The anti vax movement is perfect to observe how science is strangely viewed in different ways by a community, and also how complicated it is to be understood. The amount of information that is available to anyone could provide a wide range of understanding, however it’s also possible that superstition and miscomprehension lead to confusion and become an obstacle to perceive what is truth. American pragmatism philosophy provides some notions that are useful for this purpose.
In the United States vaccines are not mandatory by federal laws, but public schools (in all 50 States) require some. There are however exemptions that parents can use in order to not have their children vaccinated. Those exemptions can be based on religious, medical or philosophical reasons. [1] Some government and non government agencies regulate vaccines. CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommends how they should be used, FDA (Food and Drug Administration) evaluates that they are safe, NIH (National Institute of Health) researches and evaluates new and old vaccines, Vaccine Injury Compensation Program deals with claims of vaccine injured patients, BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) provides and develops tools to contribute to public health in vaccine development, NVPO (The National Vaccine Program Office) provides information about vaccines and develops programs and activities to carry out disease prevention programs, and many other non government agencies like Milvax, Veteran’s Affairs, Flu.gov, offer information and research for consumers.[2]
Despite the commonly understood benefits of vaccination and the medical background of the organizations that advice to have children vaccinated, there is a growing number of parents who do oppose to vaccination and that refuse to have their children vaccinated. As mentioned before, these objections have several grounds. Some are philosophical, religious and medical arguments that reject vaccines.[3] Philosophical reasons can include beliefs that vaccines do not offer the benefits that are generally claimed by the organizations. Religious reasons have to do with particular religious beliefs either in the development of vaccines and the implementation. Medical reasons are some claims that vaccines contain harm to the human body instead of benefits, there is a particular concern for secondary effects other kind of disorders and autism being a consequence of vaccines.[4]
This controversy is particularly useful to evaluate and examine how beliefs, philosophy and science interact in important matters that may affect the community. While Pragmatism offers a definition of what “truth” is, and examines the content, the possibilities, the varieties and the versatility of the concept.
The arguments in favor and against vaccination can be analyzed, but what interests me is to look at the controversy in a more panoramic sense to find the ways that one single issue appears to have many views of what is truth, and that despite the technological advances, science is not simple to comprehend. Broadly speaking there seems to be no consensus of what the truth in is this case and it seams that there is not one clear conclusion about “what science says”.
Everyone refers to “what science says”. News papers, magazines, schools, intellectuals, constantly repeat this as an exorcism to past eras that seamed to end when the light of science was lit. Freedom from darkness and the encounter with real knowledge. Everyone enjoys that there is something to safely ground beliefs on; science. Encounters with superstitious and mystical data are well undermined by this voice (of science), and although people are left alone in their religious or otherwise philosophical thoughts, the scientific fundaments are more and more appealed to in the attempt to unify truth and come to one basic sense of what truly is. In the case of vaccination, truth or science could solve it all. “What science says” could determine to make vaccines mandatory would allow humanity to be aimed to a much higher level of wellness and defeat diseases.
At least that would be the thesis of someone who normally appeals to “what science says”. However, that superficial and naive appeal, despite what is commonly understood as “truth” (that is science), is hardly even comprehended and the thought alone that science has a voice is in extreme an example of how naive and how simplistic science is viewed. In fact, the subjectivity attributed to science is bizarre and unrealistic. It is like a distant yet known god of modern times. The media solves many disputed simply by saying “this is what science says”, as if there were a subjective aim from science itself. As if science were a stream, an opinion, a way, a tendency bounded. Truth is summarized in this way and anyone must simple render to “science’s voice”. Everyone is Nietzsche’s “ubermensch”, everyone is past what Kant used to call the “minority of age”[5] just by joining in the scientific tendency, that this era has to offer and by rejecting other era’s beliefs. Science has become truth for common sense. However, that science is poorly analyzed or thought about, and the proof of this is that claims of “what science says” do not observe the science at all, they just link a result to science to make it sound truthful or to support their conclusion.
Those who do examine the content of truth and science, may not be pleased to conclude that it is as simple as attributing truth to “what science says”. The vaccines example will allow us to observe this and some pragmatist’s views and will offer us methods and definitions to observe the truth in science.
