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/u/justcool393 has a nice post about science and values below, and the conversation veers into discussion of what makes for good science. Without wanting to criticise anyone in that conversation, I'd like to vent a bit about a problem with broader discussion around Science (with a capital S), namely a kind of essentialism about science and the scientific method that's ubiquitous in Rat-adjacent spaces and popular science reporting.
In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.
This is true synchronically - some fields like pharmacology that have to deal with the insane complexities of human physiology are data-centric and heuristic by nature, others like particle physics involve a lot of narrow theoretical work and are reliant on dramatic insights, others like material science are somewhere in between. Moreover, ideas like replicability and experiment simply don't apply to all branches of science; many areas of geology (e.g. study of mass extinctions) are dependent on natural accumulation of evidence and lucky finds, while others (like parts of cosmology) are strikingly limited in the kinds of experimental data they can access, so the challenge becomes a matter of using existing data to probe theories.
But it's also true diachronically; what made for successful science in the 18th century is very different in many respects from what makes for successful science in the 21st century. Part of that is the disappearance of low hanging fruit, and the need for large scale co-ordination across teams with tens of thousands of contributors. Part of it may also be that we have stronger priors on which theories we can discard with minimal proof (e.g., perpetual motion machines). And while it's tempting to see these shifts in norms and practices of science over time as reflecting some linear trend, there's no guarantee that's the case. Here it's worth using the heuristic of an underlying "tech tree" that we're climbing (of course, things aren't like that, but work with me). In videogames, usually the amount of research points required to unlock the next branch of the tree increases steadily over time. But there's no reason to assume that has to be the case, or applies in a blanket way across different areas of science. We don't know what the future of the tech tree will look like; it's possible that advances in technology and society could open a new wave of "gentleman scientists" (cf. some of more optimistic commentary on the LK-99 affair).
I imagine some of you might be tempted to scoff at this and try to boil down "Science" into a few sensible epistemic rules, e.g., use of Bayes's theorem, active efforts at disconfirmation, preregistration of explicit weighted hypotheses, etc.. I think this is valuable as epistemology, but it doesn't provide a core to science - for one, plenty of non-scientific practices (e.g., running a sports team, managing an investment fund, optimising a relationship) also benefit from incorporating these rules. For another, many of the most fertile and successful canonical periods in the history of science (e.g., the Enlightenment) were a methodological Wild West, where few if any of these rules applied. So it's neither sufficient nor necessary for something to be science that it embody these principles. But perhaps most fundamentally, this approach to essentialising science relies on drawing a misleading equivalence between scientists and individual believers. In fact, belief doesn't have to come into science at all: someone can be a perfectly good scientist while remaining personally agnostic on the theories they're testing. What matters is that, for example, the results of their experiments are appropriately incorporated within industry and institutions. Indeed, there are some occasions where arguably science benefits from individual epistemic irrationality; e.g., scientists on the fringes who pursue low-probability high-impact theories to the detriment of their careers because they're (irrationally) true believers. All of those scientists would be individually better off (and more likely to get jobs) if they pursued safe mainstream alternatives. But if everyone does that, science is more likely to get stuck in local theoretical minima.
So if there's no core to "science", then what should we attribute the remarkable successful Renaissance/ Enlightenment technological revolution to? This is a big question, and I won't seriously attempt to answer it here. But two quick thoughts.
First, I wouldn't underestimate the role of what we could loosely call "engineering" - the steady accumulation of advances in things like horse-breeding and ship-building and glass-blowing and metallurgy and mining and industrial chemistry and carbon-fiber construction and so on. Many of the advances we think of as instances of historic scientific genius (e.g., Enlightenment astronomy, Hooke's microscopy, Faraday's insights on electromagnetism; see also, famously, John Harrison's resolution of the longitude problem) were very dependent on prior slowly-accumulated advances in fields like these, built on the back of lengthy intergenerational metis rather than just technê.
