critiques of science

zhao

there are no accidents
i kinda wish Nomad and K-punk and some of the others more versed in post-structuralism were here...

I'll see about getting nomad.

proper responses later...
 

mms

sometimes
post modernisim or even continental philosophy and science just seem diamerically opposed, historically they have been since luce irigay's idea that e equals mc squared was a sexed equation and lacan's flawed attempts at maths. Philosophy, logic and mathematics aren't though of course. There is a philosophy of science but it's mainly about logic.
A bit off thread it always struck me how badly science and christianity get on nowdays, it's clear that intelligent design is flawed, so why not thank god for science instead? It just betrays the fact that really intelligent design is about narratives, which adam and eve and the bible are the end of the day. It's also no suprise that new age guru guys are encouraging readers to get into i.d.
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Naive question: is the point here that we're working with different sorts of knowledge, not with different ways of getting at the same knowledge? If I want to know how much electricity I can put through a piece of copper wire before it melts, I'd ask a scientist for instance, whereas if I needed to deal with the inevitability of death (to use a cheesy example) I'd ask a priest or a poet or a musician. So would the 'holistic' discipline not be something that views these two things as completely different sorts of question requiring entiely different approaches - or indeed views one of them as truth / knowledge and the other as hot air - but something that views them both being aspects of some sort of unified drive towards understanding stuff?

I think a very important distinction here is that if you were to ask any two (competent) scientists the copper-wire question, you'd get the same answer, whereas you could get completely different answers about death from, say, a Christian, a Buddhist, a nihilist and an existentialist and no one of them would be any more correct or valid than the others.
 
Last edited:

tryptych

waiting for a time
i kinda wish Nomad and K-punk and some of the others more versed in post-structuralism were here...

I'll see about getting nomad.

proper responses later...

Zhao, I know fuck all about post-structuralism but I've studied as both a scientist and a historian/philosopher of science, and I'm mainly with you. So I'll have a crack at some of this stuff!


[quote = Edward] Science is not a philosophy. There are philosophical arguments as to why scientific reasoning is valid and of course they are not beyond criticism, but it is the best thing we've got for creating knowledge, without doubt.
[/quote]

Science is two things - a methodology and a philosophy. The philosophical portion is of course what the epistemological function of science is; if you are a Popperian, which you clearly are, then the method of science is clawing you ever onwards towards an un-obtainable "truth", better and better approximations produced over time as science refines itself.

But you can't just say "go read some Popper". Popper thought he'd solved the problem of induction, by introducing falsificationism, which if you read the "Logic of Scientific Discovery" he clearly falls down on - lots of hand waving to try and convince us that induction an a negative direction (i.e. falsification) isn't really induction at all. See Lakatos' critiques for starters...

And Thomas Kuhn's theories about paradigm change are a load of nonsense.

And I can say the same about Popper's theories... which gets us nowhere

Science is not a philosophy. There are philosophical arguments as to why scientific reasoning is valid and of course they are not beyond criticism, but it is the best thing we've got for creating knowledge, without doubt.

This is self contradictory - if you want to take a position on whether science is valid or not, you must agree or disagree with its fundamental philosophical claims. Being a scientist, or a supporter of science, means you tacitly agree to certain commitments - i.e. materialism, induction (or falsifcationalism), reductionism etc. Science is only the best thing for creating certain kinds of knowledge - it's pretty useless for giving you any knowledge about literature, music and so on...

Mr. Tea said:
Define "higher". Science is not about God, or love, or the soul, or the meaning of Life. These are the realms of philosophers, theologians, mystics and poets. Science is about trying to rationally understand and explain the phenomena of the physical universe, nothing more, nothing less. This could mean trying to reconstruct the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang or it could mean sequencing the DNA of bread mould.

But materialist science is about god, the soul and the meaning of life - the material universe being all there is, then unless these things have a physical basis they do not exist at all (I admit I'm using physicalism and materialism as synonyms here - but that's what I assume you're doing to unless you substribe to some sort of non-reductive physicalism).

