...and nothing but the truth
Boyd Baumgartner
Latent Fingerprint Examiner @ King County, WA | AI Software Development Enthusiast
I'm putting together a presentation and I came across the following snippet from a Journal of Forensic Science from 1960.
It states
"Today's danger with scientific procedures may well be greatest when evidence of a scientific nature is produced in court. Judges and juries may become confused. Decisions rendered on such confusion will not provide the truth - the greatest virtue of scientific evidence"
Contrast this with statements from the 2009 NAS Report which states,
"...there is a notable dearth of peer-reviewed, published studies establishing the scientific bases and validity of many forensic methods." (pg 8)
Notice anything problematic? I do. There is no reference to truth. Instead of a causality, truth is a casualty. Validity has been substituted in its place.
It's no secret that we've got a problem with institutional trust these days. Words change meaning to fit political agendas in real time. Trusting 'the science' is a shibboleth and a yard sign slogan. We've got tribalism in the form of Science Triumphalism (when science becomes mythos, completely displacing theology, philosophy, and everything else as the sole arbiter for understanding ) vs Science Denialism (when scientific claims are rejected for personal reasons as opposed to systemic ones).
Science deals with what is. The word for that is ontology.? A paradigm case is water. Weak covalent bonds that easily reattach between hydrogen and oxygen atoms just IS wetness. It isn't value laden.? This becomes more complex when your experiments move into domains that involve choices that people make such as those involving social sciences. These research paradigms do involve values, albeit observed ones.
Move the study of these choices into the domain of ethics that drive policy and we've moved explicitly into the territory of the value laden. It deals with what one ought to do (the rights and responsibilities of moral agents). The word for that is deontology.
The problem as I see it is the intermingling of the is and the ought. Research paradigms are trying to smuggle what is ‘right’ into questions of what is and doing so at the level of research.? It’s well known and well argued that no objective fact is ‘theory-less’, that is to say that all data is viewed through a lens of presuppositions, axioms, etc. It is not the case however, that all data is viewed through a moral lens. Morality is outside the purview of science. This is the domain of philosophy, which quite literally translates into the ‘love of wisdom’. Doing what’s right is wise after all. What is right can even be at odds with what is good, better or best when presented with multiple options.? These questions are often times subsumed under what is known as the ‘trolly problem’, a way to formulate situational ethics. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/trolley-problem-moral-philosophy-ethics
You can trace the comingling of is and ought back to the Science Wars of the 90s and well before if you look (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars) in which postmodern research paradigms made their way into the universities.? The biggest problem with substituting validity for truth is that it necessarily creates a bureaucratic class which seeks to insert itself as the arbiter of what is valid. Combined with the postmodern ethos that there is no truth only will to power you necessarily end up with the corruption of the institution of science into one that seeks power over truth and does so through the arbitration of ‘validity’.
Science is supposed to be a self correcting investigation of the natural world that proceeds from an interaction of method, results, peer review and reproducibility.? This should produce findings that are faithful to facts. Findings converge on a common set of facts that produce a body of knowledge known as ‘truth’. This truth is ultimately demonstrably useful as it can be the basis for technology, medicine, or social structures whose use and outcomes can be measured.
Getting back to the issue, look at the NAS report's recommendation, specifically that validity be the measure. This brings us to Goodhart's Law. Goodhart's Law is expressed simply as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Validity, when set as a measure, leads to arbitration, not truth. Validity came along for the ride with truth when science was more concerned with a set of practices than a seat at the table of power. ? What do I mean by that?
In case you haven't heard, we're in a Replication Crisis (https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/What-is-the-Replication-Crisis.aspx), a term that encompasses the notion that institutional science is producing 'scientific' findings that can't be reproduced.? Worse, it seems to be a combination of cultural and systemic problems including publication bias (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6573059/), questionable research practices (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15647155/), statistical misuse (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0149206315619011) and perverse incentive structures (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3999612/). This crisis disproportionately affects the social, psychological and cognitive sciences, but is not limited to them.? This puts forensic science and the study of it right in the crosshairs.
The layering on of bureaucracy in the form of credentialism,? the OSACs, or any other acronym agency, professional or political is all part of the same validity trap. This occurs through the same means as those that produce the replication crisis. An unreflective and unresponsive body of people who are not versed in these notions will only replicate bad practices, paradoxically I might add since these bodies are attempting to dictate best practices.
Truth is necessarily valid, but a valid construct isn’t necessarily true.? How to discern one from the other is what counts as wisdom.
Forensic Comparative Science instructor, advisor, consultant
6 个月I like searching for the truth! This poster had been outside the entry door into my lab at ISP Fort Wayne for many years. I do not endorse watching over the examiner’s shoulders!