Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Cant Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed by Henry H. Bauer

Author:Henry H. Bauer [Bauer, Henry H.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: amazon
Published: 2020-04-27T19:40:15.380357+00:00

Over-Reliance on Science

The tremendous achievements of modern science make it perfectly reasonable to admire the ability of science to gain reasonably reliable knowledge. But it’s easy to slip from that admiration into the mistaken notion that science is the only approach that can deliver reliable knowledge, let alone that the knowledge it can deliver is unquestionably true.

Figure 3: Ambiguous images. From the left: young lady or old crone; duck or rabbit; vase or profiles.

The successes of the natural sciences have been spectacular in studies of relatively simple systems of inanimate objects (Chapter 2, “Why has science been so successful?”). That does not mean, however, that trying to mimic what the natural sciences do will make it possible to gain a similar understanding of living things, in particular of the psychology and sociology and political arrangements of human beings—recall in Chapter 4, “Mimicking the natural sciences—inappropriately.”

Above all, the successes of the natural sciences do not entail that what science says should determine what societies do. Yet nowadays science has attained such prestige that societies take a scientific consensus as unquestionable and base national and international policies on it, for instance regarding the claim that refrigerants and spray propellants used at ground level can damage the ozone layer near the top of the atmosphere, or that human-generated carbon dioxide is a significant cause of climate change. Reliance on science is so ingrained in the conventional wisdom nowadays that it is chronically overlooked that science is always inherently tentative and fallible. At most, an expert or spokesperson or pundit might admit, “Of course science can never deliver absolute truth,” while continuing on some specific topic, “but in this particular case, where the scientific consensus is overwhelming, we can safely rely on it.”

Such certainty is largely welcomed, except of course by the dissenting experts who are by definition in the minority. Certainty is popular. Human beings seem to have always flocked to some faith that provides the reassurance of certain knowledge, of explanations for why things happen, delivered by interpreters—shamans, holy men, bearers of sacred scriptures. Before science gained intellectual hegemony, explanations were given in terms of the wishes and actions of spirits or gods that governed all living and non-living things. Now, at least in Western civilization, it is the explanations provided by science that have authority, and those explanations are imbued by a mechanistic world-view.

That faith in science has reached excessive proportions was recognized already soon after World War II by Anthony Standen (1950: 13):

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