Science is all the rage at the moment. The Covid-19 pandemic has given us a unique window into how scientists carry out research into the basic mechanisms of disease; how scientific data are translated (with varying degrees of success) into public health guidelines; and the rapid deployment of science and industry to develop lifesaving treatments and vaccines.
Believe science has become a comforting social media slogan amid the past year’s chaos, but this platitude has an undertone that runs contrary to the true spirit of scientific inquiry. All too often believe science means obey authority and is used as a way to shut down debate. Science is simply assumed to reign supreme.
Have our educators failed us by telling a simplistic story about a complex endeavor? The history and philosophy of science continue to be rarely taught to scientists, even at the graduate level, even though the philosophy that undergirds the scientific enterprise is truly illuminating, and could help both scientists and the general public better grasp the discipline.
What Is the Scientific Method?
As science popularizers typically describe it, the scientific method involves observing the world around us, formulating hypotheses to explain our observations and testing those hypotheses by experiment. But this simple formula has a long and complex history.
The beginnings of this concept can be traced to Aristotle in the fourth century BCE. Unlike his mentor Plato, Aristotle believed that the universal principles, or forms, of nature were best understood through a careful investigation of the natural world. He was the first thinker to write extensively about biology, and his students’ many sketches of local animal life inspired his theories of animal classification and development in On the Generation of Animals. In his Physics, Aristotle outlines his four-part theory of causation. Take a wooden table, for example: its material cause is the wood of which it is composed, its efficient cause the carpenter who crafted it, its formal cause is the particular shape that makes it a table rather than something else and its final cause the purpose for which it was created.
Despite his passion for empirical observation, Aristotle was committed to deductive logic as the ultimate means of acquiring knowledge. By flawlessly reasoning from universally accepted premises to conclusions, we can guarantee certainty, he argues. But Aristotle’s method is not equipped to investigate the fundamental premises themselves.
It would be many centuries before Francis Bacon laid down a firmer grounding for the scientific method. New technical instruments had begun to give people the ability to peer deeper and farther into nature and Bacon was eager to explore the wealth of experimental evidence they could provide. Finding Aristotle’s syllogistic method inadequate to describe the complexity of the natural world, Bacon undertook his “great renewal,” a grand project to endow the sciences with a new, more rigorous methodology. Bacon’s 1620 work the New Organon, which was designed as an overhaul of Aristotle’s eponymous text on logic, is widely considered to provide the first systematic description of a scientific method. Bacon writes:
There are, and can be, only two ways to investigate and discover truth. The one leaps from sense and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles and their settled truth, determines and discovers intermediate axioms; this is the current way. The other elicits axioms from sense and particulars, rising in a gradual and unbroken ascent to arrive at last at the most general axioms; this is the true way, but it has not been tried.
Bacon’s proposed method relies on meticulously curated observations, organized into an elaborate system of tables that would make a modern scientist blush with envy. In one “Table of Presence,” Bacon lists all the phenomena associated with heat, for example, including “the sun’s rays” and “lightning that sets fires,” and then compares them to a “Table of Absence”—closely related phenomena that do not produce heat—containing items such as “the moon’s rays” and “sheet lightning which gives light but does not burn.” A third table correlates how these phenomena increase or decrease with changes in certain other properties. By discarding the redundancies among the various tables, Bacon reasons, the causal principle underlying each phenomenon can be uncovered.
About a century later, David Hume famously threw a wrench into this project. In A Treatise of Human Nature, he notes that, every time we draw an inductive inference, our chain of reasoning conceals the unstated, unproven premise that nature is uniform across space and time: “If Reason determin’d us, it would proceed upon that principle that instances, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those, of which we have had experience, and that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same.”
Hume’s “problem of induction” dogs philosophers to this day. It doesn’t much bother scientists, however. Induction is the firm foundation of the scientific method and researchers carry on making empirical observations and inductive inferences unperturbed by philosophical dilemmas.
In addition to laying out a new method of inductive logic, Bacon warns about the various prejudices—“Idols”— that can impede our ability to obtain reliable, objective knowledge of the world. The “Idols of the Tribe” are those distortions inherent to human consciousness and sensory perception, and the “Idols of the Cave” are those particularities of family, friendships, culture and geography that shape how we perceive the world. The “Idols of the Marketplace” and “Idols of the Theater” are, respectively, those influences that originate in language and in the prevailing dogmas and philosophies of the day. Bacon was a truly prescient thinker. His theory of “Idols” foreshadows the modern concepts of cognitive bias and the other types of systematic error that scientists attempt to banish from their work.
Shifting Paradigms
Over the next few centuries, natural philosophy, which encompassed all scientific endeavor, was gradually transformed into the highly technical and specialized disciplines we recognize today. The twentieth century brought perhaps the most dramatic changes, as government and industry began to invest heavily in scientific research, having recognized its value to public health, technology, national security and prestige.
