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Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Scientific progress

Daniel Morgan said:

***QUOTE***

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].

***END-QUOTE***

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:

***QUOTE***

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/

***END-QUOTE***

Or, to take a more specific example:

***QUOTE***

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

***END-QUOTE***

16 comments:

  1. Good post!

    I think one of the key statements was:

    "Hanson, Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend agreed that all observation is theory-laden, so that there is no theory-neutral observational language."

    Thus, when Daniel says: "Do you agree or disagree that science is a tool whereby we establish reliable knowledge (although perhaps not absolute and universal)?" -- he must realize that the idea of "reliable knowledge" is itself "theory-laden."

    Daniel Morgan (and others in a similar vein) cannot simply assert that there is something "reliable" or "trustworthy" or "factual" etc. They must demonstrate how they can define anything as "reliable", "trustworthy", etc. by showing how these things come about within their worldview.

    In other words: there is no free lunch. :-) If you are going to make truth statements, you must have a way to account for truth. Stating "Science is truth" can certainly be assumed, but such would have disasterous results for a worldview relient upon it (as witnessed by all the discarded scientific "truth" from past years).

    Finally, when Daniel says that science is "the method we rely on, which has proven itself so far, [and] will continue to expand in scope and power (as it has shown itself capable of doing for generations now)" he must realize that what science has shown "for generations now" is the fact that scientific dogma of the day is always discarded (and often mocked) by the next generation of scientists, and thus we cannot say that what we "know" today is actually "known" since science, following its historical trend, will reject today's theories in the future and, in fact, treat today's theories with contempt, just as we treat flogistan today.

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  2. Calvindude said:

    "he must realize that what science has shown "for generations now" is the fact that scientific dogma of the day is always discarded (and often mocked) by the next generation of scientists, and thus we cannot say that what we "know" today is actually "known" since science, following its historical trend, will reject today's theories in the future and, in fact, treat today's theories with contempt, just as we treat flogistan today."


    Kinda reminds of religion/theology and Biblical truths as well....

    Those precious religious truths that the primitives that wrote the bible believed...and are mocked today....because they've been proven wrong by science.

    BZZZZZTTTT!!!!! Next!

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  3. I was interested to read the assertion that the chap you mentioned wanted to deny the 'myth of scientific progress.' I'm swiftly coming to the conclusion that a teleological view, of history, civilisation, etc. is to sign on to the enlightenment's agenda, consciously or unconsciously.

    Again, just musing, as I do, while thinking about my MA Dissertation. In terms of second-order causes, is there a teleology? Are some things 'inevitable' in human terms?

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  4. Cornelius.

    Oh dear. 'Primitives!' By what standard?

    And the number of things I've seen presented as 'the assured results of modern scholarship' that were nothing of the sort makes me somewhat suspicious.

    Now, maybe you'd like to give examples, sir?

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  5. cornelius,

    Thank you for entirely missing the point of my comment. Your contribution is greatly appreciated.

    You said: "because they've been proven wrong by science."

    But of course, the whole idea of something being "proven...by science" is what is at issue.

    But don't let THAT get in the way of a good BZZZT!!!

    If you'd like to actually look at at the issue, perhaps you can provide us with a defintion of "proof" and demonstate how it is theory-neutral. Or, you can demonstrate how the theories it relies upon are actually so. Either of those would be really helpful. Because right now I think you're just throwing around terms divorced from the philosophical systems required to define them simply so you can pretend to have made a valid point.

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  6. Calvindude:

    My young chap, so eager, so excited....

    Do you believe the earth is flat?
    Do you believe the sun can stop its passage across the sky?
    Do you believe that disease is caused by demons?
    Have biblical theology and the religeons that attach themselves to it changed over the years?

    and most importantly...

    does "science" claim to "know" things universally, or provisionally?

    thanks for shopping!

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  7. If God says that the earth is flat, then the earth is flat. Who can disagree with God? If a scientist contradicts what God has decreed, then that scientist is a devil and a viper, and he will have his place in the lake of fire. This is God's will. So much for "scientific progress."

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  8. I couldn't have said it better, "suffering servant."

    Those scientists, with their theories, and facts, and years of research...

    morons!

    vipers!

