September 22, 2009
Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks
by Nick Smyth
I
The most interesting thing about this manoeuvre is that almost no-one performing it—scientist, philosopher, or otherwise—will be in possession of a single defensible definition of “science”. In other words, they won't know what they're talking about.
The situation is not good. In the defense of progress and civilization, some very smart people are marshalling a weak and ill-defined concept which cannot support the rhetorical weight they have placed upon it. The cranks may one day discover that this is so, and they will immediately (and devastatingly) point to the irony involved in being called irrational by people who do not know what they are talking about.
What's worse, I contend that this ignorance is unavoidable: there is no real boundary between “science” and “non-science”, and all of our posturing amounts to little more than power politics under the guise of reasoned discussion.
Now, if you believe, as I do, that the research programmes associated with what we commonly call “science” are among the most reliable guides to truth and progress, then you will want to know how we can defend those programmes against real threats to their authority without attacking them for being “pseudoscientific”. I hope to show that there is a far better option available to us, and it involves a simple change of focus.
To put my position bluntly, the problem with creationism isn't that it's “pseudoscience”. The problem with creationism is that it's bollocks.
“Bollocks” is one of the Great British Words underappreciated in North America. It denotes rubbish, nonsense, or claptrap with guttural force and not-very-subtle sexual undertones. Say it to yourself right now. Its derisive power should strike you immediately.
Yet, the very idea of creationism as bollocks implies a crucial change in focus, one which sets us back on a path that we unwisely abandoned at the turn of the 20th century. In short, we must drop our modern obsession with science as a formal category and recover the older conception of science as intimately connected with epistemology, with issues of truth and justification. For some of us, this will not be easy.
II
“Science” entered the English language in the 14th century (from the Latin scientia) as a near-synonym for “knowledge”[1]. Specifically, it was the sort of accurate, systematic, demonstrative knowledge that traditional folk-wisdom often lacked.
By the late 17th century, there was an explosion of interest in new ways of thinking and reasoning from experience. Yet, historians have noted that until at least 1775, absolutely no-one described themselves as doing “science”[2]. Even the works of such 19th century luminaries as chemist Antoine Lavoisier, mathematician Marquis de Laplace and the philosophers John Stuart Mill and William Whewell[3] show no traces of our modern obsession with “science” as a monolithic concept. Rather, each thinker had independent reasons for believing that a powerful truth-finding method was emerging, and they made (competing) generalizations about what this method was. To think about “the sciences” was to think about knowledge, about truth and justification.
While early positivists such as Auguste Comte and Ernst Mach were the first to attempt the strict demarcation between science and non-science, I do not have space to describe the development (and fiery demise) of positivism here. What is important is that by the 1930s a subtle revolution had taken place, and a new breed of philosopher began to speak urgently of the need for a strict demarcation between science and “pseudoscience”. Sir Karl Popper remains the most prominent (and tragic) figure in this movement. In Popper's work, we find a search for formal criteria of science, abstract features of its method which can once and for all tell us what science is, just as elementary geometry textbooks tell us what squares and triangles are.
In particular, Popper sought to rule out Freudianism and Marxism. He was somehow convinced that the essence of science was contained in the negation of psychoanalysis and Marxist theory[4]. His proposal was seductively simple. Such theories were unscientific because they were not falsifiable. That is to say, someone like Freud (allegedly) did not specify experimental conditions under which he would completely abandon his programme. In the face of troublesome data, he would (allegedly) just reinterpret the data.
Note that we are no longer focusing on which fields make true or justified claims and which fields make false or unjustified claims. In other words, we are tearing scientia and episteme apart, something John Ruskin called a “modern barbarism”[5]. The concept of “science” that remains is a purely formal category. We are trying to exclude certain fields of inquiry from this category, and we are failing miserably, for there is now general agreement that the late Sir Karl's demarcation criterion was not just wrong, it was spectacularly wrong.
Astrological claims can easily be falsified (just wait until 2012), yet clearly astrology is not meant to be on the “good” list. Ditto for many creationist claims. Conversely, many genuine scientists routinely “re-interpret” strange data in order to preserve central theoretical apparatus; in other words, they protect their hypotheses from falsification. Furthermore, Popper's tunnel-vision focus on physics blinded him to the magnificent and definition-defying diversity of scientific practise.
The situation has not changed much. For any formal definition of science, it either excludes too much, or includes too much, or both. It is enough to say that today, even those writing anti-pseudoscience manifestos[6] concede that it is not possible to give a complete definition of what constitutes science or pseudoscience. Rather, they tend to revert to weak, vague and totally indefensible “ballpark” definitions that are designed to exclude specific targets. Judge Jones’ 2005 ruling in the Kitzmiller creationism case is a recent example:
ID [Intelligent Design] fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980’s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. (Jones 2005, 64)
It’s hard to properly describe how bad this ruling was, how incredibly vulnerable it is to logical and factual attack.
Take, for example, the second and third requirement. If we banish everyone who has either (2) seriously employed a false argument, or (3) has had some position refuted, it's hard to imagine that there will be many scientists left to speak of. These requirements are patently absurd.
The first requirement doesn't fare much better, for its meaning turns on the definition of “natural”, and to my knowledge no-one has been able to define this term meaningfully without resorting to the claim that “nature” is the stuff that natural science talks about. Circularity looms.
However, even if we can define these terms responsibly, this “ground rule” is of questionable historical validity. For example, we are going to have to explain why Newton's acceptance of alchemical principles and Kepler's devout mysticism don't disqualify them as scientists.