At the same time, there was heated debate as to how science itself makes progress. Karl Popper believed that the defining quality of a scientific theory is its ability to be falsified: a solid theory should contain hypotheses that can be decisively ruled out by experiment. It is primarily by falsifying erroneous theories, not by accumulating supporting evidence for true ones, that science makes progress. Overall, scientists tend to agree that falsifiability is an important criterion, which is why string theory—considered by some to be more metaphysics than science—has generated so much controversy.
Thomas Kuhn’s theory of how science advances is more radical. Instead of obeying a linear process of verification and falsification, he thought that science as a whole often advanced in unpredictable jumps. In the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn writes that scientists often work productively on the basis of a given paradigm or foundational research model for long stretches of time. Then there is a trickle of contradictory and/or puzzling experimental results. Eventually, these problematic findings grow so numerous that they provoke a crisis in the discipline, which is resolved when a new paradigm is adopted. Competing scientific paradigms are often incommensurable, meaning that their methodologies and languages cannot be directly compared. But, although there are no permanent, objective rules that govern the choice between competing paradigms, Kuhn did not believe that the choice was arbitrary. A scientific paradigm should be simple, internally coherent, compatible with other accepted theories and able to generate new avenues of research and explain a wide range of phenomena.
One such paradigm shift was ushered in with Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin’s theory of descent with modification from a common ancestor, subject to the mechanisms of natural selection, explains the diversity of life in terms of purely physical principles. At a time when the only other explanatory game in town was divine creation, the evolutionary paradigm placed humanity squarely within, rather than above, nature. The story of our place in the universe was completely overturned. The significance of this has been aptly summarized by evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Trouble in Paradise?
As Kuhn points out, most day-to-day science consists of the modest, incremental progress of thousands of scientists, woven into a practical canon of knowledge. Researchers working anywhere in the world should be able to review the published findings of their peers and build upon them: the ability to reproduce experimental results is a cornerstone of the scientific method. Recently, however, there has been growing alarm over a replication crisis, particularly in the biomedical and social sciences.
One high-profile example came to light when pharmaceutical firm Amgen attempted to reproduce the findings of 53 landmark papers in cancer biology—and failed to do so for all but six. This raises serious questions. Are resources being invested in technology and therapeutics on the basis of flawed data? Is this problem endemic to just one corner of scientific research or is it more widespread? A few factors may be playing a role here: flawed research methodology and abuse of statistics, such as p-hacking; the need to publish or perish, which invariably leads to rushed and shoddy research; the gradual drift toward a Big Science in which the majority of scientific R&D is funded by corporations, instead of government. Science is a human institution, limited by the fallibility of its individual human practitioners.
Passionate debate over the proper limits and role of science in our societies will surely continue. But a careful study of the history and philosophy of science could have a salutary effect on the discipline. It would help us better communicate science to the public, suggest fruitful paths forward as we learn from the challenges of the past, and bring this venerable institution back down to earth where it belongs.
29 comments
Nice to see this, I did a presentation last summer for the 400th anniversary of the Novum Organum. http://www.lesser-reset.com
Thank you for this piece. One thing to emphasize is that research into Covid-19 and the vaccines clearly seems to support a realist interpretation of science. Kuhn and Foucault be damned; there does seem to be a real world that scientists are understanding with their theories. How else to explain the discovery and treatment of viruses so effectively? This point should be emphasized in the present context against all those who want to speak of social constructivism, or that science does not find the truth. There are times when sciences gets led astray or is influenced by social values, but this is consistent with a broadly realist view of science that society sorely needs to hear about now.
It’s been years since I last read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” but I definitely do not recall his ever denying the existence of a real world anywhere in his book, nor denying that scientific paradigms always base themselves on real empirical observations even if they interpret them in different ways. Kuhn, as I recall, definitely believed that successive paradigms were progressively more accurate and more adequate in portraying the way the real world “out there” actually works. Kuhn very definitely believed that Copernican astronomy was closer to the full, ultimate truth than Ptolemaic astronomy, that Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection was closer to the full, ultimate truth than either a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation story or Lamarck’s theory of evolution through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and that 20th century physics incorporating relativity and quantum mechanics was closer to the full, ultimate truth than 17th/18th century classical Newtonian physics and its 18th and 19th century modifications. Kuhn, as I recall, definitely felt scientists are progressively getting closer and closer to the ultimate full truth, even if he perhaps doubted that we will ever quite actually fully reach it. I do not recall Kuhn anywhere ever arguing that we ought really to give a benefit of the doubt to the theories say of Trofim Lysenko or of Immanuel Velikovsky, nor saying anywhere that Chinese or African traditional medicine is just as good as conventional 20th century Western scientific medicine. I really do not think that Thomas Kuhn had much (or anything) in common with Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida (and I *DON’T* just mean in the trivial sense of not being a Frenchman).
