What Science Is, and Is Not

Though apparently a conservative on the right side of many things, when Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is no Aristotle.
A little history: The first proto-scientist was the Greek intellectual Aristotle, who wrote many manuals of his observations of the natural world and who also was the first person to propose a systematic epistemology, i.e., a philosophy of what science is and how people should go about it. Aristotle's definition of science became famous in its Latin translation as: rerum cognoscere causas, or, "knowledge of the ultimate causes of things." For this, you can often see in manuals Aristotle described as the Father of Science.

The problem with that is that it's absolutely not true. Aristotelian "science" was a major setback for all of human civilization.
The first 'proto-scientist' represented a setback? A setback to what? A tradition that didn't exist?

It turns out that Gobry is wrong about almost everything he says about Aristotle, starting with what Aristotelian science is about and how it connects to the search for what Gobry calls "capital-T Truth." One of the distinguishing features of Aristotelian sciences is that they are separate. There is a science for every genus. Where there is not a proper genus to unify a field of human endeavor, no science is possible. This is why dialectical logic and rhetoric are not sciences, Aristotle says: they aren't restricted to one genus, so we can't have scientific knowledge of them. We use logic in many fields of inquiry, and rhetoric in political and ethical problems. We can't separate them cleanly enough for scientific knowledge, we can just study them as a kind of art.

This is why Aristotle spends so much time asking whether it is proper to have a science of different fields of knowledge. If you read the Metaphysics, which is the part of Aristotle's work most closely connected to anything like "capital-T Truth," the very first question he treats is whether there is a subject matter for this science. You can have a science of biology, because it treats living things. You can have a science of physics, because it treats motion. What sense would it make, Aristotle asks, to have a science of everything? Each has its own separate science, after all, so what point is there to trying to unify them? What's the subject matter that makes this a sensible project?

The answer is that Metaphysics is the study of existence itself, not of anything that exists. The idea is not to put it all together and get to a knowledge of the ultimate causes of, say, your horse in the pasture. It's to try to understand what is necessary for existence of the sort we observe to be possible.

Now as for all this being a setback, the slightest acquaintance with history would disprove the remark. (As, also, the remark about Aristotle being the first among these -- even if you only read Aristotle, you would discover the names of dozens of men whose work he references and considers.) The boom in Islamic civilization in the early Middle Ages came as they encountered and translated Aristotle, which is what changed them from a merely warlike collection of conquerors into a civilization proper. When their translations in Arabic were recovered by the Spanish during the reconquista, it produced a scientific and technical revolution that was revolutionary in the West. Without it, there would have been no development of the kind of science we do today at all. The foundations were laid by the recovery of Greek thought.

Further, it is not Aristotelian but modern science that believes you can unify the fields of knowledge. That is why you hear talk of 'unified field theories.' Aristotle thought you should study animals under one science, and motions of things under another, and chemical reactions under another. Modern science thinks that motions are produced by physics, which at a higher level of organization is chemistry, and certain kinds of chemicals become biochemistry, which ultimately leads to biology. Many Determinists have argued that everything, including the fields we call psychology or sociology, will prove to be reducible to physics -- with adequate knowledge, we would get to the ultimate causes of everything.

Well, sort of. The problem of existence, Metaphysics, isn't solvable that way. Commonly physicists respond that this means it is a non-problem, one we should ignore as not very interesting. Of course things exist; we can observe them. Why ask how it could be possible for there to be something rather than nothing? Obviously it is possible, and as far as we know it's not possible for there to be nothing (indeed, the laws of conservation suggest something like that).

By the way, who knows the story of how Einstein came to his revolutionary theories? It turns out it wasn't by careful, systematic observation. Gobry's picture of how modern science work doesn't even apply there: what Einstein did was philosophy, starting with a return to the Greeks and the problems they raised.

The other thing that he's wrong about is the idea that we could do 'scientific' studies of things like welfare issues. You can't, because you can't control and repeat in what are called 'social sciences,' but which are properly arts and not science at all (as Aristotle would have told you). That means your theories about what would have happened if you'd done something else instead are non-falsifiable. This is a problem raised by Karl Popper.

