Governance
Back to Emptier I mean Fuller. From the morning session this time.
It is, in fact, very easy, as it were, for
things to fall out that, in a sense, the boundary
between science and non-science isn’t something one can
ever take for granted. It is actively being negotiated
at all times because there are all kinds of people who
are trying to make claims that what they’re doing is
scientific. Insofar as science is the most authoritative body
of knowledge in society. So in that respect, there’s a
kind of policing, you might say, and an occasional
negotiation of the boundary that takes place.
Yes, very true. There certainly are all kinds of people who
are trying to make claims that what they’re doing is
scientific. And there are also all kinds of people who amuse themselves by trying to create suspicions about the whole arrangement via words like ‘policing’ and ‘boundary’ and ‘authoritative’. (No doubt the next generation of Science Studies whizzers will be talking in terms of handcuffs and cells and torture and lethal injections. Why not.)
Q. Does the text Governance of Science speak to the
role of peer review in science?A. Well, yes. And one of the things that it says is
that, while the scientific community is nominally
governed by a peer review process, as a matter of fact,
relatively few scientists ever participate in it. So if one were to look at the structure of
science from a sort of, you might say, political science
standpoint, and ask, well, what kind of regime governs
science, it wouldn’t be a democracy in the sense that
everyone has an equal say, or even that there are clear
representative bodies in terms of which the bulk of the
scientific community, as it were, could turn to and who
would then, in turn, be held accountable.
There is a tendency, in fact, for science to be
governed by a kind of, to put it bluntly, self-perpetuating elite.
Now what I want to know is, why would one want to look at the ‘structure’ of science from a political science standpoint? Is science supposed to be a form of politics? Is political science a relevant way to study the structure of science? It doesn’t seem very relevant to me – at least not in the usual sense of political science. I can certainly believe there is plenty of ‘political’ maneuvering and manipulation in science, as in any vocation, profession, workplace, group of people; and that that kind of thing is eminently worth looking at. But is that what’s meant by political science? I don’t think so. I think political science is about governance, and government. That’s a different subject. (So we have here another example of mission creep, and of changing the subject.) And that matters, because the reality is that science isn’t supposed to be ‘a democracy in the sense that everyone has an equal say’. For obvious reasons. Scientific results aren’t supposed to be reached by a vote; scientific questions aren’t supposed to be decided by majority rule. (Except on juries. Which can be a real problem…a problem which illustrates the problems with the basic idea.) Mistakes don’t turn into non-mistakes simply because a lot of people think they should.
Time for another cheap shot;
‘It is, in fact, very easy, as it were, for things to fall out that, in a sense…’
God, the man’s another Clarence Darrow.
And Heaven forbid that science have an elite which takes a cold, scientific look at ‘all kinds of people who are trying to make claims that what they’re doing is scientific.’
Meet them every day. Some of them are sociologists.
I know. There are quite a few ‘kind of’s and the like, too. For a teacher he’s not a brilliant talker. But I’ve cut him a little slack on that because it’s probably not easy to testify in court.
But then he should have stayed home!
ELITE!
HACK! HISSS! BOOO!
I think this guy is onto something here. If science is subject to voting like , oh, American Idol, we would have no trouble getting approval of acts like changing raw data to suit orthodoxies….
So majoritarians could say with perfect scientific veracity that the evidence supports creation…
that science supports gun control…
that science supports not vaccinating your children…
that science supports false allegations of rape and child molesting…
All because I and Joe Bob can just SMS our votes to 1900 666 666 to PROVE COLD FUSION!
This is bizarre stuff. I understand that Fuller works in a university department. Presumably when they have a post to fill, they advertise, interview the most promising applicants, and then appoint the one they think is the best. In other words, they are a ‘self-perpetuating elite’. Or maybe they just pick the first person who comes in off the street in order to avoid such elitism.