You should read Kuhn again. He writes that it is remarkable how *infrequently* science theory is married to observations, and he described science as moving away from falsehood but not necessarily closer to truth, since current paradigms might be totally wrong. Whilst he may not have been a literal relativist, his writings gave so much succour to subsequent relativists who referred to themselves as Kuhnian that he, later, had to deny that he himself was “Kuhnian” in their sense. And any arts/humanities/social science academic today who promotes epistemological relativism, queer theory, standpoint epistemology and the like will claim to espouse the writings of Kuhn.
Science is a method. Within its limits, it can be trusted. Scientists are human, and thus should be treated with appropriate skepticism. Greed, vanity, ambition, ideology, etc., often corrupt scientists. Nobody should forget it. The author correctly points out that regard for science often translates to obedience to authority. That needs to stop.
Criticism is a method. Critics are human, too, and thus should be treated with appropriate skepticism as well. Greed, vanity, ambition, ideology, etc., corrupts the critics of science just as much if not moreso. Jealousy and resentment too. Nobody should forget it. The author correctly points out that regard for science often translates to obedience to authority that at least makes sense. Regard for the critics of science often translates to obedience to a different authority without any rational epistemological basis. That needs to stop.
1) I do not trust any government funded scientist nor anything they produce.
2) I do not trust any scientist that gets angry when questioned.
4) I do not trust any scientist that refuses to fully disclose their data and methods.
4) Computer models are opinions dressed up as science. They are totally worthless.
“Believe science has become a comforting social media slogan amid the past year’s chaos, but this platitude has an undertone that runs contrary to the true spirit of scientific inquiry. All too often believe science means obey authority and is used as a way to shut down debate. Science is simply assumed to reign supreme.”
My impression is that “believe science” is urged as an alternative to ideology and political bias, not as an admonition to obey authority. I noted that Russell’s essay on ‘belief’ ought to make it clear what this notion of “believe science” refers to.
> “Believe science” means believe science instead of ideology…. <
This is much less true now, than was so in Russell's day.
Now, it often means a badge of (class) tribal identity, see e.g.
https://judithcurry.com/2019/03/26/why-i-dont-believe-in-science/ .
I believe in science. I rarely believe scientists. This critical difference seems to have been lost to all but a very few.
Science has sometimes been hailed–or criticized–for supposedly having an inherent political agenda, an inherent natural affinity for liberalism, socialism, conservatism, or racism, for social and political philosophies and movements of the Left or the Right. It has been linked with ideas like eugenics and Social Darwinism on the Right and Lysenkoism on the Left. A skeptical historian of ideas, however, might do well to consider the role of what one of my University of Virginia friends in the 1960’s used to call “historical enantiodromias.”
Adapting Carl Jung’s psychological term “enantiodromia” (from the Greek for “running backwards”) in a somewhat different sense, my friend used it to describe the way he saw philosophical positions aligning at different times and places with different political orientations. Thus, he noted, philosophical viewpoints like materialism or idealism, empiricism or rationalism, pluralism or dualism or monism, have in different historical settings been variously associated both with liberal, progressive, or left-wing and with conservative, reactionary, or right-wing political outlooks. Philosophical materialism, for instance, has variously served as both a “left-wing” and a “right-wing” world-view, being invoked at different times by advocates both of revolutionary socialism and of rigid racial hierarchies. My friend’s “historical enantiodromia” concept was essentially his own version of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s description of the way “unit-ideas” have perpetually combined and recombined throughout history into different philosophical, religious, and ideological ”complexes” in his Introduction, “The Study of the History of Ideas,” to *The Great Chain of Being* (1936).
Science, too, is subject to historical “enantiodromias” in my University of Virginia friend’s sense. Science itself, strictly speaking, is value-free, ethically and politically neutral. A strongly science-minded intellectual and cultural outlook, on the other hand, can be either “left-wing” or “right-wing,” “liberal” or “conservative.” Individual scientists and science-minded intellectuals, likewise, can be either liberals or conservatives, supporters either of left-wing or right-wing social movements. Indeed, being human beings and not artificially engineered thinking machines, flesh-and-blood scientists cannot possibly avoid having feelings, loyalties, commitments, sentiments, values, preferences of SOME sort.
