3 The Importance of the Scientific Attitude
Many thinkers have tried to identify what is special about science based on its allegedly unique methodology. This approach has been criticized because it has been shown that many scientists do not actually follow the steps that philosophers of science have used to justify their work.1 This does not mean that there is nothing important about what scientists do that might have great bearing on science’s privileged epistemic status. It is just that perhaps we should be looking less at the method by which science is justified and more at the attitude that its practitioners have in mind while they are doing it.
As we saw in chapter 1, there is no recipe for doing science. Likewise, there may be no logical means of distinguishing between the type of reasoning that scientists use to think about the empirical world and that which is used elsewhere. Nonscientists can certainly be rigorous and careful in their consideration of evidence, and scientists can occasionally rely on subjective, social, and other criteria to decide between theories. There is, however, an important feature of scientific work that is seldom talked about in philosophical circles, which is the attitude that guides scientific inquiry. Even if scientists cannot always rely on a set of rules to follow, it is clear from the history of science that they must rely on something. An ethos. A spirit of inquiry. A belief system that tells them that the answer to empirical questions will be found not in deference to authority or ideological commitment—or sometimes even in reason—but in the evidence they gather about the subject matter under investigation. Such a creed, I maintain, is the best way of understanding what is special about science. I will call this the scientific attitude.
The scientific attitude can be summed up in a commitment to two principles:
(1) We care about empirical evidence.
(2) We are willing to change our theories in light of new evidence.
This, of course, does not rule out the idea that other factors may sometimes weigh in. As Thomas Kuhn’s work demonstrates, even when we care about evidence it can underdetermine theory choice, which opens the door to extra-empirical considerations. What must be ruled out, however, is wishful thinking and dishonesty. In the pithiest version of his ongoing attempt to capture what is distinctive about science, Richard Feynman tells us that “science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves.”2 Perhaps there is no better rendering of the proper mindset behind the scientific attitude than this.
Such talk about the attitudes and values of science may be dismissed by some as too vague and unrigorous to be helpful, so let me now be more specific about what this approach might entail. What does it mean to care about evidence? Maybe the best way to think about this is to examine what it means not to care about evidence. If one does not care about evidence, one is resistant to new ideas. One is dogmatic. Such a person might hold onto their beliefs no matter what the evidence shows. When the scientific attitude says that we must “care about evidence” the idea is that we must be earnestly willing to seek out and consider evidence that may have a bearing on the grounds for our beliefs. In some cases this will improve our justification, but in others it may undermine it. Scientists must be open to either.
To care about evidence is to be willing to test our theory against a reality that might refute it. It is to commit to hold a belief not because it makes us feel good, seems right, or even coheres with other things that we believe, but because it fits with the data of our experience. While there is a vast literature in the philosophy of science that shows just how difficult it is sometimes to decide between theories on this basis—necessitating all sorts of other considerations such as simplicity, fruitfulness, and coherence—this does not change the underlying creed of science: where it is available, evidence should drive scientific theory choice.3
Of course, with some topics, we might not care about evidence because it is irrelevant. If the subject is math or logic, then evidence will not make a difference because anything at issue can be resolved through reason. But when an empirical subject is under investigation, this kind of rejection of evidence is anathema to rigorous inquiry. In science, we seek knowledge from experience in order to see what the world is like. Caring about evidence is fundamental because it is the only way to shape our knowledge closer and closer to the reality that we seek to know.
One might imagine here a list of traits. The person with a good scientific attitude is humble, earnest, open-minded, intellectually honest, curious, and self-critical. The danger here, however, is that we cannot simply make the scientific attitude a matter of individual psychology, nor can we leave it to the judgment of the individual whether he or she possesses these traits. For one thing, what to do about the denialist or pseudoscientist, who might say that they care about evidence—or even actually believe it—when it is obvious to the rest of us that they do not? Such a person may simply be lying to us, but they may also be lying to themselves. If the scientific attitude were just a matter of how one feels about whether one cares about evidence, it would not be possible to differentiate between the genuinely earnest person who is searching for a way to test their beliefs against experience versus the ideologues who are deluded into thinking that they care about evidence merely because they cherry pick facts that confirm their prior beliefs. Instead, the scientific attitude must be measured by our actions, and these actions are best judged not by the individual, but by the larger community of scientists, who share the scientific attitude as a guiding ethos.4 To care about evidence is thus to act in accordance with a well-vetted set of practices that have been sanctioned by the scientific community because they have historically led to well-justified beliefs.
