Philosophy of Science

Amherst HSTEM 2020 Spring

By Claire Carlin

Why This Workshop

At the beginning of this course, we talked about deconstructing the image of a scientist as a white man. Building off of this, in my part of this project I want to think about deconstructing not just who this scientist is, but also how they do their science. My motivation for this arose out of my own experience in STEM. My participation in STEM was always encouraged growing up, and I felt able to stand up for my right to be in any academic space. I was captain of my high school robotics team and volunteered in after-school activities to teach elementary school students about engineering. I didn’t realize until college the way my own gender, and to a lesser extent my sexuality, affected my STEM experience.

While I generally feel comfortable speaking up in class and in office hours, there are other times when I am hesitant to do so. With time I have realized that this doesn’t so much stem from a fear of having the answer wrong, but rather from a fear that showing others the way I have thought through a problem might reveal some fundamental flaw in my way of thinking. My introduction to the philosophy of science is when I began to see the value in approaching problems differently from others and fully appreciating the different perspective each person brings to STEM.

My introduction to the philosophy of science actually began with Richard Feynman, an excellent physicist but also a known misogynist. Regardless, an idea from a talk of his that really stuck with me is that science must be motivated by our own inherent curiosity about the world. At the same time, I was also reading the works of Paul Feyerabend, Karl Popper, and Thomas Kuhn. I began to fully appreciate the beauty I had already seen in science and to start questioning any one rigid formulation of a scientific method. It wasn’t until I took HSTEM and learned about feminist philosophy of science that I began understanding the connection between my interest in philosophy of science and my own place in the scientific community. As participants in this workshop will begin to see, there are many different approaches to creating knowledge, and incorporating a variety of approaches from people of different backgrounds makes science better.

These theories and studies have helped me understand that I don’t need to train myself to think differently than I do. Of course, I have a lot to learn and a long way to go in improving my problem-solving skills, but these don’t need to come at the cost of my individuality. I don’t need to be trained to think one way, but rather I need to further develop my own way. I have learned to value not only the way I think, but also have a much greater appreciation for the way others think. I still have a long way to go in valuing the contributions of others in a more expansive sense.

My own way of thinking is firmly rooted in western science. Western science is so deeply entrenched in my experience of STEM that I still struggle with incorporating the ideas of some radically different approaches to developing new knowledge, such as the construction of knowledge in some indigenous populations.

We all have something to learn from this. I am learning to value my own contributions and extend this to others who are less well-represented and accepted in STEM than myself. I want myself and others to expand our idea of what science is and find a way to create a space that is truly inclusive. Cultivating diversity in STEM requires recognizing the ability of all people to participate in our STEM classes and our fields at large. But this can’t mean just “training” people to think in one way. If we are going to cultivate true diversity, we need to value the way each person thinks as well. We cannot expect people from a diversity of backgrounds to come to our classrooms and engage in one type of science. While we learn in traditional disciplines that will still generally require us to be trained in a fairly specific way, we can take these larger lessons and bring them to our own community, learning to appreciate the many different approaches students will take.

Goals

The goal of this workshop is to encourage people to reflect on both what they uniquely bring to their STEM courses and also what others bring. I hope that by introducing students to some feminist philosophy of science and indigenous science we can help people think more broadly and openly about science. Perhaps seeing these approaches in the literature and seeing what can come out of a diversity of thought will help people think more broadly on large and small scales, from how science is done overall to how they bring their own ideas forward and respect the perspectives of their peers. I would like to cast doubt on some of the practices we take for granted, and show the ways that these can be mitigated by increasing diversity in STEM.

Outline

This outline provides some ideas about what I find to be the relevant ideas. It should be freely modified and changed as necessary and I expect it will (and should) be heavily influenced by the presenter.

