Philosophy of Science
Bob’s post has coincided with my reinstallation as an occasional writer, so just to test that everything is working, I’ll offer up this quote, from one of my favorite philosophers of science:
In the enterprise of grasping the facts, [judgement] relies on whatever concept or combination of concepts looks most promising, yet it stands ready to replace them by other, more befitting ones if and when they become available. Everyday concepts are, however, flexible in a way that physical theories are not. According to the conventional wisdom, “if it walks like a duck, it swims like a duck, it quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.” And a duck’s deviant behavior will not easily lead one to reclassify it as something else. [...] On the other hand, the unexplained perihelion advance of Mercury by a mere 43″ per century [...] is enough to conclude that neither the Sun-Mercury system, nor the entire Solar System, nor, for that matter, any gravitational system in the world can be represented to our full satisfaction by a Newtonian model. Due to their great rigidity, physical theories cannot supply us with resilient articles of belief that can vie in endurance with myths and superstitions. But this feature of mathematical physics is also a great source of power for those who wield it with circumspection to find their way about the world.
Roberto Torretti
from =The Philosophy of Physics=
To be fair to Torretti, he provides a caveat, noting that in fact while the perihelion advance was unexplained, it wasn’t instrumental in Einstein’s thinking.
But you can see there the source of the current anti-evolution strategy. Any given scientific theory is brittle. One bad fact can break it. But superstition is silly putty - it bounces back, it changes its shape over time (there’s room here for an extended metaphor, but I won’t indulge myself). So they throw as many stones as they can, but only one needs to hit. Whereas none of their own mistakes and inconsistencies matter. Superstitions can absorb the blows.
What they don’t understand is that the breaking and reforming of scientific theories is a forging process - and each newly emerged theory is sharper and tougher than the last. And in the end, the proof is in the pudding. Antibiotics and semiconductors weren’t imagined in the sacred texts, and the explanations of their operation won’t be had there.
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(I believe American Scientist or some similar mag had, about a decade ago, an article attempting to make as coherent a picture of the fundamentalist’s cosmology as possible. The author hoped to show it much more vulnerable to those stones than the scientists’ view. At one point I thought it a laudable effort, but this quote of Torretti’s suggests that it would remain only preaching to the choir. As laughable as that geologic history was, the author didn’t realize that it wasn’t brittle. Something other than facts is necessary to bring it down.)
Welcome back, Tim!!
So, can I conclude you’re a hardcore Popperian? I don’t understand it (and the alternatives) well enough.
Obw, the <cite> tag works. I’ve left a suggestion on the WordPress cite (yuck yuck), and perhaps in the fullness of time we might get it. I wrote some pushbuttons for the HTML mode editor, so I’ll probably install them soon. But adding buttons to the visual editor isn’t nearly as easy.
April 15th, 2008 at 1:47 amA hardcore Popperian? I don’t think so. I’m sympathetic to Popper. Certainly falsification is important to science. But not all of his critics can be ignored. (It’s ironic that science, which is about precision and disambiguation, may not be definable in a precise and unambiguous way.) Lest that sound much too mealy-mouthed and campaign speechy, it’s not just a Popper thing, it is a stance with regard to the holding of theories.
One can distinguish theories of the sort that are like physical laws, and theories of the sort that are like ideologies. The first type is true (or nearly true) whether we like it or not. The second sort is likely not true, but adopted because it is convenient or gratifying or simple enough to be within grasp.
To be a “hardcore Popperian” (or a hardcore Libertarian or a hardcore Deconstructionist) is to indulge in the latter kind of theory. And I promise that you are wrong. (Even if only tautologically so.) Not to say that it isn’t worth knowing those things and extracting what truth is in them. Just to say that the hardcore part is a guarantee that you will be in error. And, I’d say, an admission of intellectual laziness or an embarrassing credulity.
On the other hand, would anyone ever call themselves a “hardcore geometric optician” or a “hardcore General Relativist”? It defies common sense - no one adheres to those kinds of theories, they just use them so long as they work.
Which, I guess, is the point.
I treat theories, physical or metaphysical, in the latter way. Use them when they work. And I’ve got a lot more faith in General Relativity (to pick an example) than I do in Popper, as much as I think he was a pretty smart guy.
Maybe it all comes back to my hobby horse - which I don’t think I’ve trotted out in a while. Theories of the other than physical law sort are, when misused in the “hardcore X-ist” sense, a lot like slogans, a lot like truthiness. It’s much safer and more honest (and harder work) to deal in particulars.
Or did you rather want me to say what I thought qualified as science?
