What makes science credible

Consider now what all these reflections mean for climate science. Why should we trust it? Not simply because a diverse community has engaged in some unspecified way with the world.

Second, that the correlation can be explained only by taking human activities to be responsible for the observed warming trend. Although there is no such thing as Scientific Method, there are scientific methods— products of a long history of inquiry, forged in strenuous efforts to solve problems. When considering the trustworthiness of science, those methods are crucial. Reasonable doubt about the conclusion can focus on any of the elements of the evidence I have sketched.

Because reliable techniques for predicting and controlling the transmission of heat, largely worked out in the nineteenth century, directly yield the basic picture of the greenhouse effect. Why should anyone think that past temperatures can be measured? Again, because reconstructions based on tree rings and ice cores are based on claims that have successfully generated reliable results across a wide domain. Because they belong to a diverse community in which data and lines of reasoning are constantly scrutinized, and within which there are large rewards for showing that some consequential piece of current orthodoxy is mistaken.

Because in a community of that kind, there is no way of bringing it off. To do so would be analogous to enforcing uniformity through a large and sprawling empire.

We see, then, that part of the answer to the question of trust—as it arises in climate science or in any other field—turns on social facets of the scientific community, the aspects Oreskes emphasizes. Yet that dimension must be supplemented by recognizing the distinctive ways that scientists engage with the world, the rules of evidence they deploy in their deliberations and interactions, the techniques on which they agree, and the ways that evidential standards and research skills are grounded in a history of successful practice.

Although there is no such thing as Scientific Method, unless it is simply a vague collection of discordant ideas utterly irrelevant to the day-to-day practice of science of today, there are scientific methods , products of a long history of inquiry, forged in strenuous efforts to solve problems. Yet there may still be reasons for questioning this cheery story I have told.

The reliability and regularity in the account I have given of scientific success has begun to look doubtful. Generalization about science—as if it were a single enterprise, governed everywhere by that mythical Method—should be resisted.

In an incisive reply to Krosnick, Oreskes offers an important perspective on these recent troubles. She explains how some of the studies claiming to show a pervasive problem of replication failure have themselves proven to be methodologically! She distinguishes various factors that might cause an inability to replicate. The difficulty of specifying all the conditions of the successful experiment is a commonplace of recent studies of science.

Indeed, you may be quite unaware of some of the relevant factors. Particular conditions in the laboratory, or particular local conventions for performing some procedure, can make all the difference to the ability to replicate.

On the other hand, the pressures on young researchers today—to establish themselves by publishing quickly, to obtain support for their work when budgets for science are being slashed—may well lead them to seek shortcuts. Nobody knows how many investigators send off their papers earlier than they would have wished. What we do know, as Oreskes lucidly points out, is that replication difficulties beset particular fields, perhaps those in which competition for funds is most intense or in which experiments are most sensitive to a range of potentially perturbing factors.

Given the state of the evidence now available, it would be wise to refrain from premature distrust, and to investigate, as carefully as possible, the causes of trouble. In particular, generalization about science—as if it were a single enterprise, governed everywhere by that mythical Method—should be resisted.

We might note that many fields have few, if any, retractions. Ironically, climate science fares relatively well in this respect. In her measured diagnosis of failures of replication, Oreskes is at her best. Techniques for generating stable solutions to problems emerge unevenly across the domains we group together as the natural and the social sciences.

The more intricate the systems under study, and the more variables are potentially in play, the greater the difficulties in recognizing and controlling them. Instead of declaring a replication crisis or leaping to denunciations of an epidemic of fraud in the lab, it would be better to explore the limitations of the orthodox methods in the fields in which replication appears most difficult.

In the end, then, we should trust science when it is pursued as a collective enterprise, subject to standards recognized by the practitioners, and when the standards are derived from reliable results.

Properly conducted research conscientiously uses techniques of observation and experimentation that have generated recognizably stable successes, and analyzes the results using methods that have been shown to work. Since the seventeenth century, to different extents in different fields, domains of research have acquired a rich corpus of such methods and techniques. That corpus is transmitted to young investigators in their training.