Thus, science was very widely perceived in 19th century Europe, in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, as being inherently “liberal,” “radical,” “progressive,” “left-wing,” or even “revolutionary.” It was often seen as closely allied to the anti-clerical, anti-monarchical, and anti-aristocratic attitudes of the Encyclopedists, *philosophes*, and Jacobins. More broadly, we may see different 19th (and then 20th century) thinkers stressing either one or the other of two distinct if often closely intertwined themes of the 18th century Enlightenment, both seen as implied by modern science: the “Naturalist” theme of human beings as natural creatures in a natural world subject to natural laws and to the limitations imposed by nature, and the “Rationalist” theme of humans as rational beings capable of understanding nature’s (including human nature’s laws) and using that understanding to build a better, freer, happier, and juster society. 19th (and 20th) century thinkers emphasizing the Enlightenment’s “Rationalist” legacy tended to see science as implying liberal, radical, or progressivist views of society and politics. Thinkers more impressed with the Enlightenment’s “Naturalist” side, on the other hand, tended rather to see science as implying conservative or even reactionary social and political views, as proving the inevitability or even desirability of political authoritarianism, of social and ethnic or racial hierarchies, and of war and aggression. Both “Rationalist” and “Naturalist” ideologues could and very often did appeal to the scientific knowledge of their time in support of their social and political views.
Thus, the 19th century saw the rise of “Naturalistic” (in the sense just defined) right-wing ideologies claiming a scientific basis, such as racism and Social Darwinism. Conservative or reactionary 19th century thinkers invoked science–and especially Darwinian evolutionism with its stress on the “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest”–to justify existing social hierarchies and oppose demands for democratic reform or socialist revolution. As historian H. Stuart Hughes noted in *Consciousness and Society*(1958).Social Darwinism inspired a pessimistic “scientific fatalism” about the ability of human reason to alter unjust or unfortunate social conditions that he saw as “the antithesis of the buoyantly optimistic attitude that had characterized the *philosophes* of the eighteenth century or the English Utilitarians of the first part of the century following.” Around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, racism and Social Darwinism morphed into the “science” of eugenics, a movement that despite its underlying basic classism and racism beguiled even many liberal and progressive thinkers and activists, like H.G. Wells in England and Margaret Sanger in the United States (for a while, even Marxists like J.B.S. Haldane) with its “scientific” and ostensibly “forward-looking” aura. In late 19th and early 20th century Germany, nationalist-minded engineers joined reactionary social and cultural thinkers to develop what historian Jeffrey Herf called an ideology of *Reactionary Modernism* (1985) blending an enthusiasm for applied science and for industrial and military technology with racism, anti-Semitism, German nationalism, and violent opposition to the Enlightenment ideals of *Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité*, that was eventually adopted by the Nazis (as in Joseph Goebbels’ technophilic “steely Romanticism”).
Also in the 19th century, however, the Marxists proclaimed the “scientific” character of socialism. That claim was continued by 20th century Communist leaders like Lenin and Stalin, who liked to wrap their regime in the mantle of “science.” In the 1920’s and 1930’s, as Lenin and Stalin were “building scientific socialism” while conservatives and right-wingers were preaching (and practicing) eugenics and racism, the “Logical Positivist” scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers of the “Vienna Circle,” spearheaded by Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Hans Hahn, likewise portrayed a left-wing politics as a natural, logical corollary of “the scientific world-conception.” They were echoed across the English Channel by prominent left-wing British scientists like J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, Lancelot Hogben, Joseph Needham, and Hyman Levy–some of them, though not the adamantly anti-Stalinist Hogben, members of the British Communist Party. Science historian Gary Werskey portrayed their program of a politicized science in *The Visible College A Collective Biography of British Scientific Socialists of the 1930’s*. A few decades later, they were also echoed by C.P. Snow’s celebrated 1959 “Two Cultures” lecture hailing scientists (even those who personally were political conservatives) as natural inherent progressives “with the future in their bones,” in contrast to literary intellectuals with conservative, reactionary, or even Fascist leanings (or else an irresponsibly self-absorbed apoliticality) “wishing the future did not exist.”
In the United States, science was widely seen in the 19th and early 20th centuries as supporting racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics, as justifying “WASP” or “Nordic” supremacy, *laissez-faire* economics, “Jim Crow” segregation, and the forced sterilization of the “unfit.” Beginning in the 1920’s and 1930’s, however, this basically conservative and hereditarian outlook was increasingly challenged by more culture- and environment-oriented sociologists and anthropologists like Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu. A culture- and environment-oriented, anti-hereditarian, anti-racist, anti-eugenicist perspective, stressing “nurture” over “nature” (as against the earlier stress on “nature”), eventually became dominant in American social sciences from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. This shift was further reinforced by revulsion at the murderous racialist and eugenicist crimes of the Nazis, by misgivings over the sterilization-happy excesses of early 20th century American eugenicists, and by the growing number of American social scientists of immigrant non-“WASP” origin. Science thus came to be believed by most educated Americans in the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s to have conclusively proven once and for all that “nurture,” “culture,” and “environment” trumped “nature,” “biology,” and “hereditary,” and that racism and eugenics were just plain wrong and unscientific, no more scientific than a flat earth, a Ptolemaic geocentric picture of the Solar System, or fundamentalist anti-Darwinism. In short, science in the 1950’s and 1960’s was overwhelmingly seen as siding with liberals over racists and extreme reactionaries. Stanford University historian Carl N. Degler’s *In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought* (1991) gives a judicious, readable scholarly overview of this shift.
