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How Our Botched Understanding of "Science" Ruins Everything
An anonymous reader writes "Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes at The Week, "If you ask most people what science is, they will give you an answer that looks a lot like Aristotelian 'science' — i.e., the exact opposite of what modern science actually is. Capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. And science is something that cannot possibly be understood by mere mortals. It delivers wonders. It has high priests. It has an ideology that must be obeyed. This leads us astray. ... Countless academic disciplines have been wrecked by professors' urges to look 'more scientific' by, like a cargo cult, adopting the externals of Baconian science (math, impenetrable jargon, peer-reviewed journals) without the substance and hoping it will produce better knowledge. ... This is how you get people asserting that 'science' commands this or that public policy decision, even though with very few exceptions, almost none of the policy options we as a polity have have been tested through experiment (or can be). People think that a study that uses statistical wizardry to show correlations between two things is 'scientific' because it uses high school math and was done by someone in a university building, except that, correctly speaking, it is not. ... This is how you get the phenomenon ... thinking science has made God irrelevant, even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them. ... It also means that for all our bleating about 'science' we live in an astonishingly unscientific and anti-scientific society. We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our 'pro-science' people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science). "
... half way through the summary
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Lets leave the crazy rants to the comment section.
No - engineering "gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet". Science gives us the theoretical (in the scientific sense) frameworks and tools that engineering can apply to do that. The author shows at least as much confusion as those he decries, and he does it from the start.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
That's exactly why I suggest that teaching about creationism IS appropriate for a science class. If I were a biology teacher (and my approach were permissible), when the subject of creationism inevitably came up in the class, rather than dismiss it with the arrogant assertion that "this is a science class, we'll not discuss your religion here", I would, instead, follow up with a discussion of Popper's criteria. Then I might request a short essay discussing how well evolutionary theory or creationism met the criteria for a scientific hypothesis.
That, in my opinion, is part of teaching science.
I read the summary and thought that this article might be on to something, but on reading it I don't think the author really understands science at all.
Here are some excerpts that I find particularly disagreeable:
"Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering "
Absolutely not. Science is indeed in pursuit of Truth. The author criticizes Aristotle's form of "research", quite rightly, but then throws the baby out with the bathwater when he says this.
"Because people don't understand that science is built on experimentation, they don't understand that studies in fields like psychology almost never prove anything, since only replicated experiment proves something and, humans being a very diverse lot, it is very hard to replicate any psychological experiment."
This is factually incorrect. There are many Psychological phenomena that can be reproduced reliably. The Stroop effect, the Simon effect, visual illusions..
"What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things"
This is completely incorrect. A core goal of science is to understand the cause of things by developing abstracted understandings of them (i.e. theories).
I know nothing about this author, but from the article, I suspect that he is trying to reconcile his beliefs in science and religion by convincing himself that science cannot answer the big questions, it's just for making airplanes and computers. I could be wrong of course (--- very important scientific principle)
Correlation is necessary but not sufficient to scientific proof of causation. To prove causation you need to have a theoretical model allowing you to construct experiements which, with variables controlled for, produce fresh demonstrations of the posited effect. There have been laboratory experiments demonstrating the "greenhouse" effect of CO2 levels since the late 1800s.
Correlation + theory + well-designed experiments + confirming results = causation
Science often starts with observed correlations. But not always. Sometime the theory comes first. It's only on putting all the parts together that science can speak with confidence about causation. If we use the "corelation != causation" slogan as if it refutes all science which follows from observation of correlations, we entirely miss the point.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The piece is mumbo-jumbo. Yes, Bacon eschewed the "Aristotelian" search for final causes. Does that mean that Baconian science doesn't try to determine the truth? Of course not.
The history of philosophy/history of science done in this piece is clap trap. He says that Galileo used experiment, whereas Aristotle did not. And that's why Aristotle thought that "heavier objects should fall faster than light ones". Supposedly. The problem: Aristotle didn't use "abstract reasoning" to come to that incorrect conclusion. He just didn't control his variables adequately. Not controlling variables adequately can happen to the very best of experimentalists.
So how does this argument run? Scientific knowledge is knowledge about specific empirical propositions. Therefore, scientific knowledge is not "true" knowledge. Therefore, science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth? That's a terrible argument. This seems like just a case of begging the question from the author where he has an unargued "definition" of what "Truth" is. Why anyone else is beholden to this definition, of course, is a mystery.
I highly doubt Bacon ever said this. Of course, there is no citation to check. I think the author has confused Bacon's model of Bensalem, where he has the houses of specialists hide their operation from others, so that the others don't come to conclusions based on partial understandings, before the work of the specialists is completed.
Who made these "definitions"? No one in sight.
Oh I see, Dawkins, a great evolutionary biologist, is a philistine. The evidence? I guess because the author disagrees with Dawkins about God. No argument is given.
It can be the perfect setting for morality plays.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
As much as it may hurt _your_ beliefs, GP raises a point that many other "scientifically" minded people have been raising for some time. We can rarely have rational debate about numerous topics, which means that some of our "science" is really just bias. They even provide an example, which I think is a great one.
Science has not answered the question of whether or not the Universe requires something in order to exist. Philosophy has attempted to answer that question for over two thousand years, and any honest Philosopher will tell you the same thing. "There is no proof, but it's a rational conclusion to believe that something did cause the Universe to exist. At least as rational as the thought that a Universe could spring up out of nowhere from nothing."
Many atheists can't, or refuse to, separate Religion from the Philosophical question regarding the origin of the Universe. The second argument from the same or similar set of atheists is a claim "the question does not matter". The former does not follow the Socratic Method or Scientific Method. The latter is about as unscientific as you can get, discouraging investigation and discovery (No, it's not about _you_ it's about discouraging others from pursuing the question). In reality, this one question is an exceptional question for training the mind to think critically, debate, and begin to question ethics and morals.
