Philosophy for PhD students

I keep thinking how no one seems to even know anything about philosophy of science. And I am talking about lecturers and doctoral students. Three years ago, I audited a series of research methods seminars at a certain university faculty where they literally laughed at the mention of epistemology. The consensus was that it is a nonsense concern. One student added, with everyone nodding to that, that - verbatim quote - "studying epistemology would undermine the very existence of our discipline". I wish I had filmed that moment, priceless.
 
Actually, there's not even a crash course in any basic philosophy for PhD (Doctor Philosophiae!!!) students that I know of! When I ask my fellow doctoral researchers, 'Who are your three favourite philosophers?' more often than not I get blank stares in response. And that is from students of social sciences, arts and humanities! Don't even get me started on natural scientists! Those guys just "believe" in science and their pop-prophets, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking, who all I bet never sat next to a philosophy textbook in  their lives.

I really think that if SOAS wants to up its game it needs to make training in philosophy and formal logic compulsory. And real proper methodology training too, like at LSE. I remember vividly  how an academic supervisor reacted to my including a methodology chapter in my thesis. Doesn't how we collect data  affect our research findings?

When I try to talk about it here, I usually get, 'You think too much'.

Isn't that what we are meant to do as academics, thinking too much?

Surely, thinking critically about how we think should not be such an esoteric concern for a scientist?

What do you think?

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P. S. Adjacent to this is why we need to teach social theory to even start discussing any social issues. At the same seminar that I mentioned above, I was ridiculed for suggesting just that. The lecturer who conducted the seminar was part of that too.

What are social facts and why we need to bother

Social facts to society are like grammar to a language, a higher level of abstraction that is nonetheless real, as it governs the way things/words are ordered. You can speak a language without knowing anything about its grammar.  Perhaps, that may affect the higher level of your command but you should mostly get by.

It is possible to deny the existence of social facts because they are not real in the sense of how physical things are real. It is never having been told about that that enabled Margaret Thatcher to claim, with a beady-eyed aplomb, that "there is no such thing as society". (The same woman insisted that a country finance is just like someone's purse: a deliberate lie  or a misguided naiveté, we shall  never know.) Some professional academics I know told me, very seriously, that identity, values and post-liberalism do not exist. They doubtlessly live according with their middle-classes values and various identities (class, gender, race, religion, etc.) in a very Neo-Liberal reality of latter-day London, yet since they have not been taught the grammar of (their own) social existence, they cannot quite put their finger on it. There is no vocabulary to talk about it and therefore it exists not: out of mind, out of sight. It is just like some of my students, very bright and eloquent young adults, who do not know a subjunctive clause from a parenthesis, because someone long time ago decided that teaching grammar at school is a waste of time, innit.

Learning grammar and learning social theory can and often do open up people's mind to a realisation that there is more to reality than just what is visible to the naked eye. As Castaneda's Don Juan wisely said, 'The true essence of the tree is between its leaves.' Without such an insight, one won't be able to see, metaphorically, the forest for the trees. Which automatically should disqualify anyone from any discussion about social matters. Unfortunately, that is still not the case, particularly where it matters: in politics and academia. Hence, we end up taught and led by people whose ability for mental abstraction and educated discussion does not exceed that of your average teenager.

Historians and the present

Historians seem to need to wait for secondary sources before assessing current social reality. Thirty years, on the average.

Qualitative methods and the footsoldiers of science

A very sophomoric attitude to science is to take it as the source of ultimate truth, a modern God of sorts. It is all too often exemplified by research footsoldiers in natural sciences as well as by frequent readers of science blogs. A result of that is an egregious, irrational and deeply misguided belief that the complexity, messiness and overdetermination of reality can be reduced to and explained by two arbitrary variables. For example, for the purposes of  this particular piece on  GM crops, yield and profit - while ignoring everything else - public health, environment, food quality, larger-scale economical implications, etc. - as mere "external factors". 

Also, limiting the time scope for meta-analysis - understandably necessary to make it handy - ignores any long-term effects even within the chosen yield-profit scope. That's how we end up with grossly biased and reductionist conclusions dangled around by BSc graduates and their associates as "scientific facts". It is very unfortunate that the same "facts" are then used for policy development and administrative decision-making. All because some dimwits were not taught Qualitative Methods and can't see the forest behind the trees.

