Harvard Professor, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, is clearly a well-read, learned woman. I learned some time ago that a scientist is one thing, a historian of science is something quite different, having had the privilege of teaching alongside a historian of science for several years. Professor Oreskes is the latter, a historian of science, and her presentation is thoughtful, academic, and well worth watching -- thus I link to it below. Several questions arise from her talk that she doesn’t have time to address, and some of which she may not even be aware, but I thought it worth stating them here for others to consider: 1. Professor Oreskes is keen on building trust in the conclusions of science. That’s her stated purpose in this presentation. Its no secret that she is a proponent of man-made global climate change (or climate disruption). And thus she wants to build confidence in the science supporting that thesis. Very well. I doubt not that she has studied the evidence and scrutinized the methods of investigation rigorously. Yet, in her otherwise comprehensive account of the history and nature of modern science (what the ancient Greeks would’ve called technê, as opposed to epistêmê or the even more broad quest for philosophy), she omits one key, central premise of ALL science: Every conclusion of science is provisional, temporary, as science is always ready to accept new conclusions based on new evidence or new findings. Want a different scientific conclusion about virtually any subject? Just allow time to pass, and sooner or later science will announce a new conclusion, maybe even an entirely new paradigm. That is an undeniable, if sometimes inconvenient, truth about science, made famous by Thomas Kuhn. This is precisely why science does not consider itself doctrinaire, and how science distinguishes itself from religion. So while Oreskes is free to encourage the rest of us to trust the find the latest conclusions of science, in all fairness she ought also encourage us to grant that trust with a degree of reservation and provision, as the conclusions of science are themselves provisional. 2. Professor Oreskes acknowledges that reliance on authority is a logical fallacy -- just because a really smart or important person says X does not mean X is necessarily true. The really smart or important person might be wrong, after all. Still, Oreskes says we should trust the judgment of science because these arent just ordinary authorities, they are PhDs, the best and brightest who emerge from modern academia. As a fellow PhD, I know all too well that academics all too often ignore the forest because they think theyve discovered something really interesting about a particular tree. But even more important, no matter how many fancy degrees any group of academicians holds, they never can escape the simple truth of point number 1 above. 3. Toward the end of her presentation, she places great emphasis on the right judgment not simply of one or several scientists, but when a large number of scientists come to a “consensus.” When many scientists coming at a subject from different angles agree on something, that something is likely to be true, according to Oreskes. This part of her thesis is somewhat undermined by her own presentation – she describes, for example, the wide agreement over centuries among the most talented scientific minds on the pre-Copernican model that the Earth was the center of the universe. Still, there is truth to what she is asserting: We tend to have more confidence in any opinion the more widespread and widely held an opinion is. In a kind of back-hand way, she is paying tribute to the forces of markets – when many people over long periods of time find a product or service or technology to be good, useful, and reliable, we can be pretty sure that the product or service or technology is just that. That’s why markets are almost always better guides to quality than regulations set by a few “experts.” And thus we find the interesting phenomenon of a Harvard historian of science agreeing with free market economists. She might not agree with that consensus, but she’s certainly part of it.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 15:14:38 +0000
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