On Scientific Judgment

June 8, 2024 timothywstanley@me.com

No one should doubt for a second that natural scientists take evidence from observation and experiment very, very seriously. But evidence, regardless of its form, cannot by itself determine what one ought to believe. Two individuals faced with all the same data can nevertheless rationally disagree with one another. This trivial point, easy to appreciate in the abstract, is for some reason treated as a scandal when applied to the domain of scientific inquiry. In the minds of many of my students, the difference between science and whatever the hell it is I do is that scientists can come to consensus because their individual use of scientific evidence guarantees that each one of them will arrive at the same logically unavoidable conclusion about nature. For them, human judgment is simply a contingency by which these logically unavoidable conclusions are reached. The hard truth, which it can take several semesters for them to come to terms with, is that scientists who agree on all the facts nevertheless routinely disagree about how those facts ought to be interpreted — and that, no matter how many more facts they acquire, rational disagreement will always be possible. Anyone who says otherwise is promoting an epistemological fantasy world that, while undeniably comforting, erects more hurdles than it clears when it comes to understanding the production of knowledge... Scientific knowledge is not what we come to believe about nature after making sure that we’ve subtracted the influence of human thought. It is a product of human thought.

Chris Haufe, “Do Humanists Know Anything,” https://www.chronicle.com/article/do-humanists-know-anything.