The Scientific Attitude

by Lee McIntyre

  21. Of course, they have beliefs; they are just not scientific beliefs. They are ideological. Thus it matters what denialists take to be the standard for their other beliefs.

  22. This might seem curious. If their beliefs are ideological, why do they think that they need any evidence? Because they are not willing to admit that their beliefs are ideological. But then they are trapped in a double standard, for once we are playing the evidence game how can they hold that their own views are better warranted than those of science? This just seems delusional. Once a denialist insists that you must disprove his evidence, while dismissing your own out of hand, it seems best just to walk away.

  23. We might usefully compare scientific skepticism with what Robert Merton called “organized skepticism” in his essay “The Normative Structure of Science” (1942), reprinted as chapter 13 in The Sociology of Science, ed. Robert Merton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

  24. Though there is now a fledgling movement called “experimental philosophy.”

  25. Although such a statement may seem uncomfortably close for string theorists, they would surely welcome opportunities to put their theories to the test, even if such opportunities are not available at the moment.

  26. I discuss this further in my article “The Price of Denialism,” New York Times, Nov. 11, 2015, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/07/the-rules-of-denialism/.

  27. In one provocative study, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler showed that exposing those with biased beliefs to evidence that their beliefs were wrong could actually have a “backfire effect.” See Nyhan and Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions, Political Behavior 22, no. 2 (2010): 303–330, https://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf. For an earlier study that paved the way for this result, see C. Lord, L. Ross, and M. Lepper, “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 11 (Nov. 1979): 2098–2109, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.11.2098.

  28. It is a fair point that Sagan did not present this as such, but it seems a natural extension of his views. I maintain that Sagan’s matrix is also wrong about pseudoscientists being open to new ideas; see below in this chapter.

  29. For instance, President Mbeki’s health minister claimed that AIDS could be cured with garlic and lemon juice. See Celia W. Dugger, “Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa,” New York Times, Nov. 25, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/world/africa/26aids.html.

  30. Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 137.

  31. In a 2004 literature review published in Science, historian of science Naomi Oreskes found that of 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global climate change published between 1993 and 2003, exactly zero of them disagreed with the idea that human-caused global warming was occurring. A follow-up review in 2012 found that of 13,950 peer-reviewed papers on climate change from 1991 to 2012, only 0.17 percent rejected global warming. For discussion of some of the scientific evidence see http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ and http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/global-warming/science-and-impacts/global-warming-science#.V-beXvkrK1s.

  32. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).

  33. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 72–80.

  34. For instance, Sen. James Inhofe, Sen. Rick Santorum, and President Donald Trump.

  35. Rebecca Kaplan and Ellen Uchimiya, “Where the 2016 Republican Candidates Stand on Climate Change,” CBSNews.com, Sept. 1, 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/where-the-2016-republican-candidates-stand-on-climate-change/.

  36. Thomas R. Karl et al., “Poissible Artifacts of Data Biases in the Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus,” Science, June 26, 2015, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full.

  37. “Scientific Evidence Doesn’t Support Global Warming, Sen. Ted Cruz Says,” NPR, Dec. 9, 2015, http://www.npr.org/2015/12/09/459026242/scientific-evidence-doesn-t-support-global-warming-sen-ted-cruz-says.

  38. Justin Gillis, “Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Challenged by NOAA Research,” New York Times, June 4, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/science/noaa-research-presents-evidence-against-a-global-warming-hiatus.html.

  39. Michele Berger, “Climate Change Not on Hiatus, New Research Shows,” Weather.com, June 4, 2015, https://weather.com/science/environment/news/no-climate-change-hiatus-noaa-says.

  40. For the uncorrected graph, see http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/files/2013/04/updated-global-temperature.png. For the corrected graph, see http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/noaa_karl_etal-640x486.jpg.

  41. The Associated Press recently made no one happy with a policy change to stop calling climate change denialists either “deniers” or “skeptics,” preferring the term “doubter.” On one side, they had complaints that the term “denier” was too closely associated with “Holocaust denier,” and on the other those who said that the term “skeptic” was and should be associated with scientific skepticism. Their compromise, of course, leaves the impression that there is still “room for doubt” about the truth of climate change, which is arguably no better than using the term “skeptic.” Puneet Kollipara, “At Associated Press, No More Climate Skeptics or Deniers,” Sciencemag.org, Sep. 23, 2015, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/09/associated-press-no-more-climate-skeptics-or-deniers.

  42. Yes they still exist, and they have a gorgeous website. One wonders, though, whether they believe that any of their Internet traffic involves satellites, for what would they orbit? http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/home/index.php.

  43. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 73. In an intriguing follow up, however, it was found that virtually all of the contrarian papers on climate change had methodological flaws in them. R. E. Benestad, D. Nuccitelli, S. Lewandowsky, et al., “Learning from Mistakes in Climate Research,” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 126, nos. 3–4 (2016): 699, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-015-1597-5.