This is a serious problem. It's fine to talk about science in a loose and squishy sense, as a historical phenomenon or as a diverse, loosely related set of practises or what have you, but once you start denying someone else social and political power on the grounds that you are scientific and they are not, you'd better have more to say than simply “your theory is supernatural”. Otherwise, you will quickly be reduced to claiming that you just know science when you see it, and well, isn't that just the sort of maddening claim that those pesky “pseudoscientists” love to make?
III
I want to suggest that a century and a half of bad philosophy has infiltrated our thinking and convinced us that if we can't draw borders around ourselves (with Pinkers and Dawkinses manning the immigration booths) then all is lost. Roger Pennock (witness for the pro-science prosecution at the Kitzmiller trial) and George Reisch exemplify this attitude in their recent responses to demarcation skeptics:
Since the problem of creation-science is a live problem, and its outcome potentially very dangerous for the future of science education, this rejection [of demarcation] has also been potentially dangerous for science. (Reisch, G., 1998, "Pluralism, Logical Empiricism, and the Problem of Pseudoscience", Philosophy of Science)
Distinguishing science from religion was and remains an important conceptual issue with significant practical import, and philosophers who say there is no difference have lost touch with reality in a profound and perverse way. (Pennock, R., 2009, “Can’t philosophers tell the difference between science and religion?”, Synthese)
This—there is no other word for it—hysterical response is indicative of a larger anxiety, one which is both irrational and highly unflattering to scientific practise. It is as though, without well-drawn and fiercely defended borders, the whole enterprise of responsible inquiry is in danger. The fact that research programmes have flourished for centuries without such borders should be enough to quell this panic, yet somehow it is not.
There is, I must insist, an alternative. We can go back 150 years and recover our epistemological focus. We will discover that truth is what matters, and that all we need to say about creationism, astrology and the like is that they are extremely bad truth-tracking programmes. They are, in a word, bollocks.
Want to keep creationism out of schools? Point out that we shouldn't teach bollocks in schools, and that constitutional freedom of religion cannot imply that false things should be taught as if they were true things. Want to keep government funding away from creationists? Point out that the government shouldn't fund bollocks. I could go on, but Reisch, Pennock and others seem to think that once we abandon formal demarcation we are left with “no difference” between molecular biology and talking snakes. This is clearly absurd.
The only rational and intellectually honest thing to do is to forget about demarcation and to give authority to powerful, accurate and consistent explanatory programmes. In other words, we must recover the original sense of “science” as a diverse, evolving set of human activities that are only important because they produce systematic knowledge. Otherwise, that clever creationist is going to come along one day and point out that a central pillar of our rejection of his doctrines—the concept of “pseudoscience”—is bollocks.
[1] Ross, S, (1962), “Scientist: The Story of a Word”
[2] Cunningham, A., (1988), “Getting The Game Right”.
[3] Although Whewell was the first, in 1834, to suggest the term “scientist” as a label “by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively”. (Whewell, The Quarterly Review, 1834, 51, 58-61)
[4] This practise of defining science in relation to what it is not continues to this day and should make us immediately suspicious. It is a clear sign that the aim is not to discover a genuine distinction but merely to exclude certain unwanted elements.
[5] Ruskin (1878, The Nineteenth Century, 107). Popper, 75 years later, explicitly admits to this change of focus in Conjectures and Refutations (1953): “The problem which troubled me at the time was neither, 'When is a theory true?' nor, 'When is a theory acceptable?'... I wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science.” Popper evidently saw no danger in defining science in total isolation from its epistemic virtues.
[6] See Lillenfeld (2003), “Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology”, for a striking example.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 04:17 PM | Permalink
Comments
Your attacks on Jones' ruling conflate the person and the "theory"; it is irrelevant whether Newton believed in alchemy or not.
Creationism isn't crackpot science because people who advocate it are crackpots. It's because, as you say, it's bollocks.
But *saying* it is bollocks isn't sufficient grounds to reject it. That's just name-calling and provides nothing of substance in the search for truth.
The idea behind the demarcation problem is that there should be principles by which we can identify theories as having some prospect of being true. Any analysis of truth implicitly involves the demarcation problem.
You say:
"The only rational and intellectually honest thing to do is to forget about demarcation and to give authority to powerful, accurate and consistent explanatory programmes."
So you are in effect advocating demarcation along the lines of explanatory power, accuracy and consistency.
Posted by: Clinton Daniel | Sep 22, 2009 7:18:58 PM
Here's a single defensible definition of "science":
Science is a continuing effort to discover and increase human knowledge and understanding through disciplined research. Using controlled methods, scientists collect observable evidence of natural or social phenomena, record measurable data relating to the observations, and analyze this information to construct theoretical explanations of how things work. The methods of scientific research include the generation of hypotheses about how phenomena work, and experimentation that tests these hypotheses under controlled conditions. Scientists are also expected to publish their information so other scientists can do similar experiments to double-check their conclusions. The results of this process enable better understanding of past events, and better ability to predict future events of the same kind as those that have been tested.
Yes, the boundaries may be fuzzy, but most categories have this "problem"--that doesn't mean that we can't say that certain things definitely are or definitely aren't science. (For example, basketball is a sport but washing dishes isn't. Chess is probably somewhere on the boundary.)
Now that we have a definition of science, your whole article collapses on itself.
I was also amused by your tone-deaf suggestion about creationism in schools: Considering that one-half to two-thirds of Americans believe in creationism, I tend to think that calling it "pseudoscience" will be just a tad more effective than calling it "bollocks"--that is, "bullshit".
Posted by: billy | Sep 22, 2009 7:31:08 PM
Good stuff, Abbas! Give Nick a job?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Sep 22, 2009 8:47:25 PM
I enjoyed this essay, while joining others in noting that Newton's peculiarities are irrelevant to the thesis. The observation that demarcation is futile is one that I share.
