Scientific truth

The previous discussion concentrated on only one of the controversies

that surround scientific realism, the debate about whether talk of
unobservables should have the same status as talk of observables.
Contemporary exchanges, however, are often directed at a broader
issue: the possibility of judging whether any claim at all is true. Some
of these exchanges involve issues that are as old as philosophy—very
general questions about the nature and possibility of truth. Others
arise from critiques of traditional philosophy of science that are often
inspired by the work of Kuhn but are more radical.

Many people, including many philosophers, find it natural to think of

truth as correspondence to reality. The picture they endorse takes
human language (and thought) to pick out things and properties in a
mind-independent world and supposes that what people say (or think)
is true just in case the things they pick out have the properties they
attribute to them. A deep and ancient conundrum is how words (or
thoughts) manage to be connected with determinate parts of nature. It
is plainly impossible for human beings ever to occupy a position from
which they could observe simultaneously both their language
(thought) and the mind-independent world and establish (or
ascertain) the connection. That impossibility led many thinkers
(including Kuhn, in a rare but influential discussion of truth) to
wonder whether the idea of truth as correspondence to mind-
independent reality makes sense.

The issues here are complex and reach into technical areas
of metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Some philosophers
maintain that a correspondence theory of truth can be developed and
defended without presupposing any absurd Archimedean point from
which correspondences are instituted or detected. Others believe that
it is a mistake to pursue any theory of truth at all. To assert that a
given statement is true, they argue, is merely another way of asserting
the statement itself. Fine elaborated this idea further in the context of
the philosophy of science, proposing that one should accept neither
realism nor antirealism; rather, one should give up talking about truth
in connection with scientific hypotheses and adopt what he calls the
“natural ontological attitude.” To adopt that attitude is simply to
endorse the claims made by contemporary science without indulging
in the unnecessary philosophical flourish of declaring them to be
“true.”

These sophisticated proposals and the intricate arguments urged in

favour of them contrast with a more widely accessible critique of the
idea of “scientific truth” that also starts from Kuhn’s suspicion that the
idea of truth as correspondence to mind-independent reality makes no
sense. Inspired by Kuhn’s recognition of the social character of
scientific knowledge (a paradigm is, after all, something that is shared
by a community), a number of scholars proposed a more thoroughly
sociological approach to science. Urging that beliefs acclaimed as
“true” or “false” be explained in the same ways, they concluded that
truth must be relativized to communities: a statement counts as true
for a community just in case members of that community accept it.
(For an account of this view in the context of ethics, see ethical
relativism.)

The proposal for a serious sociology of scientific knowledge should be

welcomed. As the sociologists David Bloor and Barry Barnes argued in
the early 1970s, it is unsatisfactory to suppose that only beliefs
counted as incorrect need social and psychological explanation. For it
would be foolish to suggest that human minds have some attraction to
the truth and that cases in which people go astray must be accounted
for in terms of the operation of social or psychological biases that
interfere with this natural aptitude. All human beliefs have
psychological causes, and those causes typically involve facts about the
societies in which the people in question live.
A comprehensive account of how an individual scientist came to some
novel conclusion would refer not only to the observations
and inferences that he made but to the ways in which he was trained,
the range of options available for pursuing inquiries, and the values
that guided various choices—all of which would lead, relatively
quickly, to aspects of the social practice of the surrounding
community. Barnes and Bloor were right to advocate symmetry, to see
all beliefs as subject to psychological and sociological explanation.
But nothing momentous follows from this. Consistent with the
emphasis on symmetry, as so far understood, one could continue to
draw the everyday distinction between those forms of
observation, inference, and social coordination that tend to generate
correct beliefs and those that typically lead to error. The clear-eyed
observer and the staggering drunkard may both come to believe that
there is an elephant in the room, and psychological accounts may be
offered of the belief-formation process in each case. This does not
mean, of course, that one is compelled to treat the two belief-forming
processes as on a par, viewing them as equally reliable in detecting
aspects of reality. So one can undertake the enterprise of seeking the
psychological and social causes of scientific belief without abandoning
the distinction between those that are well-grounded and those that
are not.