Second, I'd emphasise that the major expansion in human knowledge that (according to the traditional story at least) started in Europe in the 1600s-1700s and has since taken over the world should not be attributed to us summoning The Science Demon (the Science Demon doesn't exist, on my view; he's like like sixty different minor demons) but something rather more abstract. If I was pressed, I'd call him something like "pluralistic-quantified-high-stakes-competition-demon" (a close relative of one of the Darwinian demon). What started to happen in Europe, maybe, around the 1600s-1700s, was European civilisation started to converge on a successful recipe, involving lots of inter-state and inter-elite competition, increased quantification/visible demonstrations of results via things like warfare, ideological pluralism allowing lots of experimentation, etc..
That said, I'm not a historian, and precise characterisation of the demon is beyond my paygrade as a philosopher, so I'll leave my speculations at that. But what I would emphasise is that if are looking for any kind of unified explanation of "the success of science", it won't be at the level of "do experiments using method X"; it'll be something far bigger and more abstract, more at the level of civilisation-wide social-institutional design than epistemology.
Eh. You might have anticipated this objection when you said that "some of you might be tempted to scoff at this", but it is really quite easy to scoff and say that this account of the state of "science" is a postmodernist exercise in pulling wool over the reader's eyes, where I want "postmodernist" to be interpreted somewhat idiosyncratically as encompassing all uses of language that are aimed at extracting value from one's fellow humans rather than from nature. All these fields you list that now engage in "different ways of knowing" appear to me to just become increasingly barren as they deviate from the essentials of the scientific method (or, perhaps, the modernist toolbox of science, which queries our instance of nature for its parameters, mathematics, which derives truths that hold in all instances of nature, and engineering, which gives best practices for leveraging understanding of parameters to achieve a desired outcome). Pharmacology produces a procession of p-hacked drugs that don't work, with the exception of some narrow domains of heavily automated industrial drug discovery that are basically Bayesian in nature; geology has the same cliquish turf wars that you see in history and any other discipline which will never have to contend with a ground truth (pun acknowledged but initially unintended); and my understanding of the state of particle physics or cosmology is that at this point it's basically just a way of burning outrageous amounts of money to generate IFLScience content and the track record of projects such as the LHC shows that nobody is capable of predicting anything better than random guess.
In my eyes, what is happening there is not that science has transcended dogma and reached new heights under the aegis of Philosophers of Science enlightening its practicioners about the validity of radically different methods and norms, but instead that structural incentives and plain incompetence have resulted in a proliferation of bad science practiced by people who are much better at producing eloquent defenses of their wrong methods and norms, with enthusiastic fire support from the "wordcels" studying history and philosophy of science, than at correcting said methods and norms and actually generating new knowledge of reality.
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I think honestly at least in the USA, it’s largely down to how we teach science. We absolutely teach science to kids in an essentialist way, as if the theories were dictated to a scientist p-prophet in a white lab coat. And as such, unless you’re working in the field or know someone who does, science is The Science just like the Bible is The Scriptures, sources of absolute truth.
The typical way a science subject is covered is with a story that goes something like this:
Once upon a time, a famous scientist was working in his lab, and he made a discovery. For the sake of argument, it’s the structure of the atom. And thus he did some lab-magic with some chemicals, and came out saying that electrons surround the protons in the nucleus. If your school has a lab equipped to do so, you might repeat the steps of this great scientist and thus see for yourself that the prophets of science spoke the truth. The students will be taught about the scientific method, about the need to replicate, and about the need for peer review. But since most people only deal with science via the classroom lecture and lab demonstration (or played with science demonstration toys and kits), they’ve likely never conducted a real experiment that they thought of in those terms.
This I think is how we got to where we are, at least among laypeople, with scientism and other forms of pseudo intellectual bullshit. We teach people just enough about the subject that they feel like they understand it, but not enough to critically engage with the content. So when people come up against a new topic, they lack the skills to do any sort of independent analysis, or read the competing voices in the debates. Instead, much like a medieval peasant, he finds a priest. If his chosen priest sees value in the idea, then that’s good enough. More people think they know something about space because of Neil DeGaus Tyson and Michio Kakaku, even if they understand none of the scientific reasoning that leas those priests to that conclusion.
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I suspect that the view of science as disunified and pluralistic is an illusion caused by zooming in too close. Older, rival ways of knowing get neglected and forgotten. That should create the impression of a loss of intellectual diversity, but we actually zoom in until the limited, remaining intellectual diversity fills the field of view.
