The media often overuse the term “scientific” to lend credibility to their claims, which often lack any real scientific basis. Readers should be critical of these claims.
Myths of “science” in the media
If you watch the news or read newspaper articles, you’ll notice that the word “scientific” is often used. For example, every day we see articles such as “The scientific reason why drinking four cups of coffee a day is good for your health” or “Science proves that first impressions matter”. In these articles, you can see that the word “scientific” is used not only in scientific fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology, but also in various fields such as economics, society, culture, and psychology. This is probably because research using the scientific method is actually widely practiced in fields other than science. However, it’s worth questioning whether the media’s use of the word “scientific” is purely intended to convey the idea of scientific research or the use of the scientific method.
Science has never been more important in modern society. Over the past few centuries, scientific advances have led to the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions, and we’re currently on the verge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In the process, people have lived longer, more prosperous and healthier lives, and have developed a kind of faith that science can solve all our problems. The media, whose credibility is an asset, seems to rely on and capitalize on this myth of science. However, science is not the same as religion, and its status does not come from faith. Therefore, when we see the word “scientific” in the media, it’s dangerous to get carried away by the mythology of science and accept it at face value, and it’s worth taking a second look at the basis of its credibility. To do this, it’s important to understand the status of science and where its credibility comes from.
Where does the status of “science” come from?
‘Science’ is often viewed as a rational, reason-based discipline that seeks truths about nature. If this conventional wisdom is in line with what science is, then the prestige of science comes from rationality and truth. If we look at the history of philosophy of science, we can see that these discussions have led to debates about what constitutes a legitimate basis for science. Popper used ‘disprovability’ as the basis for legitimizing ‘science’, arguing that true science must be disprovable, and that Freud’s psychoanalysis or Marx’s materialism are not science because they are not disprovable.
Popper argued, and many accepted, that if a theory survives disprovability, it can be justified as a science because it is rational and close to the truth. However, disprovism was problematic and was soon refuted. Even if there is an observation that contradicts a theory, if the observation is theory-dependent and hypothetical, it cannot be disproved on the basis of the observation, because the theory on which the observation depends will also be impossible to disprove by the same logic, and if this logic continues, there will eventually be no theory that can be disproved. In the end, Popper’s argument is that even if a theory is disprovable, it is impossible to actually disprove it, making it impossible to verify it. Therefore, it is difficult to justify science on the basis of ‘disprovationalism’.
After Popper, Thomas Kuhn attempted to find a different source of legitimacy for science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science is based on ‘paradigms’ and that the progression of science is normal science → crisis → revolution → new normal science. The word “paradigm” refers to the basic theories accepted by a community of scientists and the research, methods, and problems based on them. Therefore, according to Kuhn, ‘science’ in general can be seen as meaning normal science, and normal science derives its legitimacy from the paradigm on which it is based. An important characteristic of a paradigm is its incommensurability, which means that different paradigms are incommensurable because they have different hypotheses, theories, etc. Thus, according to Kuhn, science is not unified, but rather relative, depending on which paradigm one follows. This was a revolutionary idea because it was far from the idea that science was based on rationality and truth.
In Kuhn’s view, then, ‘science’ is relative to the ‘paradigm’ it is based on, which undermines the legitimacy of science. In addition, the boundaries of ‘science’ have been blurred, and the uniqueness of ‘science’ has been weakened. Nevertheless, the status of ‘science’ cannot be ignored because of the status of normal science within ‘science’. Until it was overthrown by revolution, normal science had a solid system based on majority support and was considered the closest to the truth, regardless of whether it was actually true. Therefore, the paradigm that normal science is based on can be seen as legitimized by its own status, and it has great stature until a revolution occurs.
However, there are a few caveats. First, just because “science” is often used to refer to normal science does not mean that all “science” has the same status as normal science. There are many sciences that are based on different paradigms than normal science, and their relative credibility is not comparable to that of normal science. Another point is that even within normal science, there are different levels of status, depending on whether something is generally accepted, such as a law, or simply a phenomenon that was discovered using the scientific method.
What to make of “science” in the media
Based on the discussion so far, if we go back to our first newspaper article, we can see that we need to think about the paradigm from which the credibility of the word “science” in newspaper articles is based. But this is not an easy process. The ambiguity of the word paradigm itself, ignorance of specialized fields, and the difficulty of judging one’s position within a paradigm make it difficult to judge the credibility of the “science” in a newspaper article. This does not mean that it is impossible to make a judgment. For example, when reading an article such as “The Scientific Reasons Why Drinking 4 Cups of Coffee a Day is Good for Your Health,” you may decide that the research presented in the article uses statistical methods that are considered to be within the paradigm, but that the lack of controlled variables and the lack of a large enough experimental group mean that it cannot be considered to have the same status as a law.
However, it’s difficult to make this judgment in every case, so it’s important to look at the evidence in the article rather than making your own judgment. Most credible research is published in prestigious journals, and being published in a prestigious journal is a sign of its status within the paradigm of legitimate science. Therefore, when you see the word “science” in the media, it’s worth checking out the journal in which the study was published or the research center where the study was conducted to verify its credibility. If there is no such evidence, you should be suspicious of its credibility.
So far, we’ve seen how the word “science” in the media is used as a tool to lure readers into the myth of “science,” and whether it actually has the credibility to match the myth. If we recall that highly authoritative studies are published only a few times a year, we can see that when we read the word “science” in the media, it is probably not very reliable. Therefore, it is dangerous to uncritically accept the word “science” in the media and treat it as truth. Even if the media tries to cover your eyes by leaning on the myths of “science”, you should always stay awake and critical of “science”.