Possibly a better way of getting at what Zhao is talking about, instead of describing science as "narrative" or "ideology" , is science as discipline. Science is not just the methodology, but the system of academia, peer review, and all the human aspects that go along with it. Science as practice doesn't always (and radically, never) follow its idealised objectivity, and how can it, when it takes place in the minds of subjective agents? Which is were you get back into this age old argument about whether an objective "view-from-nowhere" is possible or if if you can never escape the confines of your own subjectivity (Wittgenstein, Heidegger and all that follows...)

Collins & Pinch's The Golem: what everyone should know about science is a very readable introduction instances of science's failure to live up to its standards "in the field", a lot less philosophically technical than the book Zhao quoted from the introduction (although that does look an interesting read now I've gone back and read the full posts...)
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
But materialist science is about god, the soul and the meaning of life - the material universe being all there is, then unless these things have a physical basis they do not exist at all (I admit I'm using physicalism and materialism as synonyms here - but that's what I assume you're doing to unless you substribe to some sort of non-reductive physicalism).
Does science have to be materialist, though? What I thought scientists said, strictly speaking, is that unless things have a physical basis they don't have a place in a scientific model for the physical world, not that this model is then the same thing as Reality and that therefore things without a physical basis aren't Real....
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Does science have to be materialist, though? What I thought scientists said, strictly speaking, is that unless things have a physical basis they don't have a place in a scientific model for the physical world, not that this model is then the same thing as Reality and that therefore things without a physical basis aren't Real....

I would broadly agree with this. I happen not to believe in ghosts or God or things of that nature, but there's no way science can ever be used to disprove their existence, because they are inherently supernatural, and science is, at its most fundamental, the study of the natural universe. On less mystical, but somewhat more metaphysical, grounds, you can talk about things like patterns, cultures, emotions, opinions, ideas, numbers, languages - all things which unarguably 'exist', but have no physical reality. Perhaps you can call them gestalt entities or emergent phenomena or something - I don't know, I'm not an ontologist. What's interesting is that in some branches of physics we deal with entities such as 'space-time' or the quantum 'state vector' which aren't necessarily physically real either (especially in the latter case) but can nonetheless be used to formulate calculations that predict observables, i.e. tangible phenomena.

So yes, it's not necessarily the case that something without physical reality has no Reality at all.
 
Interesting posts,especially Tryptych... I'm a bit too raved out to reply to that one right now but will post some thoughts tomorrow hopefully.

But Mr Tea, I am shocked that you are talking about the supernatural. Surely "nature" is just everything that exists. So IF there are ghosts, god etc, they are part of it too.
Do you think there are things that do not obey the same laws of nature as everything else? If there are, doesn't that just mean we've got the laws of nature wrong? Or do we need two sets of rules? And then we may discover super-supernatural things that require a third.... that way lies trouble!

Slothrop, I think one of the fundamentals of most scientific viewpoints is that everything that exists has a physical basis. Otherwise in what sense can it be said to exist?
Even your dreams exist as physical patterns of neuron firings inside your brain.

But materialist science is about god, the soul and the meaning of life - the material universe being all there is, then unless these things have a physical basis they do not exist at all (I admit I'm using physicalism and materialism as synonyms here - but that's what I assume you're doing to unless you substribe to some sort of non-reductive physicalism).

I'm in agreement with that, although I think there is in all probablility more than one "universe" as we usually define the term. Will get back to you....

Lory D was awesome on Saturday night.....:cool:
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
But Mr Tea, I am shocked that you are talking about the supernatural. Surely "nature" is just everything that exists. So IF there are ghosts, god etc, they are part of it too.
Do you think there are things that do not obey the same laws of nature as everything else? If there are, doesn't that just mean we've got the laws of nature wrong? Or do we need two sets of rules? And then we may discover super-supernatural things that require a third.... that way lies trouble!
Just as well I don't belive in it, then!

