Is Science Really Objective?
How objective and neutral is science? Is there a distinction between ‘good science’ and ‘bad science?’ Does progress inherently rest on the back of the scientific method? How much of our culture’s fascination with science is actually an affinity for engineering? What cultural and other values were necessary for the invention and adoption of scientific rationality? What values are necessary for the practice of scientific inquiry? Is our culture’s (especially in the Bay Area) celebration of ‘sciency’ things just another belief system and aesthetic preference?
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First of all, this is an EXTREMELY complicated philosophical topic. We’re probably not going to solve it once and for all, and we’re certainly better off if we can be made aware of existing arguments and inquiries into the topic.
How objective and neutral is science?
Is there a distinction between ‘good science’ and ‘bad science?’
Does progress inherently rest on the back of the scientific method?
How much of our culture’s fascination with science is actually an affinity for and faith in engineering?
What cultural and other values were necessary for the invention and adoption of scientific rationality?
What values are necessary for the practice of scientific inquiry?
Is our culture’s (especially in the Bay Area) celebration of ‘sciency’ things just another belief system and aesthetic preference?
///Anyway, to answer these questions,
We will be dealing with the philosophy of science, which is the key term to browse if you decide to go do some research afterwards or during the discussion.
Philosophy of science deals with the foundations, methods and implications of science.
By foundations, I mean the basic argument for why science should be practiced at all, or whether it should hold a privileged place as a type of human knowledge, and whether the results of science can be taken as ‘truth.’
By methods, I mean the procedures used to obtain results, including experiments, observation, repeatability, procedures around the use of control subjects and isolated laboratory settings, etc.
By implications, what I mean are the conclusions we draw from the findings of scientific experiment, observation and study, and what the use of those conclusions is.
so foundations, methods, implications.
///I’d like to dive into these three things one at a time, by citing important scholarship that has questioned the objectivity of science on each of these sites, starting with foundations.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that science progresses through a series of ‘paradigm shifts,’ which were the result of both an enthusiasm for scientific inquiry and societal beliefs. Kuhn defines paradigms as “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.”
Kuhn explains that out of paradigms “spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research”, out of which forms what Kuhn calls ‘normal science.’
This occurs when a paradigm or a theory is accepted, and scientists attempt to fit as much as they can within the theory, using it to explain their research.
In ‘normal science,’ researchers attempt to solve problems under an existing paradigm, sketching a highly system-dependent version of truth.
But the system itself is liable to come under question.
Paradigms are frequently overturned, resulting in an abandonment of much that was assumed to be true prior to the paradigm’s collapse. These bold shifts of opinion challenge the notion that science is building some kind of linear arc of truth.
///Similarly, and still on foundations here: Foucault’s The Order of Things:
Epistemes
Less field-specific.
Foucault speaks about the various ways in which all kinds of classification—inherent to the practice of language itself—are subject to certain a priori assumptions. He talks about: ‘schemas of perception’; ‘preliminary criterion’ upon which a ’system of elements’ may be formed; ‘thresholds’ “above which there is difference and below which there is a similitude.”
Also, certain social concepts that tend to inform hypotheses in scientific research.
(evolution and economics in the nineteenth century would be an example of this)
Foucault’s study is “an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on what basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed” (xxii)
In other words, the social conditions that allowed for a certain science to take hold, becoming an episteme.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals:
Nietzsche claims that our society is rife with moral prejudices, which are informed by our Judeo-Christian heritage.
Scientific inquiry, says Nietzsche, while appearing as neutral, is actually deeply rooted in an Epicurean optimism about the world, and the prospects for progress as a means of staving off a tragic pessimism about life and existence.
Nietzsche argues that moral prejudices are definitely present in science, arguing that “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
///to shift over to method, now:
Bruno Latour, Science In Action:
Latour is really interested in the materiality of the practices of science, and his critique therefore concerns method.
Latour makes several claims.
Papers: papers, in their materiality, are composed of many citations, effectively staking the credibility of the authors on the credibility of many other authors. To critique them would be to go agains an ‘army’ of authors and their findings. To disprove them, one would need an equally powerful lab or research setting, and to replicate the experiments—a high level of overhead.
