The question of whether there are methods that can be fairly described as scientific is one that, I believe, contains within it two assertions either of which would be fatal to the scientific thesis. Or, since it is in fact a question and not a statement, call them challenges. The first — which I will term the objectivity challenge — is one that has been advanced by feminist and post-structural philosophers of science. Broadly put, the objectivity challenge contests that the methods of science are such that they will eventually, if followed precisely and repeated ad infinitum, produce only one result, which we might fairly call “scientific truth.” The second challenge — which I will term the induction challenge — began as a sort of attack on what we might call “scientific certainty.” That is, the induction challenge to scientific methods casts doubt on the very foundations of science upon which we might build any sort of picture of the world. I believe that both challenges are ultimately unsuccessful, and I will show why momentarily. But first, I must put forth my answer as to what I believe constitutes a scientific method.
I take it for granted that the question posed is not simply asking if there are methods that people refer to as scientific: there is, after all, a “scientific method,” and many people do adhere to that method in attempting to investigate the natural world. It seems to me, rather, that this question is really about whether our usual conceptions of what “scientific” means or ought to mean are genuinely warranted. Are we in fact justified in treating “science” as a synonym for “nature” or “scientific” as a synonym for logical? Or are there reasons to believe that scientific methods do not in fact provide us with justification for believing certain things to be true about the natural world?
Use your promo and get a custom paper on
"Is Science Scientific? Is Reason Rational? Does Induction Induct?".
When I say that there are methods which are justifiably regarded as scientific, and when I say that the ideas we have about what that means are in fact accurate ideas, at least generally, the methods I refer to are those that take the following form: the identification of a question and the resolution of that question by empirical means. To be more precise about the steps of such a method, we might say that all truly scientific methods proceed as follows. A question is identified, and this question is determined to be of the sort that empirical observation can answer. A tentative answer to the question is selected based on the answerer’s intuitions about the world and on past scientific results. A test is devised, the results of which would likely prove the tentative answer to be false, if indeed it were false. The test is carried out, and the tentative answer either becomes more plausible or is disconfirmed. This process of testing is repeated by others until the consensus is that the tentative answer will not be disconfirmed. If the tentative answer is disconfirmed, another answer is suggested and testing begins anew. All of this should sound very familiar to scientists, philosophers of science, and most other educated adults.
Of late, this method has come under fire as a means for arriving at the truth. As mentioned above, there are two primary attacks that are leveled at it. I will first address the objectivity challenge. The objectivity challenge, put as plainly as possible, suggests that the epistemic goals of all individuals (including, of course, scientists) are inherently subservient at least at some times to their nonepistemic goals. To use other language, this means that people’s interest in knowing the truth, at a subconscious level, is at times subordinated by their interest, for instance, in appearing to have been right, or having their religious beliefs validated, or making an earth-shattering discovery. As Latour points out, we must only progress far enough in time to see that all of the scientific figures who were once admired must now be placed in the bin of “irrational” along with the other loons: Newton, for his alchemy, Descartes, for the “law of refraction,” and so it goes. The solution that Latour and others have suggested is to do away with the concept of scientific rationality or objectivity entirely and instead adopt the perspective that scientific objectivity, like everything else (according to the post-structuralist) is a matter of perspective — what appears to our enlightened eyes to be subjective and irrational might in 1850 have appeared perfectly sound logic, and what appears to us to be perfectly objective might one hundred years hence be shown to be nonsense.
There are, too, those who believe that all criteria are inherently subjective, and that perhaps the problem is not so much that individuals at times fail to be objective, blinded by their biases, as that there is no such thing as objectivity. We see this, for instance, in assertions that to insist on objectivity is to sacrifice accuracy, because all accurate descriptions acknowledge their own subjective nature. Seen in this light, efforts to produce a language which could purely and completely express a proposition without any hint of bias or implication or connotation were of course doomed to fail — and indeed, many who advance this critique of scientific objectivity believe that attempts by Carnap and others to devise such a language were in fact last desperate struggles against the bleak implications of such a position.