The last few decades, however, have seen a partial return to biologically-oriented emphasis in the social sciences. Thus, there has been a growing re-biologization of American psychology and psychiatry in American psychology and psychiatry since the late 1960’s. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s, as social anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann observed in *Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry* (2000), the psychodynamic or psychoanalytic approach strongly dominated American psychiatry, often in its classic Freudian version. From the late 1960’s on, however, the biomedical model has become increasingly dominant, with psychiatry becoming almost synonymous with neurology, biochemistry, and drug therapy. Talk therapy has largely given way to drug therapy. Also from the late 1960’s and the 1970’s on, as portrayed by Dr. Luhrmann, there has similarly been a growing revival of a more biological orientation in psychology and psychiatry, stressing neurology, brain physiology, biochemistry, and even genetics, particularly in discussions of the causes and treatment of schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, even neuroses, shyness, and alcoholism, are increasingly seen as products of disordered brains, nervous systems, or body chemistries, even of heredity, as they were in 19th century psychiatry, rather than as reflections of childhood traumas, adolescent maladjustments, or social inequalities. As Dr. Luhrmann put it, American psychiatry has increasingly abandoned Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic orientation for the biological orientation of the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), who saw the chief origin of psychiatric disease in brain and genetic malfunction.
The growing hegemony of biological psychiatry depicted by Tanya Luhrmann has been closely paralleled, by a similarly growing interest in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in the past few decades. The sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (*Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge*, 1998) and the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker (*The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature*, 2002) spearheaded a backlash against what, following the evolutionary psychology pioneers John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, they called the “Standard Social Science Model” (SSSM) dominating American social science. Tooby and Cosmides introduced SSSM in 1992 for social science philosophies of the “blank slate,” relativism, social constructionism, and cultural determinism they saw as forming the dominant theoretical paradigm in the development of the social sciences during the 20th century, portraying the human mind as shaped almost entirely by culture with little if any biological or genetic influence–a picture they wished to replace with an integrated causal model (ICM) melding cultural and biological theories for the development of the mind. Wilson and Pinker attacked the SSSM as a politically-correct “blank slate” view of the human personality inspired far more by wishful egalitarian liberal and leftist political ideology than by any hard objective scientific facts. Pinker, in particular, denounced the SSSM as enshrining and perpetuating three scientifically untenable 17th and 18th century myths–John Locke’s myth of the mind as a “blank slate,” René Descartes’ myth of the mind as a “ghost in the machine” with no physical substratum, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage” myth of human beings as naturally good, peaceful, and cooperative but corrupted by bad social institutions.
Thus, in response to Wilson’s and Pinker’s attacks on the SSSM, and to the growing influence of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and biologically-oriented psychology, science has come to be seen in some quarters as an essentially conservative or even reactionary force. This, in turn, has led to anti-leftist counter-criticisms attacking dogmatic racial egalitarianism as “anti-scientific,” and comparing militant anti-racists to flat-earthers and anti-evolutionists. Even as moderate a critic of “blank-slatism” as Steven Pinker, who is hardly a fanatical White supremacist, and in fact has described himself as something of a moderate political leftist or at least liberal, has compared dogmatic opponents of any genetic influence on human behavior to Creationists, climate change denialists, and anti-vaccinationists.
The hallmark of the scientific outlook is often defined as a commitment to strict rationality, a determination to follow evidence and logic as against emotion, sentiment, and prejudice, as well as against tradition and social convention. However, scientists and science-minded intellectuals have almost always focused on opposing, resisting, or combatting SOME feelings, emotions, and sentiments rather than others, on being strongly suspicious of SOME sentiments but perhaps less so of others. Thus, politically liberal, progressive, or left-wing scientists follow in the footsteps of the 18th century Enlightenment “philosophes” and the French Revolutionaries by being particularly suspicious of emotional and sentimental appeals to religious piety, to patriotism and national, ethnic, or religious loyalty and “honor,” and to “chivalrous” devotion to a king, queen, royal dynasty, or “time-hallowed,” “well-beloved” aristocracy. Politically conservative, reactionary, or right-wing scientists, on the other hand, mainly focus on being particularly scathing in their disdain for “bleeding-heart” “sentimental,” “kumbaya” egalitarianism and humanitarianism–while perhaps having relatively little objection to religious piety, national patriotism, or dynastic loyalty. Leftist scientists, on the other hand, might think there’s little harm in a bit of “bleeding-heart sentimentalism” even as they mock devotion to Church and King and question “My country, right or wrong!” patriotism. It’s not really quite enough to say that scientists value “reason” over “emotion” or “sentiment”–there is also a question of WHICH “emotions” or “sentiments” a given scientist MOST strenuously objects to! Something like all this, I sometimes think, may have been part of what David Hume might have been thinking of back in 1739-1740 when he wrote that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”–(Hume, *Treatise of Human Nature*, Book III, Part II, Section III)
This is a brilliant summary of the interplay between science and ideologies of its practitioners. Very well done – thank you. (And yes, I believe Hume’s words are very applicable here – he, like Bacon before him, knew that the heart ultimately rules the head no matter how much we may deny or try to subvert it.)
