When you hear the phrase, “Science is socially constructed,” what does that mean to you? If you are a philosopher of science, you likely have a deep and nuanced understanding of exactly what that means. Unfortunately, in my experience, many scientists and science communicators do not fully appreciate what it means, and may even have severe misconceptions about it. I am not a philosopher, but I have studied a lot of philosophy and always try to align my understanding with the experts. I also have an interest in many different sciences, which I think is extremely helpful in understanding the socially constructed nature of science.

Let me first say what is not meant by that phrase – it does not mean that science is not real, that the findings of science are not true in some meaningful way, or that all methods of understanding the universe are equivalent. This is not relativism or post-modernism.

What it does mean is that science is something that people do. That may seem obvious, even trivial, but often people speak of “science” as if it is an entity unto itself. I know that we often use shorthand for convenience, but it is good to occasionally think about how that shorthand may bias how we think about things, and reflect those biases. When people say things like, “listen to the science” it makes it seem as if “science” is something that can speak with its own voice. It isn’t. Similarly someone might say, “look at the facts” as if the facts can interpret themselves. They can’t. People are always in the loop. People actively construct science out of observations and hypotheses and theories. There are institutions of science, different cultures within science, and different perspectives.

People decide which questions to ask, how to ask them, how to define terms, how to categorize nature, where to set thresholds of confirmation, which outcomes are meaningful, how to determine which studies get published and disseminated, and which scientists get promoted, get funded, and win awards. Science is also a community effort, and it works best when groups of scientists collaborate and provide a check on each other.

At the same time, the very nature of science means that the findings of science are constrained by reality. There is a “mind independent reality” and that reality pushes back. ome philosophers of the mid 20th century forgot that part, which is what lead to post-modernism notions that the findings of science are all socially constructed. They aren’t. The constraints of reality are persistent and hard, and if you’re doing it right, the processes of science should inch closer and closer to approximations and models of reality.  It is critical to understand this dual nature of science otherwise you risk going to one extreme or the other. Let’s get more specific.

Scientific perspectivism is the understanding that different perspectives can be equally valid but will be looking at a topic in different ways. Ronald Giere, who developed this idea, gave the analogy of different people looking at the same building from different perspectives. They are all looking at the same reality, but will see different aspect of reality. No one is seeing the entire picture at the same time. We can extend this analogy further – imagine an architect, historian, engineer, physicist, and economist all looking at the same building. The architect can tell you about the design of the building, maybe even the architect who designed it, the tradition of which it was a part, etc. The engineer could tell you about the the specific strength of the materials used in construction and how the design allows for the building to be as tall as it is and withstand the winds at that height. The economist may tell you about how the building was funded, and the economic activities that take place inside the building. These are all valid, but very different, perspectives.

Giere also discussed how different interests affect how we model reality. For example, you can have different maps of the world, all providing different types of information, and all making different tradeoffs in terms of detail and methods for representing a globe on a flat map. These are all socially constructed choices – but the Earth is real.

Similar to this is the notion of scientific pluralism, that different disciplines and subdisciplines look at the world through different lenses. John Dupré pointed out that the world is simply too complex for any one specialty to encompass it. Biology is a classic example – we could describe nature with taxonomies based upon reproductive isolation, phylogenetic ancestry, ecological niche, morphology, or genetic clustering. All of these are valid, they have different strengths and weaknesses, and some may serve different disciplines better than others. But there is no one “science” with the others being “not science”. They are just different.

You can also think of this in some cases as describing nature at different hierarchical levels.  Physics tells us how atoms are built, chemistry tells us how molecules interact, biochemistry tells us about the chemistry of life, physiology tells us how tissues are organized and function, and evolutionary biology tells us how populations of creatures interact with the environment and adapt. This is obviously a partial and simplistic map, but it illustrates the point. Dupré specifically used pluralism to push back against reductionism – the notion that you can explain everything by digging down to more and more fundamental phenomena. But I think it should be obvious that you cannot explain evolutionary biology with physics alone. 

This is where I feel my experience as a science communicator has been helpful, as I have had to look at questions from many different perspectives. Also, my career as a physician has also been helpful. Medicine is a microcosm of science in that we have many disciplines all with their own perspectives, tools, jargon, and priorities but all working together to take care of the same patients. Further, I have had many scientists, engineers, and people with other areas of expertise as patients. I have watched them try to apply their knowledge to their own struggles with illness, and have seen what translates and what does not translate. For example, I once had a physicist patient of mine tell me (questioning to some extent the validity of medical science) that in physics they do not accept that a phenomenon is real until it is demonstrated to 5 sigma (a measure of statistical significance). I told him that in medicine this will never happen – because people are not electrons. Not only are we dealing with far more chaotic systems, it is pragmatically impossible and ethically dubious to do the kind of clinical study that would produce anything close to 5 sigma. It would be wrong to consider, therefore, that clinical medicine is not a “real” science, or that it is not as rigorous as physics. We simply use different methods constructed for different purposes.

This is just a quick overview, but keeping this in mind is far better than not being explicitly aware of the socially constructed nature of science, which can lead to scientism or hyper-reductionism on one side, or post-modernism on the other. Also knowing that we are making choices helps us explicitly make the optimal choices. At times scientists are not even aware they are practicing philosophy, which means that they make default assumptions which may not be valid or complete. We need to simultaneously understand the unique power of science, but also the limitations of science as a human endeavor.