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TV "In Italy, as Gerardo Ienna has shown, younger radicals such as the authors of L’Ape e l’Architetto advanced the principle of the non-neutrality of science, in contrast to senior Marxists who upheld traditional dichotomies between science and nature rooted in dialectical materialism".
Radical
Radical
The "non-neutrality" of science is a core concept championed by the radical science movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which argued that science is not a value-free, apolitical pursuit of pure truth, but is instead deeply embedded in and reflective of dominant socioeconomic and political systems
Marxist
Marxist
Marxists treat nature as an objective, external reality governed by independent laws, while positioning science as the human tool used to discover and master those laws. More in Engels’s Dialectics of Nature)
THE NEUTRALITY OF SCIENCE
THE NEUTRALITY OF SCIENCE
Peter Harper August 2026
I have been following the exchanges regarding the Neutrality of Science with some bafflement. All the protagonists seem to be academics with a compulsion to dress up their prose in learned phraseology. It is daunting, and reminds me of the absurd fantasy of the Radical Science Journal editorial collective, imagining that ‘the workers’ would be queueing round the block to buy the latest number of RSJ. How we laughed, us mere ‘environmentalists’.
I’ll come back to The Environment later.
Yes, I was part of that collective, and unusually also part of the Science for People editorial board, and part of the Undercurrents collective as well.
Here I would like to make a contribution in plain English, based on my own experience. I apologise for the autobiographical details.
We cannot avoid the fact that there are facts, many of them known to us through the scientific process. Ganymede is a moon of Jupiter. There are small creatures that can only be seen through a microscope. An inverse-square law governs the gravitational attraction between masses. Insects have six legs. Nobody would disagree. They are neutral.
There are also ‘facts’ that are not quite facts. To say ‘the earth goes round the sun’ is not strictly correct, because sun and planets all go round a complex barycentre within the sun itself. But the understanding that ‘the earth goes round the sun’ was fundamental in establishing the principle that ‘things are not always what they seem’, and that scientific enquiry was needed to look under the bonnet. That was in effect the beginning of the scientific endeavour, to find a self-consistent (‘consilient’) account of how the universe works.
It is not capricious, as the ancients thought. It is profoundly and mysteriously lawful, and rigidly obeys its own laws. Thank God for that, otherwise science would be impossible.
You can still regard the earth as the centre of the solar system, but the contortions needed to make the calculations are hair-raising, and so even astrologers use the Copernican system to work out the physical arrangements, which are totally objective. The solar system is entirely mechanical, Newtonian, predictable, and yes, neutral. Some things just are.
All this notwithstanding, as a student I encountered the work of Thomas Kuhn and all the kerfuffle surrounding it. There was also Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend. How we debated long into the night! Did it mean that science was in some sense socially constructed?
Interestingly, I had an early experience of just this. In my undergraduate years I was simultaneously in the Zoology Department and the Psychology Department. In those days the dominant fashion in psychology was Behaviourism, and the field was defined as ‘the study of behaviour’. It seemed mostly about rats and pigeons in small boxes, and the laudable goal was to find the ‘atoms’ of behaviour. Oddly however, I was also undergoing a course in Animal Behaviour in the Zoology Department, same framework: animal behaviour. So, by the rules of scientific ‘consilience’, the two should be identical.
NEUTRALITY OF SCIENCE
NEUTRALITY OF SCIENCE
Charlie Clutterbuck Oct 2026
There is a lot I agree with in Peter's piece, especially the language. But...it wouldn't be BSSRS if we didn't disagree!
I was on RSJ, SfP (mostly) and Undercurrents...PH and I know and like each other well.
While the workers weren't queuing up to buy RSJ, the radical science organisation did manage to create Hazards Bulletin, bringing together scientists' expertise and workers' experience, like never before. 50 years later, the Hazards Conference and movement is still going strong, preventing workplace ill health and pushing the unions to do more.
And we can certainly have a go at how Marxists treat nature as an objective external reality. But there are all sorts of Marxists (really!), and I would describe myself as listening carefully as to what he had to say. I am especially interested in his later years, when talking about 'metabolic rift' - the disjuncture between humans and nature...
When it comes to my favourite subject, 'soil', he is unsurpassed to this day. Quite simply, in Capital he says, 'All wealth comes from soil and labour'. The way he describes how soil is seen is relevant to this day. He talks about how 'abstract materialism' (Sorry Peter, that's two now!), 'treats nature as a fixed, static, or purely mechanical system, ignoring how human history, social relations, and labour actively affect it'. This exactly how most people see soil today including a lot of scientists.
This fixed view - as if soil just arrived from somewhere- is prevalent. So much so that I have had to write my book 'On the Origin of Soils' - out in the Spring - in order to show soil has evolved over half a billion years. To me, it is obvious, but it is new to humanity - and evolutionary and ecological science. Why? Because we've viewed soil as 'abstract material' until now.
