Science and the scientific method

Reflections on epistemic humility and confidence

Within our modern world, science is often synonymous with reliable knowledge. If we know things, then that is because of science. However, if you follow broader discussions and descriptions of science, there are very different ideas about what science is and what it gives us. To use our preferred concepts here at Humble Knowledge, different people associate different epistemic attitudes with science.

One common perspective on science can be summarised in statements like this one:

Science discovers objective truths….. Once an objective truth is established by these methods, it is not later found to be false.

Science is the reliable method for understanding the world and achieving truth and we should therefore trust science and believe scientists. On this view, science provides with epistemic confidence - even epistemic certainty - and that confidence can be placed in the content of scientific theories and discoveries.

An alternative, but also common, view is expressed in statements like:

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

Or alternatively:

So what is the truth of science? …. A theory is considered never to be absolutely true, but to be provisional and approximate. Science makes a web or network of understanding, into which known facts can fit.

This view neatly expresses an epistemic humility. Knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is hard and we need to be aware that we often get it wrong. We have to be careful and recognise the limits of what we can claim. Established scientific theories are the best descriptions of the world that we have at the moment but it is expected that many will get overturned or refined over time.

On this understanding of science, we can trust the process of scientific investigation to give us truth if it is diligently followed over time. However, we have to remain humble and provisional in our acceptance of any particular scientific theory at the moment.

These two conceptions of science are both popular but cannot both hold. However, they touch on big questions that we don’t have space in this post to explore. There are serious and ongoing debates about what science is and how it actually works. While we can see it works in practice, it is unclear to philosophers and theorists why.

We can, however, learn something from the core idea that everyone is taught about science: the scientific method.

The scientific method

While there are many variations on the details, we are all familiar with the basics of the scientific method:

1. Make a hypothesis (possibly based on a theory or it might be an entire theory).

2. Design and conduct an experiment (or experiments) to test whether the hypothesis holds up or not.

3. If it doesn’t, modify or come up with a new hypothesis.

There are many variations of how this works in practice, including using existing evidence rather than new experiments every time. However the core idea holds across scientific practice. However, our familiarity with this method blinds us to a number of robust philosophical assumptions that it embodies.

Firstly, it requires a strong form of empiricism. The deciding factor as to truth or not is through experience of the world, via experiments. This might seem obvious but it was rejected, for example, by Ancient Greek philosophers. For them, the world was too corrupted to provide reliable information from experiments and therefore rational thought was preferred.

Secondly, however, the scientific method is not consistent with a direct form of empiricism. We don't directly know the world via our experiences. Instead we make hypotheses and theories about what the world is like and then test them with experiments. A such, it presumes that we don't experience the world directly as it actually is. We need to investigate the world and our experiences carefully.

Thirdly, the scientific method not only presumes an indirect empiricism but it embodies a significant skepticism about our human theories and mental abilities. We have to conduct experiments to check our theories because we cannot, just with our minds, access the truth about the world. This may seem intuitive now but human rationality was long thought to be a reliable guide to knowledge of the world on its own. Even today we are often tempted to think that we can figure out what is true just by thinking about it and don't feel the need to verify or confirm.

These three assumptions need to hold for the scientific method to make sense as an approach to building knowledge. Otherwise, the scientific method builds in unnecessary or counter-productive steps. Notably, the latter two assumptions are also clear expressions of epistemic humility. Knowledge is hard and we need to carefully test it, via experiments, to work out what is actually the case or not. This is particularly the case given, as in quantum physics, there are successful scientific theories that we struggle to make sense of.

Science as an expression of humility

There is a lot more to any robust discussion of the nature of science. For a start, there are interesting questions about whether science can ever prove something to be true. However, we can say that the core scientific method relies on an assumption of epistemic humility. Science does not answer our questions once and for all, but embodies a systematic and careful approach to improving our understanding, theories and knowledge. It is an ongoing process that is never finished.

Importantly, maintaining humility about our theories and results drives ongoing scientific investigation. We can be more confident in the process involved in science because (or when) we have adopted an attitude of humility towards our existing knowledge compared to an approach that presumes we can be confident that we already have the answers.

This is the same basic dynamic mentioned in the post on practical humility and points to a reason why science has been so successful. We have been arguing here that epistemic humility accurately describes the state of us as humans and our knowledge. Given this, as scientific methods embody a disciplined humility, they are built on a more accurate understanding of how human knowledge works than other methods.

We will look at this dynamic and these claims in more detail in a later article in the Epistemic History series.