Science as it Should Be

Steven Pinker has a go at defending a scientific approach to the world against hostile critics:

Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. Scientism does not mean that all current scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science. It is not an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them. And it is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.” The commitment to intelligibility is not a matter of brute faith, but gradually validates itself as more and more of the world becomes explicable in scientific terms. The processes of life, for example, used to be attributed to a mysterious élan vital; now we know they are powered by chemical and physical reactions among complex molecules. . . .

The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

This is how scientists like to see themselves: as the people working hardest to understand how the world really works, as the ones with a toolkit that, properly used, provides real answers to hard questions.

The problem with a description like this is that it doesn't really describe how scientists work or what scientists are like. "Science," as a theoretical construct, may be as wonderful as you like, but if in practice it is rife with fashion, prejudice, politics, intellectual bullying, and so on, why should humanists or religious believers trust what people like Pinker say? After all, science's defenders bristle when religious believers offer sweetness and light justifications of faith that leave out crusades and inquisitions. When it comes to politics, in particular, science has a terrible record, stretching from social darwinism through communism and racism to the current fad for libertarianism, which is quite common among American scientists.

Science is the only way we know of to learn how the world really works, but for that very reason it encourages attitudes of arrogant superiority among those who know a lot about it. If scientists want people to like them and appreciate what they do -- as Pinker seems to -- they should start by practicing humility and being as skeptical about their own works as they are about the words of the prophets.