"The essential point is that, although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it. Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement. " - Hate Mail

JUST BY CHANCE I have been reading a biography of the early sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and just last night read this quote by him, “Nothing in nature can escape natural law.”   

It's not for nothing, though I don't think the author of the biography meant it, that she noted in the beginning of the book that Hirschfeld was a product of the 19th century and, though unusually modern in many aspects of his thought, he was a thoroughly conventional 19th century materialist.   I don't think it would have been easy for someone to make much of a splash in the soft-sciences of his time if he hadn't been.  Especially in his line of trade.*

The confident assertion by an educated man working in what has to count as certainly the softest of sciences,  something which depended entirely on the self-reporting of human beings about not only their sexual activity but their interior sexual consciousness, that "natural law" had some independent existence apart from the PEOPLE who formulated such laws and that such "natural law" which had its basis in the observations of non-living and systems, planets, objects moving and being affected by gravity and other seemingly involuntary forces could have anything to do with his area of study has to count as a monumental leap of faith, not based on religion but based on an ideology that was intrinsically hostile to religion and in that attempt to win out over it,  clung on to entirely unfounded articles of faith such as that one. 

People like to think of "scientists" such as Hirschfeld who had some progressive ideas about forbidden sexuality in heroic terms  He is generally presented as a hero to my fellow LGBTQ+ People.**  Also for the extreme opposition to him that the Nazis had, both due to him being Jewish and due to his subject of research but also due to the fact that a number of Nazi Party members had exposed their own homosexuality to him and his colleagues.  They were especially targeted by the Nazis for that.   And there was a lot to respect in what Hirschfeld did, though certainly not everything.   I have to say that the book's reporting of his fears for the direction that Zionism was headed in during his time were prescient. 

And a lot of his "science" is as definitively rejected now as an enormous part of what was accepted as even hard science, published in books and journals, taught at universities and colleges and high schools, especially the farther you get from physics and inorganic chemistry.   Which shows you just how durable the 19th century notions of "natural law" are.   

If 21st century notions of natural law are any more durable, we don't know yet,  no more than someone who died an old man in 1935 could have - though if he'd read, for example, the eminent astro-physicist and non-materialist, A.S. Eddington on the topic he might have had a more sophisticated view of what "natural law" is.***   Though you could say the same thing about a lot of current professionals in science, even many a living physicist and, especially, cosmologist.  

The "natural law" that we can talk about is a human creation.   Just as every aspect of everything we can talk about, write about, make mathematical calculations about, teach about, etc. is a product of human consciousness.  And it is nothing like a complete picture of even simple realities.  The farther you get from those simple entities, the less scientific the science gets. 

* Like all of the social-pseudo-sciences, anything that depends entirely on reports by People of their own unobserved behavior and, ever more so, their internal experience of their own consciousness,  can never, ever have anything like the reliability of the observations of planets or molecules or subatomic particles.   People lie about their sexual activities,  they lie to their partners,  they lie to themselves about it.  Those lies are so basic to the pretense that what they are doing is science that they are reported as fact in publications held to be science, even as the resulting statistical analyses are mathematically incoherent and impossible.   Sexology might be a suitable topic for academic study and publishing but any alleged scientific handling of it is pseudo-science. 

See the reports of the numbers of sexual partners of heterosexually identifying males and the different numbers of sexual partners of heterosexually identifying females as only one glaring example.   Yet it is published as science. 

I would go into the history of political opinion polling and, especially, the notoriously partisan polling results of Republican favoring polling firms but I won't for now.   I'd ban political polling and the reporting of them before elections if it were my call. 

** I hadn't till last week come across the designation "2SLGBTQ+" and had to look it up.  the "2S" means "Two-spirit."   Since it was a Canadian source that I found it in, I gather that it's given its first place out of respect for First Nations ideas, which I have no problem with, though it's a bit cumbersome to keep adding to the inclusive term which I prefer, I might adopt it out of respect.  

But the complexity of any one of those identities included in that ever expanding acronym shows how pointless and hopeless it is to come up with a real "science" of human sexuality.    I often half-joke that I refuse to share a sexual identity with Republican-fascists who like to have sex with men, but that's only half a joke. 

***  To get some idea at the extremely tenuous relationship of exact science and the (pseudo-)would-be-sciences, especially something like sexology, take this passage from Eddington's 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World.  

As is my current MO, I have inserted breaks for the ease of modern readers who aren't accustomed to reading long paragraphs but I have not changed any words or their order. 

 Nature of Exact Science. One of the characteristics of physics is that it is an exact science, and I have generally identified the domain of physics with the domain of exact science.  Strictly speaking the two are not synonymous. We can imagine a science arising which has no contact with the usual phenomena and laws of physics, which yet admits of the same kind of exact treatment.  