This is not to say that the process of science is perfect. Even when we fully embrace it, the scientific attitude probably cannot eliminate all of the denialists and pseudoscientists who say that they have it, even when they do not. Whether they are fooling themselves or others, it is sometimes hard to tell.5 Likewise, there may be scientific researchers who sometimes get too close to their own theories and refuse to believe what the data tell them.6 Where is the line between these two camps? Even if the scientific attitude cannot draw a firm logical or methodological division between science and its imposters, it can at least expose a basic lacuna in values that are illuminated by how we behave in the face of contravening evidence.
What is evidence? It is probably impossible to define all of the different things that may count as scientific evidence. Statistical, qualitative, or even historical evidence may exist across different empirical endeavors. Evidence is the data we get from experience that affects our rational degree of belief in a theory. Sometimes this data is quantitative and can be measured directly. Other times it is diffuse and must be interpreted. Either way, scientists should agree that evidence is crucial in choosing or modifying a scientific theory.
There are, however, many competing theories of what it means for scientists to use evidence in a rational way. As Peter Achinstein writes:
Scientists frequently disagree about whether, or to what extent, some set of data or observational results constitute evidence for a scientific hypothesis. Disagreements may be over empirical matters, such as whether the data or observational results are correct, or whether other relevant empirical information is being ignored. But conflicts also arise because scientists are employing incompatible concepts of evidence.7
Entire books have been written about these different concepts of evidence, and their various strengths and weaknesses in explaining how the facts of experience either do or do not lend support to a scientific theory.8 It might shock those outside the philosophy of probability and statistics to learn that there are competing accounts of what it is appropriate to infer from one and the same piece of evidence. There are furious debates, for instance, over the “subjectivist” approach to probability favored by Bayesians versus the “frequentist” approach offered by Deborah Mayo and others.9 The scientific attitude may be thought of as compatible with many different concepts of evidence. No matter your theory of the proper way to use evidence, the scientific attitude toward evidence is one where you are committed to the idea that evidence is paramount in making up your mind about whether a theory is worthy of belief.
Of course, the best way to appreciate the importance of the scientific attitude is to see it in action, and I’ll soon give a few examples. First, however, I would like to address two possible misconceptions. First, the scientific attitude is not meant to be a solution to the problem of demarcation.10 The goal of the demarcation project is to find a logical criterion by which one can sort all and only science into one camp, and everything else in the other. That is a tall order and, as we have seen, virtually every attempt to do this has failed. This leaves science open to misunderstanding and criticism by those who do not fully appreciate what it is about. The goal of identifying the scientific attitude as an essential feature of science is not to wall it off from other disciplines but to show that unless those who make empirical claims are willing to follow the rigorous standards that define scientific reasoning, they will fall short of the best way the human mind has ever devised of coming to know the empirical world.
A second possible misconception may involve my intentions. I am not here attempting to give a descriptive account of what scientists actually do because, in any given lab on any given day, one’s commitment to the scientific attitude may be in flux. Scientists may occasionally violate the norms of science and then later, one hopes, come back into line.11 Instead, I offer the scientific attitude as a normative ideal, by which we may judge whether some individual scientist or entire field of inquiry is living up to the values of science. As we’ve seen, science is not based on some formula, as the scientific method promised. Neither is it strictly a matter of some all-or-nothing judgment about logic or methodology. Science is defined by a set of practices that are embedded in the values upheld by the people who perform it.
This is not to say that science is solely justified (or not) by what it does. Practice is important but it is not the only thing that matters in judging science. I say this because one strain of argument against the methodological approach to the philosophy of science over the last few decades has been that, because science does not always follow the precepts that the logic of science would dictate, science must be no better or worse than any other form of inquiry. I believe this conclusion to be misguided. Although I myself eschew a methodological defense of science, my approach too is rooted in the idea of rational justification. I may not agree with the traditional idea that in order to defend science one must draw a rigid distinction between facts and values, but I do not believe that science is hopelessly subjective either. Although objectivity is important, values play a role by guiding our practice and keeping us on track. This is to say that even though the practice of science may sometimes fall short, it is still possible to justify science as a whole based on the goals of its aspiration.
