Critical perspectives on science: Arguments for a richer discussion on the scientific enterprise

ABSTRACT

Science, as a body of knowledge, process or an interactive network of individuals and institutions, is a central component of contemporary society. This privileged position attracts some potential dangers of over-reaching, analysed by a variety of commentators. Central to these discussions is the importance and relevance of values to the practice of science. Far from being ‘value-free’, science takes place in a social environment that brings its values and influences the contract between scientists and society. In addition to the internal values of scientific practice, the individual scientists are unavoidably influenced by their personal views and biases, acting as external sets of values. This issue, aimed at the young practitioners of science, addresses some of these topics and represents an occasion to (re)examine the assumptions underpinning scientific practice(s). The eclecticism of topics illustrate the rich offerings humanities can provide and such interdisciplinary efforts contribute to the burgeoning field of science humanities.

KEYWORDS:

• Science humanities
• human sciences
• values
• facts
• epistemic values
• non-epistemic values
• emotions
• scientism
• culture of science
• science and society
• public trust of science

1. Introduction

Science occupies a very strong position in society. Several recent reports (Funk 2020; DBEIS 2019), published before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, indicate that the general public, in many countries across the world, view science and research in a positive light, and support governmental investments in scientific activities as benefiting the society. In the UK, for example, 80% of the people viewed science as playing such an important role in their lives that it should warrant them taking an interest in it, and three quarters of the respondents acknowledged that science makes their daily lives easier and thus it is important to know more about the basics of science (DBEIS 2019). The same survey indicated that, for the general public, science is not only of practical importance, but also has a philosophical relevance, since it helps them understand the world better than the arts. Also, encouragingly, more than half of those questioned reported that they have a basic understanding of important scientific terms such as ‘hypothesis’, ‘theory’ or ‘research trials’ (DBEIS 2019).

Nonetheless, anti-scientific movements are on the rise again and critical and sceptic voices are gaining more power and reach among the general public, thus hindering the effectiveness of science, especially when it comes to medical issues (i.e. vaccination) and climate change. It is not always clear if the issues of trust are with science or individual scientist(s) and how one can evaluate the parallel rise of trust and dis-trust in the sciences. Understanding the scientific enterprise and its ever-changing role in society confronts us with renewed old questions and emerging new ones.

The issue of public trust in science and in scientists is always an important one. When analysed in more details it would appear that there are differences in the public perception of science and of scientists. Seen as an overall enterprise, the basic positive perception of the role of science on society has not been affected in a significant way by the COVID pandemic (Spencer and Funk 2022). However, the trust in scientists, and more specifically in the medical scientists, has decreased by almost a quarter over a period of a year (November 2020 to December 2021) and at the time of the survey it arrived at below pre-pandemic levels (Kennedy, Tyson, and Funk 2022). Still, when compared with other institutional groups (e.g. politicians, journalists, police, etc.), scientists are still held in the highest esteem (on a par, interestingly, with the military, at least in the US). In retrospect, the pandemic, alongside the older issues of vaccination and climate change and its relationship with human activity, added to on-going debates about the public trust in science or about the confidence in professional elites. The growth of right-wing populist and, somehow linked, anti-science movements engendered public discussions about the relevance of professional scientific expertise in dealing with the issues of days. Politicians, while leaning on the support of science when having to take difficult decisions with social consequences (for example, during the COVID pandemic) have raised, on other occasions, doubts about the value of experts (for example, the famous pronouncement of a British politician during the Brexit debates, that people ‘have had enough of the experts’, while the ex-US President Donald Trump has often expressed a low opinion of experts). A more in-depth analysis of current public trust in expertise reveals that, for the general public, practical experience, irrespective of formal credentials, appears to trump academic expertise (Funk 2020). Further analysis of the topic of public trust in science are presented in this thematic issue.

One way to increase the awareness of and trust in science is to enhance the communication and the dialogue between the scientists, pursuing their aims and interests, and the various societal stakeholders. This communication can take place either in the form of public engagement with science, a top-down approach, in which the scientists present their science to the general public in an accessible manner, or as a direct support of the scientists for citizen science projects, initiatives that are nearer to a bottom-up approach. Such dialogues can enhance the transparency of the decision-making process and reinforce the public trust in scientists, as a professional group and, by extension, in science.

This thematic issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews aims particularly at the early career research scientists, and intends to contribute to the vast field of science humanities and offer these young scientists some critical perspectives on understanding, evaluating and contextualizing science and scientific activity, thus providing arguments for a more nuanced and richer discussion about the scientific enterprise.

2. What is science?

When talking about ‘science’, one can distinguish several aspects of this concept. In many instances, when talking about ‘science’, people switch from one meaning to the other within the same argument, creating confusion and tensions. One meaning is that science is a product, a set of propositions, a body of accumulated knowledge about the world, which has been verified and can be relied upon, at least until significant evidence emerges to cast doubts about it. These products (i.e. the ‘big’ equations, the big names (historical or contemporary), the big theories, the numbers, the famous discoveries, etc.) are usually what the general public refers to when talking about ‘science’. ‘Science as product’ is also what is provided by textbooks to students and taught in introductory courses to non-scientists. This textbook science is a stabilized, consensually accepted and agreed set of information, of a static nature, many times presented as implicitly a-historical and a-social. This material is then presented to laypersons (names, dates, slogans), students (equations, theories, periods) and to fellow researchers (discoveries, problems, anomalies), all at different depth levels and detail.