Fuller is very clear about the methods of science studies sociologists:
“We apply the theories and methods of the humanities and social sciences to the work of natural scientists and technologist… We observe them in their workplaces, interpret their documents, and propose explanations for their activities that make sense of them…”
For this he doesn’t think knowledge of the subject matter in question is a prerequisite for understanding the development of science, only “ambient political, economic and cultural factors”. Like many another science studies sociologist, he believes he can “interpret their documents” without knowledge of the science itself.
http://members.tripod.com/~ScienceWars/indoo.html
Here’s a jaw-dropper. Fuller defends his testimony in a letter to UK tech webzine “The Register” here (need to scroll down):
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/28/letters_2810/
on the basis that many well-known historical scientists were theists and came up with their ideas from a mental framework that included the existence of god.
Fuller writes:
“Contemporary ID defenders have yet to reconnect fully with this history – I suspect, more for religious than scientific reasons: After all, once you assume the mind of God, you also assume his sense of responsibility for what happens in nature!”
Fuller’s fails to grasp the difference between scientists who believed that a deity created the *original* order of nature, and the ID crowd who believe that at a later stage an “intelligence” (let’s call it “God”) interceded to arrange things aright to make them function.
Phil:
I wish it were a jaw-dropper. Unfortunately it’s no worse than what he said in the witness-box.
To ever so slightly support Fuller, it is certainly true that in some fields, possibly they have to be at the smaller end, there is something of a distortion of the research agenda by a small number of influential and powerful individuals – individuals who are influential and powerful largely through institutional forces.
On the plus side, even these individuals don’t govern by divine fiat, obfuscation and just plain projectile smugness like Fuller and his fellow tenured radicals in the woolly end of the academy.
i believe that all Ph.D. physicists who publish in peer-reviewed journals also participate in peer review, often multiple times per year. your mileage may vary, but certainly physicists from dozens of universities are involved in review of any one subfield.
Having looked through this again I’ve just had a chill down my back. I have always realised that there was a *theoretical* link between postmodernism and pseudo- science but I never really thought that someone would actually go out of their way to support rubbish such as ID. I believed that they were just trying to show off.
What is even more terrifying is the political link between supposedly leftist SSK types and creationists. This is a genuine alliance against rationality.
(Am I getting paranoid here?)
MKJ:
No, not the slightest bit paranoid. I got that chill down my back many years ago. Not everyone on that side is in on the conspiracy part, nor do I think that all the elements were forged with an eye towards the purpose they are now serving (that’d be ID, wouldn’t it?), but you haven’t exaggerated one whit in describing it as a genuine alliance against rationality.
Why is the classroom such an important battleground? Why aren’t they satisfied with being able to propagandise amongst the adult population to their hearts’ content? Because they want an unfair advantage in influencing minds not yet fully formed. Their own children get it from infancy in their own households and it hasn’t sufficed to turn the U.S. into a genuine theocracy. Therefore they must campaign for the right to ram it down other children’s throats. “Live and let live” isn’t in their vocabulary. As long as we’re not beaten and subservient to religious dogma which we dare not question at the risk of our lives, their fight isn’t over.
No, not all of them talk like that and no, not all of them think like that. But that’s exactly how things used to be and they are all trying to turn the clock back. Think evolutionary principles here. How could one animal turn into another that looks utterly different? Step by tiny step. That’s how we could get from where we are now to a nightmare scenario. The difference being that social upheaval doesn’t require the amounts of time that evolution does. Where it may take millions of years for a biological feature to appear or become redundant, one can remove an entire element from human society in a very short space of time indeed. People like us, that is…
Here’s something I can’t understand.
Fuller and his ilk feel free to pontificate about what scientists are doing. How do they know that what they say about scientists is correct? Presumably they look at the evidence to back up or disprove theories of this sort.
Which is the proper way to decide the correctness of ideas like those of Fuller’s. So why do they, by implication if not explicitly, denigrate scientists for testing scientific theories against the evidence? Why do they think science is all about politics and power and not about a search for correct theories about physical reality?
Because that’s how they themselves are trying to get the power they accuse the scientists of having.