To recognize the role of practice in understanding science does not diminish the importance of its ideals. Though some may cheat or do sloppy work, this does not mean that science is unjustifiable. Just as it does not undermine the logic of science to say that individual scientists are sometimes irrational, it does not undermine the values of science to point out that some practitioners have occasionally betrayed the scientific attitude. Indeed, this is why it is important to champion the role of group scrutiny in judging scientific work. The standards of science are upheld not just by the individual, but by the community of scientists, who have developed a set of tools to keep it honest. This is why the scientific attitude is a normative rather than a descriptive thesis. Humans sometimes cheat on an ideal even when they believe in it. In such a case, it is up to others to offer correction. And this is exactly what the scientific attitude allows one to do. What makes science distinctive is not merely what it does, but what it aims to do. Despite any mistakes made by the individual, it is the ethos of science that affords it such great epistemic authority.12
Two Examples of the Scientific Attitude
I promised at the outset of this book that one could learn the most about science by looking not just at its successes but also at its failures. I also promised not to use examples exclusively from the history of physics and astronomy. Given that, I will now pursue one example that illustrates the virtues of the scientific attitude drawn from medicine, followed by a “failed” example from chemistry (cold fusion), which demonstrates what can happen when the scientific attitude is compromised.13
For this strategy to be credible, it must square with the belief that it would have been easy to find other examples from the history of physics and astronomy that would also demonstrate the merits of the scientific attitude. I think this is not an unreasonable assumption. One could, for instance, turn to Newton’s theory of gravity or, better yet, to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Given the head start we have from Popper’s reliance on this example, this might serve well to illustrate the power of having the proper mindset when one is testing a theory. But I will leave it to the reader to imagine what Popper might have said about the scientific attitude of Einstein. Instead I will here share one of my own favorite examples from the history of science: Semmelweis’s theory of childbed fever. This example was made famous within the philosophy of science by Carl Hempel, who used it in his 1966 book Philosophy of Natural Science to illustrate the virtues of scientific explanation.14 For my own purposes, I will take pains to highlight the way that Semmelweis’s theory demonstrates the scientific attitude, rather than the logical empiricist account of science within which Hempel frames it. This will also tie in quite well with what I have to say about how the scientific attitude transformed modern medicine in chapter 6.
Given the unquestionably scientific status of modern medicine, it is hard to believe that more than two hundred years after the start of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, medical care was still in the dark ages. As late as 1840, medical care still had not enjoyed the discovery of anesthesia (1846), the germ theory of disease (1850s), or antiseptic surgery (1867). One problem is that even when discoveries were made, there were few agreed-upon routes for disseminating the information or overcoming the objections of skeptics.15 Experimental methods took a back seat to intuition and tradition. This makes it all the more remarkable that in 1846, at the Vienna General Hospital, we see one of the greatest examples of the scientific attitude in full flower.
Ignaz Semmelweis was a lowly assistant physician in the world’s largest maternity clinic, which was divided into two wards. In Ward 1, childbed fever (also known as puerperal fever) was rampant and the mortality rate was as high as 29 percent; in the adjacent Ward 2, the rate was only 3 percent.16 Another piece of relevant information was that women who delivered their babies at home or even on the way to the hospital in a “street birth” had a much lower incidence of childbed fever. What was so different about Ward 1? Various hypotheses were offered. One was that Ward 1 was overcrowded. When Semmelweis counted up the patients, however, he noted that the overcrowding was in fact much worse in Ward 2 (perhaps because of all those women avoiding the notorious Ward 1). It was then noted that, because of the physical layout in Ward 1, the priest who was summoned to give last rites to women who were dying of childbed fever was required to pass by many other beds—all while ringing a bell—which might put great fear into the other women and perhaps increase their chances of contracting childbed fever. In Ward 2, the priest had direct access to the sickroom. Semmelweis decided to try an experiment in which he asked the priest to take a different, silent, route to the sickroom in Ward 1, but the mortality rate from childbed fever stayed the same.
Other tests involving whether the women lay on their sides or their backs while giving birth were similarly fruitless. Finally it was noted that one of the main differences was that in Ward 1 the deliveries were handled by medical students, whereas in Ward 2 they were performed by midwives. Were the medical students giving rougher examinations? After the medical students and the midwives changed places, the mortality rates followed the medical students, but still no one knew why. After instructing the medical students to use gentler techniques, the mortality rate still did not improve.