The other meaning is that science is a process, a practice resulting in the accumulation of observations and facts about the world, then integrated in hypotheses that are continuously tested experimentally. ‘Science as process’ is frequently thought of as a reference to the ‘scientific method’, but this view fails to account for the dynamic, controversial, often contradictory, ever changing nature of the work that lead to the product of science. The concept of ‘scientific fact’ stays somehow in opposition to the flexible and pulsing nature of the actual scientific process. The classical take on the ‘scientific method’ is to depict it as a rather rigid, standardized set of moves that somehow, in a natural and rational manner, lead to obtaining facts and truths about the world. The actual process of doing science is filled, in the reality of its practical implementation, with uncertainties, failures, discussions, compromises, little tricks that lead, eventually, to consensus. If one thinks about science as a process then ‘method’ should be seen more as a guide to follow and revise, and not as a measuring stick of one’s rationality; as a set of suggested possibilities and not as an objectified one-dimensional road to success. There is certainly a lot of work still to be done in presenting this view of ‘science as a process’, accounting for its dynamism and presenting the individual and social aspects of this process. The issue is that a more humanistic picture of science, including the various levels of revision on the road to facts, does not square easily with the views of the general public on the matter and does not foster, in some quarters, public trust in science. As the pandemic has shown, when the inconsistencies and uncertainties that prevail in the daily work of science are made explicit (often in the social media), people lose faith in the scientists and accuse them with lying or immanent failure and irrationality.

Part of the liveliness and dynamism of the ‘science as process’ comes from the fact that science is practiced by individuals, who are bringing to it both the objective and the subjective. And that brings to the fore a third relevant aspect of defining science. Particularly in modern societies, science is organised in a network of institutions, societies and bodies, supported by a wide range of publications and organized meetings, which all have a role in certifying the reliability and truthfulness of the outcomes of the scientific practice. Measures of success, objectivity and rationality are extended to citations tables, rankings and other quantifiable measures of activity. As science has become international, using a common language, teamwork has become very common, while individual creativity, typified by the ‘lone researcher’ model, lost ground. It is still open to further detailed assessment (especially among philosophers of science and people interested in the nature of and the public understanding of science) how these new social and institutional processes determine changes not just in the external picture, but also of the internal logic of science, scientific methodology and discoveries.

Interestingly, this third meaning seems to be connected to an old doctrine about how quantities and qualities are inter-related. Thomas Kuhn has already shown and pointed out how communities, associations, programs, departments and small-scale personal relations shape the internal development of science and theories. His famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions examined in a proto-experimental form how networks and group-belongings contribute to the rationality of science. Thus, the network idea is not entirely new. But, in the last few decades, this ‘belonging’, these small-scale societies, associations, and memberships are being pushed to either mask or signal other internal/logical/methodological undertaking. As science got bigger and wider, it started to change on every level: the more, the different.

3. Science and society

Keeping in mind the different meanings of ‘science’, one can easily state that science provided a wide range of reasoned explanations and understandings of many of the world phenomena, allowing for significant interventions and changes in the natural environment. As a result, science has acquired in the last half of the last century a prominent role in society, extending in the cultural, political and social domains. Such a position emerged, particularly after the Second World War, from the crucible of the relationship between science, with its achievements and its potential, and the political power. A foundation pillar for such a development was the famous Science: The Endless Frontier report written by Vannevar Bush (1945), that formed the basis for the US National Science Foundation (NSF). A crucial element of the report, with significant long-term implications, was the social contract between science (i.e. the scientific community) and society that allowed scientists to decide what areas of research are best responding to the needs of the society, while receiving funding from the society. A similar strong endorsement of the scientific establishment was reflected in another politician’s statement, almost twenty year later. In 1963, Harold Wilson, then soon to become British Prime Minister, gave a speech in which he stated that, for the country to prosper, a ‘new Britain’ needed to be forged in the ‘white heat’ of the ‘scientific revolution’ (Wilson 1963).

Such endorsements placed science in a privileged position in society, giving it freedom and support to develop research projects that provided a deeper understanding of the natural world. Thus, the declaration on the World Science Forum on the Enabling Power of Science stated:

The accelerating accumulation, use and diffusion of scientific knowledge and its application in technological innovations is reshaping our world. Advances in science have enabled us to confront hunger and disease, to tackle our ever growing demand for energy, to connect and communicate with immediate effect and they have provided the economic foundations for an improved quality of life for ever increasing population. (WSF 2015, 1)

In the last couple of decades, the relationship between science and society became much more complicated, as the political power started to expect a certain ‘price’ for the freedom it granted to scientific enterprise: the need for science to increasingly address the needs of the society and thus provide a justification for the funding coming, most frequently, from tax payers' money. Science policy started to push towards applied science and such returns with a visible and justifiable outcome gave science and, by extension, the scientific establishment, an even more powerful position in society. There are also other types of societal sectors, yielding significant power in their own right, such as the economic sector or the press and the media in general, that engage with science, offering support (financial and/or intellectual) and expecting returns for such investments.

4. Perspectives on science

As always, with power, or with the access to power, there are dangers of over-reaching or over-confidence and these have been and continue to be picked-up and analysed by a variety of science humanities commentators. ‘Scientific imperialism’, as initially described by the British philosopher of science John Dupré (1994, 2001), alluded to the tendency of a successful scientific idea to be applied far beyond its original domain, and usually resulting in decreased explanatory effectiveness as its application is expanded. The term contains probably a certain degree of political tendentiousness, alluding maybe to the other well-known political metaphor used in the philosophy of science (i.e. Kuhn’s phrase ‘scientific revolution’ (see above)) and has been used in a variety of forms. In addition to the original description, scientific imperialism, particularly when applied in the domains of the humanities disciplines, has also been seen to signify the dangers of overlooking or failing to engage and describe a range of important human values which are not captured by the scientific approach (Clarke and Walsh 2009). A more general aspect mentioned by Dupré is that ‘imperialism’ works by applying an outside general structural perspective that might be insensitive to the nuances of the original field (and he focuses on two examples: use of economic theory to account for various social relationships and use of evolutionary biology to psychology). The concept has been refined later to include not only disciplinary terms but also methodological approaches, when ‘the styles and strategies of research, such as the techniques and standards of inquiry and communication, characteristic of one discipline, are transferred to, or imposed on, other disciplines’ (Mäki 2013, 334) but also power and prestige relationships (Mäki 2013; Małecka and Lepenies 2018). But certainly one should not disregard the fact that the application of one field of work, conceptually or methodologically, to another might lead either to new perspectives or even to emerging new fields. There is a continuum of interactions between scientific imperialism and interdisciplinarity.

