《背叛真理的人们》的有关争论

2009.07.12

William Broad 和 Nicholas Wade合著的Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science（《背叛真理的人们：科学殿堂中的弄虚作假》）一书在1983年出版之后，很快就被翻译成了中文。大概由于大家开始越来越关心学术不端行为的关系，2004年又出版了这本书的重译本。现在这本书似乎已经成为国内讨论学术不端问题的一个标准读本。打假人士们一谈到学术不端，就会将其中的有关学术不端故事信手拈来。

豆瓣网上《背叛真理的人们：科学殿堂中的弄虚作假》一书信息链接：http://www.douban.com/subject/1323591/

Amazon上Betrayers of the truth一书的介绍链接：http://www.amazon.com/Betrayers-truth-William-Broad/dp/0671447696

但在这本书的故乡，学术界却存在着对这本书的相当不同的看法，这些看法似乎使得Betrayers of the Truth一书在美国学术界远不如在中国学术界这样重要。但从我接触的资料中，中文世界里面似乎并不知晓围绕这本书的一些争论。

我在80年代中读到Betrayers of the Truth这本书的中文版的时候，还是学生。我现在所以对关于这本书的古老争论感兴趣，是因为我觉得现在国内学者在讨论学术不端以及所谓科学主义（scientism）问题的时候过分依赖于这本书中的观点和解释，推崇和诠释不无过度的地方。所以自己觉得如果能够看到事情的不同层面，在一个比较全面的背景下来了解有关事情，应该是一件有益的事情。

事实上，这本书一出版就受到学术界的不少非议。有趣的是，虽然这本书讲的是科学中的作假行为，但这些讨论主要集中在科学社会学界和科学文化学界，在科学界似乎反应并不强烈。

David Joravsky曾经是美国西北大学历史系的教授，研究俄国近代文化和历史的专家。他在The New York Review of Books写过不少的与前苏联的科学文化和历史有关文章和书评。David Joravsky在1983年10月13日的The New York Review of Books上，发表了一篇对Betrayers of the Truth的书评。在这篇题为Unholy Science的文章中，Joravsky对该书提出了比较严厉的批评。这篇书评中还提到1983年科学社会学大师Robert Merton甚至在The Washington Post Book World上对这本书的评价极为糟糕：“in his angry reaction to the book, urging scholars not to buy it but to read it in the library if they feel obliged to see how bad it is.”

我没有找到Merton的那篇文章，但的确找到了David Joravsky的Unholy Science全文，以及William Broad 和 Nicholas Wade俩人在1984年初对这篇书评的“愤怒”的回应，以及Paul Feyerabend对这篇书评的评论及David Joravsky的回应。

那么，David Joravsky对Betrayers of the Truth一书的评价究竟是什么呢？

David Joravsky后来在回复Feyerabend的意见的时候的这句话应该算是一个好的总结：

Sociologists of science found the Broad-Wade book sensationalist, superficial, and confused. I could not  disagree, for it is sensationalist, superficial, and confused. At the same time I tried to show that the book has some redeeming qualities.

David Goodstein教授曾经是加州理工学院长期的副教务长，多年前曾经负责该校有关学术不端规范的事务，并起草了该校的有关学术规范，成为美国学术界处理相关问题的范本。2001年Goodstein在In the Case of Robert Andrews Millikan一文中对Betrayers of the Truth一书中一口咬定的Robert Milligan选择性发表数据的指控从最原始的文献出发提供了最为可信的具体分析和反驳。Goodstein对Betrayers of the Truth一书的看法是这样的：

Broad and Wade, both of whom were then reporters for Science magazine, and both of whom now write for the New York Times, are the ones who tried and convicted Robert Millikan of scientific misconduct. Others, like the writer of Sigma Xi’s Honor in Science simply bought their argument at face value.

In Betrayers of the Truth, Broad and Wade want to make the point that scientists cheat.

