Inside Science The New Scientist

The truth is out there

19 Feb 00

Instruments such as microscopes or telescopes can reveal the

physical world to us, showing a cell's walls or a distant star
system. To examine science itself, you need a different
approach: you must think about thinking. The philosophy of
science uses step-by-step examination to reveal good or bad
science
DOES science tell us the truth? How do we tell the difference
between science and non-science? If one group of scientists says that
genetically modified foods are harmless and another says they are
dangerous, who should we believe? To answer these questions we
must think about the way scientists reach their conclusions.
Science's goal is to discover the laws of nature, which we assume
exist independently of humans. We find these laws by collecting facts
and assembling new theories to explain them. Good science is
conducted publicly. Scientists release their results in a way that
allows others to scrutinise them and try to duplicate them or show
that they are wrong. Few people seriously doubt that science works.
It has been hugely successful in giving us explanations of the world
around us. It has the power ultimately to explain all natural
phenomena, even if in practice some problems are proving very
difficult. Science has also allowed us to create technologies such as
drugs to treat cancer or the laser in your CD or MiniDisc player.

WHAT IS SCIENCE?
Testing ideas
No one has yet defined what science is in a way that satisfies
everyone. Science, for example, cannot give absolute proofs of the
laws of nature because, although we can test an idea repeatedly, we
can never be sure that an exception does not exist. Some religious
fundamentalists and TV psychics exploit this difficulty, and claim that
science is just another set of beliefs, with no more validity than any
other. But while science may not give us absolute truth, this doesn't
mean we must give equal time to magicians and the like. Far from it.
To see why, we need to examine the philosophy of science. Like
other branches of philosophy this involves thinking about thinking
(the word originally meant "love of wisdom"). The philosophy of
science uses similar methods to a mathematical proof: a step-bystep examination of assumptions, data and conclusions.

A classic philosophical question is: "Do I exist? How do I know that I

am not just a program in some immense supercomputer that is
feeding me false sensations about a simulated world?" The French
mathematician and philosopher Ren Descartes (1596-1650)
answered this question with a proof involving the famous statement,
"I think, therefore I am." In other words, the act of doubting that we
exist proves we exist; there must be something that thinks about the
problem of proving existence.
The philosophy of science examines scientific method and asks
what it can tell us. Science deals with empirical knowledge. This is
knowledge about the Universe that we acquire by examining how it
appears to our senses-enhanced, if necessary, by instruments such
as microscopes or particle accelerators-rather than by sitting and
thinking. Empiricism sounds like common sense, but as a way of
learning about the world it is comparatively recent. It triumphed in
the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, when Galileo
Galilei, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and others showed that facts
gained from empirical observations could revolutionise our picture of
the world.
This was where science parted company with magic. Although there
was some overlap at the time-Newton was an enthusiastic alchemist,
and mystical texts may have inspired him to think of gravity-there is
a basic difference between science and magic. Science involves
repeatable observations and open publication. There are no hidden or
"occult" texts, and when an experiment does not work we do not
blame the heavens, the experimenter's lack of spiritual purity or-a
favourite of today's TV magicians-"bad vibes" from critical observers.
Empiricism creates its own philosophical problems, however. How do
facts lead to theories and laws of nature? Imagine an experiment
involving observations of apples. After watching apples fall from
trees, and verifying that apples will also fall if dropped from the
hand, or from the top of a tall building or other tall structures, we
reason that a fundamental law is responsible. We call it gravity, and
we predict that when we release an apple or any similar object in
midair, it will fall to the ground.
When we make a prediction based on past experience, we are
moving from statements based on our observations, such as "the
apple fell to the ground", to universal statements such as "all apples
in the future will fall to the ground". This leap from the singular to
the universal is called inductive reasoning.
Inductive reasoning appeals to common sense, but is logically flawed.
The empiricist philosopher David Hume (1711-76) pointed out that
there can be no logical connection across time. Just because
something has happened many times in the past does not prove that
it will happen in the future. Karl Popper (1902-94) pointed out that
scientific verification doesn't actually prove anything. No matter how
many times we record in our notebooks the fact of observing a white

swan, we get no closer to proving the universal statement

swans are white. Popper decided that science finds facts
verifying statements but by falsifying them. We may never
to prove that all swans are white, but the first time we see
swan we can firmly disprove it.

that all
not by
be able
a black

To reason in this way runs counter to intuition (see Figure 1).

