The next scientific revolution won’t come from scientists
pemThomas Kuhn taught us that scientific revolutions arrive only in moments of a crisis of the paradigm. Now, as philosopher strongSteve Fuller/strong argues, we may be able to intervene without having to wait for a Kuhnian paradigm shift. In a scientific world dominated by computer simulations and unread research, generative AI offers a radical solution. By mining the entirety of scientific knowledge and placing it in the hands of non-experts, AI could trigger a metascientific revolution—one that finally delivers on science’s promise of collective empowerment./em/pp /ppThe most influential work on the nature of science for at least the past fifty years has been a href="https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd.pdf"emThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions/em/a, first published in 1962 by a young physicist-turned-historian, Thomas Kuhn. Although influential, the book has also been widely misunderstood. It is quite common to think—certainly based on the title—that Kuhn was providing a formula for producing scientific revolutions. On the contrary, he was arguing that revolutions only happen once scientists confront insurmountable obstacles in attempting to solve their own research problems. In the Kuhnian jargon, the “paradigm” is then in “crisis.”/ppSuch crises typically involve the presence of phenomena that cannot be explained within the terms set by the paradigm, even after much research has been devoted for many decades—if not centuries—to the matter. Kuhn’s own case in point was the persistent difficulties that physicists working in the Newtonian paradigm faced with accounting for the nature of light, which eventuated in the relativity and quantum revolutions in the early twentieth century. The paradigm that was formed after those revolutions continues to dominate physics research today. /ppNowadays, many authors—including accredited scientists—believe that physics is once again in crisis and that a revolution is required to establish a new paradigm. Interestingly, the first call came in 1996 from an editor at emScientific American/em magazine, John Horgan, whose book a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-horgan/the-end-of-science/9780465050857/?lens=basic-books"emThe End of Scien/emceme/em/a predicted—accurately, I believe—that the increasing use of a href="articles/ai-can-uncover-humanitys-unknown-unknowns-auid-3083"computer simulations/a in cutting edge research across the sciences would shift the site of validation from hard empirical fact to more aesthetic criteria, such as beauty and elegance, which are normally associated with pure mathematics./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"We can regard what began four hundred years ago as a kind of technical solution to the profoundly fallen nature of humanity./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/ppHorgan had interviewed Kuhn himself but went beyond him to suggest that scientific research was becoming the collective realization of an artistic vision that might then be imposed as the lens through which everyone sees the world. This reading of Kuhn makes sense if you think about “paradigm” as meaning “worldview” or “world-picture.” Imagine Newton as being like Rembrandt, both master artists who first sketch a vision and fill in much of the detail but then leave it to others to follow their example and complete the final work./ppHorgan was vehemently opposed by the scientific establishment. Nevertheless, he had history on his side. What we now regard as the first ‘scientific revolution’ in seventeenth century Europe started a shift in the source of privileged evidence from the field to the lab. It was ultimately about not trusting your senses until they were systematically mediated, starting with telescopic observation but quickly incorporating all the other instruments that are commonly found in scientific laboratories today – not least computers. In this respect, physics was the a href="articles/the-thin-line-between-science-and-magic-auid-2382"vanguard science/a, followed by chemistry and then biology and the social sciences./ppWe can regard what began four hundred years ago as a kind of technical solution to the profoundly fallen nature of humanity, a common belief shared by these early scientists, due to an exceptionally strong reading of the Christian doctrine of “Original Sin.” The secular upshot was that they felt they had to “steelman” (to make the strongest possible argument for a claim) everything they proposed about the world because their compromised minds made any naked observations and intuitions fundamentally unreliable. Whereas Descartes proposed that a strict adherence to deductive reasoning as a mental discipline could perform that corrective function, most scientists adopted a version of Francis Bacon’s a href="articles/science-is-a-method-not-a-worldview-auid-3341"“experimental method,”/a whereby technology is taken to provide an independent arbiter of human judgment. This is the trajectory that leads us from Galileo’s original telescope to science’s omnipresent reliance on computers today./ppMoreover, the fallen state of humanity extended to natural languages. Over the subsequent centuries, it has inspired various projects of linguistic renewal, most of which devolved into the jargons that have rendered scientific writing impenetrable even to educated non-experts. Nevertheless, for Kuhn, the combination of specialized discourse and instrumentation served to ringfence scientific inquiry from those who might want to exploit prematurely its novel and powerful insights. He invoked the a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.1960.0001"1660 Charter of the Royal Society of London/a as the institutional origin of modern science for its official insulation of scientific from non-scientific concerns./ppFrom that moment, Kuhnian paradigms could flourish, initially by a self-selecting group of correspondents but eventually by academically trained professionals. It is perhaps no accident that the person who coined “scientist” in the 1830s to mean a scientific professional, William Whewell, was himself a theologian. He understood science as a “vocation,” a kind of secular priesthood. This helps to explain why even today “lay people” may refer to either those who have not taken Holy Orders or those who have not received advanced formal training in science. In both cases, the laity participates through involvement in public demonstrations of the faith. Thus, Whewell was also a founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"The referencing habits of scientists suggest that up to 80% of the published scientific literature is effectively ignored./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/ppHowever, there is a downside to thinking about science as this autonomous and somewhat exalted form of inquiry, which has in turn motivated the periodic calls for revolution. In a famous 1965 debate in London, Kuhn’s only serious contender as a twentieth-century science influencer, a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper"Karl Popper/a, declared that science should be subject to “permanent revolution,” a phrase he provocatively adapted from the Trotskyites of the time. He worried that science’s institutional autonomy undermines the sort of cognitive autonomy that inquirers need to advance the frontiers of knowledge. In short, paradigms are potential incubators of groupthink./ppBut is permanent revolution the solution? Not even Popper’s admirers, who were generally more sensitive to political matters than Kuhn, could follow him on this point. Calls for permanent revolution have tended to result in repeated purges of the sort all too familiar from the French and Russian Revolutions. Epistemologically speaking, Popper’s signature critical stance to taken-for-granted assumptions in science would quickly dissolve into a self-devouring a href="articles/mistrust-of-science-isnt-always-irrational-auid-2968"skepticism/a, which eventually would call into question the very legitimacy of scientific inquiry. /ppMany who fear that we inhabit a “post-truth condition” believe that we have already landed in Popper’s nightmare scenario. Be that as it may, does it follow that Kuhn is correct that scientific revolutions should be postponed as long as possible? The latest development in computer-based technology—generative artificial intelligence—sheds an interesting light on this question./ppSociologists from Robert Merton onward have long observed that the collective attention span of the scientific community is highly skewed. The referencing habits of scientists suggest that up to 80% of the published scientific literature is effectively ignored, notwithstanding the exponential growth in the number of scientists and their publications over the past half-century. Indeed, nowadays most scientists publish not to be read by their colleagues, but to be promoted in their universities./pp
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