The other problem is that you can't control for variables in these very complex fields. To do a truly scientific experiment, you should hold everything constant except one variable. There is no potential to do that in a study involving human beings, especially human beings who are going about their lives in an uncontrolled fashion.

What we get in these artistic studies of human behavior and thought is only an analogy to science. It is characteristic of analogies that they always break at some point, because the only way to have an analogy that doesn't break is for the analogs to be identical (in which case you don't have an analogy at all, you have an identity). It may be worth doing -- we learn a lot from analogies. All our political and ethical reasoning is ultimately based on analogies, and those projects are worthwhile. But they are not, and cannot be, sciences.

History is not a science; if you try to do history as a science, your efforts are only analogous to science. Sociology and psychology and 'political science' are often conducted in analogical ways to science, but they don't offer control of variables nor can their theories be falsified.

That's why there are still all those Marxists in all those fields.

I'm sympathetic to a lot of Gobry's project, but he needs to go back to school and rethink his basic understanding of science -- and learn some history.

50 comments:

Eric Blair said...

That's a pretty good fisking.

Texan99 said...

Gobry's a Bacon man, as am I. He was really the first guy ever to write anything about an approach to science that I could make any sense of.

Grim said...

Yeah, I must have been in a foul mood this morning. That piece irritated me more than it should have.

Bacon was a great improvement over his competitor, Descartes & Co. There is significant value to the decoupling of physics and metaphysics, as the one is possible to pursue via the empirical scientific method (which Bacon largely developed), and the other really begins where that method has reached its limits.

Some of those limits are soft, as we develop new technologies and modes of inquiry. But some of the limits are hard, e.g., those that deal with things that can't be observed even in principle.

Tom said...

Meh. His definition of science is SO early 19th century:

Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation.

So I guess Darwin wasn't a scientist.

Grim said...

Nor, as I suggested, Einstein.

Texan99 said...

This controversy so often gets caught up, though, in the phonics-vs.-whole-language kind of dispute. As mad as I can be driven by a scientific style that neglects facts in favor of insisting that "things simply must be a certain way, I don't care about the data!"--it's kind of silly to claim that science has nothing to do with abstract reasoning about causes. Einstein could get way out ahead of himself, but experimentation ultimately proved him right about many of his wildest concepts. If it hadn't, he'd have been a guy with highfalutin notions, no more. Clearly abstract reasoning has some value, or no one would ever intuit a pattern from fragmentary evidence and then later be proved right.

What I value about Bacon is his insistence that pet theories should give way when new information comes in that they can't account for. The data shouldn't be the thing to give way, unless someone can show that they're lying, mistaken, etc.

Grim said...

Well, it's not quite as clean as that. We sometimes get experimental data that casts doubt on some of Einstein's claims -- for example, that the speed of light is the fastest speed possible in this universe. Whether to revise the theory or try to understand why we got the interesting data can turn out to be an unsolvable problem for the moment. This happens in a number of experiments about time direction, for example: is there an 'arrow of time' like the one we think we experience, or can things act causally 'backwards'?

So what we do isn't one or the other; we do both. We try to figure out both (a) what could account for the results besides Einstein being wrong, and also (b) what physical or metaphysical theories need to change if the results turn out to be right. For now, we don't really know which to change, so we try to set up an array of possibilities to consider in light of future results (or theories).

Texan99 said...

When you get experimental data that casts doubt, you doubt the data and you doubt the theory and you keep working until you figure it out, acknowledging our imperfect knowing in the meantime. You don't just ditch the data because you don't like the results. There are often prolonged periods of great doubt, when the right data are hard the get and the data we have can't be satisfactorily accounted for.

Grim said...

Right. And that's what we do now, and it's what they were doing at the early Modern period too. It just took longer, because tools were weaker -- both physical tools like telescopes, and intellectual tools like the scientific method (which didn't exist in its present form) or calculus (which Newton and Liebniz developed concurrently).