I think every physical process happens according to laws that are, in principle, amenable to rational understanding. However, there are quite clearly cases of very complex systems which interact and evolve in ways that are not actually physical as such, in that the laws (or 'guidelines') governing such systems cannot be derived from physical first principles. I'm talking about things like culture, languages, ecosystems, economies. I'm not a reductionist.

Going back to the supernatural, I suppose it's conceivable that you could have a kind of Aristotlean 'one set of laws for the physical world, and one for the spiritual', or something like that. Obviously as someone who has no truck with mumb-jumbo I don't find this necessary myself.
 
if you are a Popperian, which you clearly are, then the method of science is clawing you ever onwards towards an un-obtainable "truth", better and better approximations produced over time as science refines itself.

I think I am in a lot of ways but not 100%... I'll have to do more reading but I agree with the rest of the quote.

"lots of hand waving to try and convince us that induction an a negative direction (i.e. falsification) isn't really induction at all. See Lakatos' critiques for starters..."

I don't think Popper quite understood what he had come up with or didn't express it that well. There is a lot of hand-waving as you say, but I think he was basically right.
I think the "negative direction" as you put it is what we can use to test our theories, and that we rely on the best theories we have, that have passed the most tests so far (in fact have not failed any experimental tests so far). In my reading of Popper, it is wrong to say "the theories have passed many tests so they are probably true" (ie induction)... it is right to say "the fact that they have not failed tests that means they are our best guess so far." I think this is a fundamental difference that goes beyond accusations of hand-waving.

And Thomas Kuhn's theories about paradigm change are a load of nonsense.
And I can say the same about Popper's theories... which gets us nowhere

Fair dos but I don't want to go into a lengthy critique of Kuhn unless you really want me to! It's a bit of a sidetrack....
Popper is not beyond criticism but I think he on the right track.

me: Science is not a philosophy.
you: This is self contradictory

yes I suppose you're right. if I think the scientific method is valid then it follows I have an underlying philosophical reason or reasons for doing so.

- if you want to take a position on whether science is valid or not, you must agree or disagree with its fundamental philosophical claims.

yes, kind of.... but it's not universally agreed on what those claims are.

Being a scientist, or a supporter of science, means you tacitly agree to certain commitments - i.e. materialism, induction (or falsifcationalism), reductionism etc.

Materialism, yes.
I absolutely do not believe in induction, i don't think anyone has for a very long time! I'm not exactly sure how to define falsificationism so I won't comment.

Reductionism is a moot point as well. Personally I think that there are useful theories that emerge at higher levels that cannot be deduced from first principles, or if they can then it's not simple... and it's certainly worth using these theories even though they were not arrived at "from the bottom up".
eg. Darwin's evolution as propounded by Dawkins. I think that evolution does follow from the laws of physics (certain substances are good at getting themselves copied in certain environments) but I don't think anyone would've come up with such a successful theory without studying animals and plants and so on.


Science is only the best thing for creating certain kinds of knowledge - it's pretty useless for giving you any knowledge about literature, music and so on...

There's a key difference between "creating knowledge" and "giving you any knowledge" - science aims to find out things nobody already knew. Knowledge about literature for example is created when the literature is written, not when you learn about it. Learning about it at college or whatever is just moving knowledge from one person's brain to another's.


Science is not just the methodology, but the system of academia, peer review, and all the human aspects that go along with it. Science as practice doesn't always (and radically, never) follow its idealised objectivity, and how can it, when it takes place in the minds of subjective agents?

Well, we can agree to disagree on our definitions of "science". The thing I am defending is science done right. All along I have said to Zhao that I fully support justified criticism of individual scientists, the industrial/pharmacological complex etc etc.

I think science is the method and not the surrounding crap.
Just like the truly religious don't confuse God with priests and churches (could be a dodgy example :slanted: )


Which is were you get back into this age old argument about whether an objective "view-from-nowhere" is possible or if if you can never escape the confines of your own subjectivity

yes of course but the science I have been defending is demonstrably a useful way to get beyond subjectivity and generate usable knowledge about the universe that actually works.
you can't stop being an individual but by inventing a theory and then using the real world to test it in various ways you can find things out that are more reliable than any other method of finding things out that we know of.

