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Home > Scientific Objectivity > Experimenter Effects > The Traditional View of Science
The Traditional View of Science
Does it Stand Examination?
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The traditional view of science is that scientists are searching for the
truth in a disinterested and objective way. It is generally admitted that
there are occasional dishonest scientists, but these are regarded as highly
exceptional.
This self-image of scientists has been subject to much skeptical analysis in
recent years. Sociologists of science studying scientific controversies
have found that evidence is only of many factors that influence what is
accepted as authoritative. These other factors include funding, prestige,
rhetoric and political influence. Seven fascinating case histories of
scientific controversy are described in one of the key books in science and
technology studies, The Golem: What You Should Know About Science by Harry
Collins and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge University Press, second edition,1998).
This book helped trigger off a controversy within the scientific world
called "Science Wars", and was attacked by "science warriors" who tried to
defend the old image of science. In the words of Collins and Pinch, the
science warriors "seemed to think of science as like a fundamentalist
religion: mysterious, revealed, hierarchical, exhaustive, exclusive,
omnipotent and infallible. The language is that of the Crusade or the Witch
Hunt; victory, confession and retraction are the goals wherever heresy is
encountered."
Other discussions on the practice of modern science have focused on the
political and economic forces that influence it. A recent critique by
Daniel S. Greenberg, Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and
Ethical Erosion (University of Chicago Press, 2002) gives a masterly
overview of how big science and big government have operated together in
post-war America. For 40 years Greenberg has produced a newsletter Science
and Government Report in which he has analysed Government spending on
science. The scientific establishment was not used to being held up to the
same standards of accountability as other special interest groups but
Greenberg showed that time and time again, scientists were as grasping as
any other spending department. Far from being pure, research science
involved moneygrubbing politics, backroom deals, special pleading, inflated
claims and scare-mongering. Too often, in return the public got shoddy
science and waste on a monumental scale.
Another area of concern has been a number of well-publicised cases of
scientific fraud. William Broad and Nicholas Wade provided an insightful
and comprehensive analysis of fraud and deceit in science in their book
Betrayers of the Truth (Oxford University Press, 1985). As they express it,
"The claim of science to represent a reliable body of knowledge rests
four-square on the assumption of objectivity, on the assertion that
scientists are not influenced by their prejudices or are at least protected
from them by the methodology of their discipline. Science is not an
idealized interrogation of nature by dedicated servants of truth, but a
human process governed by the ordinary human passions of ambition, pride and
greed, as well as by all the well-hymned virtues attributed to men of
science." Dogmatic skeptics often try to discredit research in unorthodox
areas by accusing researchers of fraud and deceit, but Broad and Wade
conclude that fraud is much most likely to be successful in mainstream,
uncontroversial areas of research. In controversial areas there is usually a
far greater degree of skepticism and scrutiny.
Acceptance of fraudulent
results is the other side of that familiar coin, resistance to new ideas.
Fraudulent results are likely to be accepted in science if they are
plausibly presented, if they conform with prevailing prejudices and
expectations, and if they come from a suitably qualified scientists
affiliated with an élite institution. It is for lack of all these qualities
that new ideas in science are likely to be resisted.
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