Goodstein的In the Case of Robert Andrews Millikan文章全文链接：http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/MillikanII.pdf

Goodstein对于Milligan的指控的这些详细的分析和反驳，方舟子在他2008年发表在《经济观察报》上的《科学史上著名公案——密立根事件》一文中并未提及。以至于继续使得谬种流传，是让我极为诧异的事情。

令人担忧的事情是，《背叛真理的人们》最近似乎被国内某些人当作学术打假的圣经。因此，我觉得从故纸堆中翻检出这些有关科学社会学家以及处理学术不端事务的专家的意见和评价的相关信息，对打算对这些问题有兴趣做一些严肃研究的人来说应该有其参考价值。

下面是The New York Review of Books上有关文章的全文。

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The New York Review of Books

Volume 30, Number 15 · October 13, 1983

Unholy Science

By David Joravsky

Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science

by William Broad, by Nicholas Wade

Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 256 pp., $14.95; $6.95 (paper)

Learned audiences smile happily when they hear the story of Einstein's defiant response to Kaufmann. Walter Kaufmann was a professor of physics who had been measuring the relation between charge and mass in electrons when Einstein, a twenty-six-year-old employee of the Swiss patent office, published the special theory of relativity. Kaufmann declared the theory to be incompatible with his experimental findings. So much the worse for your ephemeral findings, Einstein replied—and for the limited theoretical vision that informs them. And then the happy ending: other experimenters produced findings that suited Einstein's theory.

Learned audiences like the story because it reinforces faith in the creative power, not only of the unique Einstein, but of the scientific mind that he has come to symbolize. Such a mind is not slavishly chained to apparent facts. It not only discovers, it invents; it creates the maps that guide those who grub for bits of truth in the chaos of experience. Einstein's haughty response to Kaufmann recalls Faust's comment on his drudging assistant Wagner:

der immerfort an schalem Zeuge

   klebt,

mit gier'ger Hand nach Schätzen

   gräbt,

und froh ist, wenn er Regenwürmer

   findet![1]

I draw the moral in such exaggerated fashion to suggest a disturbing similarity between the daring that creates and the daring that fabricates, between the inventor and the deceiver—including the Great Deceiver to whom Faust turned at last in despair. Literary artists have been fascinated by the connection between creativity and deception—as in Bergman's most recent film, Fanny and Alexander, and Calvino's latest novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler—but scientists do not like to think about it. To invent theories and be disdainful of inconvenient evidence may be admirably bold and creative, but it must somehow be different from creating literary fictions.

Learned audiences smile nervously, or not at all, when they hear the story of Newton "fudging" the data that he offered in confirmation of his theories, or John Dalton selecting experimental findings that suited his theory of atomic weights, or Mendel offering numbers that fit his theory of heredity too perfectly to be an unimaginative count of yellow and green peas in a real garden. In such displays of bold genius we sense something unpleasantly analogous to recent scandals involving the deliberate faking of experimental results—like the young man at the Sloan-Kettering Institute who inked in the black patch he had predicted would appear on the skin of his experimental mouse; or the cancer researcher at Cornell who did a much more subtle faking of chemical analyses; or Cyril Burt (1883-1971), a leading British psychologist who published heaps of fabricated data to hold back the scholarly criticism and social revulsion that have overwhelmed IQ testing.

Now two respected science reporters, William Broad and Nicholas Wade, have written a book insisting that there is more than analogy here. There is virtual identity:

If history has been kind to scientists such as [Newton and Mendel], it is because [their] theories turned out to be correct. But for the moralist, no distinction can be made between an Isaac Newton who lied for truth and was right, and a Cyril Burt who lied for truth and was wrong.

"Moralist" is the crucial term in this lofty declaration, a "moralist," indeed, who brushes past the distinction between factual right and wrong to express his revulsion against the moral wrong of "lying."

That outlook may come as a surprise, for Broad and Wade are well known as factual reporters on recent work in science. Now they have ventured a bit into the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. But their most urgent impulse in the present book is to moralize, to denounce the sanctimonious pretensions of objectivity and dispassionate logic that they find in "the ideology of science."

They are eager to prove that "betrayers of the truth" are not rare freaks but symptomatic figures, who suggest that something is rotten in the state of science. Objectivity is a myth; scientific method is a purely rhetorical device; replication is quite rare. Scientists do not check each other's results but accept them on faith—unless accidental scandal exposes deception, in which case the scientific establishment hastens to insist that exceptional deceivers prove the rule of self-enforcing honesty in the profession as a whole. Thus the profession continues its profitable exploitation of public faith in science, which the authors consider the modern substitute for religion.