Collins & Pinch's The Golem: what everyone should know about science is a very readable introduction instances of science's failure to live up to its standards "in the field"

I haven't read it but I am quite sure there are myriad examples of people calling themsleves scientists who are unworthy of the name.
I don't want to defend them.
I just want to make a distinction between them and science.

Actually I think the religious analogy I used above is OK.
Clergy often do bad things, child abuse etc. but it doesn't follow that God is bad or corrupt.

The same goes for those who claim to represent science but use its name for dishonest ends and misrepresent what they are really doing. They are bad, not science.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"I absolutely do not believe in induction, i don't think anyone has for a very long time!"
I'm not sure about that. I remember a few years ago that my girlfriend was studying this and told me about David Papineau (and others I guess) who constructed an inductive argument for induction that he argued is not circular.
I couldn't remember it myself but from a quick google, the gist of it seems to be that, for an argument that you can use induction in the future the steps are as follows

1. Induction has worked in the past
2. So induction will work in the future

Apparently it's not circular because it does not have its conclusion as a premise.

I got that from here, there is a fair bit about it

http://www.ling.rochester.edu/~feldman/philosophy152/12-induction.htm
 
My first thought:
Underlying assumption = the future will be the same as the past.
On what basis can you make this assumption?

Now I will go and look at the article. :)
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Didn't get much from that article I'm afraid, no mention of this Rosineau chap...."
No, I'm not sure that I did really either to be honest (though it's Papineau I was talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Papineau)

"By the way, if you're not sure about why it's not cool to say the future will be the same as the past, go and read about Russells Chicken!"
Yes, seen that before.

I'm not totally sure exactly what he (Papineau) is arguing, presumably not that induction is always valid because anyone can produce countless counter-examples. I mean, we can probably guess that the sun will rise tomorrow but we can also guess that one day the sun won't rise. Maybe his formulation is supposed to provide some justification for the first bit, I'll ask my girlfriend to explain it to me again.
 

Townley

Member
I absolutely do not believe in induction, i don't think anyone has for a very long time!

So are you (inductively?) arguing that:

1) People have not believed in using induction for a very long time.
2) There is something wrong with using induction.

Seriously though, don't we all think inductively all the time, including scientists?
 
Lol ^

Seriously though, don't we all think inductively all the time, including scientists?

I suppose so but it's just a lazy short cut and if you find yourself needing a better explanation for your beliefs, the explanation is (hopefully) there.

For example, yes I think the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday and the day before.
But in my heart of hearts I know that is not an explanation, and the real explanation is that we have theories about the motion of the sun and the earth and so on which have not yet failed any experimental tests so we choose to act as if they are true until they are falsified.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
For example, yes I think the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday and the day before.
But in my heart of hearts I know that is not an explanation, and the real explanation is that we have theories about the motion of the sun and the earth and so on which have not yet failed any experimental tests so we choose to act as if they are true until they are falsified.

So perhaps induction - as someone once said about quantum mechanics - is 'FFAPP': Fine For All Practical Purposes, even if it isn't logically watertight? Or perhaps it's best viewed as a useful pointer to theories or models which can later be proven by more rigorous means, such as deduction?
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
I don't think Popper quite understood what he had come up with or didn't express it that well. There is a lot of hand-waving as you say, but I think he was basically right.
I think the "negative direction" as you put it is what we can use to test our theories, and that we rely on the best theories we have, that have passed the most tests so far (in fact have not failed any experimental tests so far). In my reading of Popper, it is wrong to say "the theories have passed many tests so they are probably true" (ie induction)... it is right to say "the fact that they have not failed tests that means they are our best guess so far." I think this is a fundamental difference that goes beyond accusations of hand-waving.

This is really dredging my memory, but.. as I remember, Popper tries to argue that falsification is like deduction. But I don't see why saying "a theory has failed x tests, so it should not be our best guess" is any different from saying a theory has passed x tests, so it should be our best guess" - i.e. they're both forms of induction.