I'd like to recommend an outstanding contribution to this area of inquiry, Alan Sokal's 2008 Sense About Science lecture, "What is science and why should we care?"
Posted by: Ken Pidcock | Sep 22, 2009 9:28:57 PM
Correction: "...an outstanding contribution..." should have been "...another outstanding contribution..."
Posted by: Ken Pidcock | Sep 22, 2009 9:35:40 PM
And. I like _Das Narrenschiff_, too...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Sep 22, 2009 10:31:22 PM
Clinton:
Of course saying it's "bollocks" is enough. If something is bollocks it is, by definition, false. And I, for one, can't think of a more negative thing to say about a theory than that it is false. Can you?
Your claim that epistemology requires a strict demarcation is not only implausible, it's demonstrably false. Epistemology flourished long before anyone was obsessed with defining social institutions dedicated to inquiry.
Finally, if anything I said lead you to believe that I am pro-demarcation, let me assure you, I am not. I am pro-epistemology, and nothing I said implies otherwise.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 23, 2009 12:20:43 AM
billy:
We can play the counterexample game, but you must forgive me for asking for a little clarity before we begin, especially when the definition in question arises from wikipedia.
Now, in your definition, are each of the listed criteria necessary for an activity's being a science? For example, must all scientists publish their work? Must all scientific experiments record only "observable data"? I can properly respond to your definition if I know the answer to these questions.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 23, 2009 12:30:57 AM
You've made a good point. No matter how legally convenient it may be to define all variants of creationism as non-starters, we still have the obligation to show by evidence that they are worse accounts of life than is Darwinian evolution. Here's a little starter essay (used as a homework writing example for a class).
Q: Two of the most prominent accounts of the origin the variety of life on Earth are the Darwinian explanation (descent via natural selection from a common ancestor) and the creationist explanation (supernatural creation of different kinds in parallel). Give an argument for one of these as opposed to the other. If you wish, you may instead advocate hybrid views, e.g. gradual evolution with supernatural guidance.
A. Evolution or Creation?
In this country, the two most widely held clear-cut accounts of the origins of species are the one based in Biblical literalism and the one which has developed from Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. It is often alleged that the choice between these cannot be made on scientific grounds, either because the creationist account can be ruled out ahead of time as non-scientific or because the Darwinian theory is an empty tautology devoid of testable predictions. In arguing for the Darwinian account, I will avoid the common claim that creationism should be rejected a priori as a non-scientific claim, since the real question of how life acquired its present form cannot be answered merely by defining one answer as illegitimate. Any sufficiently definite account should have observational implications, allowing actual tests. I shall argue here that in fact the Darwinian theory has made a wide variety of testable predictions, which have been remarkably successful, while the creationist account fits very poorly with observed data.
Darwin proposed that, starting from some ancestor in remote antiquity, all life evolved by the action of natural selection (including sexual selection) on random heritable changes. In order for that account to be true, several requirements must be met. Most obviously, there must have been ancestors forming continuous links between various species, groups of species, etc. Although this claim was a statement about the past, it was also a prediction about what would be found in the future. Needless to say, the fossil record has been found to be filled with intermediate forms, whether they be small-brained upright hominids, whale-like creatures with small legs, mammal-like reptiles, or small feathered reptiles. Obviously, the fossil record will never be complete, but one could hardly ask for more vivid confirmation of the evolutionary hypothesis than has been found. From the creationist viewpoint, these intermediate forms are about as welcome as the moons of Jupiter were to followers of Ptolemy.
In order to allow the great diversification shown by modern life, a very long history is required. A variety of isotopic dating techniques, based on the highly reliable and reproducible physical processes of radioactive decay, show that the Earth is more than 4 billion years old. Furthermore, these techniques allow reliable dating of fossils. The dated fossil record does indeed make sense, e.g. simple organisms flourished for a long time before more complex ones, the mammal-like reptiles flourished before the earliest mammals, etc. At least the most literal versions of creationism deny the antiquity of the Earth, and lack any coherent account of the isotopic evidence.
One early objection to the idea of evolution via natural selection was that blending inheritance would dilute the effect of any beneficial random heritable change before it could be established in a population. Darwin conceded that something must prevent full blending of heritable traits, i.e. he predicted that there must be discrete heritable units. Mendel's discovery of genes can be viewed as a confirmation of Darwin's prediction. Modern molecular biology has provided a full molecular picture (via DNA) of all the features required for the Darwinian account- heritability, random mutation, and random shuffling of combinations of traits. While these features do not contradict the creationist account, it is striking that they were more or less explicitly predicted by Darwinian theory.
Furthermore, the DNA evidence provides an independent check of the evolutionary history, which can then be compared with the fossil record. Many changes in DNA have no effect on phenotype, so evolutionary theory predicts they will gradually accumulate randomly. Thus, comparisons of DNA sequences in different organisms provide a way of estimating when they shared a common ancestor. The dated family tree obtained from this DNA clock agrees nicely with that inferred from the fossil record. It is extremely hard to see why a designer would carefully design non-coding, apparently random, differences in the DNA of different organisms specifically to mimic the relationships expected from the fossil record on the basis of evolution.
Rather than further belabor the overwhelming evidence for evolution, I would like to briefly address the question of whether the mechanism of evolution has indeed been natural selection. Perhaps the strongest argument is that once mechanisms of heredity and random mutation are established, it is simply impossible to avoid evolution by natural selection, unless all genomes were miraculously to be equally good at reproducing. The question then becomes whether this mechanism is sufficient to account for the varieties that we find.
