"The Knowledge Machine": some brief impressions

Over the past few days, I have read Michael Strevens’s The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science . This book caught my attention because it creates a clash between two biases of mine: while, on the one hand, I am sceptical about method-centric accounts of science, I am also very interested in seeing treatments of the irrational elements of scientific practice.¹ So, after seeing some enthusiastic reviews on Twitter, I decided to give this book a try.

This book presents an interesting overview of two giants of 20th Century Philosophy of Science — Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn — and of the shortcomings in their overarching views of science. Like those two, Strevens subscribes to the idea that science is characterised by a unique method of looking at the world. However, he eschews Popper and Kuhn’s definitions of the method in favour of a timeless image of science as a practice rooted in the iron rule: the only proper way to resolve a scientific controversy is through empirical claims. Modern science distinguishes itself from other knowledge-seeking practices, such as the various philosophical traditions, by rejecting appeals to metaphysical, aesthetical or various other forms of rational considerations; instead, the choice between two theories must be grounded on an experiment that supports one hypothesis but not the other.

The iron rule is targeted not at the behaviour of individual scientists, but at the scientific community, as it defines the rules of the game of scientific argumentation.² This fixed game plays the role that Kuhn ascribes to paradigms in normal science: providing the stability that individual scientists need to provide incremental gains to the accumulated body of knowledge. However, individual participation in the game of science is irrational, because not only one has to forsake the use of all forms of non-empirical — yet rational — argumentation, but also the experiments often require painstaking effort to resolve minute differences between theories. What draws scientists to play this strange game, then? As Strevens suggests, one might point towards a mix of individual and social factors, but they are ultimately related to the effectiveness of science as a social practice that generates knowledge about and intervenes in the world.³

I am not entirely convinced that Strevens’s account provides entirely robust responses to the various studies on the relevance of non-epistemic values in science. As his discussion of the Pasteur example suggests, a cynic could point out that empiricism only takes us so far, and some disputes are resolved through the able wielding of institutional instruments to induce an impression of success. This acknowledgement of the role of non-epistemic values is often associated with “radical subjectivists” such as Bruno Latour, but it does not need to collapse into a full-blown denial of science having any objective content. Here, I am reminded of Hans Kelsen’s approach to interpretation:⁴ empirical arguments, much like norms, can frame interpretation, but the latter is underdetermined by the former. While Strevens does present a valuable distinction between value-free science and claiming that uses of science — in particular in public policy — are not value-laden, even scientific practice itself is not as hermetically sealed as his image suggests.⁵

This treatment of values, as well as the relative lack of engagement with contemporary exemplars of science, soured me a bit on the book as a whole. Nevertheless, Strevens gives a fair presentation of the shortcomings in Popperian and Kuhnian images of the philosophy of science, which might be of interest both for scientists and for those like me who work in science-informed fields. In addition, the author presents a fascinating ideal for science: as an irrational practice that, unlike some of its most ardent enthusiasts state, has no claims to the entirety of human thought, but is propelled by this rationality toward growing knowledge about the world. I therefore recommend this book as a thought-provoking read about science, but policy-minded readers should feel comfortable to skim large sections of it, especially given how some points are frequently repeated.