Another form of expressing an ultimate power of science comes under the label of ‘scientism’, defined as an exaggerated and often distorted conception of what science can be expected to do or explain (Pigliucci 2015). An even more intense philosophical examination of the claims made by science brings into discussion many other forms of ‘ism’s such as physicalism or eliminativism, to give some examples, and each of them reflects, one way or another, the fact that science could provide the ultimate understanding of the world. Physicalism, mostly discussed in the context of biology and neurosciences (theory of mind), holds that everything which exists can be explained entirely through its physical properties and, thus, explained by the account of the physical world that the physicists finally agree upon at one particular moment (Smart 1978). An even more extreme position, again used mainly in the field of the theory of mind, starts from the observation that, on current knowledge, part of what is observed does not fit into a physics framework. And eliminativism proposes that all the higher-level processes that cannot be reduced to physics (or to other lower-level (‘natural’) sciences, still based on physical principles) need to be rejected, waiting to be replaced with future scientific knowledge emerging from those lower-level, physics-based sciences (Churchland and Churchland 1998). Most of these positions are based on the strongest, and to a certain degree the most limiting, form of ‘ism’: reductionism. This term has a very rich history and range of meanings, both in philosophy (van Riel and Van Gulick 2019) and more specifically in biology (Brigandt and Love 2022), ranging from the attempt to explain higher order processes through a detailed description of interactions at a ‘lower’ level (Bickle 2007) to the process of ‘decomposing’ complex processes to simpler processes (Bechtel 2002) or reducing the number of variables when studying and characterizing a phenomenon. Whereas reductionism can be a powerful methodological tool providing for important explanatory strategies in sciences, it also has significant limitations (Darden 2016).

All these ‘ism’s descriptions appear to make science, seen as a ‘product’ (see discussion above), look more like a philosophical discipline or current; and, indeed, until the early nineteenth century, the people practising the sciences were referred to as ‘natural philosophers’ (Wootton 2015; the term ‘scientist’ was first coined by William Whewell only in 1834 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in responding to a question asked by Samuel Coleridge, see Snyder 2012). However, science develops mainly as a practice, an empirical investigation based on the flexible and dynamic application of a method, the scientific method, and it is thus not surprising that many contemporary scientists are dismissive of philosophy (the famous quip ascribed to Richard Feynman: ‘Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds’; or the late Stephen Hawkins’ statement: ‘ … philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics’. But maybe the role of philosophy is not to advance physics, or science, but rather to reflect and provide a view from outside. Other scientists, of older generations, and thus maybe more familiar with the philosophical culture, were able to see this dimension. Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize Laureate (1986) in physiology or medicine, took a distinctly philosophical perspective when wisely drawing attention to the limits of science: ‘ … there is indeed a limit upon science, made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer. These are the questions children ask – the ‘ultimate questions’ of Karl Popper. I have in mind such questions as: How did everything begin? What are we all here for? What is the point of living?’ (Medawar 1986).

One of the assumed strengths of the scientific method is that its empirical foundations are built on what it considers to be the objective and irrefutable facts. A world in which values are not of significant relevance, since they are disputable and relative, whereas facts are considered uncontroversial. This view has a long history that can be traced all the way back to an eighteenth century philosopher, of empirical tradition, David Hume, who put forward the conclusion that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’ That is, values that ‘ought to be’ cannot be derived from ‘facts that are’. Facts cannot entail, on their own, any moral view and thus sciences (based on reasoning from empirical observations) and morality (essentially about human views on what is good or bad) are fundamentally different. Even more, the statements of science can be either true or false whereas the value-based views are generally relative, a point picked up and later developed by the logical positivists (e.g. Ayer 1936).

5. Science and values

A valid question would be whether such debates are relevant to the actual practice of science, relevant to the researchers practising their type of science out there, in the field or in the laboratories? Should one studying the gene editing processes in bacteria, or nuclear interactions or developing brain–machine interfaces need any familiarity or knowledge of philosophical value considerations? The arguments presented above are relating mainly to ‘science’ seen as a product of the practice, but another dimension, also directly relevant to the scientists, is revealed by assessing the relevance of ‘value’ from the perspective of (i) the practitioners seen as human individuals and (ii) the network of institutions that foster and support the current practice of science. In a landmark work, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) proposed that science is, in reality, a social enterprise. At any one time, there is a status quo of scientific views (paradigms), seen as complex interactions of theory, methods and data, which are supported by a large majority of the scientific establishment. Tensions appear when new data are obtained that cannot be aligned with the prevalent standard views, and radical changes in the scientific paradigms are taking place only when the proponents of a new view which resolves the problems created, are gathering sufficient support in the networked community (journals, university departments and other scientific institutions). Following Kuhn’s work, a wide range of studies – most of them not accepted by Kuhn himself, who considered them over-sociologizing and missing the focus on the internal development and rationality of science – showed how interests, values and/or cultural views are shaping, through its practitioners, the edifice of science.

When assessing the importance of values for science one might consider that a scientific account of something does not necessarily give us the full picture. A rather simplistic, anecdotal example of the differences between asking the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions, was offered by John Polkinghorne, a 1970s Cambridge professor of mathematical physics and Fellow of the Royal Society, turned theologian and Anglican priest. A person observing a kettle of water on a stove could ask ‘Why is the water in the kettle boiling?’ One answer, the scientist’s one, is that of energy transfer: the burning gas is creating heat, which raises the temperature of the water to the boiling point. But another answer to the question is that the kettle is boiling because one intends to make a cup of tea. Both responses are valid. They do not compete, but rather complement each other, giving a more complete and integrated view of the activity under scrutiny. While Polkinghorne cloaks the second answer in a fabric of faith, one could more neutrally see it in the context of human intentionality. While science is good at answering many of the ‘how’ questions relating to the way the natural world functions, it does not engage, in the main, with the ‘why’ of human activity.

Whereas Kuhn’s perspectives switched the perspective on science from the ‘science as product’ to the importance and relevance of the social, networked dimensions of science, Polkinghorne’s example brings into relevance the importance of the science practitioners, as intentional and situated human beings, with a range of motivations and values that drive their activity. In this, Polkinghorne develops a set of ideas that can be traced back to Michael Polanyi, another scientist turned philosopher. In his influential book, Personal Knowledge, Polanyi (1974) states that all knowledge is personal and observers cannot separate themselves from their backgrounds, experiences and judgments, in effect, from their set of values.