In the heat of this sermon, Broad and Wade fail to note the most obvious counterevidence: themselves, their own work. They have been hired by the most prestigious scientific journals to write the exposés that they summarize in their book. It is hard to accept their insistence that the scientific community does not police itself against fraud when one notes their persistent references to Science, the chief publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, not only for their own articles on recent scandals, but even for historical discussions of the "fudge factor" in Newton's Principia and the wholesale fabrication of evidence by Cyril Burt.

Ignoring that the chief journal of the largest scientific organization has been actively and continuously helping to expose fraud in science, Broad and Wade make their case for habitual coverup by dwelling on the characteristic reactions of scientists when fraud is discovered in the work of close colleagues. The common reflexive reaction, they find, is refusal to acknowledge unpleasant truth. When public scandal makes further resistance impossible, scientists ease the criminal colleague out of their community as quietly and gently as possible, arguing that he must have been insane to attempt fraud in an enterprise where everyone checks everyone else's claims of knowledge. Broad and Wade attack that customary reassurance with a variety of arguments; sometimes they are muddled and superficial, sometimes illuminating and persuasive—most ironically so when they have the unintended effect of undermining their own moralizing purpose.

They admit that "complete fabrication...is probably a rare event." Burt's reports of IQ studies that he never did, telling of assistants who never existed, are virtually their sole example, unless one counts the fabrication of the Piltdown man, which was probably intended as a hoax rather than a fraud. Mostly Broad and Wade tell about "fudging," "trimming," or "cooking" evidence to make it fit preconceived theories. They ignore the dismissal of evidence, as in Einstein's reply to Kaufmann, for it is hard to call that conscious deception. Yet they acknowledge that the usual pattern begins with self-deception, which turns into deliberate faking only in extreme, very rare cases. What matters, they insist, is not those rare cases, but the social system of science and its attendant state of mind, which pushes scientists toward deception, whether of themselves or of others. Scientists are driven by careerist lust for fame (or tenure, at least). Disinterested yearning for objective truth is not the motive force of scientific research.

Evidently the authors expect us to be shocked, but I confess surprise only at their strident tone, their extreme, black-or-white vision. Is it really a dirty secret that selfish passions and irrational guesswork drive scientists along their careerist ways? I thought everyone knew that; all the scientists of my acquaintance seem to take it for granted. (Much the same, of course, is true of journalists, and of humanistic scholars.) The hard question is whether—or rather, to what extent—the social organization of science (or journalism, or humanistic scholarship) transmutes those brutish energies into disciplined inquiry by the community as a whole, and with how much objective knowledge as a result. Linked to that sociological question is a psychological puzzle: whether—or again, to what extent—the transmutation is internalized in the minds of scientists. To what extent are aggressive self-assertion and wild guesswork inwardly disciplined by the rules of public inquiry and rational discourse?

Philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science have offered a variety of responses to those questions, as Broad and Wade are vaguely aware. Their book offers potted sections on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science—so oversimplified and superficial that the naive reader will be completely misled, while the knowledgeable reader is inclined to throw up his hands in dismay. Max Weber, for example, is given a one-line, walk-on role, declaring unqualified faith in the inner honesty of scientists, as opposed to the faith of Durkheim and Robert Merton in the power of the scientific community to enforce purity of behavior if not of heart. Thus sociologists and philosophers are pictured as reinforcing the scientists' complacent belief that they are uniquely honest, rational, objective. The innocent reader would never know that Max Weber's classic essay, "Science as a Vocation," portrays the torment of a mentality in continual conflict with itself, since striving for utterly rational objectivity is, in Weber's view, a cruel disfigurement of our human essence. It is also dismaying to see Broad and Wade dismiss, in a "see also" footnote, the most careful and thorough analysis of scientific fraud in recent sociological scholarship.[2]

Nevertheless, I think that Robert Merton, the grand old man in the sociology of science, went too far in his angry reaction to the book, urging scholars not to buy it but to read it in the library if they feel obliged to see how bad it is.[3] In my opinion the book has what the courts call redeeming social value.