Grossly oversimplified: one bunch of guys collects information from observation, experiments etc. over many, many centuries. They make mistakes, of course, but they establish a discipline that is by nature self-correcting and an enormous body of knowledge. Absolutely, some power goes with that and some of it is bound to be abused, but there are checks and balances as in every system and even the most corrupt person entering it cannot usually survive indefinitely because results are required, things have to work. Atomic bombs have to go off, probes have to hit comets. If these things don’t work, if a space shuttle incinerates on re-entry, killing everyone on board, there are enquiries into why (when was the last time the Vatican launched an internal enquiry because the pope called for world peace and it didn’t happen?). Deep down, most people know this, but, for all kinds of reasons, want to have their cake and eat it. I can’t remember who said this first, maybe Michael Shermer, but a good example is Prince Charles, who is forever backing alternative medicine, yet does not fly around in a helicopter powered by homeopathically diluted fuel.
Anyway, with this in place, another bunch of guys come along who don’t have any of the scientists’ knowledge, never did any of the experiments, and they look only at the power aspect of it. Just as some of their colleagues can deduce, from the fact that people are hungry in Africa, that the West is evil, so they take it upon themselves to construct an entire scenario based only what they can see and people like Fuller freely admit that this does not include understanding what scientists do, only an external observation of how he thinks they do it. When they really get going, as is now happening in Dover, everyone with a beef against science, for whatever reason, becomes their natural ally. Has anything been more responsible for religion’s loss of temporal power in the last century and a half than science? I doubt it. So they are really hopping mad and itching for payback time.
Even simpler: one bunch of kids is playing a very complicated game with rules outsiders don’t understand. Some of the other kids are in awe of how the game always works out, but another bunch is really pissed off, to the point that the only thing they care about is ruining the game. They tell all the kids who belong to neither group that the game doesn’t actually mean anything and it’s all a social trick to exclude kids they didn’t feel like initiating. The emotional force they thus stir up in those kids can overwhelm things to the point that the entire game is ruined.
Basically, po-mo bullshit does exactly what it accuses science of doing, creates a game with its own vocabulary and inner clique and pretends to mean something, intimidating those who don’t understand and playing exactly the kind of power politics it spends all its time accusing others of doing. The difference being, unlike science, it has no comparable base of knowledge and it really is just a charade for the benefit of a self-perpetuating elite.
Stewart- I agree. I suppose it is the overwhelming realization that they (e.g. Fuller et al.) actually believe what they say and are prepared to stand up in court and say it. This is even though they are trashing something which, by their own admision, they don’t understand and which they must know is valuable.
Paul Power- I think that Fuller is trying to ignore the paradox you have put forward. Fuller acts like a “useful idiot” for the creationists. Once they have censored evolutionary ideas then there is nothing to stop them using the same arguments to silence him.
Bingo, MKJ!
That’s the one point on which Fuller is being stupidly irresponsible. He’s happily whacking away at the science establishment, enjoying the fact that the religious kooks are helping him get a higher profile because they seem to have a common enemy right now. He’s not following this all the way down the slippery slope to where (with a little bit of his help) they’ve won the battle and his remains the most secular voice around, “so thanks, Steve and goodbye. Au revoir is inappropriate, because we’ll be sitting at the right hand of god and you’ll be in conscious torment for eternity.” There are friends of his friends who could tell him that to his face right now, but the middlemen prefer not to make such introductions prematurely.
It’s too easy to dismiss such scenarios as panic-mongering, but look at it step by step and what is to stop it (Scalito to the rescue?). The biggest delusion is to pretend there aren’t a lot of people who want that – just that – and that nothing but their present lack of power stands in their way.
Stewart wrote: “Because that’s how they themselves are trying to get the power they accuse the scientists of having.”.
Which leads to the obvious question: has anyone ever done Fuller’s sort of analysis on the activities of people like Fuller himself?
