No. No no no no no no.

Clearly you both have a fundamental misunderstanding of science. Models are not “searched for”. They are fabricated. The model is not reality; the map is not the territory. A model, by definition, is an oversimplification. They are used sparingly when used at all, and even then it’s important to remember that the model does not actually tell us anything we didn’t build into it from the beginning.

If it’s models you’re interested in, be a mathematician. Their models don’t even have any burden of physical meaning. Science only concerns itself with models as a tool to EXPLAIN bits of science. The models themselves are not science.

You’re right that science has nothing to do with truth, though. It has to do with fact. Truth is a philosophical concept only, tied up with honesty in some contexts and meaningless queries about first and final causes in other contexts. Fact is that which corresponds to measurable reality, plain and simple.

Scientific consensus means absolutely nothing — either it is valid or it isn’t. Believing something doesn’t make it so. At one time the consensus was that fire was caused by an invisible fluid called phlogiston, that disease was caused by miasmas, and the universe was filled with an invisible substance called ether. Seventy-five years ago eugenics was considered good science and only a few mavericks doubted that “race hygiene” was a good idea.”

Titus–you said it best: believing something doesn’t make it so. Using erroneous beliefs of the past also does nothing but show that mistakes and bad conclusions are part of science, but science being what it is (based on analysis of repeatable findings) those erroneous beliefs come to light and are changed accordingly. The fact of evolution, micro and macro, has been shown to exist. The passage of time will find the fitter of theories to be the one that survives. Creationism will end up on the dust heap of history; along with phlogiston, eugenics, miasma, and ether.

science determines and/or explains conditions; philosophy(or theology) justifies preferences.

Science has no preferred outcome. It tries to discover and explain what is. We may not like what is, but that is not the fault of, nor does it disprove, the scientific fact.

“Scientific consensus means absolutely nothing — either it is valid or it isn’t”

“Science is advanced by proposal of hypothesis and then becomes accepted when it can’t be falsified”

You’re missing the point. Leah didn’t say science should be accepted based on votes or “who’s who”. She is just stating that in the real, practical world science is not as concrete as you would like to think. You both list absurd examples (flat earthers, phlogiston) from a history of “established facts” that have now been debunked.

You are confirming the real point, there are no established facts. Scientists might not believe in relativity or quantum mechanics in the same way that historical peoples believed “scientific facts” (or at least not in the same way we picture flat earthers, since the Galileo narrative is itself just a narrative). These are accepted models.

How, in actual practice, does a community of scientists acknowledge that models can and will continue to change, but still assess just how significant the difference is between say, how certain evolution is, and how uncertain the beneficial effects of wine are? (Wine studys… another news obsession which the public sees swinging wildy with each new story)

Combine this with a science that is now so large that no scientist can even begin to evaluate all of the arguments for an against the principles of his own field.

The way we evaluate what is valid and what isn’t, and the way we evaluate what models can’t be falsified, is in practice a very communal process. And that is what Leah is trying to articulate and define.

Her point is to say that just because the scientific community is debating an issue, it doesn’t mean there is any real scientific controversy. Those who make that argument are fundamentally misunderstanding the scientific community. I think it is a very insightful articulation of just why these “controversy” arguments are so convincing to the public.

I also see nothing in your comments which disputes her point.

Scientific consensus means absolutely nothing — either it is valid or it isn’t. Believing something doesn’t make it so. At one time the consensus was that fire was caused by an invisible fluid called phlogiston, that disease was caused by miasmas, and the universe was filled with an invisible substance called ether. Seventy-five years ago eugenics was considered good science and only a few mavericks doubted that “race hygiene” was a good idea.

For just one example, in recent years, American elections have become unverifiable. Counting is done in secret, by machines thoroughly debunked as unsuitable for their purpose, often producing nonsensical results, such as negative vote totals or jurisdictions reporting more votes than registered voters. Regardless of what outcome is reported, to accept it is an article of faith as no verification of accuracy has been done and often no proof even exists. Such conditions necessarily create *inherent uncertainty*, and at its core, this is what I think the notion of manufactroversy is about.

As Naomi Wolf documents well in “End of America,” authoritarian governments close down free societies in predictable patterns that are in abundant evidence in the US. The wedge concept mentioned by Leah demonstrates a consistent method used to intentionally divide the masses. The manufactroversy that creates inherent uncertainty serves as a particularly insidious divider in that it creates a rift in the perception of reality. This phenomenon has been recorded in literature such that our lexicon recognizes the terms Orwellian and Catch-22.

For more on inherent uncertainty, please see:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/from-around-world-inherent-uncertainty.html

Evolution by natural selection is about as settled as anything can be outside fields that allow for truly precise measurements such as basic physics. It has been endlessly confirmed directly and through further theories and predictions that assume evolutionary theory as a base then go on to make further predictions which have also received experimental confirmation.

While less well settled than, say, evolution – that HIV causes AIDS seems to this non-specialist to be quite well confirmed and to have been the base theory behind the development of a number of (rather-more-than-less) successful treatments that have had positive effects controlling the process of the disease.

