Epistemological curiosity & respecting other worldviews

My particular interest in taking this class this semester is to understand something about approaches to knowledge that are very different from Western approaches, from scientific approaches. I may be a bit odd as a scientist, because my first year at uni I spent more time studying the nature of scientific knowledge than I spent studying the content area of my field of study, physics.. I'm very grateful to Professor Layzer for giving me a solid grounding in epistemology of science before I embarked on the content of science. I'm also grateful to my brother, who was studying the philosophy of science, for giving me things to read and talking about ideas with me. I'm grateful to my parents, for encouraging my curiosity about how the world works. My interest in epistemology continues.

Both scientists and non-scientists may revere the scientific view. The non-scientists who do so, in my experience, are often self-proclaimed "skeptics" seeking to deny the (admittedly absurd) ontological claims of Western churches, and replacing Western theism with what they see as the pure rational claims of logic and deduction. Let's call these people skeptics, and their worldview "scientism". Neither scientists nor skeptics very often reflect on the tenets of scientism. This world view seems to hold that only things that are currently understood, studied and explained by scientific theories are real. Thus personal experiences that are not currently explainable in science are dismissed as "unreal," or "delusions," or "lies." However, this view is in fact quite unscientific.

Science, operating at its ideal, means keeping an open mind and considering what the evidence has to say. It means comparing different theoretical views in light of all the available evidence and making a decision as to which one is most consonant with the data. It means letting nature instruct you: the data are always right, rather than some theory. Theories, in fact, are of necessity in flux. Kuhn described eloquently the process of "scientific revolutions," by which one theory gives way to another. A revolution occurs once sufficient evidence incommensurate with the old theory accumulates and there is a new theory that is more commensurate with available evidence. It is a necessary fact about science that theories will always be incomplete, that is, not completely true. All things will not be explainable in current scientific theories. Knowledge, like life, evolves.

With the actual epistemology of science in mind, scientism makes little sense. When someone’s reported experience seems incommensurate with current scientific theories, it may be as likely that the current scientific theory is incomplete as that their report of their experience is inaccurate. Of course, looking more closely at how current theories fit with the incommensurate experience is the first step one should take. Certainly there are some experiences that at first seem incommensurate with current scientific theories that, on closer examination, prove to be explainable in current scientific terms. Some UFO sightings, for example, turn out merely to be examples of "mis-identified flying objects": rare electromagnetic weather phenomena that produce something that looks like a lighted object hovering above the ground. Other experiences of people's being kidnapped by aliens turn out to be explainable in terms of theories of memory reconstruction. Memory may not always be a veridical representation of the past, but a reconstruction, and some people’s memories of "alien abduction" are incommensurate with other memories they hold at the same time that are inter-subjectively verifiable. Science generally believes in the most "parsimonious" explanation, that is to say, the one that requires the least additions to current theories. I am happy to grant that distorted memory reconstruction may be a more parsimonious explanation than that 10% of the US population is regularly being kidnapped and examined by aliens. (Part of this is my belief - it seems implausible to me that aliens would be that interested, or that there exists a scientific funding agency anywhere in the galaxy who would fund research on such a scale.) The more singular and individual an experience is, the more parsimonious it seems to try to fit it into current scientific theories.

There are, however, many experiences reported by people in non-Western cultures that seem incommensurate with current scientific theories. (And by some Westerners too.) So, does one dismiss the experience of an entire people, or does one assume that our theories may be incomplete? The latter seems far more parsimonious to me. It does not seem parsimonious to assume that an entire people must be deluded or must mean something different than they are saying. A more scientific attitude, to me, would be to assume, "Hmm, there’s something interesting going on here. We may need to expand our understanding."