We need science and the humanities

Antiscience attitudes have been around for a long time, particularly in religious organizations. A new development has been the emergence of antiscience within a part of academia, traditionally a strong supporter of science. This antiscience movement has been centered in the arts, humanities, and social science departments. I lump these under the title "humanities" for brevity in his article.

Academic antiscience has been described in a book titled Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994). It has also been discussed by many others in a variety of media, including articles in the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER by Paul Kurtz and Gerald Holton (both in Spring 1994) and by Gross and Levitt (March/April 1995).

This academic antiscience problem is easy to describe. Some college teachers in the humanities are seriously misrepresenting the nature of science: its current state of knowledge, the methodology of science, and its philosophical foundation. Their message is that physical science (I include biology) is not significantly more reliable than other areas of knowledge; that it is a search for knowledge dominated by politics, bias, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

One example (generalized and paraphrased) follows. Since perfect objectivity is not possible, all knowledge is equally reliable. In other words, any given physics topic is no more dependable than a branch of literature or sociology. Since objectivity cannot be perfect, relative degrees of objectivity don't matter, and one might be well advised to forget the attempt to try for objectivity. These academics think that seeking knowledge through the use of observation and logic is illusory. The vast majority of physical scientists disagree.

These misguided scholars in the humanities simply do not understand physical science; specifically they do not understand the role of operational definitions. (Quantities are defined by the operations that are performed when we measure them. Example: Length is the quantity that you obtain when you use a meter stick in the following way, etc.) The "etc." stands for a lot of carefully described detail, but it is readily provided in an unambiguous form. The uniformity with which physical scientists pursue their work throughout the world provides testimony that operational definitions are relatively unambiguous. The human mind and human senses can be trusted to perform reliably when used with this type of carefully prescribed operation.

Physical science is based on experiments performed in the natural world. By limiting our investigations to those quantities that allow the use of operational definitions, the response of nature to experiments is independent of national Borders, the gender of the experimenter, and so on. Models that scientists develop to explain nature must match experimental data with a high level of precision or the model is discarded, even if the proposer of the theory has a great reputation. Decisions about theories are decided by nature!

In one sense, physical scientists have defined their discipline in a realm that ensures objectivity and reliability. This is done by restricting their interests to those quantities that are appropriate for operational definitions. However, it is also true that the borders of topics that are amenable to operational definitions continue to grow rapidly. Science is continually moving into realms that were previously the sole domain of the arts or the humanities. One recent example is the research into the human mind and how it works. Science appears to be able to shed light on thought processes and emotional responses that were formerly considered a part of other (nonscientific) disciplines. There are many similar instances throughout history, such as that which occurred when the heliocentric model of the heavens was proposed.

The real measure of the reliability of knowledge is how that knowledge permits people to make predictions about future events. In this regard, no other field of human endeavor has come close to the record achieved by physical science in recent centuries. This ability to predict accurately also is evidenced by the performance of modern technology that provides countless (literally) specific examples of the reliability of science. Our model of the electron (its charge, mass, and other properties) is the same for every application: chemistry reactions, toaster design, cathode ray tube design, radar performance, and others. A similar case could be provided by the many applications of Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. The list of successful scientific models and their applications goes on and on.

Operational definitions provide powerful concepts that can be expressed with unusual clarity; researchers around the globe can communicate and discuss issues with each other from an unusually uniform perspective. Use of operational definitions also makes the scientific method (comparison of theory and experimental data) more precise and efficient; it makes peer review (organized skepticism) more objective and reliable. The conclusion is that quantities in physical science (length, time, mass, etc.) can be discussed with a relatively high degree of accuracy and in a relatively (much) more objective manner than the quantities (love, loyalty, greed, etc.) that are encountered in other research disciplines such as the humanities. By the same token, the sciences are limited to those topics that are amenable to operational definitions.