Week 3 Discussion
Failures of scientific objectivity are unfortunately more common than anyone would like. The example of the Piltdown Man in Britain in 1912, where forged bone fragments were presented as observable evidence of a ‘missing link’, was ultimately (more than forty years later!) proved to be a fraud. As a child / early human I remember seeing the fraudulent bones on school trips to the Natural History Museum in London and learned how scientists had incorrectly hypothesized that they belonged to early humans. Such a case demonstrates how an overabundance of faith in scientific method can mask bad actors, and erode public trust. Such famously fraudulent studies might be avoided through using tighter ethical guidelines, transparent peer review, and fostering an inclusive scientific community willing to impose a rigor which challenges itself and prevailing assumptions.
Such peer review processes always hold opportunity for enhancement, especially in a politicized era where the role of science is often weaponized into partisan opinion. Journals might adopt more rigorous double-blind peer reviews, seeking to minimize both conscious and unconscious bias. Compulsory inclusion and diversity programs for scientists on ethical research practices, and how to spot transgressions and fictions might further improve the reliability of findings, but I believe there is also a moral imperative to uphold the principles of the scientific method itself when it becomes politicized as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kuhn’s skepticism wrestles with the idea of the accumulation of additive scientific progress and if revolutionary modes of discovery can co-exist, or must reject existing knowledge. In many ways, we are living through a revolutionary paradigm shift at the moment with the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence into every digital experience, and we see many automated industries struggling with the threat of human replacement. But technologies rarely completely overwrite their predecessors. Or if they do, it takes a very long time. More evolution than revolution. The internet did not kill books any more than radio killed the theater. But this does not mean the distrust posed by these changes isn’t real for those at risk. As Kuhn skeptically mentions “the scientist after a revolution is still looking at the same world” (P.129), but I disagree. Revolutions in knowledge do change our experience of the world.
Failures of scientific objectivity often stem from biases, systemic flaws, or ethical oversights. But within these failures are opportunities for betterment, through self-awareness, humility, empathy and community-driven reform. But by fostering diversity, promoting transparency, understanding that advances in knowledge rarely replace those which came before them, and providing protections for scientific enquiry itself, we might all advance toward even greater objectivity and reliability.
