Scientific Virtue : The Frontal Cortex

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

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Scientific Virtue

Posted on: July 7, 2008 2:47 PM, by Jonah Lehrer

Steve Shapin, a historian of science at Harvard, argues that the romantic notion of scientists lusting after truth and not worldly riches is a wee bit oversimplified:

IDEAS: Are we wrong to think of scientists as academics engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge?
SHAPIN: Well, I wouldn't deny that there are scientists, just like historians or sociologists, who are interested in following their curiosity for its own sake. What I do end up disputing, and I'm not alone in this, is this picture of who the scientist is, which emerges overwhelmingly from a rather idealized picture of academic scientists. The scientist working in corporate, industrial, commercial, or governmental settings, from early in the 20th century, is far more representative.

IDEAS: Who still believes in this idealized picture?

SHAPIN: If you put to members of the academic humanities or social sciences the question of academia and industry, the presumption is that this is about the unequal distribution of virtue, about threats to the autonomy, integrity, value, and authenticity of science, represented by commercializing interests. The people who write most eloquently about academia and industry write in defense of academia.

I've already pre-ordered his new book. I've always loved the opening sentence of Shapin's concise and lucid history of the Scientific Revolution:

There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.

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Comments (5)

Sure, characterizing science as the pursuit of truth its own sake is an idealization. But isn't that the way it usually is with ideals? And isn't the pursuit of truth for its own sake a worthy ideal?

Posted by: bob koepp | July 7, 2008 4:27 PM

Cynic Warning...

All my friends who started off in the sciences with passion and the pursuit of knowledge were eventually thrown off. Whether it was during their master's thesis or their doctoral dissertation it was made clear that science wasn't theirs to study. They were immediately owned by the grants that dictated their professor's line of study. If they made it past the PHD, then the University owned them. Every last one of them, all brilliant folks, work in the private sector now, most of them very far from the sciences they studied. Many of them as jaded about academia as they are about "working for the man." I don't know what scientists are being glorified, the scientists who do work in academia are just as owned as those who work in the private sector. Someone is paying the bill and that someone is also directing the work. The problem, of course, is that science is expensive.

The image of a scientist working alone, self-directed in a nifty lab, (Doc from Steinbeck's Cannery Row) comes to mind, that's fiction. If the general population still believes in that scientist maybe they believe in the Easter Bunny too.

Posted by: amybuilds | July 7, 2008 5:06 PM

I'm a fish taxonomist and that is what I really liked to do. I've done mostly that in my academic career. I did get sidetracked into doing environmental stuff for Corps of Engineers, etc. The deal you can't refuse! The money was good, the work was noble, the university, my colleagues, and our students benefitted,etc., However when I turned 50 I had my midlife crisis. Should I concentrate my efforts on environmental consulting and thus get financially able to take early retirement from the university? Or should I return to studying killifish in Venezuela and take retirement later on? Well, I hustled up some grant money and took off for Venezuela and lived the (largly) pure scientific life until retirement twelve years later.

I think a person ought to do what they want to do as best they can. It's good to reevaluate from time to time, because you can get seduced into something that's pretty good, but not really what you want.

Posted by: Jim Thomerson | July 7, 2008 9:34 PM

Of course, the questions asked are oversimplified!

"Are we wrong to think of scientists as academics engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge?"

What about scientists not as academics? Is self-interest noble, and if so, how much? What is nobility, if not landed gentry or noble gases?

Why should scientific pursuit be idealized more than, say, medicine, law or divinity studies?

Posted by: Alan | July 8, 2008 10:43 AM

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

[Ode on a Grecian Urn, lines 49-50, John Keats [1795-1821].

Shakespeare, other poets and other literary figures were grappling in their own ways with the Big Questions. Science has developed into an alternative approach. William Blake made his own etchings, by his own invented technology, to illustrate his own quirky take on cosmology and other weighty issues. Blake considered himself radically opposed
to Isaac Newton [4 January 1643 - 31 March 1727], even though both Blake and Newton were influenced by a common metaphysical thinker, Jakob Boehm [1575 - 21 Nov 1624] mystic and theosophist who founded modern theosophy; and influenced others such as George Fox[1575-1624].

"In his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' Keats will say exactly the same thing, more elegantly but more cryptically also: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' - which some English professors have called "surely the most famous equation in English literature and precisely correct in suggesting the Newtonian origin of the unstated 'proof.'"

"The urn, in other words, begins by quoting Sir Joshua [Reynolds] (for Keats and his readers, the world's greatest authority on art of all kinds), implicitly affirms the sufficiency of human intellect, explicitly affirms the equation of beauty and truth, and pronounces this knowledge entirely sufficient to create the elegant geometry of such superb art as the urn. Because of the uniformity of human minds and passions, moreover, the figures inscribed on the urn (which puzzle the observer at first glance) become intelligible as we relate them to our own experience. The first stanza of the poem is filled with questions;
the last, with none. Being art, the urn retains its ability to 'speak' to all who observe it, reminding us of our paradoxical dilemma as mortals who exist in finite time."
['Some Quotations in Keats's Poetry' by Dennis R. Dean. From the Philological Quarterly. Volume: 76. Issue: 1, 1997.]

Oh yes, we do indeed exist in finite time, yet my life as Mathematician and artist is deeply connected to Infinity.

Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | July 8, 2008 11:23 AM