Why Trust Science? Read online

  2. This claim was picked up by various media outlets, including several promoting conspiracist ideation. Jones, “About Alex Jones.”

  3. Mnookin, The Panic Virus.

  4. Miller, Only a Theory; “Evolution Resources from the National Academies.”

  5. Newport, “In U.S., 46% Hold Creationist View of Human Origins.”

  6. National Center for Science Education, “Background on Tennessee’s 21st Century Monkey Law.”

  7. On the history of attempts to teach creation in the classroom, see Minkel, “Evolving Creationism in the Classroom.” On the broader history of American creationism, see Larson Summer for the Gods; Numbers, The Creationists; Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, Evolution, Creationism and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms.

  8. See Zycher, “The Enforcement of Climate Orthodoxy and the Response to the Asness-Brown Paper on the Temperature Record”; Hayward, “Climategate (Part II)”; Sample, “Scientists Offered Cash to Dispute Climate Study”; Union of Concerned Scientists, “Global Warming Skeptic Organizations”; and Sachs, “How the AEI Distorts the Climate Debate.”

  9. Sachs, “How the AEI Distorts the Climate Debate.”

  10. Zycher, “Shut Up, She Explained.”

  11. Richards, “When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus.’ ”

  12. This is not to suggest that the authority of science has never been questioned. Certainly the values of science have been questioned by many writers, poets, religious leaders, and others. Mary Shelley’s indictment of scientific hubris in her classic work, Frankenstein, particularly comes to mind, along with Goethe’s Faust and other variations of the Faust legend. Various artists and poets who implicitly or explicitly criticized science on diverse grounds, including the disenchantment of nature (see, for example, Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 1999). My point here is that as a source of authority on empirical questions, science has been broadly accepted in recent Western culture, which is, in part, why the current state of affairs seems to many of us to be so shocking.

  13. A particularly cogent refutation of this strategy is found in Bloor, The Enigma of the Aerofoil. See also my discussion in Rejection of Continental Drift, pp. 313–18.

  14. Shapin, A Social History of Truth. See also discussion in Frodeman and Briggle, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way.”

  15. Crosland, Science under Control. It is also a reason, although not the only one, why women were generally excluded.

  16. Bourdeau, “Auguste Comte.”

  17. For background on the rise of secularism in the nineteenth century, see Weir, Secularism and Religion in the 19th Century.

  18. Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy, on p. x.

  19. Ibid., p. 2.

  20. Morris and Brown, “David Hume.”

  21. Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy, p. 4.

  22. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

  23. Ibid., p. 23.

  24. Emphasis added. Thus we find that Bruno Latour is in fact a positivist. Ibid.

  25. Note that Comte does not take this to logical conclusion regarding gender. Bourdeau, “Auguste Comte.”

  26. Richardson and Uebel, Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism, use the terms logical positivist and logical empiricist (and sometimes neopositivist) interchangeably, noting that while some philosophers in the mid-century thought these terms had different referents most did not, and that by the 1930s logical empiricist was the term preferred by most discussants.

  27. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, p. 13.

  28. Ibid., p. 11.

  29. Friedman and Creath, The Cambridge Companion to Carnap; Quine and Carnap, Dear Carnap, Dear Van.

  30. I focus here on challenges relevant to the philosophy of science. There were also substantive challenges in the domain of mathematics, e.g., the attempts by Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead to place mathematics on a logical footing, but this is beyond my expertise and ambition.

  31. Popper’s critical rationalism is directly related to his politics: indeed, he insists, throughout his work, that his project is both epistemological and political: he believes that the sort of skeptical attitude necessary for scientific work is the same as what is necessary to resist authoritarianism.

  Both his politics and his epistemology are radically individualistic; Conjectures and Refutations is dedicated to von Hayek. Perhaps for this reason his work was widely taken up by anti-Communists in Eastern Europe, as well as by neo-liberals. See Mirowski and Plewe, Road from Mt. Pelerin.

  32. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 46ff.

  33. Popper sometimes expanded his positions in ways that softened them. So as noted above, his theory seems to be radically individualistic, insofar as he focuses on the attitude of the individual scientist. But, on the other hand, he also notes that the objectivity of the scientist does not, in fact, reside in the individual, but in the objective nature of scientific theory insofar as a theory must be communicated to others for it to be subjected to severe tests. For example, in The Myth of the Framework, he explicitly rejects the idea that rational discussion in a community is impossible unless they “share a common framework of basic assumptions,” or at least have agreed upon such a framework. But then he allows that there is a kernel of truth in this myth, namely, that fruitful and rational discussion “among participants who do not share a common framework may be difficult.” Either way, here he is acknowledging that scientific discussions take place among communities (Popper, Myth of the Framework, 34–35). Put another way: theories are not tested only by the individuals who perform the test, but also by the community of experts to whom those tests are reported. Helen Longino makes a similar point in Fate of Knowledge, 5–7, when she notes that the process of refutation, which is key to Popper’s concept of science as “conjecture and refutation,” acknowledges the role of other scientists’ criticisms in causing us to rethink our views. Thus even for Popper, criticism—which is central to science—is a social activity. Put another way, if we take criticism seriously, then we see that the social component of science is not epiphenomenal, but constitutive.