Logically, however, it is very powerful, and scientists make good use
of this power. Popper said that science progresses by testing
hypotheses. One scientist holds up a hypothesis for examination- for
example, that gravity bends light waves. Colleagues or rivals then
subject this hypothesis to experimental tests that could show it to be
false. If the hypothesis survives repeated tests, it becomes accepted
as scientific truth.

Popper's ideas provide a link between theory and

experiment. They tell us that no matter how many
tests a hypothesis survives, we will never have a
Figure 1
philosophical proof that it is true. Popper wrote:
"There can be no ultimate statements in science . . . and therefore
none which cannot in principle be refuted." This makes a willingness
to accept falsification central to science. Scientists must behave
rationally and gracefully, by stating in advance what experimental
observations would disprove their hypothesis, and if such findings do
emerge, accepting that their hypothesis was wrong.
This was important to Popper, who was born in Austria and whose life
was dominated by struggles against ideologies such as those of Nazi
Germany, which tolerated no doubts. Popper also contrasted Albert
Einstein's theories of relativity with Karl Marx's theories of history.
While Einstein offered his followers tests, such as solar eclipses,
which might have disproved his theories, Marxists were undeterred
when history did not unfold according to prediction. Popper also
attacked Freudian psychology and Darwinian evolution for what he
saw as their unfalsifiability.
Most working scientists today would go along with the idea of
falsification. But Popper's ideas leave us with several problems:
- Falsification alone cannot distinguish science from non-science. The
hypothesis that reindeer can fly is falsifiable by any scientist with
access to a herd of reindeer, a high cliff and an unusually compliant
ethics committee. No one, however, would describe the hypothesis as
scientific.
- Where do hypotheses come from? One answer might be that they
are merely the application of general principles. For example, they
might be inspired by the principle-named after the medieval
philosopher William of Occam-known as Occam's razor: the
simplest explanations are the best-or that the Universe everywhere

obeys the same laws of physics. But this brings us back to the
problem of induction.
- Science doesn't progress through falsification. In a strictly
Popperian system, we would have to abandon the laws of chemistry
every time a school student got the wrong result in a chemistry
practical. Clearly, we do not do this. We blame the student's error, or
if confronted with a run of anomalous findings, contaminated samples
or faulty instruments. Sometimes this is wrong. Scientists rejected
early evidence of a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica because,
rather than accepting such unexpected results, they assumed that
the satellite collecting the data was faulty. This leads us to the next
problem.
- How to explain scientific revolutions, discoveries which transform
understanding? Leaps of genius like the theory of evolution by
natural selection, or the theory of relativity, appear to be neither new
bricks in the wall of knowledge nor the consequence of falsifying
previous theories.

WAYS OF SEEING
Paradigm shifts
The last question was tackled by Thomas Kuhn (1922-96). In his
book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, Kuhn
said that scientific revolutions need creative thinking of a kind that
cannot grow out of the old order. He dismissed Popper's picture. "No
process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development
at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by
direct comparison with nature," he said.
Kuhn suggested that science does not develop by the orderly
accumulation of facts and theories, but by dramatic revolutions which
he called paradigm shifts. The worlds before and after a paradigm
shift are utterly different-Kuhn's term was "incommensurable"- and
experiments done under the old order may be worthless under the
new.
The switch between before and after is as dramatic as that which
occurs when looking at a trick gestalt-switch picture (Figure 2). You
cannot reject one view without replacing it with the other. Such
switches are rare. Kuhn's examples include the Copernican
revolution, which adopted the idea that the Earth orbited the Sun and
not the other way round, the discovery of oxygen, and Einstein's
theories of relativity. By contrast, most "normal" research takes place
within paradigms. Scientists accumulate data and solve problems in
what Kuhn called "mopping-up operations".

Inevitably, some research throws up findings that

do not fit the paradigm-perhaps an unexpected
wobble in a planet's orbit around the Sun. In
Figure 2
Popper's model these would immediately falsify
the paradigm's central theory. But according to Kuhn, scientists
prefer to cling to old paradigms until a new one is ready. The
anomaly is either discarded or, preferably, worked into the existing
paradigm. In this way the elegant model of an Earth-centred
Universe developed in the second century BC by the Greek
astronomer Ptolemy accumulated more and more subsidiary orbits to
account for astronomers' subsequent observations.
After a while, however, the anomalies build up into a crisis of
confidence, and science stalls. Eventually a genius comes up with a
new paradigm. Copernicus realised that the observed orbits of
planets made sense when he placed the Sun, rather than the Earth,
in the centre of the Solar System. Kuhn said that such leaps happen
only in times of crisis.
In times of paradigm shift, hard scientific facts can become
meaningless, or change their meaning entirely. For years, scientists
made measurements on a substance called phlogiston, which they
thought was given off when objects burnt. The discovery of oxygen
rendered phlogiston meaningless. But chemists could not discover
oxygen until they decided to treat it as a distinct gas. In other words,
oxygen had to be invented as well as discovered (Figure 3).

