I’m crowdsourcing here, to ensure that I don’t say anything more stupid than usual.
I’m writing a piece for a forthcoming book on antiscience, edited by Massimo Pigliucci. I want to consider the heuristics of antiscientific thinking, but, not being a psychologist or cognitive researcher, may be missing some obvious sources. Can people indicate what I should be aware of before I hang myself in public? I want to look good on the gallows.
It seems to me that little work has been done specifically on how people make decisions about science that leads to antiscientific conclusions. I suspect there is a general tendency of thought style – a difference between practical, problem-based thinking and theoretical, comprehensive thinking – that leads in extreme cases and the right circumstances to antiscience. That is to say, that this otherwise ordinary aspect of human cognition and heuristics can result in opposing knowledge for entirely rational reasons. I have already argued this for creationists in my Synthese paper [manuscript version here].
I would love to hear of any work on this, especially in book format that doesn’t show up on the usual searches.
“My target question is why educated people believe nonscience. In particular those who are educated in scientific fields or what I call parascientific fields like medicine or engineering. What heuristics that they employ, and what circumstances they employ them in, leads them to adopt a nonscientific view, when they are grounded in science in their professional or intellectual life?”
A hodgepodge of suggestions:
• Review studies on Bounded Rationality and Naive Realism. As you know, many philosophers have a lot to say about this, and social psychology, and now neuroscience, have added new layers.
• Even the most “rational” scientist does not have access to the subtle biases of their “adaptive” unconscious. We can all have glitches and false beliefs in our thinking and be unaware that they contradict the rest of our world view. We can dissociate, disconnect, and hold multiple contradictory assumptions. [Check out Lakoff and Johnson's biconceptuality research.]
• Then there is the study of confabulation and delusion.
Having a false belief in one area does not translate to an entire “mind”.
Peter Duesberg is a dangerous HIV denialist but he still appears to be conducting respectable cancer research
Penn and Teller are famous debunkers of woo but have done a disservice to the world by promoting the “Libertarian” view of Climate Change denial.
• Check out Emily Pronin’s research on the Blindspot Bias
• Also, evidence is showing that humans tend to be naturally vitalistic, dualistic, essentialist magical thinkers, etc. which is why I recommend that you read Bruce Hood and Paul Bloom and others
• How we are trained to look at evidence is extremely important. Research on reasoning and metacognition is showing is that critical thinking and logic are NOT enough to help us confront our subtle biases, emotional investments and self-deception and misperceptions.
For example, someone with Asperger’s may be intellectually brilliant but miss subtle emotional cues as well as nuances of language in others.
I speculate that many of the arguments that occur among the Atheists/agnostics/etc., are due to subtle language misperception. Sam Harris arguing with Philip Bell amazed me: I honestly felt that Harris was not understanding the subtle semantics in Bell’s sentences and was jumping to conclusions based on his own literal projections. Bell, also, didn’t address this possibility, so they were literally talking past each other.
• I think that the study of “interoception” is a particularly fruitful area for finding ways promote reflective thinking where we can question our most cherished or unseen schema by helping us become aware of what makes us uncomfortable and what we are identified with.
• Carol Dweck’s research on the importance of learning through mistakes and stumbles
Please allow me to email pdfs of papers on any of these topics if you cannot easily find them.
I have reference lists and abstracts too.
And consider
I mean’t Philip Ball not Bell. Sorry
I doubt that you could come up with one explanation of why people do what you ask about, their motives would be individual. You would have to distinguish those who took the anti-science position out of conviction and those who took it out of professional advantage. I doubt that you can distinguish the list you asked about from any position that was without the normal levels of scientific validation. To uphold the position supporting science, whatever evidence you used would have to have an impeccable profile of scientific propriety, not least of all because to not do that could leave you open to a charge of inconsistency.
In his Swathmore Lecture of 1929, Eddington pointed out that in order to express a value judgment about an incorrect answer to even the simplest math problem, you had to do so from outside of science. Mathematics can tell you the right answer, it can’t tell you why that answer had a higher value than the wrong answer. I believe he shortened his argument to “science can’t deal with ‘ought’ statements”. I’m inclined to give Eddington’s observations on scientific epistemology a lot of credence.