Dewey talks about common sense[6] and explains two views of common sense. “In any case the difference between the two meanings may be reduced, without doing violence to the facts, to the difference between phases and aspects of special practical situations that looked into, questioned and examined with reference to what may or should be done at a particular time and place and the rules and precepts that are taken for granted in reaching all conclusions and in all socially correct behavior. Both are concerned, one directly and the other indirectly with the “ordinary affairs of life” in the broad sense of life”.[7]
Common sense “can be summarized as the general view of what is good, this has been some kind of collective observation that is implemented by communities. Therefore, common sense is not static but has some kind of motion, because it changes overtime. Common sense in respect to both its content of ideas and beliefs and its methods of procedure, is anything but a constant.” [8] As he summarizes; “the contents and techniques of common sense underwent a revolutionary change. It was noted earlier that common sense is not constant. But the most revolutionary change it has ever undergone is that effected by the infiltration and incorporation of scientific conclusions and methods into itself”.[9]
The impact of science in common sense is described by Dewey as “there is much highly technical material that has not been incorporated into common sense even by way of technological application in “material” affairs. In the region of highest importance to common sense, namely that of moral, political, economic, ideas and beliefs, and the methods of forming and conforming them, science has even had less effect. Conceptions and methods in the field of human relationships are in much the same state as were the beliefs and methods of common sense in relation to physical nature before the rise of experimental science”.[10] What Dewey wants to highlight is the importance of having scientific content in common sense by the introduction of scientific inquiry. The lack of this is what he is criticizing but seams to be something science can bound into a better understanding.
However, the incorporation of scientific content into the vaccine controversy is not simple. Those who oppose vaccination are normally common people (that is not scientists), and how they manage scientific data can easily lead to errors. People who lack the expertise and try to fragment scientific knowledge may have partial information or wrong information. If there were a scientific controversy it should be held by scientists that have experience in the medical field.
This particular controversy shows that there is no “single” common sense. Dewey’s aim for common sense is quite difficult. It is not a simple task to incorporate scientific content to common sense. The lack of scientific inquiry of common sense is pointed out by Dewey as a default “they also indicate the differences between the problems and procedures of inquiry that are characteristic of common sense in different stages of culture”.[11]
Furthermore, Dewey later points out that “The problem of the relation of the domain of common sense to that of science has notoriously taken the form of opposition of the qualitative to the non-qualitative; largely, but not exclusively, the quantitative. The difference has often been formulated as the difference between perceptual material and a system of conceptual constructions. In this form it has constituted, in recent centuries, the chief theme of epistemology and metaphysics. From the standpoint that controls the present discussion, the problem is not epistemological (save as that word means the logical) nor it is metaphysical or ontological. In saying that it is logical, it is affirmed that the question at issue is that of the relation to each event as such but only to determine what it signifies with respect to they way in which the entire situation should be dealt with, the opposition and conflict do not arise. ”[12]
Dewey believes that the incorporation of science in common sense can offer much good. In the case of the vaccination controversy, apparently common sense based on science would offer a more solid and safe ground that would allow health to reach the population in a better way. That based on that “The effect of the embodiment of science in the common sense world and the activities that deal with it in the domain of human relationships is as great as that which has taken place in relation to physical nature”.[13] By the means of experimentation, common sense would be elevated to a scientific level as he concludes “It is not intimated that the incorporation of scientific conclusions and operations into the common sense attitudes, beliefs, and intellectual methods of what is now taken for granted as matters of common sense is as yet complete or coherent. The opposite is the case. In most important matters the effect of science upon the content and procedures of common senses has been disintegrative. This disintegrative influence is a social, not a logical fact. But it is the chief reason why it seems so easy, so natural, to make a sharp division between common sense inquiry and its logic and scientific inquiry and its logic”.[14]
However, there is no way to guarantee the aim of science or one scientific truth to guarantee the aim in common sense. It is not simple to obtain the “voice of science” to claim that there is a right or wrong common sense. “The logic of science is not only separated from common sense, but the best that can be done is to speak of logic and scientific method as two different and independent matters. Logic being ‘purified’ from all experiential taint has become so formalistic that it applies only to itself”.[15]
The vaccine controversy shows a complex scenario where there could be “several common senses” that are opposing each other. Whether science inquiry favors one or the other is a matter of finding “truth” through a scientific way, and not just by quoting the “voice of science”. To find true scientific reasons, it is necessary to understand science and the concept of truth. It is clear that common sense cannot be regarded as science because it isn’t, and the science that is contained in any commonsense belief must be determined as such.
That is how, the comprehension of science is needed in order to understand not just how common sense is scientific, but up to what point can science give a true idea of what could be true or not. In the present case of the vaccine controversy, understanding science will mean a better understanding, a deeper understanding of what is going on in terms of scientific arguments in favor and against, and this will give a better idea of what could be done for public health in this matter. As a tool for understanding and better following the controversy in a scientific way, philosophy appears.
