Scientific progress

Daniel Morgan said:

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Do you agree or disagree that science is a tool whereby we establish reliable knowledge (although perhaps not absolute and universal)? If you agree, then it is rather clear that there is a fundamental disconnect between expressing trust that the method we rely on, which has proven itself so far, will continue to expand in scope and power (as it has shown itself capable of doing for generations now), and trusting in...trust itself.

When you say, "we'll find out an answer one day," you are not referring to a methodology by which you intend to show an answer will/can BE found, but rather, faith that somehow, someway, someday answers will just plop into our laps, or we will see God after death.

Teeny little difference, eh?

Also, a distinction ought to be made between the falsifiable and the unfalsifiable. I express no "faith" in the power of reason or science to give anyone answers [concrete ones] to the unfalsifiable. Luckily, the power of methodological naturalism extends far deeper than is required to form a coherent worldview [of naturalism].

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Unfortunately for Danny, he continues to fluff off the metascientific debates within the scientific community itself over the question of whether science is, indeed, a progressive discipline.

It’s striking to see someone who is so utterly out of touch with his own field of study.

This is because, for Danny, science functions as just another faith-commitment or surrogate religion. In his apostasy, all he’d done is to exchange one absolute for another.

Here’s the side of the argument that Danny never bothers to acquaint himself with, much less engage:

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The predominant view has been that scientific progress consists in advancement toward some goal: but much disagreement exists as to what that goal is. Major candidates for the (primary) goal of science include truth, simplicity, coherence, and explanatory power—none of the latter three necessarily entailing truth. An air of arbitrariness frequently pervades such contentions, it often being claimed that, whatever they are alleged to be, the goals are simply those we set up at the outset—as “founding intentions” (Gutting 1973, p.226) definitory of the scientific enterprise.

Views of the relation between progress and advance toward truth typify controversies regarding scientific progress. Popper maintained that science progresses by increasing approximation to truth, or “verisimilitude,” this being a function of the relative truth and falsity contents of the theories being compared. Severe technical flaws undermine his conception of verisimilitude (see VERSIMILITUDE), and in any case we have no way of counting the number of true and false statements in a theory. Those who retain the general notion are hard pressed to analyze truth approximation (Newton-Smith, 1981, ch. 8). Some writers speak of “convergence toward truth,” though Laudan argues that the notion that science converges toward truth is contradicted by the history of science.

The issue of progress is complicated by Kuhn’s contention that scientific change is not cumulative, in either the empirical sense (of a linear accumulation of facts) or the theoretical (that every later theory contains earlier ones as approximations). Kuhn describes revolutionary scientific developments as frequently regressive, answering fewer problems than their predecessors, and holds that we may have to abandon the notion that paradigm changes bring scientists closer to the truth. While there is “a sort of progress,” its ultimate criterion is the decision of the scientific group.

Like Toulmin and Kuhn earlier, Laudan claims that science (and being rational) is essentially a problem-solving activity. Progress is measured not by approximation to truth (which is improbable and uncertifiable in any case), but by problem-solving capability.

…Laudan’s view also fails to deal adequately with criteria of progress toward solving a problem, or with ways in which problems change over the history of science.

As opposed to those who interpret scientific progress as advancement toward some goal, some argued that progress consists in moving away from some kind of status, for instance in correcting old errors rather than arriving at new truths (Peirce, Reichenbach, Salmon).

W.H. Newton-Smith, ed. A Companion to the Philosophy of Science (Blackwell 2001), 418-19.

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Along the same lines:

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In the early twentieth century, analytic philosophers of science started to apply modern logic to the study of science. Their main focus was the structure of scientific theories and patterns of inference (Suppe 1977). This “synchronic” investigation of the “finished products” of scientific activities was questioned by philosophers who wished to pay serious attention to the “diachronic” study of scientific change. Among these contributions one can mention N.R. Hanson's Patterns of Discovery (1958), Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963), Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Paul Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis (Feyerabend 1962), Imre Lakatos' methodology of scientific research programmes (Lakatos and Musgrave 1970), and Larry Laudan's Progress and Its Problems (1977). Darwinist models of evolutionary epistemology were advocated by Popper's Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972) and Stephen Toulmin's Human Understanding (1972). These works challenged the received view about the development of scientific knowledge and rationality. Popper's falsificationism, Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions, and Feyerabend's thesis of meaning variance shared the view that science does not grow simply by accumulating new established truths upon old ones. Except perhaps periods of Kuhnian normal science, theory change is not cumulative or continuous: the earlier results of science will be rejected, replaced, and reinterpreted by new theories and conceptual frameworks. Popper and Kuhn differed, however, in their definitions of progress: the former appealed to the idea that successive theories may approach towards the truth, while the latter characterized progress in terms of the problem-solving capacity of theories.

A major controversy among philosophers of science is between instrumentalist and realist views of scientific theories (Leplin 1984; Psillos 1999; Niiniluoto 1999). The instrumentalists follow Duhem in thinking that theories are merely conceptual tools for classifying and systematizing observational statements, so that the genuine content of science is not to be found on the level of theories (Duhem 1954).

Hanson, Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend agreed that all observation is theory-laden, so that there is no theory-neutral observational language. Accounts of reduction and progress, which take for granted the preservation of some observational statements within theory-change, thus run into troubles. Even though Laudan's account of progress allows Kuhn-losses, it can be argued that the comparison of the problem-solving capacity of two rival theories presupposes some kind of correlation or translation between the statements of these theories (Pearce 1987). Various replies have been proposed to this issue. One is the movement from language to structures (Stegmüller 1976; Moulines 2000), but it turns out that a reduction on the level structures already guarantees commensurability, since it induces a translation between conceptual frameworks (Pearce 1987). Another has been the point that an evidence statement e may happen to be neutral with respect to rival theories T1 and T2, even though it is laden with some other theories. The realist may also point that the theory-ladenness of observations concerns at most the estimation of progress (EP), but the definition of real progress (RP) as increasing truthlikeness does not mention the notion of observation at all.

