Is There a Bias in Science?

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There are all sorts of other biases besides just sort of the bias towards publishable or fancy or exciting results. And so like you get some cases of what look like outright fraud and the outright fraud being driven basically by the sense that there's a way to sort of clout with the media and with policymakers. I think that what we have to do kind of so to speak is do our best to fix these things but also in some sense it's just quite right for people to decrease their trust in this institution insofar as their trust was previously based on a image of scientific researchers or scientists which made it immune from those things.

Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the rescue! I had a very ambitious conversation with Liam Kofi Bright, starting with what we mean by “truth” (correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, and deflationary approaches), and then getting into the nitty-gritty of how we actually discover it. There’s a lot to think about once we take a hard look at how science gets done, how discoveries are communicated, and what different kinds of participants can bring to the table.

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Liam Kofi Bright received his Ph.D. in Logic, Computation and Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently on the faculty of the London School of Economics in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and the Scientific Method. He has worked on questions concerning peer review and fraud in scientific communities, intersectionality, logical empiricism, and Africana philosophy. He is well-known on Twitter as the Last Positivist.

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