As part of my philosophy states that the best way to explore reality is science, I’ve decided I actually need a concrete definition. The best I have come across so far is one from Theoretical Physicist Lee Smolin, in his book, The Trouble With Physics. His is a fairly convincing argument, so I am curoius to see what, if any, weaknesses you find in his definition.
The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. Some of the worst tragedies of the last century
happened because well-meaning people fell for easy solutions proposed by bad leaders. But arriving at a consensus is part of who we are, for it is essential if a band of hunters is to succeed or a tribe
is to flee approaching danger.
For a community to survive, then, there must be mechanisms of correction: elders who curb the impulsiveness of the young because if they have learned anything from their long lives, it is how often
they were wrong; the young, who challenge beliefs that have been held obvious and sacred for generations, when those beliefs are no longer apt. Human society has progressed because it has learned
to require of its members both rebellion and respect, and because it has discovered social mechanisms that over time balance those qualities.
I believe that science is one of those mechanisms. It is a way to nurture and encourage the discovery of new knowledge, but more than anything else it is a collection of crafts and practices that, over
time, have been shown to be effective in unmasking error. It is our best tool in the constant struggle to overcome our built-in tendency to fool ourselves and fool others. From this brief sketch, we can see what science and the democratic process have in common. Both the scientific community and the community at large need to reach conclusions and make decisions based on incomplete information. In both cases, the incompleteness of information will lead to the forming of factions that hold different points of view. Societies, scientific and otherwise, need mechanisms to resolve disputes and reconcile differences of opinion. Such mechanisms require that errors be uncovered and new solutions to intractable problems be allowed to replace older ones. There are many such mechanisms in human societies, some of them involving force or coercion. The most basic idea of democracy is that a society will function best when disputes are resolved peacefully. Science and democracy, then, share a common and tragic awareness of our tendency to fool ourselves, and also the optimistic belief that as a society we can practice correctives that make us collectively, over time, wiser than any individual.
Now that we’ve put science in its proper context, we can turn to the question of why it works so well. I believe the answer is simple: Science has succeeded because scientists comprise a community
that is defined and maintained by adherence to a shared ethic. It is adherence to an ethic, not adherence to any particular fact or theory, that I believe serves as the fundamental corrective within the scientific community.
There are two tenets of this ethic:
l. If an issue can be decided by people of good faith, applying rational argument to publicly available evidence, then it must be regarded as so decided.
2. If, on the other hand, rational argument from the publicly available evidence does not succeed in bringing people of good faith to agreement on an issue, society must allow and even encourage people to draw diverse conclusions.
I believe that science succeeds because scientists adhere, if imperfectly, to these two principles. To see whether this is true, let us look at some of the things these principles require us to do.
• We agree to argue rationally, and in good faith, from shared evidence, to whatever degree of shared conclusions are warranted.
• Each individual scientist is free to develop his or her own conclusions from the evidence. But each scientist is also required to put forward arguments for those conclusions for the consideration
of the whole community. These arguments must be rational and based on evidence available to all members. The evidence, the means by which the evidence was obtained, and the logic of the arguments used to deduce conclusions from the evidence must be shared and open to examination by all members.
• The ability of scientists to deduce reliable conclusions from the shared evidence is based on the mastery of tools and procedures developed over many years. They are taught because experience has shown that they often lead to reliable results. Every scientist trained in such a craft is deeply aware of the capacity for error and self-delusion.
• At the same time, each member of the scientific community recognizes that the eventual goal is to establish consensus. A consensus may emerge quickly, or it may take some time. The ultimate judges of scientific work are future members of the community, at a time sufficiently far in the future that they can better evaluate the evidence objectively. While a scientific program may temporarily succeed in gathering adherents, no program, claim, or point of view can succeed in the long run unless it produces sufficient evidence to persuade the skeptics.
• Membership in the community of science is open to any human being. Considerations of status, age, gender, or any other personal characteristic may not playa role in the consideration of a scientist’s evidence and arguments, and may not limit a member’s access to the means of dissemination of evidence, argument, and information. Entry to the community is, however, based on two criteria. The first is the mastery of at least one of the crafts of a scientific subfield to the point where you can independently produce work judged by other members to be of high quality. The second criterion is allegiance and continued adherence to the shared ethic.
• While orthodoxies may become established temporarily in a given subfield, the community recognizes that contrary opinions and research programs are necessary for the community’s continued health.
When people join a scientific community, they give up certain childish but universal desires: the need to feel that they are right all the time or the belief that they are in possession of the absolute truth. In exchange, they receive membership in an ongoing enterprise that over time will achieve what no individual could ever achieve alone. They also receive expert training in a craft, and in most cases learn much more than they ever could on their own. Then, in exchange for their labor expended in the practice of that craft, the community safeguards a member’s right to advocate any view or research program he or she feels is supported by the evidence developed from its practice. I would call this kind of community, in which membership is defined by adherence to a code of ethics and the practice of crafts developed to realize them, an ethical community. Science, I would propose, is the purest example we have of such a community. But it is not sufficient to characterize science as an ethical community, because some ethical communities exist to preserve old knowledge rather than to discover new truths. Religious communities, in many cases, satisfy the criteria for being ethical communities.
Indeed, science in its modern form evolved from monasteries and theological schools - ethical communities whose aim was the preservation of religious dogma. So if our characterization of science
is to have teeth, we must add some criteria that cleanly distinguish a physics department from a monastery. To do this, I would like to introduce a second notion, which I call an imaginative community. This is a community whose ethic and organization incorporates a belief in the inevitability of progress and an openness to the future. The openness leaves room, imaginatively and institutionally, for novelty and surprise. Not only is there a belief that the future will be better, there is an understanding that we cannot forecast how that better future will be reached. Neither a Marxist state nor a fundamentalist religious state is an imaginative community. They may look forward to a better future, but they believe they know exactly how that future will be reached. In words I heard often from my Marxist grandmother and friends while growing up, they are sure they are right because their “science” teaches them “the correct analysis of the situation.” An imaginative community believes that the future will bring surprises, in the form of new discoveries and new crises to be overcome. Rather than placing faith in their present knowledge, its members invest their hopes and expectations for the future in future generations, by passing along to them the ethical precepts and tools of thinking, individual and collective, that will enable them to overcome and take advantage of circumstances that are beyond the present powers of imagination.
The Doorman
