Both reality and social forces are equally at work on all scientists working on the issue
You lost me at “equally” and “all”.
Why not just say that both social forces and the part of the natural world under study influence a scientist’s decisions, and a scientist becomes a good scientist who draws correct conclusions about the natural world only when ze keeps the ratio of social influence to natural world influence low?
This leads naturally to the conclusion that yes, a disproportionate amount of correct science will be the result of correspondence with reality, and a disproportionate amount of incorrect science will be the result of social forces.
That doesn’t quite work: how would you keep that ratio low ? In practice, the only way is by countering social influences which might lead a scientist astray with other social influences. The total amount of “social” stays roughly the same.
Consider the LHC, or any particle accelerator. It takes a good deal of “social influence” to get it built, compared to an infinitesimal fraction of its total mass for what scientists hope to observe.
To a very good approximation, any given quark exerts the same influence on a “bad” scientists as it does on a “good” scientist. It takes exceptional and patient work to set up circumstances where the behaviour of a quark, through a long chain of mediating physical influences, results in noticeably different behaviour for a particular scientist.
Generally, there is an enormous amount of “leveraging”, for lack of a better word, that needs to happen between some relevant bit of reality under scrutiny at one end, and the kind of scientific consensus on the other end which affords building something like the LHC.
If you wish to study these leveraging effects accurately, you must adopt a symmetrical stance; you have to bear down and study precisely the nature of these enormously long chains of mediation that bridge the gap between reality and our knowledge of it.
Latour for instance does a great job of this kind of description. Pickering’s study of Morpurgo in the case of quarks is interesting; I got the sense that Morpurgo is a perfectly good scientist, he just failed to discover quarks. This doesn’t jibe with the asymmetric account. I have yet to read “Leviathan and the Air-Pump” which I understand is the original inspiration for the symmetric approach, but apparently Shapin and Schaffer trace these issues all the way back to the debate between Hobbes and Boyle.
This kind of approach gives you a sense of the reality of science as opposed to its mythology—which is largely a product of scientists themselves, for reasons which Latour also outlines convincingly.
It’s a messier, more complicated story than the myth—but then reality always is.
That doesn’t quite work: how would you keep that ratio low ? In practice, the only way is by countering social influences which might lead a scientist astray with other social influences. The total amount of “social” stays roughly the same.
Well, depends if you want to define “desire to find truth” as a social force. A scientist motivated by a desire to find the truth is a better scientist and more likely to get an accurate result than a scientist motivated by a desire to confirm the tenets of zir religion or political system, or to fit in, or to get a promotion, or to get home early, or any of those other social forces.
The stronger the motivation to find the truth, the less we would expect other, more traditionally “social” forces to influence a scientist, and the more likely that the scientist’s results would be accurate.
Because the direction of the motivation to find truth varies along with the evidence, seems fair to say the scientist motivated primarily by truth-seeking is influenced by the evidence and not by the social situation ze’s in.
There may not be any human motivated entirely by truth seeking (except of course Eliezer pbuh), but some people are more than others, and that makes those scientists better.
Well, depends if you want to define “desire to find truth” as a social force.
For the purposes of this conversation, we are using “social” as a shorthand for any influence on the scientist’s behaviour that isn’t linked (through a verifiable publication trail) to the effect under study. That does include “desire to find truth”, if the object of study is (say) the cosmic microwave background.
The stronger the motivation to find the truth, the less we would expect other, more traditionally “social” forces to influence a scientist, and the more likely that the scientist’s results would be accurate.
Do we now ? Some motivation to advance your own career will definitely be required in very competitive fields. (See Latour’s interview with Pierre Kernowicz, “Portrait of a Biologist as Wild Capitalist”.) Given the high degree of specialization in science today, how much do you expect “desire to find truth” to resist to a realization that you don’t, after all, care that much about molecular biology ? Science is a job, and we may expect people motivated by “traditional” social forces such as keeping their boss happy, making promotion, tenure or whatever, and so on will contribute to getting accurate results.
We have demonstrable evidence that working scientists are required to submit to certain non-truth-related conventions in order to be permitted to carry out science. You have to write papers in a form acceptable to journal editors, you have to work on subjects acceptable to your thesis advisor to get your PhD, and so on, and if you refuse to comply with this kind of requirements you may well be able to do science of some kind, in spare time left over from your day job, but certainly not, say, experimental physics.
