I found myself involved in a discussion recently, and some of the people I was discussing with were strongly of the opinion that science is a social and political construct. In support of this they are quoting people like Bruno Latour, Ludwig Fleck and Thomas Kuhn.
Now I know that the idea of science as a social construct is widespread, but I have problems accepting the statements as quoted - they seem too dogmatic and I find it very hard to believe that scientific theories never become dominant because they are objectively the most logical or the most accurate. I rather believe that most become dominant because they do provide the most accurate predictions of the observed experimental results.
Similarly, they claim that scientific evidence is never a concrete and permanent thing measured independently because of its intrinsic validity, but is the product of a cognitive process which is affected by the persistence of a relatively isolated opinion system. Again I have issues with this as it seems too dogmatic.
I accept that quite a lot of what is widely taken as "Science" by many people is not necessarily well-founded; but I feel that to paint such a picture of all science is too strong.
I expect that much of science is sufficiently well inter-related and democratic (in that anybody could in theory do the experiments and publish the results) that any theory which is sufficiently at variance with observed experiment when other theories provide better predictions (and/or explanations etc.) will eventually become replaced by some other hopefully better theory. This to me would seem the normal mechanism of science - even if a dominant group can promote a theory strongly enough to exclude competitor theories, it will still eventually lose out to better theories.
But this discussion has opened up new questions for me, and is making me re-evaluate my views. I have never really investigated the social construct stuff in any depth. Have I been hopelessly naive in my assumptions about the purity and integrity of science? Is it all really driven by dominant groups and hegemony? Or does this apply more in some areas of "science" and less in others. Or is it the case that areas like medical research are not such strong science as basic phsyical sciences because they are dealing with harder problems in more complex and subtle systems that preclude tightly controlled and repeatable experiments, and so deprive those research areas of a strong and (relatively) incontrovertible basis.
So, all you philosophers out there, what is your view? If you know the area, can you give us a nice potted summary? Have I been hopelessly naive in my assumptions about the purity and integrity of science? I would love to hear your views and pointers for me to investigate further.
The problem is that some of your assumptions are counter-intuitive. For example, science is not seen as a social construct; its findings are in fact usually counter to society's assumptions (note astronomy and evolution). You also have a lot of philosophical gobbleygook in there (my favorite has to be " the product of a cognitive process which is affected by the persistence of a relatively isolated opinion system").
Not saying that science hasn't occasionally fallen victim to cultural or political pressures (most notably feminist and religious (both pro and con) groups), but those have eventually been challenged and slammed (for example, video games were originally thought to cause violence, but a number of studies have reversed that). However, Science's need for repeatability and peer review usually deals with that (for example, the inability of anyone to show that a scientist's theory that black people had a smaller cranial capacity in 1866 (which was eventually shown to have been caused by using different grains of sand)).
In essence, whereas you may have once been able to say that science was the product of social pressures, that just hasn't been as true for a while now...
HM
Some of the claims you listed are true. Some are a bit of a stretch.
| make_life_better wrote: |
| Now I know that the idea of science as a social construct is widespread, but I have problems accepting the statements as quoted - they seem too dogmatic and I find it very hard to believe that scientific theories never become dominant because they are objectively the most logical or the most accurate. I rather believe that most become dominant because they do provide the most accurate predictions of the observed experimental results. |
You are correct. It is true that dogmatism can hold science back... but only for a very little while. Eventually, under the weight of the evidence, a dogmatic stance will falter. To claim that scientific theories are only held because of peer pressure for any length of time is nonsense. But then, i don't think that's what Khun was trying to say, anyway.
| Quote: |
| Similarly, they claim that scientific evidence is never a concrete and permanent thing measured independently because of its intrinsic validity, but is the product of a cognitive process which is affected by the persistence of a relatively isolated opinion system. Again I have issues with this as it seems too dogmatic. |
Actually, i would say that that is sorta true. Raw results are meaningless, and must be interpreted within a paradigm in order to be understood as scientific evidence (for or against) - even if that's not done consciously. In fact, the existing congnitive processes also determine what questions are asked, and thus what experiments are done. So it is theoretically possible for the established thinking processes to have created a sort of groupthink barrier that isolates them from the reality of the answer.
But in practice... i think not. Realistically speaking, there are tens of thousands of scientists around the world, including new ones entering the field daily looking to make their name by revolutionizing it. These people are members of the top percentiles of smart people all over the world - simply by virtue of how easy it is to get into and through a science program compared to most other college and university programs. i can't imagine that none of them have minds flexible enough to work around a problem for any length of time.