I would suggest that right now we're in a very analogous period, in which fundamental theories are going to have to change. But we don't even know what tools we need to develop in order to think about the problems in the right way. We are trying to design new experiments with our current tools, and that's fine -- we may get some interesting results if someone thinks of something clever. What we really need are tools we haven't yet imagined. Our descendants will say about us what we tended to say about the early Moderns: "Why couldn't they see that they needed this obvious thing?"

Texan99 said...

That may have been what some people were doing. Whom did you have in mind?

Tom said...

Something I wanted to bring out with Darwin is that the data does NOT just come from experiments. A lot of the data come from observation, and a lot of science is using reason and imagination to try to explain those observations. That's all Darwin did.

If we insist on repeatable experiments, then we can't know anything scientific about the past. It is not just history, but biology, geology, and cosmology that at least in part disappear from the sciences.

E.g., we can't say humans and other apes had a common ancestor. There is no way to go back to the past and run a controlled experiment on that. Sure, we can run experiments now on microbes or birds or what have you, but we can never go back and see how humans evolved in the distant past. So is the idea that humans and other apes share a common ancestor a scientific fact or not?

Or, again, what about the big bang and all the theories about the origins of the universe?

Tom said...

To continue, if we accept evolutionary and cosmological explanations of the past as scientific, then why not the social sciences or history? They do the same thing Darwin and the cosmologists do when they imagine the past based on current observations.

(Well, historians can use many different approaches, but it's certainly possible to approach doing history scientifically.)

I think the problem is that we are still trying to make believe that all science is all true all the time. It isn't, and in fact, different parts of the very same science have different probabilities of truth. We can do some experiments in evolutionary biology and the results of those experiments have a higher probability of being true than when we take what we learn and imagine how organisms evolved in the past. Same science, different methods and different probabilities of truth.

I think it's better to acknowledge that there are a number of ways of doing science that result in different probabilities of true results. It we develop and use a language of truth probabilities, if news articles reporting on science gave the reader both the conclusions of a scientific report and a gauge of how likely the report is to be true, it would be much better than a strict definition of science that would throw out evolutionary and cosmological theories about the past.

Grim said...

Well, you can do history in a way that is more similar to science than other ways, but the point is that in the more complex areas of investigation you lose access to the kinds of objects that can be held steady in terms of variables. Electrons are -- as far as we know, and maybe we just don't know enough -- more or less distinguished from each other by position. Human beings are so much more different from one another than electrons that there are going to be endless variables uncontrolled in any kind of experiment.

What that means is that you can -- in physics -- do something like what you can do in strict logic, where you have universals and particular examples of the universal. We tend to get confused into thinking that we can do that with complex objects, too: a man is a particular example of the universal "Man." But that's just not true: the man is Joe, whose mother and father were different from anyone else's mother and father (save his siblings), and who grew up in a particular culture and place and time, and who has a particular background and set of experiences unique to him, and...


So it's the difference between logic and analogy. The point of logic is that it can guarantee truth preservation if you obey the rules of logical deduction or (possibly, Hume's exception being noted) inference. Analogy, by contrast, is guaranteed not to preserve truth. Analogies always break. The question is only just when and where they break.

So it's a hugely different kind of endeavor, history versus physics. It's the difference between analogy and logic.

Tex, I suppose I was thinking of the guy who added that introduction to Copernicus that pointed out that his method should be considered a useful form for computing navigation -- not, at least not for now, an argument about the actual structure of physical reality. Him, and the others who found that acceptable (so that Copernicus didn't have Galileo's troubles). They were willing to consider alternative models and hold them in mind, but not to accept an insistence upon a result that -- though it made sense in a particular case -- as yet destroyed a whole set of scientific theories apparently well-supported under other experimental models. Indeed, those experiments still work; we've just learned, via new tools, that the reason they work is different from the original theories.

Grim said...

By the way, Tom, that analogy/logic distinction places the division between science and art somewhere inside of biology. Some of the simpler organisms can be studied as if they were logical objects. But somewhere in the midst of what we think of as a single discipline, we lose logic and begin doing analogical work. At that point, it's really natural philosophy of the old fashion -- which is where I think Darwin (and Einstein) were.

Texan99 said...

