Free Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer Page B

cultural traditions do influence theories, which, in turn, determine how facts are interpreted; the facts then reinforce theories, and round and round we go until, for some reason, a paradigm shifts. Yet if culture determines science—if ghosts and the laws of nature exist nowhere but in people's minds— then is science no better than pseudoscience? Is there no difference between ghosts and the laws of science?
    We can get out of this circle of questions by recognizing this about science: despite being influenced by culture, science can be considered cumulative and progressive when these terms are used in a precise and nonjudgmental way. Scientific progress is the cumulative growth of a system of knowledge over time, in which useful features are retained and nonuseful features are abandoned, based on the rejection or confirmation of testable knowledge. By this definition, science (and technology by extension) are the only cultural traditions that are progressive, not in any moralistic or hierarchical way but in an actual and definable manner. Whether it is deified or defied, science is progressive in this cumulative sense. This is what sets science apart from all other traditions, especially pseudoscience.
    Resolution of the internalist-externalist problem—Pirsig's Paradox— follows from semantic precision and study of historical examples. One example will serve to illustrate the fascinating connections between science and politics. Most political theoreticians regard Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) as one of the most important political tracts of the modern age. Most do not realize, however, how much Hobbes' politics built upon the scientific ideas of his time. Hobbes, in fact, fancied himself as the Galileo Galilei and William Harvey of the science of society. The dedicatory letter to his De Corpore Politico (1644) has to be one of the most immodest statements in the history of science: "Galileus . . . was the first that opened to us the gate of natural philosophy universal, which is the knowledge of the nature of motion. ... The science of man's body, the most profitable part of natural science, was first discovered with admirable sagacity by our countryman, Doctor Harvey. Natural philosophy is therefore but young; but civil philosophy is yet much younger, as being no older . .. than my own de Cive" (1839-1845, vol. 1, pp. vii-ix).
    Hobbes' introduction to scientific thinking came at the age of forty, when he happened upon a copy of Euclid's Elements at a friend's home and turned to a theorem he could not understand until he examined the preceding definitions and postulates. In one of those flashes of insight so important in the annals of science, Hobbes began to apply geometrical logic to social theory. Just as Euclid built a science of geometry, Hobbes would build a science of society, beginning with the first principle that the universe is composed of material matter in motion. His second principle was that all life depends on "vital motion," just as, in Hobbes' words, "the motion of the blood, perpetually circulating (as hath been shown from inany infallible signs and marks by Dr. Harvey, the first observer to it) in the veins and arteries" (1839-1845, vol. 4, p. 407). Through the senses, the brain detects the mechanical motion of objects in the environment. Since all simple ideas come from these basic sense movements, complex ideas must come from combinations of simple ideas. Thus, all thought is a type of motion in the brain called memories. As the motion fades, the memory fades.
    Humans are also in motion, driven by passions—appetites (pleasure) and aversions (pain)—to maintain the vital motion of life itself. To gain pleasure and avoid pain, one needs power. In the state of nature everyone is free to exert power over others in order to gain greater pleasure. This Hobbes calls the right of nature. Unequal passions among individuals living in nature lead to a state of "war of all against all." In the most