Past the traditional definition that philosophy is “the love of wisdom”, philosophy is today many other things. Dewey finds two sorts of philosophy, non scientific and scientific based philosophy. There is perhaps a general content of knowledge in all sorts of philosophy according to Dewey “All philosophy bears an intellectual impress because it is an effort to convince some one, perhaps the writer himself, of the reasonableness of some course of life which has been adopted from custom or instinct.”[16] This means that all philosophy has content that requires knowledge, but the distinction that he draws from scientific and non scientific philosophy is perhaps the aim that he suggests philosophy should have. All philosophical content that could be inquired and supported by science is the way that philosophy should be. “It is this dependence upon the method of logical presentation and upon scientific subject matter which confers upon philosophy the garb, though not the form, of knowledge”.[17]Furthermore, Dewey emphasizes in the scientific value in philosophy; “Scientific form is a vehicle for conceiving a non-scientific conviction, but the carriage is necessary, for philosophy is not mere passion but a passion that would exhibit itself as a reasonable persuasion. Philosophy is therefore always in a delicate position and gives the heathen and Philistine an opportunity to rage. It is always balancing between sophistry, or pretended and illegitimate knowledge, and vague, incoherent mysticism – not of necessity mysticism in its technical definition, but in that sense of the mysterious and misty which affects the popular meaning of the word.”[18]. The importance and the value of scientific content for philosophy is therefore determinant for Dewey. Science supports philosophy in current times. In this sense knowledge has reached a point that either is supported by scientific advances or not. But then again, how can this knowledge be understood as scientific without just saying it is scientific? The problem that this has is that to determine the scientific content of philosophy means to use philosophy as a tool to examine philosophy itself. Therefore, philosophy itself remains a tool and despite Dewey’s distinction, there is still value in “non scientific” philosophy.
In order to understand what science is, perhaps it is necessary to understand also how it developed. How did we reach a scientific knowledge. I think it is fair to recognize that science emerged from philosophical activity, particularly from Aristotelic introduction of scientific method. From there on, it departs from philosophy and perhaps finds its own path.
The question now perhaps is does science justify (in the way that Dewey observes) in some way philosophy or does philosophy justify science?
The case of the vaccination controversy may offer a view that can offer some new views. Science alone, as a subjective quote is nothing. We can easily say this is science and science supports vaccination, or the opposition can say, new scientific research has given reasons to attribute neurological disorders that are necessarily linked to vaccination, and therefore science says vaccination is not good. Science needs to be understood in order to evaluate its value and to evaluate what it is truly saying. The fundament of experimentation alone offers different possibilities and the deeper it is explained, the more complex the scenario gets. All scientific findings depends on circumstances that are not absolute. Like in the case of the vaccines, all vaccines are different. It is unlikely to assume that it is scientific to just conclude that all vaccines are bad or that all vaccines are good. Experimentation finds specific reasons why or why not something favors something else, and why something should be used or avoided.
By this analysis it is evident that science needs to be comprehended and philosophy, can allow this comprehension, what else could we call the content of scientific evaluation?
The answer to a more complete and comprehensive way to understand science by the aid of philosophy can be found by understanding and comprehending the notion of truth. What truth is, what we conceive of truth can offer science a more precise understanding.
James talks about truth; “Truth as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain ideas. It means their agreement as falsity means their disagreement with ‘reality’. Pragmatist and intellectualist both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may be precisely meant by the term ‘agreement’, and what by the term ‘reality’, when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with”.[19] Therefore, there is something more than just attributing truth to something. Pragmatist have a sense of determining what is truth as James defines “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot”.[20] That is the definition of truth as something verifiable. The problem with this definition is that we are far from verifying everything we assume is true. Therefore, we depend on verifications made by others and the verification is something we assume.
Although truth is the aim of common sense, science and philosophy, sometimes there is no agreement of what truth is. The vaccination case is a clear example of this. Pragmatism can help to understand and process this. James pragmatism for example does not rely on a particular truth, but on a method. In his own words; “The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise would be interminable.”[21] But not only metaphysical disputes are hard to resolve, “The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle”.[22] That is how the vaccine controversy could be analyzed and examined under the pragmatic method as James states “Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right”.[23]
For this, it is necessary to understand what pragmatism is. “A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word (cannot insert caracters), meaning action, from which our words ‘practice’ and ‘practical’ come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Pierce in 1878. In an article entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, in the ‘Popular Science Monthly’ for January that year Mr. Pierce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that, to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve – what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conceptions of this effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all. This is the principle of Pierce, the principle of pragmatism”. [24]
James explains an experiment that is solved by pragmatism. The case of Ostwald a chemist from Leipzig. The dispute was about the inner constitution of certain bodies, some properties seemed equally consistent with the notion of hydrogen atom inside of them, others claimed that the texture was due to instable mixture of two bodies. James claims that pragmatism (although not called by that name solved that dispute). He explains; “controversy raged, but never was decided. “it would never have begun” says Ostwald, “if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was as unreal as it, theorizing in primitive times about the raising dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a ‘brownie’, while another insisted on an ‘elf’; as the true cause of the phenomenon”.[25] The philosophical analysis of the experiment allowed a further and more deep comprehension of the phenomena and a better understanding.
