Tag Archives: The Folly of Scientism

Are Scientists Superhuman?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Those who identify “good science” with the current mainstream practitioners of institutional science seem to think so. Professor of biology Austin L. Hughes, however, sees serious problems with the adulation of scientists in his essay, “The Folly of Scientism.” Hughes points to the core issue with this line of thinking:

The fundamental problem raised by the identification of “good science” with “institutional science” is that it assumes the practitioners of science to be inherently exempt, at least in the long term, from the corrupting influences that affect all other human practices and institutions. Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett explicitly state that most human institutions, including “governments, political parties, churches, firms, NGOs, ethnic associations, families…are hardly epistemically reliable at all.” However, “our grounding assumption is that the specific institutional processes of science have inductively established peculiar epistemic reliability.”

Is this correct, that scientific institutions have escaped the weaknesses of humankind that plague other human institutions? Hughes strongly disagrees:

This assumption is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. If any human institution is held to be exempt from the petty, self-serving, and corrupting motivations that plague us all, the result will almost inevitably be the creation of a priestly caste demanding adulation and required to answer to no one but itself.

Hughes moves on to accuse philosophers who have indulged in scientist worship:

It is something approaching this adulation that seems to underlie the abdication of the philosophers and the rise of the scientists as the authorities of our age on all intellectual questions. Reading the work of Quine, Rudolf Carnap, and other philosophers of the positivist tradition, as well as their more recent successors, one is struck by the aura of hero-worship accorded to science and scientists.

In spite of their idealization of science, the philosophers of this school show surprisingly little interest in science itself — that is, in the results of scientific inquiry and their potential philosophical implications. As a biologist, I must admit to finding Quine’s constant invocation of “nerve-endings” as an all-purpose explanation of human behavior to be embarrassingly simplistic. Especially given Quine’s intellectual commitment to behaviorism, it is surprising yet characteristic that he had little apparent interest in the actual mechanisms by which the nervous system functions.

Does Hughes not believe that the scientific method is reliable? Is he anti-science? Not at all. Read on.

Ross, Ladyman, and Spurrett may be right to assume that science possesses a “peculiar epistemic reliability” that is lacking in other forms of inquiry. But they have taken the strange step of identifying that reliability with the institutions and practitioners of science, rather than with any particular rational, empirical, or methodological criterion that scientists are bound (but often fail) to uphold.

Thus a (largely justifiable) admiration for the work of scientists has led to a peculiar, unjustified role for scientists themselves — so that, increasingly, what is believed by scientists and the public to be “scientific” is simply any claim that is upheld by many scientists, or that is based on language and ideas that sound sufficiently similar to scientific theories.

Hughes is a keen observer of our current culture. Listen to what he is saying: scientists have become the new priests of our time. Whatever comes out of their mouths, we swallow without question. Most of us don’t really understand what they are saying, or whether what they are saying makes any sense. We just parrot what we hear, because, after all, they are scientists, and they must be right.

Is Science Defined By What Scientists Do?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Frustrated by an inability to rule out certain “unscientific” ideas (e.g., intelligent design) by using epistemological criteria, some scientists and philosophers simply make the claim that science is what scientists do. Or put another way, science is defined by the institutions that practice science.

Professor of biology Austin L. Hughes, however, believes this way of defining science is fraught with problems. In his essay, “The Folly of Scientism,” he argues the following:

By this criterion, we would differentiate good science from bad science simply by asking which proposals agencies like the National Science Foundation deem worthy of funding, or which papers peer-review committees deem worthy of publication.

So what is the harm in this approach to defining science? Hughes explains:

The problems with this definition of science are myriad. First, it is essentially circular: science simply is what scientists do.

Second, the high confidence in funding and peer-review panels should seem misplaced to anyone who has served on these panels and witnessed the extent to which preconceived notions, personal vendettas, and the like can torpedo even the best proposals. Moreover, simplistically defining science by its institutions is complicated by the ample history of scientific institutions that have been notoriously unreliable.

Can Hughes provide an example of an unreliable scientific institution?

