Science™ has begun to displace public understanding of the very thing it supposedly represents.

Hello, I am a scientist, and I hate phrases like “Science is Real.”

Not because I don’t love science. Quite the opposite. I hate these types of politicized phrases because they fundamentally misunderstand what science is.

As a scientist, I was trained to question things. To examine evidence. To interrogate assumptions. To come to my own conclusions based on the available evidence—and to remain open to the possibility that those conclusions are wrong.

Skepticism isn’t merely permitted in science. It is fundamental to science.

A scientist’s job is not to defend pet theories, institutions, or the prevailing scientific consensus. A scientist’s job is to gather evidence, construct explanations, test them against reality, understand the limits of what we can conclude, and revise when the evidence demands it.

Which is why I am bothered by politicized messages like:

“SCIENCE IS REAL.”

NO!

Reality is real. Science is a process for building and testing models of reality.

We observe the world. We measure selected aspects of it. We turn complicated phenomena into variables, identify patterns, construct models and theories, and test them against new observations.

When they fail, we revise them. When better explanations emerge, we replace them. And where there is uncertainty—and there inevitably is—we try to quantify it.

That isn’t a weakness of science. It is the entire point of science.

Science is not a collection of capital-F Facts handed down by people wearing lab coats. At its best, it is an iterative process that moves us toward better and better models of the world based on the data available to us.

We hope it moves us toward Truth.

But we should never confuse the two. They belong to fundamentally different categories. Reality is what we are trying to understand. Science is something we do. Science is a verb. That’s why it’s called the Scientific Method.

The map is not the territory.

A map is an abstraction. The word love is not Love. It is a symbol for a first-hand experience of reality. The word itself contains none of that experience.

The same is true of scientific models.

A model selects certain features of reality and represents them in a form we can manipulate and understand, necessarily leaving other features behind. This is not a defect. Abstraction is what makes models useful.

But models have boundaries.

We never have all of the data. We measure some variables and not others. We inevitably choose what to measure, how to measure it, which populations to study, and what to include in our models. A population average is not an individual. A diagnostic category is not a person. A measurement is not the phenomenon being measured. A model output is not reality.

A map designed to navigate Austin isn’t a bad map because it can’t get you around Mumbai. It becomes a bad map when we forget what it was designed to represent—or forget that it is a map at all.

The products of science should never be confused with the reality they attempt to describe.

Mistaking science for unquestionable Truth is a troubling cultural fad.

Phrases like Believe Science, Trust Science, and Science Is Real may be intended to defend evidence and rationality. I sympathize with that goal.

But science does not ask us to believe.

Science asks us to investigate.

Of course, skepticism does not mean every claim is equally credible. Some scientific conclusions are supported by mountains of converging evidence, while others are contradicted by mountains of evidence. A major part of a scientist’s job is attempting to quantify that uncertainty.

Uncertainty does not mean we know nothing. It means being honest about what we know, how we know it, and how far that knowledge extends. We shouldn’t be afraid of uncertainty. We should understand it.

A problem arises when Science becomes synonymous with Truth. Consensus becomes confused with certainty. Institutional authority becomes confused with empirical authority. Allegiance to “Science” becomes a substitute for scientific thinking.

Science is an extraordinarily powerful way to interrogate reality. It allows us to overcome limitations of individual perception, test our intuitions, discover patterns, make predictions, and construct explanations far beyond the capabilities of any individual human mind.

Defenses of science should not pervert the entire point of science.