All the key ingredients of Darwinian evolution have been established by observation. Large phenotypic variations can be induced by selection, as was known to Darwin from the experience of animal breeders. Populations evolve, sometimes very rapidly, in response to changing selective pressure, explaining why antibiotics and antivirals quickly lose much of their effectiveness if they are overused. New species do indeed form spontaneously when small populations become isolated, as insect experiments have confirmed. It is hard to see how these observed processes could fail to give rise to new species in a changing natural environment. It is not possible to rigorously rule out the role of non-random genetic changes, but Occam's razor would suggest that such processes should not be postulated unless the known random processes decisively fail.
Finally, life as we know it is full of ugly little quirks which make perfect sense within the Darwinian framework but which would seem inexplicable within a framework embued with more purpose. For example, the prevalence of diabetes among pregnant women has been coherently explained as a result of competing selection on fetal genes (favoring higher blood sugar levels) and maternal genes (favoring lower levels), leading to dangerously high levels of competing chemical signals released by the fetus and the mother. Any rational designer would have simply set the blood sugar at a compromise level, with low and safe levels of the competing signals. Likewise any rational designer would have given vertebrates optic nerves attached to the back of retinas, as in squids, rather than ones delicately attached to the front through blind spots. Unfortunately, evolution proceeds in a way which only sometimes mimics rational design, much less comprehensible higher purpose.
Posted by: Michael Weissman | Sep 23, 2009 1:11:43 AM
I'm not so sure I'm ready to discard pseudoscience as a useful term. It refers to something that pretends to the status of a certain type of research programme, without actual reference to the methodology of that program. I sympathize with the idea that there is some porosity or mushyness to what we mean by science, and I think this is what the "ways of knowing" debate in the scientific blogosphere is addressing. History, for example, traffics in facts, but not in accord with what we call the scientific method. Experiment is of no use for unitary, past events. It is inherently hermeneutical in a way that physics is not.
And philosophy is just as robust a determinant of truth as science is, since it's the method we use to define our terms, without which science cannot proceed.
But pseudosciences seem to me to explicitly make the sort of claims that we call "scientific," without recourse to the methods that characterize that kind of knowledge. The distinction between this term and "bollocks" is that with the former we acknowledge on what grounds we are declaring an epistemological failure. The latter merely obscures the criterion behind forceful rhetoric.
Creationism (or ID)'s entire claim to fame is that it is not myth, that it is a certain kind of demonstrable, literal fact. Except that it isn't. It's a bunch of gotchas strung together with the implicit temptation to resort to a deus ex machina. There's nothing wrong with pointing out the logical inadequacies in such a pretension to "theory."
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Sep 23, 2009 1:49:36 AM
My argument was against your second paragraph:
The most interesting thing about this manoeuvre is that almost no-one performing it—scientist, philosopher, or otherwise—will be in possession of a single defensible definition of “science”. In other words, they won't know what they're talking about.
You don't provide any evidence for this claim. In fact, it seems extremely absurd, since I would think any halfway-decent scientist would be able to, on the spot, come up with a definition similar to the one I quoted from Wikipedia. Are all those criteria necessary? Why don't I say "yes" for now, so that you can properly respond.
To reply to some other things: "We will discover that truth is what matters" & "we must recover the original sense of “science” as a diverse, evolving set of human activities that are only important because they produce systematic knowledge". If you want to say that science is the only way (we've found, so far) of accurately and reliably understanding the world, then I agree.
Posted by: billy | Sep 23, 2009 2:05:01 AM
Nick,
This is an interesting essay. You observe well how science and non-science are hard to demarcate, and how many diffuse and diverse practices have historically gone under the rubric of science.
You then suggest that we ought to shift the conversation away from science vs. non-science to truth vs. non-truth (or bollocks). First, I'm not sure that those who speak in terms of the former don't also imply the latter. Second, even if they didn't, and we shift the conversation, does it not also shift the burden? That is, the questions now become those of epistemology: what constitutes truth, how does one arrive at it, etc.? The methods we use here include those based on sense perception, reason, logic, and/or expert opinion, none of which are without holes (even leaving aside their ultimate reliance on metaphysics). And so eventually, you are left with yet another language game where conversation and mutual understanding still depend on others playing by the rules of the same game (of which now "the way of the truth" is a part, instead of "the way of science"). Can this approach be much superior than the previous one at crushing the bollocks of ID?
Posted by: Namit | Sep 23, 2009 3:21:02 AM
"Take, for example, the second and third requirement. If we banish everyone who has either (2) seriously employed a false argument, or (3) has had some position refuted, it's hard to imagine that there will be many scientists left to speak of. These requirements are patently absurd."
I stopped reading after this. There are three problems I have with this quote:
1)Nobody's bannished (it's the theory that's bannished)
2)It's not bannished from society, it's bannished from teaching in school.( I think it's a sound idea to bannish false arguments from being taught in school.)
3)Just as "Bollocks" is no argument, "Absurd" is no argument. ( And without arguments there's no debat, I think this subject needs to be debated.)
hans
Posted by: jw kersten | Sep 23, 2009 4:25:22 AM
As far as I can see, all this argument boils down to statements like: "language is imprecise" or "meanings and definitions can shift and are 'fuzzy'".
Follow that path and you can end up with what Anthony Flew once called "the fallacy of the disappearing middle" - and then you can't say anything about anything. I can't abide philosophers, they talk like lawyers without customers.
So for my money, the Creation account in Genesis is still unscientific and is contradicted by a host of evidence, but neither is it 'bullocks' - it is an element in a certain long-standing human conviction about there being an overall Purpose to the world.
Happy New Year, btw, its 5770.
