Reactionary (Pseudo-)Science

Okay, I am still wandering the life & style section of newspapers and found another disgraceful and infuriating article. Apparently some "research" somewhere has shown that women prefer breeding and rearing babies more than climbing corporate ladder. I have absolutely no interest in getting into the details of this so-called research but this has become part of a very annoying trend so I thought I will vent some of my irritation here.

First of all the abuse of scientific method and the dishonest way the researchers in humanities try to piggyback on the prestige and the certainties associated with "hard sciences". To be fair, the original research paper generally would make (it has to, actually) the methodological assumptions very clear before stating any conclusions but the same can't be said of journalists who report it in the popular media or the scientists themselves who write popular books for mainstream consumption. Now, I am not denying the possibility of the use of scientific method in these subjects even though they most certainly fall far short of standard criteria of verifiability, falsifiability, repeatable experiments etc which are the hallmarks of scientific method. After all, there are many different levels of certainties. It may not ever reach the certainty of laws of physics but still there are different gradations of truth. But still you just have to think about the good old problem of induction to see the essential ridiculousness of any such research which observes a sample size of few thousands and concludes for the entire human race. I wonder what would Hume have made of it? He even doubted common-sensical causation as logical invalid. (The fact that causation can never be concluded just from spatio-temporal adjacency and succession of two events!) And not to mention the irony of the whole thing! The same arts and humanities people never miss a chance to belittle claims of objectivity and superiority of scientific method by using fanciful theories (Thomas Kuhn et.al.)

As I said I am not arguing against the use of scientific method in these subjects but the essential limitations and assumptions should be properly stated when one is advertising the results. That brings me to second and even more important point. The way science is being used more and more to make normative judgments about social policies. The job of science is to explain phenomena, and not to tell us what we should do. If we confuse facts with values we will be prone to both factual error and also doubtful ethical judgments. Doing otherwise would be to commit what is called naturalistic fallacy - that is, what should be doesn't imply from what is. They are both two very different things. So even though by some truly remarkable and groundbreaking research one "proves" that women indeed prefer breeding and lack the will to succeed in a career, it still doesn't justify the wage differentials between the two genders. Again, it is generally not the scientists but the journalists and popular science writers who abuse science in this manner to set their own personal political agenda.

There is standard problem in philosophy of science called the demarcation problem, that is, finding the principles on the basis of which we can differentiate science from non-science and pseudo-science. Science and Philosophy are two very different things. If you mix both of them together it will create confusion in both camps. Just to take the example of gender, science can explain how male and female sexual organs work but it can't say anything to the ontological questions about the existence of gender as a category. Science can't help us in finding the meaning of what we mean when we say "X is a Man." Science can't help us decide which of the two is better, whether we should see ourselves as "men" and "women" or simply as "persons" - simply because it is a normative question which should be decided based on normative goals of individuals and society as a whole. There can be both conservative and progressive arguments which require persuasion and sustained thought and that's what these journalists and pop-science writers should focus on rather than crying eureka every second day.