Black boxes: Latour argues that scientific knowledge operates as something of a structure composed of black boxes. (A black box is a complicated part of a machine diagram or other schematic that is bracketed in order to skip mapping out its functionality, essentially showing merely the input and output of whatever it is). Because so much knowledge exists, it would be impossible to know—in detail—all of it, or even all of it that is necessary to support original scientific research. Scientific advancement, then, has to bracket much of its supporting material, looking only at the inputs and the outputs (or findings) of past research.
Ultimately, Latour argues, drawing from these observations of method, science is a network, and therefore subject to Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which positions objects in webs of social networks.
In the natural sciences, Latour argues, the overall ‘network’ being constructed is the concept of ’Nature’—Nature is the project; the overall construction. Similarly in the social sciences, but with ‘Society.’ ’Nature’ or ‘Society’ are the outcome of settled controversies in science, and the result of the accumulation of currently-accepted scientific arguments, which are, in sum, taken to be ‘Truth’, and are (perhaps fallaciously) viewed as actually existing, rather than constructed through the stitching together of weak theories, which find strength and robustness in their interconnectedness.
Importantly—and this perhaps carries over into the implications of science—these networks of theories are taken as already-existing and studiable things, such that you often hear people talk about the study of society or of nature. This confuses the findings with the object of study, or the territory for the map. As we all know, the map is not the territory.
///So now on to Implications:
There are a great many works dealing with implications of science, and I’m not going to cite any one in particular, and instead cite several categories of criticism of the objectivity of the implications of science.
Perhaps the most glaring issue:
Science doesn’t tell us what we should do with science: Even if science was 100% neutral, it doesn’t tell us what we should do with our findings.
There are still social issues>>
What if the findings of science are unacceptable to our values?
Failings of techno optimism: Scientific discovery and hopes for technological advancement are often conflated.
The hope for new knowledge to bring salvation from urgent issues can actually delay urgent action.
Good science or bad science, we do definitely have a cult of science (especially in the Bay Area), where we lend a huge amount of significance to ‘sciency’ things. We see science as being super ‘cool,’ and sing its praise very frequently.
I think we have a cult of techno-optimism that prevails in the privileged echelons of our culture.
(is this because privileged people are often the beneficiaries / employees of technology?)
(science perceives itself as being under attack by other frameworks and worldviews:
evolution climate change genetics research certain areas of health (though medicine is not inherently a division of science, even if it has certain scientific ‘paradigms.’)
There are several problems with this:
The specific aspects of ‘science’ that seem to be most worshipped are pretty much engineering, which is certainly never objective.
Technology is not science, even if it makes use of scientific discoveries.
Social studies and the humanities are comparatively undervalued, even though they have tremendous amounts of lessons to teach us as well.
Perhaps we can parse scientific method from technology and engineering, but even then, the choice to investigate along technical, rather than social or political lines is to make a rather political choice.
This being said, it might be the best thing we have.
/// concluions:
We can search for epistemes, and make them more overt and stated.
We might dispense with the idea that science is objective, and instead treat it like a tool.
In the realm of human understanding, I think that science as necessary but insufficient.
Nietzsche prioritizes art over science.
I’d personally like to make the case for philosophy.
/// So, bearing this bit of framing, I’d like to pose some of the questions I had earlier again:
How objective and neutral is science?
Is there a distinction between ‘good science’ and ‘bad science?’
Does progress inherently rest on the back of the scientific method?
How much of our culture’s fascination with science is actually an affinity for engineering?
How does a faith in science reveal an alliance to certain social, political and economic constellations remaining intact, with less controversial technological change being tasked with rectifying the consequences?
What cultural and other values were necessary for the invention and adoption of scientific rationality?
What values are necessary for the practice of scientific inquiry?
Is our culture’s (especially in the Bay Area) celebration of ‘sciency’ things just another belief system and aesthetic preference?
And, if we choose to trust their wisdom and accuracy, how do we decide what to do with the findings of science?
Discussion Notes
Descriptive vs. prescriptive theories.
Description itself is always subject to the representation process, which can only ever be a poor ‘translation’. This is a model, and of language
What is the distinction between what scientists are saying (“well, we don’t know what it means, but we observed some consistent results.”), and what the world makes of these findings (“Science shows that mice are gay!”).
What is behind the cult of pseudo-science, and ‘what-people-think-is-science belief system’?