The Scientific Attitude Read online

  The Scientific Attitude

  Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience

  Lee McIntyre

  The MIT Press

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  London, England

  © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book was set in Stone Serif by Westchester Publishing Services. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McIntyre, Lee C., author.

  Title: The scientific attitude : defending science from denial, fraud, and pseudoscience / Lee McIntyre.

  Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018037628 | ISBN 9780262039833 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Science—Social aspects. | Science—Methodology. | Pseudoscience.

  Classification: LCC Q175.5 .M3955 2019 | DDC 306.4/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037628

  For Louisa and James

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

    1   Scientific Method and the Problem of Demarcation

    2   Misconceptions about How Science Works

    3   The Importance of the Scientific Attitude

    4   The Scientific Attitude Need Not Solve the Problem of Demarcation

    5   Practical Ways in Which Scientists Embrace the Scientific Attitude

    6   How the Scientific Attitude Transformed Modern Medicine

    7   Science Gone Wrong: Fraud and Other Failures

    8   Science Gone Sideways: Denialists, Pseudoscientists, and Other Charlatans

    9   The Case for the Social Sciences

  10   Valuing Science

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustration

  Figure 1.1

  List of Tables

  Table 4.1

  Table 4.2

  Table 4.3

  Table 4.4

  Table 4.5

  Preface

  This book has been a labor of love from the beginning and—as with any labor—it has taken a while. I remember the exact moment when I decided to become a philosopher of science, as I was reading Karl Popper’s enchanting essay “Science: Conjectures and Refutations,” in the fall of 1981, in one of the upper carrels in Olin Library at Wesleyan University. The issues seemed earth-shattering and the romance was obvious: here was a person who had found a way to defend one of the ideas I believed in most—that science was special. Popper made it his life’s work to defend the epistemic authority of science and explain why it was superior to its imposters. How could I not want to be involved in that?

  Though the issues gripped me, I never fully agreed with Popper’s conclusions. I knew I’d get back to it someday but, as the professional reward system in academia seemed to favor taking somewhat smaller bites of the apple, I contented myself with spending the first decade of my career writing about the importance of laws and prediction, how to improve the methodology of the social sciences, and why we needed a philosophy of chemistry. Since then I have taken great enjoyment in expanding my reach to write philosophy for a general audience on topics such as science denial, the importance of reason, and why—especially in this day and age—even the staunchest philosophical skeptics need to defend the idea that truth matters.

  But this is the book that I have always wanted to write. By taking up a topic as important as what is distinctive about science, I hope that it will be of interest to philosophers, scientists, and the general public alike.

  For inspiring me to go into philosophy I would like to thank my teachers: Rich Adelstein, Howard Bernstein, and Brian Fay. Although I overlapped with him only toward the end of my college career, Joe Rouse was also an inspiration to me. In graduate school at the University of Michigan, I had the good fortune to learn the philosophy of science from Jaegwon Kim, Peter Railton, and Larry Sklar. I was not always happy in graduate school (who is?), but I look back on my education there as the foundation for all my further work.

  Since then, I am grateful to have worked with some of the best in the business: Dan Little, Alex Rosenberg, Merrilee Salmon, and Eric Scerri, all of whom have taught me much through their excellent scholarship and warm colleagueship. My debt to Bob Cohen and Mike Martin—both of whom passed away in recent years—is enormous, for they gave me a home in the philosophy of science and helped me along at every step of the way. I am glad to say that the same has been true of the new director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, Alisa Bokulich, as well.

  For guidance and advice on some of the specific ideas contained in this book, I would like to thank Jeff Dean, Bob Lane, Helen Longino, Tony Lynch, Hugh Mellor, Rose-Mary Sargent, Jeremy Shearmur, and Brad Wray. I was lucky to have been a participant in Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry’s workshop on “scientism” at CUNY in the spring of 2014, where I heard some extremely stimulating papers by Noretta Koertge, Deborah Mayo, and Tom Nickles, that inspired me to think about writing this book. Rik Peels and Jeff Kichen made pinpoint suggestions about discrete problems that were enormously helpful as well.

  My good friends Andy Norman and Jon Haber have done me the honor of reading the complete manuscript of this book in draft and making many helpful suggestions. My friend Laurie Prendergast has once again done yeoman service by helping me with the proofreading and index. I would also like to acknowledge the work of five anonymous referees, whom I obviously cannot thank by name, each of whom made enormous contributions to the content of this book. It goes without saying that any remaining mistakes are mine alone.

