At the Post-Normal Times blog, Jerry Ravetz has posted excerpts from his book, The No-Nonsense Guide to Science (described here previously). An excerpt of an excerpt:
The decline of the illusion of objectivity
Over the last half-century, science has experienced great transformations in its scale, size, power, destructiveness, and corporate control and social responsibility. There is lively debate over many policy issues concerning health and the environment, and over proposed innovations such as those in the GRAINN set. But until we get over the illusion of objectivity of science, as embodied in its supposed certainty and value-freedom, those debates will be hindered and distorted. So long as each side in a debate believes that it has all the simple and conclusive facts, it will demonise the other, and dialogue will not be achieved. We need not fall into some nihilistic philosophy of total subjectivity or power-games. That is not the only alternative to the lost illusion of perfect objectivity of science. To find a viable alternative we will need to examine why scientific objectivity is no longer common sense.
The process is already well underway. Towards the end of the last century, just too many things began to go wrong for science. First we discovered how mankind has been polluting the environment. And sometimes the pollution was worse when the science was the strongest. The first big pollution scare came in 1963 with Silent Spring, where the death of the songbirds was explained by their being poisoned with agricultural pesticides. Then we had the accidents in civil nuclear power. Of all industries this was the one most completely based on science. We might have expected that an industry created and run by scientists would not be vulnerable to sloppy workmanship and elementary blunders; but we were wrong. In both those cases, as in many others, the pattern was that even where science had defined the situation, something would unexpectedly go wrong, leading to an accident or disaster. Then science would be brought it for the attempt to understand the accident and to prevent its happening again. It was as if science was chasing after itself in the cleanup jobs, retrospectively correcting its own mistakes.
The public's experience of values, priorities, choices and exclusions has come through debates on science in fields relating to health and the environment. For a very long time, supporters of 'alternative energy' have pointed to the vast disparity between the meagre funds doled out to them for research and development, and the huge sums still lavished on the moribund nuclear power industry. In medical research, patients' groups have observed how the lion's share of the resources, even those collected and allocated by charities, goes on that 'basic' research which someone hopes and claims will solve the problems of cause and cure of the disease. At the same time, research on the quality of treatments and of care is left on the margins. The reasons are plain: everyone hopes for a 'magic bullet' which will kill the pathogen that makes us sick. Also, that sort of research is also useful in building a career in the relevant research science. By contrast, treatment and care are the 'soft' sciences, in which there are no Nobel prizes. It doesn't take much imagination to see how particular sets of values are built into the ruling criteria of quality in science.
Link: The Post-Normal Times - Putting Science into Context: Excerpts from The No-Nonsense Guide to Science.
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