Values are, indeed, essential, culturally determined elements of human decision-making. Thus, any science practitioner takes such values into account, most of the times implicitly, rather than explicitly, when setting avenues of research and/or deciding on the various research methods to be used. There are numerous examples, in post-war science, when a clash appeared between the scientist(s) decisions and the values upheld by the society, examples running from the 1940s Manhattan project all the way to the recent case of using the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR to modify, in a heritable manner, the genetic make-up of an individual (Lander et al. 2019). The fact that such values either enter the science decisions process unacknowledged or that they result in acceptable outcomes makes the effort of familiarization of the scientific establishment with the range of human values a stringent requirement.

It is beyond doubt that, when scientists perform their scientific practice, they are always driven by certain values, since values give meaning, shape, and goal for actions. Many scientists will probably accept the view that they are driven for and motivated by such values as consistency, simplicity, coherence, perhaps even unifying, predictive and explanatory powers. These values are often thought to be taking us closer to truth, and thus such values are known as epistemic, cognitive values or as internal values since they are internal to the workings and machinery of the scientific enterprise. However, there is another set of values that seemingly come from the outside of the scientific practice, from sources as varied as politics and religion and which have social or moral valences. These non-epistemic, non-cognitive or simply external values are disregarded as illegitimate values by many practitioners of science. Having a certain religious stance would not take one closer to truth, but a systematic data-gathering, minute analysis and objective, evidentially-supported interpretation will. This separation of these two types of values, the epistemic and the non-epistemic ones, is generally agreed upon by both philosophers and scientists. Where scientists and philosophers of science start to disagree is on the existence of a strict separation between epistemic and non-epistemic values. Can science avoid a substantial influence of non-epistemic values, can science be truly ‘value-free’, that is, free of external non-cognitive impact? How much influence of non-epistemic values can be permitted, and up to what level will they not corrupt the practice and method of science? At which point do non-epistemic values enter the picture at all? These are many, fundamental questions asked in that vast literature generated in the last few decades that deal with the problem of the relationship between values and science (Douglas 2009; Elliott 2017, 2022; Laudan 1986).

Arguments and considerations vary in detail and comprehensiveness but, according to the latest take on the issue by Kevin Elliott, we might distinguish three arguments that purport to show that non-epistemic values are basically inevitable in the scientific enterprise. According to the ‘gap argument’ there is a certain distance between the collected evidence and the conclusions drawn from them, especially in cases when the limited range of facts available is compatible with different considerations. In those cases, value-laden background assumptions, auxiliary hypotheses and preferences will enter the picture and bridge the gap. Another argument, the so-called ‘error argument’, starts from the idea that scientists engage with major decisions throughout their practice. One has to decide whether a certain vaccine is safe or not; whether there might be life on a certain planet or that a new machinery is working and reliable. When scientists are facing such decisions, they need to weigh the risk of accepting a vaccine based on (possibly) false evidence. As no amount of evidence is able to support, with final certainty, a particular conclusion (as in the well-known problem on the limits of induction, in that no amount of past evidence makes the future 100 percent (a.k.a., ‘the under-determination of theory by facts’), there will always be room for scepticism and risks. Scientists will thus have to take a decision on how much evidence is required in a certain situation in order to accept or reject a hypothesis. In the case of vaccines, for example, that level of evidence is much higher than in the case of deciding whether a far-away small planet might have life on it – in the latter case, we might sustain, at worst, a financial loss if our ideas turn out to be false, whereas, for the first case, the wrong decision will result in significant loss of life. Such decisions on setting limits, expectations and levels are not done by using the set of cognitive values, such as of simplicity, coherence, etc., but mainly on non-cognitive grounds (in the example above, on ethical grounds). Finally, the ‘aims argument’ points out that science might often have non-epistemic aims (for example: ecological, biological-preservationist, climate-related, economical, justice-motivated, etc.), and such non-epistemic goals are set and determined by non-epistemic values (Elliott 2022, 19–31).

There are, of course, counterarguments. Some philosophers are more sceptical about the legitimate role and scope of non-epistemic values, though even they try to preserve some kind of function and place for such ideals within the scientific practice. But, irrespective of the stance taken, it is philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, ethics and history (of ideas and of science), that is, the humanities or human and social sciences that are able (conceptually and institutionally) to give structure and context to such discussions. Scientists may have (or they may think that they have) good reasons to uphold a value-free image of science but doing laboratory work, data analysis, calculations, derivations, scanning and designing experiments will not give an answer on the possible values that either necessarily or accidentally pervade the scientific practice, and those scientific activities per se will not guide or define a path of action towards the value-related aspects of science. The humanities are in a privileged position to do that.

6. Science and the humanities

When talking about ‘values’, about the balance between objective and subjective in the decision-making process in science, about the relevance of the social context in driving the progress of science, both in establishing the directions of development and the drivers of various forms of institutional support, we are, in effect, talking about the subject matter and areas of research of a range of disciplines that are generically labelled the ‘humanities’. The relationship between sciences and humanities is and has been for a long time fraught with tensions, dating back to the discussions, in the German cultural and early academic environment, about the differences between ‘Naturwissenschaft’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaft’. Responding to the strong positivist positions professed by most of the scientific disciplines in the German academic environment, positions that suggested that only the explanations offered by natural sciences can be considered as legitimate ones, Wilhelm Dilthey, a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, engaged with a detailed analysis of the kinds of knowledge offered by the various sciences. Knowledge in the natural sciences always attempts to explain (erklären) the observed events, relating them with other events, all in the ‘external’ world, all working in agreement with the natural laws, already formulated or just to be discovered. But, Dilthey argued, there is another type of knowledge, provided by the sciences that deal directly with human mind and actions. This knowledge provides a direct insight into the experiences, the desires, the value judgements or the purposes of human actions, a type of knowledge that goes behind the observable actions, and allows one to understand (verstehen) and relate to the internal, the ‘felt’ experience. For these sciences he proposed, in a famous 1883 volume, the term Geisteswissenschaften, different in reach and methodology from the Naturwissenschaften, which explored the natural sciences, the aim of which being to explain the make-up of the physical world.