Eventually, enlightenment came in 1847 when one of Semmelweis’s colleagues received a puncture wound during an autopsy on a woman with childbed fever, and died of an illness that appeared to have the same symptoms.17 Could childbed fever be contracted by someone other than pregnant women? Semmelweis realized that there was a difference in where the medical students were before they came to the maternity ward; they came directly from performing autopsies, with unwashed hands and instruments (remember that this was before antisepsis and the germ theory of disease), straight to the maternity ward, leading to the hypothesis that childbed fever may have to do with the transfer of “cadaveric matter” to the pregnant women. As a test, Semmelweis ordered the medical students to wash their hands in chlorinated water before performing their deliveries. The mortality rate plummeted. He now had an explanation not only for why the incidence of childbed fever was so much greater in Ward 1, but also for why “street births” saw such a low incidence of childbed fever. Eventually, Semmelweis was forced to broaden his hypothesis to include the idea that childbed fever could also be transferred from putrified living tissue, after he and his colleagues examined a woman with cervical cancer, and then a dozen other women in succession, eleven of whom died of childbed fever.18
Use of the scientific attitude in this example is obvious. Semmelweis did not assume that he already knew the answer to the question of what caused childbed fever; he examined the similarities and differences between the two wards, then learned what he could through observation and controlled experiment. He came up with various hypotheses, then began to test them one by one. When a hypothesis flamed out, he moved on to the next one, leaving himself open to learning new information along the way. Finally, when he found the answer—and later broadened it—he changed his ideas based on the new data.
Did he “care about empirical evidence”? Clearly he did. By controlling the circumstances and testing his ideas against actual experience, Semmelweis was respecting the idea that the cause of childbed fever could not be discerned merely by reason. Was he “willing to change his theory based on new evidence”? Again the answer is yes. Not only did Semmelweis change his hypothesis each time one was refuted, he enlarged it when new information came to light that it was not only cadaveric matter—but also putrid living tissue—that could transfer disease from one body to another. He still did not know the exact mechanism of transfer for the disease (much as Darwin did not know about genetics when he proposed his theory of evolution by natural selection), but the correlation was undeniable. Semmelweis had shown that “lack of cleanliness” was responsible for childbed fever.
Incredibly, this idea was resisted and ignored for decades. Despite Semmelweis’s incontrovertible empirical demonstration that chlorinated hand washing could radically diminish the incidence of childbed fever, his hypothesis was challenged by the majority of medical practitioners. Countless women unnecessarily lost their lives as the stubborn medical establishment resented the implication that they were the ones who were giving their patients childbed fever. They were insulted by the idea that gentlemen could be seen as somehow unclean. With no explanation for how cadaveric matter could be transferring illness, they were reluctant to give up the hypothesis that it was probably the result of “bad air.” Semmelweis was fired from his job and, after further demonstrations of the efficacy of his ideas at other hospitals throughout Europe (still with no acknowledgment from the medical community), he became bitter. Eventually he was committed to an asylum, where he was beaten by guards and died two weeks later of sepsis, a blood infection similar to childbed fever.
In the resistance to Semmelweis’s hypothesis, we can see the flip side of the scientific attitude as well. It is true not only that the presence of the scientific attitude facilitates progress in scientific discovery and explanation, but that its absence can impede it. During the 1840s, the medieval concept that disease resulted from an imbalance in the body’s “four humors” was still widespread. Custom and tradition dictated answers to medical questions more than empirical discovery. It was not until Pasteur’s and Koch’s work on the germ theory of disease in the 1850s, and Lister’s later introduction of antiseptic surgery in 1867, that medicine began to find its scientific footing. Years after Semmelweis’s death, his ideas were vindicated.19
One could be forgiven for thinking that this is all so simple and obvious that the people who ignored Semmelweis must have been fools. How could they have been so stubborn and ignorant to miss what was right in front of them? The answer is that up until the middle of the nineteenth century, medicine did not embrace the scientific attitude. The idea that we could learn about an empirical subject through careful experimentation and observational evidence had already taken hold in the physical sciences. Galileo’s revolution was more than two hundred years old in astronomy. But old ideas held a firm grip on medicine until much later. Indeed, perhaps the most stunning part of the story about childbed fever is not why so many medical practitioners rejected controlled experimentation and learning from empirical evidence, but that Semmelweis ran so far ahead of the pack and embraced it.20
But what excuse do we have for some of today’s scientists who occasionally pursue research that does not live up to this standard? It is perhaps ironic that one of the most compelling demonstrations of scientists’ reliance on the power of evidence can be shown through what some have called the worst example of scientific bungling in the twentieth century. In the spring of 1989, two chemists from the University of Utah—B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann—held a press conference to announce that they had achieved a sustained nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature. If true, the implications would be enormous, for it would mean that the dream of a clean, cheap, and abundant source of worldwide energy might soon be fulfilled. As expected, scientists met this announcement with enormous skepticism—not least because it was made via press conference rather than the more customary route of publication after rigorous peer review—and set about immediately to try to reproduce Pons and Fleischmann’s results.
