The Objectivity of Science




The Objectivity of Science

The Traditional View


Does it Stand Examination?

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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