Not to mention that the naysayers - the mystics, the flat earthers, the creationists and other fringe wackos - do a service to science, in much the same way that cancer does a service to the world by encouraging us to better our medical practices, they perpetually challenge the most basic precepts of science. Mind you, they challenge it with lunacy, but that's not the point. The point is that their perpetual haranguing means that science is not an "isolated opinion system". It is an opinion system under constant assault that must perpetually justify itself.
i agree with your assessment. Although there are some truths to those ideas, the way that you are presenting them suggests that they were presented to you far too rigidly. i wouldn't say that science is so much democratic as meritocratic - maybe even closer to an anarchy working on a principle similar to social darwinism, where selection is by virtue of the strengh of your logic and your experimental support. The cream really does rise to the top eventually, despite the claims that you mentioned. Yes, they may slow it down... for a little while... but to claim that they hold it back for any great length of time - or that they stop it! - is untenable. Kuhn emphasized a distinction between “ordinary science” and “revolutionary science” in which the cognitive paradigm is changed. High IQ’s work great for ordinary science, but in the face of the much more daunting task of spearheading a scientific revolution that changes paradigms, IQ is utterly useless without higher cognitive functions such as emotional intelligence and creativity.
The people with the highest EQs and highest creativity are definitely not attracted to science at all. Only dysfunctional geeks with high IQs go into science, anyone else with a high IQ goes into something with more social status. Scientists are notoriously low on the scale of social status and so science fails to attract hardly anyone with high EQ’s and high creativity. Given that the overturning of bad science that has become stale and out of date can only be done through revolutionary science, as Kuhn defines it, this cast a pall over your assertion that science has such a high degree of guarantee of being self-correcting.
It took more than 20 years for people to stop literally sneering at the notion that the Yucatan peninsula was a crater that dated the extinction of the dinosaurs. Egyptologists almost unanimously ignore the overwhelming evidence that the Sphinx is 10,000+ years old, even though geologists unanimously agree that it must be 10,000+. That has been going on for more than a decade and shows no sign of self-correction what-so-ever. The Aquatic Ape Theory is one of the best theories on early human evolution ever conceived, and yet it is also almost universally ignored, despite the overwhelming evidence in support of it.
Science is not even vaguely self correcting. Outside of engineering fields it is insane and fanatical in what it rejects. What it accepts is generally golden, it almost never comes up with false positives, but it is rife with false negatives. The fact that science rejects something means extremely little, it has an ancient history, unbroken to the present, of making an utter fool of itself over fanatical devotion to false negatives that it enshrines.
I think that some of these arguments about the objectivity of science, particularly from the "strong school", seem to me to be abusing Kuhn's original idea. I think that most people now accept Kuhn's view of paradigms being defended beyond their objective usefulness by groups of people who have invested heavily in the paradigm, and it is not until there is sufficient weight of evidence to cause a widespread breakdown of belief in the old paradigm that the paradigm shift happens. I have no problem with that.
I suspect that part of the problem is that I was trained as a physicist, with leanings towards the mathematical physics side, but this annoyed the hell out of some of the lecturers who believed that I was the best experimentalist in the year group. Physics has made huge progress in finding a detailed description of the world/universe. I suspect that is largely because it is strongly based in hard objective measurement that enables "Science" and the scientific method to work at its best.
Other subjects like biology, geology, paleontology, zoology and so on are in many ways much harder subjects to study scientifically - these subjects by their very nature are addressing much more complex and subtle systems than physics, and those systems are not separable to remove the complicating factors. Hence it is much harder to get clear objective evidence that is incontravertible in these subjects. It does not make these subjects in any way lesser subjects. Indeed, I think that physicists have just been lucky to work in a field where a relatively high degree of objectivity is possible.
Indi's comments about the paradigm controlling what questions get asked and what things get measured makes real sense. I would contend that a subject like physics is largely objective enough to be relatively free of this problem; other subjects like those I mentioned above are by their nature working at a relative disadvantage in terms of objectivity, and so are more likely to be prone to this problem.
mike1reynolds' comments about the Yucatan peninsula and so on would seem to me to support my argument - these examples are in subjects that are much harder to shake the foundations hard enough to break them, because the foundations themselves are comparatively flexible and tend to be adaptable enough to allow the dominant paradigms to blur, fudge or ignore inconvenient evidence. More objective hard sciences like physics now have hard foundations which are in a sense more brittle - the objectivity of the foundations means that cracks will be harder to cover up and contain.
