The Successes And Failures Of Science Through The Lens Of Intellectual Humility: Perspectives From The History And Philosophy Of Science

Templeton funded project

PIs: Nancy Cartwright and Robin Hendry

Scientific endeavors fail or succeed for many reasons. We hypothesize that Intellectual Humility (IH), or its lack, plays a significant role, not just as a virtue of individual scientists but as embodied in the norms, practices and institutions that constitute science. We will look at successes and failures in science through the lens of IH in order to chart what constitutes IH in scientific institutions and how IH affects scientific success.

This project has four aims: 1) opening up research on IH in science, where little attention is directed; 2) focusing on IH in the institutions that affect how science is conducted and what it achieves; 3) studying how IH impacts effectiveness and progress in science and its ability to serve society; 4) exploring how to make science more successful and better able to serve society.

To achieve our aims we will look at successes and failures in different domains of pure and applied science: physics, chemistry, and the socio-economic sciences. We will proceed iteratively, formulating concepts and theory from case studies and feeding those back to inform the studies.

Our outputs include drafts of two books: one a scholarly study, invited by Springer, of IH and its failure in 19th century chemistry and its effects on scientists’ thinking about the ‘big questions’ and the societal role of chemistry as a discipline. The second will be a short non-technical book commissioned by CUP, 'A Philosopher looks at Science'. We will also produce three journal articles and six conference talks.

If we're right that lack of IH affects science’s chances of success, this is reason for larger projects understanding how to improve matters. We provide the crucial first step, testing our central hypotheses and mapping the kinds of effects that appear.

Our project should spur subsequent research on IH in science institutions in history and philosophy of science, science studies and institutional sociology, as well as spark interest from funding bodies and among scientists.

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It barely needs stating that science has been a remarkably successful enterprise. Equally uncontroversial, however, is that science has also failed on numerous occasions. There are many different senses in which science may be said to have succeeded or failed, and many possible reasons for its successes and failures. Our aim in this project has been to examine the role of intellectual humility, and its corresponding vices of intellectual arrogance or hubris on the one hand and excessive doubt or diffidence on the other, in some of the successes and failures of science from the early modern period to the present. 

The project has had two main focusses. One of these was on “big” metaphysical questions and the ability of science to answer them. Two metaphysical theses we have explored in depth are determinism and reductionism, respectively the claims that that all states of the universe are fully determined by its past states and that all phenomena are reducible to and derivable from the laws of physics. Both theses are widely assumed to be supported by science. Yet a closer look at science and its history reveals that neither thesis has ever been supported empirically. The claim, then, that science has answered these big questions is hubristic; it takes science to have established more than it in fact has. This, however, is not to say that science can never answer such questions, as we show in our research on chemistry’s success in answering questions about matter previously thought to be beyond the scope of empirical investigation. 

The other focus of the project was on the application of science to practical matters such as industry, law, and public policy. In this part of the project, we looked at several case studies from the history of chemistry and chemical industry including potable water analysis and the development of nutritionally engineered foodstuffs and various synthetic products. We also conducted an in-depth analysis of the scientific advisory teams SAGE and Independent SAGE and their advice to the UK government and public during the COVID-19 pandemic. In several of these cases we found that a lack of intellectual humility on the part of scientists, both individually and collectively, has led to significant harms to humans, eco-systems, and the environment. 

The project constitutes an important step towards filling two significant gaps in the literature on intellectual humility. Firstly, previous research has been conducted mainly by epistemologists and psychologists, the former focussing primarily on conceptual analysis and the latter on empirical investigation in controlled experiments. As a result, there has been little research on intellectual humility in real-world situations. By providing perspectives from history and philosophy of science and science and technology studies, disciplines that look essentially at intellectual activity in different social and cultural settings, the project has added some much-needed contextualisation, and this has augmented existing work on situational influences both on intellectual humility in particular and on intellectual virtues and vices more generally. 

Secondly, existing work has conceptualised intellectual humility almost exclusively as a character trait or state embodied by individuals. Almost no attention has been given to intellectual humility as a collective virtue, and this is something we have provide by looking at intellectual humility at the level of scientific institutions and disciplines. An especially interesting finding here is that collective intellectual humility is fundamentally different from, and cannot be reduced to, the intellectual humility exhibited by individual members of a collective.