The question regarding the origin of the Universe is just one question where bias takes charge and science is put in the background. Vaccines, GMO foods, and Global Warming are other areas that are so entrenched with bias that it is nearly impossible to debate any of these topics rationally.
Anyone that dares to challenge the status quo is attacked and ostracized. If they have arguments that are really good, they are ignored and black listed from media. Society has gone through many phases just like this one previously, as a true Philosophy I study everything including History.
I can almost assure you that this post will be censored by people with mod points, and I will receive plenty of attacks (most likely from the anonymous cowards). Not because this post is offensive, in fact I was very cautious in wording, but because it challenges the status quo.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
But science does not dismiss questions about why the universe was created, it merely discovers the limits of what we know. The big bang is how the universe was created. The inflation of the universe is the event that we cannot measure beyond with the tools we currently have. "Why?" is still a valid question; and science says we lack the tools to gather evidence of "why?".
engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff
religious affairs are obviously beyond the realms of science, and are no obstacle in the quest for truth and understanding.
i think some scientists disagree. like for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
The pope who had Galileo prosecuted was *also* the bishop who defended him when he first pushed for heliocentrism years earlier. This pope also asked Galileo to write on heliocentrism. What then happened is that in these writing Galileo mocked the pope. His prosecution had far more to do with politics than science. Much like climate change today, one political faction decided to use it as justification for their political/economic agenda, another faction decided to attack the science to undermine the justification for the political/economic agenda. There was no inherent hatred of the concept, it was merely attacked to undermine something else. Then and now, science gets caught up in politics and suffers.
Bishops of this same church are also responsible for promoting and popularizing the western tradition of the scientific method during the middle ages.
Today this same church states that scientific discovery can not be in conflict with faith, that such discoveries describe how God's universe works. This includes everything from cosmology to human evolution. With respect to evolution where science and this church depart is that the church considers the origin of man to be when the soul was imparted, not when the biological form was created. With respect to the creation of the biological form they consider the biblical genesis to be figurative language not literal.
Also with respect to cosmology, the currently accepted theory of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang theory. It was originally put forward by a priest teaching at university of this church.
I mean, it's not like you can run an experiment to determine if the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid... I mean, what would that involve? Creating planets and populating them with dinosaurs, Jurassic-Park style, and then bombarding them with asteroids? Even if it were possible, it wouldn't really prove anything except whether the mechanism is feasible, it wouldn't determine whether that was actually what happened or not. So you can't really use an experiment.
What you CAN do is make predictions based on that hypothesis, and then make observations to see if the predictions are borne out. For one, you should see evidence of asteroid impact, things like iridium, shock-deformed quartz, microtektites, an impact crater, maybe even a tiny fragment of the asteroid itself... and in fact, after 30 years of looking, every single one of those things showed up, so we're pretty confident there was a giant asteroid impact. For another, you predict that the extinctions coincide with that impact if the impact caused them. And when you look at really abundant microfossils, stuff like fossil plankton and pollen, you can trace the Cretaceous stuff right up to the iridium layer that is the debris field, and then these species vanish forever. So the observations of geology, geochemistry, and paleontology are all consistent with predictions. The same process is used to test other hypotheses about historical processes, such as continental drift, or natural selection, or the formation of the solar system.
That's the *actual* scientific method. It's testing hypotheses against observation. Controlled experiment may or may not come into it at all.
Whereas science needs both hypothesis generation and experimental validation/repudiation of hypotheses.
Hypothesis generation sometimes has to go out there, and invent new concepts that have so far only been thought about, not yet tested.
So to summarize, science needs both creative conceptualization (ontology formation) and experimentation (validation or repudiation of the ontology and/or hypothesis).
These need to go on in circular reinforcement. (Spiral development model).
Experimentation without re-conceptualization will eventually run dry, because it will get stuck in a local-maximum paradigm, and people won't know what new things/aspects to test any more.
Remember, relativity was discovered in a thought experiment by Einstein. Is a thought experiment a real experiment in the article author's view? I doubt it.
Einstein, from the outside, was doing "magic". Speculating about the larger truth.
Relativity was an example of theory creating a completely new set of concepts that were way ahead of the ability to carry out experiments that could validate or repudiate them. It was a well-formed theory, in that it clearly suggested new kinds of experiments that could test it, but it was pure non-experimental theorizing nonetheless.
Darwin also, most likely, happened on his key theoretical insight about natural selection (the simple core of it), by thinking about the generalization of many observations, and having a theoretical insight.
Experimentation has its essential place in science, no doubt (keeps the theorists honest and humble), but it is only half of the game. The other half is innovative philosophy, carefully practiced, in the mind.
Exper
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Scientist here - by geekoid's definition at least.
Scientists use jargon for the same reason sailors do - to efficiently communicate a very specific concept. In a sailing vessel at sea in a storm, you really don't want to take a minute to explain that you mean the green-white striped rope that connects the beam to the hull - you say mainsheet*.
Now, there is a lot of nonsense going on in science, with ridiculous performance metrics, a discouragement of actually innovative high-risk research, a sometimes religious worship of established names and theory; and a lot of stuff gets published not because it is particularly innovative, enlightening or even robust, but because it uses the right buzz words and cites the right people. However, that does not make science as an endeavour less wortyh - it's a bit like** how democracy is a good idea even if a lot of politicians (the ones in high places, at least) are dodgy.
* if my English sailing jargon is correct - not a native speaker
** my next analogy will be about cars, I promise