4 - Science

Summary

NATURAL SCIENCE

At first glance, science is the last place where we should find deceit. Contrasting science with other social institutions which endure despite endemic lying, Weinstein (1979:639) remarks:

The one institution that has the pursuit of truth as its dominant value is science.

Most philosophers and sociologists of science, notably Merton in his earlier writings, would have us believe that scientific inquiry is distinguished from other social domains by its openness and by the continual checking of the claims of colleagues. Yet the historians of science tell a somewhat different story, at least in the natural sciences. We now know that in the second century AD Ptolemy not only appropriated as his own data collected by someone else; he fudged his data as well to make them appear more supportive of his thesis that the sun moved round the earth and that the planets travelled in epicycles. Even after the notion of disinterested scientific inquiry had begun to be established in the West in the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle complained of ‘fraudulent tricks’ by experimental scientists, of which he could provide ‘diverse instances’ (Boyle 1744:205). Newton admitted amending his data so that it would be easier for the laity to see the support they gave to his theory of gravitation. Mendel did the same to provide stronger support for his views on genetic inheritance. Presenting data modified in this way as if they were the true outcome of observations might be deceitful, but is not necessarily so.