I do not feel qualified to answer that. We’re doing it in a very small way here. But if “people like Fuller” is defined broadly enough, then, yes, you have Gross & Levitt and all the fall-out from the Sokal “Social Text” hoax, including his book with Bricmont. And if you look at what Fuller’s been writing since the mid-Nineties, he’s positively in love with science compared to his attitude to these guys. Look at the words surrounding the name “Sokal” in a piece by Fuller and you can practically smell the venom. He knows these guys are his worst nightmare, the ones who take the trouble to show his ilk up for what they are. They’ve largely limited themselves to those who’ve misused scientific terms they know nothing about (I just have to think of turbulent flow and Irigaray to start laughing), but it’s arguable that their work has done some of the weakening of po-mo’s stranglehold over the last decade.
The SSK-on-SSK move has already been done, by an SSKer in fact, it’s Malcolm Ashmore’s “The Reflexive Thesis”, way back in 1989.
There’s also a bit of SSK-on-SSK-ers in a forthcoming book with the mellifluous title Why Truth Matters – Continuum, February 2005. In fact it even points out the amusing circularity of it all – I believe there’s a reference to a snake swallowing its own tail, and something about ‘here we all are, sniffing out one another’s motives.’ But fair’s fair, after all…
2006, stupid, not 2005.
I’ll correct it later. This new database takes hours, so I’ll do it later.
Whew, what a relief. I was beginning to fear I’d have no excuse for not yet having read it…
This is all very interesting, Opelia, but what the hell does it have to do with Feng Shui?
At last! Something MikeS won’t volunteer for. Or…
Sayeth Fuller:
“You just can’t count on three or four people and somehow expect them to spontaneously generate followers, especially when they’re being constantly criticised by the establishment.
You have to provide openings and opportunities where in principle new recruits to the theory could be brought about. And, of course, the way to do it, the most straightforward way is by making people aware of it early on, and to show promise, not to mandate it, but to show that it’s there. Take it or leave it.
And some will take it. And they may go on and develop it further. And then you’ll see the full fruits of the theory down the line. But unless you put it into the school system, it’s not going to happen spontaneously from the way in which science has been developing at this point”.
Reading Fuller’s testimony has been a surreal experience. His claim that unorthodox scientific theories don’t get an honest hearing from the dreaded ‘Science Establishment’ and so need special support in school science class is both ridiculous and ignorant. In the context of his defence of ‘Intelligent Design’, this statement is also profoundly disingenuous because ‘Intelligent Design’ is not a scientific theory.
But look Steve, when for example Peter Mitchell proposed the chemiosmotic hypothesis he initially had quite a hard time (see: http://www.life.uiuc.edu/crofts/bioph354/mitchell.html). Crucially however, he didn’t go whining to his lawyer demanding equal time in infant school lessons, he just did some really neat experiments. In other words, he and an increasing number like-minded researchers built their case by the hard slog of accumulating empirical evidence. Guess what? He eventually won the Nobel Prize.
I work in the biochemistry department of a major UK university. The other day I asked a random collection of my colleagues (including some with FRS to their name) if they had ever heard of Steve Fuller. Nobody knew who he was or what he was claiming. The blunt truth is that Fuller is a charlatan who has had a (thankfully) negligible influence on the way real science is conduced in real science departments.
“Scientific results aren’t supposed to be reached by a vote; scientific questions aren’t supposed to be decided by majority rule.”
I’m not sure what this means. If by scientific results you mean the results of experiments, majority rule certain is the rule. Those experiments that can’t be reproduced by competent individuals are not accepted by the majority, and are not incorporated into science. If you think otherwise, I have some cold fusion stock to sell you.
If by scientific result you mean theorizing, again, science history shows us that science works by shifts in the majority opinion of scientists. And, much like a jury, that opinion can be swayed for long periods of time by authority.
