Why Scientific Controversies Exist

To a large extent what can be disputed is isomorphic to the structure and factors that can be identified in the analysis of scientific theories and their functioning. Disagreements about truth, adequacy, relevance, and appropriateness can originate at or about any of them.

To start describing the objects and origins of scientific controversies, there is an obvious beginning. Whether one holds that the aim of science is to explain phenomena, to solve empirical or theoretical problems, or to describe regularities among data, there is no doubt that science, unlike fiction, art, or religion, is intended to comprehend the facts of the world. How well it comports with these facts is therefore the crucial test of the adequacy of scientific claims. Cosmologist Dennis Sciama has written that “in the middle of the debate we don’t know the ultimate outcome and we must be guided by our own sense of the fitness of things”; however, “ultimately, the only test is the pragmatic one of whose ideas succeed the best.”8 Accordingly, it is the relationship between such ideas or cognitive claims and the relevant facts, or the question of whether the former match the latter, and to what extent, that are obvious sources of possible controversies.

Regarding the facts, the early moderns and the contemporary philosophers following them proved to be very optimistic. They held a sort of “facts-are-out-there” view. Sensible experiences, clear and distinct ideas, phenomena, observations, impressions, and sense data, or later, protocol sentences, basic statements, and Konstatierungen, were for them reliable building blocks provided by nature to any fair observer. They were not so naive as to not recognize that these blocks are affected by the ways the human mind perceives the world. Francis Bacon, for example, knew that observations could be “idol-laden,” and Galileo did criticize the prejudices of the Aristotelians that, having been “imbibed with mother’s milk,” affected sense perception. However, they were confident that idols, prejudices, expectations, and the like could be expurgated and the mind left in a state to see clearly and think rationally. This is the main reason why they thought that controversies can be settled easily and completely.

Once we abandon this optimistic foundational epistemological basis, things become more complicated (Wilfrid Sellars). Facts, or the experiences that give rise to assertions of or about them, involve interpretation and, thereby, a certain degree of cognitive or social construction. Even the identification of what is to be explained is subject to various cognitive and social processes.

This explains why in some cases the facts themselves can be controversial. A fact can be questioned as to its existence, debated as to its inclusion in the domain of things to be explained, or called into question as to its relevance in testing a theory. And there is more. As some scientific fields develop, experiments become the way to ascertain facts, and these involve observation techniques, instrumentation, and experimental designs. Accordingly, all of the factors that are presupposed in assuming that an instrument is working properly, that an experimental device is appropriate, and that a design is adequate can become the subject of controversy. For example, there were those who argued that sunspots and the satellites of Jupiter were nothing but optical illusions created by Galileo’s telescope.

In addition, the very nature of experiments can raise problems. Often experiments are conducted in group settings such as laboratories or depend on interactions among individuals and groups who exchange information about their results or techniques. These interactions and the appropriateness of such interchanges and borrowings can give rise to heated personal, nationalistic, or straightforwardly epistemological disputes. One interesting type of dispute occurs when prior research results and the authority of the researchers who did the work are called into question or are themselves used as evidence in support of the claim. The grounds for such questions are manifold and of distinctly different kinds, for example, fraud, inadequate experimental controls, contradictory new results, better experimental techniques, and so on.

In the philosophical and, sometimes, in the experimental literature as well, discussions about facts, phenomena, and observations and their relations to procedural techniques and instrumental devices are usually referred to the methodology of science. But methodology is not only concerned with the procedural rules and norms for observational and experimental practices. Methodology also consists of beliefs or metatheories about the evidential relations holding among empirical bases and scientific hypotheses or theories. Thus, one could dispute whether a bit of data really is evidence for a given claim, what degree of support is provided by certain evidence, or what the overall strength of the evidence is for a given theory. Similarly, controversies can occur over whether the evidence warrants inferences to specific theoretical conclusions or predictions, for example, in the early 1960s in the debate over the quark model or “particle democracy,” where the evidence for the quark model was scant indeed at the time. Besides empirical adequacy, methodology has also be taken to include other sorts of adequacy criteria for scientific theories, such as principles of symmetry, simplicity, comprehensivenss, explanatory power, fecundity, and so on. Such a debate occurred about the theory of special relativity and Einstein’s focus on the “aesthetic” principle of symmetry rather than on the slim evidence that was available in 1905. Methodology has often been a source and object of scientific controversy.