Superficiality and sensationalism may help popularizations serve useful purposes. My circle of acquaintances is limited; many people, scientists included, may share the mythic faith in scientists as uniquely dispassionate, rational, and objective people. In any case, whatever the state of public opinion on the virtuous or sinful nature of scientists, their fear of sin may be usefully reinforced if they have on their shelves a minatory compilation of the scandals that have erupted recently, especially in the biomedical sciences, at some of the most prestigious research centers.

Even the book's shallow historical compilation of frauds charged against great scientists like Ptolemy, Newton, and Mendel may serve a useful purpose. Readers may be sufficiently intrigued to look into the scholarly references that Broad and Wade have solemnly tacked onto their little caricatures of historical argument. They cannot plead limitations of space in exculpation of their onesided sensationalism. Within three pages of the "see also" article by Harriet Zuckerman the curious reader will find a summary of historical counterarguments that Broad and Wade simply ignore. For example, it is anachronistic to use twentieth-century standards of statistical reporting and analysis to make charges against Dalton and Mendel.

Nevertheless, there is special reason to be forgiving of such faults, for this peculiarly one-sided, moralizing book points urgently toward an important problem that is usually ignored, not only in popularizations but also in the scholarly literature. As dullness of sight can heighten sensitivity of touch or hearing, the authors' obsession with inauthenticity, with phoniness, has enhanced their attention to the problem of the persona and the person, the outward role and the inner self.

Scholars have reproached Broad and Wade for insensitive lumping of plagiarism with fabrication—and their further tendency to lump all degrees and kinds of fabrication—in their moralizing eagerness to inflate the magnitude of "fraud and deceit in the halls of science." And they deserve reproach, if one's central concern is the reliability of scientific knowledge and the process by which it is improved or spoiled.

From that point of view, plagiarism is a peccadillo compared to the mortal sin of fabrication. Knowledge of cancer may be advanced by a plagiarized report of new evidence; it is gravely damaged by fabricated evidence, whether the claim of authorship is authentic or phony.

Broad and Wade are largely indifferent to such distinctions, for they care rather little about the content of science. Their minds are focused on scientists as people. They are obsessed with the problem of personal authenticity, of really being what one pretends to be. They are even disgusted by the mask of dispassionate objectivity and rationality that scientists put on when they write up articles that are neither plagiarized nor fabricated. In short, they sense a kinship between the extremely few scientists who have been caught faking and the great majority who have successfully maintained an appearance of rationality and objectivity. Time and again they seem on the verge of shouting: "You're all a bunch of phonies!"

A number of literary artists have had a similar obsession with the problem of authenticity in the creative process, with the relation between the author's inner self and his public mask, with the resemblance to the theater, where creation and deception are obviously similar. Think what Melville or Mark Twain, Thomas Mann or Nabokov, or most recently Italo Calvino, would have done with the tale of Elias A.K. Alsabti. He was a confidence man who came from Jordan, pretending royal blood and academic degrees, and made a brief, dazzling career in American cancer research. His favorite trick was quite simple. He would copy an article from one scientific journal and submit it to another, with his name substituted for that of the authentic creator. There are so many medical journals—a British editorial on the Alsabti scandal estimated 8,000—and they publish so much trivial, repetitive, and otherwise ephemeral stuff that Alsabti had little reason to fear detection if he had been modest or restrained. But he dared too much, in this respect resembling a creative person.

He not only stole authentic work, he faked data, and he published so many plagiarisms so rapidly that one victim found himself scooped by his own article. (Alsabti had stolen it in typescript and got it to a journal that published faster than the one chosen by the author himself.) Quietly eased out of one institution, he managed to wangle a position at another, and so on through a rising scale of prestige, until a major public scandal erupted about him while he was at the University of Virginia. That was the end, or seemed to be. Sneering at his gullible victims (they had assumed he was of royal blood simply because he had a crest on his stationery), correcting errors in newspaper stories (his Cadillac was white; he had sold the yellow one), threatening lawsuits against his detractors, Alsabti disappeared from public view in 1980. Chances are, as Broad and Wade conjecture, he changed his name and is now making a new career in the world's premier land of opportunity for medicine men on the make.

