Self-Fulfilling Science

Charles Lowe

• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110746532
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Epistemology in Philosophy

Claims that science may becoming 'self-fulfilling' through its impact on objects of study have recently risen to prominence. Despite radical statements about the supposed consequences of such accounts, however, the central notion of scientific self-fulfillment has remained obscure, leading to skewed views of its actual prevalence and significance.

Self-Fulfilling Science illuminates this underexplored phenomenon, drawing on insights from philosophy of science to address questions of its conceptualization, prevalence, and significance. The book critically engages with the popular notion that economic theories of homo economicus exhibit self-fulfillment, and explores its relevance to various metaphysical, ethical, and epistemic issues. Extreme claims of fundamental incompatibility with our usual notions of scientific success are ill-founded. Instead, self-fulfillment's true epistemic significance lies in more local, nuanced philosophical issues such as theory evaluation and the thesis of underdetermination.

In presenting a novel framework, this book facilitates deeper engagement with the developing field of self-fulfilling science, and is of interest to philosophers of science, social scientists, and social constructionists.

1 Science: Camera or engine?

1.1 Introducing self-fulfilling science

1.1.1 The new oracle

Storytellers and their audiences have long been fascinated by the idea that premonitions of future events may not be simply borne out but may themselves beget the future they portend. Perhaps the most ancient and famous example in Western society is the tragedy of Oedipus. The king of Thebes, informed by the oracle of Delphi that he shall be killed by his own offspring, leaves his infant son on a mountainside to die. The boy, Oedipus, is raised in a neighboring country, his true parentage kept a secret. Oedipus flees his new home after being told by the oracle that he shall commit patricide, but while traveling meets and kills a man who is, unbeknownst to both, his father, the king of Thebes. Thus, the prophecies of the oracle come to be fulfilled precisely because of the actions undertaken by both father and son in an attempt to avoid their prognosticated fate.

Not all such stories end in tragedy. In the Arabian Nights, a poor man sets out for Cairo full of hope after dreaming he will discover a fortune there. Alas, upon arriving, he is robbed and jailed. When asked by the jailor why he has come to the city, the man relates his dream, upon which the jailor mocks him for acting so foolishly on the basis of a mere premonition. The jailor tells the man that he himself has often had a similar dream concerning the whereabouts of a buried treasure, but is too wise to act upon it. In a final twist, however, the poor man recognizes the location described in the other’s dream as none other than his own courtyard, and upon returning home unearths the treasure. “Thus,” as Sir Richard Francis Burton’s classic translation of the story concludes, “Allah gave him abundant fortune, and a marvelous coincidence occurred.”

We might be tempted to see such stories as making a point about the inevitability of one’s fate. Maybe Oedipus would have come to kill his father even without the oracle’s prophecy, albeit, perhaps, in a different manner. This is certainly a weighty thought, but what appears to me to make this such an effective trope is rather the irony and ‘marvelous coincidence’ inherent in the idea that had the protagonists not been exposed to the prophecy, or had they chosen not to act upon it, then the prophesized event would never have come about. Whether the result is tragedy or fortune, the key notion in both of the above stories, as in many similar ones from various times and cultures, is that the protagonists’ belief that some future event would come to pass was, in fact, a crucial factor in the causal chain leading to that event’s occurrence.

To put it lightly, for most of us today, oracles and dreams no longer possess the same degree of epistemic authority they once seemed to have concerning the future. This doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned the idea of using knowledge about the likely course of future events to guide our actions in an attempt to avoid tragedy and achieve fortune. Where we once turned to oracles and dreams, we now consult scientific theories and predictions. Whether concerning the future of our health, economic growth, or just about any other domain concerning matters of fact, including the fate of the universe itself, science is now widely considered to be the best epistemic authority we have.

If the implied comparison between the oracle of Delphi and, say, Albert Einstein seems too far-fetched, one need only consult the writings of the early Enlightenment defenders of science to sense the atmosphere that reigned during the infancy of modern science. Their explicit adoption of religious rhetoric, for example, of the famous New Testament verse “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” and the explicit wish to establish a “scientific priesthood” seems to make clear the degree of epistemic authority to be attributed to scientists (cf. Kitcher 2001, 147). But hasn’t this attitude gone out of style? Consider the following impassioned plea, made by the extremely popular and influential science communicator, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in a video created in support of the recent ‘March For Science’ rallies held as a sign of solidarity with scientists and dedication to a scientific worldview:

