6/14/2023 0 Comments The ascent of manLurking in the background of his argument is the same anti-religious message that Voltaire is advancing in The Philosophical Dictionary. ![]() Later in the film he specifically asserts that there is no such knowledge. His references to “the knowledge of gods” may mislead some into thinking that he is claiming that such knowledge exists. ![]() Why this is unjustified in most scientists’ opinion is beyond the scope of these modest notes, but it is important to keep in mind that Bronowski does believe in scientific knowledge: he simply denies that it is complete or perfect. Philosophers and other humanists have often seized on uncertainty theory and quantum physics to argue for skepticism, and tried to use it to deny all validity to science. But all knowledge is limited, never absolute. He emphasizes that we can be very precise about what we can and cannot know through scientific means. It is crucial to understand that he is not saying that there is no such thing as knowledge, or that all approaches to knowledge are equal. Watch for this man’s face to return at the very end of the film in the context of another reference to “touch.” Some aspects of our knowledge of this man which cannot be conveyed by scientific instruments can be conveyed instead by an artist trying to convey the man’s spirit or by a blind woman actually touching the man’s face. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that all perception, including that provided by scientific investigation, is necessarily imperfect, limited. He begins the film by focusing a number of devices on the face of an unnamed elderly man to see how much detail each can produce. You do not have to understand modern atomic physics to follow his argument, but it helps. Both argue that the logical result of human limitations should be tolerance. The defense of science which Bronowski mounts depends on the “uncertainty principle,” or “indeterminacy” or–as he prefers–“the principle of tolerance.” His insistence that there is no absolute truth, not even in science, descends from the same line of reasoning as Voltaire’s insistence on the limits of knowledge. However, we are viewing this film for a slightly different reason. This episode of “The Ascent of Man” concentrates on two catastrophic events of the 20th century for which scientists have often been blamed: the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This connection led him to Nagasaki after the war to study the effects of the atomic bombing there, but he came away convinced that scientists needed to pay more attention to the ethics of science, and in particular the danger that their discoveries would be misused. During World War II, his work helped to increase the effectiveness of bombing raids. Jacob Bronowski (born 1908) emigrated with his family from Poland to Germany to England, where he studied mathematics at Cambridge University. Although it shows its age a bit (smaller particles than that shown have been “photographed” since and the sexist title of the original series would probably be changed to something like “The Ascent of Humanity” today), most of it is still scientifically valid. ![]() ![]() “Knowledge or Certainty” is an episode in the 1973 BBC series “The Ascent of Man,” a history of science from the prehistoric period to modern times.
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