So it's OK to use this theory to make predictions that will work like a charm in the real world, but don't you dare claim you're accurately describing something different called "physical reality"! It's as if "physical reality" had some sacred meaning untouchable by physical data, which is exactly the (non)scientific approach I think Gobry was deprecating. I think we began to make rapid progress in science, after a very, very long stagnation, precisely when people began to reject this dichotomy.

It was never a good idea for us to found our faith on a particular theory about how the physical world works, such that new and upsetting physical theories--backed up by compelling data--felt like religious threats. That only led to the spectacle of the Church appearing to want to suppress the truth. I realize some members of the Church didn't really mean to do that, or not quite, or not always, but enough did so often enough to bring the faith into serious disrepute. It was a completely unnecessary self-inflicted wound.

Whenever we're tempted to discount a fact, we're on a dangerous track. Remember Screwtape's temptation tool: "Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason."

Grim said...

It's like your rejection of climate science, though: there are lots of experiments -- tons of them -- that say you're wrong. You have reasons to doubt those experiments, and some of them are about the character of the experimenters (who are, after all, human beings). Galileo was apparently an ass, and it's not very surprising that an arrogant ass ran into trouble when insisting that he was right and everyone else -- in spite of their working experiments -- should shove off. He just happened to be right.

In any case, what I meant was that people were still working on the problems -- just not insisting that they were clearly right and a much broader set of working theories that functioned quite well must be wrong. They were the ones who developed the tools that Galileo lacked, the ones that confirmed those findings and gave us the capacities (especially calculus) to see how to fix the problems the new theories created.

The Church was involved at all only because the Church was the only one providing education at that level. Moderns who interpret this as "the Church was suppressing the truth" forget that the Church was the backbone for the whole inquiry into the truth. They're the ones who translated the Greek works out of Arabic and into Latin. They're the ones who made sure they got taught. They funded most of the experiments and much of the engineering that turned the new scientific knowledge into practical goods that improved lives.

If they got sideways with Galileo, it's largely because he was the kind of arrogant jerk who gets sideways with people. It's not because they weren't interested in truth: they were the very ones who were at the heart of the search.

Texan99 said...

If the person advocating what seems like a dangerous idea it is acting like an ungrateful ass, the temptation to suppress his idea must become more than usually powerful, but it should still be resisted.

It's not actually very much like my objections to the current state of climate science. The data and theories are certainly in doubt, and rightly so. I don't expect any scientist to agree with me just because I don't think he's proved his case yet. I don't even expect him to stop publishing, despite the pernicious political use to which his theories are being put. I am, however, deeply disappointed in scientists who let their political convictions override their honesty--as demonstrated by their own private communications that come to light against their will--and I object to the pressure put on their adversaries to squelch their opposing views.

Even very good ideas can be brought into disrepute by those tactics. The suppression of ideas not only harms the process, in the end it undercuts the ideas the perpetrators sought to protect. I may be surprised some day to find that the concerns about global warming were not overblown at all. In that case, I'll regret that people who should have known better deafened much of the world to their opinion by engaging in what they thought was morally acceptable strategic misinformation.

Grim said...

My own sense about climate science is similar to yours: there is clear evidence of data manipulation even in spite of the best efforts to suppress it (as, analogously, the IRS's loss of the evidence that would allow us to judge the degree of political conspiracy is pretty convincing that there was a damning conspiracy). This seems to be combined with a highly suspicious campaign among supporters to make their opponents, including those who are merely skeptical, into villains who should shut up.

One of the most valuable and least read websites on the subject is Climate Debate Daily, which makes a point of publishing the best of both sides of the argument. It was founded by the same guy as Arts & Letters Daily, and after he died some scholars who love A&L Daily expressed how sad they were that such a wonderful and thoughtful man would give a platform (and thus credibility) to climate skeptics.

As for Galileo, he was educated in a Catholic monastery, and supported by both the Pope and the Jesuit order in his conflict with the rest of the Church up until he wrote the Dialogue that insulted the Pope (and everyone else). It was that, I think, more than anything else that did him in -- the Jesuits had been making a point to repeat his observations with telescopes, and had often (though not always) ended up changing their positions in line with his if they could confirm his claims. He's the one who insisted on turning the scientific debate into a fight, in the midst of an Italian culture in which men often killed each other over slanders.