  44. Taken from a 2009 Pew Research poll cited in https://ncse.com/blog/2013/08/how-many-creationists-science-0014996.

  45. Thomas Kuhn explains this well in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

  46. See Koertge, “Belief Buddies versus Critical Communities.”

  47. Philip Bump, “Ted Cruz Compares Climate Change Activists to ‘Flat-Earthers’: Where to Begin?” Washington Post, March 25, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/25/ted-cruz-compares-climate-change-activists-to-flat-earthers-where-to-begin/. Though, technically speaking, what Galileo disputed was geocentrism; not all geocentrists believed in a flat Earth.

  48. John Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World’s Greatest Flood (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2008), 126.

  49. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 131.

  50. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 133.

  51. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 143–144.

  52. Many also, no doubt, would compare Bretz to his contemporary geologist Alfred Wegener, whose theory of plate tectonics was the subject of enormous ridicule and rejection, with vindication coming only many years after Wegener’s death. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 165–168.

  53. Most of Bretz’s principle critics had never visited the scablands. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 201. This reminds one of those who rejected Galileo’s theory, yet refused to look through his telescope.

  54. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 160.

  55. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 191, 207.

  56. http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0912/features/legacy.shtml.

  57. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 144.

  58. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 226. This is how science sometimes works; see Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

  59. Soennichsen, Bretz’s Flood, 228.

  60. Soennichsen, Bre
tz’s Flood,. 231.

  61. For example: http://www.godsaidmansaid.com/printtopic.asp?ItemId=1354.

  62. This is not to say that Bretz undermined uniformitarianism in general. Most geological features can in fact be accounted for by gradual change over a vast period of time. What he did, however, was show that there were exceptions to it as an explanation for all geological phenomena, in particular for the features of the scabland region.

  63. Note that this is the point of my earlier claim that Pigliucci seems wrong when he says that science is “what scientists do,” for what if they behave like the ones who fought Bretz?

  64. Note for instance Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which, while scientifically controversial, nonetheless demonstrates that it is possible to offer a nontheological hypothesis to propose a sudden change in natural events: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/5/l_035_01.html.

  65. Another example might be seen in some of the mistakes made by Stephen Jay Gould in his work on scientific racism. See Robert Trivers’s blistering indictment of Gould, whom he felt committed borderline fraud in service to his political agenda: “Fraud in the Imputation of Fraud: The Mis-Measure of Stephen Jay Gould,” Psychology Today, Oct. 4, 2012, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-folly-fools/201210/fraud-in-the-imputation-fraud.

  66. While it is true that other considerations like internal consistency, explanatory power, scope, fruitfulness, and the like may sometimes be relevant to theory choice in science, ideally these are used within a context in which more than one theory fits the evidence and a choice must still be made. This is to say that fit with the evidence is a necessary condition that pseudoscience does not meet. See Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for further discussion of the idea that “social factors” can sometimes be crucial for theory choice in science. Yet even Kuhn believes that if a theory does not fit with the evidence, no amount of other considerations should be able to rescue it.

  67. Accurate figures are hard to come by, but this estimate is from Paul Kurtz, the prominent American philosopher and skeptic, from a 1985 study of the astrology industry. Brian Lehrer, “Born Under a Dollar Sign Astrology is Big Business, Even If It Is All Taurus,” Orlando Sentinel, Nov. 10, 1985, http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1985-11-10/news/0340290056_1_astrology-columns-un-sign-astrology-scientific-fact.

  68. See “34 Billion Spent Yearly on Alternative Medicine,” NBCNews.com, July 30, 2009, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/32219873/ns/health-alternative_medicine/t/billion-spent-yearly-alternative-medicine/#.V-bqYPkrK1t.

  69. Whether one chooses to call pseudoscience “fake” or “fraud” perhaps matters little, but I prefer to think of those who embrace the scientific attitude and then cheat on it as frauds, whereas those who only pretend to embrace it while claiming to do scientific work are fakes.

  70. My favorite example here, courtesy of Carl Sagan, is why a spirit medium who claims to be in touch with the ghost of Fermat never asks him to provide the details of his missing proof.

  71. For those who are curious about these ongoing efforts, one might take a look at The Skeptical Inquirer, which is published by CSICOP http://www.csicop.org/si. Sagan’s work is masterful here. See in particular his chapter “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” in Demon-Haunted World, 203–218.

  72. Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996); Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts, 160–186; McIntyre, Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 85–92; McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 64–71.

  73. In contradistinction to the popular myth of a “moral victory” at trial (which was made into the play and movie Inherit the Wind), Tennessee’s antievolution law stayed on the books until it was repealed in 1967.

  74. Ruse, But Is It Science? 320.

  75. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 67–68.

  76. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/us/darwin-vs-design-evolutionists-new-battle.html. It might have helped the intelligent design proponents more if one of their central texts had not been a word-for-word revision of an earlier creationist text, with the only change being removal of the word “creationist” and substitution of the word “design proponent,” except for one place they missed which said “cdesign proponentsists.”

  77. See https://ncse.com/library-resource/discovery-institutes-model-academic-freedom-statute.

  78. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 69.