I feel such overwhelming relief seeing that you guys published this article. It is so disturbing for me to watch as the spirit of inquiry itself is now itself labeled anti-scientific.
As a great example, Wikipedia has now classified “vaccine hesitancy” as a conspiracy theory. Vaccine HESITANCY – as in, skepticism (the very definition of the spirit of scientific inquiry) – is now synonymous with actually holding an anti-vax view:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy
The craziest part is there was a massive thread on Reddit where doctors asked each other if they would get the mRNA vaccine, and pretty much everyone expressed some anxiety (though they mostly intended to get it). So I guess they are all conspiracy theorists then— for even expressing their hesitation at getting a new type of vaccine?
Are these doctors also conspiracy theorists— for daring to speculate on the possibility of long-term side effects of the vaccine? Isn’t that a form of hesitancy?
https://learnaboutcovid19.org/questions/could-mrna-vaccines-create-a-different-protein-than-expected-that-could-result-in-autoimmune-disease-down-the-road/
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4347/rr-6
Statisticians, for that matter, would also be conspiracy theorists according to Wikipedia’s definition. Statistics, of course, tells us we can’t possibly know the long-term effects of a vaccine tested only in the short-term / extrapolation as such is dangerous. “Hesitancy” is basically intrinsic to statistics and science, when drawing long-term conclusions from limited information.
I won’t even get into the fact that there actually *are* cases of recent vaccines causing (or strongly appearing to cause) chronic health conditions. The link between Gardasil and neurological disorders is a prominent example. Whether or not Merck feels this claim had been debunked, there is indeed a large body of research suggesting a causal link between the two. Also, the fact the link hasn’t been definitively established increasingly seems to be a function of the limited testing scientists have devoted to Gardasil research.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406435/
This woman’s family successfully sued Merck for causing their daughter’s death through Gardasil (they were found to meet the burden of proof):
https://newyork.legalexaminer.com/health/fda-prescription-drugs/family-found-to-have-met-burden-of-proof-that-gardasil-caused-daughters-death/
Dr. Scott Ratner’s daughter developed autoimmune fasciitis after getting the Gardasil vaccine in a way that suggested a causal link; he’s been publicly opposed to it since:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gardasil-researcher-speaks-out/
A number of Gardasil researchers have actively distanced themselves from the vaccine, particularly given that the likelihood of such side effects, however small, is actually…. just as high as the likelihood of a cancer caused by HPV.
Good article about this by Danielle Ryan:
https://medium.com/@danielle_ryan/ireland-lets-have-a-real-debate-about-the-hpv-vaccine-f6650df281a6
Also, Gardasil doesn’t even protect against many high-risk strains! I myself have a high-risk strain that is turning cancerous despite getting the vaccine because it wasn’t one of the four strains that is covered. I happen to have dysautonomia and POTS, as well (though I recognize it’s unscientific to suggest a causal link between this and Gardasil).
There is so much more I could say on this. The fact Wikipedia now classifies alternative medicine as pseudoscience also disturbs me profoundly. In fact, there are a number of forms of alternative medicine that have extensive scientific research behind them. There is an established causal link between acupuncture and relief from certain types of chronic pain, for instance; this is why many insurers cover acupuncture for back and hip pain. I believe there is also an established link between acupuncture and fertility / increased ability to conceive. My old acupuncturist’s wall was covered with birth announcements that her former female patients sent her and I remember reading some of the acupuncture/fertility research at the time.
The entire field of naturopaths who make dietary or nutrition recommendations, or suggest many forms of illness are linked to stress, actually are now routinely dismissed as “quacks.” And yet increasingly science tells us that numerous GI, immune, neurological, and psychiatric conditions do in fact directly arise from a compromised microbiome— hence the growing demand for stool transplants. I’m predicting a stool-sample black-market will exist in years, if it doesn’t already. And doctors themselves prescribe probiotics for eg IBS patients. The only difference is that prescribing a probiotic ALONE (what the doctors are doing) is actually not nearly as effective for IBS, as improving the microbiome by prescribing a DIETARY change (what the naturopaths are doing).
Aka it’s the doctors, not the naturopaths, who are unscientific in this regard.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-019-0256-8
It’s also apparently unscientific to recommend stress-reduction techniques for chronic illness— even as Healthline etc often cite statistics like “80% of illness is caused by stress.”