Sociological critiques of “scientific truth” sometimes try to reach their

radical conclusions by offering a crude analogue of Laudan’s historical
argument against scientific realism. They point out that different
contemporary societies hold views that are at variance with Western
scientific doctrines; indigenous Polynesian people may have ideas
about inheritance, for example, that are at odds with those enshrined
in genetics. To insist that Westerners are right and the Polynesians
wrong, it is suggested, is to overlook the fact of “natural rationality,” to
suppose that there is a difference in psychological constitution that
favours Westerners.

But this reasoning is fallacious. Sometimes differences in people’s

beliefs can be explained by citing differences in their sensory faculties
or intellectual acumen. Such cases, however, are relatively rare. The
typical account of why disagreement occurs identifies differences in
experiences or interests. Surely this is the right way to approach the
divergence of Westerners and Polynesians on issues of heredity. To
hold that Western views on this particular topic are more likely to be
right than Polynesian views is not to suppose that Westerners are
individually brighter (in fact, a compelling case can be made for
thinking that, on average, people who live in less-pampered conditions
are more intelligent) but rather to point out that Western science has
taken a sustained collective interest in questions of heredity and that it
has organized considerable resources to acquire experiences that
Polynesians do not share. So, when one invokes the “ultimate
argument for realism” and uses the success of contemporary
molecular genetics to infer the approximate truth of the underlying
ideas about heredity, one is not arrogantly denying the natural
rationality of the Polynesians. On the contrary, Westerners should be
willing to defer to them on topics that they have investigated and
Westerners have not.

Yet another attempt to argue that the only serviceable notion of truth
reduces to social consensus begins from the strong Quinean thesis of
the underdetermination of theories by experience. Some historians
and sociologists of science maintained that choices of doctrine and
method are always open in the course of scientific practice. Those
choices are made not by appealing to evidence but by drawing on
antecedently accepted social values or, in some instances, by
simultaneously “constructing” both the natural and the social order.
The best versions of these arguments attempt to specify in some detail
what the relevant alternatives are; in such cases, as with Kuhn’s
arguments about the irresolvability of scientific revolutions,
philosophical responses must attend to the details.

Unfortunately, such detailed specifications are relatively rare, and the

usual strategy is for the sociological critique to proceed
by invoking the general thesis of underdetermination and to declare
that there are always rival ways of going on. As noted earlier, however,
a blanket claim about inevitable underdetermination is highly suspect,
and without it sociological confidence in “truth by consensus” is quite
unwarranted.

Issues about scientific realism and the proper understanding of truth

remain unsettled. It is important, however, to appreciate what the
genuine philosophical options are. Despite its popularity in
the history and sociology of science, the crude sociological reduction of
truth is not among those options. Yet, like history, the sociological
study of science can offer valuable insights for philosophers to ponder.
Science, Society, And Values

Science as a social activity

Traditional philosophy of science is relentlessly individualistic. It
focuses on individual agents and on the conditions they should satisfy
if their beliefs are to be properly supported. On the face of it, this is a
curious limitation, for it is evident that contemporary science (and
most science of the past) is a social activity. Scientists rely on each
other for results, samples, techniques, and many other things. Their
interactions are often cooperative, sometimes competitive. Moreover,
in the societies in which most scientific research is carried out, the
coordinated work of science is embedded in a web of social relations
that links laboratories to government agencies, to educational
institutions, and to groups of citizens. Can philosophy of science
simply ignore this social setting?

