Scientific error and the ethos of belief

Social Research, Spring, 2005 by Lorraine Daston

INTRODUCTION: KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF

FOR THE MODERN SCIENCES, THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN WHAT COUNTS as established and reliable knowledge and what is viewed as hypothesis, conjecture, and tentative belief shifts constantly, according to the dynamic of research and debate. Today's reigning theory may be toppled by tomorrow's finding; within the span of a single scientific career the received wisdom of a discipline may be fundamentally revised not once but several times. What was once judged to be audacious speculation may be confirmed by ingenious empirical tests; conversely, the very axioms of mathematics may be confronted with alternatives. On the basis of the latest research, knowledge is demoted to the status of mere belief, and belief promoted to that of knowledge; hence the instability of the boundary between them--and the dynamism of the modern sciences. The price of scientific progress is the obsolescence of scientific knowledge.

The problem of knowledge and belief was born with the modern sciences themselves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period, a whole range of explanatory systems and empirical claims that had been accepted as eternal truths for centuries was overturned. The cross-fertilization of natural history, natural philosophy, craft knowledge, and mathematics created new forms of inquiry, test, and proof--a whole "new science." The origins of modern philosophy--one might argue the origins of modern Western thought tout court--lie in a seventeenth-century diagnosis of pathological belief. The beliefs in question ranged from the theological and the astronomical to the geographical, from the anatomical to the natural philosophical: the voyages of discovery, the Reformation, the triumph of Copernican astronomy and Newtonian natural philosophy, William Harvey's demonstration of the circulation of the blood--all confronted early modern thinkers with dramatic and disturbing examples of errors that had persisted for centuries on the authority of the very best minds.

It is difficult to capture the enormity of this revelation of pervasive and enduring error for those who had been educated largely in the old systems of thought--the sickening realization that so many respected authorities could have been so wrong for so long. Some of the most famous projects of the Enlightenment, such the Encydopedie of Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, germinated in this overwhelming awareness of having only recently emerged from over a millennium of collective

intellectual error. One of the avowed aims of the Encydopedie was to serve as a kind of time capsule to preserve the new discoveries should war and pestilence plunge Europe once again into darkness: "a sanctuary, where the knowledge of man is protected from time and from revolutions" (d'Alembert, 1976: 121).

The search for an explanation of and thereby an antidote to future intellectual disasters centered on the problem of excessive belief. This was regarded as an emotional, ethical, and even medical, as well as intellectual malady, and one with potentially devastating consequences. Much blood as well as ink had been spilled in early modern religious controversies, and throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "enthusiasm" and "superstition," both diagnosed as pathologies of religious belief, were reviled as sources of ecclesiastical and civil unrest. Excessive belief stemmed from psychological and corporeal causes, both of which had to be strictly managed in the susceptible: too great an appetite for the wondrous (asserted to afflict the vulgar and unlettered), a too soft and therefore impressionable brain (as allegedly found in women and children), or too much black bile (the temperament of melancholics) might all cause credulity. The fact that excessive belief was understood at least partly in medical terms by no means exonerated sufferers from the moral responsibility of restraint; spiritual and bodily regimens must be rigorously followed to rein in such dangerous inclinations. Cambridge philosopher Henry More acknowledged that false enthusiasts--people who sincerely but mistakenly believed they were directly inspired by God--were often melancholic and that in such people "the enormous strength and vigour of the Imagination" was affected by the weather, wine, and certain potions. But he blamed the enthusiasts for a lack of temperance, humility, and reason in succumbing to errant fancy. Had they only abstained "from all hot and heightning meats and drinks," repressed desires to stand out in a crowd, and rationally resisted "every high flown and forward Fancy that endeavours to carry away the assent before deliberate examination," they would never have become so mad as to claim that they were prophets or even the messiah (More, 1712: 5, 37-38; Heyd, 1995: 44-108, 191-210).

Among philosophers, the responsibility was intellectual as well as ethical--for example, Descartes' instructions in the Meditaiones (1641) to take inventory of all one's stock of beliefs and discard those with the least blemish of uncertainty, to "guard myself no less carefully from believing them than I should from believing what is manifestly false" (Decartes, 1979b: Meditation I, 79), or Locke's insistence in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that belief be apportioned to evidence (Locke, 1959, IV.xvi.2, vol. 2: 369-370). These religious, philosophical, and theological programs for disciplining belief not only raised the threshold of the credible; they also changed the nature of belief itself. Whereas belief had previously been conceived as an involuntary state and, in religious contexts, as a divine gift, by the late seventeenth century it had become a matter of voluntary assent: the "will to believe"--or to disbelieve--had become possible.