Fortean perspectives on science
Interesting question. Fort was dubbed, wrongly, the 'arch-nemesis of science.' I'm sometimes not sure whether Fort simply intended to show sciences deficiencies and fallacies, or whether he wanted to suggest improvements as well.
Certainly, where it comes to evidence, Fort was most vitriolic. He noted, in Lo!, that he could likely find evidence to support the 'looniest' ideas any of his readers could devise, to make that lunacy plausible. Fort was very careful to show that evidence is mute in itself, and its functional power in a theory is wholly dependant upon how it is deployed. Evidence is a double-edged sword- the same piece of evidence can be used For or Against a single theory.
Of course, one cannot simply amass data. Fort himself opposed the collection of data for the sake of quantity- and said as much somewhere (don't have his books to hand). We must engage our information, and to do this, we need hypotheses, as much for structural as theory-making purposes.
Say you collect masses of data upon birds- you would classify them by size, colour, shape, diet, etc., as much to organise as to taxonomise. Hypotheses are necessary to arrange and understand data, as Fort observed. 'My liveliest interest,' he said in WT, 'is not so much in things, but in relations between things.'
Thus we have the dual problem:
1) Evidence is subjective, and can be ambiguous, in application if not in nature
2) Theories are equally subjective, being guided as much by personality as rationality, and are victims of evidence- or lack thereof.
Is a fact true if its theory is unproven or evidenceless?
The greatest scientists are the ones who spill things, break things, blow things up and drop things. They're the ones who break the circles of regular pondering and dull experiment. Think of Fleming and the mould, for instance.
Ian
