Topics Science

Question Is science merely a system of universally codified opinion? Cf. Jacob Klein, Paul Feyerabend, etc.

Accepted:
February 12, 2008

Comments

At any one time, quite a bit of science is provisional, conjectural, and the subject of hot debate among scientists. So, rather boringly, science in general can't be said to be a system of "universally codified opinion".

I suspect, however, that the intended question is something more like this. Take a scientific claim that isn't any longer provisional, conjectural and contested -- e.g. take the claim that DNA has a double-helix structure. Then, the rephrased question goes, does this claim in any good sense tell us the fact of the matter, tell us how the world is independently of us? Or is it, in the end, merely that some bunch of people (the scientists) have come to a shared opinion about the world, in this case the opinion that DNA has a double-helix structure?

To which the common-sense realist answer is the first. After all, science tells us, it is the fact that DNA does indeed have a double-helix structure which causally explains the behaviour of DNA under X-ray diffraction etc.; it is not the opinions of scientists which do the causing! And science tells us too that the structure was there before we had any opinions about it (it hasn't developed only recently); and it will still be there in the dark ages to come, when scientific knowledge has been lost, and our shared opinions have evaporated.

And who are we to say that science has got it all wrong here? We'd certainly need some pretty strong arguments to usurp the common-sense answer to our rephrased question.

Now, maybe there are such arguments to be had. But I rather doubt that Paul Feyerabend, for one, has provided any. To be sure, in many of his later writings, he wanted to tease and torment mainstream philosophers of science of the day about how hopeless their accounts of scientific methodology supposedly were. Famously, he argued that "Anything goes!" was about as useful and accurate as the recommendations of some methodologists. But it is one thing to say that our philosophical stories about how scientists come to represent the world they are discovering are not very good; it is quite another thing to say that scientists aren't ever really discovering how the world is, but merely coming to agree on shared stories to indoctrinate their students with.

Question Is science merely a system of universally codified opinion? Cf. Jacob Klein, Paul Feyerabend, etc. Accepted:February 12, 2008

Question Is science merely a system of universally codified opinion? Cf. Jacob Klein, Paul Feyerabend, etc.

Accepted:
February 12, 2008