It is conceivable that the Mendelian theory of heredity may grow into an independent science of this kind, for it would seem to occupy in biology the same position that the atomic theory occupied in chemistry a hundred years ago. The trend of the theory is to analyze complex individuals into “unit characters.” These are like indivisible atoms with affinities and repulsions; their matings are governed by the same laws of chance which play so large a part in chemical thermodynamics; and numerical statistics of the characters of a population are predictable in the same way as the results of a chemical reaction.

I break in to note that even with Eddington's quite unusual caution in describing the then presumed knowledge of genetic inheritance,  that view of biological inheritance AND IT IS PROBABLY STILL THE DOMINANTLY HELD VIEW OF "GENES" EVEN AMONG MANY BIOLOGISTS! it is extremely naive in light of the ever increasing complexity and non-fixity of the behaviors of genes and the general area of biological inheritance.   "Mendelian theory," that is genetics, has become ever less like that description of it with its presumed proximity to 1920s chemistry, starting with the work of geneticists even in the decade after these lectures were published.  I don't know the extent to which Eddington may have known about that cutting edge work before his death in the 1940s.  

Now the effect of such a theory on our philosophical views of the significance of life does not depend on whether the Mendelian atom admits of a strictly physical explanation or not. The unit character may be contained in some configuration of the physical molecules of the carrier, and perhaps even literally correspond to a chemical compound; or it may be something superadded which is peculiar to living matter and is not yet comprised in the schedule of physical entities. That is a side-issue. 

We are drawing near to the great question whether there is any domain of activity - of life, of consciousness, of deity - which will not be engulfed by the advances of exact science; and our apprehension is not directed against the particular entities of physics but against all entities of the category to which exact science can apply. 

For exact science invokes, or has seemed to invoke, a type of law inevitable and soulless against which the human spirit rebels. If science finally declares that man is no more than a fortuitous concourse of atoms, the blow will not be softened by the explanation that the atoms in question are the Mendelian unit characters and not the material atoms of the chemist.

Let us then examine the kind of knowledge which is handled by exact science. If we search the examination papers in physics and natural philosophy for the more intelligible questions we may come across one beginning something like this: “An elephant slides down a grassy hillside…” The experienced candidate knows that he need not pay much attention to this; it is only put in to give an impression of realism. 

He reads on: “The mass of the elephant is two tons.” Now we are getting down to business; the elephant fades out of the problem and a mass of two tons takes its place. What exactly is this two tons, the real subject matter of the problem? It refers to some property or condition which we vaguely describe as “ponderosity” occurring in a particular region of the external world.

But we shall not get much further that way; the nature of the external world is inscrutable, and we shall only plunge into a quagmire of indescribables. Never mind what the two tons refers to; what is it? How has it actually entered in so definite a way into our experience?

Two tons is the reading of a pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing-machine. 

Let us pass on. “The slope of the hill is 60˚.” Now the hillside fades out of the problem and an angle of 60˚ takes its place. What is 60˚? 

There is no need to struggle with mystical conceptions of direction; 60˚ is the reading of a plumb-line against the divisions of a protractor. Similarly for the other data of the problem. The softly yielding turf on which the elephant slides is replaced by a coefficient of friction, which though perhaps not directly a pointer reading is of kindred nature. No doubt there are more roundabout ways used in practice for determining the weights of elephants and the slopes of hills, but these are justified because it is known that they give the same results as direct pointer readings.

And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left with only pointer readings. If then only pointer readings or their equivalents are put into the machine of scientific calculation, how can we grind out anything but pointer readings? But that is just what we do grind out. The question presumably was to find the time of descent of the elephant, and the answer is a pointer reading on the seconds’ dial of our watch.

The triumph of exact science in the foregoing problem consisted in establishing a numerical connection between the pointer reading on the weighing-machine on one experiment on the elephant and the pointer reading on a watch in another experiment. And when we examine critically other problems of physics we find that this is typical. The whole subject matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications.

We cannot enter here into the definition of what are to be classed as similar indications. The observation of approximate coincidence of the pointer with a scale-division can generally be extended to include the observation of any kind of coincidence - or, as it is usually expressed in the language of the general relativity theory, an intersection of worldlines. The essential point is that, although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it. Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement. 

Look at the above link to the post about something as seemingly simple as the statistics of numbers of sex partners and the knowing scientific reporting of what are mathematically impossible data for reference. 

I have to confess, reading that again makes me eager to use the word "superadded" and getting some online knickers in a twist.  The ones this kind of a post gets knotted up.