BOM SENSO CIENTíFICO
Para quem se interessa pelo assunto, por ciência ou psicologia, ótimo artigo.
In the midst of all this hoopla, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of Einstein’s legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible.
Scientists’ contempt for common sense has two unfortunate implications. One is that preposterousness, far from being a problem for a theory, is a measure of its profundity; hence the appeal, perhaps, of dubious propositions like multiple-personality disorders and multiple-universe theories. The other, even more insidious implication is that only scientists are really qualified to judge the work of other scientists. Needless to say, I reject that position, and not only because I’m a science journalist (who majored in English). I have also found common sense - ordinary, nonspecialized knowledge and judgment - to be indispensable for judging scientists’ pronouncements, even, or especially, in the most esoteric fields.
All these theories are preposterous, but that’s not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge.
Common sense - and a little historical perspective - makes me equally skeptical of grand unified theories of the human mind. After a half-century of observing myself and my fellow humans - not to mention watching lots of TV and movies - I’ve concluded that as individuals we’re pretty complex, variable, unpredictable creatures, whose personalities can be affected by a vast range of factors. I’m thus leery of hypotheses that trace some important aspect of our behavior to a single cause.
Over the past century, moreover, mind-science has been as faddish as teenage tastes in music, as one theory has yielded to another. Everything we think and do, scientists have assured us, can be explained by the Oedipal complex, or conditioned reflexes, or evolutionary adaptations, or a gene in the X chromosome, or serotonin deficits in the amygdala. Given this rapid turnover in paradigms, it’s only sensible to doubt them all until the evidence for one becomes overwhelming.
Yes, common sense alone can lead us astray, and some of science’s most profound insights into nature violate it; ultimately, scientific truth must be established on empirical grounds.
So far, Einstein seems to be wrong about God’s aversion to games of chance, but he was right not to abandon his common-sense intuitions about reality. In those many instances when the evidence is tentative, we should not be embarrassed to call on common sense for guidance.