The Unnatural Nature of Science Read online

  One of the rare examples of an attempt to analyse a major advance in modern science is Andrew Pickering’s study of the revolution in high-energy physics that resulted in the discovery of quarks and the unification of two of the fundamental forces of nature – the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. Quarks were seen as a new fundamental entity from which many of the particles in the world of the subatomic physicist were built. A new era of physics emerged. Pickering’s claim is that he has written his history – and it seems that his historical account is excellent – within the framework of the ‘constructivist’ approach to the sociology of science. He is indeed an adherent to the ‘Strong Programme’ of the sociology of knowledge. However, there is really nothing in his analysis that reflects such an approach or that is in conflict with an image of scientific advance that scientists themselves would readily find acceptable. In fact there is little sociological analysis at all where one might expect it – of, for example, the factors involved in the financing and building of the very expensive high-energy accelerators that were required for the experiments. His account shows just the sort of complex interactions between theoreticians and experimentalists that one might expect. On several occasions the experiments failed to support the theory (which was eventually to be successful) and were later set aside, even though they were never discredited. (This is, of course, another counter-example of Popper’s falsification model being the way in which science advances.) What Pickering does make clear is the symbiotic relationship between theoreticians and experimentalists: both are looking for new opportunities to advance their work.

  A central point for Pickering is that scientific choice is in principle unlimited and open, for he believes that the choice of a theory is not determined by any finite set of data. He takes the view that it is always possible to invent an unlimited set of theories to explain a given set of facts. But, as we have seen, this is a quite misleading view. The puzzle lies in how scientists decide which experimental data or which theoretical construct they are willing to give up when these are in conflict. Pickering’s claim is that such decisions are not forced on the scientists by the data but represent an open choice, in which options are foreclosed according to the opportunities that are perceived for future practice. But this is merely a claim: it is not demonstrated. Just the opposite is demonstrated by his own reconstruction of a crucial development, the acceptance of the neutral current – a phenomenon associated with particles known as neutrinos. Before 1971 there was general agreement that the neutral current did not exist, yet from 1974 onwards the neutral current was accepted. In the earlier period the experimental work had given indications of the neutral current, but the calculations involved were filled with uncertainties and, in the absence of an appropriate theory, the issue was not pursued. Only later, when there was new theoretical work which encouraged both re-examination of the previous experiments and initiation of new ones, was the neutral current accepted. If this is to be regarded as the social construction of knowledge then it is quite acceptable to most scientists and is quite uncontroversial. Scientists are dismissed by Pickering for their naïve realism, but he offers nothing in its place. Scientists can be very proud to be naïve realists.

  A striking feature of the revolution in high-energy physics relates to Kuhn’s concept of incommensurability. The new and old physics are very different and in a sense incompatible. But contrary to the notion of incommensurability, the new physics arose in a congenial world where the issues were widely debated, characterized by mutual congratulation, with little conflict or recrimination, and the new physics helped unify areas of physics that had previously been somewhat isolated from one another.

  In attacking the claims of the relativists, I am not arguing that social factors have no influence on science. Quite the contrary: scientific thinking is influenced by the ideas current at the time and often takes concepts from the prevailing technology. Creativity is influenced by many factors. There is no denying that authority, fashion, conservatism, and personal prestige play important roles, and it is no surprise that scientists use rhetoric to promote their ideas – their ideas are, after all, precious to them, and they wish to see them succeed. There is no doubt that, in the 1950s, Francis Crick and other molecular biologists were rhetorical – even evangelical – about their new subject and its new approach. Again, Galileo certainly used rhetoric to persuade and attack. But it is misleading to think, as some have claimed, that science is really nothing but rhetoric, persuasion and the pursuit of power. No amount of rhetoric is enough to persuade others of the validity of a new idea, but it can make them take it seriously – that is, follow it up and test it. But persuasion ultimately counts for nothing if the theory does not measure up to the required correspondence with nature. If it does not conform with the evidence, if it is not internally consistent, if it does not provide an adequate explanation, the authority and all the other social factors count for nothing: it will fail. Such a failure is undoubtedly culturally determined, the culture being one that adopts a scientific approach.

  The case of continental drift (Chapter 5) provides a good example of how new ideas became accepted because of evidence, not social factors, though social factors did delay acceptance. Another example, from the 1960s and early 1970s, is the claims, based on experiments, for the discovery of a new form of water, called polywater, which some even thought could be as dangerous as ‘ice-9’ in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle because it could cause all the world’s water to be crystallized in a chain reaction and so lead to a catastrophic drought. Although many distinguished physicists were involved, there was, as with continental drift, tremendous scepticism. In this case the scepticism turned out to be justified for the experimental evidence was due to impurities from the glass affecting the water. Again it was evidence, not social forces, that caused the rejection of the idea. And the same scientific process led to the rejection of the recent exciting claims for cold fusion. Small errors in science may go undetected, but this is not the case with major issues: the community can respond vigorously – the institution of science is robust.

