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Higher Critics of Science
Some background
Ever since the 16th century there’s been talk of a “method.”
Francis Bacon’s new logic of discovery—novum organum or new instrument—entails the systematic empirical investigation of nature in order to arrive at
general truths about the world.
• The inductive or Baconian method.
• Carefully observe particular instances of nature, aiming for general principles.
• For example, three weekends in a row you develop an allergic reaction after eating out on Friday night. What common or general circumstance attends all three occasions?
Descartes also promotes a “method.”
Discovering an undoubtable, self-evident truth and then building on that foundation by reasoning from one clear and distinct thought to the next.
Newton puts the capstone on this.
“I feign no hypotheses.”
Translation: I don’t speculate or do guesswork. I read the text of nature without reading my biases or presuppositions into the text.
Said another way:
• I don’t do metaphysics.
• I don’t philosophize; I don’t speculate beyond what nature gives me; I don’t make things up as I go.
• I let nature speak for herself.
Given Newton’s tremendous accomplishment, this sounds right to many people.
Alexander Pope: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night, God said, ‘Let Newton be!,’ and all was light.”
The method is the key. It allows you to unlock the secrets of nature in a completely objective manner.
Other endeavors—like art, philosophy, music, literature, theology—don’t have an absolutely reliable method. Hence they are hopelessly (and regrettably) embedded
in metaphysical guesswork.
Thomas Huxley’s Cinderella metaphor
Cinderella [science] is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters [relating to God’s reality and purpose]. She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair of shrews [theology and philosophy] who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes; and she learns, in her heart of hearts, the lesson that the foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.
Huxley’s agnosticism
= positivism. Opposition to metaphysics.
Science doesn’t pretend to know things beyond the ken of the human mind.
Science, unlike theology and philosophy, practices intellectual modesty.
This thinking culminates in the early 20th century with the Vienna Circle
• Logical positivism—an attempt to find the foundational truths of reality, which are assumed to be logical and scientific.
• Start with raw facts of nature and express them in utterly simple ways (so as not to let metaphysical presuppositions slip in).
• Example: While pointing at something, “Red here now.”
• When one utters this phrase, is she speaking beyond experience?
The logical positivists (Vienna Circle) decide yes, even this simple phrase is not free of metaphysical
interpolation (guesswork).
Because calling the thing “red” transcends the perceptual event by including it as a member of a class of red experiences, thereby referring to more than what is actually present at the experience.
The only way to get avoid metaphysical interpolation is to point and grunt.
This book appeared in 1924. Burtt argued that despite Newton’s “I feign no hypotheses” stance, Newton (and Galileo, Descartes, et al.) were all involved in metaphysical guesswork.
“There is no escape from metaphysics.”
Another critic of what increasingly comes to look like a naïve view of science.
According to Popper,
There is no “immaculate perception” of nature.
• Science proceeds by conjectures. That is, guesses, hunches, intuitions.
• Which comes first, observation or theory?
“You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at the stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these
the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and then again you will see there
battles and strange figures in violent action, expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and
proper forms. In such walls the same things happen as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine.”
--Leonardo da Vinci
How much is imagination and how much is “out there” in the world?
A statement by Einstein. Agree or disagree:
“Physical [scientific] concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”
Duhem-Quine hypothesis
• Theories are always underdetermined by evidence.
• Evidence does not uniquely determine or constrain a single theory.
The street is wet. Why?
Refutations = Falsifiability
Paul Feyerabend
No rhyme, method, or reason to science
Friedrich Kekulé saw the circular structure of the benzene molecule in a dream.
"...I was sitting writing at my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis."
Paul McCartney heard “Yesterday” in a dream.
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan came out of an opium dream.
Science doesn’t proceed according to reason.
Rather, it proceeds according to ad hoc hypotheses that eventually become “reason.”
When Copernicus proposed a moving earth, there was no “reason” to support the hypothesis.
People had to, in a trial and error way, learn to reason about nature in a new way.
The scientific method is the simplistic story scientists tell after making their discoveries. Science is life, not an algorithm to be mechanically executed, and life
cannot be reduced to such simple formulas.
Taking aim at Popper, Feyerabend challenges falsifiability. This, he says, is another simple idea.
