This is science

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 13.

Such subjects of thought furnish not sufficient employment in solitude, but require the company and conversation of our fellow-creatures, to render them a proper exercise for the mind.

David Hume, ‘Of Essay-Writing’ (1777)

[snip]

But we can’t make progress with those methods alone. It’s not enough to make a solitary observation in your lab; you must also convince other scientists that you’ve discovered something real. This is where the social part comes in. Philosophers have long discussed how important it is for scientists to show their fellow researchers how they came to their conclusions. John Stuart Mill puts it this way: 

In natural philosophy, there is always some other explanation possible of the same facts; some geocentric theory instead of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true one: and until this is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do not understand the grounds of our opinion.

And so, scientists work together in teams, travel the world to give lectures and conference speeches, debate each other in seminars, form scientific societies to share research and, perhaps most importantly, publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. These social aspects aren’t just a perk of the job, nor mere camaraderie. They’re the process of science in action: an ongoing march of collective scrutiny, questioning, revision, refinement and consensus. Although it might sound paradoxical at first, the subjective process of science is what provides it with its unmatched degree of objectivity.

It’s in this sense, then, that science is a social construct. Any claim about the world can only be described as scientific knowledge after it’s been through this communal process, which is designed to sieve out errors and faults and allow other scientists to say whether they judge a new finding to be reliable, robust and important. That each discovery has to run such a gauntlet imbues the eventual products of the scientific process – the published, peer-reviewed studies – with a great deal of power in society. This is no mere cant, rhetoric, or opinion, we say: this is science.

Which is why free flow of information is so critical.  Once centralized institutions are able and willing to deem what is true, the whole system breaks down.