F Coda
In this chapter, we began to investigate how automatic thinking affects scientific reasoning. Our brain is an organ that is designed in large part to help us make sense of the world by constantly generating hypotheses about what is going on in and around us.
The hypothesis therefore is one of the most basic thinking tools, and, rather than fantasizing about how scientists can do away with it, we should concentrate on understanding and mastering our hypothesis-generating tendencies so we can make sure they work to our advantage.Because hypothesis generation is automatic and mostly unconscious we are not always able to “justify” (i.e., to explain and account for) them, and another word for a tendency to act in ways that we can't consciously and explicitly justify is “bias.” Bias is therefore unavoidable, and it may have positive, negative, or neutral consequences. While bad bias can affect scientists, as it does everyone else, there is no reason to associate its ill-effects with the hypothesis in particular. Once we realize and accept the prevalence of bias, we can focus on the more important tasks of ferreting it out and keeping it from adversely influencing our thinking. The danger is not in the bias or the hypothesis, per se, but in the unrecognized and unexamined bias that is associated with tacit and unacknowledged hypotheses.
We also examined the phenomenon of “fads” in science and, again, we noted that the propensity of scientists to follow flashy trends has its good and bad sides. We shouldn't reflexively look down on scientific fads, but we should analyze the hot topic itself and decide whether concerted effort on it is called for: Is it necessary or superfluous? And we should keep in mind that, as was the case with bias, there is no reason to conclude that hypothesis-based research is uniquely prone to attracting crowds of imitators.
Finally, inductive thinking is deeply ingrained in our nervous systems because it represents a primitive survival strategy that allows all animals, and perhaps all cellular life forms, to detect and respond adaptively to regularities in their environments. As this trait seems to be the core of what is most often meant by “induction” (Chapter 1), then there is little cause to consider it a special intellectual property of the human mind. Appreciating the true nature of inductive thinking should make us far more reluctant to want to substitute it for hypothesis-based thinking.