Friday, August 30, 2013

What's in a name?

We all bear the burden of many different labels, some of them self-proclaimed, others imposed on us by various groups or institutions, or simply by common convention.  Take me, for example.  I am a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, an uncle, a husband, a son-in-law, and a brother-in-law by our society’s kinship conventions.  I am a citizen of the United States of America, a resident of Washington State, and a licensed driver.  I am a high school graduate, a Bachelor as well as a two-times Master of the Arts, and currently a Ph.D. student in archaeology.  I am also a practicing archaeologist (some days more so than others), and I am comfortable calling myself a demographer, though I have yet to publish in this field.  In my archaeological and demographic pursuits, I am an unapologetic scientist.  I am not a registered member of any political party, but among family, friends, and colleagues, I favor a handful of labels that locate my attitudes in the social, political, economic, and cultural universe.  I am a beer snob, though not an expert beer snob, and a wet-behind-the-ears wine snob as well.  I am a middle class, heterosexual male and a small-town person living in a big city (“big” by my standards, anyway).  I am a used car owner and a tenant of a rented apartment.




Each and every one of these labels is rich with meaning.  Many of them entail obligations, rights, privileges, and restrictions, either by legal standards or by social convention.  Some of them also reflect on my character, either about how I choose to live my life or about personality traits that I inherited by birth.  However, it is also possible (and in some cases quite easy) to over-interpret such labels, to take meanings from them that are not implicit in them at all, thus doing both me and the label a great disservice.  Of all of the labels listed above, that of “scientist” is perhaps the most burdened with misunderstandings, and these misunderstandings are what I intend to address in this blog.

In the spirit of full disclosure, however, I concede that I have other, more self-serving motives in writing this blog.  First, I am deeply frustrated by the common impression that scientists are a peculiar sort of creature, as if somehow different from Homo sapiens, and therefore possessing a nature somehow removed from human nature.  In response, I will continually attempt to deflate this false sense of division.  Second, my job security as a scientist is necessarily dependent on the health of the scientific enterprise in general, so my advocacy of science, including educational reform and public funding of science, could easily be seen as a matter of self-interest.  Not only won't I deny such a self-interested motive, but in fact I explicitly concede it.  Yet, there is no warrant for a crisis of confidence in this concession, for two reasons: first, if I were convinced that the scientific enterprise were bankrupt, I would not advocate it; my choice of career is contingent on my belief that the scientific enterprise is worth pursuing, not vice versa.  And second, the self-interest inherent in my advocacy of science does not in itself undermine the validity of the arguments I intend to make in favor of it.  To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of ad hominem argument.

I jokingly refer to what I am doing here as navel-gazing, and the reader might choose to view this blog as little more than self-indulgent and therapeutic journaling.  Yet my goal is much bigger than that, and in fact I really do not care if people misunderstand who I am as a person.  What I do care about is that too many people understand science so poorly, and my goal for this blog is thus to encourage greater scientific literacy among the general public: to clarify what the main goals and key strategies of science are, to contrast science with non-scientific pursuits (some of which charade as “science” in order to misappropriate the privileges of the label), and to review the high and low points in the history and current affairs of science.  Within certain bounds, the scientific enterprise is rich with potential for the human species (both good and bad), yet our collective grasp of these potentials, pitfalls, and limitations is full of holes and misunderstandings.  Improving this poor grasp is my main motivation in writing this blog.  I want people to understand science for what it truly is: a habit of thought, but also a social activity, that relentlessly seeks to establish higher-quality, better-organized understandings of the world in which we live.  In this respect, we all have some right to the label of “scientist,” no special training necessary, provided that we at least ascribe to the particulars that define scientific practice.

