I have been amazed at the number of comments I get from people to seem to think they are knowledgeable about science yet display a narrow doctrinaire view resembling fundamentalism in religion. It is to our collective advantage to grow beyond such antiquated notions about science. I am hoping people at this site will see the connection between taking that position about science and the right wing world view. George Lakoff has made the connection very well and it needs to be understood if we are to be able to take reasonable positions on issues like global warming, agriculture, health, and evolution. Modern complexity science is a paradigm shift of major proportion and needs to be understood. Read on below and I will give a short introduction to these important ideas and tell how they change our view and usage of science in this modern age.
The old science was one of rigid rules and forbidden areas of questioning. The old philosophical crutch of positivism was one of the reasons for this. This dogma has been tried and it fails to hold up. Closely related to this is the school of formalists in mathematics exemplified by Hilbert. In both cases a way of describing the scientific method was taught and caused widespread misunderstanding. Do you remember the famous statement that science only allows "how?" questions and never "why?" questions? Did you ever wonder why this was supposed to be true? The reason is not as simple as it might seem. The Cartesian reductionist influence is strong to this day in science. Scientists are rarely taught the philosophy of science systematically. Cartesian reductionism is centered around the "machine metaphor" that is the basis for all reductionist thinking. Everything is a machine. If we learn to take it apart and put it together again we have mastered it. We ask "how" a machine works. Asking "why?" has no meaning in this narrow context.
Unfortunately there is a lot more to be learned about the real world by asking "why?" questions. The answer to such questions lies in causality. Causes are what makes the things we observe in the real world happen. George Lakoff linked this directly to politics and the difference between the radical conservative world view and the progressive world view. Conservatism is based on a simple model of direct cause. An agent acts and causes a result. If you want an explanation for anything ask to find the causal agent and the problem is answered.
Progressives know better. Most. if not all, real world events are the result of complex patterns of cause. No one agent can ever be singled out because there are always other important things connected. The whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts. That means reducing things to simple direct causes like the mechanists do in science is always leaving out important parts of a whole system.
Chaotic dynamics was discovered when we realized that we had controlled these interesting aspects of reality out of our systems by reducing them and holding to many things constant. This is especially important with respect to self organizing systems like the Benard cells that form in simple fluids, including water, when thermal gradients are created across them. This, in particular, is important because it follows a principle that governs our Earth system and climate change resulting from global warming. The bookInto the Cool explains this idea very well.
Finally, once we open the door to exploring our world causally by asking "why?" we are able to develop new mathematical tools using one of the most modern developments in mathematics called Category theory. Using category theory we can mathematically map causal patterns and we quickly discover that these patterns are replete with closed loops of cause. These loops are the ultimate defeat of the formalist and positivist approaches to science. They also make another thing clear. Real complex systems can not be simulated on a computer. Another way of saying this is that anything that can be simulated on a computer is a machine.
As we try to understand the global system we are so concerned about, it behooves us to realize what we are doing. All our computer models entail mechanistic reductions of a really complex system. We are only beginning to understand how dangerous such practices can be. Real complex systems can not be reverse engineered like a machine. Taking them apart loses vital information because it destroys functional causal loops and substitutes direct cause for complex cause. From Lakoff's perspective I'd say that the old science of Cartesian mechanism is a right wing plot. All kidding aside, it does fit in nicely with their mode of political reasoning. So which kind of science do you prefer? As a progressive I'll stick with the modern version.