If your theory is experimentally falsified, do you discard it?
The Bombshell
Kuhn says.
• No such thing as theory-neutral evidence.
• Thus, for Kuhn, defense of a paradigm (e.g., Darwinian biology, relativity theory) always circular: “Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense.”
This circularity leads to incommensurability
“The issue of paradigm choice can never be settled by logic and experiment alone.”
“There is no neutral algorithm for theory-choice, no systematic decision procedure which, properly applied, must lead each individual . . . to the same choice.”
Differently said,
The yardsticks you use to defend your pet paradigm arise from the paradigm itself, and therefore intrinsically privilege that paradigm.
Why then do people embrace one theory rather than another? (Given there is no theory-neutral algorithm for deciding among
theories.)
• Kuhn quotes with favor Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up familiar with it.”
• Kuhn: “The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced [by logic or experiment]” and involves emotional, aesthetic, and social considerations.
Kuhn says
“As in political revolution, so in [scientific] paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community.”
Incommensurable paradigms implies discontinuity between paradigms
• Is Aristotelian physics continuous with Newtonian physics?
• Is Newtonian physics continuous with Einsteinian physics?
No, says Kuhn.
• “Within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships with each other,” so it’s not just a matter of arguing, for example, that the earth, contra Aristotle, really does move.
• To argue that the earth really does move, one must not only redefine the earth but also related concepts of space and motion. The “conceptual web” must be re-articulated or re-knotted to allow for the earth’s motion.
The same point applies to flat Newtonian space versus curved Einsteinian space.
“What had previously been meant by space was necessarily flat, homogenous, isotropic, and unaffected by the presence of matter . . . . To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole. Only men who had together undergone or failed to undergo that transformation would be able to discover precisely what they agreed or disagreed about.”
Hence, a Gestalt switch. Each group plays dot-to-dot with the events of nature in a different way, and there is no underlying reality to
uniquely determine what someone will see.
Generally, what you see in nature is what you expect to see.
What card did you just see?
As you may guess, Kuhn does not believe in scientific progress
• “Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?”
• He says that science, like Darwinian evolution, is a-teleological. It is process without goal.
But most scientists don’t realize this for two reasons. First,
They have a simplistic, over-streamlined idea of how their discipline evolved. Why? Because, unlike people in the humanities, they never read the primary historical documents. How many physicists have read Newton? How many biologists have read Darwin? By not reading such documents, scientists insulate themselves from the meandering, non-progressive character of their discipline.
Another reason scientists don’t realize that science is non-progressive
Because most scientists do “normal science.” They work within the prevailing paradigm but never question it. They fill in pieces of the paradigm puzzle but never deal with puzzling issues (“anomalies”) that challenge the paradigm. So they feel like they’re making progress, and they are, but only within paradigm limits. There is, however, no progress from paradigm to paradigm (incommensurability).
Add to this the fact
that as we learn to re-see the world through a new paradigm we grow blind to older ways of seeing. They make no sense to us anymore, and so we treat them condescendingly. What is more, we can get away with belittling, say, Aristotle and his followers, because they’re no longer around to talk back or lobby for space in the intellectual and political arena.
Summing up, Kuhn made people mad because he insisted on
• 1) Incommensurability with its implication of scientific relativism and scientific non-progress.
• 2) Irrationalism: science, the alleged epitome of reason, is rooted in emotion, social dynamics, aesthetic preferences, etc.
• 3) The uncritical attitude of scientists toward the historical development of their discipline.
A common response to Kuhn:
• Hillary Putnam’s scientific realism: modern science must be true or approximately true given all its predictive, practical, and technological success. Otherwise, the success of science would be “miraculous.” That is, it would be incredibly strange if genes and quarks did not exist while nature at the observable level yielded results consistent with their supposed existence.
• What do you think?
Finally, Imre Lakatos
Science is not a matter of conviction:
“Scientists are very skeptical even of their best theories. Newton’s is the most powerful theory science has yet produced, but Newton himself never believed that bodies attract each other at a distance. So no degree of commitment to beliefs make them knowledge. Indeed, the hallmark of scientific behavior is a certain skepticism toward one’s most cherished theories. Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.”
