise way of reasoning is the following: the Community is well organized for verification (peer review, competition, etc.) If anything false were published, there will be a chance that referees would detect it; if not, a rival will be especially eager to find the failing.
This brazen logic forgets two facts:
1. The argument proves that the false should be detected, not the Truth. To give an example from Mediaeval astronomy: the system of peer review and competition (without any personal, heart-to-heart relation with the world) would have warranted that no false epicycle will be considered in the Ptolemaic System. But it would have been unable to have any presentiment of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton.
2. The false would be detected . . . But what is the false? If you know the Truth, you see what is false. Giordano Bruno knew that the universe was not bounded by the sphere of fixed stars, and knew that uniform translation does not affect the fall of bodies; so he saw that Mediaeval science was false. Mediaeval referees and rivals could not see that.
The problem is that Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were individuals who had a heart-to-heart relation with the world.
Today the opinions about the ability of the Big Science System to recognize the genius are divided. Some (generally top managers of the Big Science System) are convinced that a well-organized community will necessarily recognize the genius; it is just a management problem that can be solved by specific management techniques. Others (generally science philosophers) are sceptical, for they have studied history and have in mind what happened when the Church dominated society. These two opinions are widely-held, but certainly false, or rather ill-founded: the optimistic view of managers supposes that the specific management techniques really exist; and the pessimistic view of some philosophers supposes that a community of specialists will behave like the Mediaeval Church. These assumptions are false.
On the one hand, to find a management technique that will be able to recognize the genius amounts to designing an instrument for a purpose that is not already known or defined. A management technique, however sophisticated or subtle it could be, will necessarily be implemented by humans; now, in normal science there are permanently thousands of bluffers or swindlers claiming genius, so that the function of these humans will hardly ever be to detect genius, but practically always to reject swindlers. For the sake of comparison, imagine that you have the duty to find one short passage in thousands of books, without knowing its content. You only know that the passage should appear extraordinary and strange, but many authors simulate strangeness. Of course this argument does not prove that new ideas cannot be recognized, it just proves that it cannot be done by management techniques.
On the other hand, to compare a scientific community to the Church means that such a community is hostile to new ideas or has a presentiment of danger to its power. This is not the case; the authorities of the Big Science System are sincerely eager to find ideas of genius; the System is just unable to produce and to identify them. I observed that the number of scientists who are sceptical about the ability of the Big Science System to produce deep insights is great; but most of them consider that the reason for this should be something like the fear of Reds, because they have in mind the fighting of the Roman Church against Enlightment. This is false! The Big Science System is not hostile, it is merely unable.
Now we come to the heart of the subject, the new Truth. I just argued that the Big Science System is not a Cerberus protecting a holy writ, but a gigantic organization that is paralysed by its size. So the fact that Truth is now what the Community considers as such is a mere necessity, not a will. The Roman Church preserved a sacrosanct, intangible Truth. The scientific Communities of the third millenium will preserve nothing, they will merely be the neutral scene of Truth fluctuations. The way of establishing Truth will be the consensus: at any time there will be a large majority accepting the Truth of this moment. This majority will always be large, due to the structure of the Community: most workers are obscure (generally they are junior scientists) and cannot express any personal opinion; they are not subjected to any censorship, but their knowledge is too compartmentalized for leaving the possibility of a founded opinion; most of them are mainly concerned by their daily work and the hope of appointment or promotion. The consensus does not mean that everybody in the community agrees; there will always be discrepant voices, but they will remain insignificant. The typical expressions of the new thinking standards are ``most scientists think that . . .'', ``the specialists, the experts, are of the opinion that . . .'' Here are examples:
- ``The Big Bang, the theory to which the majority of astrophysicists refer''.
- ``The standard model [in particle physics], admitted by most specialists''.
This attitude towards our ignorance is certainly the best prevention against fanatism and reflects what our civilization has learned from the wars of religion and the catastrophic consequences of nationalism. It reflects the principles of the democratic free-trade society. In some sense, this modesty towards the deep secrets of the universe is probably the most reasonable attitude. But was Giordano Bruno reasonable, as he considered most of the scholars of his time dim-witted? Was the quest for Truth of Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, reasonable? Is the dream of rational understanding of the world reasonable? In fact, among plenty of questions arising now, the most important and may be the only practical one is:
What will be lost if we give up the unreasonable quest that has been the basis of our progress, for a reasonable scientific activity?
The answer to this question could give us the true sense of Truth.