Ethics in Science
Henry H. Bauer
Puzzle and Filter Model
There's another model of how science gets done that I think is useful.
It was suggested by Michael Polanyi, a chemist who turned philosopher
of science (and whose son John won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry not so
long ago). Polanyi asked, how can people best work together to produce
good science as efficiently as possible? And he thought of other
cooperative activities. Let's say you have a wagon-load of potatoes to
peel and lots of people to help: you give each of them a pile of
potatoes and ask them to peel them. But science wouldn't progress
efficiently if every scientist were trying to do the same thing at the
same time; it works best when scientists specialize and also critique
one another. In any given study, people get ideas at different times,
they get different ideas, they have different experimental skills - how
to arrange it so that whenever a particular idea or experiment is
called for, the best qualified person knows that it's time to step in?
Only by ensuring that everyone knows what everyone else is doing,
by having open and honest publication. Polanyi made the nice
comparison that the sort of cooperation you want in doing science is
the same as when a group of people are jointly working a jigsaw puzzle:
everyone does what they can do best, everyone works at their own pace,
and since everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and what the
present state of the puzzle is, everyone is able to step in at the
right place at the right time.
So my first main point is that to
understand science, its history and development, its contemporary
state, what it can do in the future, what role it can and does play in
society - you need to think of it not as individuals
practicing "the scientific method" but as people working at a jigsaw
puzzle and filtering knowledge. There are lots of things about science
that you can understand through the puzzle-&-filter model that you
can't understand in terms of a "scientific method"
(Table 1):
So why has the myth persisted, that science is what it is because of the
scientific method? There are a number of reasons:
- Practicing scientists don't much care about explaining why
science works, they're interested in doing it. They're happy to let
the philosophers and sociologists worry about philosophy and
sociology.
- Philosophers and sociologists don't pay much attention
to scientists; and they don't know much about the actual practice of
science. What they understand is abstract methodology, and theory, and
theory about method.
- The only claim that sociology, political
science, and psychology have to being scientific is that they use the
scientific method. Those fields haven't accumulated reliably
applicable, predictably useful knowledge.
- Some people argued that
if science doesn't use the scientific method, if it's "just" a
human activity, then there's nothing especially rational or reliable
about it.
- And we don't like to give up the possibility of being
quite certain about things. About a century ago, we discarded religion
as the revelation of truth because science seemed to explain a lot of
things better; if we now give up the certainty of science, what's left?
- at least for Marxists or secular humanists?
At any rate, it's still a firmly entrenched belief that science works
by the scientific method; which is objective, self-correcting,
impersonal. That's why, when the public fuss about misconduct
in science really got going 5 or 10 years ago, most scientists
dismissed it as making mountains out of mole-hills. So what if a few
silly people think they can cheat in science and get away with it?
We know that they can't.
Send questions or comments about this essay to:
Henry H. Bauer
Professor of Chemistry & Science Studies
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0227
hhbauer@vt.edu, (540) 951-2107, http://www.cis.vt.edu/stshome/faculty/bauer.htm