Nor is it a matter of consensus:
“A statement may be pseudoscientific even if it is eminently ‘plausible’ and everybody believes in it, and it may be scientifically valuable even if it is unbelievable and nobody believes it. A theory may even be of supreme scientific value if no one understands it, let alone believes it.”
“The typical descriptive unit of great scientific achievements is not an isolated theory but rather a research programme.”
Components of a research programme:
(1) Core laws to be protected at almost all costs.
(2) Protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses.
(3) Powerful problem-solving machinery.
For example, Newtonian physics
Core laws: gravity & three laws of motion.
If a planet is not in the right place, call upon auxiliary hypotheses. E.g., unknown planet.
Use problem-solving machinery to calculate the position, mass, and velocity of the unknown planet.
In this way, Newtonian physics “digests” anomalies and turns them into “positive evidence.”
What is the distinctive feature of science?
The ability to make bold, stunning, novel predictions that pan out.
Like Halley’s prediction of a comet.
Like Einstein’s prediction of a star’s displacement when observed during solar eclipse.
Research programmes that make such predictions are “progressive.”
• But many research programmes make bold predictions that don’t pan out. E.g., Marxism.
• These are “degenerating” research programmes.
“Marxism predicted the absolute impoverishment of the working class. It predicted that the first socialist revolution would occur in the industrially most developed society. It predicted that socialist countries would be free of revolutions. It predicted that there will be no conflict of interest between socialist countries.”
“Marxism ‘explained’ all its failed predictions. It ‘explained’ the rising living standards of the working class [in capitalist societies] by devising a theory of imperialism; it ‘explained’ even why the first socialist revolution occurred in industrially backward Russia. It ‘explained’ Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968.”
The difference between progressive and degenerating research programmes:
“The Newtonian programme led to novel facts; the Marxist programme lagged behind the facts and has been running fast to catch up with them.”
This is how we distinguish between science and pseudoscience.
“The problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not merely a problem of armchair philosophy: it is of vital social and political relevance.”
Lakatos believed his distinction between progressive and degenerating programmes allows reason to prevail against ideological muck.
“Do we have to capitulate and agree that a scientific revolution is just an irrational change in commitment, that it is a religious conversion. Tom Kuhn arrived at this conclusion after discovering the naivety of Popper’s falsificationism. But if Kuhn is right, there is no explicit demarcation between science and pseudoscience, no distinction between scientific progress and intellectual decay; there is no objective standard of honesty.”
• Important to note that Lakatos grew up in Hungary under Nazi and Soviet regimes. This shaped his thinking. Reason for him was a weapon against totalitarian ideology.
• By contrast, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and other proponents of scientific irrationalism grew up in democratic societies.
Lakatos saw firsthand what ideology can do to science.
“The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1949 declared Mendelian genetics pseudoscientific and had it advocates, like Vavilov, killed in concentration camps; after Vavilov’s murder, Mendelian genetics was rehabilitated; but the Party’s right to decide what is science and publishable and what is pseudoscience and punishable was upheld.”
Continuing, he doesn’t let the West off the hook:
“The new liberal Establishment of the West also exercises the right to deny freedom of speech to what it regards as pseudoscience, as we have seen in the case of race and intelligence. All these judgments were inevitably based on some sort of demarcation criterion. And this is why the problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophers: it has grave ethical and political implications.”
• END
Finally, Larry Laudan’s response to irrationalism
• Argues that reason is an obscure concept and should not be deemed a yardstick for independently evaluating scientific success or progress.
• Reason is not a tool for solving scientific problems. Those problems come first, we solve them (by whatever means), and reason is merely an index of how swiftly and effectively we solve them.
In other words, Laudan deflates reason
• Reason is not something that pre-exists science as a kind of divine endowment, but merely the way we express satisfaction with our problem-solving abilities.
• Irrationalism falsely supposes that reason exists in a vacuum. Not so. Reason is just effective problem-solving.
For Laudan
• Humans are curious, problem-solving creatures. We do science because we enjoy figuring things out.
• Not because we love truth for its own sake or because we want to eradicate disease or other human ills.
• As Laudan says, science is “beyond veritas and praxis.” That is, beyond truth and practical purpose.