Let’s take an example. As is well known, Newton thought light was particulate. In the Optiks, although he takes up some incongruencies in his theory, he still opts against Huygens oscillatory theory. Now, when Thomas Young showed that light waves interfere with each other, was this greeted as the definitive overturning of the Newtonian view? By no means. Thomas Young was an outsider, and he was pretty roundly denounced. Also, his results were not mathematical. So when Fresnel produced the mathematics for them, were these “scientific results ” accepted? No. Why? Because the majority of scientists thought that the results defied the authority of Newton, which by this time — the early 19th century — had gelled into orthodoxy.
Do we think Fresnel and Young were right because they were the only people capable of seeing the interference of light waves with each other? If that were so, they would still be roundly rejected. Many a crank has produced exceptional results that only exceptional people can see. No, the objection was gradually overcome, and in particular after Arago showed the interference pattern experimentally to one of the great objectors, Poisson — the Poisson distribution guy.
This little slice of history is rather famous, due to Arago’s experiment — one of the least ambiguous experiments in history. But the whole structure — the struggle about competence and over authority — is as accessible as any other struggle to political analysis. If you don’t think so, tell me: why was Young’s “result” rejected? and Fresnel’s math?
To tell you the truth, I don’t understand what countering image of science you are presenting, or how that image could possibly account for what we know of the history of science.
PS — I should note that, since Young’s day, statistics have become an integral part of the experimental method — another example of majority rule being incorporated into science, since ‘scientific results” are not tied to one single experimental instance, but variations in experimental results tend towards some mean, which is taken to be the truth of the experiment.
“Those experiments that can’t be reproduced by competent individuals are not accepted by the majority, and are not incorporated into science.”
That’s what I mean. By ‘majority vote’ I meant the electoral kind – I meant democracy. Pure preference as opposed to expectation of reproduction of experiments by competent individuals. Referendum. Ballot initiatives. Majority will in the sense of a majority of the entire population, regardless of qualifications.
“But the whole structure — the struggle about competence and over authority — is as accessible as any other struggle to political analysis.”
Sure; I said that.
“But look Steve, when for example Peter Mitchell proposed the chemiosmotic hypothesis he initially had quite a hard time (see: http://www.life.uiuc.edu/crofts/bioph354/mitchell.html). Crucially however, he didn’t go whining to his lawyer demanding equal time in infant school lessons, he just did some really neat experiments. In other words, he and an increasing number like-minded researchers built their case by the hard slog of accumulating empirical evidence. Guess what? He eventually won the Nobel Prize.”
That kind of majority is the right kind for the task. It’s the electoral kind that isn’t.
OB — Actually, if political action were all about whining to your lawyer for equal time in infant school — a caricature of a caricature — then science would be in danger, since, in effect, we would live in a howling anarchy in which man was wolf to man. In actuality, when Exxon sues El Paso Gas or when the SEC regulates a stock rule, what do they do? Is it like a lawyer and infant time, or do they consider — testimony from supposed experts? Consequences of hypotheticals? Proof, and degrees of it? And what happens when a grad student in, say, biochemistry, makes an experiment? Does he go to a representative, say, the prof who is supervising his project? Does that prof “whiningly” represent his work to others?
I can understand arguing against Fuller’s version of the history of science — myself, I thought his book on Kuhn was entertaining, but ultimately not convincing. But to argue against him on this level only demeans the arguments against him, since it absolutely caricatures both terms of the analogy.
The phrase — “the hard slog of accumulating empirical evidence” sounds pretty, but I would bet dollars to donuts that it is misleading in the extreme. What happens is empirical evidence is modeled, with different models giving us different ways of contextualizing that evidence. Myself, I like Nancy Cartwright on this issue, but even the most hardcore scientific realist doesn’t throw around the term ’empirical evidence” as if this was an argument killer. Your theory of science is much to narrow, in my opinion, to explain what science does or how it works. If this is really the position you are defending.
“even the most hardcore scientific realist doesn’t throw around the term ’empirical evidence” as if this was an argument killer”
That must be why we all have cars running on cold fusion, I suppose
Roger worte: “If by scientific result you mean theorizing, again, science history shows us that science works by shifts in the majority opinion of scientists”.
