Democratic Science?

A friendly critic just posted to complain about a glib comment I am often overheard to make; namely, that scientific practice is in an important sense "democratic."

"Science is not a democracy," he writes, "but a dictatorship."

I simply could not disagree more.

I think that what some of the rather more puritanical champions of scientific culture think I mean when I say science is democratic is something on the order of: "People make the world what it is simply by agreeing to say so."

That is, they simply offer up a caricature of idealism or relativism from a perspective that I would then go on to caricature as naive realism. You can readily imagine the joyless ritual that tends to eventuate from the mutual incomprehension of this failed point of departure.

What I actually mean when I say "science is democratic" is simply that it involves practices of collaboration among peers according to shared but contentious standards in the service of shared but contentious ends.

Science cannot be a dictatorship, I say, because neither the world it describes, nor any particular scientist exercises anything like absolute authority over the community of scientific practice.

The world has no preferences in the matter of how humans describe it. The descriptions that will be the best ones on offer from moment to moment will crucially depend on the network of warranted beliefs into which new candidates for belief are offered up for testing and consideration -- including beliefs about what are good powers to have more than others.

That the world is susceptible to description as such underdetermines the descriptions that will satisfy the criteria of warranted assertibility. And by these criteria I mean the usual suspects: falsifiability, testability, adequacy, coherence, elegance, etc.

And since every single one of the criteria on the basis of which we have been rightly satisfied that beliefs are warranted in the past has selected at least some beliefs that were subsequently replaced with better beliefs later, we have to assume that we will never know that a belief is more than the best on offer but also final in some sense.

And so: science is an endless collaborative effort to describe the world in ever more instrumentally powerful ways in the service of shared values.

I am a champion of scientific culture as a collective project to discover uniquely empowering descriptions of the world and thereby satisfy human needs. There are always indefinitely many scientists who can re-stage the experiments on the basis of which descriptions are offered up as candidates for warranted assertibility, and incomparably many more people are empowered to weigh these descriptions against other candidates on offer to shape the emerging consensus. I can think of no higher compliment than to point out how wonderfully democratic all this is.

Science, it seems to me, needs no dictators and needs no priests.