#TheBanalityOfEvil #TheRuleOfExperts #GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople

Right-wing anthropologist

Is there such a thing as a right-wing anthropologist? I am yet to meet one. My guess is that when you take so much time and effort learning about people's lives, walking in their shoes, trying to  understand their world in all this complexity, you can't go right-wing on them: blame them for the life they live, compare them with what they are not, treat them not as fellow human beings but as labels, bugaboos, somehow not-quite-humans and hence non-deserving.

Right-wing sociologists, on the other hand, do crop up every now  and then. I blame Quantitative Methods. When you are trained to reduce people to figures, graphs and spreadsheets, without bearing in mind that it's but an exercise in mental abstraction, that's essentially dehumanisation. And dehumanisation of other humans is a surefire precursor to right-wing thought and right-wing action.

*All that being said, the old-fashioned right-wing vs. left-wing dichotomy has been largely hollowed out in the political world. The majority of Tories and Labour, Republicans and Democrats are but mildly differing flavours of Neo-Liberal (right-wing, in the old sense, par excellence). The crunch nowadays is largely between the old establishment and populists. 

What do you think?

In the name of Science, Data and Quantitative Methods

Before God('s word) was the language of power.  This day and age, it is science. Or rather the religion of Scientism. Hard data. Statistics. Figures. Graphs. Flashy PowerPoint presentations. The tool of mass persuasion. The tool of policy justification.

It's the only language power speaks. It's the only language power understands.

That is why Quantitative methods are so in vogue. Heavily Quant-laden MSc courses command the three-letters-behind-your-name market: the fees are higher and so are the expected salaries. Tens of thousands of science graduates churned out into the labour market.

This is how Bloomberg calculates that Thailand is world's happiest economy. This is how development consultants' number-jugglery  for ever leaves the Third World struggling, while keeping the HQ in New York, London or Geneva pleased. This is how the rule of technocrats indoctrinated in Quantitative Methods runs entire countries into the ground. This is how nuclear energy is (falsely) made out to be the cheapest. This is how technocrats from Goldman Sachs get to assume top-echelon positions in European governments and bleed everyone white with their misguided austerity policies. Never mind that even natural scientists demonstrate that uncritically quantitative research produces false results.

Wars used to be fought over one word in the Scripture. Now countries are turned into "competition states" to climb up a few places in rankings, never mind the social, environmental and psychological  cost (ala, the externals, generally excluded from most business model, 'coz who cares!). Blind belief in holy words may have given way to a blind belief in  holy numbers, but the latter is even more dangerous because of how efficiently it commands far vaster resources and more advanced technologies.

Social science koan: inspired by Baudrillard

All human systems produce difference and waste.

Flash ethnography

I know this goes again the very grain of participant observation, but sometimes there's just no time and flash ethnography is the answer. Switch off your ego, open your doors of perception, swoosh in, and assume a vantage position absorbing all the visible and invisible vibes, until they come after you and kick your pfrecious butt out.

Wealth gap in the UK

 
It's not wealth trickling down, they are pissing on you.

#GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople

Study case: corporate exec ruins charity

 

Another example how the #RuleOfExperts is, in fact, but clueless bottomline-mongering, knee-jerk streamlining and PowerPoint-assisted cheek-puffing: a former AT&T exec has ruined the American Red Cross with her senseless cuts and restructuring. #GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople

Gender and the City: homosociality among Bangkok's Japanese

Homosociality is so in your face in Japan that no one even notices it. A lot of time, men and women socialise separately. It's a given, no one even talks or thinks strange about it. As it is often the case in Japan, things go extreme. There are women-only train cars, lots of urbanites stop having romantic or sexual realtionships with the opposite sex, while Japanese gender-targeted marketing is perhaps the most pervasive and relentless you'll ever see. Still, homosociality is never talked about. It's so normal, like the air we breathe, that it does not even seem to register.