Posted by: aguy109 | Sep 23, 2009 5:05:06 AM
Michael,
I guess that one of the things I was trying to highlight is that there is a profound tension between defining creationism as a "non-starter" and showing that it is epistemologically inferior to Darwinian accounts.
The reason is simple: if we can show that Darwin's account is better, we must be comparing the two, and therefore they must be comparable. This implies that creationism is not a non-starter, that it in fact starts on the same basic track that Darwinism does. It's just that it barely gets out of the blocks before falling flat on its face.
I think this all shows that unless we think the law should just lurch from one unstable, politically motivated definition to another, evolutionists should rethink their strategy.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 23, 2009 11:00:09 AM
Chris,
First off: thank Christ we finally disagree about something.
Second off, while I think your response would be shared by many, I think their confidence would evaporate if they were forced to consider just what the "methodology" of "a certain type of research programme" is. My claim in this post is just that there is no such definitive methodology.
Classically, by focusing on macro-level physics, people have convinced themselves that a certain type of methodology (inductive, or hypothetico-deductive, verificationist...) characterizes the sciences. Ironically, Darwin stands as one of the great counterexamples, here: his focus on abductive explanation (inference to the best explanation) and his heavy reliance on a non-observable, quasi-metaphorical process (natural selection) makes enormous trouble for many of these supposed methodological truisms. Was he doing science? Well, apparently. Was he specifying definitive causal laws and inferring them inferring from his own experimental data? Not really.
So, I would just ask that if we are to talk about this supposed "scientific method", let's actually say what it is. Otherwise this popular response doesn't work.
Also, one of my main [perhaps concealed] points in this post is to suggest that current demarcation criteria are merely formal and do not "specify the grounds on which [creationism] fails". Indeed, there is a sense in which they cannot, for they purport to enact a total schism in theory, one between science and non-science. They therefore rob us of the ability to legitimately and plausibly compare the epistemic value of "science" and "pseudoscience" (see my comment to Michael above).
Finally, of course there are logical inadequacies in ID/creationism, and that's exactly my point. They are logical flaws in argument, not methodological ones. In fact, some of the more high-profile ID is just a (bad) attempt at inferring design from empirical data. There's nothing wrong with attempting to do that, but these attempts ultimately fail. It is the failure, not the methodology, which is most problematic.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 23, 2009 11:30:47 AM
Billy,
OK, so two things:
If "publishing work" is a necessary condition for science, that means that if Newton or Einstein had never published, they would have somehow not counted, and that all the experimental and theoretical work they had done would no longer count as "science". I find this implausible. It's hard to see how a body of ideas can suddenly be unscientific simply because they aren't printed in a journal. Many of the criteria listed in the wiki article have this problem: they exclude too much.
Your definition, for example, relies on a totally obsolete "collect information--->construct theory" model of research which has (since the 1960s) been recognized as a very bad one. Observation is always, in the words of my discipline, theory-laden, and if the definition requires a kind of pure, objective observation then it rules out all the sciences.
As I said, none of this would matter if we weren't relying so heavily (in law and elsewhere) on demarcation to exclude certain people and movements from social and political power. Those people are rightly going to demand a rigorous and robust definition, not a rough characterization with several flaws.
Finally, I would definitely not agree that "science is the only way we've found of accurately and reliably understanding the world". This is far too strong, because I would never want to exclude the forms of understanding provided by the humanities (and related disciplines). That would make me an adherent of scientism, something I'm not too fond of.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 23, 2009 11:50:00 AM
And last, Namit, (whew!),
You're right that the ultimate success of the strategy I advocate depends on the establishment of some epistemological ground rules. Indeed, I have been whinging--annoyingly--about this on 3QD for years now: science requires philosophy, and this is one of the (many) reasons why.
Yet, I think this particular post is better read as an address to you, I, or any other "scientifically-minded" person. Do you believe that creationism is pseudoscience? If yes, then tell me what science actually is. Hey, it turns out you can't. Alternately, do you believe that creationism is false? Well, clearly you do. So, why not specify the grounds on which you think it is false?
There is something deeply contradictory in saying definitively that a theory is false but also suggesting that we, as a human society, could never come up with some basic, shared epistemic standards because we'd be stuck in "just another language game". Everyone on both sides of this one believes that there is such a thing as truth and falsity, and they are therefore committed to the possibility of these shared standards. So we, as individuals, have a sort of responsibility to try to articulate and defend those standards, or else our conviction that creationism is a false theory will ring hollow.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 23, 2009 12:04:43 PM
If Newton or Einstein hadn't published their work, then they'd have done something very close to science, but not quite science. Just like chess might be considered something close to but not quite sport, since it lacks a physical component. "if the definition requires a kind of pure, objective observation": The definition I provided doesn't require this (although usually the more objective, the better).
"If yes, then tell me what science actually is. Hey, it turns out you can't." Oops, hey, I did. This is your general problem here, Nick, that you insist that people can't define science but don't provide any evidence for that claim.
Posted by: billy | Sep 23, 2009 2:14:38 PM
Darwin is an interesting counterexample. Fodor's recent critique of the theory of natural selection runs just along such lines. Evolution is historical, but not predictably lawful. There is no "covering law" that defines how an adaptation will occur, and even the word "adaptation" itself is misleading, not only because there is no fixed set of possible adaptive strategies, but also because an organism will often modify its environment so that it is better "adapted" to the organism; or the organism will colonize an entirely new niche. Only in hindsight can we see what changes differentially increase offspring.
