Is science influenced by society?

Imagine a world where the most brilliant minds of the 19th century were obsessed with the biology of deep-sea creatures rather than the mechanics of steam engines. Would our modern world look the same? Probably not. We often think of science as an objective, "pure" search for truth, but it is actually a human activity deeply embedded in the culture, politics, and economy of its time. ## Science as a Product of Its Time Science is not just a collection of facts; it is a process of asking questions. However, **society decides which questions are worth asking.** This is driven largely by funding and collective priorities. During the Cold War, for instance, the United States and the Soviet Union poured billions into physics and aerospace engineering not just for "truth," but for geopolitical dominance. [Thomas Kuhn](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/), a physicist and philosopher, revolutionized our understanding of this in his 1962 book, [*The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions). He argued that science doesn't always progress in a straight line toward truth. Instead, it operates within a **paradigm**—a set of shared beliefs and values held by the scientific community. > "The choice between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life." — Thomas Kuhn Kuhn’s work suggests that when a society’s values shift, the scientific paradigm often shifts with it. ## The Influence of Human Perspective Who is doing the science matters just as much as what is being studied. For decades, medical research primarily used male subjects, assuming that results would apply equally to everyone. It wasn't until social movements pushed for gender and racial equity that scientists began to realize how biological differences affect drug reactions and disease symptoms. This is what philosopher [Sandra Harding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Harding) calls **Standpoint Theory**. She argues that our social position (our "standpoint") influences what we observe and how we interpret data. By including diverse voices in science, we don't just make it "fairer"—we make the science itself more accurate by removing blind spots created by a single social perspective. ## The Feedback Loop Society and science exist in a feedback loop. Technology created by science (like the internet or CRISPR) changes how society functions, and those social changes, in turn, create new ethical dilemmas and goals for scientists to solve. Science provides the "how," but society often provides the "why." *** ### Explore Further 1. **The Ethics of Funding:** If a private company funds a study on the health effects of its own product, can the science truly be objective? 2. **Scientific Racism:** How did 19th-century social views on race lead scientists to create flawed "data" to justify inequality, and what does that teach us about "objective" science today? 3. **Artificial Intelligence:** As we build AI, are we accidentally coding our society's current biases into the "objective" algorithms of the future?

Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world where the sun does not rise, but instead, the Earth simply rolls away from it. While the math might work out similarly, your entire relationship with the cosmos has shifted. This is because scientific debates are never just about equations on a blackboard; they are battles over how we see, live in, and organize our world. When the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn wrote his groundbreaking 1962 book, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, he introduced a startling idea. He argued that choosing between competing scientific paradigms is not a simple, logical decision. Instead, it is a choice between incompatible modes of community life. ## What is a Paradigm? In science, a **paradigm** is a complete package of shared beliefs, values, techniques, and boundaries that define a scientific community. It dictates what is considered a "real" problem, what counts as valid evidence, and even how scientists should behave. When a paradigm shifts—like moving from Earth-centered astronomy to Sun-centered astronomy—it is not just an upgrade to a new software version. It is an existential shift. As Kuhn famously wrote in [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions): > "The choice between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life. Because it has that character, the choice cannot be determined by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue." ## The Clash of Incompatible Worlds To understand why these communities are "incompatible," think of two different political systems, like a direct democracy and an absolute monarchy. You cannot use the rules of a monarchy to prove that democracy is good, because the monarchy doesn't value equality in the first place. Similarly, different scientific communities literally live in different worlds. Consider these historical clashes: 1. **The Priestley vs. Lavoisier Debate:** In the late 1700s, Joseph Priestley believed that things burned because they released a substance called "phlogiston." Antoine Lavoisier argued that burning was actually oxygen combining with the material. They did not just disagree on facts; they disagreed on how to do chemistry, what instruments to trust, and what vocabulary to use. 2. **The Quantum Mechanics Schism:** Albert Einstein famously rejected aspects of quantum mechanics, declaring that "God does not play dice with the universe." He could not accept the new community's willingness to abandon strict cause-and-effect laws, representing a deep divide in how physicists viewed the very nature of reality. ## Why This Matters This concept matters because it takes science off its pedestal of pure, cold logic and reveals it to be deeply human. It shows that science progresses through social consensus, persuasion, and sometimes, simply waiting for the older generation of scientists to retire. If changing our scientific paradigm means changing our community, it raises a profound question for us today: As we face new shifts in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and climate science, are we merely debating data, or are we fighting over what kind of human society we want to become?