After 25 years of spending a lot of time with the Japanese, it really only occurred to me as a social fact last winter. For my fieldwork, I had to do sampling among Bangkok's Japanese migrants. Men wouldn't give me time of the day, so it was mostly women that I got to hang out with and ask questions. The contrast was so sharp, it came as a cognitive shock. Knowing of homosociality from research on and my travels in the Middle East and North Africa, I immediately had a light-bulb moment, 'Bang! This is it! How could I miss it all these years?'

It seems that no one has cottoned on Japanese homosociality either. There's one piece of literary research on it, but it is mostly about homoeroticism in Modern Japanese literature. Nothing in social sciences. Completamente nada. Perhaps, it's because many social scientists are not hip to the very term homosociality (I did ask around) as it comes from literary criticism. Namely, from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who, inter allia, claimed that Henry James's broken sentence structure is a sign of anal-fingering tendencies.

Cue to my Japanese migrants in Bangkok with their penchant of hanging out along gender lines. Despite my sampling difficulties, I've managed to gather enough empirical evidence from my interviews and participant observation. There are so many subtle arrangements, tacit understandings and internalised values getting the entire gender segregation machine running! Earthlings never cease to amaze me.

So that's what I just gave a talk on at the Daiwa Foundation. It is based on one of my thesis chapters, which I am also presenting at the Southeast Asia Symposium 2016 in Oxford, and also at the ASEASUK Conference 2016 at my alma mater. 

I would be very grateful for comments and suggestions, particularly re. extant research on the subject.

'Mainly' anthropologist: the journey of an interdisplinarist in a non-interdisciplinary world

When schmoozing and networking, I introduce myself as an anthropologist. That makes sense. I have attended seven courses in Anthropology, wrote my MA thesis in Anthropology, and now am writing my quite anthropological thesis based on my ethnographic fieldwork. By far, Anthropology is the language I speak and the questions that I ask about the world are very anthropological. In the course of their training, all academics get by necessity indoctrinated in the axioms and terminology of their discipline. By that token, I am at most ease talking to other anthropologists: we share the same theoretical and methodological base that enables a meaningful qualitative argument (see, anthropologists don't really use regression analysis or p-values to prove their points).

At the same time, I have done more than that. I have taken courses and research method seminars in History, Political Science, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Psychosocial Studies, Art History, Linguistics, Studies of Religions, and even Cross-Cultural Management and Quantitative Methods. Each time I sincerely and earnestly went "local" and, by a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, assumed their epistemological claims to be true. The expected and oft achieved result was of the kind that Evans-Pritchard got after living with the Azande and studying their belief system: it all makes sense from within the system. Up to a point, however. The leap of faith, the effort to acknowledge what you see (e.g., another academic discipline) for what it is, is a conscious effort to suspend your judgement just for a while. Eventually, however, the Doubt - one of the great propelling forces of Science - creeps in. Warts, patches and chinks in the armour come to light. You still see the merits and strong points, but not with the starry-eyed naïveté of a full-on convert.

 

To illustrate the point I'm trying to drive home here, I often recur to the tale of an elephant and the six blind men of Hindustan. When they came across the animal one sunny day, they all tried to figure out what it was like by touching it. Each one assumed that it was like the part that he touched. Each one was, effectively, neither completely right, nor completely wrong: knowing well one part of the beast, but not really its ontological entirety. That is how the various branches of science operate: they know a lot about one particular part or aspect they chose to focus on, but next to none about other parts and aspects. They often do not even suspect that the elephant actually exists and is bigger than any of its constituent parts.

I feel like my blindfold has fallen a bit. I don't claim to know everything about the elephant, but at least I know that what I know is far from perfect. I also have had glimpses of the whole picture. In broader terms of the philosophy of science (shame it is not even part of most PhD courses!), this elephant metaphor is situated at a very particular place in the history of the Western scientific project.