    To the pit with them!

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  9. Suffering Servant,

    You're not doing us Christians any favors by blurting out this stuff. You're just producing fodder for the atheists. So, please refrain. If you would like to engage in cogent biblical argumentation, by all means do, but you're approach is not one that is taken here and is certainly not helpful when dealing with unbelievers.......thanks

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  10. 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.


    It's a bit more striking to see someone who is so utterly out of touch with reality. The next time you have a medical condition, I'd like to see where your skepticism and scientific anti-realism go...into the crapper.

    Call me a pragmatist about scientific methodology, seeing it as a tool. If it works to produce things for us that meet our needs (eg medicine), then we use it until better tools come along. So far, your theology and philosophizing has done squat for the human race as far as meeting needs and saving lives and mass-producing food and etc. etc. etc.

    In that sense, I laugh at your scorn and lofty assessments that I am so ignorant of my own profession. For you have chosen a field to work and study in within which you have nothing to fear -- success or failure. The unfalsifiable fruit of your work, and life, will not be tasted for nutrition's sake, or for sustainment, but set on a table like wax apples for showmanship. And though you may in some way contribute to these ancient ideas that you have devoted your life to, I am quite sure that none of them will ever save a life or relieve pain. And so not only does the practicality of science swamp out any sense of "what if we're just brains in a vat?" but its nobility renders such contemplations as whether or not the layers of perception marr reality ignoble.

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

    Hardly. You don't know my views on the philosophy of science and demarcation. I haven't bothered to engage with you on it, as I stated long ago, since you're a scientific anti-realist. As I said there, why cast pearls before swine? Why get into contextual disputes with someone who doesn't subscribe to any of the contexts?

    You always want to move the ball back into your court, because it's the only one with the 4' rim. Thus, making "slam dunks" on the court of scientific anti-realism is your bag. Why should I bother distinguishing Popper's change of views on evolutionary theory and falsifiability with someone who thinks that such knowledge goes through "too many layers" of perception to be real?

    As you said:
    Scientific realism involves two basic positions. First, it is a set of claims about the features of an ideal scientific theory; an ideal theory is the sort of theory science aims to produce. Second, it is the commitment that science will eventually produce theories very much like an ideal theory and that science has done pretty well thus far in some domains. It is important to note that one might be a scientific realist regarding some sciences while not being a realist regarding others...The mind does not enjoy direct access to the external world. Rather, what we perceive comes to us in the form of encoded and reencoded information, viz. electromagnet information converted to electrochemical information...Yet he’s in no position to objectify the process, for he is unable to escape his own port of entry. Between the sensory input and the conscious readout there lies a blackbox...How can a scientific theory be truly descriptive of the world if the world is inaccessible to the scientist?...So realism and antirealism have to answer the same question: how can a mistaken theory be successful?...My own answer is to distinguish between a correlation and a correspondence.

    As Calvindude has hinted at here, some theories are later found to be "false". What neither of you in your theorizing allow for is that when the prior theories are shown to be false (viz. creationism by evolution) the new theory must accomodate the observational data of the old, as well as provide a better explanation for other phenomena. In this sense, scientific theories are evolving, but they are selected for by their utility and scope. Furthermore, the data itself doesn't change (unless you live in a cartoon universe), but rather, our explanation of the underlying phenomena becomes more consistent with what we know [or think we do]. If one theory doesn't surpass another in terms of explanatory power, it is filtered out by the process.

    Is the same thing true of theology or philosophy? When these debates over property dualism and epiphenomena really fire up, what provides some means by which to test their ramifications? Theology? Hardly.

    You spent a lot of time talking about your analogy between a CD's encoding of a live performance and the performance itself. The binary data in a CD is a language which can be correlated to the frequencies of the music. What strikes me as odd is that, as observations are made through layers of perception, you fail to argue that there is some fundamental disconnect between the "language" of perception and that of reality. You simply posit that these layers exist (which I don't deny), and that by their existence, a correlation to reality is somehow not itself dependable as knowledge.

    If our brains fundamentally change the nature of reality, there is absolutely no way for us to know it. Likewise, there is absolutely no way for us to prove it false. This is an unfalsifiable concept, like all of your 4' rim court abstractions.