Marx liked Darwin's demonstration of movement and energy, and that life always changed - helping him with his more revolutionary ideas. But he thought old Charles wasn't so good at including human society in any changes, and if he did reflected the surrounding capitalist society.
Rest of Peter's
Rest of Peter's
But they were not. In fact, there was no overlap whatever. They were different in culture, subject-matter, underlying assumptions, practitioners and conclusions. Neither did they communicate with each other, or acknowledge each other’s existence. There was no attempt to iron out the problems of consilience. Aha! Here was ‘social construction’ in action, plain as day.
This led me into considerable cynicism, and by the time of BSSRS and the RSJ I regarded the whole thing as a giant fabrication no better than astrology – or for that matter, Marxism or psychoanalysis. And I should remind readers that most members of the RSJ collective were self-declared Marxists, some psychoanalysts, and some indeed both. While I looked down on them a ‘ideological’, they looked down on me as a mere environmentalist.They possessed the true faith, the keys to the kingdom. Hah!
Subsequently I went off to seek my fortune and became a tradesperson, far from all these concerns. In the fullness of time, I returned to environmental matters, and sometimes I encountered flaws in the system. On one occasion I collaborated with a local university in a trial of ‘compost tea’ as a treatment for late blight in potatoes. Good results had been reported in the USA, but we found no effect. We could not get these results published. We did it again, still could not get it published. It seemed that ‘editors like positive results’. Subsequently, I discovered that many others had done similar trials, with similar negative results, but none had been able to achieve publication. The result was that a general belief persisted in the efficacy of compost teas in the UK, despite almost universal failure.
This is not a question of the Neutrality of Science, but of a failure in its institutions. There are of course many similar stories. The practice of formal science is socially constructed, and has many flaws.
Eventually I ended up teaching ‘sustainability’ in a university.
[Parenthetically (because I want to use this an example) I should just say a few words about modern environmentalism. The old days of river pollution, acid rain etc., are long gone. Now the focus is on two basic ‘existential’ issues: climate change and biodiversity. Within both fields (they overlap a bit) there is a mainstream consensus, and a varied body of critics.]
Ah, right, sustainability. Now the chips are down. Seems like as a species we are facing some very serious challenges. The stakes are very high. We must have the Truth, and quickly. It is more like science in wartime. Perhaps we cannot afford the luxury of P<0.001, and have to make do with P<0.01 and press on. I have found no better sources than the standard peer-reviewed literature of the global scientific community. I do my best to be critical, not to take everything at face value, not to succumb to groupthink, but in the end I cannot but be reliant on thousands of researchers everywhere taking measurements, constructing hypotheses and debating savagely with each other. Just like it’s supposed to be.
What? say the critics. Why do you believe them? They are just your trusted source, and we think they are all down a rabbit hole and seriously misled, whereas our trusted sources are to be, well, trusted.
Ouch. Why indeed should I believe the scientific community and the peer-review process when I have seen with my own eyes how it can go wrong?
And very often, the material is not peer-reviewed, but presented in substantial, well-referenced books. What I observe is that nearly everybody I know has a certain prior point of view and cannot help but ‘cherry-pick’ items or opinions that reflect their view. The alternative is cognitive dissonance, which can be very unpleasant. So, we all cherry-pick and end up with the number we first thought of. The problem is how to escape from these echo-chambers or halls of mirrors. This seems a far cry from the 20th century debates about the Neutrality of Science.
The modern conundrum about the Neutrality of Science must be seen in this context. We want truths that are ‘true enough’, like the statement that the earth goes round the sun. Compare for example ‘the atmosphere is warming and to avoid severe risks we should restrict the average warming to below 2°C’. A little vague, but what we now look for from the scientific community.
Can such statements be regarded as ‘neutral’? The statement is almost certainly true, but does it justify such a huge amount of effort, both in pursuing it and dealing with its implications? Most ordinary citizens do not seem to care much. As the gilets jaunes slogan has it ‘Never mind about the end of the world, what about the end of the month?’. So why should scientists, of all people, get so worked up about it? Are they really working for the general good? They appear to be favouring the interests of posterity against the immediate interests of today’s citizenry. Are they entitled to do that? Does it suggest that indeed, science is not neutral? That it is (for example) tainted with middle-class ideals?
Let me attempt some distinctions. The data are neutral. The immediate logical implications or corollaries are also neutral. They simply cannot be gainsaid. The decision to investigate the data isnot neutral. The decision to publish the data is not neutral. The interpretations of the data are not neutral. Applications of the data are not neutral. Drawing conclusions from the data is not neutral.
It’s starting to look as if the confirmed results of science are neutral; the practice of science is not. And even the results can mean different things to different people. For example, I have heard religious people accept entirely the observed warming but say it is God’s way of preventing the onset of the next ice age. Try arguing against that!
Surely this is enough for now. I wanted to inject two things into the debate. A dialogue in plain English, and bringing it into the era of sustainability, when it probably means something different.
Who else?
Who else?
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