Science is not what you think it is

Tomorrow is a worldwide March for Science, on Earth day. I am strongly considering going there. However before I do that there are some things that I believe must be said about science, just so as we are all clear on what I will actually be marching about. Because I am actually not at all uncritical about science. How could I be uncritical, being a scientist? It comes with the job, I should think. Yet, what I am witnessing is a growing sense of dogmatism and lack of critical reflection by scientists about their own trade. And there are times at which this worries me even slightly more than the dogmatism of radical religious fanatics or the ignorance of online fake-news addicts.

Recently there has been some tweeting going about claiming science is “universal, international, inclusive, nonpartisan, a-political, a-gender, a-race, & a-ideological”. Luckily many reactions came to oppose to this claim. Some obvious objections figuring the inherent politics and historical structures in scientific practices today. In this blog post however I would like to dig a bit deeper and open up a few topics that I think have been largely overlooked or misunderstood so far.

The first question that is left largely implicit is why the topic is flourishing right now and why the objectivity and neutrality of science it is so forcefully defended by various writers. The whole idea of doing a Science March is part of the same thing, of course. If someone is forcefully defending something, that person is most likely afraid of something bad happening. And indeed there are obvious reasons why people feel afraid. The blatant dismissal of scientific findings by politicians and others, the non-diminishing influence of religious dogma on people’s beliefs and behaviour, and the growing distrust in science, with people going by their own ‘feelings’, or uncritically taking as true what the other bloke said about it on facebook: these are indeed things to worry about. It is scary to think that we are now living in a world where facts do not appear to matter (so much) anymore, where anybody’s opinion seems as good as anybody else’s and where assessments of what is true or false are like tweets in a feed passing through on your screen, to be replaced by new, ‘alternative’ assessments, with a just one click on the refresh button.

Non-thinking should be fighted against

We need to fight this. We need to fight post-fact, twitter-addicted presidents, and all this other nonsense. We need to oppose all action that comes out of blind faith or out of the irrational, dark emotions, emotions which are present in us all but which we thought we had worked hard to tame over the past several hundred years or so. ‘Non-thinking’ can never be the ground for rulings in court, for taking political decisions, for how we want to organize society, take care of the planet, and so on. But those are not the concerns that what I want to talk about. My objection to the idea that science is a-political, objective, and so on, my claim that it is in fact not neutral, not universal, etc, is not about post-fact and Twitter. The problem I have is of a different sort. It’s not part of the fight that these strong defenders of science recently seem to be caught up in. It lies deeper. It asks scientists to reflexively look back on themselves instead of pointing the finger.

If they hit low, your defence goes low as well

When feel you need to be fighting the post-fact religious- or emotionally inspired anti-science crowd, and when you think there’s actually a risk your losing the fight, you will be tempted to lower the analytic standards of what you are saying, in order to meet your opponent where he’s attacking you. If they hit low, your defense will go low as well. And so the arguments on both the pro- and the con-side of science are often quite simplistic, to the point of becoming banal. As a result, the ‘thing’ that science defenders are defending (“science”) becomes a straw-man – a caricature of what it is, should be, or even could be. What is happening is that for the strong defenders, science has become an indisputable, non-negotiable, out-of-the-question Good Thing: science as the holy grail of modern man, the only way forward. There you have it: science becomes a dogma, one with strong religious overtones. Robert Pirsig already aptly chose the metaphor of ‘a Church’, back in the 1970s to talk about science (although in a slightly different context – but discussing Pirsig I will leave for another day).

The dogmatization of science

The dogmatization of science has been pushed to the extreme, and strong defenders of science now think they have found the ultimate argument, one that is rigorously logical and irrefutable, becaused it is grounded in a matter of principle: science is, by definition, simply not something that we, as human beings, get to decide on, period. Science just *is*. Your opinions on it just don’t matter. In fact, once personal opinions would enter the scene, that would – by the same definition – no longer make it scientific. Science is what it is, and it is precisely the dangerous post-fact facebook-addicts that make the mistake of thinking that science is just something we can have something to say about. The obvious mistake of all those people who don’t know anything about science is to think science is just something we can decide to be whatever we fancy it to be. Today, science is a governmental organization, tomorrow it can be a private company, next week, science could be a TV-show. This, the science defenders say, is all wrong, because science is science and all this talk about what science ‘is’, is itself already part of the post-fact nonsense and we should not even take it serious in the first place.