April 15th, 2008 at 9:04 pmRe: biblical cosmology
Your wish is my command:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/ThreeTieredUniverse_files/image006.gif&imgrefurl=http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/ThreeTieredUniverse.htm&h=535&w=494&sz=22&hl=en&start=15&sig2=Zj0jiQ1_5hkuET0J_DnmTA&um=1&tbnid=HvePv82-nUHAtM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=122&ei=_JEGSNWnMKLGgwK52aDOAw&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfirmament%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN
It’s no coincidence that the naked eye visible celestial objects have Latin, Greek, and Arabic names, not Hebrew names.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:06 pmExcept that you’ve left something out. Kepler observed that the paths of the planets swept out equal angles in equal times.
But that is not a scientific theory. It is an observation. It was left for Newton to give us the narrative that this was because of an attractive force GmM/r2, not just between planetary bodies, but between all bodies. The bodies supply the mass, while the universe supplies the distance.
It was this narrative, this theory, that Einstein’s narrative of general relativity fixed. The universe doesn’t have passive, well behaved spacetime that serves as a mere geometric frame and doesn’t care about the bodies with mass that reside in it .
I suppose you could satisfy the observations with a different narrative, just as you could satisfy the observations of planetary motions with epicycles - I dimly recall Gauss did the latter one day just for giggles.
Not that Gauss believed epicycles were a scientifically productive narrative. It was just for fun. You and I download p0rn, Gauss calculated epicycles.
April 16th, 2008 at 10:34 pmAnd I basically have two problems with Popper. First, what are you actually left with if you rule out induction and replace it with falsifiability? That seems close to knowledge, but how do you bridge the gap, good intentions?
Secondly, as we progress from myth to criticism of myth to observation and an institutionalized methodology based on a critical attitude (and then what? but that’s a different question) — we have the same problem I worried about in Baier’s The Moral Point of View: circularity. Is a critical attitude defined as the attitude scientists take in the sense that IQ could be reduced to “whatever it is that IQ tests measure” — a definition with reliability, but not validity - a kind of argumentum ad populum
April 17th, 2008 at 12:19 amI’m not sure where you are going with this. I agree that what Kepler made was an observation. I don’t agree that what Newton gave us or Einstein gave us was a narrative. What Newton and Einstein gave us were rules. They aren’t tendencies, they aren’t just-so stories, there are no morals, there is no intentionality, no oughts or shoulds.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:49 amI’m not going to speak for Popper, here. But it seems to me that induction and falsifiability play different roles - one isn’t replaced with the other.
I don’t subscribe to this narrative of progress. I don’t think it is that we, as humans, continue to progress in our ways of understanding truth. I think we stumbled along until we came to experimental science, and at that point we had arrived. It is not going to be replaced by the next great thing, even if it is augmented by developments in mathematics or simulations.
And I don’t think “IQ” is a good model for the kinds of things that science handles. How exactly do you expect to understand mass except as the stuff that behaves like mass? In a scientific context, that is sufficient - that is all. Of course, we like to try to connect it to our pre-scientific minds, so we, as humans, make metaphors that relate it to our received sense of the world. But that isn’t the science part of things. And I’m not sure what is circular about it, either - any more than any definition is circular. (What does it mean for something to be circular - why, just what we mean when we say something is circular….seems to me the humanities have it worse. At least I can point to something that has mass whether you and I are there or not.)
April 17th, 2008 at 10:04 amWho says narratives can’t be written in mathematics? Where are the shoulds and oughts in the narrative of Athena springing from the brow of Zeus?
Sorry, I added a few words to my narrative from yesterday. You can find them.
As to Popper replacing Marxism with the myth of progress, I really do think he does that, and surely pomo solipsism and authoritarian supernaturalism aren’t progresssivism’s only rivals.
I’d like to see some other choices.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:56 amThere’s no shoulds nor oughts in the Athena narrative, but then, neither is there something to compete with science there: nothing that pretends to explanation. (That’s what, as you note, separate’s Kepler’s observation from Newton and Einstein’s explanations.)
I’m not sure I see a gap to be bridged. One might come to a hypothesis through induction and validate it through testing (falsification). If it isn’t subject to the latter, one might reasonably exclude it from “science” which is, after all, empirical.
The most simplistic view of the scientific method contains both things in harmony: Observation, Hypothesis (induction), Experiment (falsification), Conclusion.
April 17th, 2008 at 11:23 am[...] answers are not sought out. Sometimes the feeling of comfort silences the voice of reason. Irrational belief prevails and unfortunately, often makes its way into schools, governments, even [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 9:31 pm