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  3. When I was a graduate student in biochemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine, I read an abridged version of Montaigne’s

When I was a graduate student in biochemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine, I read an abridged version of Montaigne’s

admin2012-12-01  63
问题     When I was a graduate student in biochemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine, I read an abridged version of Montaigne’s Essays. My friend Margaret Rea and I spent hours wandering around Boston discussing the meaning and implications of the essays. Michel de Montaigne lived in the 16th century near Bordeaux, France. He did his writing in the southwest tower of his chateau, where he surrounded himself with a library of more than 1,000 books, a remarkable collection for that time. Montaigne posed the question, "What do I know?" By extension, he asks us all: Why do you believe what you think you know? My latest attempt to answer Montaigne can be found in Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic, originally published in January 2009 and soon to be out in paperback from the Oxford University Press.
    Scientists tend to be glib about answering Montaigne’s question. After all, the success of technology testifies to the truth of our work. But the situation is more complicated.
    In the idealized version of how science is done, facts about the world are waiting to be observed and collected by objective researchers who use the scientific method to carry out their work. But in the everyday practice of science, discovery frequently follows an ambiguous and complicated route. We aim to be objective, but we cannot escape the context of our unique life experiences. Prior knowledge and interests influence what we experience, what we think our experiences mean, and the subsequent actions we take. Opportunities for misinterpretation, error, and self-deception abound.
    Consequently, discovery claims should be thought of as protoscience. Similar to newly staked mining claims, they are full of potential. But it takes communal scrutiny and acceptance to transform a discovery claim into a mature discovery. This is the credibility process, through which the individual researcher’s me, here, now becomes the community’s anyone, anywhere, anytime. Objective knowledge is the goal, not the starting point.
    Once a discovery claim becomes public, the discoverer receives intellectual credit. But, unlike with mining claims, the community takes control of what happens next. Within the complex social structure of the scientific community, researchers make discoveries; editors and reviewers act as gatekeepers by controlling the publication process; other scientists use the new finding to suit their own purposes; and finally, the public (including other scientists) receives the new discovery and possibly accompanying technology. As a discovery claim works its way through the community, a dialectic of interaction and confrontation between shared and competing beliefs about the science and the technology involved transforms an individual’s discovery claim into the community’s credible discovery.
    Two paradoxes infuse this credibility process. First, scientific work tends to focus on some aspect of prevailing knowledge that is viewed as incomplete or incorrect. Little reward accompanies duplication and confirmation of what is already known and believed. The goal is new-search, not research. Not surprisingly, newly published discovery claims and credible discoveries that appear to be important and convincing will always be open to challenge and potential modification or refutation by future researchers. Second, novelty itself frequently provokes disbelief. Nobel Laureate and physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi once described discovery as "seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." But thinking what nobody else has thought and telling others what they have missed may not change their views. Sometimes years are required for truly novel discovery claims to be accepted and appreciated.
    In the end, credibility "happens" to a discovery claim — a process that corresponds to what philosopher Annette Baier has described as the commons of the mind. "We reason together, challenge, revise, and complete each other’s reasoning and each other’s conceptions of reason," she wrote in a book with that title. In the case of science, it is the commons of the mind where we find the answer to Montaigne’s question: Why do you believe what you think you know?
It can be inferred from Paragraph 4 that credibility process requires
选项 A、strict inspection.
B、shared efforts.
C、individual wisdom.
D、persistent innovation.
答案B
解析 推理判断题。由第四段第四句This is the credibility process，through which…可知，在credibilityprocess这一过程中，研究者个人变成了科学界中任何地点、任何时间的任何人，由此推断这一过程付诸了科学界所有人的共同努力，故答案为[B]。文中在提到这一过程需要scrutiny时，用词是communal scrutiny，可见仍在强调需要共同的审查，而不是[A]中所述的strict inspection；[C]是根据第四段第四句的individual设置的反向干扰；[D]是脱离文章的想当然。
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