Dragnet Ecology—“Just the Facts, Ma'am”: The Privilege of Science in a Postmodern World

Abstract

When Dragnet protagonist Joe Friday investigates a crime, there is almost always someone “who done it,” and usually we know who it is in the first few minutes of the episode. In one episode concerning a retired actress who falls victim to a confidence trick, Sergeant Friday sweeps aside the irrelevant circumstantial details offered by the actress and solves the puzzle with characteristic ease. Friday's sidekick, Bill Gannon, responds to a different challenge and touchingly asks for the faded actress's autograph. “I didn't know you collected autographs,” says Joe, as they leave the scene. “I don't,” replies Bill. Dragnet is a modern version of a morality play, myths and all, the prevailing myth being that it may take time to apprehend the suspect, but eventually “just the facts” will inexorably solve the crime. But isn't Bill Gannon essential to this process? Many scientists share Joe Friday's mythic goal. In the simple world of Sergeant Friday, there is a single true answer; in the scientific equivalent, the scientist believes that there is a single truth, and attempts to find it. Much scientific activity uses simple models, and thus amounts to no more than calibration. But as our colleague John Norman in the Department of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin points out, “I can do a lot with those calibrations” (and he can, too), so we must not underestimate the importance of focusing situations until they become simple. Successfully casting a system as simple results in consistent and singular answers as well as reliable predictions. However, from that consistency it does not follow that the singularity of answers arises from their being expressions of singular truths. It could easily be that the consistency results from the constraints we scientists impose on the system in order to make it simple. Furthermore, the scientist has no way to distinguish between singular truth and constraint when the data are applied to a simple model, no matter how meticulous the collection of those data. Much as Dragnet has a mythic quality, so does science that seeks out the single quantified truth. Such science would remain mythic, even in the extremely unlikely event that the simple model could indeed reflect the reality fully, for the argument about truth turns not directly on data per se, but on the belief that the perception of data yields truth. There can be no such thing as an observer-free observation (Tainter and Lucas 1983).