John Horgan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Horgan at a conference of the History of Science Society in Washington (2007)

John Horgan (* 1953 ) is an American science journalist and publicist . His best-known work is the book "At the Frontiers of Knowledge" , published in 1996 and translated into 13 languages , in which he explains his view that the progress of science - especially that of basic research  - is limited due to social, economic, physical and cognitive limitations and the age of scientific discovery was over. In Forbes Media Guide , he was in 1994 as one of the most influential journalists of the United States listed.

Life

Horgan studied English with science minor subjects at Columbia University . A crisis of meaning put an end to his initial interest in literary studies . He realized that because of the view held in literary theory that a text has several levels of meaning, none of which is relevant, no real progress in this area is possible and differences of opinion within this paradigm are fundamentally insoluble. In 1982 he completed his English studies with a Bachelor of Arts and a year later obtained a Master of Science in journalism .

From 1983 to 1986 he was an editor at IEEE Spectrum , a magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers . After working as an editor at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997, Horgan worked as a freelance writer until he became director of the newly established "Center for Science Writing" at Stevens University in Hoboken in 2005 .

In his publications , Horgan has dealt with the limits of scientific progress, the transition area between science and mysticism, and consciousness . His more recent work is in the field of conflict research .

Horgan lives in Garrison , New York , is married with two children.

plant

In his 1996 book “At the Frontiers of Science. Triumphant advance and dilemma of the natural sciences ” , Horgan represented the skeptical thesis that science would become due to the rapid advances in the 19th and 20th centuries. Century and due to social, economic, physical and cognitive factors are close to their end. Based on interviews with outstanding scientists from a wide variety of disciplines (for example Karl Popper , Richard Dawkins , Marvin Minsky or Edward Witten ), Horgan presented an overview of the previous development of scientific progress in the various fields. He asked his interlocutors about their views on the future Development in their respective research areas and extrapolated from this his view of the imminent end of science. Horgan limited himself to basic research, but admitted that applied science still had considerable development potential.

Motivation and an argumentative basis for Horgan was the book "The Coming of the Golden Age" by the biologist Gunther Stent , published in 1969 . In it, Stent took the view that science was about to end due to the breakthroughs achieved ( quantum mechanics , discovery of the DNA structure) and the limitations of the respective subject area ( geography ). Stent relied on Henry Adams ' law of acceleration (in short, this includes the postulate of exponential development due to feedback : power generates more power, knowledge generates more knowledge) and formulated a utopian vision of a "New Polynesia" in which people embrace hedonism surrender after the potentials of science have been exhausted.

Ironic science and fear of influence

Horgan took up Stent's illustration and developed the idea behind it. He first differentiates between “real” and “ironic” science (both terms refer to the respective scientific method). While real science is based on traditional empiricism , ironic science leaves the field of empirically verifiable hypotheses and becomes increasingly speculative. Horgan went back to an analogy that comes from literary studies: this describes texts as ironic which have different levels of meaning and for which the author himself is not in a position to determine the most relevant.

Horgans concept of the "strong" scientist also comes from literary studies. He referred to the concept of the "strong poet" which the literary scholar Harold Bloom had developed in 1973 in an essay called "fear of influence" . Bloom took the view that modern writers competed with existing works by outstanding authors such as Shakespeare and yet could never escape their influence or comparison with their works - they were therefore late arrivals. According to Bloom, a strong poet is one who recognizes the perfection of ancestors and virtually bypasses them. He uses tricks and deliberate misinterpretations to make himself appear more important and to eliminate the dominant influence of the past. Horgan applied this concept of the strong poet to science and created the strong scientist. He argued that all major discoveries could only be made once and that the successors of a scientist like Einstein could only concern themselves with detailed questions. The natural scientist, like the poet, would inevitably be in the shadow of his famous predecessors.

A scientist can only escape this influence, Horgan concludes, if, like the poet, he tries to overcome the theoretical structure of his predecessors by deliberately misinterpreting or reinterpreting it and using post-empirical (i.e. speculative) methods. According to Horgan, ironic science is practiced by strong scientists. This methodology removes scientific practice from its empirical basis and approaches literary studies or philosophy .

The limits of science

In support of his view that science cannot be pursued indefinitely, Horgan makes several points:

  • The extent to which a society supports the scientific community depends on the circumstances of the time. During the Cold War, for example, massive investments were made in research on both sides of the Iron Curtain in order to assert oneself in the social competition. After the collapse of the Eastern bloc , this motivational factor ceased to exist.
  • Science is now judged according to more economic criteria. Horgan argues that higher and higher costs must be incurred while returns decrease as science advances. So ever larger particle accelerators would be needed to penetrate deeper into the structure of matter and to test new hypotheses . In connection with this, the scientific theories would become more and more complex and incomprehensible, so that society would at a certain point refuse to support it, since it no longer saw any benefit in research relative to the expenditure .
  • According to Horgan, the negative consequences of high technology and environmental awareness meant that the importance of science could decline.
  • Since humans are part of the universe , they could never look at it like an external observer, which means that there is always a part of objective reality that humans cannot access.
  • Cognitive limitations exist because the human brain is designed to solve problems whose complexity is far below objective reality.

Moreover, Horgan argues that even a conclusive theory may only have limited explanatory power. Should the physicists succeed in developing a large, unified theory , for example , it would say nothing about subjective perceptions , for example about why people perceive something as "beautiful".

reception

Horgans book was extremely successful, it was translated into 13 languages, his follow-up work The Undiscovered Mind in eight. However , it was received rather skeptically in the scientific establishment . In nature it was called “ cotton candy for the brain”. In many cases, the style and language of the text were praised, while the content was rejected. David Hoffman of the University of California, Berkeley , has already described the concept of the strong, ironic scientist as flawed, and he also accused Horgan of judging topics he did not understand only through interviews .
Furthermore, Horgan's theses were rejected as self-contradicting. On the one hand, he argues that certain subject areas are about to be completed because no groundbreaking discoveries have been made in these for a long time , on the other hand, he asserts in other examples that an area is about to be completed, precisely because many important discoveries have been made in recent times were (cf. also the aforementioned law of acceleration by Adams).

In an essay in Physics Today in 1999, Nobel Prize laureate Philip Anderson coined the term “Horganism” as a catchphrase for a way of thinking that is disruptively skeptical about scientific progress.

Awards

  • The Best American Science and Nature Writing for the essay “Keeping the Faith in My Doubt” ; 2005
  • Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion; 2005
  • American Psychiatric Association Certificate of Commendation for Outstanding Reporting on Psychiatric Issues; 1997
  • Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science ; 1992 and 1994
  • National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award; 1993

Bibliography (selection)

  • Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality ; Houghton Mifflin; 2003 ISBN 978-0618060276
  • The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation ; Free press; 1999 ISBN 978-0684850757 (German edition The Human Spirit ; Luchterhand; 2000 ISBN 978-3630880020 )
  • The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of the Scientific Age ; Broadway Books; 1996 ISBN 978-0553061741 (German edition At the borders of knowledge . Luchterhand, 1997 ISBN 3-630-87992-6 )

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ self-characterization at edge.com
  2. ↑ Limits, pp. 12/13
  3. ↑ An argument also made by Stent and the linguist Noam Chomsky .
  4. ↑ Horgan named a blog launched in early 2007 “Horganism”, cf. discovermagazine.typepad.com
personal data
SURNAME Horgan, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American science journalist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1953