Discussing science as a whole is not the same as discussing scientific facts

However we need to tease out a few things here that get muddled up in the smoke of the gun-fire. First, I believe there is a difference between discussing the status of science as a whole and discussing the truth of any particular fact-of-the-matter that is rolling out of a scientific laboratory. To start with the latter: Yes, I agree, it is dangerous and unproductive to compare some orange-haired president’s tweet with the hard-won facts that resulted from years and years of meticulous PhD work. The human influence on climate change cannot simply be discarded on account of it not suiting ones’ business agenda. However, the status of science as a whole is another matter. This concerns the foundational epistomological and ontological questions that philosophers worry about, and which most scientists couldn’t care less about, or so it seems. Science operates under a number of basic assumptions (not facts, assumptions) and the seeming disinterest of scientists in what these assumptions are and what to think of them worries me. This even results in a rude dismissal of philosophy by some scientists. And in some sense it worries me more than what people are tweeting about whatnot the whole day long, or whether there’s a radical religious leader somewhere preaching doom. Scientists should always be highly critical about their own trade: what are the basic rules we play by, and do we still think these rules are the right rules? And then there’s another thing, which is this: If other people are breaking the rules that you have set for yourself, it doesn’t mean you should do the same:

Undisputable facts end thinking

In my book, an argument that ends all arguments, one to which no further response is allowed, such as the ‘fact’ that ‘science is non-negotiable’, is of the kind that just ends thinking. And any expression that ends thinking, in my book, is *by definition* not scientific. My short list of what makes up for a scientific attitude, which is a very short list that most certainly does not contain all the specialist methods and tools and techniques that happen to be currently en vogue, would at least include this: everything that we think is true is open for scrutiny, everything we hold true may at some point turn out to be false. That is: all facts are provisional.

Interestingly, the facts that we think are the hard, ‘undisputable’ facts, are the facts that have suffered the most of reason and argument trying to disprove it. With this I mean to say that a fact that nobody has stood up against, a fact that nobody doubted or disbelieved, is no solid fact at all. It’s a hypothesis, at best. Only the hypotheses that withstood the vicious battles put up against it over years and years could claimed to be ‘real’. In good science, “undisputability” is something you need to earn by surviving many, many disputes. But if discussion is not allowed in the first place, because you believe you have some ultimate truth in hand about whatever’s the matter (like “science is objective”), then I conclude that whatever it is we are doing in discussing it, we are not being scientific about it anymore. Instead, I would like to discuss a few implications of the claim that science is objective and why I think the claim is false.

Of course there’s the obvious things that have been raised by many sensible people, for example the idea that science is an industry, with stakeholders, and that the money flow has influence on what is being investigated, and that women are grossly underrepresented in science, that science is racist, and so on. That has been discussed by others and I will simply point to it here. But let me also point to one particular issue that is much more basic: The claim that science is objective, is itself normative. That is, what is claimed, is not just that science ‘is’ something (objective etc), but also, that this is a good thing. It is claimed that it is wrong, or less desirable at least, to believe in false things, and is good to hold on to things that are true and science is what helps us do the latter and avoid the former. The question of what is the good thing to do, however, cannot be answered by science. And to wit, no scientist would disagree. Yet scientists that think science is good, and who would agree that science itself cannot decide on what is good or bad, should mature themselves in thinking about why they think science is good, and in particular why it is that they get so thoroughly emotional (that is: irrational) when someone dares to attack science, or points out to the fact that science practice is invested with normativity, and so on. Let it be clear: I holehearthedly agree, with most sensible people, that sticking to the facts, wherever possible, is a good thing. And I applaud what science has achieved. I really do agree that science is a good thing. But I just wish to point out that it is a normative assessment, not an objective fact, to say that it is. And while I think we should stick to the facts, I also think we should stick to some other things that are not facts. With this I do not mean God or Twitter. For example, I think we should not kill other people. I think war is bad. People should be treated equally. Groups of people (men, women) have no predestined task or role to play, individual people are free to develop their own lives in their own way as long as they enable others to do the same. We should take care of the planet. Children should be enabled to flourish, grow an identity, and develop their talents into something beautiful. And so on. Perhaps you have other values, these are some of mine. Regardless: science has nothing to say about all these things. And this means that there may be points in people’s lives where they have to decide for themselves, situations that science can no longer help them, or even gets in the way, unless they are called Sherlock or Mr. Data.

But what about “science”?

I will not discuss the fact here that science is, in practice, partisan, political, racist, and so on, although all of these things are obviously true. Just compare the numbers, the salaries, the career developments, of men and women in science. And this would be just one example pattern. I want to discuss the objections because they say something about how some scientists think that science somehow rises above any questionable patterns in actual human behavior and therefore would automatically be released of all charges, a priori. The easy objection made by the strong defenders is that these ugly truths are truths of scientific practice, not of science. It’s the scientists that may, or may not, be racist, male chauvinist pigs, etc, not ‘science itself’. Well, we know that kind of reasoning. Communism was right, but it’s the actual communists that applied it wrongly. The principle of banking is quite ok, if the bankers would just not be so greedy. This line of reasoning assumes there’s maps and there’s territories and what really matters is the soundness of the map, even if it doesn’t at all match the territory. It is actually most often applied within science itself: scientists that encounter surprising data would first maintain that the model is still right: we just need to search harder for the data that will support it. And there is nothing wrong with that in principle – we shouldn’t start jumping around each time we observe something strange, it will get us nowhere in the long run (Although at some point, a map that gets you nowhere at all in the territory, becomes a quite useless map and may just as well be discarded. Sometimes it is better to just look around where you are, rather than keep staring at the navigation on your smartphone, or you may end up driving into a river).

