Lies That Scientists Tell (Themselves)
A critical overview of some common rationalistic fallacies of science
By MARTIN REZNY
Your great article about rationality being a myth has reminded me of the many frustrations that I have with the academy and especially the social sciences. I’ve decided to make it into a series of critiques and observations. I’ll try to reference where all of these ideas come from, because most of them are not just mine, but mostly to show that there are others who think them, since I’m sure that many people have arrived at similar conclusions independently. First, a little about how sense is made.
Realities of Truth About Reality
If you’re at all familiar with the scientific vocabulary, you must have heard words like “objectivity” or “rationality”. If you haven’t really thought about the meaning behind them, as most people and even scientists haven’t, you may assume that “objective” means something like “applying to all cases” or “real”, and “rational” means something like “making sense” or “correct”. If you do, you have been successfully misled. These words mean no such thing.
The word for something applying to all possible cases is actually “universal”. Why does it matter? It matters because the word “objective”, or rather its concept of that which can be observed and agreed upon by multiple independent observers, is only a subset of “universal”, all that is real in our universe. The counterpart to “objective” is “subjective”, or all that is internally experienced by individuals, and only them. You see, science disregards it.
If yout think about the word “subjective”, what connotation do you assume it has? Untrue, unreal, incorrect, nonsensical? I’m sure it’s something along those lines. But it is true and real, and subject to any laws that govern this universe, which makes it an important thing to study, as well as something that’s valid not only from our human standpoint, but from any natural point of view. And yet, science treats it as something supernatural, imaginary.
Why is that so? Many people forget, again including scientists, that science is still only a branch of philosophy, and that it’s built on arbitrary axioms. Science is a method that’s based on objective observation, interpersonal corroboration of data, and consensus. Which is fine, within certain limits, which mean that the subjective realm lies largely outside of its reach. That’s why it would naturally be biased toward discarding subjectivity.
Science must be objective, or it stops being itself, and other thing it must be is rational. Rational again doesn’t mean “making sense”, there’s other word for that — “logical”. Rationality is only one of possible logics, internally consistent paradox-free systems of thought. Rationality is specifically the instrumental logic, which is goal-oriented, problem-solving, tool-making, and resource-managing way of thinking. You can make all kinds of sense as an irrationalist.
Since rationality, too, is only a subset of logic, what are some other logics like? Number one subjective and irrational logic that comes to mind would be emotional logic, based on, well, emotions, ranging from empathy to rage, happiness to sorrow, pleasure to pain. There’s also transcendental logic, belief in things beyond our knowledge allowing for resistance to objective proof at hand, and other key ways of thinking for our personal and social life.
When Science Gets Emotional (And Can’t Handle It)
And rest assured, those irritate the hell out of the most “faithful” scientists. Especially in natural sciences, it’s not a coincidence that “irrational” is practically a slight. I’m sure you’ve been conditioned to feel it intuitively as a bad word even through a tangential contact with scientific thought. The worst part, however, is that scientists as human beings living in this universe cannot escape the fact that they are irrational beings, and that causes real problems.
As any cognitive dissonance would, it interferes with the ability of the academia to address certain of its personal biases and social problems, corrupting both the quality of research and leading to various unethical uses of sciences with harmful real world consequences. Since scientists would like to see themselves as rational beings more so than any other group of people and stake the reputation of their enterprise on it seeming that way, they’re logically among the least likely groups to recognize this interference.
Here is first of many ways in which scientists struggle, and often fail, to overcome irrationality they cannot reconcile with their objectives:
1.) Authority Spell and the Gospel of Scientism
As much as public champions and promoters of science would like us to believe the institution of science is somehow radically different from all the other social institutions, it really isn’t. There’s no duplicity required for that to be the case, since it is what scientists themselves truly want to believe, and that’s one of the most basic ways how to create bias. The case of science is especially tricky because it got the closest to believing it has absolute truth.
In a sense, a defender of science could say that religious organizations are the ones who believe more in their own infallibility and authority when it comes to discovering the truth about the universe, but in a very specific way they’re sabotaged in this regard precisely because they don’t base their truth on objective evidence. Science is more authoritative because it has proof. It’s arguably much harder to believe something absolutely without clear proof.
The problem is, even objective proof is based on subjective belief. Belief in the method, in the process, in certain axiomatic settings of the universe and what observation even is, in one’s own senses and mental faculties, and the list goes on. Objective proofs have sometimes been misleading and any interpretation of fact or policy based on that interpretation are beyond the limits of scientific method itself. Scientism is precisely the belief that science can what it cannot.
Because scientists are not immune to the classic trappings of certitude and power, despite their sincere efforts to correct errors and improve, the scientific institution is a church, with its denominations (divisions in fields), prophets and saints (glorified and revered historical figures), its officials and ceremonies, and its lore that goes beyond its objective method. There are many commonly projected and believed scientific fantasies or articles of faith.
Professor of humanities Wes Cecil from Peninsula College has a great series of lectures on many topics related to this subject, and some of the scientistic fantasies that he talks about include the obsession with numbers and all kinds of misplaced numerical attempts at measuring quality of subjective things, unreasonable belief in the scientific ability to facilitate constant progress, or that health is about coming up with a magic pill for every disease. All false beliefs.
These are largely promoted by the scientific authorities and believed so widely even by opponents of science because of the immense unquestioned authority scientific establishment has attained after a series of performed miracles. Whatever you choose to believe about theories like eugenics or Marxism-atheism, they have been promoted by scientific establishments as sciences out of sincere belief of majorities of scientists. And they did harm.
To say that these were not really sciences because now we know them to be factually incorrect (=objectively wrong), shows a misunderstanding of what science is, or an intention to obfuscate the issue. Science is what scientists do and what they believe, their consensus. At certain points, scientific consensus was able to flatly deny even phenomena as logical and provable as hygiene or continental drift. Those errors were corrected, but which others weren’t?
Don’t forget that the notion of science progressing linearly ever forward is also only an assumption, a belief. It’s entirely possible that science regresses our understanding of the universe overall, or goes constantly back and forth. As comedian Lewis Black puts it rather brilliantly as someone who has observed several decades of scientific “revelations”:
“Is milk good for you? I rest my case.”
In light of what happened with nutritional science in particular and things like vitamins, alternative medicine especially can demonstrably often be right, even though it uses different methods to gain insight, but scientists largely choose to believe that “alternative” medicine is nonsense because medicine can either be scientific, or incorrect. And health is a physical issue. As far as mental disciplines are concerned, there isn’t even how to know what truth is.
To paraphrase Wes Cecil again, many of the major technological and industrial developments in the history of humanity were pre-scientific, meaning that by simple trial and error without any theory of physics, useful tools and complex machinery can be devised. As far as theory is concerned, theory of relativity was simply thought out in an armchair, which is normally the dismissive way scientists talk about philosophers. Science is not magic.
