The Value of Empirical Knowledge

In a recent editorial in Science, Kurt Gottfried and Harold Varmus offer the hope that the Obama administration will restore the traditional harmonious relationship between science and government in the United States, a relationship that (in my opinion) had become discordant under the Bush administration. They write:

The authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were children of the Enlightenment. They understood the power that flows from combining human reason with empirical knowledge, and they assumed that the political system they were creating would thrive only in a culture that upheld the values of the Enlightenment. And thrive it did, in large part because our people and government upheld those values throughout most of U.S. history. Recently, however, the precepts of the Enlightenment were ignored and even disdained with respect to the manner in which science was used in the nation's governance. Dogma took precedence over evidence, and opinion over facts.

Comment: I really like that paragraph! On the other hand, I note that the authors focus on "empirical knowledge" not "scientific knowledge". Of course the spread of what we would today consider scientific knowledge among even the most knowledgeable Americans was very limited not only at the time of the American Revolution, but until after World War II.

On the other hand, Jefferson, Franklin, Thompson were prototypical men of the enlightenment who had a great deal of accurate empirical knowledge. America's innovators included Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, characterized by empirical rather than scientific knowledge.

Readers of this blog will recognize the high value I place on scientific knowledge, but I also place high value on empirical knowledge. In developing countries we should perhaps place more emphasis on the developing "empirical knowledge societies" in which people are encouraged to distinguish between their empirical knowledge and their unfounded beliefs, and to utilize their analytic abilities accordingly. JAD