Why the Best Scientists Are Open-Minded: Jane Goodall and Bali’s Water Temples | Philip Kitcher

Why the Best Scientists Are Open-Minded: Jane Goodall and Bali’s Water Temples

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Define science. It seems like a simple request, but it's been the cause of debate for philosophy over the years. "There are all sorts of things that go under the name of science," says Philip Kitcher, as he runs through the various branches of science, both obvious (physics, chemistry) and not (detective work, economics). All use different tools, and deal with different matter, so much so that finding a common denominator is difficult. The only thing these distant disciplines seem to share is the scientific method—a way of thinking, reasoning, and testing ideas. This is something we all participate in, whether knowingly or not, when we are confronted with problems we need to overcome: why is the sink leaking, and where did I leave my keys? It makes the question of what is science and what isn't it hard to delineate. There is also a second defining feature of science, but this one is not always put into practice as it should: open mindedness. Historically, science has been closed off to people outside of a certain class: Western, affluent gentlemen (as per the Royal Society of science's stipulations). But as society becomes more open, broader perspectives are coming into the mix, and they remind us of why the best scientists possess flexible minds, capable of seeing beyond the limits of their own experience. Kitcher takes two examples—female primatologists who transformed our understanding of primates in the 1960s, and Balinese farmers who outsmarted Western engineers through prayer—as evidence for why we make greater breakthroughs when our minds are wide open. Discovery in science, it seems, is in direct proportion to diversity. Philip Kitcher is the co-author of The Seasons Alter:How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PHILIP KITCHER:

Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Previously, he taught at the University of California, San Diego, and before that at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Science in a Democratic Society, and most recently The Seasons Alter: How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Philip Kitcher: So is there a way to define science and separate it from other things? Philosophers for a very long time have been quite dubious about this possibility and I think that’s right—right to be dubious. There are all sorts of things that go under the name of science. There are the natural sciences, there are the social sciences, there are also various applied sciences.

It’s not really very easy to find anything that all of those things have in common with one another that isn’t relatively banal and also common to many of our everyday activities. So we start off thinking about, of course, things like physics and chemistry and biology and earth science and so forth, but then there are also the social sciences, the human sciences, various branches of psychology, economics and so forth. But it’s easy to forget that there are also sciences that do rather specific things, like the kinds of scientific investigations people undertake when they try to restore old works of art or the kinds of research that people take when they try to figure out whether a particular document from the past is a new manuscript by a famous author.

So there are lots and lots of scientific studies and they shade over into relatively familiar things like detective work, and those shade over into the kinds of things that we do when we’re trying to solve quite practical problems in our own lives, when we’re trying to figure out what goes wrong with the plumbing or where we’ve left something. So it’s very, very hard, I think, to say that there’s something distinctive about science that doesn’t also apply to lots and lots and lots of other activities.

There are certainly some ways of criticizing scientific practice, some of which I’ve made myself. But I want to begin with some very familiar ones. I mean some people will say that the science that was produced throughout much of the history of science was distorted because it was produced by a certain class of people. The Royal Society famously wanted its members to be “gentlemen, free and unconfined.” They didn’t like having tradespeople in because they might have a pecuniary interest that would lead them not to respect the truth. And they didn’t let women in until after the Second World War! And actually...

For the full transcript, check out