A few days ago I began reading Harold J. Berman’s Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983). It’s a scholarly tour de force covering an amazing range of subjects in law, history, theology, ecclesiology, and even the rise of science (particularly how Christian thought generated that).
These paragraphs, from pages 155–6 and 157–8, particularly caught my attention:
Although science, in the modern Western sense, has usually been defined only in methodological terms, there has been an increasing recognition that it must also be defined in terms of the attitudes, convictions, and fundamental purposes of those engaged in the scientific enterprise. One may, indeed, speak of a scientific code of values [emphasis added], which includes: (1) the obligation of scientists to conduct research with objectivity and integrity, and to evaluate their own and one another’s work solely on the basis of universal standards of scientific merit; (2) the requirement that scientists adopt a position of doubt and of “organized skepticism” toward the certitude of their own and one another’s premises and conclusions, together with a tolerance of new ideas until they are disproved, and a willingness publicly to acknowledge error; and (3) a built-in assumption that science is an “open system,” that it seeks “increasingly close approximations to the truth rather than final answers,” and that “science cannot be frozen into a set of orthodox conceptions … but is an ever-changing body of ideas with varying degrees of plausibility.” [Quotations citing Andre F. Cournand and Harriet Zuckerman, “The Code of Science: Analysis and Some Reflections on Its Future,” Studium Generale, 23 (1970), 945.] …
The value premises of science, including legal science, were implicit in the dialectical method of analysis and synthesis of legal problems created by the scholastic jurists of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The intense concentration on contradictions in law, on dialectical problems, and the intense effort to reconcile them by legal principles and concepts on ascending levels of generalization, could only succeed, as a method, by adherence to the very values that characterize science itself: objectivity, integrity, universalism, skepticism, tolerance of error, humility, openness to new truth—and, one should add, a special time sense that is associated with the coexistence of contradictories. Since it was believed that the whole of law was informed by a common purpose, a ratio, it was taken for granted that the paradoxes would ultimately be resolved; meanwhile, the corps of jurists [and scientists] would patiently cope with the uncertainties that the paradoxes created.
Ask yourself: How well are the leading scientists (let alone politicians and activists) involved in promoting the crisis narrative about anthropogenic global warming abiding by this scientific code of values?
Photo of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker by Avery Evans on Unsplash.
Jeff Green says
You have slurred climate alarmists with those that research climate. THe two are quite different. I would also challenge the idea that the intentions of this blog are not at all clean. Science is as close to reality as we can get. A great deal of the climate science is so thorough in its evidence, that there is very little left that is uncertain and not understood well.
Yet the pupose of blogs like this is really about support of fossil fuels at nearly any cost. Denial of this stark reality climate denial brings will cost us plenty in the future.
E. Calvin Beisner says
I appreciate your concern to defend the reputations of climate research scienitsts, but we specifically write about “climate alarmists” and “leading scientists (let alone politicians and activists) involved in promoting the crisis narrative about anthropogenic global warming.” We are well aware that many of the actual research climatologists DON’T embrace the alarmist viewpoint. There is a world of difference between the views of many (most?) actual research scientists and the movement-involved people (which does include SOME research scientists, and far more scientists who don’t do the actual research but echo what they hear from others) who push the crisis narrative. This is why, for example, one will not find language such as “crisis” or “existential threat” or “catastrophe” in the actual scientific assessment reports coming out of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, though you will find language near to it in the summaries for policymakers (which are put together as much by government representatives as by scientists and make claims well beyond what’s in the scientific assessment reports).