That doesn't make evolution "bollocks" but it makes it a different kind of knowledge than the kind that reliably predicts how chemicals will interact or how bodies in motion will behave.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Sep 23, 2009 2:56:19 PM
"Want to keep creationism out of schools? Point out that we shouldn't teach bollocks in schools, and that constitutional freedom of religion cannot imply that false things should be taught as if they were true things."
The problem is that giving up the science/religion demarcation isn't practical, given the legal framework we're working with. These rulings are based on church-state separation. This requires that some demarcation be made, even if more emphasis is put on the definition of religion than that of science.
So while I found your essay thoughtful, and like your general epistemological drift, I do think that we will continue to rely on roughly drawn boundaries for expediency's sake.
Posted by: Scott | Sep 23, 2009 3:58:09 PM
Chris: Exactly. Evolution is not bollocks, and evolutionary biology is clearly something we would (normally) want to call a scientific research program. Yet, its methodology includes some procedures and assumptions that aren't included in other obvious sciences, and my point was just to generalize from this (Fodor's) observation and question the supposed methodological unity of the sciences. I take it that this unity is what you were drawing upon in your initial comment, so I don't think I'm convinced by what you initially said. How can pseudoscience "pretend" to a methodology that doesn't exist?
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 23, 2009 5:22:24 PM
Scott:
The pragmatic response is an interesting one, but it leaves us open to a very serious charge, one which folks like Behe are already beginning to make: we are using criteria that we cannot rationally defend. Rationality is supposed to be the cardinal scientific virtue. How can we, in the name of "science", use indefensible criteria in any context?
How can we ignore the hypocrisy that this involves? And, most importantly, how long until some supreme court judge is moved by this irrationality and strikes down the Kitzmiller precedent?
In short, I agree that pragmatic concerns are important, but I don't think that intentionally being irrational is very pragmatic in the long run.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 23, 2009 5:27:17 PM
Nick,
I agree that the "scientifically-minded" ought to specify the grounds on which they call creationism false, and not just declare it non-science for all the reasons you have outlined well.
The question I'm left with is whether "our" commitment to specify these grounds will lead to shared epistemic standards, given that ground rules eventually run out of justification, leaving the door open for ID folks to circumvent them as before. Unless they accept our epistemic standards (why should they; their motivations and assumptions about reality are not the same), won't there be a corresponding lack of convergence on "true" and "false" theories (hey, even our own camp debates it)? We'll have a new pissing contest over what one should or shouldn't believe.
Call me a realist but I doubt there is any possibility of coming up with broadly shared epistemic standards across human societies. Steven Weinberg once said, "Science does not make it impossible to believe in God [or design or purpose]. It just makes it possible to NOT believe in God [or design or purpose]." Replace Science with Epistemology in this quote and it still holds.
I think combating ID will need a lot more than an appeal to standards (of science or epistemology). Physicist Lawrence Krauss articulated a strategy I liked (~30-48 mins into this 3-yr old video): teaching science has to be an act of seduction; we have to hook young minds by revealing the beauty and wonder of the universe through science; we must demonstrate the explanatory power of science, show why it can be part of more powerful stories. We need to sell science as a better product (but not oversell its reach), for which we need to better understand both the product and its "target customers". Corporations do this well--unlike the neo-atheist camp, they know that pomposity, railing at target customers, and calling them stupid for patronizing a different product is a way to stagnate or go out of business. Sure, even our best attempts at seduction will not seduce everyone. Them we may just have to put up with, as we do with so much in life.
Posted by: Namit | Sep 23, 2009 8:08:10 PM
If we can further seduce the audience to insist for themselves that they brook no attempts to get them to think about the transitions between nothingness and somethingness, lifelessness and life, and instinct and free will, we'll have it locked up.
Posted by: Carlos | Sep 23, 2009 10:26:43 PM
I'm pretty sure I don't actually have a dog in this hunt, all appearances to the contrary...
but…is it Smyth's (and Dawkins') goal to get more Evangelicals into the research labs? Seriously?
I wish you the very best of luck.
Posted by: Carlos | Sep 23, 2009 10:34:50 PM
Hi Namit,
Call me a realist but I doubt there is any possibility of coming up with broadly shared epistemic standards across human societies.
Well, what about single countries? I'm not talking about the whole world, obviously, but do you think Americans could ever come to accept certain standards? What about the law of noncontradiction?
It is important to note that your position represents a total abandonment of reason itself in favour of power politics (and its primary mechanism, "persuasion"). Now, I might ultimately agree with this move, but the difficulty lies in the total hypocrisy of defending the sciences irrationally. One of the things that is supposed to characterize science is its committment to reason, to evidence and argument, not sophistry.
Your position turns it into just another story about the world, one which we must force upon others because we cannot defend it with reason. This is pretty significant, and would not be accepted by any of the usual Science Guys in this debate.
Carlos: My post was certainly not aimed at Evangelicals, and it was in fact a plea for more philosophical reflection, not less.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 24, 2009 12:15:10 PM
Reply to everyone except me? Whatever...
Posted by: billy | Sep 24, 2009 2:41:25 PM
Nick,
It is important to note that what science has enabled is indeed another story about the world. Our reason tells us that it is a better story than what went before. We have our epistemological grounds for saying that. And we must defend this story with the most rational arguments we can summon (which includes understanding the limits of science and reason).
Our rationality also requires that we see that others are not obligated to sign up to this story, great and true as we think it is. Scientific rationality is one among a competing set of priorities for people. This is as clear as daylight to me. We can't demand rationality from others, the way we define the term (is there is standard definition?). I am not abandoning reason (on the contrary), but pointing out that we cannot demand adherence to our epistemic standards and conclusions. What if they say "back off"? We have to persuade. Is there a more rational alternative for promoting the constituency of reason in society than persuasion? If the Science Guys don't see this, they will lose.
