Science has come to have a certain authority in the popular mind as a source of reliable facts and certainty, and as an unfailing guide – even the only one - to truth. According to some commentators, scientists have become the priesthood of a new religion which holds science and scientific truths to be sacred and beyond criticism – a role rejected by many honest scientists. I would like to devote this post to a critical reflection on the claims for authority, objectivity and truth made on behalf of science.
It might be helpful to begin by clearing up a number of misconceptions about science.
THREE MEANINGS OF ‘SCIENCE’
Let us start with the meaning of the word ‘science’ itself. It is used to refer to three distinct sets of ideas:
a) bodies of knowledge (e.g., Newton’s laws of motion) – I shall call this SBK.
b) methods of enquiry (asking questions, observing or collecting objects and classifying them, designing experiments and instruments, guessing or constructing hypotheses, performing measurements and calculations, judging error, testing for reliability, predicting, etc) – call this SME
c) social practices (science is whatever scientists do as scientists – apply scientific knowledge developed by others, share data, hold seminars and conferences, judge their colleagues’ work, seek funding for their projects, try and convince other people of the value of what they do, publish results, settle arguments between themselves, sometimes fudge or conceal or steal data, etc.). – call this SSP.
It is often helpful to keep these distinctions in mind to avoid confusion.
For instance, it is often asked whether science is in some sense culturally neutral. After all (it is claimed), Newton’s laws of motion are not culture-specific; they operate equally everywhere, in all cultures. It isn’t as if they are especially effective in England, and less so in Xian, China or Mobile, Alabama; nor is it the case that Newton’s laws began to work only in the 17th century when Newton formulated them. This suggests that science is universal and culturally neutral, not specific to time or place or culture.
There is a sense in which science is universal, but there is also a sense in which it is bound to a specific historical and cultural context. As always, one must be very careful when making statements for which one is claiming universal validity. Let’s use this three-fold distinction to unpack this claim.
a) As a body of knowledge, Newton’s laws are a set of claims about the behaviour of bodies acting under the influence of certain forces, and in certain conditions. Newton’s laws of motion are not an accurate picture of the world at the macrocosmic level – i.e., for astronomical or cosmological bodies like stars or planets or galaxies. Nor are they of much use at microcosmic levels of matter – i.e., at molecular, atomic or subatomic levels. They are a pretty good description of the behaviour of bodies in the middle range between these extremes. The laws are therefore valid over time and space but for a restricted range of phenomena.
b) Strictly speaking, the laws of Newton do not constitute a method of enquiry. However, they offer very powerful ways of explaining many phenomena in the middle range. It may be more useful to ask what method of enquiry led Newton to those laws. To the extent that those methods were historically contingent, this aspect of Newton's laws are not universal.
c) Newton’s laws do not constitute a set of social practices. On the other hand, it is useful to ask how scientists use the laws, or why scientists do not divide themselves into Newtonians and Einsteinians and Bohrians in seeking to explain natural phenomena (as economists have often been doing between Keynesians and Monetarists – to mention just two camps - in explaining economic phenomena!). Do scientists regard Newton’s laws as inviolable truths or limited but compelling generalizations? Do scientists generally concern themselves with truth, or only with the most convincing explanation which explains the widest range of phenomena with the fewest theoretical concepts? The same scientists who agree among themselves about Newton’s laws (and about so much else of their knowledge), disagree more or less over a wide range of questions in which the laws are applicable, such as whether the missile shield is a reliable and effective form of defence, or whether sending out weapons into space is a good idea.
It should be clear that something as “solidly” uncontroversial as Newton’s laws of motion are reliable and predictable only over a range of phenomena where they are applicable. Scientists themselves do not claim more for these laws (or any other laws) than this.
Bauer’s ‘Ethics in Science’ is particularly helpful in sorting out what is reliable in what passes for scientific knowledge, and why. The filter described in this article is a corrective for the misleading exaggerations about science that one often encounters in the popular media, and in the essays of students whose only encounter with science has been from a textbook (this is not to be harsh on students, but to understand the source of their misconceptions).