I am not claiming that any subject is completely free of this effect - I would bet that it is present in every field to some degree. I would be very surprised if all subjects had this problem to an identical degree. It's just a hunch (with no hard evidence 
) that the subjects I worked in are less prone and those I didn't are more prone. But my own background must to some extent be colouring my views. Hence my concern that I am being too naive and simplistic in my assumptions - I like my foundations being challenged like this, even if it is a bit scary. I guess it's sort-of equivalent to soulfire's recent self-questioning - maybe I had too much faith in science's integrity. Hey-ho and on we go... I agree pretty much with what people are saying here. I think that any process involving human beings is by definition a social process, and I think that, like Indi says about paradigms and groupthink. A few scientific failures that are also success stories come to mind:
One is evolution. There are some big names on the Natural History Museum at the Univesity of Kansas, and many of them weren't evolutionists. Very intelligent people, like Louis Aggasiz (who was first to hypothesize the ice age and was a very important comparative zoologist) was also a staunch disbeliever in evolution, and the last of the old guard. Despite being a true visionary, he allowed his biases to guide him away from evolutionary theory (in the face of a mountain of evidence supporting the theory) and towards some unfortunate avenues, such as the racial classification scheme of humans. Nonetheless, evolution prevailed and Agassiz made many important contributions to science. His good ideas held up, and his bad ones faded from view.
An important transition occurred in the field of anthropology, which had been dominated for many years by stuffy, wealthy, and mostly male, British aristocrats. The cultural biases of these people colored the way they interpreted their observations. Recently, the cultural diversity of anthropologists has expanded considerably, and the field has benefitted.
I think the machine of scientific progress works well. To answer your questions about different disciplines, I think it does matter somewhat which department you are in and what your field is. In the case of ecology, many researchers are friendly towards one another, few researchers are hungry for power or fame, and egos are mostly in check. People seem to be genuinely motivated to enhance knowledge and make the world better. In my experience with clinical medicine, I would say that the situation can be different. Many high-profile research groups would quelch other research during the peer review process and scoop discoveries, or manipulate the process in other ways. Backstabbing rates were high, as were affairs with students, etc. Also, in the sciences social networking can be important and tiring. I was also at an Ivy League University, which makes a big difference (edit: I gathered this impression mostly through hearsay, not personal experience). Nonetheless, the quality and pace of advancement in medical science is simply astounding. I think the high-stakes atmosphere that breeds such intense academic competition also encourages the rapid progresson of ideas.
| make_life_better wrote: |
| I think that some of these arguments about the objectivity of science, particularly from the "strong school", seem to me to be abusing Kuhn's original idea. I think that most people now accept Kuhn's view of paradigms being defended beyond their objective usefulness by groups of people who have invested heavily in the paradigm, and it is not until there is sufficient weight of evidence to cause a widespread breakdown of belief in the old paradigm that the paradigm shift happens. I have no problem with that. |
Well, see, i never read Khun, i've just read about Khun, so i don't know precisely what Khun said. But the way it was explained to me is that it is not just an active defence of the old paradigm, as you imply, but also a case of intellectual inertia. To put it another way, yes, it's true that people do actively defend old theories far beyond their objective usefulness - but sometimes old theories stick around long after they have been shown to be problematic simply because people can't let go of the old one. Until someone comes along who is thinking outside of the box, everyone is trapped inside the box - not because they are doggedly holding onto old ideas, but because they just haven't wrapped their head around the new idea.
| make_life_better wrote: |
I suspect that part of the problem is that I was trained as a physicist, with leanings towards the mathematical physics side, but this annoyed the hell out of some of the lecturers who believed that I was the best experimentalist in the year group. Physics has made huge progress in finding a detailed description of the world/universe. I suspect that is largely because it is strongly based in hard objective measurement that enables "Science" and the scientific method to work at its best.
Other subjects like biology, geology, paleontology, zoology and so on are in many ways much harder subjects to study scientifically - these subjects by their very nature are addressing much more complex and subtle systems than physics, and those systems are not separable to remove the complicating factors. Hence it is much harder to get clear objective evidence that is incontravertible in these subjects. It does not make these subjects in any way lesser subjects. Indeed, I think that physicists have just been lucky to work in a field where a relatively high degree of objectivity is possible.
