The pessimistic meta-induction—the argument that since past scientific theories have been shown to be false, we should expect that today’s will turn out false, too—makes the New York Times.

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Elay Shech, professor of philosophy at Auburn University, takes up the topic in the context of current political disputes about science and our government’s seemingly increasing disregard of expertise:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, made a version of this argument in August when defending his decision to halt hundreds of millions of dollars in mRNA vaccine development despite the objections of vaccine scientists. He said that “science is always evolving” and the experts could not always be trusted. 

Shech accepts that “many widely accepted [scientific] theories have been discarded” but that the question, “why should we trust the ones we have now?” is misleading. Why?

It implies that the only possible attitudes toward science are naïve faith and wholesale pessimism. It assumes that science is a single global entity that rises or falls all at once, when in reality, science is an array of local domains of inquiry, each with its own standards of evidence and degrees of reliability.

In place of skepticism, Shech recommends “disciplined trust.”

The first step in the direction of disciplined trust is recognizing that “there is no single scientific method used in all of science.” Shech writes:

Newton’s deduction from observed phenomena is very different from Darwin’s inference to the best explanation, which in turn differs radically from Einstein’s thought experiments with light beams, trains and elevators. What people call “the scientific method” is really many distinct ways of investigating the world—different strategies for representing, experimenting and classifying.

Since different areas of science employ different methods and rely on different kinds of evidence, to make a case for skepticism “you need to look at the evidence and methods in a specific area of inquiry.” And that case will not be “a sweeping claim about all of science” but rather about that particular area of inquiry with, for example, what might turn out to be “well-understood methodological problems.”

Shech’s piece is “Science Keeps Changing, So Why Should We Trust It?” (NYT gift link).

Discussion welcome (readers are advised to keep in mind that Shech’s piece is an op-ed in a popular newspaper, which constrains its length and depth).