Rose-tinted Science Goggles

Phlogiston, the 'book of facts', and what the distortions of hindsight means for scientific process

“Denigrating theories we dislike, classifying scientific approaches that shake our prejudices as ‘pseudo-science’ is a long-standing tactic: it is how one writes scripture, and it is a recipe for dogma.” - Babette Babich

According to the philosophy of magical science, scientists infallibly uncover truth, so all claims asserted by scientists are scientific truth. Thus if and when the circumstances shift we can ‘debunk’ or ‘discredit’ those responsible and say they were not really scientists at all, or even exclude their claims from consideration in the first place! This is where ‘pseudoscience’ has traditionally been used as a dismissive label. As Babette Babich has written about extensively, the discrediting assault associated with the term ‘pseudoscience’ serves as a dogmatic manoeuvre that all too frequently prevents any scientific enquiry from even beginning. When this particular word comes out, it narrows scientific knowledge by declaring certain topics forbidden and out of bounds – and woe betide the researcher who goes on to try to report experimental results from such verboten fields...

The highly problematic implication of every attempt to discredit (i.e. to demarcate ‘science’ from ‘pseudoscience’) must be that we cannot know when scientists assert a claim whether it will later need to be ‘debunked’. Faith in magical science is therefore inevitably a distortion of the truth – things we claim are scientific truths on this philosophy may later be ‘discredited’, or even discredited before they are considered at all. The alleged truths of magical science can only be defended by ignoring the inevitable consequences of the inherent revisionism of scientific practice. It entails pretending that the current consensus among researchers is ‘more true’ than it was yesterday and thus that now (and by implication, only now) we can trust everything scientists say as long as we are standing guard for those pernicious pseudoscientists who ruin it for everyone. To say that this is dangerous nonsense is easy – to replace it with a more sound philosophy of science will be much harder!

There might be a way out of this maze, but it requires us to think differently about the relationship between truth and the sciences. Part of what deceives us here is our desire to understand the truth as a set of valid statements. Since we can point to scientific concepts we abandoned, like phlogiston (the hypothetical substance that made combustion possible), we want to assert a gradual improvement in the accuracy or scope of our ‘book of facts’. “We would not be fooled by phlogiston today,” we might claim. Yet phlogiston was an important – and entirely scientific – proposal that was merely discarded when our understanding of chemistry shifted such that combustion could be thought about in terms of a chemical reaction with oxygen.

The brutal truth of the ‘book of facts’ is that such a collection of statements today would theoretically contain far more ultimately false claims than it would in the 1770s, simply because the number of scientists and the diversity of research fields has increased dramatically so we are now paradoxically more wrong than researchers in the 18th century (in terms of sheer numbers of errors made) – the inescapable consequence of asking both more and more difficult questions. What makes it feel as if we are now more right is knowing that phlogiston would come to be replaced by a new understanding of chemical reactions. But this is largely an illusion caused by examining successful research programmes entirely in hindsight.

Similarly, when I say phlogiston was ‘scientific’, I am back-projecting, since the term ‘scientist’ was not coined until 1834. Researchers in the 1770s would not have described anything they were doing as ‘scientific’! It is our desire to paint the sciences as something with a history of more than two centuries that makes us ‘claim’ both phlogiston and oxygen (not to mention Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and so forth) as part of the story of ‘science’, rather than the natural philosophy that those involved were pursuing. Thus our ‘book of facts’ not only contains more errors than our predecessors two and a half centuries ago, it is not even entirely honest about its relationship with its own past. Add to this the unavoidable truth that this imagined ‘book of facts’ does not exist (for all that encyclopaedias and their successors have dreamt of fulfilling this role) and it begins to feel uncomfortably like we are deceiving ourselves – as if we have all fallen for the seductive confusions of magical science.

Next week: Legitimate Scientific Practices