No . Completely wrong. It’s when science does not work that opinions matter. Newton’s optics could not explain certain obseved phenomena so was dumped. Just because it was not dumped overnight, or because certain individuals were extremely reluctant to change their opinion, does not change the reality that it was the incompatibility of theory and experiment that did for Newton.
Roger writes of the early wave vs particle debate on the nature of light:
>This little slice of history is rather famous, due to Arago’s experiment — one of the least ambiguous experiments in history. But the whole structure — the struggle about competence and over authority — is as accessible as any other struggle to political analysis. If you don’t think so, tell me: why was Young’s “result” rejected? and Fresnel’s math?< Leaving aside that these things always appear more clearcut in hindsight than at the time, of course specific debates in science bring in human behavioural propensities, including the negative aspects. But as Roger intimates, experimental results play a crucial role in the process (sooner or later). The problem with so many people in the field of science studies is that they believe the process of arriving at a scientific consensus can be understood without detailed knowledge of the scientific issue in question. Thus Fuller writes that the direction taken in a scientific discipline is the result of “ambient political, economic and cultural factors” – period.
http://members.tripod.com/~ScienceWars/indoo.html
Roger writes:
>the struggle about competence and over authority — is as accessible as any other struggle to political analysis.< The problem is that if you decide to look at a scientific dispute by “political analysis” you will find what you are seeking – an explanation in terms of socio-political factors. What it leaves out are scientific factors that played a role. No one disputes that Newton’s immense authority was a major influence on the wave vs particle dispute, but scientific factors also came into play, such as phenomena not at the time explicable by the wave theory.
If I may perform a similar analysis on this discussion, but without all the jargon, I don’t see anybody trying to deny that power, prestige and reputations have had their influence on science, but I do see Roger not paying a lot of attention to the fact that Fuller is trying to tell us that nothing else matters, that there is actually no science beyond what he sees being controlled by an elite and wishes to throw open to democratic debate, in the sense of all opinions having equal weight, whether they know anything about anything or not.
6 tubes of… no, that would be substance abuse and thus off topic, because, if I have not missed the point entirely, we are dealing with the insubstantiality of Steve Fuller’s vacuous drivel – which is obviously insubstance abuse.
There has been some adverse comment on how Fuller et al think they can study scientific activity without understanding the underlying science.
I think Fuller et al are right in this regard, but err in their implementation of their policy. Their mistake is to assume that because understanding the science is unimportant to those studying scientists, the science must have no importance to the scientists themselves. This leads them to ignore that science is an activity with a purpose, and that the activities of scientists must be judged against that purpose.
What do I think them right in principle? Because science is done in the open. It’s “rules”, however uncodified, are available to everyone. One can examine scientists’ behaviour to see how “well behaved” in terms of those rules scientists are. An abuse of the rules can be detected by a non-expert. For example, as arguments from authority do not hold final sway in science, a scientist dismissing another’s ideas by invoking his authority is invalid by science’s rules and such a manoeuvre is easily spotted by a non-expert.
Of course there are limits to how much scientific activity can be understood by a non-expert. An understanding and appreciation of the “scientific method” is a bare minimum requirement.
Heck, it’s not as if Fuller’s even saying “I’ve done the work, found good evidence ID is as valid as evolution and they’re shutting me out.” He’s claiming that science can shut out good ideas and wants kid gloves for this particular one in spite of the fact that he doesn’t claim to know the science and admits that the ones making scientific claims for it have also come up with diddleysquat (did I spell that correctly, Karl?). I think these are scientifically valid reasons to mock Fuller mercilessly.
“There has been some adverse comment on how Fuller et al think they can study scientific activity without understanding the underlying science. I think Fuller et al are right in this regard.”