Individual scientists are loath to make such leaps,

Kuhn says. The revolution occurs only when
practitioners under the old paradigm either die or
Figure 3
retire. It takes a new generation to carry the torch
of the new paradigm.
Many people have criticised Kuhn. They say his use of the word
"paradigm" is imprecise. He chooses his examples overwhelmingly
from physics, and they say other sciences may change in different
ways. And scientists do not seem as reluctant to make paradigm
shifts as Kuhn implies. The discovery of DNA's double-helix structure
utterly changed the way we think about biology, yet biologists
accepted it with enthusiasm, replacing a model based on metabolism
with one based on information. Did this make it less than a paradigm
shift?
Likewise the discovery in the late 1980s of new materials that
become superconductors at relatively high temperatures was eagerly
pursued by scientists. Such breakthroughs must throw into doubt
Kuhn's distinction between "normal" science-the mopping-up of factsand revolutionary science.
Finally, Kuhn does not tell us where revolutionary ideas come from.

We enjoy the folklore of scientific breakthroughs happening by

accident, as with Alexander Fleming and penicillin, or through the
work of outsiders such as Einstein. Sadly for Hollywood, such stories
are often myths. Although Einstein was working as a patent office
clerk when he came up with his theories of relativity, he had steeped
himself in contemporary work on physics. Fleming spotted penicillin's
effects because he was an expert in bacteriology, working in a
laboratory. In science, chance favours the prepared mind.
Most worrying, if Kuhn is right, science is just a matter of fashions
and a kind of crowd psychology, with nothing to distinguish it from
pseudoscience. This problem concerned the Hungarian Imre Lakatos
(1922-74), who refined some of Popper and Kuhn's ideas in a way
that makes such a demarcation clear. Instead of "normal" and
"revolutionary" science, Lakatos drew a distinction between
progressive
and
degenerative
research
programmes.
A
progressive research programme is one that leads to the discovery of
facts that were previously unknown. An example is Newton's theory
of gravity, which allowed Halley to predict the return of the comet
that now bears his name. A degenerating research programme allows
no such predictions; rather, it must itself be modified to cope with
inconvenient facts. Lakatos cites Marxism, which although it
describes itself as a science has a poor record of predicting a crucial
phenomenon-political revolutions.
In progressive research programmes the appearance of awkward
facts, such as unaccountable wobbles in a planet's orbit, is not
necessarily fatal to the core hypothesis. Scientists can ignore them if
the central hypothesis is still coming up with "unexpected, stunning,
predictions", Lakatos says. Revolutions happen gradually as
progressive research programmes replace degenerating ones. But
even in progressive research, facts come after theories.
Theories are clearly made up by humans: they are socially
constructed in modern jargon. Does this mean that scientific facts
are too? The idea that science is a social construct intrigues many
people, especially those thinkers described as "postmodernists". If,
according to Popper, scientific laws are impossible to verify logically
and, according to Kuhn, the same findings can mean different things
before and after a scientific revolution, how can science claim to be
any more objective than any other cultural pursuit?
No one would deny that culture, values and beliefs shape our choice
of what science to do. Drugs companies began researching AIDS
when it affected people who could afford to buy medicines rather
than rural Africans. Military spending on research and development is
responsible for similar biases. Scientists believe, however, that the
basic facts of the Universe are there to be discovered, whatever the
motivation for doing so. We spent billions of pounds developing
nuclear weapons, and in the process learned a lot about some
strange metal alloys. But we would have found the same facts in a
race to build the ultimate ploughshare.

