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[gusl]

Are Scientists Rational?


from Paul Thagard - Rationality and Science

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In fact, emotions play a significant role in inference to hypotheses as well as in inference to actions, because the inputs to and outputs from both kinds of inference are emotional as well as cognitive. The similarity of outputs is evident when scientists appreciate the great explanatory power of a theory and characterize it as elegant, exciting, or even beautiful. As with practical judgments of emotional coherence in practical decision making, we have no direct conscious access to the cognitive processes by which we judge some hypotheses to be more coherent than others. What emerges to consciousness from a judgment of explanatory coherence is often emotional, in the form of liking or even joy with respect to one hypothesis, and dislike or even contempt for rejected competing hypotheses. For example, when Walter and Luis Alvarez came up with the hypothesis that dinosaurs had become extinct because of an asteroid collision, they found the hypothesis not only plausible but exciting (Alvarez, 1998). In contrast, some skeptical paleontologists thought the hypothesis was not only dubious but ridiculous. Emotional inputs to hypothesis evaluation include the varying attitudes that scientists toward different experimental results and even to different experiments ­ any good scientist knows some experiments are better than others. Another kind of emotional input is analogical: a theory analogous to a positively-viewed theory such as evolution will have greater positive valence than one that is analogous to a scorned theory such as cold fusion.
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No, scientists are not rational. This is why we need to normatize science. And for that, we need to formalize scientific inference in all its forms.
Calculemus!