Fun story: My neurologist told me that my autonomic dysfunction, which has recently caused seizures, was caused by stress. This is a fairly intuitive conclusion, as I have PTSD. Less intuitive is his response: suggesting medication like anticonvulsants. Seeing this was a nonsequitur, I asked how I could fix the stress itself. His response: “You have to turn the page on your stressful past.” How terrifying that a neurologist hasn’t even heard of things like EMDR or the Wim Hof Method or Trauma Release Exercises (all backed by research), or thinks PTSD can be “willed away.” Even as they acknowledge the role of stress, doctors have no training or awareness on how to treat it. A neurologist hasn’t even heard of basic interventions that are now second nature in, say, psychology and to some extent psychiatry.
This growing divide between doctors of different specialties as such – the very antithesis of “holistic” medicine – actually strikes me as far LESS scientific than holistic medicine.
Don’t even get me started on the condescension towards people with “adrenal fatigue,” either.
If it were indeed impossible to have hypo-cortisolism and associated fatigue on account of chronic stress (which seems to be the definition of adrenal fatigue), this would debunk everything we know about PTSD sufferers:
https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/152/12/4496/2457286
Don’t get me started on the condescension towards non-celiacs who avoid gluten, either. I guess Stephen Hawking would be “anti-science” by this standard: Long before gluten was being widely discussed, he refused to eat it because he found it aggravated his neurological symptoms. See: Traveling to Infinity (memoir by his ex-wife, Jane Hawking).
Since then, there’s been tons of research on “gluten ataxia” and plenty of non-celiacs have experienced autonomic dysfunction on account of consuming gluten. There is a large body of research on the legitimacy of non-celiac gluten sensitivities, as well.
I could go on and on about the ways science has become a belief system that deviates from actual evidence and the scientific method. I think about this a lot in religious contexts as well. Somewhere along the line, atheism, even the type where people believe that God DOES NOT exist (rather than just suspending their opinion entirely) became more “scientific” in the eyes of liberals than holding literally any spiritual or religious view whatsoever. Without getting too much into this, I don’t find these arguments remotely philosophically compelling and gather most actual philosophers don’t, either (see the work of Alvin Plantinga, for instance). I also gather that scientists hold the view “you can’t prove a negative” which would directly contradict claims that atheism (in the restrictive sense) is somehow scientific.
**I should add that I actually think that most real scientists don’t have the above attitude (the attitude described in this article) at all. My uncle is a physicist at an Ivy League school and he and I have these conversations all the time— including those about spirituality, medicine, the mind-body connection.
I do think many doctors hold these non-scientific views (such as my neurologist); however, I think the majority of the people holding these views are just a bunch of delusional random liberals who actually think they’re smarter than everyone. Also not a very scientific view— given their oblivion to basic statistics, logic, or philosophy.
Yeah, Hannah, Wikipedia has now classify as “conspiracy theory”, virtually anything that goes vs. the conventional “wisdom” of the “educated” upper-middle classes.
Typo:
Make the above “Wikipedia now classifies….”
I did not know that. How horrifying. In that case, my question would be: How many of these people (eg editing Wikipedia) actually believe what they are writing? And how many are just doing it to avoid getting “canceled”?
Science or scientists can or course be used to prove or disprove almost anything. Some/many scientists effectively work as corporate shills for big corporations which in turn use public relations outfits to prove almost anything such as using doctors to prove that smoking is good for you.
Public relations outfits are of course huge. Many years ago I read that the majority of “news” stories are created and placed by such outfits. They write “authoritative” essays which “prove” that Toxic Sludge is Good (which is the title of a book).
Knowledge is of course power and scientific knowledge is now the only allowable form of knowledge. Scientism has effectively become the dominant religion in our time and place. The scientific establishment has been organized in league with the highest levels of concentrated political, economic, and propagandistic power in the world today. Science is simply the primary method of knowing in modern societies, and its rule is established in no less an irrational and authoritarian manner that was the case with any religious or philosophical principle that ruled societies.
At another level there is a direct philosophical connection between the ideology of scientism and atheism, both provide the philosophical underpinnings for the now world dominance of political and cultural materialism.
The past year has shown just how big Big Science is, and how undemocratic it is living in a world where the same corporations own the legacy media. I’d have hoped that lots of people understood the issue here but the lack of questioning around experimental MRNA vaccines that don’t actually seem to provide herd immunity has me doubting (of course I can’t know how many people really are questioning narratives cos the tech arm of the monster is lovingly protecting us all from the disinformers).
It would have once been uncontroversial to question the safety of rushed-through solutions, but to do so now is, apparently, to be something akin to a psycho.
I would have thought too that a thorough analysis of the context in which we get our numbers of infected covid-19 cases woukd be extremely important to people. The PCR test at one end and then the amount of deaths being ascribed to covid that could be flu, pneumonia, other respiratory illnesses, or the many, many comorbidities of those who die. But that too seems to be a matter of switching off in order to allow the experts of the corporatocracy to give us the data.