So who is to blame for the present state of low scientific literacy?  It is hard to answer this question, in part because it involves assigning blame, which is always contentious.  I will touch on this topic repeatedly in the future, but for the moment I will simply say that the scientific community is not above reproach in this.  On the contrary, it has contributed to scientific illiteracy by frequent (even if unintentional) gate-keeping activities.  For example, we insistently employ technical terminologies (“jargon”) that provide the general public very few points of entry into discussions about scientific matters but many points of exit.  Popular science journalists have attempted to mitigate this shortcoming, acting as liaisons between formally trained experts and the untrained public, but even their command of science is uneven, and the strong incentive to catch the public’s attention with provocative and sensational headlines further undercuts their credibility as effective liaisons.  Finally, certain players in certain communities of belief and in certain industries have vested ideological or commercial interests that are often well-served by stifling scientific research, so these players are certainly to blame as well.  In fact, the people who are least to blame for the general public’s limited scientific literacy are the general public itself.  Speaking now as a member of the general public, our best opportunity to acquire scientific literacy is during our thirteen or so years of primary education, yet not all of our primary educators are well-trained to teach the fundamentals of science, or else they are constrained by poorly designed or informed curricula.  Then, as adults, we juggle so many pursuits – job security, individual and family well-being, and so on – that there is often little time left to pursue any remedial education in scientific literacy, were we so inclined.  So scientific illiteracy prevails.

We in the scientific community are sensitive to the currents of scientific distrust that run through the general public, and we tend to attribute this distrust to the prevalence of scientific illiteracy.  Yet this sensitivity is sometimes a hypersensitivity, overstating the intensity of such distrust and therefore misidentifying its cause.  In fact, our current lifestyle is profoundly dependent on scientific discoveries and the technological innovations they have supported in energy, transportation, communication, information management, food, shelter, health, etc.  Our tacit level of trust in science is much higher than we sometimes recognize despite our low scientific literacy, in much the same way that I trust the roadworthiness of my car despite my general ignorance of automotive mechanics.  If scientific illiteracy is high yet scientific distrust is low, then we certainly cannot think that the former leads necessarily to the latter.  Instead, the real risk of such illiteracy is that it provides leverage for manipulative individuals to exploit the illiterate, whether by passing off bad ideas as science or by stirring up unwarranted distrust in credible science.  The possibility of such exploitation is what should motivate the scientific community to campaign against it, but by the same token so should the general public.  My sense of urgency in writing this blog rests in my awareness of the exploitability of scientific illiteracy.


I cannot tell the future of this blog for certain, but I intend my early posts to present an idealized blueprint of science, in parts.  This blueprint will identify what the goals of science are, how it sets about accomplishing them, what its limitations are, and what endeavors do not qualify as science (including those that charade as such).  While it might be nice to present a definition of science in a single post, I am favoring a "parts" approach because the scientific enterprise has a lot of moving, interacting parts, and I would much rather define science in summary than in advance.  There is, however, a difference between my idealized blueprint of science and what science is in practice. When we venture into the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which the history of the sciences has unfolded, we realize that science in practice may not always conform to the neat and tidy structure suggested by a blueprint.  As a result, the second labor of this blog will be to continually revise the idealized definition of science that I present in light of scientific practice.  Conversely, revision of principles in light of practice is not always wise; if a poorness of fit stands between the two, we might have better reason to lay the burden of failure on practice than on principle.  The third labor of this blog will therefore be to critique scientific practice and the forces that miscarry it, both historical and current.

A final note on leaving comments: I welcome most comments, particularly those that are thoughtful and rich in content, even (or especially) if they are critical of what I have to say.  My own thoughts on what I do as a scientist change over time, and sometimes this is a result of other peoples’ well-reasoned critiques of my thoughts, so please don’t hold back on that count.  However, my tolerance for logical fallacies and especially for arguments that rely more on rhetorical flare than on strong or valid reasoning is low.  I have little patience for unsupported assertions (I am not Gallup), for directionless stream-of-consciousness ramblings, or for vitriolic sarcasm, and none whatsoever for name-calling.  Where appropriate, I will assert my prerogative as referee of comments to enforce these standards.  I will make no bones about pointing out fallacious lines of argumentation where I see them, and I will shut down any personal attack appearing in the comments (as in, I will delete them, with no apology).  In the spirit of fairness, I will abstain from making these conversation-stifling mistakes, myself.  The truth is, I don't want to be referee.  I would much rather play the part of a discussant, so I kindly ask that commenters explicitly identify the particular points that they wish to build on or challenge and to keep their comments on-task and constructive.

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