With anthropogenic global warming (or whatever the correct term is this week), however, I see rather fewer unassailably confirmed predictions. I see a great deal more argument about even such things as the basic data that climate scientists are dealing with, and I see a large number of people saying that “science proves” that their preferred political outcomes are the correct ones (whereas I believe that science may inform political decisions, but that can neither confirm nor deny their correctness).

While I am somewhat agnostic about anthropogenic climate change, my skepticism is informed by the feeling that both “sides” are lying to me. I become very uncomfortable when told not to look at things too closely, because the “science is settled” (I thought science was never settled), because “consensus has been achieved” (I thought scientific questions were addressed through hard data obtained from well-designed experiments) and (in my opinion) highly premature announcements that climate science should be considered as well-established as evolution by natural selection (and, by perhaps by rhetorical extension on my part) the existence of gravity and the certainty of death and taxes.

…Mike

One of the excellent points made there is that “verbal persuasion” is *often* effective but not *always* effective, and that some of our most persistent problems will not yield to effective argumentation alone. For those problems, you have to have a “well-told story” which generates a “vicarious experience” for the reader/listener. By attempting to condense the message to its essence, we often drain the message of its power to convince.

One example from that book was a set of facts and figures delivered to three audiences. One audience had just the facts, a second had charts and graphs, and the third had the same information worked into a story about a little, old winemaker. Not only did the third group *remember* the material better, they also *believed* it more strongly because they had been led to identify with a character in a story.

I’m not 100% sure why this is, but I believe that *emotion* has a lot more involvement in thought than we give it credit for, especially scientists, engineers and academics. Logically we can usually work out whether something is true, but emotion is what makes it *important* to us and emotion also controls what people believe and identify with.

As a scientist myself I couldn’t agree more that the power of persuasion is massively important in communicating to the public what it means for something to be a scientific fact, or the most widely-accepted scientific theory. Of course scientists will always have different opinions about the interpretation of those data, or whether that model is a good fit, or how the evidence for X supports Y, or whatever. That’s because we’re people, each with out own bias and way of looking at things.

What this does *not* mean is that there is necessarily a scientific controversy. It basically works like this: All these little bits and bobs of data and theoretical models from different labs swim around together in a great big mess of publications, conferences, and scientists having chats down the pub. Someone might look at something and go ‘that’s funny, I wonder how that works…?’ and someone else might go ‘oh yes, that fits in here’ and someone else might go ‘no, that doesn’t work at all’, and so on. There are different people with different opinions, yes, but rarely a controversy.

Obnoxio, of course truth in science is not determined by democracy. But I think you may have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science. Science does not search for truth. Science searches for the best model for the data. And models are made by scientists, and it’s the consensus among scientists that determines the generally accepted model at the moment. The model will change, of course, because there is always more data, and sometimes the model will be shown to be fundamentally wrong and will have to be replaced by (and this is important) a model that fits the data *better*.

…oh, I see Nobody in Particular made my point for me, probably better than I have just done!

Thanks for the article, it was excellent.

Ms. Ceccarelli never said any such thing. She said that when a significant majority of scientists agree that something is true, it is accepted within the scientific community as true.

I think it’s also important to note that science is empirical, that it is based on evidence derived from experimentation and observation—and that it is flexible: its perception of truth is mutable, depending on the evidence. That which we perceive as “truth”—even scientific truth—can change, based on changes in the evidence and on our increasing ability to understand the universe. Sophists will try to turn this vital characteristic of science against it, citing cases when scientists “changed their minds” or “flip-flopped” on particular issues. The dogmatic mind sees rigid inflexibility of theory or opinion as a virtue, and sophists will play that tendency for all it’s worth.

Thanks, Ms. Ceccarelli, for a wonderful article.

Have you come across the concept of “argumentum ad populum”? Just because a majority of people believe something to be true, doesn’t make it so. Finding the truth in science is not a democratic process.

“With all the sophisticated sophistry besieging mass audiences today, there is a need for the study of rhetoric now more than ever before.”

Are you familiar with the terms “ipse dixit” or “remove the beam in your own eye”?

My own profession, the study of rhetoric, is also frequently mischaracterized to the public. Many assume it is focused only on empty talk, sophistry, words that are divorced from truth or action. But the study of rhetoric is actually much broader than that; it examines how the means of persuasion are marshaled in any given case. I completely agree with you that in the case of science, persuasion of fellow experts is accomplished through arguments that are grounded in “reproducible evidence and facts.” Those who study the rhetoric of science have taken a close look at that process of argumentation, and also at how that argumentation is sometimes distorted in the public sphere by modern-day sophists.

However, in the overall context of your article, your definition as

A more accurate portrayal of science sees it as a process of debate among a community of experts in which one side outweighs the other in the balance of the argument, and that side is declared the winner; a few skeptics might remain, but they’re vastly outnumbered by the rest, and the democratic process of science moves forward with the collective weight of the majority of expert opinion.

is inaccurate and misleading.

Your definition in the context of this article could lead one to believe that a debate among scientists could be won by rhetoric alone, which is not the case at all. All accepted scientific knowledge is based on reproducible evidence and facts. Any legitimate scientific debate is over the interpretation of that evidence.