The limits of rationality in science

Although science is perceived as objective and rational, it is subject to the influence of foreign and subjective factors, which influence both the directions in which it develops and its products

Marius Cohen Galileo

In the scientific age in which we live, science is a central force that has a huge impact on the nature of human society and its culture and well-being. This effect is partly positive: developing technologies to improve the quality of life, producing life-extending drugs, improving the ability to predict the weather, increasing agricultural crops, and more. But in part it is negative: increasing the power of destruction in military applications, placing humanity under the threat of a nuclear or biological holocaust, and severe damage to the environment.
However, the relationship between science and society is not one-way: the nature of society and the culture in which the scientific activity takes place also has, as we will see below, a great influence on the trend of scientific activity and its results. Not only that: although science is perceived as objective and rational, and we would expect that subjective considerations would not have an effect on the conclusions of studies or on the acceptance of theories, it turns out that in practice not only does such an effect exist, but that the subjective component is probably unavoidable in scientific practice.

Social factors and their influence on the directions of scientific activity

Social factors influence scientific development in different ways. First, they direct scientists to specific fields of research: the social need to eradicate diseases and ease the suffering of patients results in the pouring of large resources into medical research and pushes many scientists to engage in this field, sometimes with a sense of mission.

The desire to improve the quality of life is an incentive for the development of new technologies in the fields of transportation, communication, construction, home appliances and others; The need to feed large populations requires investment in the development of means to obtain larger and more durable crops; The need for security is an incentive to develop personal self-defense measures, to improve the ability of criminal identification and to develop military technologies, and modern meteorology developed due to more reliable forecasting requirements for aviation, sailing and agriculture.

Of course, where there is a need, there is also a willingness to pay to satisfy this need, and therefore in all these fields the economic factor is an incentive that mediates between the social factor and the scientific activity. Investors and even public companies are more willing to invest money in areas where the potential for profit is greater, and naturally researchers are mainly focused on research subjects for which it is easier to obtain funding. The many military conflicts that characterize human society lead many regimes to invest huge resources in the development of weapons and even to establish large research bodies for this unique purpose.

On the other hand, many studies are also driven by human curiosity and the desire for knowledge, and a lot of money is also invested by private individuals and non-profit organizations in space exploration, in developing technologies for interstellar flight, in deciphering the structure of matter and the forces that shape it, and in the search for intelligent life outside the earth.

Social values ​​are often also a factor that hinders scientific research (whether it's a good thing or not): comparative studies between the cognitive abilities of different ethnic populations receive a lot of criticism in the name of the fight against racism, even if the authors of the studies claim that their purpose is scientific and not racist, since their conclusions of such studies can easily play into the hands of racist groups. Research and experiments on animals also arouse a lot of opposition from groups fighting to reduce the suffering and killing of animals.

Due to this struggle, in the developed countries there is a downward trend in the use of animals for research purposes. Another area that has made headlines in recent years is the use of embryonic stem cells. Research in this field may lead to important breakthroughs in the field of medical treatment, including finding effective treatment methods for incurable diseases; However, the public opposition to the production of such cells (usually on the basis of a religious concept, which sees the fetus as a living person for all intents and purposes), laws have been enacted in many countries that prevent or significantly reduce the possibility of research in which stem cells derived from fetuses are used.

So it seems that scientific research cannot maintain neutrality: the social intention of scientific activity, the good and the bad of such an intention, leads to the growth of knowledge in certain areas and hinders it in other areas. Science cannot close in on itself and study the world at will without considering human, social and moral needs and values.

However, is it possible that the results of studies, and not only the research subjects, are affected by factors that go beyond the objectivity and rationality that science boasts of?

Negative interference in scientific practice

It turns out that various factors may indeed erode the objectivity of science, including political, economic and personal factors.

Totalitarian regimes sometimes pressure researchers to favor certain theories over others for political or racial reasons. Thus, for example, the Nazi regime in Germany on the eve of World War II made an attempt, which was partially successful, to declare the theory of relativity a wrong theory, and this because it was "Jewish physics" (its developer was the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein).

The Nazi regime preferred to promote the status of "Aryan physics", which was "clean" of "Jewish ideas" and conservative in its essence, even though the international scientific community saw it as something wrong. Although most German physicists opposed this external intervention in their work, many of them had to cooperate with the regime's instructions for fear of their jobs.

In the communist Soviet Union, the Soviet regime exerted pressure on Russian scientists to prefer Soviet theories, which bring pride to the nation, over "capitalist" and "corrupt" Western theories. Due to this ideological pressure, a significant gap was created between Western scientific activity and that of the Soviet Union, and Soviet science deteriorated to the lowest level (even though communist propaganda did not stop praising Soviet science and created the false impression that the Soviet Union was at the forefront of scientific progress).

Economic factors are involved in the results of scientific studies; Bodies that may gain or lose from these results exert pressure on scientists to reach certain results, or to present the results in a misleading way. Since scientific journals only publish articles that have undergone rigorous peer review, commercial companies sometimes publish the results of research in the media without these being published in a professional journal.

Such studies are often presented as internal studies in the company's laboratories, and the innocent consumer, who is unable to distinguish between reliable scientific studies and trend studies, the results of which are sometimes dictated in advance, may be convinced by the wonderful properties of a product, which does not actually possess the virtues it declares (for example, certain cosmetic products or supplements different food).

Research results are sometimes falsified by the researcher himself, when his academic future or his reputation depend on them. Often it is precisely this irresponsible action, when it is discovered, that results in the end of the academic career of the researcher who failed, but sometimes this may take years and it is also possible that not every such case is discovered in the end. Because of this, certain areas of research may be infected with inaccurate or false information, which directly or indirectly affects the work of other researchers.

And what happens when scientific studies are conducted "by the book"? It turns out that, even then, objectivity and scientific rationality are to some extent tainted by subjective considerations, and it seems that this cannot be avoided.

The limits of objectivity and rationality of science

Even in proper scientific practice, subjective factors are involved which influence the results of the research: a good theory must be, among other things, simple, beautiful, an empirical examination, unifying a large variety of phenomena and in many fields even mathematically formable. However, there is a real difficulty in justifying each of these criteria, and this is because there is no certainty that nature can indeed be fully mathematically formulated through one beautiful, simple theory and empirical examination.

Many physicists do believe that this is possible, but it is a wishful thinking that is difficult to justify. Also: what are the criteria for simplicity or beauty? Scientists may not agree among themselves on the definition of these, since these are subjective and unmeasurable criteria. Therefore, the standards for determining what is a good theory may change from time to time, from place to place and from person to person.

Is it possible to avoid the "disease" of subjectivity in science, and base it on objective and rational elements only? Probably not, and this is because for each theory it is possible to propose alternative theories with the same explanatory and predictive power, and often a preference for one of them is possible only on the basis of subjective criteria. Because of this, some (mainly postmodernists) believe that it is impossible to avoid scientific relativism - the claim that "anything goes", but that the fact that subjective criteria are involved in the preference of a theory does not mean that all theories are equally good.

The successes of modern science are a confirmation that the above criteria, even if it is difficult to rationally justify them, "provide the goods". So it can be said that they have a pragmatic justification (and actually there is something rational in being pragmatic).

Dr. Marius Cohen teaches philosophy at Ben-Gurion University