The way I see the "academic condition" in our time is that we have moved along the (modified) Fichtean triad from the Cartesian Thesis: "what happens if we assess reality only with oursenses?", to the Modernist Analysis, where we have classified the world into multitudes of competing taxonomies consisting of neat(ish) and handy dichotomies, and now finally to the Post-Modernist Critique, where it has dawned on (some of) us that the taxonomies and dichotomies are but imperfect mental tools, and are not reality. At this point, however, science has faltered for a while: the Post-Modernist debate has largely degraded into the increasingly abstruse debates that mostly resemble spectacularly prolific projectile verbal vomiting. There are still departments and faculties organised alongside Modernist divisions, and also those organised around various brands of Post-Modern  critique. All of them keep getting increasingly specialised (the phenomenon known as academic tribalisation) getting sort of hyphenated identities: the Anthropology of Tourism, Environmental History, the Studies of Yoga and Meditation, let alone the Critical Studies of Medieval Korean Pottery. (Ok, just taking the piss with the last one here, by no means to look down on the ever-rising professional finesse of the actual sub-disciplines). Essentially, however, instead of trying to assemble a holistic picture of the elephant, we got on with specialising in the ever smaller bits of it, while a vociferous minority of Post-Modernists, Post-Colonialists, Literary Criticists, Feminists and such, keep decrying all research results, past and present, in increasingly abstract terms. The critical bunch analyse the socks off the Modernist analysis, while the adepts of the latter, in their turn, analyse the output of the former. This way we're not getting anywhere remotely close  to the final destination of the Fichtean triad, the Synthesis, where the concerned parties would come to understand the entirety of the methaphorical elephant. Diagnosis: analysis paralysis. I won't even go on with any graphic allusive metaphors to the overflow of the cognate 'anal' in this discourse. In psychiatry, however, this level of hyper-reflexivity - thinking, then thinking about thinking, then thinking about thinking about thinking, etc. ad nauseam - is commonly exhibited in schizophrenia. I'm saying no more.

 
Back to my academic affiliation and  sense of disciplinary belonging. Academically, I'm an anthropologically grounded generalist, a Jack of many trades, a master of a couple. I humbly see myself as a kind of, so to speak, God's vessel for the good of the Synthesis stage in science. I'm quite certain that there are others like me out there, probably, increasingly so. However, I'm yet to meet one.  

That is the case also because, to make my eclectic professional stance even more interesting, bureaucratically, I'm affiliated not with the Department of Anthropology but with the only supposedly interdisciplinary centre in my very non-interdisciplinary university. The centre too, in fact, has turned out to be anything but. I have chaired a panel and then presented a paper at what was supposed to be interdisciplinary conferences but they turned out to be 'this-and-that-disciplinary' rather than anything coherent theoretically or methodologically. Last few years, I have often felt like a motherless child, having to find my own course in the vast ocean of science. I do have a sense of purpose and direction, but it still does feel like a very lonely journey. 

But there's still hope. Coincidentally, while writing this piece, I decided to do what I always recommend my students: google around.  And this is what I've come across:  King's Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre KISS DTC. I shall try my luck there and tell you about the outcome.

Resistances and such

In Cultural Studies (a well-meaning Marxian political project that is not really a science, however), resistance has been spotted everywhere: any symbol or purported meaning can be exegisised as such. I too, sometimes try to play Devil's advocate too trying to see cop-outs that people attempt at least as a coping strategy: like people glued to their smartphones might be trying to create a sense of connection and intimacy in the social environment that alienates them from each other. However, I still find this strain of glorifying "resistance" rather flimsy. This kind of "resistance" reminds me of that scene in Precious where the protagonist is imagining herself a star singer on a stage while her stepfather is raping her again. We are getting screwed over big time, the sooner we realise it, the sooner you can do something meaningful about it. Foucalt was right, a shift in knowledge begets a shift in power relationship.

Holistic understanding and mythical thinking.

Growing up, I read the fairy tales of practically all peoples of the world: from Persian, Chinese and Russian, to Madagascan, Georgian and Aboriginal. It wasn't, however, before decades of life experience, meditational and yogic practice and, finally, an encounter with structural anthropology and depth psychoanalysis, that the actual meaning of fairytale metaphors has finally dawned on me. If Jesus Christ had to use similes to explain the intangible structures of reality, so should social sciences, instead of confusing themselves and everyone around with the sky-high castles of educated guesswork and terminology.

Supermarket bread and mass control

Human earthlings are mad: they go crazy about the calorific value of their food and joust over vegan suitable or non-suitable snacks but no one seems to wonder if "mono- and  di-acetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerdies of fatty acids" is something you need your bread to contain (and end up in your system). Why do "esters of synthetic fats with a composition similar to partially digested natural fat esterified with other natural acids" need to be used to make something that comes out just fine when simply made from only flour, water, and salt? I have googled around and sent a couple of emails and here's what I have seen/read.