THE VALUE-NEUTRALITY OF SCIENCE
The other great misconception about science is that it is removed from the realm of values, and that it is in this sense objective. This debate in The Ecologist is an argument between a believer in the value- neutrality of science (Wolpert) and an environmentalist critic of the idea of value-neutrality in science (Goldsmith). Although the arguments range widely over a number of issues, Wolpert’s claims to the neutrality of scientific knowledge seem to be based on several arguments.
a) Scientific knowledge is neutral because it consists of what he, along with other scientists, regards as well-established ‘facts’ – “If we are not at the centre of the universe, and genes are responsible for determining some of our behaviour, [or that “…we are made of cells or that the heart pumps blood or that DNA is the genetic material”] that is the way the world is - it is neither good nor bad.”
b) The problems that Goldsmith says are created by science and technology are created not by scientific knowledge (SBK in our distinction), but by its application by “large and rich industrial companies” (SSP). Wolpert seems to attribute a certain moral purity to scientists when they are engaged in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, as opposed to the application of that knowledge.
c) The moral values of scientists have no influence on his/her scientific ideas, and the scientists’ personal morality should not influence the application of their work.
Notice that there is a confusion here between different sorts of values: moral and aesthetic values, and values which determine the relative priority or importance between different courses of action. When scientists decide that they wish to focus on certain aspects of a problem rather on others, do certain kinds of research rather than certain others, they are making a judgment of priority. Polanyi gives examples from his own scientific career of decisions he made that emanated from moral concerns about the consequences of certain government actions. Scientists and mathematicians are often concerned about the aesthetic aspects (e.g., elegance and beauty) of their work. So the claim that scientists are value-neutral when it comes to science is one which is valid only in some fairly restricted senses, e.g., when “science” is used in the sense of SBK, understood as a body of facts. But scientists are not neutral in the sense of how these facts are established, or what standards of acceptability scientists agree to work with i.e., in the sense of SME or SSP.
This may also be the appropriate place to address the distinction made by some between the "text" and the "context" of science on the way to suggesting that they are independent. Facts within the context of science (SSP in my terminology) are supposed to have little influence on the text of science (SBK or SME). For instance, it is claimed that the occasional dishonesty of individual scientists, or the fact they work on defence or commercial projects (SSP), does not affect the knowledge create by their research (SBK). It is probably true to say that scientific knowledge as a set of claims about the natural world (SBK) is independent of the uses to which it is deployed (SSP). But this is not the same as claiming that claims about the workings of the natural world are indpendent of how (SME) and in what context (SSP) such claims are established. It should not be difficult to acknowledge the pressures that are created on scientists nowadays by their almost universal dependence on corporate or government funding, and by the association of much scientific work with the prestige and competitiveness of corporations and of nations (all aspects of SSP). Nor should it be difficult to see how such pressures can influence the questions that are raised by scientists (SBK), the methods (SME) that they adopt in addressing them, and through them, the content and reliability of scientific knowledge itself (SBK).
THE MYTH OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
The title of this section forms part of the title of a book by Bauer titled Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method in which he undermines the notion that science is about objective truth (‘facts’), sought according to some standard procedure known as the scientific method. The basis of his claim can be clearly seen in the filter model that he develops.
The so-called scientific method is supposed to consist of a cycle of observation =>hypotheses formation =>testing of hypotheses => verification or falsification => prediction => testing the prediction => further observations. But this assumes that scientists know in advance what to observe, whereas the observations themselves pre-suppose a theory. A theory in turn embodies a set of perceptions – of patterns in data, or of similarities or analogies with more familiar phenomena, or a model constructed by selecting some particular features of a phenomenon. Secondly, if a prediction generated by a hypothesis is not confirmed, it is far from certain whether it is the hypothesis that should be rejected. An error could have occurred in the measurement, or in the interpretations of the observation, or in the instruments used for conducting the observation or experiment. So the process of observation, or of interpreting the results of an experiment, unavoidably relies on subjective elements of judgement and perception (seeing something as one thing and not another – as a ‘duck’ instead of as a ‘rabbit’).
The history of science shows that scientific understandings change when new and better explanations are found. This suggests that scientific theories are very rarely final and conclusive, but can be improved. The criteria for judging theories are given in reading 1. Notice that none of the criteria suggests that scientific theories need be true. Even a flawed theory can successfully predict phenomena, so that successful prediction of a limited range of phenomena does not necessarily imply that the theory is true. However, if a theory is consistent with a large number of known facts, and can successfully predict a wide range of events, scientists usually tend to regard the theory as “true”, but what that means is that the case for accepting it over other theories is very compelling. It does not mean that the search for a better theory is over, particularly if observations emerge later which cannot be explained by the current theory.