What gets you accurate results in experimental physics isn’t “desire to find truth”, it is a particle accelerator.
You lost me at “equally” and “all”.
Why not just say that both social forces and the part of the natural world under study influence a scientist’s decisions, and a scientist becomes a good scientist who draws correct conclusions about the natural world only when ze keeps the ratio of social influence to natural world influence low?
This leads naturally to the conclusion that yes, a disproportionate amount of correct science will be the result of correspondence with reality, and a disproportionate amount of incorrect science will be the result of social forces.
That doesn’t quite work: how would you keep that ratio low ? In practice, the only way is by countering social influences which might lead a scientist astray with other social influences. The total amount of “social” stays roughly the same.
Consider the LHC, or any particle accelerator. It takes a good deal of “social influence” to get it built, compared to an infinitesimal fraction of its total mass for what scientists hope to observe.
To a very good approximation, any given quark exerts the same influence on a “bad” scientists as it does on a “good” scientist. It takes exceptional and patient work to set up circumstances where the behaviour of a quark, through a long chain of mediating physical influences, results in noticeably different behaviour for a particular scientist.
Generally, there is an enormous amount of “leveraging”, for lack of a better word, that needs to happen between some relevant bit of reality under scrutiny at one end, and the kind of scientific consensus on the other end which affords building something like the LHC.
If you wish to study these leveraging effects accurately, you must adopt a symmetrical stance; you have to bear down and study precisely the nature of these enormously long chains of mediation that bridge the gap between reality and our knowledge of it.
Latour for instance does a great job of this kind of description. Pickering’s study of Morpurgo in the case of quarks is interesting; I got the sense that Morpurgo is a perfectly good scientist, he just failed to discover quarks. This doesn’t jibe with the asymmetric account. I have yet to read “Leviathan and the Air-Pump” which I understand is the original inspiration for the symmetric approach, but apparently Shapin and Schaffer trace these issues all the way back to the debate between Hobbes and Boyle.
This kind of approach gives you a sense of the reality of science as opposed to its mythology—which is largely a product of scientists themselves, for reasons which Latour also outlines convincingly.
It’s a messier, more complicated story than the myth—but then reality always is.
Well, depends if you want to define “desire to find truth” as a social force. A scientist motivated by a desire to find the truth is a better scientist and more likely to get an accurate result than a scientist motivated by a desire to confirm the tenets of zir religion or political system, or to fit in, or to get a promotion, or to get home early, or any of those other social forces.
The stronger the motivation to find the truth, the less we would expect other, more traditionally “social” forces to influence a scientist, and the more likely that the scientist’s results would be accurate.
Because the direction of the motivation to find truth varies along with the evidence, seems fair to say the scientist motivated primarily by truth-seeking is influenced by the evidence and not by the social situation ze’s in.
There may not be any human motivated entirely by truth seeking (except of course Eliezer pbuh), but some people are more than others, and that makes those scientists better.
For the purposes of this conversation, we are using “social” as a shorthand for any influence on the scientist’s behaviour that isn’t linked (through a verifiable publication trail) to the effect under study. That does include “desire to find truth”, if the object of study is (say) the cosmic microwave background.
Do we now ? Some motivation to advance your own career will definitely be required in very competitive fields. (See Latour’s interview with Pierre Kernowicz, “Portrait of a Biologist as Wild Capitalist”.) Given the high degree of specialization in science today, how much do you expect “desire to find truth” to resist to a realization that you don’t, after all, care that much about molecular biology ? Science is a job, and we may expect people motivated by “traditional” social forces such as keeping their boss happy, making promotion, tenure or whatever, and so on will contribute to getting accurate results.
We have demonstrable evidence that working scientists are required to submit to certain non-truth-related conventions in order to be permitted to carry out science. You have to write papers in a form acceptable to journal editors, you have to work on subjects acceptable to your thesis advisor to get your PhD, and so on, and if you refuse to comply with this kind of requirements you may well be able to do science of some kind, in spare time left over from your day job, but certainly not, say, experimental physics.
What gets you accurate results in experimental physics isn’t “desire to find truth”, it is a particle accelerator.