And they could not. After a two-month honeymoon in the media, during which time other scientists were handicapped by Pons and Fleischmann’s refusal to share the details of their experiment, it was shown that their work was hopelessly flawed. Accusations of extrascientific meddling ran wide, but in the end all that mattered was appeal to the evidence. Many scientists were extremely embarrassed by this whole episode, especially when books began to appear with titles such as Bad Science, Too Hot to Handle, and The Scientific Fiasco of the Century. Rather than being ashamed of this, scientists might instead have celebrated this occasion to demonstrate the power of scientific skepticism. Despite all of the money, prestige, and media attention, the case was decided by empirical evidence. Though one particular theory (and a couple of reputations) had been spectacularly shot down, this was a victory for the scientific attitude.21
Here one sees a situation that is almost the opposite of what faced Semmelweis. In the case of childbed fever, it was the lone practitioner who insisted that his results were correct, if anyone would bother to look at the evidence. With cold fusion, the original experimenters were perhaps too blinded by the hype surrounding their theory to be more deliberate with their inquiry and release their results only after they had survived a little more methodological self-scrutiny, an attempt at replication, and peer review. Fortunately, with cold fusion, the scientific attitude was embraced by the larger scientific community, who acted as a check against the haste and preference for one’s own theory that can sometimes derail scientific research. For the wider scientific community—some of whom surely had their own interests at stake—the proper way to decide it was to see what evidence could be brought to bear on the problem.
It is not that mistakes are never made in science. Scientists are human and thus subject to all of the traits of ambition, ego, greed, and stubbornness that motivate the rest of the human population. What is remarkable is that in science we have agreed-upon, transparent standards that can be used to adjudicate empirical disputes and try to correct any errors. For Semmelweis, the medical field waited two decades for the right theory to become firmly entrenched. With cold fusion, it took only two months. The difference was the presence of the scientific attitude.
Roots of the Scientific Attitude
The idea that scientists’ attitude is an important feature of science is not new. It has been anticipated by many others, including Popper and Kuhn.22 Popper, in his account of falsification, emphasized the idea that there is a “critical attitude” behind science. Indeed, in some sense Popper seems to feel that a critical attitude is prior to falsifiability.23
What characterizes the scientific approach is a highly critical attitude towards our theories rather than a formal criterion of refutability: only in the light of such a critical attitude and the corresponding critical methodological approach do “refutable” theories retain their refutability.24
In his intellectual autobiography, Popper reflects on how he first came to the idea of falsification and draws a connection between the critical attitude and the scientific attitude:
What impressed me most was Einstein’s own clear statement that he would regard his theory as untenable if it should fail in certain tests. Thus he wrote, for example: “If the redshift of spectral lines due to the gravitational potential should not exist, then the general theory of relativity will be untenable.” Here was an attitude utterly different from the dogmatic attitude of Marx, Freud, Adler, and even more so that of their followers. Einstein was looking for crucial experiments whose agreement with his predictions would by no means establish his theory; while a disagreement, as he was the first to stress, would show his theory to be untenable. This, I felt, was the true scientific attitude. It was utterly different from the dogmatic attitude which constantly claimed to find “verifications” for its favourite theories. Thus I arrived, by the end of 1919, at the conclusion that the scientific attitude was the critical attitude, which did not look for verifications but for crucial tests; tests which could refute the theory tested, although they could never establish it.25
I applaud this account. There is an important aspect of the scientific attitude that is captured in Popper’s insight about falsificationism. I disagree with Popper, however, that the best way to capture this critical attitude is to reduce it to a methodological principle that serves as a criterion of demarcation. As Popper recognizes, there is something special about the attitude that scientists have toward the power of empirical evidence. But need this be a matter of logic?
