Letters

From the August/September 1994 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

There are alternatives to privatization. Change the FAA's salary structure, for example, to reflect cost-of-living adjustments for different regions and job descriptions. Then the busiest airports in the most expensive cities would offer the highest salaries and attract better-qualified controllers. Waive the extensive government purchasing regulations for new capital equipment. Right now, the technology is available and, presumably, the money is there, but new radars and computers aren't being installed because of bureaucratic red tape.

Edward M. Teyssier
La Jolla, CA

Mr. Poole replies: Messrs. McKay and Teyssier repeat all the arguments for "reform" of the FAA that have been proposed over and over for the past 20 years: stop abusing the Trust Fund, modernize controller compensation, reform procurement regulations, etc. No serious reform in any of these areas has been carried out, which is why a near-consensus has now developed that structural reform is the only workable approach. The basic problem is Congress, which insists on manipulating the Trust Fund to mask the size of the budget deficit and simply adding new layers to personnel and procurement regulations rather than abolishing them.

The record of corporatization overseas speaks for itself. Freeing an ATC enterprise from government "oversight" and funding, and establishing a direct relationship between services provided to users and revenue received by the enterprise, are the keys to real reform. Airways Corp. of New Zealand has modernized that country's ATC system while reducing annual operating costs by one-third (between 1988 and 1993).

Readers Kaip and King would prefer more-radical reforms, and so would I. My article presented the maximum extent of reform that I judge (just barely) possible to achieve at this point, after 17 years of work in this area. If we can finally liberate the ATC system from the clutches of Congress, making it independent and totally user-funded, it will be a huge accomplishment. To have any hope of moving toward either cockpit-oriented ATC technology or separately owned ATC facilities, a necessary precondition is getting ATC out of the FAA, out of the federal budget process, and into a corporation controlled by its users.

Science Fictions?

In his review of Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science ("Not-So-Popular Science," May), Lee Dembart quotes author Alan Cromer: "Scientific thinking didn't--and couldn't--evolve from the prophetic tradition of Judaism and Christianity." Cromer evidently knows nothing of the work of the physicists Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki. Duhem showed that the development of science in the Middle Ages from its Greek beginnings was nourished crucially by Judeo-Christian belief, that the motivation to do the arduous labor of scientific discovery depended on the faith that the world was orderly because it was the orderly work of a Creator and on the belief that we had the power to understand the world because we were made by the same Creator. Duhem's work is most easily read through Jaki's books: The Road of Science and the Ways to God (1978) and Science and Creation (1974).

Dembart states: "We certainly can hold up Euclid's geometry as the model for all knowledge: Start with premises about which no one can disagree, and then, using logic alone, prove theorems that are as certain as anything we know." That's not the way most science works, simply because there are usually no rock-solid foundations to start with. Reason isn't so simple. One must build up a structure of knowledge through a method of coherence. As Jean Piaget shows in The Construction of Reality in the Child (1954), that's what each of us did to attain ordinary knowledge when we were babies.

Dick Hazelett
Colchester, VT

Lee Dembart seems to suggest that our only epistemological alternatives are a subjective universe in which all truth is private and local, and an "objective" cosmos in which "we can learn about the world, but we are essentially passive observers of it." Both propositions are untrue. Independent reality exists; the world is not a lucid dream. But human beings are not passive, objective observers; we are entangled in our universe and cannot avoid constantly changing it. Dembart asks whether the world is discovered or invented. The obvious, simple answer is: both.

Does Dembart honestly believe that there exists no socially constructed intersubjective zone between independent truth and private belief? He gives that impression when he sneers at the idea of "the social construction of reality." Does Dembart really think that the rhetoric of objective science is never a cover for prejudiced scientism, that one cannot question the scientist's pose of impassioned neutrality without giving up the ideal of the impassioned, neutral scientist?

It is possible, I suppose, that Dembart simply thinks that such critiques of human fallibility are in fact assaults on independent truth itself. If so, he is familiar with only a slender portion of the literature he is criticizing. Yes, a lot of "postmodern" thought is airy nonsense, and much of it fails on its own terms. That is no excuse for ignoring the real issues it raises.

Jesse Walker
Port Townsend, WA

Mr. Dembart replies: Dick Hazelett makes two points: First he says religious thinking crucially nourished the development of science in the Middle Ages. This is rather an odd claim, I think, as there wasn't very much science done during the Middle Ages, a period also known--with good reason--as the Dark Ages. Religious thinking was in control, and it stifled science and scientific thought, which didn't get going until the Renaissance.

Mr. Hazelett's second point is that I am wrong to think that science is like geometry. But that is not what I said. In the sentence immediately after the one he quotes, I wrote, "Unfortunately, only geometry is like geometry." I feel an emotional and an aesthetic attraction to the certainty of geometry. It is a model for all knowledge, unattainable in other realms.

I agree with Jesse Walker that we both discover the world and invent it. But the proportion of discovery and invention varies greatly across the spectrum of human endeavor. The social arena may have a good deal of the social construction of reality. The hard sciences do not.

As I write these words, I am looking out my window at the Golden Gate Bridge. Whether that bridge stands up or falls down has nothing to do with the race, gender, class, or sexual orientation of the designer. It has only to do with the laws of physics and the skill of engineers and builders in complying with them. Does Mr. Walker think otherwise?

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