Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. Tainted: How Philosophy of Science Can Expose Bad
Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Can philosophy of science make a difference to science? Or is it as useful as
ornithology is to birds, as the famous quip attributed to Richard Feynman goes?
Kristin Shrader-Frechette has no patience for debating this question from first
principles. Throughout her career she has demonstrated by example that
philosophy of science can and should make a difference. And this is also the
conceit of her latest book – to assemble together the many cases she studied over
the past decades (most previously published) in which scientific controversies
can be illuminated and indeed resolved by careful application of knowledge
developed in traditional philosophy of science. But not just any controversies.
Shrader-Frechette’s focus is squarely on what she calls ‘welfare-related science’
(6) – that is scientific research that bears directly on human and animal health
and well-being, and most importantly bears on corporate profits. The safety of
nuclear waste storage; the habitats of endangered animals; the health effects of
pesticides and radiation are some of her examples. It is this combination of high
economic and moral stakes that makes some scientific knowledge a valuable
commodity whose content all too often benefits those who pay for this research.
This is not a rare occurrence. As Shrader-Frechette repeatedly reminds, “at least
in the United States, 75 percent of all science is funded by special interests in
order to achieve specific practical goals” (2). When philosophers of science use
their skills to redress the balance – that is, to evaluate the weight of evidence in a
controversy blighted by asymmetries in power and money – they practice
liberation science, of which this book is a primer and a manifesto.
Shrader-Frechette argues for liberation science in two ways. First, each chapter
puts forward a first-order claim evaluating a particular scientific controversy. All
in all there are 14 such substantive claims spanning chapters 2 to 15 from across
social, physical and biological sciences. The range is truly remarkable, from
hydrogeology, to conservation ecology, economics, biochemistry, toxicology,
statistics and nuclear physics. In each case, the presentation is accessible,
requiring no background in either science or philosophy; but at the same time it
is detailed and comprehensive enough to give prima facie support the author’s
substantive verdicts. Thus, for instance, in chapter 3 Shrader-Frechette makes a
strong case against the industry-funded toxicologist Edward Calabrese’s defense
of hormesis (roughly, it refers to the alleged beneficial effect of toxins at low
doses). Only time will tell whether her 14 verdicts will stand up to scrutiny, but
the ball is squarely in the court of Shrader-Frechette’s critics. In many cases in
question she is the first professional philosopher of science to engage in these
controversies. (Kevin Elliot’s work on hormesis is one exception). So the mere
existence of her 14 arguments in print is just as significant as their actual merits.
Her strategy and hope is to show that these exercises are part of philosophy of
science too. They are its proper applications so far wrongly neglected and
underappreciated in the profession.
The other side of her argument is second-order – to show the precise tools with
which philosophy of science effects liberation. For starters logic and classic
conceptual analysis, which are second nature to philosophers, often do the job.
Thus chapters 2-4 uncover familiar logical fallacies in instances of scientific
inference and expose lack of clarity about the boundaries of concepts. For
example, in defending hormesis Calabrese shifts between different definitions of
it in a way that protects hormesis from inconvenient evidence. Less convincingly,
the author accuses Cass Sunstein’s defense of cost-benefit analysis of being
logically inconsistent, an argument I found uncharitable. It is hardly news that
logic and clarity can improve science, but Shrader-Frechette’s contribution is to
show the power of these tools.
The second and third role for philosophy of science is, respectively, with
discovery and with justification of hypotheses. Discovery can be helped with
judicious use of statistical data and thought experiments (chapters 5-8); while
justification can be achieved by attending to theory’s favorable and unfavorable
evidence, by conducting careful case studies and by inference to the best
explanation (chapters 9-12). Again it is hard to disagree that indeed scientific
practice presents instances in which each of these methods fails or succeeds. But
Shrader-Frechette’s recurring theme is that these familiar tools look
dramatically different when their use is scrutinized in practice rather than in
idealized examples or cleaned up cases from history of science to which
academic philosophers often help themselves. She observes time and again that
methodological rules that look reasonable in the abstract – look for statistically
significant results, favor the hypothesis best confirmed by evidence – can be
dubious and harmful in the real world. If only statistically significant results are
attended to, we miss out on important effects visible only in more narrowly
defined populations or when causal mechanisms are complex. This rule becomes
a convenient tactic for dismissing undesirable theoretical and mechanistic
evidence, for example, evidence that points to harmful effects of various
chemicals. Similarly, if we follow Larry Laudan in attending only to the
comparative advantages of hypotheses rather than their truth or probability, it
becomes all too easy to support hypothesis ‘nuclear power accidents do not
cause cancer’ just because no evidence is collected that allows us to properly
evaluate an alternative hypothesis. Absence of evidence, which is frequently, an
intended outcome because evidence is expensive and troublesome to collect, is
then easily converted into evidence of absence in the public sphere. When
collection and analysis of data is carried out by scientists whose livelihoods
stand or fall with the profits of their employers, it is no wonder that scientific
evidence, produced in apparently legitimate ways, ends up lining up
conveniently with those who foot the bill.
