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While this statement will strike many as obviously true, it's worth interrogating.
Here's the question: does science do best when it's practitioners take a neutral position regarding the truth of a proposition?
A thread with some reasons to think "no." https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1341205977127923715
Here's the question: does science do best when it's practitioners take a neutral position regarding the truth of a proposition?
A thread with some reasons to think "no." https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1341205977127923715
@msolomonphd gives an important example that should give folks pause: continental drift. When the idea was first proposed, most of the evidence suggested it was wrong. Had scientists been dispassionate observers, they should have abandoned the idea right away.
Perhaps the idea would have come back, but maybe not. More evidence surfaced because a few committed scientists went *looking* for that evidence. Without a partisan commitment to the idea it would have been delayed.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/289680
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/289680
Solomon isn't the only person to have this idea. David Hull uses case studies from early cladistics to show how a partisan fight over methodologies led to important scientific advancements that might not have happened without them. He, rather poetically, puts it this way:
Karl Popper also recognized that sometimes a theory appears to be falsified, but isn't really. One way to prevent the premature abandonment of good theories is a somewhat "irrational" commitment to one's preferred theory
I've argued, both using case studies and computer simulation, that dogmatism can serve an important purpose in scientific enterprises because dogmatism helps to maintain cognitive diversity better than "rationality" does. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-009-9194-6
The original motivation seems obvious at first: make science better by making scientists more "rational." This philosophical literature suggests this might not be right. Science as a social process might be good in part because it's practitioners are irrational.