Yeah, so do I. Susan Haack, Philip Kitcher, James Robert Brown, and even Barnes and Bloor (at times) have useful things to say on all this. Sure, it is possible to bracket the content of scientific disputes in order to examine other factors – politics, interests, status, authority, etc. Possible and also useful. But then you need to be clear about the bracketing. You need to refrain from pretending that your examination of the extra-bracket matters qualifies you to examine the bracketed matters. Fuller explicitly says that he is not qualified – he hasn’t even read the damn Pandas and People book – so he should not be testifying in a court case about the stuff inside the brackets, on account of how he doesn’t know enough about it.
Paul, I was amused by this: “Roger worte: “If by scientific result you mean theorizing, again, science history shows us that science works by shifts in the majority opinion of scientists”.
No . Completely wrong. It’s when science does not work that opinions matter. Newton’s optics could not explain certain obseved phenomena so was dumped. Just because it was not dumped overnight…” Yeah, Newton’s theory did last a little more than overnight — it lasted one hundred years.
The point is that science is a mix of several things — authority, observation, plausibility, correction, modeling, simulation, etc. As we all know, Newton’s corpuscular theory got revived later, for quite different reasons. But the reason that Newton didn’t adopt the wave theory in the first place was not that he lacked observations or even a model that might have directed him in that direction. It was because he distrusted the method that Huyghens and the Continental virtuosi used to make their claims. For him, a method that deducted from hypotheses couldn’t be right — which is why he famously claimed to coin no hypotheses himself.
This isn’t just a disagreement of opinion — this is an entirely tenable stance, and we see it repeated again and again in science. For instance, in Einstein’s objection to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
To call this all “empirical research” is to use words in a magical sense, with empirical used not as a descriptive, but as a value term — rather like the way advertisers use the term “natural”.
I mentioned Arago because, of all experiments in science, this is the one that comes closest to Bacon’s experimentum crucis. Newton thought that his own observations that undermined the ancient theory of color was exactly that kind of experiment, but he found that scientists actually argue about what, exactly, experiments prove. Interestingly, even Arago’s experiment, which produced exactly the kind of phenomenon that the opponents of the wave theory had said couldn’t be produced, didn’t convince all parties.
Much of the question of what is going on in science from the perspective of “hindsight” — otherwise known as empirical research in history — is not something one would expect the average scientist to have an informed opinion about. Why should he? But scientists often do have opinions on the subject, usually self justifying ones. Well, I don’t think ignorance of a subject qualifies one as an expert on it, or even produces a higher grade of snark.
That said, you are of course right about the openness of science — a point I made several times. However, the history of science — which is a relatively young thing — does not, contra your claim, show that authority has no standing in science. Science changes — but almost all forms of discourse change. That authority doesn’t pose a final limit in science doesn’t mean that authority has no place in science. Authority doesn’t have a final place in, say, rock and roll, or in law, or in almost any genre of human action. Even in a pseudo-science like Christian theology, authority is questioned. If you don’t believe me, look at the history of the Protestant reformation.
Myself, I doubt there is a rule for deciding when the conflict between authority and the “rules” — the accumulation of evidence from experiment, the production of mathematical models that would explain this evidence, etc. — overturns authority and re-instates a new authority. But I do know that the history of science would be incomprehensible if one pretended that authority doesn’t have a structurally legitimate place in science.
But no one is claiming that authority has no legitimate place in science. Open authority, revisable authority, checkable authority, but still authority. It has to, if only because no one can know everything. Working scientists have to take a lot of things on trust, i.e. via authority. So…what’s the disagreement?
There probably isn’t one, unless Roger is saying things should start off in classrooms and then proceed to general acceptance or that everyone in the world should have an equal voice in the scientific process, neither of which I have heard him say.
ob, I’d totally agree with your sentence that “Open authority, revisable authority, checkable authority, but still authority” has a place in science. (Actually, this also describes authority in other realms too). What is in dispute, I think, is how one should do history of science, given our agreement about what constitutes the basic mix of science. There is a whig version of that history that would go: science moves towards an ideal of enquiry, and that movement is the main story of science. Another version, however, would go that this is a misleading way to do history of science since it leads to subordination or elimination of too many elements from that history, and it posits a sort of transcendental tropism that doesn’t seem to have any specific material mechanism as its vehicle. The whig version of science does have the advantage that it constructs science as a distinct whole. But the anti-whig school has the advantage that case studies of science do not seem to fit the whig model at all.