  34. Sady, “Ludwik Fleck.” See also Löwy, The Polish School of Philosophy of Medicine.

  35. Fleck, “Scientific Observation and Perception in General.”

  36. Fleck and Kuhn, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, p. 42.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Longino, Fate of Knowledge, p. 122.

  39. Fleck identified the problem of the isolation of the expert from the non-expert community. The expert is “already a specially modelled individual who can no longer escape the bonds of tradition and of the collective; otherwise he would not be an expert” (Sady, sec. 7). Public presentation of science takes the fluid and interactionist reality of science and presents it as a fixed and finished project, making science seem more certain and dogmatic than it actually is.

  40. Together with the American chemist J. Willard Gibbs, Duhem developed the mathematics that describes the relationship between changes in the chemical potential of substances in a system and changes in the temperature and pressure of the system—something I stayed up many long nights studying in my days as a geochemist.

  41. The French original may be accessed at https://archive.org/stream/lathoriephysiqu00unkngoog#page/n6/mode/2up.

  42. De Broglie, forward, in Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, p. xi.

  43. Ibid., p. 220.

  44. Ibid., p. 219.

  45. Here, he is attempting to distinguish between experimental laws as regularities, like F=Ma, and the explanatory theory that makes sense of them, such as the laws of motion.

  46. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, p. 180.

  47. Aim and Structure was published in 1906, but according to de Broglie, Duhem wrote it in 1905, when Einstein published his work on the photoelectric effect. This result may have been in Duhem’s mind.

  48. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, p. 183.

  49. Ibid., p. 185.


  50. Ibid., p. 187.

  51. Ibid., p. 180.

  52. Ibid., p. 181.

  53. This was an accusation that in the 1920s would be made against Alfred Wegener, see Oreskes, Rejection of Drift.

  54. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, p. 217.

  55. Ibid., p. 212.

  56. Ibid. p. 270. So in the end he does seem to privilege theory over experiment, but this is beyond the scope of this chapter. The key point is that it is history that gives us grounds for confidence, in the long run.

  57. Quoted in Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, p.17. Note this makes clear he’s not doubting the existence of the external world; the issue is how we respond to evidence from it.

  58. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Quine also emphasized what has come to be known as the “theory-ladenness” of observation. Duhem stressed that there are no experiments without instruments, and there are no instruments without theory: “without theory it is impossible to regulate a single instrument or to interpret a single reading.” Quine pushes this further to argue that without theory there is no observation. All observations are created and interpreted in the framework of preexisting theory, and thus observation has no life of its own.

  59. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, p. 20.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Conant, Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science Volume I.

  62. Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times; Reisch, “Anticommunism, the Unity of Science Movement and Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions”; Galison, “History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor.”

  63. Fleck and Kuhn, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. I think this is a very important point—and it is not simply that the loner is more likely to be viewed as a crank than a maverick, he is more likely to be a crank.

  64. Kuhn, Reflections on My Critics, on p. 247.

  65. As an undergraduate I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with a group of friends—aspiring scientists all—and we liked it because it seemed realistic. Kuhn’s description of scientists not questioning the larger assumptions under which they operated seemed true of our professors.

  66. Kuhn himself denied this, and spent much of his later life in philosophy of language, attempting to sort the problems of scientific translation as a species of the general problem of translation.

  67. Lakatos, Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, on p. 181.

  68. Kuhn and Conant, The Copernican Revolution, p. 182.

  69. One student of mine asked how Kuhn’s views are different from Fleck. As a historical matter, Kuhn had far more influence in Anglophone circles than Fleck; from the US perspective Fleck has been rediscovered in recent years (e.g., Harwood, Ludwik Fleck and the Sociology of Knowledge, 1996). From the European perspective, one might argue that Kuhn borrowed heavily from Fleck without adequate acknowledgement. But Kuhn borrowed heavily in general; Structure does not have a very extensive bibliography. Mosner, Thought Styles and Paradigms, has recently argued that scholars have been too quick to equate their philosophies. It seems to me the obvious major difference involves Fleck’s view of the evolution of ideas, which lack the abrupt disjuncture that Kuhn insists characterizes scientific revolutions.

  70. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes. One interesting question, which needs to be explored more, is the extent to which sociologists were inspired by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality. This book, published in 1966, is hard to interpret because the authors deliberately omit the names of prior scholars (see Social Construction of Reality, p. vi) as disruptive to the argument. However, they do acknowledge the influence of Alfred Schutz, an Austrian philosopher with links to one of the founders of neo-liberalism, Ludwig von Mises. Zammito (pp. 124–25) places Berger and Luckman in the tradition of American pragramtist George Herbert Mead, and suggests it had rather little influence on sociology of knowledge. He argues that social constructivism in science studies was much more a response to the Frankfurt school.

  71. Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge.

  72. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 7.

  73. Shapin and Schaefer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 332.

  74. Sokal, Beyond the Hoax; Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition; Gross, Levitt, and Lewis, The Flight from Science and Reason.

  75. Barry Barnes, quoted in Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, p. 134.

  76. See Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, and Hacking, The Social Construction of What? The term “social construction” is generally credited to Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality.

