What the heck is science, anyway?

I think Chuckie's comment on my previous post about belief goes a long way toward answering my question -- how can I be absolutely certain about matters on which some people disagree with equal certainty? But it's a complicated question and it's not really possible to write out an adequate brief summary. 

 

There are enough worthwhile books on epistemology to fill a library, but if I had to recommend one it would be The Knowledge Machine, by Michael Strevens. It's a substantial, fairly dense book, so again I'm not going to pretend I can adequately summarize it here but I will offer what he proposes as the core of his argument, which he calls the Iron Rule of Explanation. There is no such thing as THE scientific method. Science uses a bewildering variety of methods. But it does require that propositions be tested against reality. That is, it has standards for what counts as evidence, and requires that scientific discourse be limited to such evidence. Scientists are free to think whatever they want in their private lives but must resort to valid evidence in their public roles.

There's a lot to unpack there and I'm not really going to try to do it. But I will make two important points. The first is that people who adhere to unscientific belief systems essentially work in the opposite direction. They start with a conclusion, then they try to fix the facts around it. Any evidence that doesn't fit the preconception is disparaged -- there has to be something wrong with the purported evidence, because we already know the truth. Any coincidence or even fabrication that does seem to support the preconception is singled out and amplified. 

The second is that it takes a lot of time and effort to understand what are often complex layers of evidence and trails of logic that underlie important scientific knowledge and theories. (And no, "theory" doesn't mean a hypothesis or an unproven concept. There are innumerable scientific theories which are so well established they are considered incontrovertible, for all practical purposes.) While I am not so modest that I can't say I have devoted much more time and effort to understanding many field of science than most people, we all, even Nobel laureates, to a considerable extent do need to trust people who work in fields outside of our main expertise. 

 

I have never looked at a eukaryotic cell through a powerful microscope but I don't waste any time worrying about whether it really does contain the components and work in the way biologists say it does. I do have a general understanding of cellular biology, cosmology, evolution, and much more in part because my grandparents gave me a subscription to Scientific American when I was 13 and I've had it ever since; because I have done some limited study of physics, biology, mathematics and other fields as an undergraduate and in graduate school; and because I read a lot of books on science and the philosophy of science. Most people aren't going to do that. It's much easier just to be told the answers, and the simplest answers to understand, and often the most psychologically satisfying, are the wrong ones. 

Accepting this conclusion raises some very challenging questions about the viability of liberal democracy, which I will turn to next.