Kuhn also recognized the importance of the scientific attitude. This fact is often overlooked, owing to the enamored response that Kuhn’s account of science received at the hands of the “Strong Programme” of sociology of science, which argued that all scientific theories—both true and false—could be explained by sociological rather than evidential factors, and were thus in some sense relative to human interests. Kuhn, however, was dismayed by this interpretation of his work and resisted the idea that nature didn’t matter to scientists. As one commentator writes:
Kuhn … was deeply troubled by the developments in the sociology of science initiated by the Strong Programme. … Kuhn was concerned that the proponents of the Strong Programme misunderstood the role that values play in science. … He complained that the Strong Programme’s studies of science “leave out the role of [nature].” … Kuhn, though, insists that nature plays a significant role in shaping scientists’ beliefs.26
While Kuhn took seriously the idea that theories must be compared to one another, they must also be tested against empirical evidence. Kuhn writes:
[The world] is not in the least respectful of an observer’s wishes and desires; quite capable of providing decisive evidence against invented hypotheses which fail to match its behavior.27
Unlike Popper, Kuhn may not have framed this as an “attitude” that stood behind the methodology of science, but Kuhn nonetheless recognized the important role that empirical evidence could play in helping scientists to decide between theories and saw that commitment to the value of empirical evidence was necessary for science to go forward.
One is thus left with the question of why neither Popper nor Kuhn went so far as to make the values of science—either the critical attitude or respect for the idea that nature could overrule our wishes and desires—the basis for distinguishing between science and nonscience.28 For Kuhn, the answer is perhaps easier: although he felt that science was special, and took great pains to come to terms with how science actually worked, he did not wish to tie himself to any formal criterion of demarcation.29 Popper, on the other hand, overtly did wish to do this, so it is perhaps more of a live question why he did not make more of an attempt to find within the critical attitude of science an explanation for what is distinctive about it. One could argue, I suppose, that he did precisely this through his account of falsification. Yet at some level this fails to come to grips with Popper’s strategy of drawing a distinction between the way that science operates versus how philosophers try to justify it, juxtaposed against his deep ambivalence over how to deal with the fact that practical considerations could sometimes threaten the beauty of his logical account of demarcation. Even within one of his clearest statements that falsification is a logical solution to the problem of demarcation, Popper writes: “what is to be called a ‘science’ and who is to be called a ‘scientist’ must always remain a matter of convention or decision.”30 Clearly Popper understood the importance of flexibility, having a critical attitude, and occasional deference to practical matters. Still, he yearned to have an absolutely logical basis for drawing a distinction between what was science and what was not. I think that this distracted him from recognizing the full power of something like the scientific attitude, which may not have seemed “hard” enough to satisfy his mandate for logical demarcation.
An even deeper root of the scientific attitude may be found at the very beginning of when philosophers started to think about the methodology of science. Although he is primarily remembered today for his work on scientific method, the idea that there are special “virtues” that attach to scientific inquiry can be found in Francis Bacon’s 1620 masterpiece The New Organon.31 Here he offers virtues like honesty and openness as inextricably bound up with the good practice of science. Bacon asserts that methodology is important, but it must be embedded within the appropriate values that support it. Indeed, Rose-Mary Sargent has maintained that the modern quest for “objectivity” in the defense of science—where one attempts to bifurcate facts from values—represents a perversion of Bacon’s ideas.32 It may seem ironic that the person most often associated with the idea of scientific method would also uphold the idea that scientific practice must be pursued with the appropriate attitude, but one has only to read the preface and first fifty aphorisms of The New Organon to confirm Bacon’s intention.
In his subsequent work The New Atlantis (1627), Bacon also pushed for the idea that these scientific virtues must be expressed not only by individual practitioners, but also by the community of scientists who would judge and uphold them. In her paper “A Bouquet of Scientific Values,” Noretta Koertge recounts the communal nature of Bacon’s vision for science. She writes, “Bacon’s dream of a new science comprised not only a new methodology but also a community dedicated to the task.”33 Thus we see that a fairly robust account of the scientific attitude has been there all along, practically since the birth of talk about “scientific method.”
Finally, the roots of the scientific attitude may perhaps be appreciated by analogy with another philosophical field that can trace its origins all the way back to Aristotle. In Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic After Virtue, he asks us to consider the merits of his “community practice” approach to normative ethics by way of a chilling thought experiment about science:
Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nonetheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology. Adults argue with each other about the respective merits of relativity theory, evolutionary theory and phlogiston theory, although they possess only a very partial knowledge of each. Children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid. Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all.34
In such a world, what would be missing? Precisely the thing that makes science so special. Even if we had all of the content, knowledge, theories—and even the methods—of science, none of this would make sense without the values, attitudes, and virtues of scientific practice that enabled these discoveries to occur in the first place.
