Thread by @wydna00

Public propagandists of Science today uncritically accept the naïve epistemological “realism” of positivism under the false assumption that Science conquered metaphysics and formal logic obsoleted classical logic sometime in the 19th century, but the details of this elude them

The “Scientific Method” as it’s taught today is in no real sense actual Science. It’s merely an algorithm. It doesn’t represent the “Practical” compliment to any Philosophy or Theory of Science. It’s a brute force, unintelligent adherence to an algorithm of knowledge manufacture

The constant appeal to “interdisciplinary” ideals has not produced any meaningful reform of Science, as there exists no mechanism to enforce this ideal. Kant was clear though as to what body was entitled to enforce such standards: the academic Philosophy faculty.

In “Contest of the Faculties” Kant compares the University to a factory. The “higher” faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology train and govern public officials and therefore are subject to Government overview. It’s the autonomous “lower” faculty of philosophy that governs truth

As we see with Covid (and many other examples), the professional scientist today is not in the business of Truth, but is a public official bound by political duty and the social good. The sermons of the popular scientist serve a public function and are subject to State regulation

The body of such intellectuals constitutes a community of public intellectuals, whose training comes from the University’s scientific faculties, which professionally govern the members of this community via credentialing according to ideological constraints imposed by the State

“The reason why the Philosophy faculty, despite its great prerogative (freedom), is called “Lower” lies in human nature; for someone who can give commands, even though he is another’s servant, is considered more distinguished than someone free who has no one under his command”

The Philosophy faculty has as its unique purpose the intellectual regulation of the Publicly concerned faculties vis-à-vis the actual Scientific Truth of their teachings. It is precisely its “lower” status that provides it the autonomy necessary to carrying out this role

Kant is especially concerned with the danger of public intellectuals trained by the higher faculties to degenerate into charlatans and lackeys of the State, while also recognizing that the academic discourse of philosophical critique is not suitable for a general public audience

Thus he distinguishes between “publics,” the general public, which is liable to misunderstand or be confused by finer academic discourse; and the public of intellectuals and experts trained by the Academy. The higher faculties serve the former, the lower one serves the latter

In this way the general public is insulated from the academic discourse with which the philosophy faculty scientifically regulates the truth of the higher faculties’s teachings, while the generally public discourse of the intelligentsia is preserved from ideological corruption

The lower faculty for Kant comprises history, geography, philology the humanities, mathematics, metaphysics, logic, etc. It’s here that the grounding principles of science are vouchsafed, such as the fundamental unity and systemicity of knowledge, which is Rational and Historical

It must be recognized that Kant’s conception of this academic organization was instrumental in the development of the institutional philosophy of the University or Berlin, as outlined by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Fichte, and Friedrich Schleiermacher not long after Kant’s death.

This entire conception of the role of philosophy vis-à-vis the rest of the university ultimately became the core of the Neo-Kantian academic consensus which came to dominate not only at Berlin, but at Marburg, Strasbourg, Heidelberg, and Göttingen between 1860 and 1914

This system was the immediate academic context grounding such scholars as Hermann von Helmholtz, Hermann Cohen, Ernst Cassirer, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, Max Weber, David Hilbert, Max Planck, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, György Lukács…

America had almost no advanced degree programs before 1860. Most American scholars did their graduate studies in Germany. Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley were all founded to rectify this, and all followed Neo-Kantian Institutional models

It’s during precisely this period that modern propagandists of Science claim the algorithmic “scientific method,” naïve positivist epistemology, and formal logic supplanted philosophy and rendered it obsolete. Would Frege, Helmholtz, Hilbert, Planck, or von Neumann have agreed?

The propagandists of science who gesture towards this triumph of algorithmic knowledge accumulation over philosophy have, as Kant feared, lapsed into charlatanry, and now claim their ideologically constrained public function as experts is identical to the pursuit of truth itself.

Their status as "experts," their public function, their intellectual subservience to the State, and their ideological duty to the social good however remains incompatible and, at times, even contrary to a disinterested commitment to Truth beyond any immediate professional concern

This fact is rather apparent from the very nature of publicness. The truth is determined by an algorithmic consensus generation among a professional caste of State regulated public functionaries. It is only under a purely utilitarian standard that this consensus is called "truth"

In this way "science" has ungrounded itself from its own genuine metaphysical basis. What is true has become completely contingent and subject to the State's dictates regarding the momentary public interest. The scientist thus becomes professionally motivated to repudiate truth.

With no oversight of science itself provided by the "lower" faculty of philosophy, each field is allowed to go its own way, and no specific branch of science has as its object knowledge in general, or science as a whole any longer. Consequently the unity of knowledge is destroyed

There is no "elite overproduction," the fragmentation of the academy and the endless professional expansion of the intellectual class represents the collapsing of the two levels of "public" which Kant previously distinguished between, and the conflation of their discourse

This is nothing more than a manifestation of the general collapse of public utility and truth which the propagandists of science claim occurred around the turn of the twentieth century, with the victory of positivism and formal logic and science over metaphysics and philosophy

Did this transformation though actually ever happen? Certainly in the propagandistic narratives of science and expertise, the historicity of the claimed succession is beyond dispute. Yet many histories of logic, and philosophies of science, and sociologies of knowledge disagree

The truly cunning maneuver here is that the public scientific-expert caste is not bound to subject itself to the historical and metaphysical critiques issued against it from the "lower" faculty any longer. Thus "Science" can, via a circular argument, avoid accountability forever

When one investigates the supposed historical rupture at stake more deeply, however, one begins to develop the unmistakable and troubling impression that for Hilbert, Planck, Gödel, and many others, issues dating back to the time of Leibniz were growing intractable and urgent.

These figures are, by the propagandists, mutated into champions of the historical transformation of Science during that era. Harbingers of positivism, nihilism, the scientific method. Their heroism and epic stature is earned through their alleged role in defeating philosophy

This is contrary to their actual dignity as thinkers. Their titanic reputations and glorious deeds were in service of truth, not "science" so conceived by the propagandists and experts today. Their heroism consisted in their tragic struggle to confront the crisis science faced.

The supremacy claimed by the propagandists of science today rests not on "truth," as something beyond history and social necessity -- it is, in fact, precisely that kind of truth which "science" *destroyed* -- but rather upon our historical understanding of that specific moment

Food for thought, I suppose