It guides their subsequent research, and it supplies the standards against which their activities should be measured. As they pursue their particular projects, their mentors, colleagues, and rivals hold them to those standards. And so the collection of solved problems grows. Physicists become able to make extraordinarily precise predictions about the behavior of elusive particles, chemists develop new techniques for reliably synthesizing compounds, biologists read and even modify the genomes of organisms, and atmospheric scientists predict with considerable accuracy how increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases will affect the frequency and intensity of various types of extreme events.

Successes of these kinds are sometimes translated into products that affect our daily lives: computers and lasers and new drugs and robots—and frozen peas. When the reliability of those results is readily apparent—as in the examples with which I began: the safety of some GMOs, the importance of vaccination, the great age of the earth, and the reality of climate change, caused by human activities—withholding trust is out of place.

Confronting the many challenges of COVID—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. Checked and extended how?

What kinds of information do scientists use in their research? Why is that? Are all scientific results replicable? Is science infallible?

So in short… Scientific research is a human activity and therefore subject to flaws. Take a deep dive Want to confirm this information is accurate? Know it all?

Prove it. Science relies on: b. But they need to convey to others their conclusions and the methods and evidence on which those conclusions are based so other scientists can check and extend their observations and conclusions. To the extent possible, scientists are expected to make their data and the analyses that determined their results openly available so: a. True or False: All scientific results are replicable.

True b. Share this article:. Stay in the Know We'll send you an email when new content is added! First Name. The norms he described were the shared values of this social group, for which he found evidence in their practices -- the things that scientists in the tribe recognized that scientists ought to do, even if the actual behavior of particular scientists sometimes fall short of these oughts. Universalism is the idea that the important issue for scientists is the content of claims about the world or about the phenomena being studied , not the particulars about the people making those claims.

In other words, the tribe of science is committed to investigating knowledge claims made by graduate students as well as those made by Nobel Prize winners, those made by scientists at small colleges as well as those made at famous universities with huge endowments and buckets of grant money, those made by scientists in other countries as well as those made by scientists in one's own country.

Since the shared goal is building a reliable body of knowledge about the world we share, all the scientists engaged in that project are to be treated as capable to contribute. Disregarding another scientist's report because of who he is, then, is a breach of the norm of universalism. We shouldn't assume that embracing the norm of universalism means that scientists think they ought uncritically to accept as credible any claim put forward by a member of the tribe of science.

Indeed, there is another scientific norm, organized skepticism, that serves as a counterbalance to universalism. Everyone in the tribe of science can advance knowledge claims, but every such claims that is advanced is scrutinized, tested, tortured to see if it really holds up. The claims that do survive the skeptical scrutiny of the tribe get to take their place in the shared body of scientific knowledge.

Presumably, between universalism and organized skepticism, members of the tribe of science understand that any member of the tribe of science might be a legitimate source of information that counts against someone else's knowledge claim. Norms are ideals -- the standards up to which the tribe of science would like to live. In the real world, living up to ideals can be difficult. Scientists and other consumers of scientific claims do take into account the identities of the scientists putting forward scientific claims when they assess the credibility of those claims.

They are sometimes influenced by the quality of a scientist's published work to date. Overall, articles with many citations are deemed valuable by many researchers. However, multiple citations do not always equal quality research. For example, researchers may cite their own work in other articles.

These articles will then appear as highly cited on Google Scholar. Think about the reviews you may find for a popular Thai restaurant promising authentic cuisine. How many of those reviewers have experience with authentic Thai cuisine in the first place? But what about the people writing the papers? Check out the next article in this guide to learn how to assess whether an author has the experience and credentials to write a credible research article. Interpreting the Medical Literature Mini Guide.

What makes a scientific article credible? Edited by Shelley Jacobs, PhD. Is it published in a journal with a high impact factor? Is it cited by other authors in their papers? What is a peer-reviewed journal? How does the peer-review process work?

How does the peer-review process differ across journal publications? What are some problems with the peer-review process?