by Lee McIntyre
While some may be tempted to say yes, I suspect that most scientists and philosophers of science (and virtually all demarcationists) would want to say no and begin to look for some additional criterion to exclude it. This is the gravitational pull of the sufficiency standard. For how could it be that looking for one’s keys, or doing the plumbing, or fixing the television, could count as science alongside physics?18 One avenue here might be to introduce the earlier idea of “needing to have a theory” as a criterion for doing science. As we saw in chapter 2, this was the downfall of the famous Bode’s law in the history of astronomy. It fit the evidence, but only because of massive data manipulation and a bit of luck. For one to “care about evidence and be willing to change one’s theory based on new evidence,” mustn’t there be a theory at stake? But this is a fraught question. Arguably there is a theory at stake for my brother. It is not on par perhaps with the theory of evolution by natural selection, but it may amount to a theory nonetheless. Do I really want at this point to try to demarcate between a genuine and nongenuine scientific theory? (See table 4.4.)
Table 4.4
Criterion
Type
Problem
If science, then SA
(If not SA, then not science)
necessity
Exclusivity: should literature be lumped with creationism?
If SA, then science
(If not science, then not SA)
sufficiency
Inclusivity: is “looking for one’s keys” science?
This is precisely why I argued earlier that we need to avoid the temptation to offer the scientific attitude as a sufficiency condition for science. If one balked earlier at the idea of not being able to say that even physics was scientific, would one be willing now to admit that looking for one’s keys is scientific? As we saw earlier, Laudan contended that we must solve both halves of the demarcation problem, otherwise we will be open to either the exclusivity or the inclusivity problem. As a philosopher of science, one’s first reflex may be to turn to logic and methodology, and try to do this; to find some longer list of criteria by which we might make physics and looking for one’s keys come out on different sides of the equation, just as we might hope to do with literature and creationism. But I am not going to do this, because I think it is a vexed question to try to specify the myriad ways that something can fail to be science. The scientific attitude cannot be offered as a sufficiency condition for science, because it will not work as a necessity condition for nonscience. So what does demarcation come down to, besides saying that we already know what we take to be science and what we do not?19
The scientific attitude is a powerful idea for identifying what is essential about science, yet it may not be able to sort all of the disciplines so that all and only physics, chemistry, biology, and their brethren end up on the right side of some criterion of demarcation. Looking for one’s keys in a systematic way is a mindset. It is an attitude. Whether one is willing to accept this as scientific or not perhaps matters very little. There is no need to create a full set of necessary and sufficient conditions for science just to keep it out. Indeed, by using the scientific attitude as a sufficiency standard, this may be the very thing that allows it to creep in!20 There is virtue in keeping the definition of the scientific attitude simple. It is a disposition, not a procedure. There is no checklist by which we may come to know it; we feel it most by its absence. I therefore resist the idea that we should now try to pile on more and more individually necessary conditions—so that one may end up with a complete and correct set of criteria or even a dreaded five-step method—and instead recognize that the scientific attitude merely identifies a mindset that all good scientists should have toward data. The point of identifying the scientific attitude is not to come up with a laundry list of conditions for science, but rather to point out that this simple essential property is customarily missing from those ideologies that are merely masquerading as science, and also from those other areas of inquiry—like the social sciences—that might wish to step out from the shadow of ideology toward more scientific rigor.21 To say that the scientific attitude is necessary for science seems enough.
In keeping with Emile Durkheim’s famous dictum that “The sociologist [should] put himself in the same state of mind as the physicist … when he probes into a still unexplored region of the scientific domain. … He must be prepared for discoveries which will surprise and disturb him,”22 good scientists should approach their studies with curiosity and humility. They certainly should not feel that they have all the answers before they have examined the evidence (and perhaps not even then). More flexible than falsifiability, the scientific attitude may help us not only to grow science in other areas where there are empirical facts—such as the study of human behavior—but also to criticize those cases of fraud and deception where natural scientists have committed the sin of massaging their data to try to fit their extra-empirical beliefs. And, as we shall see in later chapters, it will help us to identify what is wrong with scientific denialism and pseudoscience as well.
Perhaps some future philosopher of science may wish to search for other necessary conditions that, when added to the scientific attitude, might make up a full set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient criteria by which to rule in medicine, physics, evolutionary biology, and string theory and rule out astrology, faith healing, “looking for one’s keys,” and Bode’s law.23 But that is not my task here. All I am trying to do is identify one very important condition that is essential for science to go forward, which I have argued is the scientific attitude. This is what is missing in nonscience. Thus I hope to have found a way to defend science by specifying what is most special about it, without getting dragged into providing a set of necessary and sufficient criteria in order to solve the problem of demarcation.