  77. Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory, p. vii.

  78. Zammitto, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, p. 52.

  79. Bloor, The Enigma of the Aerofoil, conclusion.

  80. On this point, see my critique of Miriam Solomon: Oreskes, “The Devil Is in the (Historical) Details.”

  81. Feyerabend, Against Method, pp. 18–19. See also Motterlini (ed.), For and Against Method.

  82. It is worth noting that the argument about the benefits of diversity in producing creative and effective outcomes is now widely accepted in the business community. See for example, Page, The Diversity Bonus, and Lowery, “Why Gender Diversity on Corporate Boards Is Good for Business.”

  83. David Bloor nicely revisits this point in his wonderful and underappreciated book, The Enigma of the Aerofoil.

  84. Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 5.

  85. Latour, Science in Action.

  86. See also Galison and Stump, Disunity of Science.

  87. I made a claim more than twenty years ago that the dream of positive knowledge had ended; John Sterman pointed out that it lived on in economics (Oreskes et al., 1994, Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences, and Sterman 1994, Letter.) See also Ladyman et al., Every Thing Must Go.

  88. Weinberg, Facing Up. In fact, it illustrates an important point to which we will return: Scientists should not be trusted when they venture outside their domain of expertise. Weinberg is a brilliant man. He won the Nobel Prize in 1979 for one of the most important developments of twentieth-century physics. But this comment reflects either a shocking ignorance of the history of science, or a shocking disregard of evidence compiled from another field. Either way it demonstrates that expertise is not transferable. We should trust Weinberg about physics, but not about its history.

  89. It is important to note that nearly all the major feminist philosophers of science of this period (e.g., Evelyn Fox Keller, Ruth Hubbard, Scott Gilbert, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and maybe even Donna Haraway?) rejected the idea that their critique of science implicated them in ontological relativism. Certainly Keller, Hubbard, and Fausto-Sterling, who were themselves scientists, were interested (like Longino and Harding) in making a better, less biased, more objective science. See, for example, Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, Hubbard, Politics of Women’s Biology, and Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender.

  90. An implicit assumption here is the demographic diversity will carry with it intellectual diversity. I address this in chapter 2.

  91. My student Charlie Tyson raises an interesting point in regard to the issue of objectivity, and the criticism that leftish scholars including Harding endured because of their “relativist” positions on objectivity. The conservative intellectuals and media activists of the mid-twentieth century who sought to create their own journals to promote conservative views—men like William F. Buckley, for example, who found themselves shut out of some conversations because of the extremity of their views—did not simply charge that the mainstream media were biased. They rejected the concept of objectivity itself, or at least the conflation of objectivity with impartiality, and accepted their bias as a legitimate one. The mission statement of the publication Human Events, one of the pillars of early conservative media activism, is tellin
g. “Human Events is objective; it aims for accurate representation of the facts. But it is not impartial. It looks at events though the eyes that are biased in favor of limited constitutional government, local self-government, private enterprise, and individual freedom” (Hemmer, p. 32). These media activists thus introduced bias and partiality as legitimate values in reporting. Hence the irony of conservatives today who accuse the media and universities of “liberal bias” (Hemmer, p. xii). So it is simply incorrect to equate the questioning of standard views of objectivity with “the academic left,” as Gross and Levitt did in their book, Higher Superstitions. Indeed I would argue that right-wing critics like Buckley rejected objectivity, while left-wing critics like Harding sought to improve it.

  92. Harding, “Women at the Center.” For one characteristic exchange, see Hicks, “Is Newton’s *Principia* a Rape Manual?”. On conservative responses to academic feminism see Schrieber, Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics. In hindsight Harding allows that The Science Question in Feminism had an “us v. them” tone, which she would not take today. See Flores, “Beyond the Secularism Tic—An Interview with Feminist Philosopher Sandra Harding.” However, if the point of being provocative is to provoke, she certainly did that.

  93. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge, 79; Harding, The Science Question in Feminism; Solomon, Social Empiricism.

  94. Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.

  95. It is important to note that simply adding one woman or person of color to an otherwise homogeneous community will not solve the problem, as that isolated individual will likely not feel sufficiently secure to challenge the dominant worldview.

  96. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge, p. 216.

  97. Ibid., p. 80. See also my discussion of the Limited Energy Theory in chapter 2.

  98. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge.

  99. Ibid.

  100. This is a theoretical rather than empirical argument; Longino did not have empirical evidence to support it in part because at the time she was writing women were only just regaining the positions in academic science that they had held and lost earlier in the century (see Rossiter, Women Scientists in America). Londa Schiebinger has given examples of how women in science have helped to open up new areas of investigation and offer alternative (better) theories in a number of domains (Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science), but this work and any attempt to demonstrate that diverse scientific communities produce better theories suffers from the dilemma that in science we have no accepted metric of “better.” Studies of diversity in business clearly show that diverse teams perform better by many standards, so much so that the finding now has a moniker: “The Diversity Bonus.” It is now routine for people in the business community to argue that diversity is not just morally right, but profitable (see Page, The Diversity Bonus).