Category Archives: Tribe of Science

Does writing off philosophy of science cost the scientists anything?

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In my last post, I allowed as how the questions which occupy philosophers of science might be of limited interest or practical use to the working scientist.* At least one commenter was of the opinion that this is a good reason to dismantle the whole discipline:

[T]he question becomes: what are the philosophers good for? And if they don’t practice science, why should we care what they think?

And, I pretty much said in the post that scientists don’t need to care about what the philosophers of science think.

Then why should anyone else?

Scientists don’t need to care what historians, economists, politicians, psychologists, and so on think. Does this mean no one else should care?

If those fields of study had no implications for people taking part in the endeavors being studied, then no, I don’t think anyone should care about them. Not the people endeavoring, nor anyone else. The process of study wouldn’t lead to practical applications or even a better understanding of what was being studied – it would be completely worthless.

Let me take a quick pass at the “why care?” question.

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A branch of learning that ‘need not be learned’?

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Prompted by my discussion of Medawar and recalling that once in the past I called him a gadfly (although obviously I meant it in the good way), Bill Hooker drops another Medawar quotation on me and asks if I’ll bite:

If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem to be able to get on very well without it. Most scientists receive no tuition in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no better as scientists than those who have not. Of what other branch of learning can it be said that it gives its proficients no advantage; that it need not be taught or, if taught, need not be learned?

Bill’s take is “scientific methodology” here can be read “philosophy of science”. So, what do I think?

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Why does Medawar hate the scientific paper?

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Following up on the earlier discussions of intentional unclarity and bad writing in scientific papers, I thought this might be a good opportunity to consider an oft-cited article on scientific papers, P.B. Medawar’s “Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent?” [1] He answers that question in the affirmative only three paragraphs in:

The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.

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Does thinking like a scientist lead to bad science writing?

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In his book A Short Guide to Writing About Science [1], David Porush suggests that the mindset useful for doing science isn’t always the best mindset for communicating science. (It’s more than a suggestion, actually — the second chapter of the book is titled “Why Good Scientific Thinking Can Lead to Bad Science Writing.”) Since it’s connected to our prior discussion of ambiguous scientific writing, let’s have a look at Porush’s diagnosis of bad science writing and the ways he thinks it could be better.

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Kept all my notebooks; what good are notebooks?

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In the discussion on the earlier post about what policies should govern lab notebooks kept by graduate researchers, the commentariat identified a number of important considerations. At least a few of the commenters were sure that a one-size-fits-all policy wouldn’t work, and collectively the comments identified some central questions that go to the heart of how, precisely, lab notebooks are supposed to function:

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Lab notebooks and graduate research: what should the policy be?

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An earlier post tried to characterize the kind of harm it might do to an academic research lab if a recent graduate were to take her lab notebooks with her rather than leaving them with the lab group. This post generated a lot of discussion, largely because a number of commenters questioned the assumption that the lab group (and particularly the principal investigator) has a claim to the notebooks that outweighs the claim of the graduate researcher who actually did the research documented in her lab notebooks.

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Fine-tuning an analogy.

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Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor’s research group.
I’m not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I’m hoping you can help.

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Book review: Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up – Diary of a Whistleblower.

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I recently read a book by regular Adventures in Ethics and Science commenter Solomon Rivlin. Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower is an account of a university response to allegations of misconduct gone horribly wrong. I’m hesitant to describe it as the worst possible response — there are surely folks who could concoct a scenario where administrative butt-covering maneuvers bring about the very collapse of civilization, or at least a bunch of explosions — but the horror of the response described here is that it was real:

The events and personalities described in the following account are real. Names and places were changed to protect the identity of the people who took part in this ugly drama …

I wish I could say that the events described in this book came across as unrealistic. However, paying any attention at all to the world of academic science suggests that misconduct, and cover-ups of misconduct, are happening. Given the opacity of administrative decision making, it’s impossible to know the prevalence of the problem — whether this is just a case of a few extraordinarily well-connected bad actors, or whether the bad actors have come to dominate the ecosystem. In any case, an inside look at how one university responded to concerns about scientific integrity gives us some useful information about features of the academic culture that can constrain and impede efforts to hold scientists accountable for their conduct.

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