Texan99 said...

Yes, he could have given in, but he wasn't the one who placed his adversaries under house arrest for disagreeing with him, and he didn't prevent publications of their ideas.

Texan99 said...

I'll certainly grant that, from the point of view of good manners and kindness in the initial disputation, Galileo came out much the worse in that interchange. But it's not an inspiring sort of freedom of thought that collapses in the face of irritating manners, ingratitude, or disrespect for one's superiors, inexcusable though that behavior may be. Centuries later, no one remembers that Galileo was rude, only that the Church discredited itself in the realm of science. It served to do very little but to alienate future generations, who took the science for granted but were extremely skeptical of the faith.

Grim said...

...no one remembers that Galileo was rude, only that the Church discredited itself in the realm of science.

A whole lot of hard work has been put in to helping people "remember" that, since it's not true. The Reformation powers, including the English after the 'reforms' designed to help Henry VIII take on a few more wives, were very interested in discrediting the Church as a backwards and evil power.

But the lights of science were lit first in the Church, and few institutions have done as much to preserve and forward it. That was true before, during, and after the case of the sainted martyr Galileo.

Texan99 said...

What's not true, that Galileo was rude?

I agree that the Church did a great deal to preserve and forward knowledge: all the more disappointing when it mis-stepped--a true own-goal. The Church needn't have been perfectly or in the right nor perfectly in the wrong. Like most groups of people, it was a mix.

Grim said...

That the Church 'discredited itself' on matters of science. I think that probably is what most people believe happened, but I also think the reason they believe it is less that they know the true facts of the story, and more that the legend was constructed that way by interested ancestors, and has passed down to us accordingly.

Unfortunately this was a particularly bad period for the Church, and yet also a particularly bright one; so much was happening so fast that it got some things gloriously right, and made errors as well. The political conditions in Italy at the time were part of that; it was dramatic, unstable, and a place of high tension. Charles V's brutal sack of Rome was within their memory as much as WWI was for us, after all; keeping things from spinning out of control must have seemed so important.

Texan99 said...

The Church discredited itself in the eyes of people with a particular view of science, including myself. It was a sad episode.

Grim said...

Well, as a priest once told me, the Church always looks like it first looked: God hung between two thieves. There are lots of sad episodes, some far worse than this, but it's still the best institution human beings have ever built. For science, and for other things.

Texan99 said...

There I think you go too far. The Church at one time did great things for science, at certain points in history and certain locations where other institutions for advancing science were undergoing a very rough patch. Whether the Church has since proved the best institution people have ever built for science is something I'd have a very hard time believing, though. For other things certainly, but not science.

Grim said...

I think you have to take the history as a single movement, in which case the Church performs well by comparison to any institution -- even the university. But even today the Church is greatly invested in the education of the next generation of scientists via its excellent schools worldwide, the funding of scientific experiments (still a major effort conducted by such institutions as the Pontifical Academy of Sciences), or the maintenance of research institutions and indeed research universities (many such institutions are part of the Church today). And if you include under 'science' the engineering business of providing scientific benefits in a practical way, the Church is the largest non-governmental provider of medical care in the world. Medical research at Catholic hospitals is always ongoing as well.

So I would say that, if you consider the history of the world as a whole, the Church is foremost. If you consider the present moment only, it is 'not unequal to most.'

Texan99 said...

Between "considerable" and "biggest ever" is a chasm that would have to be filled with something more specific.

Grim said...

I think it is filled with the fact that, unless you are imagining some very different institutions than I am, the Church has a priority relationship with them. It is as if a great oak were planted in a field, and from it fell many seeds, which grew and dropped seeds of their own. In time the forest was thick, but the grand old tree at the center of it all was still the greatest of the trees in the wood -- and the one most responsible for the coming to be of the forest.

The universities were modeled on the Church, the original ones were founded by the Church, staffed by the Church, and often funded by the Church until kings learned how helpful they were. Even government research grants to people educated in government schools including government universities don't escape this priority relationship, because those universities came to be out of a movement begun by the Church. She is the grand oak.