  1. Introduction
    • An overview of what is given above
    • Set norms?
  2. Scientific literature
    • Brief introduction to philosophy of science (Feyerabend, Kuhn, Popper)
      • See supplement A
        B. Feminist philosophy of science
      • See supplement B
  3. Indigenous science (supplement D)
    • Feminist philosophy of science encourages us to think more broadly about who does science and what it is rooted in
    • Indigenous science can exemplify this, some approaches are vastly different than what we are taught, and knowledge is often transmitted in very different ways
    • Example: Nisga’a Fisheries. This section should take up the bulk of the workshop. If presented by an Amherst professor with relevant knowledge, this is one possible example. Ideally, an indigenous scientist from outside Amherst would be brought in to speak.
  4. Paradigm shift (supplement C)
    • Be open about the fact that we have been trained to think of science as synonymous with the western scientific method
    • Think about science more broadly; it is about knowledge production in general
    • Additionally, the idea that western science isn’t rooted in some subjective ideals is flawed
      • Example: In Lost in the Math by Sabine Hossenfelder, she reveals that a lot of theoretical physics is motivated by trying to find beautiful, united ways of understanding the universe. These motivations began when science and religion were closely connected. They have since been separated, but the underlying motivation remains in some secular form, buried under a lot of math.
  5. Connection to the personal
    • While we are talking about whole modes of thought here, we can connect it back to ourselves
    • Ideally some kind of activity that helps people reflect on what they have learned on a more personal level
    • Share?
    • Maybe there is some kind of activity where there is a question that is somehow very general/ambiguous and we can see how everyone thought of it differently?
  6. Conclusion
    • Connection to Amherst? How can we bring this back to our community?
    • How can we specifically use this to empower students and make our STEM communities more welcoming?

Supplement A: An introduction to the philosophy of science

While the philosophy of science began with Aristotle (circa 300 BCE), our modern philosophy of science perhaps begins with Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and Paul Feyerabend, who were active in the mid-1900s. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of science. In it, he develops the idea that there are two distinct phases of science. “Normal science” involves scientists operating within some generally accepted paradigm. This is perhaps our normal understanding of science, in which we slowly accumulate facts that build off those which are already accepted. Kuhn argues that these periods of normal science are punctuated by scientific revolutions, in which we revise what was previously accepted. This requires a complete paradigm shift—we must begin to think within an entirely new framework.

Karl Popper is perhaps most well known for his idea of falsification. He believed the inductive method of science, in which theories are derived from observations, is not foolproof. Instead, we must develop a test to prove a given theory is wrong and show that no such test can succeed. Falsification has garnered widespread critique. Several of these critiques arise from the fact that one can always modify the theory or background assumptions to invalidate any falsification.

Paul Feyerabend critiqued many of the prominent ideas in the philosophy of science, including falsification. In Against Method, he developed the idea of “epistemological anarchism,” in which he argues that there is no single scientific method. Rather, he believed limiting ourselves to any one approach will inhibit scientific progress.

There are many other prominent philosophers of science, but these are a few of the most well-known ones whose ideas continue to be influential. I find the work of Feyerabend particularly interesting as it most radically critiques the notion of a scientific method.

SUPPLEMENT B: Feminist philosophy of science

Many of the early and most prominent voices in the philosophy of science are unsurprisingly white men. However, several theories regarding the role of gender in science have been developed over the years. One such theory is feminist standpoint theory, which posits that feminists provide a perspective that gives them an epistemical advantage in the development of scientific knowledge. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lays out the grounds on which this argument is based:

  1. Centrality: While men can ignore power structures and the way patriarchy fails various people, women are in a better position to see these shortcomings.
  2. Collective self-consciousness: Women have had to advocate for themselves as they have been collectively oppressed by men, giving them some collective identity/knowledge.
  3. Cognitive style: From the division of labor we see in society and the way women are raised, women and men may have different cognitive styles. “Ways of knowing based on caring for everyone’s needs produce more valuable representations than ways of knowing based on domination,” thus women and men may have different approaches to knowledge.
  4. Oppression: Women may be particularly interested in revealing modes of oppression because of personal experience that white men do not share. Patricia Collins has further developed this in black feminist epistemology. Collins and Sandra Harding consider the “bifurcated consciousness,” in which minorities have the ability to see both the dominant and oppressed perspectives.

Minorities have been excluded from the production of scientific knowledge at every level, from programs that systematically exclude minorities to the meta-scientific level at which “many of the epistemological ideals that inform science have androcentric origins and, once subjected to feminist scrutiny, these ideals are found to be in need of reconstruction.” These arguments can readily be extended to other populations.

