As a working philosopher, I agree. More specifically, the following passage in the article seems inconclusive to me and based on a common misrepresentation of Kuhn's work (I've heard things like that many times):
> At least since Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", historians and philosophers of science have been aware that the traditional methods of science—as described in “science as inquiry”—do not give a complete picture of how scientists develop, test, refine, and replace scientific theories. That ideologies, peer pressure, confirmation bias, and a host of other "biasing factors" play an ineliminable role in the process of doing science is now widely acknowledged. Yet "science as inquiry" has not adjusted to these findings. It continues to regard any bias as bad for science and to insist on the overall neutrality, “logicality,” and objectivity of science. As a result, there is much about the history of science, as well as about contemporary science, that “science as inquiry” misrepresents.
The problem is that from the fact that various biases cannot be avoided in science it is concluded that it is somehow desirable to "adjust to these findings" and stop regarding bias as bad. Instead of continuing to strive for elimination of bias and lessen the impact of biasing factors, the author instead insinuates at various places that biases should somehow be embraced, even emphasized in historical examples. But it doesn't follow from the fact that there will always be bias in one form or another that it's not methodologically advisable to attempt to eliminate it as much as possible.
"When scientific disagreement arises, it is interpreted as likely showing that one or more scientists have bias."
That is rarely claimed. Isn't it way more more likely that the experiments are not decisive enough or the theories not yet developed well enough, that more data has to be collected or more theoretical advances have to be made?
Other points in the article are fine. Of course, consensus is not the point of science. But I have to say I've become rather dismissive about articles who build up "logical empiricism" as a straw man and then come with Kuhn. There have never been such trivial logical positivists. The Vienna Circle had quite elaborate and diverse views, and, as one may add, logical positivism was a large reductionist philosophical programme that failed for a vast variety of reasons that have nothing to do with Kuhn's theses and how work in science is actually conducted. Those reasons were, for example, that there was no logical way to generalize from 1st person to 3rd statements, the inadequacy of crude verificationism, the lack of a logic of theory discovery, Quine's work on analyticity and ontological relativity, problems with counterfactual reasoning and theoretical notions, problems with making reductionism credible in light of apparently emergent properties, and the failure of operationalism.
I think there's an issue that sometimes the dynamics of scientific progress that Kuhn described are misinterpreted as basically meaning that, oh look, scientists are just human like the rest of us, so scientific thought isn't somehow privileged over any other point of view.
However, Kuhn's dynamics are ultimately a consequence of reasoning in the face of uncertainty. Simply applying logic to experimental results is not what scientists actually do, instead, they have to develop a sort of taste in reasoning, in order to apply appropriate prior beliefs in the Bayesian sense and in order to apply appropriate weights when new evidence becomes available.
This can lead to scientific thinking getting stuck in local optima of sorts, until evidence comes along (at the right time, potentially) that shakes people up sufficiently to force a new approach.
Still, that isn't equally true for every subfield; some subfields will have proven their worth to greater degrees than others by consistently making good predictions or consistently offering elegant explanations for phenomena.
I guess the difficulty in science communication comes to a large degree from the difficulty in communicating that last point, particularly since scientists themselves may disagree about how mature a given subfield really is.
Is there any book you’d recommend that covers the general topics you just touched on (I mean dismantling the straw-man of logical empiricism), or is this only visible after reading widely on philosophy?
> At least since Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", historians and philosophers of science have been aware that the traditional methods of science—as described in “science as inquiry”—do not give a complete picture of how scientists develop, test, refine, and replace scientific theories. That ideologies, peer pressure, confirmation bias, and a host of other "biasing factors" play an ineliminable role in the process of doing science is now widely acknowledged. Yet "science as inquiry" has not adjusted to these findings. It continues to regard any bias as bad for science and to insist on the overall neutrality, “logicality,” and objectivity of science. As a result, there is much about the history of science, as well as about contemporary science, that “science as inquiry” misrepresents.
The problem is that from the fact that various biases cannot be avoided in science it is concluded that it is somehow desirable to "adjust to these findings" and stop regarding bias as bad. Instead of continuing to strive for elimination of bias and lessen the impact of biasing factors, the author instead insinuates at various places that biases should somehow be embraced, even emphasized in historical examples. But it doesn't follow from the fact that there will always be bias in one form or another that it's not methodologically advisable to attempt to eliminate it as much as possible.
"When scientific disagreement arises, it is interpreted as likely showing that one or more scientists have bias."
That is rarely claimed. Isn't it way more more likely that the experiments are not decisive enough or the theories not yet developed well enough, that more data has to be collected or more theoretical advances have to be made?
Other points in the article are fine. Of course, consensus is not the point of science. But I have to say I've become rather dismissive about articles who build up "logical empiricism" as a straw man and then come with Kuhn. There have never been such trivial logical positivists. The Vienna Circle had quite elaborate and diverse views, and, as one may add, logical positivism was a large reductionist philosophical programme that failed for a vast variety of reasons that have nothing to do with Kuhn's theses and how work in science is actually conducted. Those reasons were, for example, that there was no logical way to generalize from 1st person to 3rd statements, the inadequacy of crude verificationism, the lack of a logic of theory discovery, Quine's work on analyticity and ontological relativity, problems with counterfactual reasoning and theoretical notions, problems with making reductionism credible in light of apparently emergent properties, and the failure of operationalism.