It is worth making here a short etymological parenthesis. The word Geisteswissenschaften is derived from two concepts. The first part of the construct is formed from the word ‘geist’ and refers, through a rich philosophical derivation, to the ‘common spirit’ or the ‘mind’ of a people. The second part of the construct, the word ‘wissenschaft’, is another rich and broad concept, particularly in comparison with the much flatter word ‘science’, which is the usual English translation. ‘Wissenschaft’ means scholarship, incorporating concepts as inquiry, learning, knowledge, and implies knowledge as a dynamic process discoverable for oneself, rather than something that is handed down. Thus, for Dilthey, Geisteswissenschaften were meant to do more than merely explain the world; these sciences seek to understand the expressions of human experience by situating them into broader personal, social and historical contexts that can provide insight into their ‘sense’. For Dilthey, the fundamental discipline in this group of sciences was psychology, understood as a descriptive science aimed at understanding the organization of the human experience.

In the English-speaking world, the discussion on the differences in world views between sciences and humanities took place mostly in educational terms. In the late nineteenth century, two giants of the Victorian cultural establishment, Thomas Huxley (‘Darwin’s bulldog’) and Matthew Arnold, had an acerbic debate on the values of liberal education, with Huxley querying the relevance of classicist education for a successful scientific career; T.H. Huxley delivered his address ‘Science and Culture’ in 1880 and Matthew Arnold responded with ‘Literature and Science’ in 1883 (see Huxley 1993 and Arnold 1993). Almost three quarters of a century later, C. P. Snow (1959) rekindled the fire of this debate in his famous 1959 Rede Lecture: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, referring to a gulf of incomprehension between the ‘literary intellectuals’ and the ‘natural scientists’, with the former choosing to staying closed in their ivory towers and thus ill-equipped to appreciate what science has to offer. Whereas scientists were not only familiar with the works of Shakespeare but also had the ‘future in their bones’. Certainly, there was an important social and political context to such views expressed by a top civil servant, as C. P. Snow was at that time. This was a time of incredible enthusiasm for science, for what it can offer and for the transformative power of technologies (as reflected in the above quotation from Harold Wilson (1963) on the ‘white heat of technology’).

The tension between the values of science education and the humanities remain topical even today and are manifest particularly in the field of academic education, where the disciplines of humanities feel threatened by the prominence of sciences. A vicious circle of closing down humanities departments and reduced student numbers are taking place both in the UK and US (Baker 2022; Dix 2018), a trend that might have been activated, and it is certainly not helped, by the statements of various politicians, mainly in the US (Marco Rubio called for more welders and fewer philosophers, since the former make more money (Rappeport 2015); or Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin asking for state universities to educate more electrical engineers and fewer French literature majors (Beam 2016)). In a professional world dominated by financial considerations, the humanities graduates are also less favoured by the fact that their average income at the point of entry into the working market are smaller than those of STEM graduates, by almost a third (Gray 2022), although the career prospects are as good as other professions (Carlson 2018).

In addition to these economic and financial considerations, the science establishment raises another set of conceptual challenges to the humanities, subtler but probably more powerful ones. That is the view that science’s approach is sufficient to provide an ultimate understanding to the natural and human universe, that, in effect, scientific knowledge is unlimited. It is less evident, however, what ‘unlimited’ means in this context. On one hand, it might be argued that science has no boundaries, and for whatever question, the answer will be, eventually, delivered by science. On the other hand, ‘unlimited’ could be a descriptor of movement but only within a well-defined bounded space of science. Within these boundaries of science, one might ask any question and an answer will be delivered by the scientific method, now or later. But, in this take, there will also be important questions that science cannot address and those could and should be pursued outside the professional domain of the empirical sciences. There are certainly a series of background assumptions in the discussion just presented (e.g. about meaning, reference, boundaries and legitimacy), but this is the background against which one shall understand the old positivists maxims like ‘When we say that scientific knowledge is unlimited, we mean: there is no question whose answer is in principle unattainable by science’ (Carnap 1967, 290, original emphasis). Clearly, a significant and relevant question in this discussion is how to draw the boundaries of science. The issue of such boundaries is yet again another field in which the humanities are relevant, because defining such boundaries need to take into account values, background assumptions and the cultural context of the scientific enterprise within a society. The earlier criteria for demarcation proposed by Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) (i.e. falsifiability) has received significant critical and analytical responses and subsequent developments, one of which being the attempt to define the boundaries of science through a cultural perspective (Gieryn 1999).

If one chooses the first understanding of ‘unlimited’ (above), universalism also comes in the picture: the product of science looks universal and consistent and it is the same everywhere. The world is organized according to a set of objective laws, all is matter, and all matter obey stringent and universal laws. However, its universalism is limited. The success of the (Western) science has been gained not by engaging with all the possible questions, but by setting up relatively narrow limits to the type of questions it addresses and developing a range of methodological tools and approaches that are specific to different branches.

In the face of such pressures, some of them considered as almost existential, the academic humanities needed to respond in various manners. At one extreme, the whole set of accusations of irrelevance in the modern technical society and ‘softness’ of the disciplines are dismissed in an ‘angry’ manner as not relevant. In a famous diatribe, Stanley Fish (2008, emphasis added) is haughtily stating that ‘[t]he humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said …  diminishes the object of its supposed praise’. The intrinsic value of the disciplines is undisputable and the scientists are in no position to impose their set of values and frames of reference and, thus, their judgement on the topic. Two worlds (un)happily separated.

A more neutral response to the challenge, on the lines of a ‘it’s room for both’, would be best represented by Martha Nussbaum’s (2012) position: humanities might not add to the current way of understanding the world, but have made and continue to make our human lives better. And then, there is a more robust, academic approach through which science, as an edifice and as a practice, a human endeavour, comes under the scrutiny of the various humanities disciplines. The rich field of the philosophy of science questions the modalities through which science acquires its knowledge (the epistemological inquiry, engaging with the limits of the inductive method or the existence of bias), the nature of the truths that science discovers (the ontological dimension) or other issue that have significant implications on the practice of science (e.g. nature of free will, choice, sensitivity to initial conditions, etc.). Other fields of academic work are those of sociology of science (SoS) and science and technology studies (STS), which contribute important views on how science takes place in a social context and is influenced by the values and culture prevalent at that time.

