The business of science is asking questions, formulating and testing hypotheses, doing experiments and seeking greater knowledge of the natural world in all its manifold complexities. Certainty it is not the business of science and being the infallible oracle is one that science was never meant to fill. But, more importantly, science is not pure fact or something that stands above human understanding and aloof from human foibles.
Mattias Desmet’s remarkable book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (in my opinion, the book of the 2020s, so far), gives an academic’s insight into just how fallible scientific findings are – and must necessarily be. Desmet is not being cynical or indulging in cheap criticisms; rather, he is exploring fundamental questions of epistemology, of what knowing is and of how we can know anything.
There is very little that we have time to find out for ourselves in this short life. We depend on other people for most of the knowledge we gain. Therefore the validity of what we understand and believe depends, among other things, on the truthfulness and integrity of other people.
What happens when a scientist has completed a research project? He looks at the findings and begins this thought process: If I report these findings exactly the way I see them, it might please some people I want to please. But it might displease some people I don’t want to displease. If I tweak what I’ve written, just a little bit, so that it could be taken to mean something that wasn’t quite what really happened, it might please some people very much. It might even get me that big research grant that I need so badly. And, if I get that grant, just think of all the good that I could do! It’s almost a moral duty to try to get it…
No scientist, Desmet says, is ever entirely removed from these types of pressures. And so wherever you go in the search for scientific accuracy, scientific knowledge and scientific truth, you find that it always comes back to this one thing: Man as a free moral agent making a choice.
Making a choice: a choice to have integrity or not; a choice to tell the truth or not. The accuracy of scientific findings depends not only on the quality of the telescope or microscope, or the sterility of the laboratory conditions, or the prior knowledge of the researcher, or the excellence of the process followed, but also on a moral choice. Morality precedes knowledge and is a necessary condition for it. Without truthfulness, there would be so little knowledge that man would be reduced to a condition of brutality.
So the business of science is to find out knowledge. But scientific fact can never be just fact, brute fact. It isn’t fact unless it’s true and it isn’t true unless it is both correctly observed and truthfully reported: it depends on someone making a moral choice.