Couldn’t the Scientific Attitude Nonetheless Work as a Modified Criterion of Demarcation?
There remains one important question. Even if I reject the idea of finding a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for science, might I try to reclaim the problem of demarcation from Laudan?24 Many commentators in this debate have noted that neither scientists nor philosophers seem to have much trouble identifying what is science and what is not, even though there is much disagreement over how to do so.25 As Laudan notes, virtually every attempt to offer a set of necessary and sufficient conditions has failed. Is that just the price one pays for trying to mark the difference between science and nonscience? Or can one perhaps try to demarcate science from nonscience without buying into Laudan’s mandate about providing necessary and sufficient conditions?26
The strategy above is pursued by Pigliucci in his essay “The Demarcation Problem: A (Belated) Response to Laudan.” Here he agrees with Laudan that no one can solve the problem of providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for science, but goes on to say that one can probably solve the problem of demarcation in another way, by acknowledging that there is a “cluster of concepts” at work in science that mark off some “fuzzy boundaries.” Recall here our discussion in chapter 1 of Pigliucci’s idea that we are better off pursuing a Wittgensteinian project of identifying the “family resemblances” at work rather than any hard and fast logical criteria.27 This may open the door to a new path for understanding science. But I worry that it may also lead us perilously close to emptying the demarcation debate of any content all together.
In a later essay, “Scientism and Pseudoscience: In Defense of Demarcation Projects,” Pigliucci again offers his Wittgensteinian interpretation of a “family resemblance” solution to the demarcation problem (which he now characterizes as the “consensus” view among philosophers of science).28 Here, however, he seems to have grown irritated with the idea that the sort of “fuzzy boundaries” one must tolerate in the absence of a hard and fast logical criterion should ever admit the kind of “everyday inquiry” we just considered in the last section (such as looking for one’s keys) as science. He writes:
[It] makes little sense to say that plumbing is science, or even that mathematics is science. Science is what scientists do, and scientists nowadays have fairly clearly defined roles, tools, and modus operandi, all of which easily distinguish them from plumbers and mathematicians, not to mention philosophers, historians, literary critics and artists.29
We seem to have jumped here directly from Hansson’s notion that “we know what science is even if we have trouble saying it” to Pigliucci’s “science is what scientists do.” Yet this seems no criterion at all.30 Indeed, if one believes this, can’t one just say “I know science when I see it” and be done with it? If so, one imagines that the creationists and climate change deniers—who have recently adopted some of the relativist tactics of postmodernism—would be overjoyed.31
While I agree with Pigliucci that it is best to disavow Laudan’s necessary and sufficient conditions approach, I nonetheless think that it is possible to be specific about the essential properties of science. I recognize that—like me—Pigliucci wants to save science from the charlatans,32 but perhaps he goes too far with his “fuzzy boundaries.” Can’t one at least have a necessary criterion?
I do not believe that science is merely “what is done by scientists,” even if it is intimately related to the good practices that grow out of the critical values that are shared both by individual practitioners and the larger scientific community.33 As we will see in the next chapter, the scientific community plays a key role in creating the practical means for policing the beliefs, norms, values, and behavior that make up the scientific attitude. Good scientific practice probably cannot be specified by a complete set of rules, but it is surely more than just what the community of scientists happens to believe.34 Pigliucci is insightful when he says:
Science is an inherently social activity, dynamically circumscribed by its methods, its subject matters, its social customs (including peer review, grants, etc.), and its institutional role (inside and outside of the academy, governmental agencies, the private sector).35
But I think he is wrong to draw from this the conclusion that science is what scientists do. Has he forgotten that the real threat here is posed by pseudoscientists? I think it is possible to be much more specific and say that what is distinctive about science is the scientific attitude, and that this can be defended by renouncing Laudan only in part, recognizing the virtue of being able to say what is not science, even if one cannot definitively say what is.
Whether one chooses to see this as complete abandonment of both a necessary and sufficient conditions approach and the problem of demarcation—or instead one where, like Pigliucci, I attempt to rescue the problem of demarcation from Laudan’s elevated standard—makes little difference to me. There would surely be virtues to accepting my “necessity standards of science and sufficiency standards of nonscience” approach as a solution to some modified problem of demarcation, but there would probably be costs as well. For one thing, how can one use something as amorphous as the beliefs and values that make up the scientific attitude as a criterion of demarcation? How can this be measured? This is why the methodological approach works so well for a criterion of demarcation, but the attitudinal approach perhaps falls short. Yet the pity here seems less for the scientific attitude than for those who seek to explain science solely by fitting it into the framework of demarcation. Attitudes and values are real, even if they are hard to measure. I am thus satisfied with saying that the scientific attitude approach to understanding science may have to give up on the traditional problem of demarcation, even while it retains the idea that one can specify an essential property of science that makes it epistemically privileged.