    The correlations we have to reality, though, have held up so far, and I don't see them toppling anytime soon.

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  11. PS: To continue my tirade on the futility of philosophy, see Babinski's excellent collection of quotes here.

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  12. Daniel Morgan said:

    "You always want to move the ball back into your court, because it's the only one with the 4' rim. Thus, making "slam dunks" on the court of scientific anti-realism is your bag."

    QUOTE OF THE YEAR!!!!

    Seriously...awesome!

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  13. Sola Fide: "you're approach is not one that is taken here."

    If that's the case, then how can you claim to be Christians? Does not God determine whether or not the earth is flat or round or whatever? Is it only lipservice when you claim to honor God's sovereignty? As I asked, who can disagree with God? If God says the earth is flat, who are the science "professionals" to say otherwise? God will prove them all liars if He so chooses. Unfortunately so many Christians today have attempted to put God into a box. It won't happen. God does not fit into a box. This is the Bible's God I'm speaking about. Perhaps you have been lured by the enemy? Only God's enemies want to put Him into a cage. God's enemies seek to limit Him according to their understanding. This is the root of all heresies. "Lean not unto thine own understanding" is what God hath said!

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  14. Suffering Servant,

    God didn't make the earth flat, we can observe this from space. God doesn't have us put away our common sense and reason--He made us with both. So I get your point, God is sovereign and if He says something it is true. But this is an apologetics web site, we don't make some assertion and only back it up with "God said so and that's good enough for me". Of course, if God said it that's good enough for me, but we're dealing with unbelievers here and the apologetic endeavor utilizes reason to some degree. So, you're not helping the cause here. Atheists and apostates laugh at such an approach as, "well, if God says the earth is flat, then it's flat!" Do you expect unbelievers to fall on their knees before God with that kind of argumentation? The apostle Paul preached the truth on Mars Hill by reasoning with the idolaters there from a common point, beginning with the fact that they worshipped an unknown God. He then proceeded to declare the one true and living God to them. He didn't even start with Scripture in that context because these people didn't know the Scriptures. So, I admire your zeal, but question your wisdom on this point. We're not putting God in a box, we're using the appropriate biblical apologetic method within this context....thanks

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  15. I have never been to space, so I don't know what the earth looks like from space. And I'm not going to buy what some lettered scientist says because he probably believes in evolution. So if he is willing to lie about origins, why would I trust him on the shape of the earth?? Yes, God created us with reason, but our reason is not to smother our faith and obedience to the one and only God. Did God create the earth flat? I don't know, God did not tell me. Does the earth look flat? It depends on one's perspective I suppose. From my perspective I see nothing wrong with thinking that God created the earth flat. It looks flat to me. God's universe is in His control. Something in creation may appear to be one way, but it's all in God's hands. I really cannot care if the wicked unbelievers and backsliders snicker and giggle at what we know to be God's truth. Only God decides who is elect and who is to be cast into the flames. If God has chosen that some reading my statements be cast into eternal hellfire, then no amount of reasoning on my part is going to reverse this. God makes his own decisions as the cause is God's and God's alone. God is big enough to see after His causes, for they are His glory and His alone. It is all in God's control, and I am faithful to this knowledge for it is a knowledge that I know is true, whether or not I always understand. Happy am I when others question my wisdom, for my wisdom is not my own. I give it all to God, and God does not want me puffed up. God wants me to give my offerings to Him, not to the unbelievers. They are at enmity with the one true God.

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  16. Suffering Servant,

    Oh-kay, brother. You can believe the earth is flat, but that is denying reality and is ignorant. The Bible doesn't say it's flat, but if it looks flat to you just be careful not to get too close to the edge. I suppose dinosaurs didn't exist either because the Bible doesn't clearly mention them, and hey, you've never seen one, so I guess the godless scientists are probably lying to us about that too. And I suppose the sun rotates around the earth, I mean it does go across our sky and everything. They must be lying about that also. I guess you can't really trust scientists when they are simply reporting scientific facts. It's a big satanic conspiracy, saying the earth is round and rotates around the sun, and that dinosaurs existed. Thanks for making us aware of it, brother........

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