Here the analogy between virtue ethics and science is made explicit.35 In the great ethical debate that has come down to us since Aristotle, some have argued that what makes right acts right is not their adherence to some normative moral theory that purports to delineate our duties based on how well they conform to an ideal standard about consequences (such as utilitarianism) or adherence to some rational principle (such as deontology); rather what makes moral behavior moral is the virtue of the people who perform it. People with good moral character behave morally; morality is what moral people do.
Can a similar move now be made in the debate over science? I do not believe it is quite so simple to say that science is simply what scientists do; as in the debate over ethics, we have also to consider the nature and origin of our values, and how they are implemented and judged by the wider community.36 Nonetheless, the analogy is intriguing: maybe we need to focus less on demarcating scientific from nonscientific theories and more on the virtuous epistemic attitudes that are behind the practices of science.37 Some of this work is just beginning in the field of virtue epistemology, which proceeds by analogy with virtue ethics: if we want to know whether a belief is justified, perhaps we would do well to focus at least some of our attention on the character, norms, and values of the people who hold it. The application of this to problems in the philosophy of science is still quite new, but there has already been some excellent work in applying the insights of virtue epistemology to such thorny problems as underdetermination and theory choice in the philosophy of science.38
I hope it is clear by now that I do not seek to make a priority claim for the scientific attitude. This idea has a long history that goes back through Popper and Kuhn, at least to Francis Bacon, and arguably to Aristotle. What I hope to emphasize is that the scientific attitude has been woefully neglected in the philosophy of science. It can nonetheless play a crucial role in understanding and defending science by illuminating an essential feature that has been missing from many contemporary accounts. If we focus exclusively on method, we may miss what science is most essentially about.
Conclusion
In previous accounts, some philosophers of science have felt that the best way to defend science is to come up with a logical justification of its method, rather than look at how science is actually done. When this resulted in a criterion of demarcation that purported to sort all and only science to one side of the ledger—and all and only that which was not science to the other—trouble ensued. For this reason, it seems a virtue of the scientific attitude that it is flexible enough to capture why scientific explanation is distinctive, yet robust enough to ensure that even without a decision procedure, we can still tell whether inquiry is scientific. Having a scientific “attitude” toward evidence may seem soft, yet it captures the essence of what it means to be scientific. Whether this is an observation about the context of discovery (how science actually works) or the context of justification (a rational reconstruction after the fact) matters little. For I think that the greatest threat to science’s credibility comes not from some philosophical distinction between the way that scientists do their work and the method we use to justify it, but instead from the improper introduction of ideological commitments into the scientific process. And the scientific attitude is a bulwark against precisely this sort of ideological infection.39
The idea behind the scientific attitude is simple to formulate but difficult to measure. It nonetheless plays a crucial role both in explaining how science operates and in justifying the uniqueness of science as a way of knowing. Science is successful precisely because it embraces an honest and critical attitude toward evidence (and has created a set of practices like peer review, publication, and reproducibility to institutionalize this attitude).40 Of course, science is not always successful. One can have the scientific attitude and still offer a flawed theory. But the power of caring about empirical evidence is that we (and others) may critique our theory and offer a better one. When we are trying to learn about the empirical world, evidence must overrule other considerations.41 The evidence may not always be definitive, but it cannot be ignored, for the check that it gives us against reality is the best means of discovering (or at least working toward) the truth about the world.
This highlights again the tentative nature of any scientific theory. The scientific attitude is fully consonant with the idea that we can never be sure that we have the truth: all theories are provisional. But this is as it should be, for what is distinctive about science isn’t the truth of Newtonian or Einsteinian theory, but the process by which those theories came to be warranted. Scientific theories are believable not merely because they fit with the data of our experience, but because they are built through a process that respects sensory evidence and the idea that our untutored hypotheses can be improved by a clash with the searching criticism of other scientists who have seen the same data.
We are reminded again of the fragility of science, for it depends on the willingness of its practitioners to embrace the scientific attitude. No matter how reliable our method, science could not work without the forthright and cooperative spirit of scientists. If we want to be scientists, our commitment cannot be to any given theory (even our own) or any ideology, but must be to the scientific attitude itself. Other factors may count, but in the end they are and always should be trumped by evidence. While this may sound meager, it is the heart of what is distinctive about science.