Despite some recent cries of alarm, science enjoys a pre-eminent position in Western society. Our worldview is essentially scientific. Our daily lives are filled with technological accoutrements made possible by science; virtually no aspect of our lives is untouched.
But as policy debates rage on topics with scientific content (like climate change), it is important to understand what science is and what it is not. In particular, it is critical to understand the difference between the realm of facts, models and theories — the purview of science — and the realm of values, policy objectives and ideologies.
The objective of science is to construct a comprehensive and consistent worldview with the dual goals of explaining known facts and predicting future facts. Explanation enables us to reconcile the diverse features of our world and organize them into a comprehensible whole.
For example, the theory of evolution explains the great diversity of life on Earth and its amazing adaptiveness. Prediction, on the other hand, enables the wondrous technology we all enjoy and utilize. For example, the scientific theories of gravitation and electromagnetism enable us to build a system of satellites (the GPS) delivering precise geographical information around the world through hand held devices.
The methods used by scientists to build theories and models are diverse. The experimental method we all learned in science class is one example. One feature of the scientific worldview is the provisional nature of its various parts. New facts might cause modifications or wholesale revisions like the replacement of Newton’s theory of gravitation by Einstein’s. The scientific enterprise should always retain a healthy sense of skepticism and an awareness of its own fallibility.
So, in a nutshell, that is what science is.
Now let me tell you what it isn’t. Philosophers have made a great deal of the distinction between descriptive language, or the recounting of facts, and normative language, or the stating of values, goals or ideals. The famous naturalistic fallacy is conflating the way the world is with the way it ought to be. In logic, it’s what’s called a category error. And as we’ve seen, science is relegated to the descriptive side of the divide, period. It describes the way the world is and what will happen if we do certain things. But there is no scientific discipline that has anything to say about what we ought to do or how we should behave. Historically, those questions have been the purview of philosophy or religion.
In many of the current policy debates, scientists have crossed the divide without seeming to realize it. Scientists, after all, are humans with religious or philosophical views. Worse, politicians and others engaged in the policy debate deliberately wrap themselves in a cloak of scientific respectability while espousing philosophical or ideological positions having nothing whatsoever to do with science.
Logically, the way to bridge the gap between science (which describes what the world is and how it works), and values, policymaking or ethics (which provides ideals or norms about how the world ought to be or how we ought to act), is to prescribe an overarching goal. But in the current debates, there is rarely an admission or even recognition of the goals or ideologies that underlie the position being espoused. It’s “pure science,” and if you disagree or question the position, you might be labeled a “denier.”
So there are two things we need to recognize. First is what science has to tell us about the issue at hand. This answer will be completely descriptive or potentially predictive: “If we do this, that will be the outcome.” In this step, it is important for scientists to communicate the provisional nature of their conclusions and the assumptions inherent in those conclusions. This has been missing in the climate debate, unfortunately. Second, the philosophical positions — values, goals and ideologies — inherent in policy debates need to be clearly disclosed, not shrouded in a false veil of science.
Maybe then we can make some progress.
George Sowers of Morrison is a rocket scientist with the United Launch Alliance.
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