While many (errantly) believe that science is totally unbiased, the reality is that science and scientists are just as prone to intellectual dishonesty, blind-spots, and other failings (I say this as one who loves science, and even has an undergraduate degree in a soft science subject [Anthropology], so don’t misconstrue this as my being “anti-science”). Philosopher W. Jay Wood wrote the following on this issue:
Even the sciences are vulnerable to dishonesty at precisely the point where one least expects it—quantitative analysis. For eleven years John Bailar (chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at McGill University) served as statistics consultant to The New England Journal of Medicine, during which time he reviewed nearly four thousand articles. He chronicles how scientists practice deliberate deception through the selective reporting of data—their version of half-truths. They accomplish this, for example, by failing to inform readers of the weak spots in their data, selecting data in ways biased to their own interests, failing to give credit to earlier work or placing reliable data in a context that causes readers to draw misleading (usually optimistic) conclusions about the success and significance of the project being reported. “When it came to the statistical review,” writes Bailar, “it was often clear that critical information was lacking, and the gaps nearly always had the practical effect of making the author’s conclusions look stronger than they should have” (John Bailar, “the Real Threats to the Integrity of Science,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 21, 1995, p. B2).
Sometimes one kind of intellectual dishonesty leads to another. Outright, bold-faced lies may lead to self-deception, It is a common observation that people sometimes wind up believing lies when they repeat them often enough (or at least become incapable of distinguishing the lines separating the truth from exaggeration and plain prevarication). But it also happens that lies we tell ourselves about a particular matter bar us from dealing truthfully with others, even if at the point of interacting with others we are no longer fully aware that we are not telling the truth.
The errors to which Locke directs our attention are not the common errors resulting from finitude. True, we are persons of limited intellectual means and resources, and even our best efforts sometimes fail miserably because we lack crucial information or find our meagre abilities taxed beyond limit. But Locke is underscoring something much darker than finitude. Though he does not call it by this name, it is sin. There resides in the interior of all reasoners hidden “passions” and “secret motives” as Locke dubs them, and vices like greed that affect our thought life, making us prone to err on subjects where our interests are most readily at stake. In cases like these, says Locke, quoting Francis Bacon, “because we wish, we easily believe” (Francis Bacon, Novum Organum 1.49).
What makes “hidden passions” and “secret motives” such formidable barriers to intellectual honesty is that we may succumb to them unaware: they are “stealth sins” whose operations often go undetected due to self-deception and the powerful grip certain passions have over us. Secretly we don’t want to be reminded of personal interest’s role in our thinking but would prefer to imagine all our deliberations to be coolly neutral and entirely dispassionate. We sometimes devolve into conditions like that of Richard Carstone, the ward of John Jarndyce in Dickens’ Bleak House. Richard is consumed by the prospect of gaining instant wealth through an interminable lawsuit (Jarndyce and Jarndyce), to the point that he forsakes friends and benefactors and grows increasingly suspicious of others. “Jarndyce and Jarndyce had obtained such possession of his whole nature, that it was impossible to place any consideration before him which he did not—with a distorted kind of reason—make a new argument in favour of doing what he did” (Charles Dickens, Bleak House [New York: Penguin, 1971], p. 648). Sometimes passions of one sort or another gain such a powerful hold on us that they reconfigure our thinking, making it appear more innocent than it is. (W. Jay Wood, Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous [Contours of Christian Philosophy; Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 1998], 62-63, emphasis added)
Further Reading:
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