PARADIGMS OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
The absence of any fixed method in scientific work led Thomas Kuhn to propose, in his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the idea that most scientists work within a particular framework of ideas which suggest ways of framing a problem, methods of dealing with it, and standards for acceptable theories. This framework is itself the paradigm, and the history of scientific ideas shows that paradigms change in response to various changes in the intellectual climate. A change in paradigm is also brought about by a radical (but not necessarily sudden) change in perceptions.
An example of a paradigm change is the replacement of the geocentric paradigm (with the earth as the center of the planetary system) with the heliocentric one (the sun as the center). The current view of the universe of the universe has long abandoned even the heliocentric view when other planetary systems were discovered, and indeed other sections of the universe. The universe is currently regarded by most astronomers as expanding from the moment of its origin in the Big Bang, but this superseded a “steady-state” view of the universe which was prevalent till the 1960’s.
Another example of paradigm change is the replacement of creationist theories of the origins of life by the evolutionary perspective originated by Charles Darwin, and developed and systematized by Huxley, Mendel, Maynard-Smith, Dawkins and others.
It would be a mistake to regard paradigms as relevant only to the natural sciences. Marxism provided a powerful paradigm to historians and economists and other social scientists for a long time, and still continues to do so. The example of Marxism shows that paradigms themselves are far from fixed.
Some would say that there are now several very large change in paradigms occurring with
• the new sciences of chaos, which study random behaviour in systems which were thought to be deterministic (e.g., the effect of predator-prey interactions in populations of animals, changes in weather patterns, etc.);
• the deeper understanding of the physics and chemistry of the brain influencing ideas about consciousness;
• ideas from mathematics and computer science being applied to the study of life and intelligence.
These new directions in science are creating a new awareness of nature and of ourselves as conscious beings within it. For further information, see the Serendip and Calresco websites among many others. For further discussion of Kuhn, start with the excellent introduction to philosophy of science by A F Chalmers titled What is this thing called Science?
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
Finally, a word about Science in the sense of SSP and SME. There are many critics who claim that it has become the new religion. Scientists and experts are the new priesthood, enjoying the power that previous priesthoods enjoyed. The large financial investment that much scientific work now requires has made scientists dependent on governments and private corporations which have an interest in the outcome of scientific research for reasons of profit or power. This poses a problem in democratic societies, since it puts public policies regarding the applications of scientific knowledge outside the range of open scrutiny by the ordinary citizen who will be affected by such public policies. This problem has been discussed in Bauer’s essay cited earlier.
This problem becomes particularly acute when the experts themselves do not agree, or when there are large uncertainties in their predictions, or when the experts themselves (either openly or secretly) represent one side or another in a debate, and therefore cannot be relied upon to be independent. This has recently attained a great deal of prominence in various controversies about global warming, about the effects of human activities on the environment, about the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment, about the causes of “Mad Cow Disease” and Aids. What all of these issues have in common is the uncertain extent of harm which is expected to flow as a consequence of certain kinds of scientific policies. What some have proposed is a Precautionary Principle which requires scientists and governments to take action to prevent potential harm even before the full extent of the harm can be determined accurately. Among the questions which this principle raises are:
• How certain do we need to be about the possible harm before we take preventive action?
• How much harm would be unacceptable?
• How long should we wait before conclusive evidence of harm emerges?
In his essay Testart (Download file) makes a plea for supplementing expert knowledge with citizen’s perceptions. The expert’s response to this would be to claim that this would effectively put a stop to any scientific endeavour, since popular perceptions of harm would be treated as evidence of potential harm. On the other hand, the “precautionists” like Testart would claim that the absence of evidence of harm is not evidence of absence of harm.
This controversy is not easy to resolve, but it is clear to me at least that what is an acceptable degree of harm is not a decision that can be left to scientists alone. Paradoxically, the answer to this uncertainty is not a turning away from science, as some scientists who are against the precautionary principle claim, but more careful science that is frequently debated by a scientifically educated and politically aware public.
CONCLUSION
This discussion has suggested that the common view of science as an infallible guide to certainty and truth, and the view of scientists as value-neutral, impartial seekers after truth, are both mistaken. However, I have also tried to reinforce the need for open and critical debate within a rational community about all scientific matters, in order that science should retain its compelling power as a guide to understanding the natural world and our place in it.
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