Skepticism Leads to Science Friction
Talk even briefly to almost any scientist these days, and you will find a common perception: that scientists are underfunded and unappreciated, laboring in a land that no longer respects their work.
Even the prestigious British journal Nature recently observed that it is “unfashionable in modern America” to think “that intellectuals matter.”
But is that true? Have scientists plummeted from their lofty position to the bottom of the social barrel, a level normally reserved for politicians and journalists?
“There are fairly regular surveys which measure the esteem in which various occupations are held in this country,” says UC San Diego sociology professor Steven Shapin. “Scientists come out at the top of the list, or near the top of the list, all the time, and there has been no change in that for a very long period of time.”
So why do so many scientists seem so gloomy? I have written about science for more than three decades, and scarcely a day goes by when I don’t hear some scientist say nobody cares anymore about what they do.
“There is a sense among some scientists that everybody is against them,” says Dorothy Nelkin, a sociology professor at New York University who specializes in the sociological impact of science.
Nelkin believes that their feeling of being unappreciated stems largely from funding difficulties encountered by most scientists these days. The end of the Cold War brought about a reordering of priorities, and many scientific disciplines that had grown accustomed to almost automatic funding found their budgets slashed instead.
But Nelkin believes more is involved than just a shortage of money. People tend to be more skeptical these days, even regarding science, and just because a scientist says it’s true, it ain’t necessarily so, as the old song goes. Spurred on by reports of scientific fraud--and almost daily reversals of opinions about what is good or bad for us--people are more inclined to question the validity of scientific findings, Nelkin says.
In short, more people are following the examples set by good scientists--searching for other answers, refusing to accept scientific claims at face value and remaining skeptical until the very end.
That’s good, right?
Well, it may have been OK as long as the skeptics were commoners, but academics outside the scientific community have gotten into the act, and that has enraged some scientists. Shapin, for example, has been embroiled in controversy ever since he helped establish a program at the University of Edinburgh to study how scientists do their work.
The program was seen by some in the scientific community as being “anti-science.” The debate that has followed in technical journals and scientific meetings has been labeled the “science wars.”
The most common theme from within the scientific community has been that academicians outside of science, namely social scientists, have no business criticizing science. That can only lead, as one scientist told the New York Academy of Sciences in 1995, to a “systematic flight from science and reason.” In the end, so that argument goes, science will suffer from a lack of public confidence.
Scientists accuse the sociologists of treating science as a “belief system,” not a process marching toward the truth. Among the most vocal critics are marine biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Paul Levitt, authors of the book “Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science.” The two scientists accuse sociologists of orchestrating an attack on science that will lead to a rise in “charlatanism.”
Shapin is both puzzled and outraged by the debate. He maintains there is no reason why science should not be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny as art and religion.
He is rankled by the suggestion that questioning science makes him anti-science.
He said, “It would be very foolish to be hostile to an activity whose importance you are trying to establish” through academic scrutiny.
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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at leedye@compuserve.com