Ymar Sakar said...

This is why Aristotle spends so much time asking whether it is proper to have a science of different fields of knowledge.

If breakthroughs and out of the box thinking is desired, then don't separate the field, instead unite them in one person's creative mind.

If you wish for applied applications and engineered fulfillment of some field work, then separate them and have experts (that know -10% total about every other field, including the subfields in their field). Thus you get experts like Hawking that thinks he knows what God thinks, due to mathematics, and how the quantum fields of Higgs Boson doesn't quite exist the way Higgs or Boson said it did. The proof was a bit contradictory, though, but that can be mathematically smoothed over, the experts think.

So you got an ultra specialized expert, aka engineer, that can develop a field after that field has had breakthroughs in conceptualization, such as quantum mechanics and Newton's Mechanics.

Then you got the unified thinkers that parallel process the entire human experience via multiple different yet coordinated fields.

The fact that Aristotle came up with some funny looking essences, comparable to the Chinese 5 elements theory, is not the product of unified field research and conceptualization. The product of unified thought is to breakthrough human limitations on cultural boxes and restraints, morally, socially, economically, or militarily.

Being able to think in two plus languages and translate concepts from one language to another, from one field to another, unites disparate concepts into a sufficient whole, one necessarily to break through human limitations called "common sense" and "morality". Or at least get a better morality.

Texan99 said...

Yes, looked at that way, the Church could be said to be the biggest influence on science. Or the Greek philosophers could. Or the invention of writing could. It's a little too broad an approach for my taste, because it assumes that nothing that comes after Event X could possibly have happened without Event X--true enough, but not illuminating in terms of which influences have been the greatest over time. That's particularly true when a particular institution is sometimes helpful and sometimes not.

Ymar Sakar said...

That the Church 'discredited itself' on matters of science. I think that probably is what most people believe happened, but I also think the reason they believe it is less that they know the true facts of the story, and more that the legend was constructed that way by interested ancestors, and has passed down to us accordingly.

Most people are retards that cannot think outside the box, instead they require slave shackles to believe themselves free and smart. Essentially, they do as they are told and believe as they are told, whether it be legend, myth, truth, good or evil.

They never conducted their own independent investigation. They merely took on the word of their social indoctrination controls, that because everyone said it was so, then it was so. The exceptions were the quacks, the crazies, the insane, the mad scientists, and the religious prophets. Pay them no mind.

Many myths are passed down to collar the ignorant masses. Whether that is done for good or evil things, is a separate issue.

Texan99 said...

No doubt, but I'm familiar with the facts that have come down to us in history about the Galileo incident, as well as a variety of early and modern interpretations of what happened. I don't take the virulently anticlerical view of the conflict, but I'm not inclined to conclude that the Church's representatives came out smelling like a rose, either.

Grim said...

Yes, looked at that way, the Church could be said to be the biggest influence on science. Or the Greek philosophers could. Or the invention of writing could.

Well, writing isn't an institution, it's a technology. 'The Greek philosophers' weren't either, although Plato's Academy was, and for 500 years it trained the wise. But it was very secretive -- even today, we can chiefly speculate about some of its core lessons.

The Greeks as a civilization (is a civilization an institution?) were certainly tremendously responsible, to be sure. But even noble Athens sinned against Socrates in much the way you feel the Church sinned against Galileo. And almost twice: Aristotle famously fled to avoid a similar fate. Yet who can doubt the value of Athens, or its glorious place in the history of human thought?

Texan99 said...

We can agree that an institution can be valuable even though it makes awful mistakes from time to time.

Grim said...

Indeed we can! If it's a human institution, it could only be valuable on those terms.

I'm generally open to thoughts about how to improve such institutions -- such as forcing the Vatican to submit accusations of priestly abuse of children to the law for an independent investigation. That seems proper to me, even though I have a generally high opinion of priests. Still, it's happened often enough -- and has never been punished harshly enough by the Church itself, which has laid down the penalties it used to deploy with such vigor, though in the case of child molestation I think such vigor would be wholly warranted.

Tom said...

