What is the scientific attitude? In 1941, at the lowest point of the war, the developmental biologist Hal Waddington published a small book with that title. The scientific attitude, he asserted, was rational, disinterested, evidence-dependent and above all modern. In alliance with progressive artists and architects, it confronted the irrationality of nazism, and shared many of the values of Soviet communism. Today, nearly 80 years later, when irrationality is once again growing, science denial and pseudoscience proliferate on social media, and to assert the “values of communism” warrants at best a scornful laugh, philosopher Lee McIntyre repeats Waddington’s question, but uses it to address some very specific modern problems.
He begins by distancing himself from the long-standing goal of philosophers of science to identify something specific about the methods of science. Prominent among these was Karl Popper’s claim that the test of a scientific theory is that it survives attempts to falsify it. The trouble with his claim, as later philosophers soon recognised, is that testing theories by trying to falsify them is not what most scientists spend their time doing; instead, the day job is mainly spent accumulating “facts” about the material world – what Popper’s critic Thomas Kuhn politely called puzzle solving. Worse still, there is not one scientific method; methods and standards of proof are very different as between, say, ethology and nuclear physics. Some sciences are experimental, others (like astronomy) observational. Instead, McIntyre argues, what distinguishes science from both pseudo-science and “not-science” (within which he includes art and literature) is its attitude; that is, its sceptical respect for evidence as opposed to mere anecdote, belief or opinion, and its willingness to change its mind when confronted with new data. Scientific scepticism accepts that our knowledge and theories are always provisional, open to challenge but hopefully approaching steadily nearer the “truth”.
This attitude is the essential feature of the scientific community. To be published in scientific journals, any particular research claim must undergo peer review, and then the scrutiny of the wider community, which is quick to detect flaws in experimental design, statistical method and interpretation. Ideally, any such published result should be replicable by others and, if can’t be, it should be expunged from the literature. Science is thus self-correcting.
This at least is the idealised view of the scientific attitude endorsed by McIntyre, who illustrates its successes both in advancing knowledge, as in the 20th-century birth of evidence-based scientific medicine, and exposing error, as in the dramatic claim by two chemists in 1989 to have achieved cold nuclear fusion and hence the long sought chimera of unlimited cheap power, soon shown to be an artefact. However, this somewhat complacent picture of how science works is under challenge, both from its own practitioners and from outside its institutional walls. Fraud – the direct invention of data or suppression of negative results – is not uncommon, especially in highly competitive or potentially profitable fields (stem cell research has been particularly prone to it). A serious example was the claim by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield to have identified a link between the MMR triple vaccine and autism, published in a leading medical journal despite the threadbare nature of the evidence and Wakefield’s failure to disclose his financial interests. As his subtitle spells out, McIntyre’s attack is both on those who deny scientific evidence, such as anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, and on pseudoscientists such as homeopaths and creationists. Deniers respond to the scientific evidence by asserting that climate change is “just a theory”, while pseudoscientists cite anecdotes that support their claims but refuse to change their minds in the face of contrary evidence.
So far, so good, but McIntyre, in his efforts to both justify his version of the scientific attitude and defend the fair face of natural science, overstates his case. He rather patronisingly looks forward to the time when sociology and economics might be mature enough to deserve the “science” moniker, without recognising that they have their own methods and “attitude”.
Such negativity may reflect McIntyre’s own unease about the evidence offered by historians and sociologists of science of the ways in which scientists’ theories and use of data are not value-free and neutral, but shaped by the values of the society in which they are embedded. Furthermore, by implying Wakefield is a rare bad apple in the otherwise uninfected scientific barrel, he dismisses the evidence of how commercial interests and pressure to publish have transformed the scientific enterprise over the past decades. In a world of “alternative facts” the scientific attitude is needed, but science as an institution needs its friends to remain critical.
• The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience is published by MIT (£22). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop,com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
