Most of us learned that science provides good answers to all sort of questions ranging from whether a certain drug is useful in treating COVID-19 to whether humans evolved from primitive apes. A more interesting question is whether there are any limitations to science or whether there are any other effective ways of knowing. The question is related to the charge of "scientism," which is often used as a pejorative term to describe those of us who think that science is the only way of knowing.

I've discussed these issue many times of this blog so I won't rehash all the arguments. Suffice to say that there are two definitions of science; the broad definition and the narrow one. The narrow definition says that science is merely the activity carried out by geologists, chemists, physicists, and biologists. Using this definition it would be silly to say that science is the only way of knowing. The broad definition can be roughly described as: science is a way of knowing that relies on evidence, logic (rationality), and healthy skepticism.

The broad definition is the one preferred by many philosophers and it goes something like this ...

Unfortunately neither "science" nor any other established term in the English language covers all the disciplines that are parts of this community of knowledge disciplines. For lack of a better term, I will call them "science(s) in the broad sense." (The German word "Wissenschaft," the closest translation of "science" into that language, has this wider meaning; that is, it includes all the academic specialties, including the humanities. So does the Latin "scientia.") Science in a broad sense seeks knowledge about nature (natural science), about ourselves (psychology and medicine), about our societies (social science and history), about our physical constructions (technological science), and about our thought construction (linguistics, literary studies, mathematics, and philosophy). (Philosophy, of course, is a science in this broad sense of the word.)

Sven Ove Hanson "Defining Pseudoscience and Science" in Philosophy of Pseudescience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem.

Using the broad definition, one can make a strong case that science is the only proven way of gaining knowledge. All other contenders are either trivial (mathematics), wrong (religion) or misguided (philosophy). So far, nobody that I know has been able to make a convincing case for any non-scientific way of knowing. Thus, I adopt as my working hypothesis the view that science is the only way of knowing.

• Science Doesn't Have All the Answers but Does It Have All the Questions?
• Territorial demarcation and the meaning of science
• What Is "Science" According to George Orwell?
• The trouble with scientism
• What Is Knowledge?
• Can theology produce true knowledge?

Last year, Jerry Coyne revived the debate by posting an article about our favorite philosopher Maarten Boudry.¹ Boudry also adopts the broad definition of science and agrees that there are no other ways of knowing [Scientism schmientism! Why there are no other ways of knowing apart from science (broadly construed)]. As I mentioned above, the debate is related to the charge of "scientism," which is often levelled against people like Boudry and Coyne (and me).

The debate over science as a way of knowing hasn't been settled. There are still lots of philosphers fighting a rearguard action to save philosophy and the humanities from the science invasion. Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci have put together a series of papers on the debate and it's a must-read for anyone who participates in this war. One of the defenders of philosophy in this book is Stephen Law, who is active on Facebook so you can engage in the debate there.

Stephen claims that there are two kinds of questions to which science cannot supply answers: moral questions and philosophical questions. Neither of those make any sense to me. Moral questions are essentially questions about the best way for societies to behave and the answers to those questions clearly depend on evidence and on observations about existing societies. As for philosophical questions, Law describes them like this,

On my view, philosophical questions are, for the most part, conceptual rather than scientific or empirical, and the methods of philosophy are, broadly speaking, conceptual rather than scientific or empirical.

Stephen Law recognizes the distinction between "questions" and "knowledge" and, while he defends philosophy as "valuable exercise," he admits that pure reason alone can't reveal reality.

So perhaps, there's at least this much right about scientism: armchair philosophical reflection alone can't reveal anything about reality outside of our own minds. However, as I say, that doesn't mean such methods are without value.

If you've read this far, then good for you! Read the ongoing debate between Jerry Coyne and Adam Gopnik [Are The Methods Used By Science The Only Ways Of Knowing?]. Now watch this lecture given by Jerry Coyne in India a few years ago to see if you can refute the idea that science is the only way of knowing.

Richard Dawkins has written an essay for The Spectator in which he says,

"[Science is not] a social construct. It’s simply true. Or at least truth is real and science is the best way we have of finding it. ‘Alternative ways of knowing’ may be consoling, they may be sincere, they may be quaint, they may have a poetic or mythic beauty, but the one thing they are not is true. As well as being real, moreover, science has a crystalline, poetic beauty of its own.

The essay is not particularly provocative but it did provoke Jerry Coyne who pointed out that, "The profession of science" can be contrued as a social construct. In this sense Jerry is agreeing with his former supervisor, Richard Lewontin¹ who wrote,

"Science is a social institution about which there is a great deal of misunderstanding, even among those who are part of it. We think that science is an institution, a set of methods, a set of people, a great body of knowledge that we call scientific, is somehow apart from the forces that rule our everyday lives and tha goven the structure of our society... The problems that science deals with, the ideas that it uses in investigating those problems, even the so-called scientific results that come out of scientific investigation, are all deeply influenced by predispositions that derive from the society in which we live. Scientists do not begin life as scientists after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social structure."

Coincidently, I just happened to be reading Science Fictions an excellent book by Stuart Ritchie who also believes that science is a social construct but he has a slighly different take on the matter.

"Science has cured diseases, mapped the brain, forcasted the climate, and split the atom; it's the best method we have of figuring out how the universe works and of bending it to our will. It is, in other words, our best way of moving towards the truth. Of course, we might never get there—a glance at history shows us hubristic it is to claim any facts as absolute or unchanging. For ratcheting our way towards better knowledge about the world, though, the methods of science is as good as it gets.

But we can't make progress withthose methods alone. It's not enough to make a solitary observation in your lab; you must also convince other scientists that you've discovered something real. This is where the social part comes. Philosophers have long discussed how important it is for scientists to show their fellow researchers how they came to their conclusions.

Dawkins, Coyne, Lewontin, and Ritchie are all right in different ways. Dawkins is talking about science as a way of knowing, although he restricts his definition of science to the natural sciences. The others are referring to the practice of science, or as Jerry Coyne puts it, the profession. It's true that the methods of science are the best way we have to get at the truth and it's true that the way of knowing is not a social construct in any meanigful sense.

Jerry Coyne is right to point out that the methods are employed by human scientists (he's also restricting the practice of science to scientists) and humans are fallible. In that sense, the enterprise of (natural) science is a social construct. Lewontin warns us that scientists have biases and prejudices and that may affect how they do science.

Ritchie makes a diffferent point by emphasizing that (natural) science is a collective endeavor and that "truth" often requires a consensus. That's the sense in which science is social. This is supposed to make science more robust, according to Ritchie, because real knowledge only emerges after carefull and skeptical scrutiny by other scientists. His book is mostly about how that process isn't working and why science is in big trouble. He's right about that.

I think it's important to distinguish between science as a way of knowing and the behavior and practice of scientists. The second one is affected by society and its flaws are well-known but the value of science as way of knowing can't be so easily dismissed.