Unfortunately, Broad and Wade lack the sardonic imagination of Mark Twain or Italo Calvino. They fail to see Alsabti's manic approach to creativity, his wild daring to stand out from the mass. They emphasize how much safer he would have been had he been content with mediocrity. Certainly they have an important sociological point: the gray mediocrity of most scientific publications offers protective coloration to mediocre scientists, whether honest or (moderately) dishonest. To deprive the dishonest of their hiding place, Broad and Wade propose a purge of mediocrity in science. They think a reduction of government subsidies will significantly reduce superfluous publications, and thus mediocrity, and thus dishonesty.

Can they possibly believe that? Have they not looked at humanistic scholarship? It gets minuscule subsidies from the government, but careerism and mediocrity and (moderate) dishonesty are probably as common among humanistic churchmice as among scientific fat cats. Indeed, if Broad and Wade considered their own field of journalism, they would note that Grub Street long ago set the pattern that scholars and scientists have belatedly adapted to their needs to make careers through publishing. Surely neither preaching nor purging will reverse these great tides of modern hackwork, within which selfeffacing plagiarists of modest ambition can safely feed upon the great majority of honest mediocrities.

Where genuinely creative people are inventing great theories or making major discoveries, gray anonymity gives way to vivid individuality, and problems of honesty assume very different forms from the plagiarism or the fudging that no one will notice because no one will care. James Watson told an exemplary tale of genuine creativity and its moral problems in his fascinating confession, The Double Helix. He boasted of the little deceptions that attended his irrational plunge into a problem he hardly, understood; he told how he managed to get Rosalind Franklin's data without letting her know that they were the key to the great puzzle of DNA structure, and he grinned as he recalled the accusations of dishonesty that this move brought upon him. He can afford to grin, for he saw the way to the Nobel prize and "Rosy" did not, in his version of the story.

Broad and Wade entirely ignore this impressive attempt by a great scientist to confess the mixture of passions and guesswork, including elements of deception, that are involved in the creative process. I suppose they ignore it because it will not fit their black-or-white categories, their either/or division of personality into honest or dishonest, objective or subjective. They prefer to tell of Antony Hewish, who took sole possession of a Nobel prize that should have been shared with Jocelyn Bell. She established the existence of the pulsar while working on a different matter under Hewish's direction. When eminent astronomers protested the theft of credit from Bell, Hewish added male chauvinist insult to exploitation: "Jocelyn was a jolly good girl but she was just doing her job. She noticed this source was doing this thing. If she hadn't noticed it, it would have been negligent." Such brute refusal of any self-examination fits the stark portrait of bullheaded hypocrisy that Broad and Wade love to paint of scientists. (Incidentally, they neglect to note the persistent evidence of exploitation to which women scientists have long been subjected.)[4]

The ultimate irony of this present-or-absent, black-or-white view of scientific rationality, objectivity, and dispassionate honesty is its unwitting confinement within the very ideology that Broad and Wade are intent on denouncing. A more complex approach would have taken them into the really interesting problems of honesty, which come up when the creative urge trembles on the dangerous edge of self-deceit, fearing the most common fate: honest mediocrity. Thus they might have perceived the analogy between the scientific and the literary forms of imagination. Both are fictive in the way they work, yet claim to arrive at truth. To be sure, the scientist's ethos requires him to be more repressive of the self when he moves from fictive imagining to proof and asks external realities to chastise and correct his fictive constructs.

Hence there is a far greater tendency in the scientific literature for the inner self to be obscured by a mask of objectivity and rationality.

Broad and Wade are indignant at that style of symbolic presentation. I read their indignation as a yearning for complete transparency of the inner person or self, for a completely clear logic in its mode of thinking, for a logic of private thought that would mirror the public rules of rational discourse and empirical testing. They are yearning for an impossibly simple "honesty." Their shouts of "fraud and deceit" at the messy incongruities involved in creating knowledge strike me as an unwitting confession of attachment to the simplistic ideology of science that they are ostensibly denouncing.

