An article just appeared in The Atlantic online, by Michael Scherer. It was headlined: “Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?” It was an interesting read and will also appear in the January print edition of the magazine alternatively headlined as “The Most Powerful Man in Science.”
The two headlines bracket the main idea of the story very well. Certainty of correctness and actual science should be mutually exclusive states of mind. Being a retired science teacher with three decades of classroom experience gives me some small measure of experience on this topic. Something Kennedy appears not to have. He was trained as a lawyer and was successful, especially arguing tort cases to obtain compensation for those whose health had been ostensibly damaged by chemicals such as glyphosate, a.k.a “Roundup.”
My experience practicing law is probably comparable to his in practicing science. I might not be correct in assuming this but I am guessing that lawyers approach problem solving differently than scientists.
Before the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment, science was the province of “philosopher” scientists. Their idea was to hem reality in with nice, tight, logical circles in order to gain a definitive understanding of things. Their type of philosophy relied on deductive logic. That method promises that a true statement can be made if it is based upon true premises. “A number of women took Tylenol when they were pregnant. Their children were born with autism. Tylenol causes autism,” is an example of using this line of reasoning. By accepting the premises to be completely accurate, as stated, one is obligated to accept the conclusion as truth.
The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, approached science, largely, in this manner. Certainly his apologists during the Middle Ages, the so-called scholastics, were committed to that process. One of the revolutionary aspects of the scientific “revolution,” was the overturning of the scholastics’ approach, by individuals such as Galileo, who used experimentation and observation to prove a point, instead of deductive arguments based upon words from the Bible and the writings of the classical philosophers.
One of Galileo’s contemporaries, and a father of the modern scientific method, was Francis Bacon. Bacon argued against deductive, and instead championed inductive, logic. Induction produces no certain conclusions. Induction can only indicate what is most likely to be the case. Truth is not guaranteed.
A kind of event may be observed hundreds of times, and those observations may lead to a conclusion (an induction), but it is only as strong as the number of times one’s been allowed to observe it, and that will never be infinite. We are forced to allow the existence of a possible exception that has, or will, escape our observation. We must always be skeptical regarding the finality of our conclusions.
This approach, if used to discover whether taking Tylenol and autism are related, means running tests with as many subjects as possible, isolating all variables and preventing any other suspected cause of autism, such as a particular genetic arrangement, to be present in a trial in which a pregnant woman takes Tylenol. An absolutely complete test is both a practical, and ethical, impossibility, therefore any data we set out to gather will necessarily have limits to its reliability.
Scientific tools, like the light microscope, augment our ability to make observations, but tools have limits. When a new, more powerful, tool is created, such as the electron microscope, the previous conclusions reached with our prior, less powerful, tool might be overturned. Science is a continual process of drawing conclusions and then revising them when new information becomes available.
A lawyer arguing a tort case before a jury would try their best to show that the conclusion they wished the jury to draw, from the presented facts, was inescapable. The lawyer would lead the jury through the steps of deduction when presenting the summary. It would not do to be scientifically inductive, reminding them that arriving at a definitive answer was impossible, then listing both the strengths and shortcomings of the argument and admitting that, after the passage of time and additional evidence; it might be replaced by a better one. Cases are not won that way.
I suspect R.F.K. Jr. operates from this assumption when he looks at problems like the negative effects of vaccines. He is quoted in the article as saying: “What we need is science, and we need definitive science. We have suggestive science.”
Could someone please help him to see that the scientific revolution showed the world that the only science worth having is suggestive science? We want a science that allows to us make the strongest possible case for our guesses. If we lose sight that those guesses are only suggestive of possible truths, grounded solely upon the strength of the available evidence and, instead, become fooled into thinking we can enter some golden age in which the scientific method is replaced by something else that promises absolute, certain knowledge, progress will cease.
The Dark Ages are so named because progress, of the kind enjoyed during the days of Greek and Roman innovation, was interrupted. Western society emerged from that period when thinkers such as Bacon and Galileo challenged the rigid and suffocating assumptions of the scholastics and led us away from a reliance on “definitive” science and gave us “suggestive” science in its place. Please resist any attempts to take us back to those dark days in our way of thinking.
Philip Lussier is a retired educator who lives in Ashfield.