Lakatos' critique/re-construction of Popper is to say that "falsifiying" a theory is not always a reason to get rid of it. Sometimes the theory is too poweful, too useful etc and other factors come into play - basically social ones, where he leans towards Kuhn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakatos gives an OK overview... how much of a critic of Popper he was later on in his career is i think debatable though.

Fair dos but I don't want to go into a lengthy critique of Kuhn unless you really want me to! It's a bit of a sidetrack....
Popper is not beyond criticism but I think he on the right track.

I don't think it's much of a sidetrack - after all, at the time Popper and Kuhn were directly pitched against each other as offering alternative views of what science is. Kuhn is not beyond criticisim but I think he was on the right track. ;) ;)



yes, kind of.... but it's not universally agreed on what those claims are.


Materialism, yes.
I absolutely do not believe in induction, i don't think anyone has for a very long time! I'm not exactly sure how to define falsificationism so I won't comment.

I think you'll find you do believe in induction - otherwise what rational reason do you have for not stepping out of a 10th floor window? (the classic example).

Reductionism is a moot point as well. Personally I think that there are useful theories that emerge at higher levels that cannot be deduced from first principles, or if they can then it's not simple... and it's certainly worth using these theories even though they were not arrived at "from the bottom up".
eg. Darwin's evolution as propounded by Dawkins. I think that evolution does follow from the laws of physics (certain substances are good at getting themselves copied in certain environments) but I don't think anyone would've come up with such a successful theory without studying animals and plants and so on.

Non-reductive materialism (Davidson?) and other non reductive philosophies, like emergent/enactive theories that Mr. Tea makes reference too, are very much on the fringes of mainstream science (and interestingly, in the latter case draw quite heavily on continental philosophy).

Refering back to what Slothrop and Mr Tea said, of course one can be a non-materialist scientist. There are lots of scientists who are religious, and hold some form of dualism, whereby their science investigates one realm, but has no meaing or use in the other, the "spiritual". Again, this is fringe stuff, and generally frowned upon by the mainstream.. more on this later as I must leave work now!

There's a key difference between "creating knowledge" and "giving you any knowledge" - science aims to find out things nobody already knew. Knowledge about literature for example is created when the literature is written, not when you learn about it. Learning about it at college or whatever is just moving knowledge from one person's brain to another's.

Huh? I don't understand - knowledge about science is created only on the very cutting edge of experimental science, not when you learn about it either. What's the difference? No one gets to practice "science" in college either, it's just learning about experiments and theories already created. You admit that literature can create knowledge also...

Well, we can agree to disagree on our definitions of "science". The thing I am defending is science done right. All along I have said to Zhao that I fully support justified criticism of individual scientists, the industrial/pharmacological complex etc etc.

I think science is the method and not the surrounding crap.
Just like the truly religious don't confuse God with priests and churches (could be a dodgy example :slanted: )

Now we get down to it... there is no such thing as "science done right", and science is precisely the "surrounding crap" - without that surrounding crap there would be no science.


yes of course but the science I have been defending is demonstrably a useful way to get beyond subjectivity and generate usable knowledge about the universe that actually works.
you can't stop being an individual but by inventing a theory and then using the real world to test it in various ways you can find things out that are more reliable than any other method of finding things out that we know of.



I haven't read it but I am quite sure there are myriad examples of people calling themsleves scientists who are unworthy of the name.
I don't want to defend them.
I just want to make a distinction between them and science.

Actually I think the religious analogy I used above is OK.
Clergy often do bad things, child abuse etc. but it doesn't follow that God is bad or corrupt.

The same goes for those who claim to represent science but use its name for dishonest ends and misrepresent what they are really doing. They are bad, not science.


The whole point of The Golem is that it is about fundamental lynchpin experiments and theories, exemplars of "proper science" and how, in fact, they are not, including Pasteur, the Michelson-Morley experiment etc. This is of course Kuhn's point too. Science at the cutting edge is determined not by appeals to "proper" objective science, but subjective factors.

more later...
 
Last edited:
Top