Professor Wang Defeng: Superstition in science is a mistake of our time.

Professor Wang Defeng from the Philosophy Department of Fudan University has made many videos on the Internet recently, some of which I don't agree with. But yesterday I saw that "superstition in science is a mistake of our time", and I supported it with both hands.

The development of modern science and technology has created great benefits for human society. The backwardness of modern science and technology in China has brought us profound disasters, which impressed the people of China deeply. In recent decades, China's great progress in the field of science and technology has inspired us, and the recent suppression and blockade of Huawei by the United States has worried many people. History and reality tell us that only by upgrading scientific and technological innovation to a national strategy can the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation have a solid foundation.

However, the superstition of science also restricts our thinking, and people have not realized its harmfulness so far. It is good to have experts stand up and speak out, but it is also good to attract everyone's attention and debate. The biggest harm of scientific superstition is blindly worshipping the West, dwarfing or even denying the excellent traditional culture of the Chinese nation.

We often hear people criticize our traditional culture "this is unscientific". In our minds, science is truth, and unscientific is backwardness, ignorance, superstition and irrationality, which must be abandoned! Fang Fang and Lilac Garden, under the guise of science and holding the sword of positivism, completely deny our Chinese medicine, which is deceptive and confusing, causing many people's ideological confusion.

First of all, reason and superstition are opposites. Our traditional culture has never lacked rationality. The traditional culture of China for thousands of years has always believed that there is a universal existence, that is, "Tao", which is highly abstract and applicable to all categories of the universe. At the same time, explore in various fields and externalize the Tao. My understanding is "law". For example, in the field of social governance, a ritual system based on patriarchal clan system has been established, as well as calendars, Huangdi Neijing and so on.

Reason is not so much the ability to know the world as the spirit to explore the truth. Perception, cognition and rationality are all subjective in the final analysis and cannot be equated with the objective world. So, obviously, science is not equal to truth.

Tao is a kind of "order" existing in the universe. Science is to explore and discover the internal order of the material world and reveal it. Science is a theory, a set of theories based on hypotheses and assumptions, which can be self-consistent for the time being based on the current level of human understanding. It is not universally applicable and cannot be subverted in space and time. For example, Darwin's theory of species evolution, the plate theory of earth formation, quantum science and so on are all hypotheses. Science is relative and imperfect, and it is a partial landscape, not a panoramic presentation.

The defects of science itself sometimes bring harm and even disaster to human beings. Modern industry developed on the basis of science and technology, accompanied by serious pollution and ecological crisis, has brought great challenges to the living environment of mankind. The invention of antibiotics has made great contributions to human health, but once abused, its harm will follow, but its harm will not appear until decades later.

Modern science originated from western ancient Greek philosophy. Natural philosophy is the earliest school of ancient Greek philosophy, exploring the essence of the universe and trying to discover the most basic elements of the universe. Aristotle invented logic. On the basis of logic, he comprehensively classified everything in the world. Physics, astronomy and biology were born one after another, and modern science gradually developed. The earliest scientists were philosophers, and now the highest doctor of natural science in many western universities is called Ph.D (Doctor of Philosophy). Strictly speaking, modern science should be called western science.

China culture and western culture are different branches of human civilization. We have been handed down from generation to generation under the nourishment of Chinese culture, which lasted for five or six thousand years and created countless glories. There is no reason to replace China's culture with western culture, and there is no reason to roughly cut and measure all our cultural heritage with western science. It is really unqualified!

What exactly is science?

I think there are many messages in the comment area saying that science is logical. Unfortunately, this understanding has long been generally denied by western scholars, who have proved that the view that "what can be confirmed logically is science" is untenable and has long been eliminated. So scholars put forward the "falsifiability" theory, but they found that some scientific theories can never be falsified, some scientific theories are constantly falsified, and the "falsifiability" theory cannot be universally established. Others put forward "paradigm theory", that is, it has its own terminology system, and the system that can achieve self-consistency is science. In short, what can justify itself is science.

As a result, non-traditional sciences such as management science, psychological science, decision-making science and social science have emerged. Even we call TCM the science of TCM, which is an active surrender to western science. In my opinion, Chinese medicine is Chinese medicine, why must it be science? Science is one of the ways to know the world, not the only way.

Science itself is still a vague concept, and it is also a chaotic concept. When it is used, it will often lead to inconsistent connotations and lack of rigor.

I am not against science, but against the absolutization of science, against the abuse of scientific concepts, and against taking science as the criterion for judging everything. In the case that the level of human understanding is still very limited, no one should belittle himself, but should coexist in various ways, instead of either one or the other, denying all unscientific things with science.

I saw a video of Jiang Tao, the founder of CSDN, saying that many programmers have been studying Chinese medicine and found that Huangdi Neijing is a huge logical and self-consistent symbol system. This is of course a good thing, but I want to say that it proves at most that we are expected to reach an agreement with western science, rather than that Chinese medicine is not false because it has been proved to conform to western scientific rules. Starting from the thought of "Tao" in China's traditional culture, the universal regularity of the world is unified at the highest level.