This experiment shows how pragmatism can aid the disputes and direct understanding of science. “It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere- no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and some when. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and to me, at definite instants of our life, if world-formula or that world-formula be the true one ”.[26]
It has to be understood that pragmatism is based on experience as opposed to pure reason. Pragmatist rely on experience to acquire truth and understanding. “Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once and for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstractions and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolute origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretense of finality in truth. At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only.”[27] By the explanation of the methodic aim, pragmatist understands that the truth is not the aim, but the method is. In the vaccine case, the method of following the controversy would be the important part for pragmatist, not the particular finding against or in favor of one truth, at least in James view.
To get to pragmatist truth one needs to follow a process where beliefs turn their opinions into something else. That would be done in the case of vaccination. People who have certain beliefs on vaccination would submit this to the pragmatic method “The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of the facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions.”[28] Then, the conclusion of this process is a new idea, “This new idea is a then adopted as the true one.”[29] What would be the result in the vaccination case? At least under a pragmatist eyes, that would be a new opinion that has been examined. “A new opinion counts as ‘true’ just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact; and its success (as I said a moment ago) in doing this, is a matter for the individual’s appreciation. When old truth grows, then, by new truth’s addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it worked; gratifying itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by activity of a new layer of cambium”.[30]
In the vaccine controversy there could be many possibilities. The vaccine advocates could be founded in scientific findings, and the opposition be grounded in mere miss understanding of scientific data or the vaccine advocates could have scientific reasons and the opposition could have other scientific reasons. Both theories would have to be analyzed and comprehended in a scientific sense. The universal reasons contained in each view would be impossible to summarize under one single truth. There would have to be many truths to consider and therefore both parts would have truths to support their theories. No single path would be considered as the voice of science, the one true finding of science. Considering truths as single blocks of understanding can allow evaluation of complex theories and assessment of scientific data. That is a more accurate use of philosophy in science. For example there are particular scientific objections to some particular vaccines. That is the case of scientist finding neurological systems being affected by the HPV vaccine. The claim does not support the anti vaccine movement, it is a claim against a particular vaccine and supported by medical research. Again, this is something that can be refuted by other scientific theories, because the further and deeper scientific investigations lead to more particular and complex reasons.
James concludes of knowing; “My thesis is that knowing here is MADE by the ambulation through the intervening experiences. If the idea led us nowhere, or FROM that object instead of towards or, could we talk at all of its having any cognitive quality? Surely not, for it is only when taken in conjunction with the intermediate experiences that it gets related to THAT PARTICULAR object rather than to any other part of nature.”[31] Experience would allow to have a sense of what is true and assimilation of what we experience would therefore be the tool to find truth in everything. An examination of how things are understood, or the processes of knowing would have understanding of knowledge and therefore knowledge is something itself that can be understood by observation.
It is the case that Dewey thinks that science makes philosophy better, but not only this can be true, it is also possible that philosophy makes science better by a deeper and further understanding. It is not something simple to object to science, but it is also not simple to attribute a voice to science and a simplistic finding. If science is not comprehended and understood, citing science as a mere voice would be the same as attributing mystical powers to nature or believing in metaphysical ideas.
[1] http://vaccines.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=006479
[2] https://www.vaccines.gov/more_info/guide/
[3] http://vaccines.procon.org
[4] http://www.healthline.com/health/vaccinations/opposition#Commonreasons3
[5] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/enlightenment.htm
[6] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry.
[7] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 63
[8] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 64
[9] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 75
[10] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 77
[11] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 64
[12] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 65-66
[13] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 75
[14] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 76
[15] Dewey. Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry. P 79
[16] Dewey. Philosophy and Democracy. P 74
[17] Dewey. Philosophy and Democracy. P 74
[18] Dewey. Philosophy and Democracy. P 74
[19] James. Pragmatisms Conception of Truth. P 198
[20] James. Pragmatisms Conception of Truth. P 201
[21] James. What Pragmatism means. P 45
[22] James. What Pragmatism means. P 45
[23] James. What Pragmatism means. P 46
[24] James. What Pragmatism means. P 47
[25] James. What Pragmatism means. P 49
[26] James. What Pragmatism means. P 50
[27] James. What Pragmatism means. P 51
[28] James. What Pragmatism means. P 61
[29] James. What Pragmatism means. P 61
[30] James. What Pragmatism means. P 63-64
[31] William James. Meaning of Truth. P1154