Indi's comments about the paradigm controlling what questions get asked and what things get measured makes real sense. I would contend that a subject like physics is largely objective enough to be relatively free of this problem; other subjects like those I mentioned above are by their nature working at a relative disadvantage in terms of objectivity, and so are more likely to be prone to this problem. |
That may be true. i mean, it is true that physics is a more fundamentally-based field than most, in that it operates with a very small set of first principles and empirical facts as the basis of it. But i don't see that it necessarily follows that that makes it less susceptible to mental pit-traps. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; i really can't say for sure either way.
What is clear is that physics is not immune. Most of the 19th century was spent stuck debating the idea of what light was, asking the question: "is it a particle or a wave? because it can't be both." That was until people like de Broglie came along and said: "... why not?" and introduced the concept of wave packets. Similarly, heat was believed to be a massless, invisible fluid called "caloric", all the way up to the mid-19th, when the kinetic theory was first proposed. But even then, people clung to the idea of caloric even as far as the turn of the century (and by people i mean physicists, writing scholarly papers even at that point), because atoms were believed to be only theoretical constructs, and the idea of a vibrating atomic crystal lattice sounded ludicrous (remember, atoms and the kinetic theory were really not experimentally verified until Einstein figured out Brownian motion in 1905 - it was only then that it could be confirmed that heat is equivalent to molecular kinetic energy). Those people did not cling to caloric because they had vested interest in the theory, they did it because their minds could not allow them to think in terms of atomic lattices.
And who knows, we may be stuck in intellectual ruts even today, just waiting for an intellectual maverick to come along and say something like: "but if you assume that c constant and time is relative - rather than the other way around - everything makes sense!" (as Einstein did). We can't get quantum physics and relativity to work together because (among other things), relativity does not allow an absolute reference frame and the standard model of particle physics requires one, and we can't figure out how to overcome that hurdle... but maybe someone will come along in the next few decades and say: "hey, that's not really a hurdle at all... just look at it this way...." and we'll have ourselves a grand unified theory.
My point is that so far i've seen everyone assuming that clinging to old paradigms is a matter of will. i'm not convinced. i think that clinging to old paradigms is more a matter of being unable - not unwilling - to think in the new paradigm.
| Gagnar The Unruly wrote: |
| I think that any process involving human beings is by definition a social process, and I think that, like Indi says about paradigms and groupthink. |
i can't take credit for that - it's what i thought Khun was saying.
and i do agree with both you and make_life_better that groupthink is indeed a factor in retarding progress by making the scientific community hold on to paradigms that should have, by all rights, been abandoned. But i don't agree that that is the only cause of it... nor even the major cause of it. (Or rather, maybe make_life_better has a point: maybe groupthink is not a major factor in physics, but is the more dominant factor in other sciences with more complex fields of study, like biology or anthropology.)I don't see groupthink as being a big problem in biology. If anything, the absence of hard and fast rules tends to mean that people feel a bit more flexible. I won't say that there's no intellectual inertia, but people on a whole seem to get pretty excited about new ideas. Ecology is an interesting science because it's very difficult to make generalizing statements, as complexity leads to high system-specificity. For that reason, people tend to get pretty excited when someone comes up with something that seems to be a more general principle -- and then they proceed to dig into it and look for system-specific exceptions .
I can think of a few examples in plant biology where the community is slow to adjust to new paradigms. One is the notion that plant abundance is controlled by only three interactions:
1) top down control by herbivores
2) competition with other species of plants
3) abiotic restrictions
Plant biology is undergoing a sort of revolution with the discovery of trophic cascades (predators in a system can increase plant abundance by reducing herbivory -- pretty well accepted), and that top down control may not be that important after all. Also, people realized that plants can actually influence their abiotic environment by enriching or depleting the soil 'on purpose' (also reasonably well accepted). Less well accepted is the idea that plant interactions are more dynamic than pure competition (community assembly theory) would suggest.
Plants can actually communicate the presence of herbivores to other plants of different species and wage war against other plants by the release of allelochemicals. Also, researchers tend to rank the competitive ability of plants in an ecosystem according to a rigid scale, assuming that the plants at the top dominate *all* plants below them, when in fact, in a given ecosystem, there may be more of a rock-paper-scissors effect. These ideas have been slow to catch on, despite the fact that I think they would be pretty obvious to a layperson. However, intrepid graduate students intent on upsetting paradigms and publishing in prestigious journals are hard at work debunking all the old theories. I think that for the most part, unsound dogmatically held theories have half lives not bigger than a decade or two. And, for the most part, I think people are pretty accepting of new and exciting ideas.