What would this mean for sorting out the disciplines? Although not a criterion of demarcation, it is perhaps interesting to note how the universe of inquiry might look according to the necessity standard of the scientific attitude. Note that this is not a sorting between science and nonscience. With only a necessity standard, one can say only “If it’s science, then it has the scientific attitude.” One cannot say “If it has the scientific attitude, then it is science.” Thus the scientific attitude allows us to be specific only about what is not science, not what is.36 (See table 4.5.)
Table 4.5
Has the Scientific Attitude
Natural science (beliefs based on evidence)
Areas of legitimate scientific disagreement (evidence not clear, so withhold belief)
Wrong, but scientific (false theory, but warranted given evidence at the time)
Social sciences (that use experimentation and evidence)
Everyday inquiry (that is evidence based)
Does Not Have the Scientific Attitude (Nonscience)
Math/logic (not empirical)
Literature, art, and the like (not empirical; not trying to be science)
Social sciences (that are not evidence based)
Bad science (sloppy, mistakes, cut corners)
Fraud (lies, cheats, misleads)
Pseudoscience (pretend to be science, but refuse to embrace good evidential standards)
Denialism (ideology based; don’t care about evidence)
The scientific attitude may offer something less than a traditional criterion of demarcation, but it is a powerful tool in our quest to understand what is special about science. We may not be able to guarantee that every field that has the scientific attitude is a science, but by showing that every field that does not have it is not a science, we may yet come to know science more intimately.
But who should judge the crucial question of whether someone is following good evidential standards and so embracing the scientific attitude? As we will see in the next chapter, this goes beyond the values of any individual scientist and must involve the judgment of the entire scientific community.
Notes
1. See my earlier discussion of Laudan’s “meta-argument” in chapter 1, note 27, above.
2. In logic, “if A then B” added to “if B then A” gets you “A if and only if B,” which is to assert the logical equivalence of A and B. If the reader wants to learn more about the intricacies of how logicians use terms like “necessary and sufficient conditions”; the relationships between “if,” “only if,” and “if and only if”; and terms like “biconditional,” “contraposition,” and “logical equivalence,” there are a host of textbooks in introductory logic, none better than E. J. Lemmon, Beginning Logic (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1978).
3. See discussion in chapter 1. Feleppa argues it was only intended to be a necessary criterion (“Kuhn, Popper, and the Normative Problem of Demarcation,” in Philosophy of Science and the Occult, ed. Patrick Grim [Albany: SUNY Press, 1990]), but note Popper’s (later) statement that it was a necessary and sufficient criterion.
4. Recall here Popper’s claim that evolutionary biology was not falsifiable.
5. Popper, “Falsifizierbarkeit, zwei Bedeutungen von” ([1989], 1994), 82.
6. Laudan seems to think that the reason for offering both necessary and sufficient conditions is that each is needed to protect from criticisms that could be leveled against the other criterion alone. But maybe that is not the case, and instead, it just opens one’s criterion up to attack from both sides.
7. Which is to say that they are true under identical circumstances. If something satisfies the criterion of being science, then it satisfies the criterion of being falsifiable, and vice versa.
8. Here the point just made against Laudan in note 6 of this chapter seems relevant. How does offering the sufficiency standard for falsifiability protect Popper from the criticism that his necessity criterion rules that “evolution biology is not science?” Likewise, how does the necessity standard for falsifiability protect him against criticism that his sufficiency criterion allows that astrology as a science?
9. But just imagine the difficulty of finding a criterion to measure this!
10. See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Karl Popper, Conjectures an
d Refutations (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965); Larry Laudan, “The Demise of the Demarcation Problem,” in Beyond Positivism and Relativism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
11. See Boudry, “Loki’s Wager and Laudan’s Error,” 80–82, and Hansson, “Defining Pseudoscience and Science,” 61–77, both in The Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, ed. M. Pigliucci and M. Boudry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Is Pigliucci guilty of this as well? In his essay “The Demarcation Problem,” he gives up on solving the problem of demarcation via necessary and sufficient conditions, and says that the whole approach of trying to come up with a criterion of demarcation is “fuzzy,” arguably because he is concerned with demarcating between science and pseudoscience rather than science and nonscience.
