Writing in the New York Times, philosopher of science Elay Shech gives boogeyman RFK Jr. grief for a statement back in August that “Science is always evolving.” In an interview, Kennedy concluded that “Trusting the experts is not a feature of either science or democracy.”
Is that really so unreasonable, though? In the context of Covid, which was one subject that RFK was commenting on, the kind of experts venerated by the New York Times got a lot wrong, while some non-experts, along with some dissenting experts, were vindicated.
What the Experts Ordered
As an illustration, I’m looking out the window right now at downtown Seattle, which has never recovered from the Covid lockdowns. Those in turn were aggravated by the “Housing First” theory of addressing homelessness (as our colleague Jonathan Choe documents). Both are, of course, just what the experts ordered. When the Follow the Experts crowd is hectoring you, this bedraggled city offers a vivid reminder to practice skepticism.
Dr. Shech, who teaches at Auburn University, advocates what he calls “disciplined trust,” or in a better formulation, “local skepticism.” What does “local” mean? Says Shech, “science is an array of local domains of inquiry, each with its own standards of evidence and degrees of reliability.”
That’s interesting because local skepticism, not the caricature of “wholesale pessimism” about science, is the attitude practiced by advocates of a scientific idea that gets its own share of grief from sources like New York Times. I’m talking about another boogeyman, intelligent design.
The ID Boogeyman
From, “Science Keeps Changing. So Why Should We Trust It?”:
One possibility is that there is something systematically defective about science. If the scientific method is flawed, you could reasonably expect science to keep generating flawed theories.
That would be the “wholesale pessimism” approach, which I don’t think even RFK Jr. proposes. Shech goes on:
The problem is that there is no single scientific method used in all of science. Newton’s deduction from observed phenomena is very different from Darwin’s inference to the best explanation, which in turn differs radically from Einstein’s thought experiments with light beams, trains and elevators. What people call the scientific method is really many distinct ways of investigating the world — different strategies for representing, experimenting and classifying.
Bingo. If you follow the debate about ID, the observation that “there is no single scientific method used in all of science,” as well as the reference to “Darwin’s inference to the best explanation,” will a ring a bell. These have been themes of the writing of Stephen Meyer, also a philosopher of science, about intelligent design, going back to his 2009 book Signature in the Cell.
What “Scientific Method”?
In Signature, Meyer describes at length the variety of methodologies that different scientific fields bring to bear (pp. 400-402). There is no one “scientific method,” he says, which is a reason that ID critics often stumble in their attack on it as a “pseudoscience.” Another reason is that ID is itself not one scientific discipline. Instead, it employs a range of disciplines and methods. Philosopher Steve Fuller discusses the latter stumbling block for the critics, that of the inherent interdisciplinary nature of intelligent design, in a new ID the Future episode this week.
Adopting Darwin’s own method of reasoning, meanwhile — to draw an inference to design as the best explanation for features in biology — is a mainstay for ID proponents. A prominent ID method is to compare multiple hypotheses about biological origins. If the inference to design is stronger than the inference to unguided evolution, that’s a notable finding.
These are all tools straight from the philosophy-of-science toolkit. A scholar like Stephen Meyer or Elay Shech will have a better grasp of such issues than, say, an inorganic chemist (which is the example Meyer gives in Signature). Sometimes, in other words, the problem isn’t asking the experts. It’s asking the wrong kind of experts.