Why Trust Science?

This book is the sequel to Merchants of Doubt, the author's study of the influence of the fossil fuel industry on the climate debate. The decline of trust in science is one aspect of a much wider social issue, and the author gives a detailed survey of various perspectives from history and philosophy of science including many of the best-known names in the field. Her basic answer to the question posed by the title is that science is fundamentally collective and consensual with rigorous processes of vetting and peer review within various scientific communities whereby 'in diversity there is epistemic strength' warranting the placing of informed trust with respect, for instance, to climate change and the safety of vaccinations. The author analyses five examples of science gone awry, including rejection of continental drift, eugenics and the debate over the efficacy of dental floss. She discusses the production of reliable knowledge in terms of consensus, method, evidence, values and humility, concluding that science is a form of Pascal's Wager even with consensus among the community of qualified experts.

There follows a series of four essays on a variety of themes, with a response from the author. Marc Lange notes the circularity in science trying to vindicate itself, as it necessarily rests on certain philosophical assumptions, including ideas of what is possible and impossible. One of the 'impossibilities' for a science based on strict materialism is the existence of psi, and Jon Krosnick comments on the firestorm generated by the publication of Daryl Bem's paper on pre-sponse (precognition) because 'the results seemed implausible from the start and could not be reproduced.' (p. 203) Implausibility is in fact a function of prior assumptions rather than a scientific category. Only a couple of days ago, I received an email from Dean Radin saying that Bem had in fact produced a meta-analysis covering 90 replications of his experiment: 'Bem told me that he submitted that meta-analysis to every journal that he had regularly published in over his 50-year academic career, and not one of those journals would accept it. The woo-woo-taboo is so strong in academia that it is virtually impossible for an editor of a top-tier journal to publish an article with positive psi results. By contrast, articles reporting null results in psi experiments are easily published. Paradigms die hard.'

Commenting on this example by Krosnick, the author maintains that the firestorm illustrates science working as it should, given that a paper was published that made a 'strong, surprising, and implausible claim. Immediately it received tough critical scrutiny, and the psychology community rejected it…the fact that it was published in the first place is evidence that the scientific community has remained open, even to ideas that some of us think should be closed down.' (p. 231) This is exactly the point – Bem was closed down and of course the author did not know about the replications of the study and the impossibility of publishing results in a respected journal. You can read the paper at https://f1000research.com/articles/4-1188. Later, she does note that the peer review process is a highly imperfect and that bad and biased papers do get published, but she seems unaware of the strength of the taboo explained above. Interestingly, there is no discussion of the debates around homeopathy and complementary medicine, which also reflect a divergence of worldview between reductionism and holism. And, parallel to the profile of the climate issue, a large community of scientists is concerned about the roll-out of 5G, but governments and businesses, intent on making as much money as possible, ignore the risks and refuse to undertake any prior research on safety. Even if there is a widespread scientific consensus, we should still scrutinise the underlying assumptions embodied and remain aware of social pressures to conform to orthodoxy.