SUPPLEMENT C: Paradigm shift

Naively, one may assume that various aspects of our identities should not influence our ability to participate in science, as we so highly value the idea of objectivity (i.e., that our scientific findings are of some fundamental truth and should not depend on the person who made the discovery). There are several ways in which this is flawed.

First, it is fairly widely accepted that humans struggle to be truly objective. Hence processes like peer-review, in which we ask experts in a field to critique the work of their peers. A reviewer is not personally invested in the outcome of research and thus is better able to identify flaws in the research. However, we know peer-review is not always all that effective. Additionally, what if there is some condition that the reviewers take for granted, just the same as the researcher did? Perhaps if we have a reviewer with a very different scientific approach or thought process than the researcher, they will be more likely to catch this. Hence the cognitive style point of standpoint feminist theory: feminists may have a fundamentally different cognitive style. Even if you don’t totally accept the points posited by this theory, I think this point has a more general and easier-to-accept truth. Different people think differently, and by allowing a diversity of people to interrogate a particular finding, we can produce a finding with greater objectivity. Objectivity cannot arise from one person being truly objective on their own—I don’t believe this is possible. But it can be achieved by uniting many different perspectives. White men hold different perspectives from one another, but perhaps not so radically or fundamentally different as perspectives from other populations.

There are other ways we seek to remove subjectivity from research, such as by singly or doubly blinding studies. This is most well-known in the context of clinical trials, but it can be done elsewhere. For example, some fundamental physics research at particle accelerators has been blinded. The scientists analyzing data do not know a crucial number relating to the experiment, thus as they go about their analysis they cannot know if what they are finding corresponds to a given hypothesis. However, this is not always plausible, and there is an additional, more fundamental flaw in our understanding of objectivity.

The point I would like to make is most easily seen in the history of physics. I am sure it can be found elsewhere, but I am most well-versed in physics, so I will stick with that. Long ago, physics was very tied to religion. The motion of the heavens, while probed scientifically, was a decision made by God. Over time, science and religion were separated. Today, we hope theoretical physicists are driven by a much more secular desire to understand our universe, and they are. But this is not to say theoretical physics is completely objective. This argument is laid out in Sabine Hossenfelder’s book Lost in Math, but one important takeaway for our purposes is that the decision to pursue some particular theory is often tied to a desire to find beauty and unification in our understanding of the universe. This is not to belittle the work that theoretical physicists do (I myself believe very deeply in their work), but to acknowledge that their motives are not so fundamentally objective. Their work is heavily constrained by the results of past experiments—they can’t just pursue any random theory they come up with—but there is some choice in which theories are pursued. Some of this is out of necessity (the universe is complicated!), but many physicists admit to being driven by beauty.

SUPPLEMENT D: From Western Science to Indigenous Science

Our discussion of the philosophy of science thus far has been fundamentally Western. Feminist philosophy of science, at least what we have discussed, is the philosophy of Western science. It considers modifications to our scientific method. However, there are other approaches to the production of scientific knowledge that look very different from what we learn in our STEM classes at Amherst.

Different approaches have produced knowledge where Western science could not. This is the result of a different way of thinking, perhaps radically so. But the same principle applies at every level, from an entirely different approach to scientific knowledge production to the different way an individual thinks because of their unique identity. I will forgo additional discussion here as this will be the realm of the expert presenting the workshop.

Other perspectives/approaches:

Bibliography

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Bird, A. (2018). Thomas Kuhn. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

Crasnow, S., Wylie, A., Bauchspies, W. K., & Potter, E. (2018). Feminist perspectives on science. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-science/

Fermilab. (2018). Why is the Muon G-2 experiment shifting time? Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtdVH1Wp7fs

Hossenfelder, S. (2018). Lost in math: How beauty leads physics astray. Basic Books.

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Preston, J. (2016). Paul Feyerabend. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paul-feyerabend/

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Helmer, M., Schottdorf, M., Neef, A., & Battaglia, D. (2017). Gender bias in scholarly peer review. eLife, 6, e21718. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21718