  Too much emphasis has probably been placed on theory as compared to experiment in considering the nature of science. Experiments are not used just to test predictions of theories: observations are used in a complex manner and involve subtle interactions between the experimental set-up and the observer. There is also a social aspect – the necessity to enable others to do the experiment, and even to use particular experiments to persuade others to one’s point of view. A detailed analysis of Faraday’s notebooks provides insights into how nature – reality – does influence scientific thinking and gives the lie to social construction. Faraday had continually to reconstruct, refine and elaborate his ideas as the apparatus provided observations which were quite unexpected. His problem was to make sense of all the phenomena.

  Support for the relativism of science has come from anthropology as well as from sociology, however. It results from an unwillingness among some anthropologists to regard thinking in primitive societies as somehow inferior to that which characterizes the West – namely scientific thinking and a passion for rationality – an unwillingness to admit that there is ‘little chemistry and less calculus in Tikopia or Timbuctoo’ and to draw from this the conclusion that science is not, after all, a common property of mankind. Thus there have been extensive attempts to show that thinking in primitive societies is rational and is not intrinsically different from scientific thought (see Chapter 3). African religious systems are seen as theoretical models akin to science and conflicts between rational and mystical, reality and fantasy, empirical and non-empirical are minimized. Such cosmologies may be internally consistent, given their assumptions, but even that is not clear. A favoured model is that of Evans Pritchard’s study of magic among the Azande in the 1930s. A Zande, according to Evans Pritchard, ‘cannot think his thought is wrong … A Zande cannot get out of its meshes because it is the only world he knows’ and the system is thus ra
tional and consistent within these constraints. But the system is closed, compared to the openness of science, and there is no critical tradition, no alternatives, no confession of ignorance. There are good reasons for this – isolation, lack of writing – but even so the system is very different from science. The anthropological explanations of cosmologies which reflect the structure of society are very different from the scientists’ cosmology, which tries to explain the universe without reference to human beings.

  Unlike science, witchcraft and magic can have a beneficial effect on community life since magic can be used against anxiety and social pressures. More generally, ‘everything works’ – each part of the system of beliefs contributes to the maintenance of the whole, no engines idling. The work that the thought does is social. Nothing could be more different from science, which has, on occasion, totally undermined the whole conceptual framework – like Darwin’s ideas on evolution – and is so often counter-intuitive. There is nothing counter-intuitive for members of a primitive culture, or even a religious one. One should be surprised that neither the sociologists nor the anthropologists have shown much interest in these fundamental differences.

  Edmund Leach points out that, taken by itself, myth appears as pure fantasy, but that the way of life of the people who use it is, in fact, ratified by the myth itself. He wishes to dispel the notion that such societies have what earlier anthropologists regarded as childish superstitions, and he suggests that primitive thought is ‘just as sophisticated as we are, it is simply that they use a different system of notation.’ For Lévi-Strauss, analysis of myth leads him to a surprising conclusion: ‘If our interpretation is correct we are led toward a completely different view – namely that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied … we may be able to show that the same logical processes operate in myth as in science.’ But, however clever or logical other societies may be, one should not confuse ‘logic’ with science. And while it must be recognized that science is influenced by and borrows from the society in which it works – for example, ideas about how the embryo developed were strongly influenced by religious beliefs (Chapter 7) – and scientific ideas may, on occasion, be used to justify social attitudes (Chapter 8), what is more important is that the structure and nature of scientific theories from quantum mechanics to the genetic code have been arrived at in quite a different way to the myths studied by anthropologists and serve a quite different purpose: namely, to provide an explanation. ‘Understanding’ is a word seldom used by anthropologists or sociologists of science.

  The issues with respect to both relativism and the importance of sociological influences on science might be encapsulated by asking if one could have had a different science if historical conditions had differed. Would a physics have evolved that is not based on what we now consider to be a set of basic forces? Would a biology not based on cells and DNA have been possible? Would the periodic table or carbon chemisty never have emerged? To the relativists the answer must presumably be ‘yes’, but then the onus is on them to demonstrate the validity of their position. To me the answer is an unequivocal ‘no’: the course of science would have been very different, but the ideas would have ended up the same. In my view science, despite blips and errors, more and more provides an understanding of the world. There is one argument that may be persuasive – the role of mathematics.

  The quantitative aspect of science is fundamental. Probably even the most ardent relativists do not believe that mathematics is a social construct. Yet some parts of mathematics – often from unexpected areas – provide essential tools for describing particular phenomena. One cannot imagine a science of motion, a successful science, that does not rely on the calculus. If the relativists wish to persuade us of social constructs, they will have to provide, at the least, major counter-examples.

  Those sociologists who support relativism have a further problem. They claim that no body of knowledge, nor any part of one, can capture, or at least can be known to capture, the basic pattern or structure inherent in some aspect of the natural world; that no particular ordering is intrinsically preferable to all others; and that specific orderings are constructed, not revealed, are invented rather than discovered. These dictates must also apply to their own ideas, which must then themselves be just another invention of no special validity.