The "science wars" being fought out between academics, especially in

North America, question whether this assumption is generally true.
Philosophers such as Bruno Latour in Paris study science as a social
phenomenon, and suggest its results are little more than social
rituals.
Some scientists are horrified by the spectre of relativism, which
holds that ideas are not universal or absolute but differ from culture
to culture, individual to individual. A relativist would assert that
science is only one way of discovering the nature of the physical
world. The anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1924-94),
perhaps mischievously, took the relativist argument to its logical
conclusion: "There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is
not capable of improving our knowledge." In Against Method (1975)
he defended the Church's indictment of Galileo. It was rational, he
said, because there was at the time no reason to suppose that
Galileo's crude telescopes could show the mountains on the Moon
that he claimed to have seen. The Church believed that the Moon was
a perfect smooth sphere quite unlike Earth.

TRUST AND TRUTH

Figure 4

Science and non-science

One vigorous defender of science's special place is the biologist and

author Richard Dawkins. He notes that when relativist philosophers
fly to an international conference on postmodernism, they generally
put their trust in a high-technology airliner rather than a magic
carpet. And, of course, absolute relativism contains its own
contradiction. "Those who tell you there is no absolute truth are
asking you not to believe them," says the contemporary philosopher
Roger Scruton. "So don't."
One battle in the "science wars" is over Darwin's theory of evolution
(see "Evolution under attack"). Some assaults on evolution come
from a particularly stormy debate over evolutionary psychology or, as
it is sometimes called, sociobiology. This attempts to explain
people's patterns of behaviour-whether it be fear of snakes, or why
we enjoy particular kinds of landscape gardening-solely in terms of
evolutionary advantage.
Evolutionary psychology is controversial because it can be used to
justify types of behaviour, such as violence, which are generally
considered unacceptable. It is possible to challenge the science of
evolutionary psychology without challenging evolution itself.
The phenomenon of consciousness is another problem area.
Philosophers and scientists both stake a claim to holding the key to
understanding consciousness. The fact that some computer scientists

believe they can create artificial consciousness gives the debate extra
spice. But any such project will first have to define what constitutes
consciousness, which is probably a job for philosophy. Science and
technology can then take over.
Finally, there is the question of exactly what science is. As we have
seen, Popper's falsification criterion alone is not enough to
distinguish science from non-science. In fact, if we look at the whole
array of science, from particle physics to cell biology to ecology to
engineering, it is hard to find any single practice that they all have in
common. Even openness is not always there: much research is kept
secret for military or commercial reasons.
A way out is to use a concept developed by one of the most
important 20th-century philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951), that of family resemblance. There are many groups of
human activities that are impossible to define exactly. For example,
it's hard to say what a game is, but when we see a new game we
have no trouble deciding that that's what it is, because of the things
it shares with other members of the games family. Likewise with
science: all we can say about good science is it has most of the
qualities of other activities we call good science, including empiricism,
peer review and openness to refutation.
Those who work in this family believe that truth is out there. Perhaps
not always in the strictest philosophical sense, but enough for
practical purposes and definitely enough to distinguish science from
propaganda and muddled thinking. Scientists do not need to be shy
of admitting that its laws are always provisional. That is not a
weakness, but science's greatest strength.

Evolution under attack

THE philosophy of science figures in heated modern debates, such
as the relationship of science and religion. The idea that science
must conflict with Christian religion is recent. Newton was a
devout if unorthodox Christian who saw science as revealing the
wonders of creation, not challenging them. Indeed what is known
as the argument from design-that the world is too intricately
created to have arisen by chance- was cited as a scientific proof
that God existed. Darwin's work smashed that consensus.
Evolution by natural selection demonstrated that we do not need a
divine creator to explain where human beings came from.
Today Darwinism itself is under fire, although the attacks are
rarely overtly religious. The target is generally the philosophy of
Darwinian evolution. Some critics cite Popper, who said that the
theory of evolution by natural selection is unscientific because it is

unfalsifiable. In one sense, this is correct: we cannot rerun the

tape of the past 5 billion years. But thousands of biologists every
day test evolution's crucial components and processes. Fame and
a large fortune in the biotechnology business await any scientist
who can find a short cut to the slow grind of Darwinian evolution.
No one has.
Of course, Darwinism is "only a theory", but this does not mean
that all other theories deserve equal respect.

Further reading:

The Unnatural Nature of Science by Lewis Wolpert (Faber

and Faber, 1992);
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
(University of Chicago Press, 1962);
The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking (Harvard
University Press, 1999);
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
(Penguin,1998)
Confessions of A Philosopher by Brian Magee (Phoenix,
1998)

Michael Cross is a freelance journalist

From New Scientist magazine, vol 165 issue 2226, 19/02/2000, page

Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 2001