NAS Blog

Two years ago I blogged that the hard sciences had not suffered the political correctness that has hamstrung the social sciences.  In response,  Frank Tipler, a mathematical physicist at Tulane, e-mailed that I was in error. Tipler’s e-mail followed a March 2004  Fortune article that depicted the cancer research field as fixated on failed paradigms.

Two years ago Al Gore appeared on a New York talk radio program.  Gore repeatedly claimed that the question of human-induced global warming has been “settled”.  Yesterday, a Globe and Mail article quotes British Climate Change Secretary (really) Ed Miliband as saying that the climate change issue is “settled”.

A claim that a theory is “settled” is profoundly anti-scientific.  In Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper points out that falsifiability is the basis of science.   In Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn shows that science involves the accumulation of facts that contradict established paradigms until the paradigm breaks down.  No paradigm is ever settled in Kuhn’s view, and less so in Popper’s.

The claim that science is what scientists say, that it is socially constructed, usurps the falsifiability principle and replaces it with tribalism, the same tribalism that Karl Popper argues is  totalitarian in his Open Society and Its Enemies.

The science of Newton and Einstein was the science of falsifiability.  Socially constructed tribalism is not science.  If academic scientists choose to claim that science is socially constructed, they no longer lay claim to the prestige with which Newton and Einstein bestowed them.   A socially constructed or tribally defined science is merely one more totalitarian ideology.