Talking about such engagements with science is also a good opportunity to reflect on a different positive contribution of humanities: that of a different set of methodological approaches offered by these disciplines. A first methodological characteristic of many of the humanities disciplines is the critical approach to the evidence, doubled, frequently, by an attempt to contextualize, historically and/or conceptually. A historicist approach is relevant not only in the context of a specific discipline of science humanities, i.e. the history of science, but also for the general science practitioner. A historical perspective helps in revealing and clarifying the range of assumptions and implicit concepts that underlie most of the experimental practice, an exercise particularly useful when experimental work hits some difficult patches. It can also show ways to avoid and learn from past mistakes or wrong assumptions, and such perspectives could certainly make science better as well as more efficient (Maienschein, Laubichler, and Loettgers 2008). And, as illustrated in this thematic issue, a historical perspective can provide a rich understanding of the social and cultural forces that are shaping the developments of whole fields of modern biomedical sciences. Probably the best support for the importance of the historical perspective in biology that no entity exists on its own but emerges from its precedents is illustrated by the fundamental biological statement, the basis of the theory of cell: Omnis cellula e cellula (“Every cell is derived from another cell”, Rudolf Virchow 1858, for discussions on attributions see also Wright and Poulsom 2012).

Another methodological difference, that has been briefly mentioned above, is that, in the main, the humanities will focus on understanding the meaning, the purpose and the goals of the processes studied. This allows for a better appreciation of the singular phenomenon, historical, social or personal, and provides for an interpretative method of arriving at the truth. This stands in some contrast to the scientific approach that aims at explaining the causality of general phenomena and thus uncovering the universal laws/truths underpinning the workings of the natural world.

Engagement with this range of different methodological approaches and concepts also provides a different important advantage for those scientists willing to explore beyond the range of their specific scientific disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is a buzz word of modern scientific practice, but it is certainly a challenging complex and difficult enterprise, requiring opening up to different practices and conceptual paradigms (Brown, Deletic, and Wong 2015). But once such first steps are taken, and the engagement activated, there are certain proven advantages both for the scientific enterprise and for the researchers, who attain much better funding performance (Sun et al. 2021). An encouragement in this direction is just one of the many reasons that triggered this project.

7. Editorial aims and papers of the issue

This Thematic Issue (TI), entitled ‘Critical Perspectives on Science’, is aimed mainly at a specific audience that is not usually addressed in academic journals in the humanities or those focused on interdisciplinarity. This intended audience is represented by the young practitioners of sciences, who would be at the beginning of their professional careers, before they would be totally immersed in their specialization. The objective of this TI is, thus, to give these young scientists, drivers of the future development of science, the opportunity to (re)examine the basic assumptions that underpin their scientific practice(s) and (re)connect with the wider historical and cultural contexts in which these assumptions were formed and developed in the first place. ‘Critical Perspectives’ presumes an audience that has relatively little knowledge of such contexts and the type of articles solicited were mainly synopses of invited topics rather than presentations of new discoveries or specific approaches. We aimed not at gathering new facts and new empirical knowledge, but rather at offering perspectives and critical attitudes. The overall view intended was that of a diverse forest rather than of specific individual trees.

Without adopting a specific point of view, or a frame of a conceptual toolkit, we settled on certain areas and topics. The first section of the issue is devoted to ‘Historical and Cultural Perspectives’ on science, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The overall aim of this section is to contextualize and position various science ideas in the specific cultural environments of particular historical moments.

Jacob Steere-Williams considers the context of the germ theory of infectious disease, which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is often considered a pivotal breakthrough in modern science, medicine, biology and public health. He starts from the fact the germ theory provided a new way to study diseases in laboratory, clinical and community settings and provided a new rationale for public health intervention. From there he goes on to explore two important facets of the germ theory. First, how the physical techniques and methods of studying germs in laboratories were taught to the first generation of doctors and, secondly, how the germ theory was communicated to diverse publics in clinical and community settings. Drawing on the concept of transnational science, he argues that late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates around the laboratory practices of bacteriology and the public reception of the germ theory help us to understand the deeper ways that biomedical scientific knowledge is created, constrained and communicated.

James Elwick explores another element of the scientific enterprise, the educational engagement that prepares one for the laboratory work. In the nineteenth century millions of people started to acquire certificates and other educational credentials, attesting that they knew what they claimed to know. These credentials resulted from mass examinations: systems of infrastructure that aspired to procedural objectivity. Among the key feature of these exams were the new numerical marking systems used to compare and commensurate answers on these exams obtained at different locations or times. The importance of these numbers rested on the fact that they could generate averages and other formal abstractions of knowledge acquisition. While the resulting tests could be restrictive for the individual, argues Elwick, they also had a positive and even creative dimension. Exam successes and credentials helped people work collectively in groups, giving each group member the confidence that other members knew what they claimed to know, and all these issues had a lasting effect on how we think about exams and related issues, arising from a specific cultural context of the nineteenth century.

Neuroscience is one of the strongest biomedical sciences developed during the twentieth century, and David Parker provides an overview on the history of neuroscience. Starting from the early reticular views of the brain as a diffuse net-like syncytium replaced later by the neuronal doctrine, Parker goes on to show how the system views of the brain, popular in the first half of the twentieth century, were challenged by the development of experimental tools that focused on components and functional units, and led to a reductionist focus. Parker describes in detail twentieth-century views of both philosophers and scientists that highlight the tension between integrating concepts in a field while retaining the ability to think critically. He illustrates this by considering two common assumptions in neuroscience: that reductionist approaches will explain the brain; and the technological metaphor that sees the brain as a computer.