Posted by: Namit | Sep 24, 2009 3:04:49 PM
Namit,
Perhaps these "Science Guys" to "win" need merely occupy commanding positions in their own societies and man barricades then. Cultures insufficiently committed to "our epistemic standards and conclusions", especially when it comes to matters of health and medical science, might conceivably have that "pathetic but praiseworthy" tendency to die out, no?
Posted by: D | Sep 24, 2009 5:49:13 PM
There is is an interesting and revolutionary scientific hypothesis, that allows for a logical explanation for the real agenda behind the appearances of the Ufos, over the millennia and especially since 1945, a sensible explanation for the original intent behind all the world religions and a better working scientific model than the theory of evolution.One simply changes the evidence of progressive design ,evidenced by the theory of evolution for the progressive evolution of design, by advanced science - much quicker than nature against a backdrop, of their having been many humanities on this very ancient planet ,which have disappeared for the self-evident reasons we an see today. If this is science fiction then, within the context of this hypothesis, so are the dangers of nuclear war, over-population and environmental degradation and for that matter the subject of Ufos.
As far as I am aware, this is one of a few scientific hypothetical frameworks of argument, that allows the subjects of Ufos to be brought in from the ' cold' , embrace all the world' religions,take into account leading edge developments in science, and form a new and much larger paradigm, as to our humanity's origins. This explanation amounts to the demystification of the old understandings and the spiritualisation of science.
P.S. Try telling the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the dangers of Nuclear war are ....b's
Posted by: Ben | Sep 24, 2009 6:53:14 PM
D,
That's one way of doing it. Hard to say if that is a "winning" solution. What do you think? Are we at a point where that is necessary? And does that strike you as sustainable?
My sense is that people worldwide are broadly persuaded by the efficacy of health and medical sciences. It is the first thing they get convinced of (often even illiteracy does not stand in the way). So I don't get the point of your second sentence (it is also empirically dubious; world population was not falling before modern science). And whoever said anything about "praiseworthy"? Can you please elaborate? Thanks.
Posted by: Namit | Sep 24, 2009 7:18:54 PM
I don't know, here is a illustration where Homeopathy trumps science:
Link
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Sep 24, 2009 7:24:47 PM
Namit,
*I* don't see myself as engaged in a project that sees science as another "story" about the world :) All the delicious cheek in using that word seems to come from the suggestion that approaching truth isn't the most relevant consideration in choosing between between these stories, with preference or politics or values or "competing priorities" doing the grunt work. Even in such scenarios though, it seems that these "stories" aren't equivalent re production of any basket of primary goods, with health picked as an example. I wasn't making policy proposals of any sort, certainly not of a building-walls sort.
Posted by: D | Sep 24, 2009 7:41:10 PM
praiseworthy from: Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. By which I meant no more than that sucky stories aren't very useful
Posted by: D | Sep 24, 2009 7:44:58 PM
Maybe the moment has passed, but here was my reply, which I couldn't get to post here:
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2009/09/science-non-sci.html#comment-194390
Posted by: NickMatzke | Sep 24, 2009 8:50:50 PM
D,
Wow. I see that as hysterical and laughable defensiveness. Let me remind you that "story" does not mean "fiction". Stories and facts can go together. This is how many scientists speak of it: the story of science, story of evolution, story of the universe. Of course not all stories are equivalent or worthy of respect (have I ever suggested that in my "project"?). Really, did you even read what I said above about my views on the story enabled by science?
So we have a story where scientific truth is our most relevant consideration. The point is that this is not the case with other stories that proliferate in the world (Nick brought up creationism / ID). What are you going to do about it? We have to coexist with others as citizens, unless the plan is to enslave them (you spooked me there for a bit!). The only option I see is to try and understand why people resist and then attempt to bring them around to our way of the world, as Krauss suggested, through selling, exemplifing, demonstrating, etc. Has scientific temper ever spread any other way? Do you have a better proposal?
Heroic posturing for the Truth is easy, as is being dismissive of politics or priorities or values of others. But shouldn't the "Science Guys" act like rational beings and let their scientific temper come into honest contact with some pressing sociopolitical questions, such as:
Posted by: Namit | Sep 24, 2009 10:07:10 PM
Nick, have you seen that both Panda's Thumb and Thoughts in a Haystack posted responses to this piece?
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Sep 25, 2009 1:33:48 PM
Namit,
I have no problem with the observation that people can't be forced to adopt my or any other views - no argument will impel anyone against his will to puppet-dance to mine. I don't believe this is controversial.
I interpreted that to mean that the ground rules themselves, unexamined in every context and indeed unexaminable, are picked based on things like "motivations" and "compteting priorities", and that since these ground rules, picked for these reasons, are to lead to "truth" and "falsehood", the statements that different people (like scientists and creationists) call true can properly represent double truths or even contradict each other. The set of ground rules is rampantly (completely even, perhaps) underconstrained, so that there is only the task of telling people proper stories so that they may adopt our motivations and priorities and hence ground rules. Corporations know how to tell such pleasing stories, in ways that "big science" types don't.
I didn't understand you to have epistemological issues with any of this, but perhaps you were merely lamenting the obduracy of man. My point was that even granting all this (which perhaps you don't) there isn't yet need to hurtle down to the hawking of Pepsi and Coke - between discovering truths and selling baubles there still seems to be utility, and in particular bedrock utility relative to goods pretty much everyone agrees upon. Flu vaccine manufacture makes sense given evolution in ways it doesn't given intelligent design, that sort of thing. But perhaps this is what you had in mind when you spoke of corporations and customers.
