Translator: Zeddi Lee Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
"To ask philosophical questions
is usually to paralyze the mind."
I often think about this remark
by one of my favorite sociologists and friends of mine,
especially when I think about today's political world.
Are we philosophers paralyzing our minds
by not asking the right questions?
Are we doing enough to help combat and challenge xenophobia,
science skepticism, post-truth politics and climate change?
What can I do, as a philosopher of science,
in this political situation?
Well, let me try,
and then you judge whether I'm paralyzing your minds.
Post-truth politics is a term that refers to a political situation
in which appeals to instinct, emotion and personal belief
is more important
than an appeal to scientific expertise or rationality.
President Donald Trump
is of course the outstanding post-truth politician.
Consider, for example, how he comments on climate change and climate science.
In 2018,
he rejected his own government's climates warning
about devastating effect from global warming
by saying, "We have scientists that disagree with it."
He also said that we should be careful about listening to climate scientists
because they have a very big political agenda.
And when asked for evidence,
he said, "I have a natural instinct for science."
(Laughter)
What shall we do with such kind of statements?
How should we respond to post-truth politics?
Well, it seems to me that as a philosopher of science,
the best I can do
is to critically explore President Trump's understanding of science,
so let me try to do that.
Let's begin with President Trump's remark
that climate scientists have a very big political agenda.
This remark refers to accusations that have also been made by others -
namely that climate scientists
are left-wing liberals trying to shackle industry
and that their research priorities
are set by politically motivated funding agencies.
Is this true?
Well, to show that it is true,
it would be good
if President Trump could present us with a smoking gun,
perhaps delivered to us by a whistleblower or two,
or it would be good
if President Trump could refer to a track record
of fraud and deception in climate science.
Well, sometimes we have such evidence about a field of science;
for example, we do have the evidence
about the track record of fraud and deception
when it comes to medical studies financed by the tobacco industry,
but we do not have any evidence concerning fraud and deception
in the case of climate science.
Still, it seems that many people are sort of convinced
by President Trump's remarks about political agendas of climate science
even though there isn't any direct evidence,
and this poses an interesting question:
Why is President Trump's criticism of climate science
plausible to many people
when he refers to political agendas?
I suspect part of the explanation
lies with widespread traditional views of science
that Trump has accepted
and that many of his followers
and indeed, spontaneously, many of us find somewhat plausible.
So let me unearth two such ideas
and explain what is problematic about them.
Let's first start with an idea I call "the lone-genius idea."
According to the lone-genius idea,
the great scientists of the past
did their work in splendid social isolation,
and when they finally emerged from their studies
to announce the truth to the world,
they had to confront reactionary backward institutions.
Galileo's heroic struggle, epic struggle with the Catholic Church
is of course the essential emblem of this idea.
And clearly,
if it needs splendid social isolation to produce good science,
then climate science is not a credible science.
That's just not how climate science works.
So, is that reason to dismiss climate science?
No.
It cannot be emphasized too much
that the idea of the lonely genius is wrong.
It's wrong for modern science,
and it's wrong for the whole history of science.
Take Galileo as an example.
Galileo, already the lone genius,
was corresponding with and interacting with
hundreds of other scientists at his time.
He was interacting with them in person,
he was interacting with them in letters,
and he was interacting with them in print.
Today, of course, science is done by big teams of people,
sometimes in the tens, sometimes in the hundreds,
sometimes even in the thousands.
One indication of this
is the number of co-authors that scientific papers nowadays can have.
The world records were set in 2015
when a physics paper of just nine pages
had 5,154 co-authors -
sort of one word per scientist involved.
(Laughter)
Climate science is quickly catching up.
The last reports of the International Panel on Climate Change in 2018
had 721 co-authors.
Moral:
Let's accept the deeply social nature of science.
But I think there's also a second idea in the background
when President Trump alludes to political agendas,
and I call this idea "the purity idea."
According to the purity idea,
a scientific community or scientist is credible and should be believed
only if they are motivated by the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Now, one way to challenge the purity idea
is to point out, as historians have pointed out,
that it doesn't even hold true of our exemplary scientists of the past.
At the very same time as Galileo was developing his scientific arguments
and was seeking evidence for them,
he was also cleverly politicking,
fairly or unfairly discrediting opponents,
appealing to a wider public over the heads of his scientific community -
that's why he wrote in Italian after all, and not in Latin -
cleverly forging alliances with cardinals, with popes, with dukes and kings,
and in fact entangling scientific,
philosophical and theological ideas.
Galileo and his followers ultimately won,
not despite of these political actions
but in good part very much because of them.
Moral:
We should accept that some level of political interaction
is essential to the functioning of science.
I conclude,
having looked at first the evidence for the political agenda
and then these two ideas,
that there is no good reason to agree with President Trump
when he says that climate science has a political agenda
and therefore should not be believed.