[I]n this, the 21st century, when it comes time to make decisions about science, it seems to me people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable, what should you believe, what should you not believe. And when you have people who don’t know much about science, standing in denial of it and rising to power, that is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy. […] One of the great things about science is that it is an entire exercise in finding what is true. […] Out of this [exercise] arises a new, emergent truth. It does it better than anything else we have ever come up with as human beings. This is science. It’s not something to toy with. It’s not something to say ‘I choose not to believe E=MC².’ – you don’t have that option. When you have an established, emergent scientific truth, it is true whether or not you believe in it. And the sooner you understand that, the faster we can get on with the political conversations about how to solve the problems that face us. (Tyson 2017)

According to those sometimes called ‘the scientific faithful,’ the truth itself may not be enough to set us free, but it forms a necessary foundation of any potentially successful attempt to do so, and the legitimate arbiter in establishing the relevant truths is to be science itself. Of course, the very need for a ‘March For Science’ shows that this authority is neither absolute nor undisputed. However, it is largely uncontroversial that, for many if not most in Western society, science continues to enjoy a special status as the genuine arbiter of truth about the natural world we inhabit and our opportunities for acting upon it in an attempt to shape our own fate.

1.1.2 Science as self-correcting

The large degree of epistemic authority enjoyed by science means that its theoretical outputs come to shape our beliefs in significant ways. However, it is also generally understood that science is fallible. Thus, its authority can lead us and has, at times, led us down the wrong path by encouraging us to believe what were later shown to be falsities. The faithful are quick to point out, however, that although science is not unique among potential sources of knowledge in being fallible, it is special in possessing a unique set of mechanisms that serves as a counterbalance to the permanent uncertainty of its claims and its frequent false starts. Although science promises no certain truths, they say, it does guarantee a relentless, if plodding and meandering, march toward a better understanding of the world.

On the view in question, scientific theories purport to tell us about some part of the world. They generally do not meet the mark on the first try or perhaps ever entirely. However, by way of principled application of various scientific methods and adoption of a suitably scientific attitude, they are altered over time so as to gradually become better suited to their task. Science, as it is often said, is self-correcting (cf. Losee 2004, 98 – 102). One familiar means of self-correction might be called ‘theory replacement’: some theory T is introduced in an attempt to accurately represent, explain, or generate predictions about some facet of the world f, but is shown to be deficient in some way, and is eventually supplanted by a new or rival theory U, which either accurately represents and/or explains f or at least comes closer to doing so than T. Self-correction may also occur by means of ‘theory modification’: a theory T₁ targets some facet of the world f, initially misses the mark, but is gradually transformed via scientific practice to a new version of the theory, T₂, which either accurately represents and/or explains f or at least comes closer to doing so than T₁. Further research may lead from T₁ to T₂, from T₂ to T₃, and so on, perhaps ad infinitum. Despite the coarseness of such a lay theory of scientific progress, many scientists and philosophers of science commonly invoke processes such as these to account (at least partially) for the special epistemic success of science.¹

The history of scientific attempts to explain the origin and global distribution of large-scale geological and (paleo)biological phenomena – the continents, mountain ranges, fossils, plant and animal species – arguably exemplifies both types of self-correction identified above. Oreskes (2003) relates the relevant details in her historical account of Plate Tectonics. In the late 19^th century, Austrian geologist Edward Suess put forth a version of what has come to be called Contraction Theory. Working from the then commonly held assumption that the earth has been continually cooling and, thus, contracting since its initial formation, Suess suggested we think of the earth like a drying apple. Just as the apple’s peel wrinkles, shrivels, and sometimes tears as it loses moisture and shrinks, the placement and characteristics of the continents were postulated to result from the ‘wrinkling’ of the earth’s crust as it cools and contracts. This and other versions of Contraction Theory were eventually discredited by the discovery of radiogenic heat, which undermined the fundamental assumption of the earth’s continual cooling.

In the 1920’s, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed an alternative explanation for the distribution of the continents. According to his Continental Drift Theory, not only continental distribution, but also other phenomena such as the origins of mountains, volcanoes, and earthquakes are explained by the fact that the continents drift around the earth’s surface, sometimes breaking apart and sometimes colliding. The theory was considered suggestive but ultimately defective for a number of reasons until it was eventually subsumed under the more general theory of Plate Tectonics in the 1960s, which described the mechanisms responsible for continental drift alongside many other paleogeographical and paleobiological observations. By the 1970s, Plate Tectonics was viewed as the undisputed unifying theory of the modern earth sciences and has since been subject to ongoing refinement and modification.