I first rediscovered older perspectives reading about the Spanish Armada of 1588. Garrett Mattingly wrote 421 pages for his book The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. He gives a largely materialist account in which the superior upwind performance of English ships allows them to stay up wind of the Spanish and pound the Spanish from long range with their superior canon. At 583 pages, Neil Hanson gets to include more on Spanish thinking in his book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, the true story of the Spanish Armada. And the thinking is religious and pious.
The Spanish did have some hard headed military men, but religion and piety also had a say in naval matters. If you had tried to warn a Spanish noble about English technical superiority and tactical advantage he might have replied with the authentic 1580's version of this
Second, I was discombobulated by reading that Hobbes was viewed with suspicion in his own time. I imagined that the throne-and-altar guys would love him. God had divinely appointed Kings and there was Hobbes justifying God's wisdom to doubters: of course we need a King. Without a King we will have a war of all against all and life will be nasty, brutish, and short. Yet his contemporaries found Hobbes' perspective mechanistic, materialist, in a word: atheistic. Not the right way to think about the world at all.
Third, in The Discarded Images, C. S. Lewis attempts to explain the Medieval world view to the modern mind. He selects some earlier work he regards as seminal, include the commentary on Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius. Macrobius divides dreams into five species, three veridicial, and two which have 'no divination' in them.
Somnium: truths veiled in an allegorical form
Visio: direct, literal prevision of the future
Oraculum: the dreamers parents or other grave and venerable person openly declares the future
Insomnium: daily cares intruding on sleep
Visum: garbled trash, including nightmares
I cannot believe there was ever a time when every-one took Visio seriously. Dreams must so often fail to come true that many would notice their limitations as a way of knowledge. On the other hand, I assume that Macrobius took dreams seriously, and others followed his lead. What must it have been like to grow up in a world in which the reliability of dreams was accepted by the adults around you and that way of thinking was metaphorically "in the water supply"? It would be hard to see the point of science. Much better to have a good nights sleep and hope, in the morning, to interpret the allegory of Somnium.
There were so many better ways of knowing things than science. You could pray to God. You could study scripture. You could dream.
None of that actually works. It fails hard enough that it is hard in 2023 to imagine taking any of it seriously, yet I believe that people did so. If we zoom out far enough to include such ideas in our field of view, Science shrinks to a small and particular kind of epistemology. Does it have an essence? In the zoomed out view, internal details are too small to be seen and, yes, science has a nerdy essence.
Yes, like the flaw with Star Trek's Klingons, that if they were as depicted, they would never have developed the technology they needed to establish their empire.
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You might be right that it is a strawman, but intriguingly, it is not a baseless strawman. The book title "in confident hope of a miracle" is a quote from a Spaniard of the time. At least one Spaniard was indeed that superstitious. The difficulty is that, with no Gallup polling from back, then it is hard to know whether that level of superstition was common enough to matter.
There are also difficult issues around compartmentalization, both of society and within the minds of individuals. I think that there were sharp class distinctions between tradesmen and nobles. So tradesmen would be level headed and practical in regard to their trade. Shipwrights would build seaworthy ships based on trial and error and folk-naval-architecture, then the noble would swoop in to have the priest bless the ship to make it seaworthy. Within the head of the noble there would be two watertight compartments. One would commission ships, but only from shipwrights whose previous ships had made it back from America. The other would navigate the treacherous waters around heresy by ensuring that the importance of the priest was never doubted. The obvious point, that only the shipwrights track record mattered would be carefully ignored.
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This particular trail of insight is not new. I don't believe it has a proper name, so I like to call it "science-denial" not in the petty sense people use today to mean heterodox belief but in the noble, anti-realist, sense of denying that empiricism has a truer grasp as the universe than most. I believe some call this position "mysticism".
The essence of this view is to regard progress in technics as the result of trial and error and "science" not as the method used to foment that trial and error but rather the ideological interpretation of such results by formulating just-so stories to explain them. The denial is not so much of the ability to learn about the universe through experiment rather than the ability to learn about the universe by making up theories to explain those experiments. It argues the theorizing doesn't produce knowledge, but merely justification.