Modern supermarkets flood their food packaging with excessive, overwhelming data on the amount of calories in a slice, the presence or absence of celery, and other superfluous trivia, while the full ingredient lists are deviously omitted. I had to beg Marks & Spensers' Nutrition department do divulge any information on what they actually put in their French baguette. Their (probably unpaid) intern responsible for communicating with pesky inquirers shared with me that "we don’t have a list of ingredients for categories of products available in a format I can share via email". How very smart for a major supermarket chain not to have one in 2015! Their colourful website, once again plastered with tangential factoids and the word "healthy" in every other sentence, suspiciously skirts around the most important issue: what is the food actually made of?

One of my most vivid memories of my trip to Croatia was seeing full lists of ingredients on every price label in the bakeries. Their content was such that I stopped buying bread after that. In the UK, however, no such info can be found. The Vegan Society have somehow managed to procure a list of ingredients on Lidl's house-brand baked goods, something Lidl do not publish on their own website nor displays in their shops. Instead, Lidl has opted for an Instagram-style display of heavily photoshopped pictures as well as typical fancier-than-PowerPoint marketing-bullshit and essentially irrelevant number juggling. Chocolate twists barely containing any actual chocolate aside, their produce is abound with such insalubrious things as cysteine (an amino-acid derived from human hair), palm oil and diphosphates. At the same time, highlighted in bold text, no doubt to make them out to be the culprits, are things like wheat, rye, milk, eggs, and sesame. The Orwellian Newspeak mission is accomplished: war is peace and peace is war! Tetrasodium diphosphate is good, wheat is bad!

From these little observation, two things become clear.

Firstly, quantitative data is the latter-day language of power, used to manufacture wilful, even enthusiastic ("Let's all lose weight by going low-carb!") consent across large swathes of the populace. Instead of arbitrarily drawn quotes from the Holy Writ to prove just about anything under the sun, now we have the highly elevated art of number-juggling, the so-called "hard figures" to the very same end.

Secondly, this kind of mass control works because the education system does not equip the majority of people with  knowledge necessary to navigate successfully through life, just with enough indoctrination to 'believe in science'. Not having basic understanding of chemistry and biology, because you chose Media Studies and PhE for your A-levels, will inevitably result in a lifetime of feeding on the worst in biochemical engineering, never knowing where your illnesses come from. The "freedom to choose" turns out to be the worst form of slavery, that very "iron cage" that repulsed Max Weber so much.

Universals and particulars in anthropology

Anthropology has had a difficult relationship with acknowledging human universals. The contradiction is that the claim that all cultures are particular and all universals are social constructs particular to the culture in question logically leads to a conclusion that humans share noting in common.

Dealing exclusively with the micro-level of cultural particulars is well known to result in culturalism and villagism, known malaises amongst anthropologists. However, those who work with the macro-levels, like political scientists and IR people, tend to zoom out of even such staples as ethnicity, gender and even political economy. But what if all of them are correct, but not completely? Like those blind men touching the elephant, they all make correct guesses but miss the entirety of the picture. This article (albeit I do have some beef with it) offers a handy way of thinking about what we have been discussing here: (Bloch's Blob)

Traditional anthropology is holistic only to a limited degree on the micro-level, looking at the social context of the tail, not just the tail itself and also somewhat aware of the hind legs (say, political economy). The rest of the elephant and the biology of the tail escapes the view. What would really come in handy, is an awareness of that fact and participant objectivation Bourdieu-style, the deconstruction of the Homo academicus. But then again, that would take another level of self-reflexivity and painful soul-searching. It is a huge individual endeavour and not everyone would be willing to put themselves through that...

Science boffins to philosopher kings: is the rule of science a good thing?