  79. Indeed, in an absolutely brilliant paper, Nicholas Matzke has done a phylogenetic analysis of the family relationship between all of these bills, using one of the primary tools of evolution to examine antievolution legislation. “The Evolution of Antievolution Policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover,” Science 351, no. 6268 (Jan. 1, 2016): 28–30. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/12/16/science.aad4057.

  80. Laura Moser, “Another Year, Another Anti-Evolution Bill in Oklahoma,” Slate, January 25, 2016. http://www.slate.com/blogs/schooled/2016/01/25/oklahoma_evolution_controversy_two_new_bills_present_alternatives_to_evolution.html

  81. John Timmer, “This Year’s First Batch of Anti-Science Education Bills Surface in Oklahoma,”Ars Technica, Jan. 24, 2016, http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/this-years-first-batch-of-anti-science-education-bills-surface-in-oklahoma/.

  82. https://ncse.com/creationism/general/chronology-academic-freedom-bills.

  83. Lee McIntyre, “The Attack on Truth,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 8, 2015, http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Attack-on-Truth/230631.

  84. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/06/willful_ignoran096781.html; http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/06/say_what_you_wa096811.html.

  85. “After Kitzmiller, even the Discovery Institute, the institutional home of ID Theory, claimed it had never encouraged teaching ID in public schools (incorrectly) and heavily promoted ‘Academic Freedom Acts’ (AFAs), aimed at encouraging teachers to promote antievolutionism.” Matzke, “Evolution of Antievolution Policies,” 1.

  86. The classic source is Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? See also Massimo Pigliucci, Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2002); Donald Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Sahotra Sarkar, Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).

  87. The decision in the Kitzmiller trial is fascinating reading and can be found at https://ncse.com/files/pub/legal/kitzmiller/highlights/2005-12-20_Kitzmiller_decision.pdf. Echoing Judge Overton’s decision in McLean v. Arkansas in 1981, Judge Jones held that if a theory cannot be proven wrong by any possible evidence, then it is not scientific. The full transcript of the decision in the McLean decision can be found in Ruse, But Is It Science?

  88. See Ruse, But Is It Science? See also Pigliucci, Denying Evolution; Prothero, Evolution; Sarkar, Doubting Darwin?

  89. Bobby Henderson, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (New York: Villard Books, 2006).

  90. An ID theorist might complain that it is unfair to compare their theory to phlogiston because that was refuted, but the problem is that their own theory is unfalsifiable, so it offers no possibility to be refuted.

  91. See http://skepdic.com/pear.html.

  92. Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts, 78.

  93. Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts, 77–80. On p. 78, Pigliucci argues that what PEAR was doing was not pseudoscience, it was just wrong.

  94. Indeed, some might argue that the best evidence that the RNGs were not truly random was the effect itself. This of course begs the question against the research and we must try to do better than this.

  95. Robert Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 199.

  96. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/pear_lab_closes_ending_decades_of_psychic_research.

  97. Benedict Carey, “A Princeton Lab on ESP Plans to Close Its Doors,�
�� New York Times, Feb. 10, 2007.

  98. http://skepdic.com/pear.html.

  99. Carey, “A Princeton Lab.”

  9    The Case for the Social Sciences

  In the last two chapters, we witnessed several examples of failure to emulate the scientific attitude. Whether because of fraud, denialism, or pseudoscience, many who purport to care about evidence fail to live up to the highest standards of empirical inquiry. One key issue to consider here is motivation. Some of these failures occur because the people involved are not really aspiring to be scientific (perhaps because they care about something like ideology, ego, or money ahead of scientific integrity) and just want a shortcut to scientific glory.

  But what about those people who work in fields that do want to become more scientific—and are willing to work hard for it—but just do not fully appreciate the role that the scientific attitude might have in getting them there? In chapter 6, we saw the power of the scientific attitude to transform a previously unscientific field into the science of medicine. Is the same path now open to the social sciences? For years, many have argued that if the social sciences (economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and political science) could emulate the “scientific method” of the natural sciences, they too could become more scientific. But this simple advice faces several problems.

  Challenges for a Science of Human Behavior

  There are many different ways of conducting social inquiry. Social psychologists have found it convenient to rely on controlled experiments (and behavioral economists are just beginning to catch up with them), but in other areas of social investigation it is just not possible to run the data twice.1 In sociology, we have case studies. In anthropology, we have fieldwork. And, up until recently, neoclassical economists disdained the idea that reliance on simplifying assumptions undercut the applicability of their theoretical models to human behavior. Of course, in this way, the social sciences are not entirely different from the natural sciences. With Newtonian physics as a model, it is easy to overlook the fact that the study of nature too has its methodological diversity: geologists cannot run controlled experiments, and biologists are often prevented from making precise predictions. Nonetheless, ever since the Logical Positivists (and Popper) claimed that what was special about science was its method, many have felt that the social sciences would be better off if they tried to model themselves on the type of inquiry that goes on in the natural sciences.