By the way, Tom, that analogy/logic distinction places the division between science and art somewhere inside of biology. Some of the simpler organisms can be studied as if they were logical objects. But somewhere in the midst of what we think of as a single discipline, we lose logic and begin doing analogical work. At that point, it's really natural philosophy of the old fashion -- which is where I think Darwin (and Einstein) were.

Same for cosmology, geology, and any discipline that tries to say anything about the past.

When you toss all that out, your definition is just muddying the waters. It fails to reflect the reality of science to such a degree that it isn't useful for communication. When you say "science," you're talking about something very different than even the majority of scientists are talking about when they say "science."

I am, however, very interested in why you think that should be the definition of "science."

Tom said...

As for Galileo and the Church, the Church was wrong in exactly the same way everyone else was wrong in 17th century Europe: they failed to fully understand the Enlightenment and implement its natural rights and freedoms across the board.

Have you read Mario Biagioli's "Galileo, Courtier"? It's the common interpretation of the event within the History of Science community.

There hasn't been a decent popular treatment of the case, unless it's come out in the last 3 years. Pretty much all of them reflect Enlightenment anti-Catholic bigotries.

Texan99 said...

I can think of few disputes sillier than whether science is better than philosophy, or vice versa.

Grim said...

My definition of science is: that subset of natural philosophy that admits of falsifiability and logical rather than analogical objects.

Why? Because of the critical issue of truth preservation. You can be sure of what you're saying here, in a way that's impossible in other inquiries. In fact, the cases couldn't be more different: logical forms with truth-preservation guarantees mean that truth can be guaranteed if the forms are right. Analogical forms of any kind mean that the guarantee runs just the other way: you can be sure that the analogy will break. Your attention needs to be on where and why it breaks.

Two things are important about that.

1) Science has won a kind of cachet among ordinary people, who get confused by the claim that a 'scientific study' proves X,Y,Z. Well, it might, if it's science by my definition: since something else has been proven, and logical forms are possible, we can offer a truth guarantee to our deduction. But otherwise, proof is not possible. What we've got is a probabilistic argument, which is fine. But we could be clearer about the difference between proof and maybe.

2) Scientists have an idea that they're doing something 'better' than philosophy. If you stick to the places where there are truth-preservation guarantees, you're doing something more certain. But most of reality doesn't admit of that. If you're going to be honest with yourself about what you are doing, you need to admit the distinction between logical and analogical arguments. If you're doing sociology, your methodology likely doesn't even get to 'probably.' If you think you're a scientist, you're just wrong. You're not a scientist; you're not a good natural philosopher. You're talking nonsense. The same goes for psychology and a lot of other fields that allege themselves as sciences, but which lack either truth preservation guarantees or the intellectual rigor to admit their limitations.

Grim said...

I can think of few disputes sillier than whether science is better than philosophy, or vice versa.

All you can say is that you've done the most certain thing you can do, given the limits of what you are interested in researching. If you're in a complex area where truth-guarantees aren't possible, philosophy may be the only thing you can do -- not the 'best' thing, nor the second-best, but the only thing.

String theory is like this. It's falling out of some things we get out of particle physics, which is science if anything is. But it's non-falsifiable thinking about the conditions that would make experimental results happen. That's philosophy, and good that it is. If you want to talk about that, you should learn about how to do philosophy well.

Texan99 said...

Philosophy will have to bump along without me, purely a matter of personal interest and preference. I'm glad other people are working on it.

Grim said...

What Aristotle says about metaphysics is that it's useless: the reason to study it isn't for something else, but rather, everything else is for it. So, you know, if you want science to be good for something, metaphysics won't ever be good for anything. You know whatever science has to offer so you can think about metaphysics, if you're inclined.

If you aren't, that's fine. As Plato said in the Republic, there are different kinds of people and society should have a place for all of them.

Texan99 said...

It could hardly be more alien to my cast of thought. Best leave it to those who care for it.

Grim said...

Quite right.

Ymar Sakar said...

Philosophy=
Epistemology
+
Metaphysics
=Ethics

Ethics->Politics
Politics->Beauty

For scientific experiments, epi and meta are mostly involved, and a little bit of ethics.

I see it as inductive vs deductive.

