Simon Jenkins is right (Scientists you are fallible. Get off the pedestal and join the common herd, 5 February).  Scientists ignore criticism when it comes from outside science.  Just that has been my experience.  For three decades, in five books and many academic papers, I have subjected scientists' whole idea of science to lethal criticism - and I have been ignored.

    Scientists take for granted that the intellectual aim of science is to acquire knowledge of truth, the basic method being to assess claims to knowledge impartially with respect to evidence, nothing being accepted permanently as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence.  But this is nonsense.  Physics only ever accepts theories that are unified - that attribute the same laws to all the phenomena to which the theory in question applies - even though endlessly many empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted.  This means - I argue - that physics persistently accepts a substantial thesis about the universe independent of evidence: there is some kind of underlying unity in nature, to the extent at least that all seriously disunified theories are false.    This substantial, influential and highly problematic assumption needs to be acknowledged within science, so that it can be criticized and, we may hope, improved.  The aim of science is not truth per se, but rather truth presupposed to be unified, or explanatory.

    And it goes further.  The aim of seeking explanatory truth is a special case of the more general aim of seeking truth that is, in some way or other, important or of value.  Values, of one kind or another, are inherent in the aims of science.  But values are, if anything, even more problematic than untestable assumptions concerning an underlying unity in nature.  Values implicit in the aims of science need to acknowledged, so that they can be criticized and, we may hope, improved.

     Finally, knowledge of valuable truth is sought so that it may be used by people, ideally to enhance the quality of human life.  There is a humanitarian or political dimension to the aims of science.  But this, again, is highly problematic; it needs to be acknowledged so that it can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved.

    In short, in holding that the intellectual aim of science is just truth, scientists seriously and damagingly misrepresent the real, problematic aims of science, and thus prevent urgently needed critical assessment and improvement of these aims.  Science suffers, and humanity suffers, as a result.  We urgently need a new kind of science which acknowledges honestly its highly problematic aims, and seeks to improve them, aided by non-scientists.

    This is the criticism I have developed over the decades of orthodox science.  I have been ignored.  Why?  I am a non-scientist, a mere philosopher of science.

 

Nicholas Maxwell

Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science at University College London