Let me turn to a second theme
that's essential in President Trump's critical remarks about climate science,
and this is his remark that we should not trust climate science
as long as climate scientists have not achieved unanimity,
as long as not all climate scientists agree.
Now, I think there are two ideas here
that are important to bring out to the surface
that might convince people
that there's something to it, what President Trump is saying.
The first such idea I call "the false comparison idea."
When people are asked to think of a major scientific discovery,
they are most likely to pick a famous discovery in the past;
for example, that the Earth circulates around the sun,
that the Earth orbits the sun.
And of course, nowadays, 100% of astronomers
agree with this claim with 100% confidence.
Now, climate science today obviously is not like that.
Even though 97% of climate scientists
believe that there are important human causes
to our global warming,
these 97% do so with varying degrees of confidence,
and even the 3% who don't agree with the 97%
of course have their own arguments.
Is this lack of agreement?
A reason to distrust climate science?
I think not.
I think the problem here
is that one should not be comparing a 21th-century science in the making -
a hot science, if you like -
with a 17th-century science,
whose result has been established and archived and shelved 300 years ago.
That's the wrong comparison.
If we want to judge the credentials of climate science
using the level of agreement as our central indicator,
we should compare climate science to another science today.
So take, for example, evolutionary biology.
No serious biologists disbelieve evolution by natural selection,
and yet there are many big disagreements in evolutionary biology;
there's, for example, no agreement on the question
how sexual reproduction developed out of asexual reproduction.
Or take quantum mechanics.
No serious physicist
doubts the mathematical side of quantum mechanics,
but when it comes to saying how should our worldview change
in light of quantum mechanics,
there are huge disagreements.
Even the most popular answer among physicists
only has roughly 42% support.
Now, compared with those sciences of today,
climate science isn't actually doing that badly,
and 97% agreement is astonishingly high -
never mind their varying levels of confidence -
and we should go with those 97%.
Just think: if 97 out of 100 doctors
tell you that eating a certain mushroom will kill you,
will you eat the mushroom?
Okay, I conclude the moral of this step
is to say that we should be comparing like with like -
21st-century science with 21st-century science,
not 21st-century climate science with 17th-century astronomy -
that's the wrong comparison.
Let me turn to my fourth and final idea,
an idea that I call "denial of pluralism."
Over the last 20 years or so,
a number of philosophers of science have argued for a new science policy,
for a new way of organizing science.
The idea is to so fund science
that there are and emerge
many competing and disagreeing research projects
even with respect to one and the same question.
The argument of these pluralist philosophers
is to say that "Well, reality is infinitely complex,
and we are more likely to find relevant truths
if we search for them
in many different directions and with many different tools."
If - and admittedly, it is still a bit of an if -
if the pluralists are right, then one thing is clear:
Unanimity is not the right ideal for science.
Some people say, "Pluralism is not just an idea of a future science policy."
They say, "Pluralism is already with us.
Already today we have sciences
that are actually pluralist in their structure."
And when people make that argument,
climate science is often given as an essential example.
This can be made in two ways -
in terms of the many scientific disciplines involved
and in terms of the many different models involved
in climate science.
Let's take the scientific disciplines first.
From astronomy to physics,
political science to economics,
oceanography to meteorology,
and mathematics to computer science,
those are just the eight most important sciences that have an impact;
and each of these sciences come with their own specific models,
their own specific little ways of construing bits of the world.
Some of these models concern things as small as a single water drop;
other of these models
concern the whole human impacts on the history of the world's climate.
Clearly, it is well-nigh impossible
to make all these scientists of all these different disciplines
understand one another,
and it is likewise impossible
to take all these models from those different sciences
and fit them together into one big supermodel,
or top model, if you prefer.
Now, is that a problem?
Does that show that there's something dubious about climate science?
Let me give an analogy that might alleviate your concerns.
Think of maps;
think of the models of climate science in analogy to maps.
We have maps of many different kinds:
we have a map for the cyclists, the map for the subway user;
we have a map for the astronaut or a map for the city planner.
Each of this kind of map is constructed
according to its own standards of what the users of that map will need,
and each of those maps distorts and selects from the world
in different ways.
It is impossible -
because each map distorts in different ways -
it is impossible
to fit all the maps of cartography into one big supermap,
or top map, if you prefer.
Does that show that cartography is not a serious science?
Of course not.
As long as we have the right map for the right purpose,
we are fine.
I want to say the same thing about the many models of climate science:
The mere fact that climate science has these many different models -
divergent, conflicting -
does not show that we shouldn't trust climate science.
As long as we have the right model for the right purpose,
we are fine.
I conclude
that we should cherish plurality and diversity
and disagreement in science
rather than striving for unanimity.
So, is my philosophy friend right
to think that when it comes to thinking about the contemporary world,
philosophy inevitably paralyzes our minds?
I'd say it need not paralyze our minds
and it should not paralyze our minds.
All of us can make good use of philosophy
and use it to tackle the big political challenges of our time;
for example, the big political challenge
of post-truth thinking about climate science.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)