From our current standpoint, Plate Tectonics is unquestionably better suited to represent, explain, and generate predictions about the facets of the world it concerns than Contraction Theory was – earth science has, over time, ‘self-corrected’ as a result of theory replacement and modification. Where exactly we draw the line between replacement and modification of course depends upon our understanding of what theories are and how to properly individuate them. I won’t delve into such details here, as my goal is simply to point out that whether we are dealing with theory replacement, theory modification, or some related notion I haven’t considered here, the key notion of science as self-correcting is that our theories become more accurate and successful over time because we work to bring them more in line with the part of the world they are meant to represent and/or explain. Such ideas will come as no surprise to most.

More likely to be overlooked, however, is an implicit assumption that often accompanies the notion of self-correction: that the facet of the world we seek to better understand remains more or less unchanged during the process of theoretical refinement. Whether improvement is to be achieved by moving from T₁ to T₂, from T to U, or in some other, more complicated fashion, f is assumed to remain a constant and, for the most part, unchanging touchstone for the development and assessment of our theories. While Suess and Wegener proposed wildly differing accounts of the geological phenomena they sought to understand, neither would likely have seriously considered the possibility that the objects of study themselves had changed significantly during the course of their investigations.

1.1.3 Science as self-fulfilling

In the case of large-scale and long-term phenomena of planetary scope, ignoring the possibility of significant change on the part of objects of study during the course of inquiry might be seen as plain common sense. However, the world does change. Furthermore, when it comes to many more local and short-term phenomena, humans are arguably one of the single greatest agents of change. Even on the global scale, our impact is significant; so much so that scientists are currently considering whether our planet should be described as having entered a new geological epoch within the last century – the ‘Anthropocene’ (Waters et al. 2016). Science, we have said, comes to shape our beliefs and thereby our actions through its status as an epistemic authority. This fact, together with an appreciation for the ability of our actions to change the world, should alert us to the possibility of a process complementary in nature to that of scientific self-correction.

If science, through our actions, changes the world, then scientific theories may, in principle, come to more adequately represent and/or explain some facet of the world not because the science has been brought more in line with the world, but because the world has been brought more in line with the science. Using the crude terms already introduced: theory T is introduced targeting some facet of the world f, initially misses the mark, but over time becomes more accurate because, through T’s influence, the world is transformed by human action such that f comes to exhibit the features ascribed to it by T.² Drawing on now familiar terminology first introduced by sociologist Robert K. Merton (1948), we might say that, in such cases, science is not self-correcting, but self-fulfilling³. Working out an adequate conceptualization of self-fulfilling science is one of the primary goals of this work; but, for now, let us employ the following preliminary characterization:

Science⁴ is self-fulfilling when it owes its (apparent) epistemic success to the fact that it causes the world to come more into line with its postulates.

Clearly, for theories like Plate Tectonics, there is no actual prospect of self-fulfillment. For one thing, the phenomena it is meant to account for are largely occurrences that took place long before humans inhabited the planet, and thus before postulation of the theory itself. Furthermore, it may seem that the natural processes it invokes are things that human action could have little impact upon. The (apparent) epistemic success of Plate Tectonics is clearly not due to any influence the theory itself has had upon the world. It may even seem obvious that, for these or related reasons, most scientific theories cannot possibly be self-fulfilling. Indeed, when the topic has at times cropped up in various literatures, it is often claimed that the natural sciences, at least, are entirely free of such strange phenomena.

The social sciences, however, are another matter. Beginning with British logician John Venn (1888), social scientists, and economists in particular, have occasionally reflected on the effect their theorizing may have upon objects of study. One common worry has been that public predictions of economic trends may prove self-defeating, rather than self-fulfilling. A prominent economist’s prediction of an unusually high price for some commodity in the near future might lead producers to increase production, thus flooding the market and, ultimately, driving prices far below those predicted (cf. Grunberg 1986 and Mackinnon 2006 for overviews of this work). In such cases, the prediction has missed the mark, but neither in the same manner nor, we may feel, with the same consequences as with ‘straightforwardly’ incorrect predictions in the normal course of science. If we can reasonably speak of epistemic failure here, it is due to the change the prediction itself has affected in the world.

Later, following the work of Merton, sociologists and psychologists became intensely interested in the possibility that their theories or predictions may display (effects resembling) self-fulfillment. Sociological theories of crime or deviance long sought to lay bare the structural and societal causes of (what were then taken to be) soc...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Science: Camera or engine?
• 2 The self-fulfillment of homo economicus
• 3 Conceptualizing self-fulfilling science
• 4 Assessing prevalence
• 5 Challenges of performativity
• 6 The epistemic significance of self-fulfillment
• 7 An engine, and a camera
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects