The Galileo Principle and Scientific Consensus

If you believe something that no one else does, you may be a spiritual descendant of this Renaissance gentleman! Or you could be nuttier than peanut butter...

When arguing with those who preach non-scientific views on subjects where my education is limited, I tend to invoke the consensus of scientific opinion.  I believe my reasoning for this is sound.  I tend to trust in the process of science.  I know that it is in the interests of scientists to be able to prove conclusively why something is or is not true, and that it’s in the interests of their colleagues to disprove what the initial scientist is saying.  Using the process of science, ideas are stringently vetted through the entire community, and if a new idea manages to make its way through that process, we can be reasonably certain that idea is an accurate reflection of reality.  The counter I receive tends to be the Galileo Principle, that Galileo was hounded on all sides by those who believed his ideas on cosmology were wrong, even though he was eventually vindicated for his heliocentric cosmos.  How do we reconcile the appeal to scientific consensus with the possibility of Galileos?

There has been a recent breakthrough in using silicon oxide to form circuitry.  A graduate student at Rice University (one of my alma maters [breathes on his nails and rubs them on his shirt all while hoping no one notices he studied English at a school famed for its Engineering]) named Jun Yao has shown that by using a sliver of silicon oxide sandwiched between sheets of polycrystalline silicon we can create three dimensional memory chips that will make flash memory ancient history.  Yao’s colleagues had looked into silicon oxide previously and decided using it for memory was a ridiculous idea.  When a current was run through the material, it seemed to break down.  Yao, however, showed that this perceived failure was in reality a major success.  Yao has shown his research correct in the face of doubt.

I think what we find in the cases of both Galileo and Jun Yao is a confusion of two pairs of concepts.  We have the Galileo Principle, where one man is correct in the face of opposition countering against the Argument from Authority, a fallacy where it is decided that one man’s word is greater than the sum of scientific argument against him.  And on the other side we have a confusion between the Consensus of Scientific Opinion, where we show that an idea has survived rigorous scientific criticism, and the Argument Ad Populum, a logical fallacy where we state that an idea must be true since so many believe it.

Galileo was combating a science in his day which seemed to be more interested in proving that the ideas it already believed in were correct than examining the evidence in front of it and drawing conclusions based upon them.  It was not a consensus of scientific opinion he was fighting but a consensus opinion based largely upon non-scientific dogma coming from the Catholic Church.  Similarly, Yao was not going against a scientific opinion on what exactly happened when a charge was introduced to silicon oxide.  Rather, Yao looked at the information that everyone else saw and found a potential that others had missed, a potential that had not been given the rigorous scientific scrutiny that Yao felt it deserved.  By applying the scientific tools of observation and investigation, Yao discovered that his initial hypothesis, which had been previously dismissed by his colleagues, was correct.

By the way, I don’t mean to imply that Yao’s colleagues were wrong to doubt him.  Yao was bringing forward a new idea and thus, the burden of proof was upon him.  Luckily for him, he managed to find the proof he needed.  I suspect we will all benefit from what he’s done in a few years.  We do occasionally find a Galileo.  Someone who’s got a new idea that the rest of the scientific world is against, but who turns out to be right in the end.  However, for every one Galileo, there are thousands of others that just don’t want to admit that they’re wrong.  Let’s take Michael Behe, for example.  Behe, as you may be aware, is a biochemist who is famous for putting forward the “theory” of irreducible complexity, one of the cornerstones of Intelligent Design.  It is important to realize that Behe is not going against a bunch of scientists who don’t think his hypothesis is correct, he’s going against a huge body of research that contradicts his point.  Or let’s take Mr. Rosch’s favorite person, Jenny McCarthy.  Jenny may like us to think that she is Galileo railing against a scientific elite, intent upon holding back a truth that the masses need to know, but the fact is she’s fighting against a mountain of evidence that says that vaccines don’t cause autism.  It’s not the Argument Ad Populum that we are bringing to bear in these cases, it’s the weight of scientific consensus.

It is not impossible to confuse an Argument from Scientific Consensus with an Argument Ad Populum.  It is certainly easier than separating one Galileo from horde of nutcases.  It is important though that we are able to keep these notions distinct.  When we rely upon the consensus of scientific opinion, we are not saying that something is correct because lots of scientists believe it, but because we are putting our trust in the process of science itself.