Posted by: D | Sep 26, 2009 2:27:59 PM
Nick, do keep up the good work, but do check the Panda's Thumb, as Chris recommended.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Sep 26, 2009 5:48:45 PM
Panda's Thumb/Haystack checked and responded to!
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2009/09/science-non-sci.html#comment-194534
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2009/09/science-non-sci.html#comment-194540
I do not think anything posted there is particularly damaging to my overall approach. At worst, it looks like it might be difficult to integrate into the courts, but my whole aim here was to question the legitimacy of the way the courts (and just about everyone else) handles this issue. So, no observation about "the way things are done" has any effect unless someone can show that they must be done that way.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Sep 26, 2009 10:55:52 PM
Gosh I've been enjoying this, even though my qualifications for doing so are dim. For smart people having fun -- always a delightful spectacle, here or anywhere -- I hope everyone has gone to Panda's Thumb and Thoughts in a Haystack and read the pertinent posts and comments.
I read a lot of history, and it strikes me there should be instructive historical instances of times that science, pseudo-science and non-science were easily told apart by highly educated people and the legal systems and philosophies their thinking arose from, and/or challenged. Can't think of one. I can't even think of one towering individual genius who was not stuck somewhere between the magick of demons and the Starry Message -- so to speak. Excuse me, but -- we are supposed to be different? Fundamentally different because we know a few more objectively verifiable things?
There is every reason to think that in the future, routinely smart people will consider the best of us to have been wrong like Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton were wrong. And that's if we're lucky. Beneath the wittiness of the post, I think part of what Nick is going for is to ask us to examine the nature of all those bright lines we like to posit. Go along for the ride, why not?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Sep 27, 2009 1:32:02 AM
Ultimately, I feel that if there's a flaw in this essay it's that it avoids discussing science as a social endeavour. Is vs Ought and all that. I agree that it is obvious that intelligent design/creationism is false. But science isn't simply true or false; it is carried on by scientists.
There is a certain social prestige in being called a scientist - your opinions are taken seriously by people who do not have the time/inclination to evaluate your claims. It is this prestige which opponents of creationism wish to deny to supporters of intelligent design.
The truth claims of ID proponents are not simply bollocks; they are bollocks told for reasons other than a desire for scientific truth, and bollocks that are well-funded by organisations and people who are committed to faith rather than truth.
It is this reason that simply calling their claims "bollocks" seems inadequate. The term "pseudoscience" seems to neatly capture the desire to have the prestige of a scientist, without the responsibility of a scientist to test claims against reality (i.e., to truth).
Posted by: Tim Byron | Sep 27, 2009 8:20:02 AM
The Kitzmiller v. Dover decision has received far more attention -- and certainly far more praise -- than it deserves. It is, after all, just a decision of a single judge and is binding only upon a small school district. And much worse, it is a decision of a crackpot judge who is the poster child of activist judges. For example, he showed extreme prejudice against intelligent design and the Dover defendants -- regardless of whether or not ID is a religious concept -- by saying in a Dickinson College commencement speech that his Kitzmiller decision was based on his cockamamie notion that the Founders based the Constitution's establishment clause upon a belief that organized religions are not "true" religions. He ruled that evolution is compatible with religion, a question that is completely inappropriate for judges to answer. He has arrogantly assumed that he knows the answers to questions that have perplexed generations of scientists and philosophers. He dodged the question of whether ID serves the genuine secular purpose of encouraging critical thinking. Without stating exceptions, he said that critics of the Kitzmiller decision have no respect for "judicial independence" and "the rule of law" (some of the opinion's biggest critics are hardcore Darwinists Jay Wexler and Larry Moran). And the whole Kitzmiller decision is badly tainted because Judge Jones likely showed a lack of restraint because an appeal of the decision was not expected because of the changeover in the school board membership. For example, the opinion's ID-as-science section was copied virtually verbatim from the plaintiffs' opening post-trial brief while ignoring the defendants' opening post-trial brief and both sides' answering post-trial briefs -- it is doubtful that Jones would have done this had he anticipated an appeal, for then the opinion would have gone to the appeals court with no answers to the defendants' points about ID-as-science. The opinion is best described by the words it used to describe the defendants -- "breathtaking inanity."
The original post says, "Want to keep creationism out of schools? Point out that we shouldn't teach bollocks in schools, and that constitutional freedom of religion cannot imply that false things should be taught as if they were true things." However, nor can constitutional freedom of religion imply that false things are necessarily religious things -- if ID is false, that alone does not imply that ID is a religious concept. And there is no constitutional principle of separation of false science and state. And there are often good secular reasons for teaching "bollocks" in schools, e.g., encouraging critical thinking, preventing and correcting misconceptions, and helping to ensure that technically sophisticated pseudoscience is taught only by qualified science teachers (the Darwinists think that ID is false, so why do they want ID taught by unqualified teachers -- e.g., parents, social studies teachers, and Sunday School teachers -- who might teach ID as true?). The courts should rule according to the law and not according to the whims of the Darwinists.
Posted by: Larry Fafarman | Sep 27, 2009 3:26:00 PM
"if ID is false, that alone does not imply that ID is a religious concept. And there is no constitutional principle of separation of false science and state. And there are often good secular reasons for teaching "bollocks" in schools."
Half_clever dodge. Should we encourage different opnions and worldwiews and teach unreligious but false wiews. Like homeopathy. It is not religious wiew.
I think ID should be teached in schools. But just what it is. As a false ideology. Wedge should be teached too, so everyone can see their agenda. There is no much material outside of Disco.Inst., so it is quite relevant.
Posted by: Tuomoh | Oct 5, 2009 11:08:44 AM
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