Long ago the Donatists insisted that only pure priests can perform effective sacraments. That may seem obviously logical: only holy agents can achieve holy effects. But it is logical only within the frame of faith in the supernatural realm of holy sacraments. The real world is much messier and more interesting, and cruel to those who yearn for holiness.

Notes

[1] In the Bayard Taylor (Modern Library) translation:

...whose choice is

To stick in shallow trash forevermore.

Who digs with eager hand forburied ore,

And, when he finds an anglewormrejoices!

[2] Harriet Zuckerman, "Deviant Behavior and Social Control in Science," in Deviance and Social Change, edited by Edward Sagarin (Sage, 1977), pp. 87-138.

[3] Reported in The Washington Post Book World, February 20, 1983.

[4] See Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and strategies to 1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

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Letters

January 19, 1984: William J. Broad, Fraud and Science

January 19, 1984: Paul Feyerabend, Fraud and Science

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The New York Review of Books 

Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984

Fraud and Science

By William J. Broad, Nicholas Wade

In response to Unholy Science (October 13, 1983)

To the Editors:

David Joravsky's review of our book, Betrayers of the Truth [NYR, October 13], was a ragbag of malevolence, misrepresentation and humbug. It would be scarcely worth responding to, except that it exemplifies a common type of review, one that reflects academic territoriality at its dreariest.

The authors of these reviews barely conceal their sense of affront that mere journalists have presumed to trespass on their carefully demarcated turf. They typically begin with some labored affectation of scholarship, usually Germanic, such as a digression on Kant. Your down-market reviewer could only manage three lines of Goethe on earthworms, a subject not very copiously treated in our book. Such displays are not as irrelevant as they may seem to the innocent reader. They serve to announce that those about to be set upon are outside the pale, hence their arguments need not be taken seriously and they can be sneered at with a license that would never be employed against a colleague.

Joravsky, in the usual mode of this type of reviewer, does not correctly describe the central theme of our book, so we will briefly allude to it here. We start from the observation that scientific fraud is almost never brought to light by the internal checking machanisms of science. This is a point of some significance because a) scientific authorities have always claimed that science is a self-correcting system by virtue of these checking mechanisms; and b) if the checking mechanisms cannot even detect gross fraud, how well do they perform their normal function of maintaining quality control and standards?

The first substantive point of Joravsky's review, after he has plodded through Goethe and the earthworms, is that the articles we previously wrote about fraud cases in Science magazine are proof, contrary to our thesis, that the scientific community does indeed police itself against fraud. Joravsky evidently believes it was our articles that brought the frauds to light. Even if this had been the case, it would still uphold our basic thesis, that the formal checking mechanisms fail to do so. It is hard to see how Joravsky could have failed to comprehend so basic and frequently articulated a point of our book.

The rest of his review is equally beside the point. He seems to believe our book is, or should have been, about scientists' inner mental processes and questions of creativity, a matter that lay entirely outside our scope. He repeatedly simplifies our positions to the point of travesty while accusing us, in the last-resort rhetoric of the affronted pedant, of having written a black-and-white book.

His vapid dismissal of scientific deception as unsurprising again misses the point of our book, that fraud is an interesting window through which to examine science at work. Yet the phenomenon itself is not so inconsequential. One third of all the pesticides now on the market were approved on the basis of safety tests now known to have been falsified. Even though many academic frauds may have little practical import, their effect on the public image of science could be disastrous.

Like other reviewers Joravsky tries to retell our story about Elias Alsabti but prefaces his brutalization of it by commenting that Melville or Mark Twain would have told it, oh, so much better than we do. "It is also dismaying," he drones, that we dismiss in a 'see also' footnote "the most careful and thorough analysis of scientific fraud in recent sociological scholarship." Had he read the work in question, or understood how completely it differed from the conclusions of the book he was supposed to be reviewing, Joravsky might have suspected a veiled putdown in the 'see also', but subtlety is not this windbag's bag.