Even though Popper accepted the theory-ladenness of observations, he rejected the more general thesis about incommensurability as “the myth of the framework” (Lakatos and Musgrave 1970). Popper insisted that the growth of knowledge is always revolutionary in the sense that the new theory contradicts the old one by correcting it, but there is still continuity in theory-change, as the new theory should explain why the old theory was successful to some extent. Feyerabend tried to claim that successive theories are both inconsistent and incommensurable with each other, but this combination makes little sense. Kuhn argued against the possibility of finding complete translations between the languages of rival theories, but in his later work he admitted the possibility that a scientist may learn different theoretical languages (Hoyningen-Huene 1993). Kuhn kept insisting that there is “no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’,” i.e., each theory has its own ontology. Convergence to the truth seems to be impossible, if ontologies change with theories. The same idea has been formulated by Putnam (1978) and Laudan (1984a) in the so-called “pessimistic meta-induction”: as many past theories in science have turned out to be non-referring, there is all reason to expect that even the future theories fail to refer—and thus also fail to be approximately true or truthlike.

The difficulties for realism seem to be reinforced by the observation that measures of truthlikeness are relative to languages.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-progress/

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Or, to take a more specific example:

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A CONVERSATION WITH: JOHN HORGAN; A Heretic Takes On the Science of the Mind


By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Published: September 21, 1999

The genial freelance writer greeting me at the door of his rustic home in Garrison, N.Y., on a warm August morning is John Horgan, 46, the unofficial bad boy of science journalism.

In 1996, Mr. Horgan, then a senior writer with The Scientific American, published ''The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age,'' a 281-page essay in which he argued that scientific inquiry has gone about as far as it can go and that the questions remaining are unanswerable. Many scientists were outraged, but the book sold nearly 200,000 copies.

This month, Mr. Horgan will no doubt be making a new set of enemies with the release of his latest work -- ''The Undiscovered Mind -- How the Human Mind Defies Replication, Medication and Explanation'' (Free Press, $25). ''I think of myself as a heretic,'' he says, ''who is challenging the central dogma that scientific progress is eternal.''

Q. Tell us how you got the idea for this new book.

A. It's really a follow-up to ''The End of Science.'' There were criticisms of my first book that I thought didn't have much substance, but one I thought was reasonable was that the science of the human mind, of all areas of science, had the most potential to be really revolutionary. So I wanted to see how far we had gotten with not just neuroscience, but psychology, psychiatry, behavioral genetics, the new Darwinian social sciences, artificial intelligence.

And what I found is that despite a lot of hype and despite some amazing instruments -- M.R.I.'s, PET scanners -- we seem to be spinning our wheels. We are not learning the kinds of things we want to learn. We aren't learning how matter can create a mind. We aren't even doing something practical like understanding schizophrenia. Or coming up with better treatments for it. Or even a cure. The practical issues are what people care about. On that, I've concluded, despite all the hype about psychopharmacology, especially, there has been very little progress in understanding mental illness and treating it.

Q. Why do you think we're not making any progress in understanding the mind?

A. I don't think that there's a mystical barrier. It's just the brain and the mind are fantastically complex.

Q. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, once told me that the understanding of outer space is relatively simple -- molecular biology was what was complex.

A. Yeah, and the brain! So he's agreeing with me that cosmology and particle physics are all wrapped up?

Q. I don't think so. He's simply saying one is a harder nut to crack than the other.

A. Oh, there's no question: particle physics is like a children's game compared to neuroscience. There are a handful of particles that behave according to fixed rules -- if you control the situation enough, you'll always know how those particles are going to act. With humans, you never know!

Q. Some would say that unpredictability is part of the mystery of what makes people human.

A. Except I don't think you have to resort to mysticism to talk about the limits of mind-related science. There's no mystical reason why we can't do these things. It's just turned out to be extremely difficult. There's no law of nature that says that just through sheer effort and will, scientists can solve every problem. People should at least consider the possibility that, in some respects, we might not solve this thing.

Q. Do you enjoy debunking ideas about scientific progress?

A. I think that ''scientific progress'' is idolized by people who think they are too rational to believe in a Christian God, or some form of religion . . . There's an almost worshipful belief that this extraordinary period of technological and scientific progress is just permanent, that it will continue as long as we have the will. I believe that science itself tells us that there are going to be limits to this process and that those limits are appearing right now. People refuse to acknowledge those limits because they have this faith that it can't end.

Q. What's your critique of most science reporting?

A. I have enormous respect for all my science-writing colleagues, but, in general, I'm distressed that science writers aren't more critical of science. We often don't get as much sophistication out of science writers as we do out of sports writers. Or political writers. Scientists are very good at intimidating science writers. They are always telling us you can't ''really understand'' science unless you are a scientist, which is absolutely absurd.

Q. When you were a staff writer at Scientific American, did you sometimes feel frustrated?

A. Actually, I was encouraged to write critical articles, but the fit became uncomfortable over time. I guess I became too critical. There were certainly some people who thought I was anti-science. There were some people at Scientific American who were horrified by my last book, by what it said and by the title. I was challenging the central dogma, this faith in scientific progress. I think it's fair to say that I left by mutual agreement.


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D05E2D91E3CF932A1575AC0A96F958260&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fH%2fHorgan%2c%20John

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