  Of course the nature of sociology itself provides an obvious, and sociological, explanation for sociologists’ wishing to undermine science. In a sense, all science aspires to be like physics, and physics aspires to be like mathematics. But too great an aspiration can lead to frustration. In spite of recent successes, biology has a long way to go when measured against physics or chemistry. But sociology? Biologists can still be full of hope and are going through exciting times, but what hope is there for sociology acquiring a physics-like lustre? One has to recognize that the problems that sociologists are dealing with are enormously complex and at this stage it is premature to expect much progress (Chapter 7). The situation is as bad as, or even worse than, in psychoanalysis. It is thus not surprising that, as Howard Newby, chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council, put it, because of their ‘massive inferiority complex’ social scientists have ‘descended with glee on those who have successfully demystified the official credo of science and who have sought to demonstrate that science is but one means of creating knowledge’. For them it then becomes quite unnecessary to have to try to emulate traditional science.

  By ignoring the achievements of science, by ignoring whether a theory is right or wrong, by denying progress, the sociologists have missed the core of the scientific enterprise. Science has been extraordinarily successful in describing the world and in understanding it. There is a real need for sociologists to try to illuminate this unnatural process. What is required is an analysis of, for example, what institutional structures most favour scientific advance, what determines choice of science as a career, how science should best be funded, how interdisciplinary studies can be encouraged. Philosophical attacks on science may be healthy in the sense that one should always maintain a critical stance; thus far, however, the results have been disappointing. I must side with Francis Bacon, who, 400 years ago, urged that those interested in science ought to ‘throw aside all thought of philosophy or at least to expect but little and poor fruit from it’.

  An encouraging and rather novel perspective has been adopted by the philosopher Richard Rorty. Rationality can be taken to mean a way of proceeding which is sane and reasonable, and in which discussion is possible and dogmatism is avoided. It is within such a context of rationality that Rorty sees science as exemplary, since it is a model of human solidarity. The institutions and practices of science can provide suggestions as to how the rest of our culture might organize itself. Leaving aside the question of whether scientists are more objective, rational, logical and so forth, scientists have developed a procedure in which there are free discussion, accepted standards of behaviour and a means of ensuring that truth will, in the long run, win. Truth will win in the sense that open discussion and observing nature constitute the best way of making progress.

  7

  Non-Science

  If scientific knowledge is special and privileged – in the sense that it provides our best understanding of the world – how can we distinguish between science and non-science? How does one deal with claims to be included within this framework of privileged knowledge from those whom most scientists would wish to exclude? There is a continual plea for recognition from those who believe in paranormal events and astrology, and there are more serious claims for recognition from some of those who work in complex areas of human behaviour such as psychoanalysis. There are also the issues of the compatibility of science with religious belief and the claims of, for example, the creationists.

  It is not always easy to give good reasons for distinguishi
ng between science and non-science – for dismissing, for example, some claims for paranormal events. Popper’s falsification criterion – if an hypothesis cannot be falsified it cannot qualify as science – is unfortunately of little help, since many falsifiable ideas like ‘Eating hamburgers will make you a good poet’ are just absurd. Falsifiability is a necessary but not a sufficient criterion. For a subject to qualify as science it needs at least to satisfy a number of criteria: the phenomena it deals with should be capable of confirmation by independent observers; its ideas should be self-consistent; the explanations it offers should be capable of being linked with other branches of science; a small number of laws or mechanisms should be able to explain a wide variety of apparently more complex phenomena; and, ideally, it should be quantitative and its theories expressible by mathematics.

  For example, there is a question as to whether the social sciences really are science. They can certainly use some of the methods used in the so-called ‘hard’ sciences – from physics through to biology. Hypotheses can be framed and tested as well as possible. But the problem lies in ‘as well as possible’: the peculiarity of the social sciences is the complexity of the subject-matter, and so the difficulty of disentangling causal relationships is immense. There is little possibility, for example, of doing experiments equivalent to those in physics, say, in which it is characteristic to try to vary just one variable at a time, keeping others constant, and so observe its effect on the system. A simple case is varying the temperature of a gas while keeping the volume constant and seeing the effect on the pressure. It is this ‘isolationist’ approach that has been so successful in the ‘hard’ sciences. Even where correlations between different events are collected by social scientists, it is extremely difficult to provide controls, which are essential wherever real confidence is to be placed in the results. That is why random clinical trials are essential for assessing medical treatments: the effect of a treatment can be judged only by comparing two groups, chosen at random, only one of which is treated. Again, compared to biology, say, it is very hard to be reductionist in the social sciences. The ability to account for much of physiology and anatomy in terms of cellular behaviour, and then in turn to be able to explain cellular behaviour in molecular terms, as yet, has no effective equivalent in the social and psychological sciences.