Scientists come up with a hypothesis, such as Ohm's theory, then test it by looking at the circuit to see if in all cases it matches the predicted outcome. If so, then it becomes a Law, like Newton's Laws. There are some things it may not match, but since it ain't on no circuit, it can be ignored for working engineering purposes.

Scientific corruption comes when the scientist has a pet theory, they take a hammer to the circuit, then test the circuit and say that the theory is right/wrong. That's called corrupting the data. In modern days, they just burn the circuit down, replace it with something that looks the same but has been manufactured differently, then say "I have experimented and done a study, believe me now peons".

History is not a science; if you try to do history as a science, your efforts are only analogous to science. Sociology and psychology and 'political science' are often conducted in analogical ways to science, but they don't offer control of variables nor can their theories be falsified.

The scope of the Left's psychological manipulation fields are too broad. Because it was designed mostly as a engineered application for mass mind control. If they narrowed it down to a single person, it would be both more art and more scientifically isolated in variables. They could make theories that would apply to one person or category of person. Then build up the foundations of connection from there, just as ancient physics did. Finding new particles, elements, or quantum magick doesn't invalidate things, it only improves it. But if people's foundation of human nature is erroneous, then everything else breaks down.

It's much easier to use a Sarah Palin as the model on control variable, since people like her are less... vulnerable to external environmental factors than the mob of massive ignorant clowns that call themselves independent citizens. The ones that obey Authority like mindless stormtroopers and myrmidons are easily experimented on and influenced. This is human experimentation using control variables and unknown variables. It's not the statistical mishmash people call a "study" where they grab a random collection of nobodies and then thinks this is a representation of humanity (most of them are poor college students looking to make a buck, that isn't porn).



Scientists have often times made breakthroughs by not having a theory. They just get this weird datum and have no idea how to explain it. So first comes the data, then the hypothesis that proves it. This is the opposite of the other logick people mostly use, which is to come up with a theory and then try to prove it exists. That would be the natural result of the Higgs Boson hypothesis on field mechanics. They couldn't find the field or the particle they were looking for, so they kept developing metaphysical theories about what it should or could be, until they did find what they were looking for. Others like Hawking said it didn't exist. Didn't exist vs does exist, pretty simple control variable.

Ymar Sakar said...

I'm sympathetic to a lot of Gobry's project, but he needs to go back to school and rethink his basic understanding of science -- and learn some history.

That would be rather counter productive. School these days make you dumber and less creative. They are not Aristotle or Plato's descendants in education.

Grim said...

By the way, Tom, I want to take a moment to say that I'm sensitive to your point. Words mean what people use them to mean, and in colloquial terms -- even among scientists -- "science" generally means disciplined efforts to pry into the truth of nature. That's more or less it: we include things like geology and at least the more disciplined and empirical forms of history when we talk that way.

That's fine, and I don't mean to sound like Nobody Should Ever Talk That Way. But there's a distinction worth capturing between the logical and the analogical, whether you choose to capture it in the definition of "science" or somewhere else. For me, that seems like the right place to do it. Not for Aristotle, though, who was happy to speak of politics as a science (as do we: "political science"), because it was a unified field of study with a particular end.

Tom said...

Grim, thank you for the explanation. I think that's a very useful way of looking at it for certain intellectual projects.

I prefer my much looser definition, however, for two reasons. First, pragmatically, you aren't going to get most scientists, much less most people, to agree to that definition. It's more likely that we'll convince people to start looking at probabilities; that's something that could even be done from the outside without the scientists' (or "scientists'") consent. It would also have the same benefit as yours, to wit, making people realize what they're talking about when they say "science."

The second reason I prefer mine is that, from my study of the history of science, it seems that in the past, very strict definitions of science have reduced the use of imagination and other useful human qualities in the field and kept science moving very slowly. More imagination lets science and technology progress more quickly, even if it has to go back and fill in the loose spots later.

Tom said...

We posted simultaneously. I was replying to your earlier definition of science.

But there's a distinction worth capturing between the logical and the analogical, whether you choose to capture it in the definition of "science" or somewhere else.

I completely agree. I just disagree with you about the place.