I think this is a psyop in action. Whether led by the market or intelligence agencies or by the ideology of the billionaire class is now a congealed point. Cognitive dissonance leading to switching off of critical faculties in order to take the advice of the same class of people who shat on the earth for profit for decades, murdered the labour movement, and have brought austerity on millions for their own gain. But nothing to see here, apparently.
Welcome to the corporatocracy. You’ll not only own nothing and like it in feudalism 2.0, you’ll like giving up your critical thinking for a vapid sense of peace too.
Your last sentence is excellent and explains the abject cowardice I’ve encountered in people I once thought smart and brave.
A superb essay, thanks.
“Believe science has become a comforting social media slogan amid the past year’s chaos, but this platitude has an undertone that runs contrary to the true spirit of scientific inquiry. All too often believe science means obey authority and is used as a way to shut down debate.” And there in lies the greater truth, politicians and moreover those SJW’s who wish to rule over the masses freely misuse ‘science’ without explanation or often understanding. As I recently commented on a ‘puff’ piece from the Royal Society of Chemistry extoling Biden’s removal of Trump’s ‘secret science’ rule for ‘science’ based policy to be ‘transparent’ with no ‘hidden’ data.
“Decisions made on the basis of ‘science’ should be clearly justifiable, the rise of ‘consensus science’ and ‘settled science’ has led many to question, both scientists and the public, why policies and actions or inactions taken by politicians without clarity of the reasoning or the ‘science’ behind it.
Worse is the treatment of Scientists who continue apply ‘scientific method’ and question such things, with accusations of ‘science denial’ often levelled against them. If we do not question the public has every right not to trust us…”
Fuck Poppa @anonymous
Are you familiar with the work of Karl Popper? He has some great insights on philosophy of science
Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn had more of substance to say about the nature of science than partisan squabbles over whether or not climate change is a pinko Democratic hoax or whether vaccination is a scam orchestrated by George Soros, the Illuminati, and the Bilderbergers.
“C” wrote in his 23/2/2021 comment that “There are times when sciences gets led astray or is influenced by social values, but this is consistent with a broadly realist view of science that society sorely needs to hear about now.” Yes, as I noted in my own yesterday’s comment, I’ve always read Thomas Kuhn himself as actually in fact holding a broadly realist view of science, seeing science as getting progressively closer and closer to the actual full truth with its various paradigm shifts. On the other hand, most people nowadays would probably agree that science got led badly astray in the 19th and early 20th centuries when it was widely interpreted as supporting racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics–“sciences” that few reputable mainstream scientists support or favor any more. Of course, many writers on the Right would probably argue instead that it was rather in the middle decades of the 20th century that science got led badly astray by liberal and leftist political pressures to advocate a sweeping dogmatic anti-racism and anti-hereditarianism. Finally, I’ve always cherished Louis Pasteur’s famous dictum that “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I’ve always thought, whenever I see Pasteur’s remark, that in fact ALL minds are ALWAYS “prepared” in some way, in the sense that depending on our over all world-view and mind-set we are all instinctively prepared to particularly notice those data and those phenomena that happen to support our own already existing world-view, and to ignore or try to explain away those data or phenomena that seem to contradict our world-view–what Thomas Kuhns called “anomalies”–Kuhns argued in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” that “paradigm-shifts” take place when the “anomalies” inexplicable by the currently reigning paradigm have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored or explained away with ad hoc special explanations. Such “anomalies,” observations and phenomena incompatible with dominant world-views or mind-sets, we might add, are found not only in domains pertaining to politics and social relations like race, gender, and IQ, but also (I believe) with regard to things like, e.g., UFO’s and so-called “paranormal” phenomena.
“The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has “been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything. Inevitably that lacuna will have disturbed many readers. We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance.
But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science’s existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community’s state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?”
page 182 of the 222-page version I have of Kuhn’s SSR.
That, T Peter Park, is Thomas Kuhn *denying* that the science project is about getting closer and closer to Truth.
Unfortunately, most of Popper’s insights were naive or just wrong. For a recent critique of falsificationism, in a popular venue, see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-idea-that-a-scientific-theory-can-be-falsified-is-a-myth/
Sorry David but that article presents a poor argument. It’s a misleading false dichotomy to say that *if* falsification pits one theory against another *then* neither can claim ascendency. Obviously, one “theory” might be vastly more valid or convincing than another. The theory that the moon is made of green cheese might have clashed with the theory that the Apollo astronauts could tell dust from cheese as they walked on the moon. So can we not decide the cheese theory is “falsified”? Popper, remember, wrote in the context of Marxism and Freudianism claiming “science” status, when they might otherwise be characterised as great big “just so” stories