But what I really want to say is that such kind of argument by the strong defenders about the difference between practice and principle can actually be countered using the same strategy, yet turning it around to face the other way. With this I mean the following. What I would be claiming, in reply, is that the defenders of science are mistaking science with reality. Reality, yes, reality is what it is. Reality is objective, neutral, a-political, a-race, a-gender, and so on. And to be precise about it, because we could easily get confused here: what I mean to say is that the reality of our lives could of course contain the fact that there is racism out there – but this reality in and of itself is not being racist *about it*. But *science* is most certainly not objective, neutral etc, because science is not reality. In other words: Reality is, well, reality (and I am not even going into all the objections to the concept of reality as for example in pragmatism, constructivism and phenomenology). Let us assume reality. Atoms don’t do politics. So that’s that. And then we have scientific practice. We just agreed that science practice is a human affair with all its thorny edges. So that’s that. But what about “science”? What about this strange thing left hanging in the middle between ‘human scientific practice’ and ‘reality’? What I’m saying is: we have now three things to deal with:

1. Scientific practice (normative, political, racist, and so on)
2. Science (???)
3. Reality (objective, neutral, ‘is just what it is’, and so on)

Perhaps the strong defenders have actually been defending ‘reality’, instead of science. Well that is commendable, I guess. It’s also a bit cute and naive. Reality doesn’t need defending? It will continue to be, regardless of the hair color of the president of the United States of America. Why the protests? Why the outrage? So what are we defending? What is this science, anyway?

Science is knowledge about reality – and we have no clue what knowledge ‘really’ is

The word science means ‘knowing’. So if anything, it concerns the knowledge about reality. Or even: ‘the process of knowing’. But that is something we do. Reality doesn’t know – it just ‘is’. Whoops. What in the heavens is knowledge? What does it mean to ‘know’? We’re back in philosophy I’m afraid. Or should we go look into the *science* of knowledge? Get some hard empirical evidence on what ‘knowing’ is all about? That would be a circular argument indeed. But, heck, let’s do it anyway, because as it happens the science of knowledge is one of the few things I know a bit about. The science of knowledge is called cognitive science . It’s what I have been studying for the past 23 years. I can tell you first hand, that cognitive scientists really have no clue what knowledge is. We’re completely ignorant about it. Yes: we have the best ignorance. It’s true! Hypotheses, at best. Grounded in – well, in nothing, really. There’s so many rival theories as there are cognitive scientists. And nobody knows what is meant with even the most basic terms that we use. All of this is not to dismiss cognitive science as a lie. There’s hard work being done and progress being made. What would be the lie is to claim that the current theories will be the final ones and that there is nothing to doubt anymore. The complexities encountered in the science of knowledge are all the more reason to conclude that science and knowing and ‘facts’ isn’t just all that straightforward. It’s fuzzy. Science is really not what you think it is. We try and we muddle through and we hope to get somewhere, someday. And within cognitive science the whole divide between those who are into philosophy and those who are into empirical science is reiterated again, so we could just as well stop and start rereading from the top of this essay. Most empirically inclined cognitive scientists just go do a lot of experiments about ‘how information is processed in the brain’. Other, in my view more thoughtful and critical cognitive scientists, dare to ask questions such as: so what is information processing? Are we actually processing information at all? Is the brain all there is to it? Is the statement ‘you are your brain’ not, to put it mildly, a bit paradoxical? What about the body? What about culture? What about emotion? How does this ‘information’ get value? How do facts get meaning? What grounds the words in our language? How can we know – and what does it mean to know something? There’s no escaping from the deep philosophical issues about what we actually mean by ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowing’. Just as the normative question on what is the good thing to do, questions about what knowledge is, cannot be resolved by scientific experiments alone.

What are we protesting about on March 22?

I guess what we are protesting about Saturday is not the holy status of scientific facts. On the website of the Science March there is a reference to ‘Science Lovers’. Although I consider myself to be a scientist – I am not a science lover. Love is something I reserve for others. I hope there will be not too many ‘Science Fans’ or ‘Science Aficionado’s’. I don’t want walk with a bunch of hardcore ball-headed supporters that would get themselves drunk and trash the whole city just ‘because they are fans’. I want to be there with my fellow players who are skilled in actually playing, and with those connoisseurs that are able to see the value, the quality – but also the limits – of the game.  There is a lot wrong with science and we should strive to correct it rather than uncritically accept it. If one is not critical about what one is doing, if one does not dare to ask the question that would undercut the whole enterprise one is undertaking, then one is not a true scientist. And so we should dare to ask, and even spend time and energy seriously exploring, the ways and contexts in which particular aspects of science are, or could be, flawed, ill-founded, or even just wrong. If this sentence was too complex – I am sorry. It’s the scientist in me. What we are protesting against is perhaps more clear. We are against the idea that any opinion is as good as any body else’s. We’re against Trumpism, framing, lying, populism. We are against religious dogma, extremism, terror.

We are against any practice that stops thinking. And that’s as good a reason as any to March for Science tomorrow.