Many philosophers believe that it can. It is worth recalling, however,

that one of the principal influences on the development of modern
science, Francis Bacon, was explicitly concerned with science as a
social endeavour and that the founders of the Royal Society attempted
to create an institution that would follow Bacon’s direction.
Furthermore, as the discussion of the Copernican revolution above
seems to show, the notion of social (or collective) rationality is
philosophically important. As of 1543, the choice between
Copernicanism and the traditional Earth-centred astronomy was
unclear; the discussion evolved because some scientists were willing to
commit themselves to exploring each of the two views. That was a
good thing—but the good was a feature of the community and not of
the individuals. Had one of the rival positions languished and all of the
community members dedicated themselves to a single point of view, it
would have been hard to accuse any single individual of a failure of
rationality. It would not, however, have been a rational community.
This is an elementary example of a social feature of science that calls
for a broader approach to rationality than what is standard in
philosophical discussions. One way of understanding why some
methods or principles deserve the label “rational” is to suggest that the
ultimate standard for appraising them is in terms of their capacity to
yield true beliefs. By the same token, one could suppose that
institutions or methods of organizing inquiry count as rational if they
are likely to enhance the chances of a future state in which members of
the community believe the truth. (There are lurking complications
here, which will emerge shortly, but they can be ignored for the
moment.) It is not hard to think of ways of promoting diversity in a
scientific community. Perhaps the educational system could encourage
some people to take large risks and others to pursue relatively safe
strategies. Perhaps the system of rewards for scientific achievement
could be set up in such a way that individuals would gravitate to lines
of research that looked neglected. Standard techniques of
mathematical modeling reveal that institutional structures like these
produce collectively rational outcomes in situations that seem to recur
in the history of the sciences. One thus discovers that factors one
might have thought of as antithetical to the rational pursuit of truth—
individual biases or interest in social rewards—actually play a positive
role in the collective venture.

Detailed sociological investigation is required to discover the ways in

which scientists interact with each other and with parts of the broader
society; detailed psychological investigations are needed to
understand the ways in which they make choices. A satisfactory
philosophical account of the sciences should be just as interested in
whether the sociopsychological matrix is conducive to the attainment
of truth by the community as it is in whether particular lines or styles
of reasoning lead individuals to correct beliefs. At present, however,
the sociology and psychology of science are in their infancy, and
philosophy has little by way of data on which to build. It is already
possible, however, to envisage a future philosophical account that
avoids the limitations of the individualistic perspective now current.
Such an account might find that the social structures inherited from
the early-modern period are quite satisfactory as a means of pursuing
the aims of the sciences (although that would be surprising). Some
contemporary philosophers believe that good reasons for thinking this
will not be so are already apparent. Pointing to the exclusion, or
marginalization, of some groups of people, they suggest that the
current collective practice of science is biased toward the realization of
a partial set of values. The most vigorous articulation of this
perspective is offered in recent feminist philosophy of science.

Feminist themes
There are various ways of pursuing feminist themes in connection with
the sciences. An important project, often dismissed as too limited, is to
document the ways in which women have been excluded from
participation in research projects. More philosophically ambitious is
the attempt to show how women’s exclusion led to a bias in the
conclusions that scientists accept. Here there is a classic and
compelling example: during the 1950s and ’60s, (male) primatologists
arrived at hypotheses about territoriality and aggression in the troops
of primates they studied; as an increasing number of women entered
the field in the 1970s, aspects of primate social life that had been
invisible came to be noted, and the old hypotheses were forced to
undergo radical revision. The specific moral of this case is that pooling
the observations of both men and women may enlarge the range
of evidence available to the scientific community; the more general
point is that a diversity of social backgrounds and social roles can
sometimes provide the most inclusive body of data.

Feminists sometimes wanted to argue for a bolder thesis. Appealing to

the general thesis of the underdetermination of theories by evidence,
they claimed that choices between equally good rivals are made by
introducing considerations of value that reflect the masculine bias of
the scientific community. Yet this style of argument works no better in
this context than it did in the blanket sociological invocation of
underdetermination considered in the last section. Where feminists
can make a detailed case for the existence of equivalent rivals, it is
important to probe their decision making to see whether an arbitrary
choice is being grounded in a problematic way. There is no general
reason for believing that evidential considerations always fall short,
creating a vacuum that can be filled only by the irruption of masculine
values.

The feminist argument does, however, point toward a deeper issue.

Once it is understood that science is a social enterprise, it may be
supposed that the institutions that guide the development of the
sciences absorb major features of the background society, including
the privileged position of men, and that this affects the goals set for
the sciences and the values placed on certain types of scientific
achievements. This form of the feminist critique is extremely
important in bringing into the open issues that were skirted in
previous discussions and that have been neglected in traditional
philosophy of science. They can best be approached by returning to the
unfinished question of the nature of scientific progress.