Lack of methodologies for collecting empirical data and  the Second Danger of Unreflexive Scientific Observation (over-intellectualising) keep plaguing many branches of social sciences. When you're not required to find any evidence to back up your claim, yet feel entitled to professing opinions by the sheer virtue of your fancy education, things can go really wrong. Reading a recently published article (Maciej Pletnia 2014, Asian Identity: Regional Integration and Collective Memory of the Pacific War in Contemporary Japanese Society) on a topic very close to my heart reminded me of that part of War and Peace (Volume IV, Part Two, VII), where Andrei Bolkonsky reminisces about the haughty conviction of Austrian generals in the Battle of Austerlitz that things in reality would go exactly the way they, highly learned and esteemed generals, believe they should happen: "Die erste Kolonne marschiert... Die zweite Kolonne marschiert..." Things, of course, did not pan out according to someone's educated guess, and a humiliating defeat ensued. 

So is, sadly, the case with many branches of social sciences, where arm-chair ponitification reigns supreme, with no signs of abating. It could be simply annoying, if ignorable, should the ideas produced in that manner remain safely within the Ivory Tower. Unfortunately, the recent surge of technocrats assuming top government positions (repeatedly exalted by the Economist's editorial board) indicates that we are in for some years of painful rule by "philosopher-kings", which both Plato and empirical research warned against.

 

Two variables are not reality: private prisons vs. universities

The US apparently boasts the most extensive prison system with the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. A fair share of the prisons are private companies running for and actually making profit, so in terms of market efficiency they are probably world's best. SCORE! Let's all go private! (in my best Eric Cartman's voice) That would however ignore that such a system is fed by the judicial systems where too many people are incarcerated long-term for minor felonies, that private prisons are allowed to select "low-cost" inmates and have access to funding, the slavery-like labour exploitation (re. the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution), the poor staff training and low wages, the lack of oversight and accountability, the inhumane living conditions due to cost-saving, etc., etc.

This is merely to illustrate the point that describing reality in terms of two variables, i.e., no state funding = high success of universities (most cited research papers + high rankings), is a formal logical fallacy. That and treating social and environmental costs as "externalities" are exactly the kind of destructive pseudo-scientific thinking that Economics and Political Science students are indoctrinated in, and which is, unfortunately, is presently the language of power and self-proclaimed "science".

#GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople

Sad truth for you, earthlings

All human social  systems only produce waste and difference. That's it.

10 worst things science has unleashed on us

I totally see where the recent wave of religion-bashing is coming from: it's a reaction of intellectuals and those aligned with them to the recent surge of the swivel-eyed religious fundamentalist spectrum of varying degrees of militancy in all corners of the world. However, the anti-religionist argument itself is none better than the religious fundamentalism: the only actual difference is that instead of invoking a paternal projection, commonly marketed as "God", the militant atheists invoke idolised science, the infallible source of rational truth, to justify their views and actions. It could be forgiven to laymen, whose naive idea of science  is of clever egg-heads shoving spadefuls of the ultimate Truth to the furnace of progress and development.  Disturbingly, however, the same kind of unreflexive, self-congratulatory drivel is peddled by professional academics cum media-enhanced prophets like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Despite or, perhaps even, because of their wide public acclaim, this is just yet another proof that natural scientists should be banned from making any statements about humanity, religion and society and stick to what they were trained to do in the first place: sticking bits of DNA up the microbes' asses, overinterpreting MRI scans, or gazing into starry skies. Thank God (sic!), their likes rarely get to any decision-making positions, but when they do, we are never too far away from carnage and rampage - Yugoslavia's genocide-mongering Biljana Plavšić, a widely published full professor of biology who incited the massacre of Bosnians using her political power and scientific reasoning, being the latest example. Science made into a god is none more rational, benign or reliable for designing social policies than any religion.

The common argument brought forward by the scientism camp is a list of all wrong-doings incurred upon humanity by religion: the Crusades to the Inquisition to witch-hunts. There's no denying, that religion did serve as justification and a rallying cry for those. For the sake of balance, however,  let's look at what the Age of Reason with its deification of Science has brought us:

1. ethnic cleansing, 
2. psychiatry, 
3. Ayn Rand, 
4. chemical weapons, 
5. genetically modified organisms, 
6. the nuclear bomb, 
7. scientific racism, 
8. colonialism, 
9. two world wars, 
10. environmental destruction...

Let us also not forget that the peace-loving and benevolent regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the Kim family were staunchly atheist.

As it usually goes, both sides of the argument fight over a false dilemma. The human nature is the problem, not religion or science.