  My father unfortunately did not live to see the publication of this book, but to him and to my mother I send all my love and gratitude for always believing in me and for their support and guidance over the years. My wife Josephine, and children Louisa and James, each read this book in detail and lived with its ups and downs through many iterations. No man was ever luckier to be married to such a wonderful woman, who wants nothing more than for me to be happy in my life and in my work. I am fortunate also to have not one but two children who majored in philosophy and claim it as their birthright to identify any flaws in the old man’s reasoning, which they have done with frightening efficiency. Indeed, my children’s contributions to this book have been so great that I would like to dedicate it to them.

  The team at MIT Press is without parallel. As they proved in my last book with them—and every day since—no author is ever successful alone. From copyediting to design, and marketing to editorial, it is my privilege to work with all of them. Here I would like to give special thanks to my tireless and creative publicity team and to my editor Phil Laughlin, who is analytical, succinct, practical, and hilarious all at the same time. Once again they have made it a pleasure to work with MIT Press, in what is now my fourth book with them.

  My final debt is an old one, but I see it every day as I look at the framed handwritten letter that I received from Karl Popper in March 1984, in response to a letter I wrote to him as an undergraduate. Popper was brilliant, lucid, defensive, and enlightening. Although I disagree with many of his ideas in the philosophy of science, I could not have developed my own without having had his to react against and—in one of the most delightful discoveries of my career—found that in some ways he had
already anticipated the scientific attitude. I never met Karl Popper, but my earliest vision of him stays with me: a young man just starting out in the winter of 1919, realizing the logic of falsification in a lightning flash, then working out its details over the course of his career. I was proud to learn that this book would be published precisely one hundred years after Popper’s discovery. It is small tribute to a man who inspired my own and so many other careers in the philosophy of science.

  Introduction

  We live in extraordinary times for the understanding of science. In May 2010, the prestigious journal Science published a letter signed by 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences. It began “We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything.”1

  But how many laypeople understand what this means and recognize it as a strength rather than a weakness of scientific reasoning? And of course there are always those who are willing to exploit any uncertainty for their own political purposes. “We don’t know what’s causing climate change, and the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try and reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us,” said US presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2011.2 In the following election cycle, in an interview in which he questioned whether there was really any good evidence for global warming, US Senator Ted Cruz said, “Any good scientist questions all science. If you show me a scientist that stops questioning science, I’ll show you someone who isn’t a scientist.”3 Scarcely a year later, newly elected President Donald Trump said that he wanted to eliminate all climate change research done by NASA, in an effort to crack down on “politicized science.” This would mean an irreparable loss for climate monitoring, not only for the United States but for all researchers the world over who depend on NASA’s legendary satellite-driven data collection about temperature, ice, clouds, and other phenomena. As one scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research put it, “[this] could put us back in the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era.”4

  The attack on science has now gotten so bad that on April 22, 2017, there was a “March for Science” in six hundred cities around the world. At the one in Boston, Massachusetts, I saw signs that said “Keep Calm and Think Critically,” “Extremely Mad Scientist,” “No Science, No Twitter,” “I Love Reality,” “It’s So Severe, The Nerds Are Here,” and “I Could Be in the Lab Right Now.” It takes a lot to get scientists out of their labs and onto the streets, but what else were they supposed to do? The issue of what’s special about science is no longer purely academic. If we cannot do a better job of defending science—of saying how it works and why its findings have a privileged claim to believability—we will be at the mercy of those who would thoughtlessly reject it.

  The aim of this book is to understand what is distinctive about science. Of course, some might say that we don’t need to do this because it has already been done; that the problem is in communicating what is special about science, not understanding it. Don’t we already know what’s special about science by looking at the work of scientists? And, if not, isn’t there plenty of work done by other philosophers of science that can answer this question? I wish this were true, but the fact is that most scientists tend to be “naive realists” who accept their findings as revealing something true (or close to true) about nature and spend little time considering the philosophical or methodological issues behind science as a whole. Those rare scientists who do venture into philosophy usually stumble over something that philosophers have already discovered or end up blasting the whole enterprise as irrelevant because the point—they argue—is not to reflect upon science but to do it.5 Yet that’s just the problem. For all the success of those who have done science, why do so many still feel at a loss to respond with anything other than inarticulate name-calling to those who say that science is “just another ideology” or that we “need more evidence” on climate change? There has to be a better way. Better both to justify the science that has already been done, but also to lay the groundwork for good science to grow elsewhere in the future. But first we must understand what is so special about science as a way of knowing. And for this, many have turned to the philosophy of science.

