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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 11. 22 July 1970

Implicit Assumptions

Implicit Assumptions

No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others, whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not. And this influence is not confined to his explicit message; it is the more powerful and the more insidious because much of it is transmitted implicitly, as a hidden persuader, and the recipient absorbs it unawares. Surely physics is an ethically neutral science? Yet Einstein rejected the trend in modern physics to replace causality by statistics with his famous dictum: "I refuse to believe that God plays dice with the world". He was more honest than other physicists in admitting his metaphysical bias; and it is precisely this metaphysical bias, implied in a scientific hypothesis, which exerts its unconscious influence on others. The Roman Church was ill advised when she opposed Galileo and Darwin, and from a rational point of view was lagging behind the times; but intuitively she was ahead of the times in realising the impact which the new cosmology and the theory of evolution was to have on man's image of himself and his place in the universe.

Wolfgang Kohler, one of the greatest psychologists of our time, searched all his life for "the place of value in a world of facts" the title of the book in which he summed up his personal philosophy. But there is no need to search for such a place because the values are diffused through all the strata of the various sciences, as the invisible bubbles of air are diffused in the waters of a lake, and we are the fish who breathe them in all the time through the gills of intuition. Our education establishment, from the departments of physics through biology and genetics, up to the behavioural and social sciences, willy nilly imparts to the students a Weltanschauung, a system of values wrapped up in a package of facts. But the choice and shape of the package is determined by its invisible content; or, to change the metaphor, our implicit values provide the non-Euclidian curvature, the subtle distortions of the world of facts.

Now when I use the term "our educational establishment", you may object that there is no such thing. I very country, every university and even facult) therein has of course its individual character, its personal face or facelessness. Nevertheless, taking diversity for granted, and exceptions for granted, there exist certain common deonominators which determine the cultural climate and the metaphysical bias imparted to hopeful students practically everywhere in the non-totalitarian sector of the world, from California to the East Coast, from London to Berlin, Bombay and Tokyo. That climate is impossible to define without oversimplification, so I shall oversimplify deliberately and say that it is dominated by three Rs.