My target question is why educated people believe nonscience. In particular those who are educated in scientific fields or what I call parascientific fields like medicine or engineering. What heuristics that they employ, and what circumstances they employ them in, leads them to adopt a nonscientific view, when they are grounded in science in their professional or intellectual life?
John, what follows are some random thoughts provoked by reading your last comment before going for a walk with the dog; all my best ideas come by dog walks, all the worst ones as well.
I think a possible answer to your query, and this will please you, is that they don’t learn philosphy of science, scientific methodology or critical thinking for that matter. Most people with a so-called scientific education are not really scientists but are practitioners of Kuhn’s normal science, doting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s in a very small area of their nominal scientific discipline. They haven’t really learnt to think scientifically or critically in a general sense but to follow a problem solving algorithm within their area of work. Another aspect is that they have not really learnt to critically assess sources but are victims of a form of undifferentiated belief in authority. XY is true or correct because Prof. Dr. ABC says so in the standard text to the subject and so on and so forth. Pseudo sciences operate according to the same principles. QP is true because Dr. Dr. Dip. Eng. MNOP says so in his major work The TRUTH about RST!
This all sounds very abstract but I have often met this form of explanation from people with scientific professions defending their belief in some sort of WOO. “I read it somewhere!” Nobody ever taught them that “you can’t believe everything you see and hear can you?” to quote that famous philosopher Jimi Hendrix.
Anyway that’s my two pence worth!
This comment strongly resonates with my own personal experiences. Obviously, we have to take care not to appeal to false equivalence, but your point is quite correct that the operating procedures of real scientists often – for good or ill, out of necessity or laziness – do overlap with those of perceived pseudo-scientists.
And without possibly banging the old drum too hard myself, I thoroughly agree that there is a deficiency in exposure and understanding* inre the philosophical underpinning of Teh Method. In fact, the belief among some scientists that there is a specific, s00pa-d00pa, tried and tested, one size fits all Scientific Method (with it’s perfect little p<0.05 benchmark for truthiness) is evidence of that.
* The deficiency in exposure is perhaps more of a problem than a deficiency in understanding. For example, my exposure to some of the discussions on Bayesian and frequentist approaches to inference has been invaluable in terms of making me realise just how fuzzy things are in the world of statistics, but my understanding of the finer points of the arguments one way or the other is sketchy to say the least. As appeals to authority among scientists go, our sometimes violent adherence to statistical models we don't actually understand is probably the most common.
It does not look particularily abstract to my eyes and is not limited to the scientific professions but a general problem of university education, I suspect.
Thony C. , I strongly endorse your comments and, at the risk of stating the obvious, would point to the concept of cognitive dissonance, i.e., I would be very surprised if denial was not a major factor in “the heuristics of anti-science.”
For John, my knowledge of social psychology, generally, and cognitive dissonance, specifically, is superficial but a name which comes up regularly is Jon Elster; may be worth looking into. Two pence more.
I’d be surprised if getting paid to support corporate viewpoints didn’t account for most of it. Which is more old fashioned lying and fraud.
Thony C., agreed (ah, greed!). Topping the list of the reasons driving denial would certainly be economic self interest. Warm regards, Bill W.
Be careful howyou describe ‘antiscience.’ Remember Francis Collins. One could hardly call him antiscience, yet he believes that the genome is complex enough to warrant an intelligent designer. The best books for you (that WILL NOT be on the radar) are Mortimer Adler’s “How to think about God, a guide for Pagans,” (he was an agnostic at the time of its writing) and “Religion vs. Science, the 500 Year war” by David Turell.
Both display highly rational people, both accepting evolution, only denying chance as the cause. Turell goes further and discusses epigenetics as a means to explain punctuated equilibrium. Both are somewhat Thomist in thinking, but any more analysis by me ad I will poison you.