Joravsky freely accuses us, without adducing the slightest evidence, of lack of scholarship, yet his standards of accuracy are as slovenly as his objectivity is exiguous. He asserts that the sociologist Robert Merton "urged scholars not to buy (our book) but to read it in the library if they feel obliged to see how bad it is." But the words "if they feel obliged to see how bad it is" are a fabrication of Joravsky's, wholly absent from the source he cites. Merton strongly disagrees with our book, but it's Joravsky who smears the disagreement into a vilification.

Unlike certain academics who cultivate a patch so small that no outsider will dare intrude, we in our book have cut across several disciplines. We assert that science works quite differently from how scientists, historians, philosophers and sociologists of science generally suppose. We certainly expected so broad a thesis to be heavily criticised, and it surely presented a large enough target. What has surprised us is that the Joravsky type critics have preferred noisily to demolish straw men of their own manufacture than to tackle our premises.

On the other hand, the working scientists from whom we have heard tell us they like the book. They recognise that it addresses aspects of the scientific enterprise that have troubled them too. Since its publication last January, new cases of fraud have emerged at the rate of about one a month, all serving to corroborate our basic analysis.

We believe the book presents, through the perspective of fraud, a novel and useful description of the practice of everyday science. We hope that your readers, whether or not in the manner of Merton's advice, will test the claim for themselves.

As for your reviewer, what can we say but "Mit der Dummheit Kämpfen Götter selbst yergebens."

William J. Broad

Nicholas Wade

New York City

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Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984

Fraud and Science

By Paul Feyerabend, Reply by David Joravsky

In response to Unholy Science (October 13, 1983)

To the Editors:

David Joravsky, reviewing Betrayers of the Truth, chides the authors for being overly Puritanical and insufficiently well read. Scientific research, he says, is a complex process, guided by conflicting emotions, similar to artistic creation; and he adds that many studies, some stunning autobiographies among them, have commented on this feature.

The criticism would be well taken if all scientists were aware of the emotional ingredients of their work and if science policy, educational policies included, took them into account. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Most scientists emphasize that scientific research is free from prejudice and has objective results while elementary schools, high schools, even universities teach science as the one and only true account of the world. Religion, not science is separated from the state; the sciences, not the arts receive the bulk of the money that is spent on cultural matters; scientists, not poets are called in when complex social problems demand a solution. The fact that some scientists permit themselves the luxury of holding more realistic views counts little in comparison, especially as none of these insightful writers has ever tried to weaken the institution that pays them and makes them famous.

It needs a different breed of writers, more concerned about society as a whole and less coy in their admissions to present the matter in clear and unambiguous terms and to explore the consequences. Broad and Wade, despite their occasional slips in emphasis are such writers. They deserve better treatment than Joravsky's brand of creative reviewing can give them.

Paul Feyerabend

Federal Institute of Technology,

Zürich, Switzerland

University of California, Berkeley

David Joravsky replies:

Sociologists of science found the Broad-Wade book sensationalist, superficial, and confused. I could not  disagree, for it is sensationalist, superficial, and confused. At the same time I tried to show that the book has some redeeming qualities. I even suggested that it is worth buying, especially by scientists, so they might have on their shelves a minatory compilation of recent scandals. Beyond that, I tried to show that Broad and Wade had stumbled on some interesting features of the creative process. They angrily reject my help; they swear that nothing could be further from their minds than creativity. I accept that.

I do not accept their denial of self-policing in the scientific community. Of course they didn't discover the frauds they wrote about in Science. They rewrote handouts from the scientists who did discover the frauds, and Science published those rewrites, and I call that self-policing by the scientific community.

Feyerabend's mind does extend to creativity, and evidently he did get the point of my essay. I am grateful for that. I do not share his alarm about "science," which is not a single thing but a hodgepodge of very different disciplines. The naive faith that they are a single thing, and the only way to truth, is an ideology that used to be called positivism and is now called scientism. It is not the dominant ideology of our culture. Every day's newspaper tells me that rival nationalisms are the dominant ideology. Anyhow, I can't see the connection with Broad and Wade's shouting that scientists are phonies and cheats, unless one has a deep resentment of scientists and wants to knock them any way one can. Of course many scientists share the naive faith called scientism, but that doesn't make them dangerous, only quaint or ridiculous, like those who organize their view of science by anger at that faith.

相关专题：学术不端
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