The Myth of Scientific Objectivity

From "The Myth of Scientific Objectivity" William A. Wilson, First Things Nov 2017

If two theories barely inhabiting the same conceptual universe can both explain our observations with such accuracy, what if there’s another? What if there are ten more? What if they give identical predictions beyond the accuracy of any instruments we will build for ten thousand years? When forced to choose between two such radically different theories, parlor tricks like Occam’s razor win us nothing. The choice is philosophical and metaphysical: It can be informed by experience, but can never be settled by science. 

In practice, scientists are rarely paralyzed by indecision when faced with situations of this sort, which implies that they must have prescientific metaphysical beliefs to help them to make the choice, even if those beliefs go unstated. Scientific theories compete with one another to explain a given body of evidence while also exhibiting the greatest simplicity, elegance, scope, consonance with other theories, and internal harmony. But they do more than that; they also make claims, implicitly or explicitly, about what evidence needs explaining and what would constitute a satisfactory explanation.