## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Strevens]] - Full Title: The Knowledge Machine - Category: #books ## Highlights - In Guillemin’s lab, then, there was much objective weighing of brains and their juices, but little objective weighing of evidence. When it came to determining what the carefully collated data said about theories of TRH’s structure and the like, not even the methodological yeomen—the postdoctoral fellows, the junior scientists, the quiet, decent majority flying in science’s economy class—followed rules. Heedless of official restrictions, they went on stuffing the overhead bins of scientific inference with their moral, psychological, political, and cultural baggage. ([Location 931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=931)) - According to the radical subjectivists, then, the world of scientific inquiry is, for all its specialized apparatus and ideology, essentially a microcosm of the multiplicity of human society, its tens of thousands of participants each having their own idea of what is worth doing and how it might be done, traveling more often at cross-purposes than together, sometimes not talking at all, sometimes arguing with each other, sometimes subtly undermining each other, sometimes seeing only what they want to see, sometimes seeing only what they’ve been told they’ll see, sometimes only seeing their status relative to their rivals in an endeavor whose content, the stuff of scientific theories, may be treated more as a means to self-promotion than as an end. Science, in the radical subjectivist view, is just another venue for the Machiavellian masterpiece theater that is the human condition. ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=945)) - Objectivity is vital to a methodist such as Popper or Kuhn, you will recall, because it makes possible a systematic, unflagging, uncompromising search through the scientific possibilities, discarding those that exhibit even the slightest weakness. For Popper, what is most important is objectivity’s discriminating power: the Popperian rule of falsification purports to detect any discrepancy between theory and the observed facts. For Kuhn, what is most important is objectivity’s motivating power. A single set of standards for doing and judging almost everything—the prevailing paradigm—gives scientists the fervent devotion to a research program needed to push it to its empirical breaking point. ([Location 1272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=1272)) - Here, then, in short, is the iron rule: 1. Strive to settle all arguments by empirical testing. 2. To conduct an empirical test to decide between a pair of hypotheses, perform an experiment or measurement, one of whose possible outcomes can be explained by one hypothesis (and accompanying cohort) but not the other. ([Location 1409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=1409)) - a protocol as weak as the iron rule—an agreement to argue by empirical testing alone conjoined with a fixed standard to determine what counts as an empirical test—gives science something that no other form of inquiry before it has had, a pool of empirical observations that dwarfs in its size, scope, subtlety, and precision anything the ancient or medieval natural philosophers could bring themselves to produce. ([Location 1516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=1516)) - The New Organon recommends this same technique to investigate every natural phenomenon, from lightning to laryngitis to life itself: gather the conditions under which the phenomenon occurs, the conditions under which it does not occur, its patterns of change, and find the hypothesis that explains the lot—the occurrences, the nonoccurrences, the variation. That hypothesis is the theory you’re looking for, the truth. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=1591)) - In 1936, Stalin oversaw the introduction of a new constitution in the USSR, guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom to demonstrate in the streets. By 1937, his regime was executing perhaps one thousand people every day. ([Location 2386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=2386)) - The iron rule, then, legislates a distinction between scientific and unscientific reasons that is not at all the same as the distinction between objective and subjective reasons, or between strong and weak reasons, or between good and bad reasons. Scientific reasons to endorse a theory are supposed to be objective, strong, and good, but that is not enough: even the most powerful argument is excluded from science unless it is empirical, that is, grounded in a theory’s ability to explain observed fact. ([Location 2658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=2658)) - The iron rule ignores all such productions—it ignores anything outside science’s anointed journals and conference proceedings—because they do not constitute moves in the game of modern science. To regulate that game is the rule’s sole concern. Its first three great innovations—shallow explanation, the demand for objectivity, and the distinction between reasoning and official argument—work together to ensure that all scientists share an understanding of what makes for an empirical move in the game. The fourth and final innovation, the “only” in “only empirical testing counts,” insists that every move be empirical and in so doing transforms the game’s players into observational and experimental prodigies, into extractors of evidence par excellence. ([Location 2670](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=2670)) - Science, then, is built up like a coral reef. Individual scientists are the polyps, secreting a shelly carapace that they bequeath to the reef upon their departure. That carapace is the sterilized public record of their research, a compilation of observation or experimentation and the explanatory derivation, where possible, of the data from known theories and auxiliary assumptions. The scientist, like a polyp, is a complete living thing, all too human in just the ways that the historians and sociologists of science have described. When the organism goes, however, its humanity goes with it. What is left is the evidential exoskeleton of a scientific career. ([Location 2882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B085SSXY45&location=2882))