For all these reasons, though a scientific controversy often appears to be about facts, phenomena, or method, it may reflect broader concerns about the theories or research programs and background assumptions that are implicated in the presentation of the relevant data. Such concerns are quite complex, and often are not patent. They have been the source of many types of controversy and debate. The different traditions of research of the chemists and the physicists in the recent cold fusion controversy is an interesting example.

If we now turn our attention to scientific theories, we can say that theories can be substantively described on the basis of the terms they include, their formal structures, and their explanatory force. First, the terms are supposed, minimally, to describe through their interrelations the observed regularities. Accordingly, controversies can involve the reference of terms, and the realistic commitments to such entities, while others focus on the exact nature of such terms or variables, for example, as idealizations, intervening variables, or hypothetical constructs. An example was the debate over the realistic status of the electron. Second, the structure of a theory can be the subject of debate: one may claim it to be a particular mathematical formalism, another a type or instance of a mechanical system, and still another a causal model. The controversies over the analytic formulations of classical mechanics turned on such considerations. More particularly, people can and have argued over the form of the equations or the type of mathematics that are proper for a given theory, and whether a given term ought be used.

We should add that controversies concern not just the constitutive factors of a given scientific theory. Relations among theories, at a time or over time, also can bring problems to practitioners. The veracity of research traditions and the reliability of certain auxiliary theories have often been the cause of concern, and so of contention. Further, individual theories are related to other, auxiliary theories whose results, explanatory framework, or structures they utilize in solving their own problems. Thus, some people have argued (wrongly) that the auxiliary theory of optics in Galileo’s time could not be used to support his use of the telescope for making observations.

Even more complexity attends to theoretically based debates when one considers that theories, or even research traditions, do not stand isolated. The adherence to a theory or tradition always involves more than just that. Choice of theories depends upon the education and training as well as on the interests and values, in varyingly broad senses, of the scientists—individually or in group. Even more abstractly, theories and traditions often reflect, sometimes unconsciously, higher level philosophical, ideological, or architectonic principles. In a way, such principles can be conceived as “external” factors, since they are borrowed from the surrounding culture. However, once they are made explicit and used in debate, they become “internal” and play a constitutive part in scientific practice or controversy.

Such background elements, as well as their implications, can be objected to in at least two ways. First, if they are conscious or are made conscious, they can be brought in as substantive parameters to a dispute. Second, at a higher level, the very relevance of such factors to the epistemic claims or procedural methods of a science can be debated. For example, controversy can arise over whether feminist commitments are present in certain critiques of medical research, or over whether such “political” commitments are at all relevant. Or, again by way of example, people can argue about the nature of deterministic assumptions as formal constraints or even as regulative principles.

A few further dimensions of science that have been the object of controversy should finally be noted. First, scientists working with a theory and belonging to an experimental tradition do not cease to be part of broader social and cultural contexts. For example, it may be relevant that such a context involves small-group parameters such as the habits and traditions of a particular laboratory, or it may reflect national interests that have been established for overtly political reasons. Second, even the context in which science is practiced can become the subject of controversy, as when, for example, a debate takes place about whether basic research can be carried on properly if it is supported by government or corporate sources. Moreover, we should keep in mind that in every context the scientist ful fills many social roles. These roles may vary from that of an entrepreneur hoping for a money-making patent to that of a timorous lab assistant afraid to offend the boss. Factors of such kinds do affect the manner and substance of scientists’work in various ways. Perhaps most abstract are those debates, such as the Velikovsky incident or the Lyschenko research program, that ultimately touch on whether a theory or program is really science or just pseudoscience.

On the more concrete end, the technological or social effects of developing a theory or of working on a project may become controversial. Questions of utility, value, interest, and righteousness attend upon the actual or perceived effects of a given project or tradition. Such effects can be the subject of controversy, both scientific and political. The controversies surrounding the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb are but one well-known example. Finally, the social or political and the epistemological come together in the deceptively simple question of whether or not something is worth knowing or just a waste of research time.