Hello,
One of my dearest friends asked me my thoughts on this recent newsletter by Jason Crawford called “What does it mean ‘trust’ science?” on his Roots of Progress newsletter. Truthfully, something so big, vague, and encompassing as this question gets my brain going in a way that I sometimes don’t like. I immediately start to think about the motivation that some people have when asking this question. Or, I obsess and focus on how the word “trust” is weaponized and turned into “faith” or capital-t Trust. I become focused on the people asking the question; by my eyes, almost always people with political agendas nitpicking or creating reductive strawmen to attack people who say that “in this house we trust science” as if the people living in those houses are suddenly automatons who aren’t merely just signaling a certain mood affiliation. But, I have decided to just give a straightforward answer.
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Science is the best set of tools that we have discovered to make sense of the world. When followed through, the scientific method allows to discover causation, mechanisms, breakthroughs, actionable, practical knowledge; facts or probabilistically reliable predictions. Or, as the subtitle of a recent textbook on the scientific method expresses: science is how we find useful knowledge about ourselves and how our bodies and brains work; about how pollutants impact our nervous system and can increase the odds of getting certain cancers; about how cognitive biases turn us into lawyers when making decisions instead of scientists, for example. Speculation and imagination based on plausible theories can be proto-scientific or a type of science. That is true even for social scientists: we had to first assess, using knowledge that came before us, whether our hypotheses or models were plausible even on the surface; this is through surface validity checks. Ultimately, hypotheses need to be testable in some way. Methodology matters. Study design matters. Without a doubt, the best critics and those really trying to shore-up and to keep pushing institutions and practicioners to be more rigorous and not subject to conflicts of interest are inside the institutions themselves. My advice: pick a field, try to go to a conference, and watch how closely each one of the presenters is picked-over by panelists, moderators, and discussants.
Almost without exception, the scientific method is the only game in town if we want measurable, falsifiable, empirical data to help us learn about what is true. It has built-in fact-checking and self-correcting mechanisms. There are 1000s of fields, sub-fields, journals, institutions, both formal and informal, that, for the most part, polices itself - for some good reasons (commitment to actual discoveries and knowledge; healthy collegial competition; and to improve the human condition) and some more ambiguous reasons (prestige, unhealthy selfish competition, money, status, etc.) To me, statistical analysis is scientific, so are the study of formal logic and critical thinking. Rationality, as Stephen Pinker puts it, should be our lodestar. Evidence-based reasoning applied through credible theories is the culture I live in and I evangelize for it as much as I can (Even during casual conversations to the chagrin of my conversation partners, sometimes.)
And, by the way, I completely agree with Naomi Oreskes in her wonderful book called Why Trust Science? (2019) that I read before teaching Introduction to Political Analysis, that the very nature of science being a social enterprise is a good thing (i.e., a thing we can trust), not a bad thing. Consensus really can be wrong (her examples in the book are the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the caloric theory of heat, classical mechanics (useful but now considered approximate), and the contraction theory of earth); but, over time, modern science can and does produce consensus that can become quite reliable or trustworthy, such as what we currently see in climatology, virology and immunology. I also agree, with some caveats, with Sam Harris that “science can determine human values” though he tries to make this Objective but he smuggles in the idea of human-flourishing-that-any-reasonable-person-would-agree-with as Objective. I digress. That is for another discussion at another time.
In the end, scientists can have agendas because they are people and people hold values and have self-interest. Science qua science is the only game in town, just like evolution through natural and sexual selection is the only game in town for understanding the story of us.
- Patrick M. Foran