Another topic discussed is, not without having a glance at some contemporary events, the discipline of virology. Nancy Tomes tracks the conceptualizations of viruses both as a scientific object of study and a cultural object of fear and fascination. After the Second World War, the scientific study of viruses took on greater significance. The discovery of viral DNA and RNA revolutionized the understanding of microbial and human evolution. Technological innovations (electron microscopy, x-ray crystallography) and improvements in vaccine development gave scientists greater confidence in managing diseases such as polio and influenza. But in the 1980s, the emergence of HIV-AIDS, a deadly new virus that provoked intense stigma and discrimination, undercut that confidence. Scientific understandings of HIV led to more evolutionary, ecological views of disease origins; widely disseminated through the news and entertainment industries, and those views inspired a newer, darker era of viral imaginaries. The identity of viruses as objects of scientific study, national security planning and popular culture have become difficult to disentangle as a result, argues Tomes, and thus provides a general cultural framework to see the various objects of scientific discussions changing in perspective over time, for the scientific community as well as for the general public.

Section two is about ‘Facets of Science’, in which we focus on values, facts and objectivity and, finally, on the role of emotions. The aim of this section is to present to our intended audience (young scientists and early career researchers) a series of synoptic papers that review the basic premises of the practice of science. Sometimes these concepts are discussed as science myths, since they represent important narratives describing fundamental pillars of the practice of science, views supported by many leaders in the field, but which, because of their widespread acknowledgement, are rarely analysed or assessed for their meaning or veracity. Further case-studies and exemplary discussions could have been initiated here and obviously the choices of topics reflect our ongoing interests and biases (hopefully corresponding to and stemming from some contemporary relevance), but already these six papers shall provide a starting point to question and critically examine certain facets of the science practice.

In the ‘Values’ part, reflection is given to the common position, assumed by many scientists, that science is value-free. Papers here, though from different perspective and emphasis, argue that ‘values’ are all around scientists and that their effects on scientific practice are unavoidable in almost all aspects of its practice. Heather Douglas examines the important roles for values in science, from deciding which research projects are worth pursuing, to shaping good methodological approaches (including ethical concerns), to assessing the sufficiency of evidence for scientific claims. She highlights the necessity of social and ethical value judgements in science, particularly for producing properly responsible research, then goes on to examine how the need for values to inform scientific practice affect public trust in science. Douglas argues that values serve as a key basis for public trust in scientists, along with the presence of expertise and evidence for a well-functioning expert community. She also suggests that scientists should be more open about the values informing their work. This result holds whether the science at issue is a matter of consensus or still contested within the scientific community.

While Harry Collins also focuses on values, he starts from the idea that science is the search for truth about the observable world, in which the only thing that can be discovered by observation is the immediate here and now. Otherwise, knowledge about the observable world is based on hearsay, spoken or recorded, about others’ observations. Apart from small and fleeting observations, science crucially rests on trust, and thus on values. Our scientific lives and scientific knowledge, argues Collins, depend on choosing who and what to trust. Since we can meet only a limited number of scientists at best, we have to decide whether to trust science as an institution. Science is a good bet because its aim is to create truth; truth is its end as well as its means. In today’s world, runs Collins’ argument, science is vitally important as a check and balance for democratic power and an object lesson for decision-makers. To do good, honest, science is to support democracy in the face of populism, thus connecting truth and values, that are usually more separated in the literature.

The next section, ‘Facts and Objectivity’, engages with the simplistic but prevalent view that facts are ‘out there’, that they are objective and are gathered in an objective manner, and that they are, almost by themselves, telling a story. This view is common among the general public and among politicians ‘following the science’ (with examples during the COVID-19 pandemic being numerous). It might also be perceived among scientists ‘following the data’. Philippe Stamenkovic shows neatly that there are various concepts of objectivity, a characteristic of the scientific enterprise. The most fundamental of them is objectivity as ‘faithfulness to facts’. A brute fact, which happens independently from us, becomes a scientific fact once we take cognisance of it through the means made available to us by science. Because of the complex, reciprocal relationship between scientific facts and scientific theory, the concept of objectivity as ‘faithfulness to facts’ does not hold in the strict sense of an aperspectival faithfulness to brute facts. Nevertheless, it holds in the wider sense of an underdetermined faithfulness to scientific facts, as long as we keep in mind the complexity of the notion of the scientific fact (as theory-laden, that is, affected by the theoretical presuppositions of the observer) and the role of non-factual elements in theory choice (as for the under-determinacy by facts, that is, there is almost never enough data to prove a theory). However, science remains our best way to separate our factual beliefs from our other kinds of beliefs, argues Stamenkovic, searching for some middle-ground.

In the second paper here, Rafael Ambríz González and Lisa Bortolotti offer a brief overview of the debate between realism and anti-realism in the philosophy of science, having an obvious and close relation to the fact-question discussed in the previous paper. For the background of that debate, they consider two recently developed approaches aimed at vindicating realist intuitions while acknowledging the limitations of scientific knowledge. Perspectivalists explain disagreement in science without giving up the idea that currently accepted scientific theories describe reality largely accurately: they posit the existence of different perspectives within which scientific claims can be produced and tested. The integrative approach instead encourages researchers to embrace pluralism: conflicting frameworks and methodologies can be integrated when new knowledge is gained. In the natural and human sciences, researchers sometimes behave as if perspectivism is true; at other times, they hope for a reconciliation between conflicting frameworks and believe that this can be achieved by progressively filling knowledge gaps.

The last part of the second section of the Thematic Issue is devoted to a topic that is much less discussed: the Role of Emotions in shaping the epistemological success. Emotions are often seen as admitting subjective assessments and opening doors to biases. But the role of creativity, of instinctual hints and ‘gut feelings’ is also well recognized as an important element of scientific advancements. Thus, Laura Candiotto provides an analysis of the emotions’ evaluative, motivational, hermeneutical functions, embedded in epistemic practices and cultures. But going beyond the functionalist assessment of the role of emotions, Candiotto also discusses a social dimension of emotions in knowledge production, considering some of the ethical significance of this role of emotions in the ethics of knowledge.