Consider the decades during which Soviet biology was dominated by the ideologically motivated theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics as inconsistent with Marxism and insisted that acquired characteristics could be inherited. An observer who distinguishes good science from bad science “by reference to institutional factors” alone would have difficulty seeing the difference between the unproductive and corrupt genetics in the Soviet Union and the fruitful research of Watson and Crick in 1950s Cambridge.

Can we be certain that there are not sub-disciplines of science in which even today most scientists accept without question theories that will in the future be shown to be as preposterous as Lysenkoism? Many working scientists can surely think of at least one candidate — that is, a theory widely accepted in their field that is almost certainly false, even preposterous.

Yes, Soviet biology was screwed up for a while, but the beauty of science is that it is self-correcting, right? Scientists may get something wrong for a few years, but eventually they get it right, don’t they? Hughes anticipates this objection:

Confronted with such examples, defenders of the institutional approach will often point to the supposedly self-correcting nature of science. Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett assert that “although scientific progress is far from smooth and linear, it never simply oscillates or goes backwards. Every scientific development influences future science, and it never repeats itself.”

Alas, in the thirty or so years I have been watching, I have observed quite a few scientific sub-fields (such as behavioral ecology) oscillating happily and showing every sign of continuing to do so for the foreseeable future. The history of science provides examples of the eventual discarding of erroneous theories. But we should not be overly confident that such self-correction will inevitably occur, nor that the institutional mechanisms of science will be so robust as to preclude the occurrence of long dark ages in which false theories hold sway.

Hughes is dead on target. I might add that origin of life research also seems to have gone nowhere fast over the last hundred years. Scientists still have no natural explanation for how first life appeared on earth. The dark ages persist for origin of life researchers. As grand as science is, it still has spectacular failures, like any other human undertaking. As long as the institutions of science include human beings, there will continue to be misadventures.

Has the Multiverse Killed Metaphysics (and God)?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you believe a handful of famous physicists (e.g., Hawking, Mlodinow, and Smolin), the answer is yes. Multiverse theorists, like the three aforementioned physicists, posit a multiverse which contains numerous universes with different physical laws. According to Austin L. Hughes, in his article “The Folly of Scientism,”  these theorists hold that “if there are enough universes, one or more whose laws are suitable for the evolution of intelligent life is more or less bound to occur.”

While any universe with a particular set of laws may be very improbable, with enough universes out there it becomes highly probable. This is the same principle behind the fact that, when I toss a coin, even though there is some probability that I will get heads and some probability that I will get tails, it is certain that I will get heads or tails. Similarly, modern theorists imply, the multiverse has necessary being even though any given universe does not.

Our contingent universe, a universe which did not have to necessarily exist, came into being because of the multiverse. But where did the multiverse come from? Hughes suggests that the

problem with this argument is that certainty in the sense of probability is not the same thing as necessary being: If I toss a coin, it is certain that I will get heads or tails, but that outcome depends on my tossing the coin, which I may not necessarily do. Likewise, any particular universe may follow from the existence of a multiverse, but the existence of the multiverse remains to be explained.

Not only the existence of the multiverse needs to be explained, but the universe-generating process. Hughes continues:

In particular, the universe-generating process assumed by some multiverse theories is itself contingent because it depends on the action of laws assumed by the theory. The latter might be called meta-laws, since they form the basis for the origin of the individual universes, each with its own individual set of laws.

So what determines the meta-laws? Either we must introduce meta-meta-laws, and so on in infinite regression, or we must hold that the meta-laws themselves are necessary — and so we have in effect just changed our understanding of what the fundamental universe is to one that contains many universes. In that case, we are still left without ultimate explanations as to why that universe exists or has the characteristics it does.

Put another way, multiverse theorists have merely backed the problem up one step. They have failed to answer the fundamental metaphysical question of why anything exists at all. What is the source of the multiverse, or is it self-existent, uncaused, and necessary? If it is self-existent, uncaused, and necessary, then it sounds a lot like the theistic God that they so like to ridicule.