The most powerful argument for this view you lay out yourself: empiricist epistemology has become a motte and bailey. The motte is strict adherence to a logical experimental protocol, the likes of which you used to see in physics, the strict discipline behind Popper's demarcation. But the bailey is everything else, every sort of theorizing that allows itself to be formalized and uses the right fonts in their PDFs, publishes in journals and wears the right colored labcoats. That is also science, somehow, and draped in the same prestige.
I don't believe the industrial revolution is that hard to explain for this viewpoint, we learned there about many things that were extremely applicable and useful, and you can indeed pin a lot of the success on engineering rather than fundamental research. People of this view like to, rightfully, point out that a lot of those usable discoveries were made by cranks. Which has been a glaring problem for Epistemology forever and is at the core of the more contemporary postmodern views on it. Kuhn's massively influential work on scientific revolutions is all about this.
I do think this denial is throwing the baby with the bathwater however, as I can point to specific insights that could only have been made with the existence of a model (atomics in particular). So I personally prefer to sidestep this whole issue by embracing Naturalism and the belief that science is not some special method of thought invented at some point in history but a process of modelling the environment using energy efficiently that every organism is engaged in.
Consider how simplistic rules, the likes of which religions provide, are actually better and more usable models of the world in most situations than detailed understandings of quantum mechanics.
The "demon" you're pointing at is indeed not science, it's a particular way of engaging with this process that focuses solely on quantity and has no regard for maintenance. And that's where the issue is, not in us building more sophisticated models, but in us building models that are as sophisticated as possible with no regard for what use we get out of them or what human capital we are burning by taking our most clever and sacrificing them on the altar of making more convenient doodads.
I laughed at Rabelais' facile quote when I was taught it: "Science without conscience is but the Ruin of the Soul". But the older I get the deeper the meaning of it strikes me. Though knowledge itself is value neutral, yearning for it at any cost can be a bad thing, and building society on top of it and nothing else the way the Enlightenment has done is indeed ruinous.
I hesitate to say people have rejected science, as I said above, to the vast majority of people who don’t work in the sciences, or know people who do (and to be honest the same could be said of most academic subjects) they don’t understand it at all. They’re not rejecting a subject they don’t understand, they’re rejecting narratives and a “priesthood” of The Science. They don’t know the work of science, they don’t understand the process, they don’t understand the arguments.the reason for anti-realism and anti-science is that once you lose your trust in the basal religion of you society and suspect that those you trusted to explain the universe are either ignorant or untrustworthy.
I think some disciplines tend to over-theorize, especially astrophysics and the like. Most of the stuff about the ultimate structure of the universe are basically no more empirical than any cosmology invented by any ancient religion. There’s no direct experiment or observation that could conceivably show air castles like String Theory or Multiverses to be reality. There have been no observations of dark matter or dark energy. All of these things might be true, but we have no data, and no empirical evidence of any of it. It’s mostly based in mathematics. Mathematics that was based on other observations, but mathematics. And I think the honest answer to these sorts of ideas is “we don’t know”.
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One of the rare times I agree wholeheartedly with you. Outside of Kuhn what are some other good writers in this vein?
Funnily enough I have a deep burning hatred of Kuhn because he moved from reasonable critiques of the way science works to straight up denying the existence of objective reality. Nevertheless he is one of the key authors to understand contemporary epistemology since he pretty much dealt the killing blow to logical positivism.
If you want to understand naturalistic epistemology, which he inherits from, you should read Quine and Goldman.
If you want further polemic as to the validity of methodology you can read Feyerabend, whose most famous book is literally Against Method and has an anarchist position. I find a lot of it ridiculous but he makes some very valid points.
If you want to understand the roots of the culture war, you can read about the Positivismusstreit, the theoretical debate between logical positivism and critical theory that sowed the seed for much of what is playing out today.
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You may be interested in Terence Tao's There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs. He also postulates that truly advanced thinking means going beyond rigour.
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It's the wrong question. The right one is: Given that there was a remarkably successful Renaissance/Enlightenment technological revolution, why should we accept the revisionist conclusion that there is no "core" to science? And the answer is then obvious: we should not.
Yes, science didn't stop working, we stopped doing science.
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My philosophy, Triessentialism, breaks things down to (or sees things through a lens of) three essences: Physical, Logical, and Emotional, or What, How, and Why.
I see science as the How of the What, and engineering as creating a What with a built-in How; they’re the same thing but in different directions.
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