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Value-Free Science: Impossibility of Objectivity?
It’s the old rub between science and the humanities. Science is quantifiable, telling us what is empirically true; it is about data and facts. But the objects of study in the humanities—from paintings to plays to poems—can yield a multitude of interpretations. As any teacher of Intro to Art or English 101 will attest, there’s more than one way to interpret Pablo Picasso’s Guernica or T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Not true for science, right? Not exactly, says Harold Kincaid, Ph.D., UAB Department of Philosophy professor and director of the Center for the Study of Ethics and Values in the Sciences. Kincaid and a host of other thinkers have put science itself under the microscope in recent years—and the result is a new view of scientific conclusions that were once considered absolute.
“Science is a human enterprise, so values inevitably come into play,” Kincaid says. “In fact, values can affect every part of the scientific process—from the way the results of an experiment are interpreted to what a scientist chooses to study in the first place. How do you read data that isn’t terribly conclusive? There’s always room for values to color a researcher’s judgment.” We’re all familiar with situations wherein values and agendas compromise scientific objectivity—cases of overly ambitious researchers who skew outcomes, for instance, or research results that deepen the pockets of industry sponsors. But Kincaid stresses that truth can be obscured by forces much more subtle than these. “Scientists often bring their own assumptions and biases—even unconsciously—to bear on their work,” he says. He cites the scientific account of human evolution as a prime example of this reality: “Thirty years ago, the standard account of human origins was the theory of ‘man the hunter.’ According to that theory, it was men—the hunters—who gave evolution a big push by developing tools and walking upright in order to hunt. And the men brought back meat that had its high levels of protein and thus contributed to a diet that led to a larger brain. “But the evidence for that theory is actually pretty thin. There are artifacts, skeletal remains, and pieces of stone that may or may not have been early tools. But what they were used for is speculative. And the scientists who did the speculating were men.” Enter women into the fields of archaeology and anthropology; exit man the hunter. It turns out that alternative theories, including women as prominent providers through food gathering, are also compatible with the evidence. The “hard facts” are the same, but the story inferred from them differs based on the storyteller.
“The old-fashioned view was that science was objective because it had water-tight methods of ensuring that the correct answer came out of an experiment,” Kincaid says. “We know now that it’s a lot more complicated than that.” Kincaid and a host of experts on values and science examined these complexities during a conference sponsored by the UAB Center for the Study of Ethics and Values in the Sciences last February. Scholars from around the globe gathered for “Value-Free Science: Illusion or Ideal?” presenting papers that examined a range of problematic scenarios—from gender bias in the selection of experimental subjects to the ethical high-wire act of scientific testimony in court cases. Kincaid hopes the conference will produce a definitive collection of essays—and a new level of discussion on this contentious topic. “I hope the conference can contribute some clarity to the debate,” Kincaid says. “The different sides of this issue do a lot of talking about science being value-free on the one hand, and value-laden on the other. “It’s important for science itself to have a clear account of how it produces objective results—while being sensitive to the fact that scientists are humans with values. We can make progress toward those goals through peer review and dialogue, and philosophers want to be at the table for those discussions, to help explore the issues in depth and seek new insights. “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to completely eliminate human bias from the practice of science,” Kincaid concludes, “but by being aware of the ever-present possibility of bias, we can exercise the most scrupulous scrutiny—and a healthy skepticism—whenever we evaluate scientific results.”
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