I think it's fair to say that scientists are considered ‘knowledgeable’. Definitive “Knowledge Workers” even. They spend years personally contributing to their chosen field and even longer consuming the conclusions of others. They obsess over niches and revel in esotericism.
They ‘know’ their stuff and people 'believe' them.
But the concept of ‘knowledge’ in science has always bothered me. If science is an iterative process – and is technically never finished – then claiming to infallibly ‘know’ something is scientifically impossible. Instead, for the scientific method to work, researchers must simultaneously accept that something can be true and it can be false. This is very different from 'knowing' something is true. It’s a chronic state of cognitive dissonance.
The idea that science produces knowledge is an extremely common misconception. Science does not produce knowledge. Experiments produce evidence that in-turn, can be used to make predictions. The accuracy and power of these predictions creates the illusion of knowledge.
For example, if I drop a ball and it falls to the floor I have evidence that there is a force directing the ball towards our planet. I can predict that next time I drop the ball, it will not fly upwards towards the moon, but will again fall towards the earth. I can use evidence to predict the future. The behaviour of the ball is currently explained by the curvature of space-time and we can use this model to accurately predict the movement of future objects. However, at no point do we truly ‘know’ space-time is curved – only that this interpretation of evidence currently permits accurate predictions of future behaviour. There might be a mischievous clan of pixies camped in the 11th spacial dimension that love dragging balls towards planets. We don’t know.
So if scientists can’t claim to know anything, why should anyone believe them? If we accept the pedantics of using exact language to invoke an idea, this is an interesting question. It’s interesting because to ‘believe’ something is to accept an idea without evidence. So to ‘believe’ in science is to accept the method of evidence driven prediction without observing the evidence for it. It’s to have faith in a process that does not accept faith.
To host this paradox is to fundamentally misunderstand the scientific method.
Adam Blankenbicker (writing for PLOS Blogs) challenges this idea in his recent piece “Why I don’t believe in science…and students shouldn’t either”. Topping his post Blankenbicker provides a salient anecdote:
“I asked one of my colleagues at work, Dr. Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist, “You believe in evolution, right?” I was surprised by how quickly she answered “I don’t believe in evolution – I accept the evidence for evolution.” The believing isn’t what makes evolution true or not, it’s that there is evidence that supports it.”
Kevin Padian, of the University of California, Berkeley adds:
“Saying that scientists ‘believe’ their results suggests, falsely, that their acceptance is not based on evidence, but is based somehow on faith.”
All good stuff. But what caught my eye was the focus on education. Blankenbicker rightly encourages “teaching the process of science, not the belief in science”. I’ve previously argued that teaching ‘scientific facts’ is very different from teaching the scientific method. The authoritarian focus of teaching facts without the supporting evidence gives a tutee no choice but to simply believe the conclusions of a tutor.
If the resulting tutee 'believes' scientific 'knowledge' then they have fundamentally failed to understand what science is.
Victor Meldrew had the right attitude.