What modern science has shown us, ironically, is that science itself, like philosophy, depends for its results upon some very human and fallible elements. The growing conflict between the “hard” sciences and the social sciences helps illustrate this.

One thing we have learned is that intention and purpose directly affect data selection. This has been one of the ongoing challenges of artificial intelligence and robotics. They world contains too much data, too much undifferentiated content. In order to navigate it, that data must be winnowed down, selected, according to a specific purpose. It is not enough to tell robots to gather data to be able to move, we must teach them to preference relevant data that serves their programmed intention. That allows them to filter out all the noise and focus on what is relevant to their goals.

This also applies to human neural processing of all kinds. We select for what information matters to our purposes and ignore the rest. We structure information unconsciously in our minds, by necessity, according to our purposes. We’re made to do that. Our mind is not a blank slate taking in an undifferentiated stream of pure data. It is a thing with a structure, with purposes, with built in mechanisms designed to further specific goals and activities. It filters, it conditions, it interprets, long before we’ve even reached the conscious level. And there are broad difference between people. We are not even all uniform in our mechanisms (although much is shared). Differences in personality reflect differences of personal motivation and strategy that affect what filters and selective mechanisms we have. They affect our goals and approaches to those goals, and so affect what data we deem relevant or irrelevant and significant or insignificant.

The next thing we’ve learned is that data selection plays an extremely powerful role in what conclusions we reach. It’s all about how you pick your data. You can alter the results of any almost any study with data selection. Not only what data you choose to include, but even how you choose to organize it can affect your results. This has been proven many times in many ways, using examples too numerous to explain here. If you can control the sample, you can control the outcome, is the gist.

Finally, the interpretation of results, deciding what they mean, deciding how to act on them, is a very human process. These are questions of decision and meaning that depend on purpose and interpretation, on the frameworks of value that inhabit our minds. This is the most obvious conclusion, frankly. Give a hundred different people the same information and ask for their recommendations, and you’ll likely receive a plethora of differing suggestions. When it comes to interpretation and action, you’re leaving the tidy world of wherever you collected the data and going back into the real world, where that slice of data is embedded in an entire complex ecosystem of competing information and competing values all pressing against one another.

This is why the secular world is so often dismissive of ideas and conclusions cooked up in the isolation of the academic world. That isolation may be useful for close study, like plucking a fish out of the ocean so you can study it carefully in a tank. But real life and real behavior doesn’t take place in a tank, and being in a tank may even limit or skew your results. That doesn’t mean the results are invalid, as some might argue, dismissing the cloistered conclusions of academics, but it is a problem. Life is much messier and more complicated and influenced by far more factors than the narrow (and necessary) focus of scientific study can contain.

Thus the businessman may have little regard for the theories of the economist. At his level of existence, they seem very unreal, and may make up only a portion of the factors that he has to consider and confront in a daily basis, whereas to the economist they seem like the whole of the reality (because they have reduced reality, in their study, to this aspect), and the businessman has no such luxury. As I said, this doesn’t mean that the economist studies only fancies of no relevance. They may be of immense relevance. But they may not describe the totality of the ecosystem of the real world, or our experience of it, and all the ways these affect our understanding of and response to the discoveries of the scientist, and this is a problem.

Science has its methodology, as does philosophy (that of logical argumentation). But a methodology, however much it might be designed to promote fair play (and both the laws of logic and the scientific method are aimed at that goal), still depends for its operation on many other factors. And what sort of players are playing the game is the biggest one. And in both science and philosophy, the answer is: humans. And humans are not a method. They have goals, they have filters, they have prejudices, they have built in psychological structures and values and purposes. Not only one, either, but many in conflict and competition and interplay and relationship. And these human factors, however much the system might provide for means of mitigating them, cannot be removed and play a large determinate role in how the game is played and what results are produced.

So, does this mean science isn’t…scientific? Not exactly. Is logic itself logical? It depends what you mean. Both are structured, determined, and organized by realities that are not themselves instances of science or logic (much as the laws of physics themselves are dependent on realities of existence that are not themselves instances of those laws). And they’re both performed by humans, who may be both scientific and logical, but are surely not only that. We recognize the use of science, the claims of logic.

Science, as a concept, may be perfectly scientific as method, in its own identity. But actual practical science that is being done, a game that is actually being played, is in the real world and is being done by people. There’s a very big difference between the rules of baseball and a game of actual baseball. And that’s a pretty small, confined game, whereas science attempts to address a plethora of different games all being played simultaneously on top of one another, that we call life.

This is not a call for skepticism, rather, for humility. When we attach the veneer of “science” to our ideology, it does not remove the contentious content or effects of that ideology. We cannot fully scrub the personal element from either the collection or organization or interpretation of data. It is present at all three levels. If we operate without this understanding, it will only be easier to misunderstand the meaning of our own results. This is also why peer review and replicabilitiy have always been so important in science. The headline “study shows” may be enough to convince the layperson that the objective nature of reality has been uncovered. But an informed scientist will be familiar with the challenges of considering competing theories, the need to take take the scope and structure of the study into account, alternative explanations necessitating further study and confirmation, and so on, and wait before they start drawing any big conclusions. There is also the problem of environment, how much the environment that produced the study, bound as it is by personal, economic, ideological, and career concerns, has been affected. If, for example, the demographics of an entire field have become homogenous in some significant way that does not reflect the normal distribution of human cogitators, how might that be affecting how the results are selected and interpreted? If there is significant social or political or intellectual pressure to either consider or not consider certain questions or conclusions, how might that be affecting a field’s ability to obtain valid results?

Of course, study will always tend to be done by certain sorts of people with certain concerns. People who are interested in how people think and behave will be the ones doing psychology research, and by necessity most of those people will be highly intelligent, be of a higher social and economic class, and have a certain kind of education. That’s true for every field. There is no “neutral human” to set to work in any field. You’re always going to be dealing with a very specifically selected sort of group. And that’s going to have an effect on how they gather, organize, and interpret the data, and it’s going to be different from how someone else might do it.

These are simply the conditions under which we must labor. They are the reason why we have seen the need to codify such concepts as the laws of logic, argumentation, the scientific method, research practices, etc. They’re offered as solutions because there’s a challenge to overcome. And while we should never lose hope of overcoming those challenges in the moment, we must never forget that they are always with us. They are always a reason for us to be cautious, not only about the work of others, but most especially about our own work, our own thoughts. That is where we are most blind, most at the mercy of our filters and proclivities and motivations and desires, most under the influence of the ecosystem in which we are embedded and most under the influence of our own nature. We must watch what we approve, what we fail to test, because it slips so easily into what we’re used to and what we want. We should be wary of always being comfortable and never having to seriously reconsider or revise or expand or narrow our ideas. We should always approach information that pleases us with a bit of humility and a bit of self awareness. As a wise man once said, the kisses of an enemy are profuse, but the wounds of a friend can be trusted.