> This article begins with the clearly implied belief that "Science" is not political, and degenerates from this false assumption into a paroxysm of wounded cries over the renaming of buildings and other, may I say, even less weighty matters – comparing them to the gulag and mass murder.
Science is not partisan. Saying "Something is political" is not precise enough for different listeners to really understand what you want to convey when you say it. If you meant "political" in any other way then please explain what you meant. Saying "Everything is political" is a perfect example of sophism in my book.
If we mean by politics as “pertaining to the mediation of social/material relations”, then what the commenter said about the politicalness of science is right on point. In fact, this is very compatible with the constructivist view of science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...)
Maybe, but you can't have it both ways. If science is just another political theory, set up to propagate the social values of the scientific community, then it's perfectly legitimate for someone to reject science if they don't think their values or interests align with those of the average researcher. That is not, I think, a conclusion that you or the original commenter would endorse.
What do you mean by “rejecting science”? First of all there is no singular “scientific community”, there are a multitude of different communities with their own norms and practices. (You’re going to expect big differences between the mathematicians and anthropologists!) And people in academia fight all the time over existing norms in sciences, sometimes fields get split over this, sometimes people really leave, and sometimes there are revolutions that change the norms of how scientists perform experiments and gather/process data. I’m not saying that I’m not endorsing science, I just want to say the practices of “science” is socially mediated and constantly in debate & subject to change. There’s a whole history of science (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science) to delve into if you’re curious about this.
For example, there's a lot of frustration over people who make politically-motivated judgments that climate change is bunk. Under the normal model of science, it's easy to explain why this frustration is legitimate: climate scientists aren't working on some kind of higher plane, but they're smart people trying their hardest to find the truth, and if you're going to discard the entire field you need a better reason than "I just don't buy it".
If science is just another sociopolitical theory, it's hard to explain why people shouldn't do this, because it's entirely legitimate in that space. There's lots of smart, honest experts working on political theories whose fundamental premises I don't agree with, and I feel entitled to ignore their conclusions without necessarily pointing to flaws in specific arguments. If someone showed me a bunch of Islamic scholars with arguments against charging interest, my response would just be that their perspective doesn't interest me because I'm not Muslim.
I’m not saying that science is just another sociopolitical theory, I’m saying that scientific theory and the scientific method are products of the social relations we make ourselves in, and this is precisely why science is important. The collective effort to build rationality so that we can understand and control our hostile environment, is a social constructed effort that has been carefully developed throughout history, and is something that needs to be actively preserved. Rationality is not something that is just “given” by nature; it is an entirely synthetic concept made up by humans and only exist because of humans, and that is precisely why it is so precious. Read Thomas Moyinhan’s X-Risk (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk), there’s a lot of Kantian underpinnings in this argument.
So returning to your climate change example: the reason why there are so many climate change deniers in the US doesn’t have to anything with science (as you’ve said), it has more to do with the retaliation from the industrial-based conservatives, as well as general distrust against the current political elites. However, that doesn’t mean that we have no responsibility in doing anything political because science is simply the “objective truth”: we need to actively make decisions in social terms so that this distrust towards climate science doesn’t end up preventing ourselves from making important future decisions for humanity. (What we actually need to do is too far out of scope for this comment, but you get the idea.)
I agree with everything you're saying, but one of the key social decisions I think that scientists need to make in this regard is to maintain deliberate neutrality on controversial political issues which aren't directly related to their field of expertise. Distrust towards science can't be prevented or mitigated in an environment where journals endorse presidential candidates.
The real problem is not journals endorsing presidential candidates, it’s the other way around. It’s the political class funding various think tanks and institutions to steer research the way they want to influence public opinion (which has been done for more than a century). And let’s not forget that the majority of the scientific advancements we had in the 20th century were made by military research!
And if you look at historically famous scientists of the past 400 years, many of them had interest in politics and were quite politically active. That doesn’t prevent them from doing objectively good research, but it definitely guides what kind of research they are doing.
Science is not partisan. Saying "Something is political" is not precise enough for different listeners to really understand what you want to convey when you say it. If you meant "political" in any other way then please explain what you meant. Saying "Everything is political" is a perfect example of sophism in my book.