What's wrong with scientific truth and

technological progress?
What is the meaning of the scare quotation marks that so often enclose truth, fact, reality,
or technological progress in postmodern literature?

“Closure occurs in science when a consensus emerges that the ‘truth’ has been winnowed
from the various interpretations.”[1] More than once in library books I saw “sic”
scribbled in the margin and pointed to the scare quotation marks in this and similar texts.
If the readers were not turned off, they would discover that scare quotes around scientific
truth, fact, reality, technological progress, and similar terms are fashionable in
postmodern literature and are spreading beyond it. What do the scare quotes mean?
What are their effects?

This note examines some forces behind the postmodern skepticism on scientific truth and
technological progress:

• Destruction of commonsense by dogmatic interpretations of general concepts.

• Misrepresentation and stereotyping of critics to promote postmodern doctrines.
• Muddled thinking abetted by attacks on rationality and analysis.

Forcing truth into Absolute Truth

General concepts of truth, reality, and the like have puzzled philosophers since the
ancient Greeks. They are extremely difficult to define precisely, because they involve the
deepest metaphysical and epistemological problems, such as the nature of the human
mind and its relation to things that are neither parts of it nor created by it. Efforts through
the millennia have produced a plethora of philosophical theories, some clarification, but
no satisfactory explanations.[2]

Despite the academic quandary in framing explicit definitions, notions of reality and truth
are tacitly understood and almost indispensable in our daily life. Anthropologists find
that distinctions between seeing and dreaming, true or false beliefs exist with slight
variations among all cultures [3]. If you tell me about a curious adventure and reply to
my incredulity: it’s true, I understand you. Similarly, when I raise my hand in court and
take the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, no one would
mistake me for pretending to be God who knows the Absolute Truth. On the contrary, if
I wiggle my fingers and declare I am telling the quote-unquote truth, I would be eyed
with suspicion if not cited for contempt of court. In this commonsense notion scientists
claim truth for scientific facts and discoveries.

Enter elitists and postmodernists with a smug smile to folks and scientists: Define truth.
As a satisfactory explicit definition does not exist, they dictatorially impute Absolute
Truth to what they call “the scientist’s account of science,” an account that abhors
scientists [4]. The notion of Absolute Truth known only in the absolutely detached and
infallible God’s eye point of view has been proposed in some metaphysical philosophies
and used in some theories of mind, sometimes dogmatically and sometimes as an
approximation to gain a toehold on an overwhelmingly complex phenomenon [5]. As an
explicit theory of truth, however, it has been criticized and rejected by most philosophers,
not to mention scientists. In research, scientists try to detach as much as possible from
their personal motivations and cultural prejudices, but they never claim to shed their
human skin to become God; they are too smart for the hubris.

Scientists and engineers are aware that judgments are indispensable in research and
results are not absolutely certain. Nevertheless, they maintain that lack of absolute
certainty does not entail total arbitrariness. The crucial question is the justifications and
presuppositions for rational judgments. Here lies the chasm between science and social
constructionism, a branch of postmodernism. In making technical judgments, scientists
and engineers strive for objectivity and accept such reasoning as because it is true (or
false) and because it agrees with objective reality (or not). These rational criteria are
ruled out of court by the social constructionist principle for the symmetric treatment of
truth and falsity. The only criteria of judgments it accepts are social and political;
technical judgments “could be made at random, each scientist choosing by the toss of a
coin at each decision point.” The arbitrariness of technical judgments, called
“interpretive flexibility,” is a central constructionist doctrine. It denies the weigh of
objective evidence and rejects the commonsense notion of knowledge as justified true
belief. Commonsense relates knowledge to reality through the concept of truth, to
rationality through the concept of justification, and to the possibility of errors through the
notion of belief. All three are jettisoned by social constructionism, whose
epistemological presupposition is “knowledge as any collectively accepted system of
belief.” Its consequence is a sociological determinism asserting that scientific knowledge
is “thoroughly socially constituted.”[6]

In commonsense as in science, objective reality is a shared world that facilitates

understanding among people in different cultures. Lift is required for atmospheric flight
no matter what culture one works in. When physical facts such as this become thorough
social constructions, a radical relativism follows: “all knowledge is relative to the local
situation of the thinkers who produce it.” Scientific knowledge cannot be true but can
only be “true,” meaning true-relative-to-their-local-culture. Different cultures inhabit
“distinct and disjoint worlds” and are therefore “incommensurate” with each other.
Consequently “there is no obligation upon anyone framing a view of the world to take
account of what twentieth-century science has to say.” They can construct their own
physical laws that differ substantially from what our science says but are equally
“true,” for instance laws that allow the existence of a atom between hydrogen and helium
in our periodic table. In sum, social constructionism maintains that scientific objectivity
is impossible. Science is “opportunism in social context,” politics by another means or
another religion. Aside from its political success to gain acceptance, science “is merely
one in a whole series of knowledge cultures including, for instance, the knowledge
systems pertaining to ‘primitive’ tribes.”[7]
To promote their doctrine of relativism that purges knowledge and truth of any reference
to reality and the physical world, social constructionists concoct “the scientist’s account
of science” in which truth means Absolute Truth. By bashing this caricature as the only
viable alternative to their relativism, by taking Absolutely True as the only alternative to
truth-relative-to-a-particular-culture, they develop an arena that permits only extreme
positions.

In this arena, scare quotes become fashionable. “Truth” means either Absolute Truth or
what my culture accepts. Furthermore, people whose commonsense claims to truth are
distorted into Absolute Truth begin to use scare quotes to avoid further abuse. The result
is that the meaning of “truth” becomes totally ambiguous. The commonsense notion of
truth is being hijacked or subverted, to use a pet term in postmodernism.

Forcing technological progress into technological determinism

Forcing commonsense notions into the molds of some defunct academic dogmas causes
confusion and undermines rational discussion. The notion of technological progress is
another case in point. For phenomena as complex and heterogeneous as technology,
overall changes are usually grasped as broad trends. This is again common sense. When
a newscast reports that the stock market rises for the year, no one takes it to mean that
every stock rises, or that the market rises every day, or that it follows a trajectory. In a
similarly sense we ordinarily talk about technological changes. Looking at broad trends
over the recent centuries, it is not unreasonable to say that technology has progressed or
advanced in the sense that overall, its gains in improving human welfare far exceed prices
such as polluting the environment, weakening some customs, or dislocating some jobs
[8].

Just as commonsense truth is twisted into Absolute Truth, the commonsense notion of
technological progress has been twisted into technological determinism, where
“progress” implies linearity, monotonicity, uniformity, universality, eternity,
inevitability, predictability, and automation; where technology having impacts on society
means technology is the only cause of historical change and social transformation, and
this cause is not caused. Some of these extreme doctrines have been advanced by old
scholars, but they are dated even in the scholarly literature [9]. They are irrelevant to
most scientists, engineers, and common people for whom technological products are parts
of everyday life. Dragging them out to batter ordinary discussions of technological
progress can only confuse.