Is Science Progressive? - Pedro Hannud

     Science is an incredibly rich area to question and debate many distinct topics. This extremely fascinating study, is mankind's best-organized attempt to discover how our galaxy, our world and how our species evolved and came to exist. After all, science is always trying to move forward solve new problems or uncertainties we humans have about everything. This brings us to the extremely complex question of whether or not science is progressive. Progress is defined as being a forward or onward movement towards a destination, which in scientific purposes can mean the attempt to unveil any possible doubts and questions regarding the functioning of everything around us and inside us as well. When addressing this question it is extremely important to stress that like almost all questions, there is no certain answer, but there is a big possible discrepancy that can be drawn, which is of whether progress should be only considered in a specific framework or if it should be considered in all frameworks. This discrepancy is very critical because the answer to the question may totally change according to whether you consider all frameworks or only one.

 As Thomas Kuhn has already stated, all scientific discoveries are the final product of a complete revolution, where after a long period of time spent on studying and exploring one question or scientific issue, a new theory is created where all agree upon and understand as the most accurate idea. When this "climax" is reached, and a new agreed-upon theory is established, we have the creation of what Kuhn calls a “paradigm”. This idea hence becomes shared knowledge until a better theory is drawn or this one is proven to be wrong. When this happens, and another theory better suits and answers a question there is a paradigm shift, which will occur continuously until the best answer is found again.

Many important paradigms we have nowadays were created in times of war and political instability, and even though the collateral damages of such studies may have been massive, important discoveries were drawn out of them, making science progress many years into the future and changing scientific history. Although there was progress in the scientific framework, the social framework was incredibly affected, bringing up debates on whether or not science is really progressive until this day. As we see in recent history, many discoveries that have totally changed the course of mankind have had negative side effects on the social framework, and one of the best examples is when Einstein discovered that if he split an atom of uranium with a neutron beam, there would be an incredibly large amount of energy released and therefore a chain reaction would occur. This revolutionary discovery willingly or unwillingly created the atomic bomb, which ended thousands of lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forced the Japanese army to surrender to the allies in World War II. Even though this discovery was a progress in science, it had dreadful social impacts and continued to harm those lands after decades due to the level of radiation exposed, hence illustrating how progress in a specific framework may devastate a different one. Another example also in World War II, was how the Nazi doctors experimented and discovered valuable information about hypothermia, and how the human body reacts to cold temperatures and until what point it can still be alive. The method of discovering the secrets of hypothermia though, was testing on living Jews who were forced to undergo these inhuman circumstances, where in many times wouldn’t resist and therefore perish. Both of these examples created new extremely important paradigms, making progress in the scientific framework but negatively impacted the social framework, which really makes us question if there is any progress in these examples. The human testing coordinated by Nazi doctors has been an important argument used to create the testing regulations used nowadays to protect humans, which shows how immoral they were. The Atomic bomb was also used after as an example to set and create war rules between nations, which brings up the question of whether or not some lives should be sacrificed in order to save others? And if so, how do we choose who will be sacrificed? After all, at what cost should progress come?

All of these questions can be answered using areas of knowledge such as indigenous knowledge and also looking at different ways of knowing such as perception.

            When looking at indigenous knowledge, we can drastically see how a different way of seeing something may impact how one sees the answer to the question of whether or not science is progressive. Indigenous knowledge is very different from western civilization when looking at sciences and social understanding due to the fact that western civilization understands these things to be separate from each other and indigenous knowledge doesn’t. If we use these two distinct views, we can understand clearly how the question being addressed in this paper can be seen in various different ways. Due to the fact that indigenous tribes don’t see science and social aspects as separate frameworks, they might perceive the answer to this question differently in the fact that they might not think it is possible to have progress in science and negative impacts in social aspects due to the fact that they are not separate from each other for them, thus they might not understand how it is possible to have negative impacts in the social framework when having progress in the scientific framework. The western civilization on the other hand might bee able to see how science may have progress and therefore negatively impact society because they are separate frameworks in their perception of things, making their answer the total opposite from the answer indigenous people would give to the question of whether or not science is progressive.

            Throughout this paper, the question of whether or not science is progressive has been addressed and it is clear that there are many answers to this question, only depending on what perspective you are looking at and how you perceive things. According to different schemas and perspectives, the answer to this question may drastically change as we have seen throughout this paper, where if you are a member of an indigenous tribe, you might see science as not progressive due to the fact that it is tied up to the social aspect, thus not progressive when using the examples of WWII.  If you are a member of the western civilization you might see science as progressive due to the fact that it can be separated from the social framework, so you might see it as progressive in the scientific framework but not in the social framework, or even though there are negative impacts in society, you might think that the progress made in science is bigger than the problems created as a result of it. So, in other words, science can be progressive, not progressive or even both at the same time, it just depends on where you are standing and through what schema and perception you analyze and try to answer this question.