That, I think, is what the dispute is about. Okay, enough in this comment thread from me. Interesting discussion.
“But the anti-whig school has the advantage that case studies of science do not seem to fit the whig model at all.”
Many 20th/21st Century examples?
Hmm. But there is also what one might call a whig-when-applicable version of that history that would go: science generally progresses because it builds on and corrects knowledge, but it doesn’t invariably progress at any particular time because it is fallible and the wheels sometimes come off.
Neither whig nor anti-whig, in other words.
Don’t shoot me down about what follows; I’m very aware of the differences between it and the Fuller etc. business. I just happened to rediscover it and thought it makes an interesting comparison on the subject of what people do, how they do it and why they do it.
It’s from Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves,” at the point where he’s explaining that using (or being used by) a meme and thinking are not mutually exclusive. He prefaces it with “A parody will expose the fallacy.”
“The people at Boeing are under the ludicrous misapprehension that they have figured out the design of their planes on sound scientific and engineering principles, and proven rigorously that the designs are as they should be, when in fact memetics shows us that all these design elements are simply the memes that have survived and spread among the social groups to which those airplane manufacturers belong.”
1) Modern science is very different to that practised in the 19th century so it is not on to invoke controversies of that time to describe the workings of modern science.
2) When I wrote that arguments have no final sway in science, I really meant that word “final”. We – scientists and non-experts alike – may accept someone’s expert authority as a heuristic to ignore a theory from an unheralded source, but ultimately it’s up to experiment to sort the good ideas from the bad. At some point a theory will make a prediction different from every other theory and on that point it can be tested, always assuming it is compatible with what we already have found by previous experiments.
Let’s get back to what Fuller actually said in the witness box:
“Q. And as we wrap up here, let me ask you, first of all, I mean, do you see intelligent design as religion?
A. No
Q. Do you see intelligent design as science?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you see intelligent design as at least holding out the prospect for scientific advance?
A. Yes.”
Is there anybody here who doesn’t recognise Fuller’s testimony as jaw-dropping nonsense? Rule number one in this science thing is that we’re not allowed to invoke the supernatural. Otherwise all bets are off. You don’t understand how insulin signalling works? Well, maybe there’s a wee pixie sitting on the fat cell membrane that bangs the insulin receptor with a magic hammer. Yes, yes I know this is an absurd example and deliberately chosen as such. But Fuller needs to explain to me why it’s any more absurd than invoking an unknowable ‘Intelligent Designer’ who for inscrutable reasons just poofs the bacterial flagella into existence using methods that can never in principle be examined by experiment or observation. It’s not (I think) that Fuller is himself a creationist. On balance I tend to agree with MKJ that Fuller is just a ‘useful idiot’. But for goodness sake, Fuller is said to be an expert on the sociology of science. Yet any serious scientist reading his testimony would just laugh at him. It really is very surreal. Imagine coming home to watch ‘Match of the Day’. You switch on the telly and instead of the game you just get the post-match discussion. But worse, as you listen you gradually realise that one of the star guests on the panel doesn’t seem to understand the rules of football, and yet everybody’s nodding sagely. At this point you just want to scream: “shut up! I want to see the match. I want to see some goals!”.
The example isn’t really all that absurd, at least I don’t think so. That’s what I’m always flapping my hands and wondering about. If little pixies banging on insulin receptors make an absurd example, why isn’t a giant benevolent man in the sky also absurd?
And Fuller did do that nonsensical dance about re-defining science to include the supernatural, after all.
The kind of success to which Fuller can only aspire…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/22/AR2005102201272.html
Hey, you guys! Seen the Discovery Institute’s new edition of the Bible? It’s really cool! They’re marketing it as a whodunit!