  The foundation of the philosophy of science since its inception has been the idea that it can make a unique contribution by providing a “rational reconstruction” of the process of science, in answer to the question of why science works as well as it does (and why its claims are justified).6 There is a good deal of debate, however, over the best means for doing this and whether it is even a worthy aim. The idea that we can transplant science into other fields by understanding what is most distinctive about it has gotten something of a bad reputation over the years. This notoriety has come from those who have claimed that there is a “scientific method”—or some other firm criterion of demarcation between science and nonscience—such that if we could just apply the standard rigorously enough, good science would bloom as a result. Such claims are made worse by those who embrace the spirit of proselytizing and engage in what has been called “scientism,” whereby they now have a hammer and every other field in the universe of inquiry looks like a nail. But there is a problem: nearly everyone in the philosophy of science these days admits that there is no such thing as scientific method, that trying to come up with a criterion of demarcation is old-fashioned, and that scientism is dangerous.7 Along the way, most have also largely given up on the idea that prescription lies at the heart of the philosophy of science.

  Karl Popper’s 1934 model of science Logik der Forschung, translated into English in 1959 by Popper himself as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, focuses heavily on the idea that there is a reliable method for demarcating science from nonscience, but that there is no such thing as a “scientific method.” Popper champions the idea that science uses “falsifiable” theories—ones that are capable at least in principle of being proven wrong by some evidence—as the dividing line. Although this model has several logical and methodological virtues, it has also proven problematic for many philosophers of science, who complain that it is too idealized and focuses too heavily on the “greatest moments” of science, like the transition from the Newtonian to the Einsteinian model in physics, and that most science does not actually work like this.8

  Another account was offered by Thomas Kuhn in 1962, in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Here the focus is on how some scientific theories replace others through paradigm shifts, where the scientific consensus changes radically as a result of problems that have built up with the old theory, and the field switches seemingly overnight to a new one. The problem here, however, is not only the familiar complaint that most science does not actually work like this (for instance, the transition from the Ptolemaic Earth–centered model to the Copernican Sun–centered model in astronomy)—which Kuhn freely admits when he talks about the ubiquity of “normal science”—but that even where it does, this is not a completely “rational” process. Although Kuhn insists on the key role of evidence in paradigm change, once we have opened the door to “subjective” or social factors in interpreting this evidence, there seems to be no “method” to follow.9 This not only presents a problem for showing that scientific claims are justifiable, but also forestalls delineating a roadmap for other sciences.

  Still further models of scientific change have been proposed by Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Larry Laudan, and the “social constructivists,” each of whom drain a little more water from the pool that allows us to say that science is “special” and that other fields of inquiry would do well to follow its example.10 So what to do? Just pick one of the existing accounts? But this is not possible. For one thing, they are largely incompatible with one another; each describes a different piece of the “blind man’s elephant,”
so we are still missing a comprehensive picture of what science is like. Another problem is that these models seem to succeed only to the extent that they leave something behind, namely the motivation that if we finally understood science we could provide a standard for other fields to become more scientific.

  If all of the best accounts fail, perhaps there is a more general weakness in this whole approach? Although some may be loath to identify it as a weakness, it seems at least a drawback that the philosophy of science has spent so much of its time focusing on the “successes” of science and has not had very much to say about its failures. In fact, the lessons of failure to live up to the scientific standard are as revealing about what science is as the example of those fields that have achieved it. There is nothing wrong in principle with exploring what is distinctive about science by looking at its accomplishments, but this has led to some mischief.

  First, while it would be comforting to imagine science as a long series of steps toward the truth—with its failures due only to the wrongheaded and ignorant—this view of science is belied by its history, which is littered with theories that were scientific but just turned out to be wrong. Both Popper and Kuhn have done much to show how science is strengthened by an uncompromising focus on explanatory “fit” between theory and evidence, but it is all too easy for others to look back and pretend that this was all inevitable and that the arc of science bends irrevocably toward a single (true) explanation of reality.

  Second, the relentless focus on explaining science through its successes has meant that most of the “victories” that philosophers can turn to for their models have come from the natural sciences. Specifically, we have been forced to draw most of our conclusions about what makes science special from the history of physics and astronomy. But this is a bit like drawing targets around where the darts have landed. And does this mean that in attempting to be scientific, other fields should try to emulate physics? Thinking that the answer to this question is an unqualified yes has done a great disservice to other fields, some of which are solidly empirical but quite different in subject from the physical sciences. Remember that one important part of the mission of the philosophy of science is to understand what is distinctive about science so that we can grow it elsewhere. But where does this leave fields like the social sciences, which until quite recently have been underserved by most of the explanatory models in the philosophy of science?