But we can see quite clearly that such critiques are not true, or at least that they are not anything like certainly proven. Entirely apart from the fact that such a position is self-defeating (if it is only a subjective fact that there is no objectivity, this does not bother the person who does believe objectivity to be real), it seems obvious that such critics have overplayed their hand. We can, of course, think of examples in which what was apparently rational was in fact nothing of the kind, and such examples may appear quite dangerous to our thesis. But we can think of such examples only by contrasting them against examples that we have of rational belief-formation. The Latourian critic of scientific objectivity would say that we imagine such a distinction, and that the purpose of bringing up this distinction is not to point out that some beliefs are rational and others are not, but instead to highlight that we have no reliable way of knowing the difference. But this also is not true, because when we say that past beliefs were irrational and not objective, we do not mean simply that they are wrong. We are advancing a psychological claim about the reasons for which they were formed — and our conceptions of how a belief ought to be scientifically formed are not open to attack in the same way that our beliefs about what the facts of nature are, because our scientific epistemology has only just begun to be a mature field.
To the problem of induction, I will devote comparatively less time. The problem of induction is ostensibly fatal to scientific objectivity because it purports to show that we do not have a good reason for drawing a connection between the habitual associations which we perceive as cause and the natural world; or, in other words, that we do not have a good reason to think that the “rules” five minutes ago will necessarily be the “rules” five minutes from now. Any attempt to justify those rules from past experience is inherently question-begging.
The most prominent form of this problem today is suggested by Goodman, in his “new riddle of induction”. The new riddle takes the following form: We take our beliefs about the colors which emeralds have to be justified by our past experience of those colors. We believe there is a rule of nature which says “Emeralds are green.” But imagine that there are properties we have not yet discovered, called “schmolors” (rhymes with “colors”), and that one of these schmolors is “grue.” Objects that are grue appear to be green if they are first seen before the year 2020, and appear to be blue if they are first seen after the year 2020. Now, every single green emerald that we have seen is one that could also be a grue emerald; that is, each emerald that we have observed gives equal support for the proposition “emeralds are green” and the proposition “emeralds are grue.” On what basis are we to prefer the one over the other? And, if we cannot devise a basis, how are we to view ourselves as justified in thinking that the laws of nature which we have identified will continue to be true in the future?
Goodman’s solution is one that would make our identified laws ultimately subjective: he believes that the difference between the “grue” hypothesis and the “green” hypothesis is that the “green” hypothesis has been used successfully many times in the past, whereas the “grue” hypothesis has not been. But this tells us why we have used it, but it does not say whether we are right to do so. A more reasonable answer, and one which Goodman did not think of, is that we ought to prefer greenness over grueness because of its parsimony. “Green” and “blue” are properly basic conclusions about an object — that is, we can in the absence of any other information, like the time, conclude whether something is green or blue just on the basis of our sense-impressions. If it were possible to devise hypotheses that were just as parsimonious as our current ones, and supported by the same weight of evidence, but made different predictions, then we might well be justified in regarding scientific prediction as dubious; however, no philosopher has yet suggested such a theory.
It may seem that I have taken you on a very circuitous route in establishing that scientific methods are properly regarded as such, but to do so was wholly necessary. It is an unfortunate fact that the modern critiques of scientific objectivity and predictive power are not particularly accessible and are difficult to summarize well in a paper of this length. It is my hope, though, that I have presented sufficiently good and understandable reasons to believe that scientific methods do, in fact, deserve the connotations they have acquired of rationality, objectivity, and predictive power. The critique of scientific objectivity commits the classic error of looking at how far we have come and assuming that we have at least as far left to go — but the mistakes that we are likely making now are of a different and less serious kind than the mistakes which we so clearly see in the past. The critique of induction is, for all that it poses an interesting brain-teaser, not in fact dependant on social explanations for why we should prefer one hypothesis over another.
- Cohnitz, D., and M. Rossberg. Nelson Goodman. Philosophy Now. Taylor & Francis, 2014.
- Curd, Martin, and Jan Cover. Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. Norton, 1998.
- Daston, Lorraine. Objectivity. Distributed by the MIT Press, 2007.
- Kitcher, Philip. The Advancement of Science – Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions, 1995.