Progress and values

Suppose that scientific realism succeeds in fighting off challenges to
the view that the sciences attain (or accumulate, or converge on) truth.
Does this mean that there is now a satisfactory understanding of
scientific progress as increasing grasp of truth? Not necessarily. For
the truths about nature are too many, and most of them are not worth
knowing. Even if one focuses on a small region of the universe—a
particular room, say, during the period of an hour—there are infinitely
many languages for describing that room and, for each such language,
infinitely many true statements about the room during that time.
Simply accumulating truth about the world is far too easy. Scientific
progress would not be made by dispatching armies of investigators to
count leaves or grains of sand. If the sciences make progress, it is
because they offer an increasing number of significant truths about the
world.
The question of scientific progress is unfinished because this notion of
significance was not sufficiently analyzed. Many philosophers wrote
either as if the aim of the sciences is to deliver the complete truth
about the world (a goal that is not obviously coherent and is surely
unattainable) or as if there is some objective notion of significance,
given by nature. What might this notion of significance be? Perhaps
that the truths desired are the laws of nature or the fundamental
principles that govern natural phenomena. But proposals like this
are vulnerable to the worries about the role of laws and about the
possibility of unified science discussed above. Moreover, many
thriving sciences do not seem to be in the business of enunciating
laws; there appear to be large obstacles to finding some “theory of
everything” that will integrate and subsume all the sciences that have
been pursued (let alone those that might be pursued in the future). A
sober look at the variety of scientific research undertaken today
suggests that the sciences seek true answers to questions that are
taken to be significant, either because they arouse people’s curiosity or
because they lend themselves to the pursuit of practical goals that
people want to achieve. The agenda for research is set not by nature
but by society.

At this point, the feminist critique obtains a purchase, for the picture

just outlined identifies judgments of value as central to the direction of
scientific inquiry—we pursue the truths that matter to us. But who are
the “we” whose values enter into the identification of the goals of the
sciences? To what extent do the value judgments actually made leave
out important constituencies within the human population? These are
serious questions, and one of the main contributions of
feminist philosophy of science is to bring them to philosophical
attention.

The main point, however, is general. An account of the goals of science

cannot rest with the bare assertion that the sciences seek truth.
Philosophers should offer an analysis of which kinds of truths are
important, and, unless they can revive the idea of an “objective agenda
set by nature,” they will have to conclude that judgments about human
interests and values are part of a philosophical account of science. This
means that philosophy of science can no longer confine itself to
treating issues that relate to logic, epistemology,
and metaphysics (questions about the reconstruction of scientific
theories, the nature of natural necessity, and the conditions under
which hypotheses are confirmed). Moral and political philosophy will
also enter the philosophy of science.

Insofar as philosophers have reflected on the ethics of science, they

have often regarded the questions as relatively straightforward.
Application of virtually any major moral theory will support
restrictions on the kinds of things that can be done to people in
scientific experimentation; everyday maxims about honesty will
generate the conclusions about fraud and misrepresentation that are
routinely made when cases of scientific misconduct surface. These
issues about the ways in which scientists are expected to behave in
their daily work are superficial; the deeper moral and political
questions concern the ways in which the goals of inquiry are set (and,
correspondingly, in which progress is understood). One might say,
vaguely, that the sciences should pursue those truths whose
attainment would best promote the collective good; but this, of course,
leaves the hard philosophical task of understanding “the collective
good.” How should the divergent interests of different groups of
people be weighed? How should the balance between satisfying human
curiosity and solving practical problems be struck? How should future
gains be judged in relation to short-term demands? Philosophy of
science has so far said too little in response to these questions.

Many of the philosophical topics so clearly formulated by the logical

positivists and logical empiricists are, rightly, still the focus of 21st-
century concern. Increased understanding of the history of the
sciences and of the social character of scientific practice has set
broader tasks for the philosophy of science. In a world in which the
power of scientific research, for good and for ill, is becoming
increasingly obvious, it is to be hoped that issues about the values
adopted in the pursuit of science will become more central to
philosophical discussion.