Anatolii Kozlov starts from the general consideration that emotions were seen as incompatible with rationality and objectivity of science and so were a marginal topic in the philosophy of science. This trend has changed progressively, when it turned out that objectivity is linked to social factors and rationality cannot do without emotions. As a result, emotions are now slowly finding their way into our understanding of what science is. Kozlov provides an overview of some aspects of science where emotions and scientific reasoning seem to come into close contact. For his survey, Kozlov considers themes such as scientific motivation, scientific evaluations, scientific explanations, scientific understanding, scientific imagination and coherence in science. Using these examples, he discusses the epistemic role of emotions in scientific progress. In conclusion, he advocates for a nuanced view of emotions in science as values that contribute to both epistemic and humanistic dimensions of science.

Following on from the exploration of how science works, assessing some of the main assumptions of scientific endeavour, the Thematic Issue engages with an overview of how science is perceived in society, with a third section under the title of ‘Perceptions of Science’. We are aware that either of the topics below could form, on their own, the focus of a whole special issue, but our aim was that through the right choice of contributions we should provide an overview of the major viewpoints relevant to each of the discussions, rather than entering into detailed analysis of the many examples that can be cited. This approach is probably the best one in our efforts to sensitize our intended audience of young practitioners of science to the relevant social perspectives of the scientific endeavour.

Thus, Kristen Intemann goes for a communicational view on trust. She starts from the consideration that there are many ways through which trust plays a crucial role in science, both between researchers and between researchers and various communities impacted by their research. Scientific practices can operate in ways that either facilitate, or undermine, trust in science. Her contribution examines the role of science communication in facilitating (or undermining) public trust in science and science-based policy recommendations. This is done by looking at some potential failures in the public communication of science during the COVID-19 pandemic that have the potential to undermine the overall trust in scientists. At the end, Intemann draws out some lessons on how we might improve science communication practices.

In a similar vein, but yet again with different emphases and contextualization, Maya Goldenberg takes a stand on the questions of trust. While acknowledging that expert advice may be wrong at times, non-experts, she argues, on balance, benefit from following scientific experts rather than ignoring them. The public needs science. Numerous professional codes such as the 2017 European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, scientific reports and academic scholarship emphasize the importance of public trust in science and recommend a variety of ways to promote it. Less attention, however, is given, claims Goldenberg, to the converse relation between science and the public, namely how much science needs the public. Her article examines this two-way relationship by considering the role of trust in science, both within scientific communities and between science and the public, where and how public mistrust arises and what can be done to improve public trust in science.

Finally, Will-Mason Wilkes goes for more specific issues. He starts from the idea that specific pieces of science communication shape the publics’ general impression of science, whether intentionally or not. This, in turn, affects how public interacts with science, and acts individually as citizens in techno-scientific societies, and thus ultimately has implications for the role of science as an institution in democratic societies. Representations of science that downplay scientific uncertainty, elide the role of the scientific community and de-emphasize the values which define the institution of science have problematic consequences for science, publics and democracy. Therefore, though increasingly encouraged to communicate research to the wider public, scientists must think carefully about their communication practices. Specifically, the epistemic status of research findings, what elements of the process of knowledge creation are foregrounded and the values which underpin the scientific community all need to be clearly communicated to the public. Wilkes paper will help Early Career Researchers reflect on their public science communication and begin to develop communication practices of benefit to publics and science.

The very last part of the TI is concerned with the topic of Scientism. While the intended audience of young science practitioners will come to the texts presented in this sub-section (and to the whole TI hopefully) with a certain amount of trust and confidence in the value and power of science, the purpose of these chapters is to provide some perspectives on the potential limits of science and on the boundaries of the scientific domain. The hope is that they will engender a healthy scepticism towards the overly optimistic claims made by various scientists and commentators on science.

For that, Rik Peels takes on the relation of scientism and similar attitudes in religion. By noticing that an increasing number of scientists, philosophers and popular science writers claim that science is the measure of all, that science can answer all questions, that there are no limits to science or that only science provides reliable knowledge, Peel asks what exactly is scientism? What is to be said in favour of it and against it? His paper suggests, after a careful evaluation of the arguments for and against scientism, that a helpful way to think of scientism is as of a variety of fundamentalism. It turns out that scientism meets nearly all conditions formulated in family resemblance accounts of fundamentalism. Finally, Peel suggests that science and scientists can learn much from religion when it comes to how to deal with scientific fundamentalism.

Finally, René van Woudenberg presents and discusses various strategies that have been wielded against scientism. The strategies identified are: (1) the counterexample strategy, (2) the denying of claimed entailments of science strategy, (3) the self-undermining strategy, (4) the presupposition strategy and (5) the limits of science strategy. In addition, van Woudenberg discusses two proposals that aim to recast the debate about scientism in a way that renders these strategies obsolete. It is argued that these proposals are misguided.

8. Conclusion

We are aware of the huge and apparently eclectic range of topics included in this Thematic Issue. But we would like to return to the initial points. This particular special issue is intended for a specific audience: young science practitioners, and early career researchers, who are, likely, very successful in their field of specialty, but have relatively little knowledge (and/or background interest) of the cultural context in which their practice started and from which it evolved, and of the hidden forces and influences that are acting from within (specialists) and without (general social community) on their domain of specialism.

We thus intended to produce this Thematic Issue as a primer and as a (first?) opportunity to encounter and discuss the basic assumptions that they, most likely, take for granted. At the same time, we want to offer the opportunity for a much wider perspective on their roles and responsibilities in society, naming this whole endeavour, tentatively and not without a hope that it might stick around, science humanities.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emil C. Toescu

Emil C. Toescu, neuroscientist with a special interest in the neurobiology of ageing, and involved with a number of academic and educational projects focusing on the interface between (medical) sciences and humanities. Senior Researcher at the Institute for Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School, University of Pécs (Hungary) and Honorary Fellow at the Department of Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, University of Birmingham (UK). Member of the MTA (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Lendület Values and Science Research Group. Member of the Steering Committee, and lead of the Education Committee of the Doctor as a Humanist foundation. He runs and contributes to a number of Medical Humanities courses.

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Adam Tamas Tuboly, philosopher of science, leader of the MTA (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Lendület Values and Science Research group and research fellow at the Institute for Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School, University of Pécs. He works on the historical questions of philosophy of science and aims to track down the demarcation between science and pseudo-science.