The final set of second-order claims concerns the ability of philosophy of science
to effect normative analysis of science. Chapters 13-15 intend to show that
liberation science requires more than just logic, conceptual analysis and
appropriate rules for discovery and justification. It also requires value
judgments. In these chapters Shrader-Frechette uses moral and political
arguments to argue a) in favor of maximin over expected utility maximization in
some societal contexts, b) in favor of minimizing false negatives rather than false
positives when stakes and uncertainty are high, and c) that scientists and
philosophers of science have a duty to practice liberation science. The book
closes with a shout-out to similarly-minded philosophers of science and practical
suggestions about how to further liberation science in the public sphere through
teaching, advocacy, activism and engagement with law.
Does the overall case of the book succeed? Note that Shrader-Frechette adopts
an expansive definition of philosophy of science, encompassing logic, conceptual
analysis, decision theory and moral philosophy as well as the more traditional
discussions about discovery, confirmation and explanation. It is hard to imagine
even Feynman disagreeing that the first two – logic and clarity – are a good idea
in science. On the latter three – the bread-and-butter topics of philosophy of
science – some of Shrader-Frechette’s examples illustrate better how science can
expose bad philosophy of science, rather than the other way around. After all it is
the details of scientific practice, not philosophy of science primarily, which
enable Shrader-Frechette to argue convincingly that Laudan was wrong about
comparativism and that hypothetico-deductivists were wrong to dismiss case
studies. Granted the line between philosophy of science and analysis of scientific
practice is blurry if at all existent, but my point is that the grouping of so many
radically different examples under one heading of ‘philosophy of science fixing
science’ at times seems forced.
But my main question concerns Shrader-Frechette’s proposal regarding values.
The bringing of moral philosophy under the heading of philosophy of science is a
more controversial though increasingly popular proposal. Philosophers of
science from Philip Kitcher, to Helen Longino, Hugh Lacey and Heather Douglas
to mention but a few, have all argued that good science requires good ethics and
politics in a deeper way than traditionally recognized. Shrader-Frechette’s
liberation science is also unabashedly value-laden – it invites us to identify the
oppressed and the oppressors and help the former resist the latter. Stated as
such liberation science might appear to follow the recent value turn in
philosophy of science – indeed it is plausibly read as allowing the priority of
justice over truth. But in fact none of the examples Schrader-Frechette discusses
take us that far – she documents and exposes cases where economic interests got
in the way of uncovering the full truth about phenomena of importance to
welfare, but she does not discuss what happens when truth and justice collide.
What to do, for instance, when truth is on the side of the oppressors? We are
never told, and here lies the disadvantage of the example-based approach of this
book. The rich examples illustrate liberation science without properly theorizing
it. Liberation science speaks truth to power, but it is ambiguous whether the
author is willing to go further and argue that scientific truths themselves may be
subject to quality control by morality and politics. Today’s philosophy of science
is not lacking in these latter more radical proposals: Kitcher is willing to claim
that some research is off limits because of its power to hurt, Elizabeth Anderson
and Alison Wylie have urged that feminist scientists are within their epistemic
rights to fashion scientific concepts in line with their politics. I could not say
where Shrader-Frechette’s liberation science falls on the spectrum of valueladenness. She is open to using value judgments to determine the relative
importance of Type 1 versus Type 2 errors in Chapter 14. (This is very much in
line with proposals by Douglas and others that epistemic standards should be
sensitive to risks, which this chapter puzzlingly does not acknowledge). She is
also open to redefining objectivity in a way that makes room for values. But she
relies on intuitive notions of oppression, power and liberation, and on
uncontroversial examples of bias in science, instead of offering a theory of which
bias is legitimate and which isn’t. This approach would be perhaps
understandable if no political philosophy of science existed and the intellectual
territory was entirely uncharted, but that is no longer the case. Philosophy of
science of today has embraced moral and political questions, or at least enough
so, for it to be incumbent on anyone who proposes a project such as liberation
science to develop this proposal properly and distinguish it from other
comparable proposals.
These reservations aside, today it is hard to find anyone who has done more to
apply philosophy of science to correct injustice than Shrader-Frechette. This
book gathers together the fruits of her admirable intellectual and practical
efforts over several decades and gives these efforts a unifying narrative capable
of inspiring other philosophers of science to use their skills where they are
urgently needed. For that it deserves unreserved praise.
Anna Alexandrova