Carnap and Scientific Realism
Via John Holbo, it seems They Might Be Giants’s latest for kids projects involves a new song “Science is Real” that opens with a quote from German philosopher Rudolf Carnap:
Carnap did a lot of good work during his career, but as I tweeted it’s disappointing to see TMBG embracing his discredited view that “science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.” That’s just not the case. It’s not how science works in practice and it doesn’t work in principle, either. Facts and theories are interdependent.
Nothing is ever observed that admits of a definitive, theory-independent observation nor does anything ever happen that can verify or falsify a single proposition in isolation. Obviously, observation and experimentation are integral to the work of scientists, but it’s a lot murkier and more complicated than that.
I think it’s unfortunate that people trying to enhance the social prestige of science and scientists (which is basically what the TMBG song is about) have this tendency to want to fall back on this kind of naive realism and positivism as their means for doing so. To understand why science is so impressive what I think you really need to do is not talk about how it’s “real” (whatever that means) but put it as a social practice alongside other social practices aimed at explaining the world. You’ll see that science is impressively progressive—when old theories get overturned by newer ones, our capabilities as a society and as a species are enhanced in really noteworthy ways. There’s no better set of ideas or practices out there. If you really really want to cling to Young Earth Creationism there’s no argument that can compel you to change your mind, but at this point in history creationist thinking is all about explaining away the successes of Darwinian theory it doesn’t actually contribute anything to enhance our understanding of things.
89 Responses to “Carnap and Scientific Realism”
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October 1st, 2009 at 4:53 pm
This is a great opportunity to mention something that was really bugging me yesterday: Andrew Sullivan defending the use of the term “Darwinist”. Its a really stupid word, which makes it seem as though there is some sort of ideology involved. Which there isn’t. We don’t go around calling people “Einsteinists” or “Kepplerists”, do we?
October 1st, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I’d be satisfied if people at least differentiated between sciences and the social studies that attempt to utilize scientific method and often fall short of what would be accepted in a hard science. That’s not to say that Psychology and Economics have no place in society (though, I often argue that Economics is an inherent corrupt field at the moment), it’s just that they can’t really be called sciences. They are studies of human behavior, not of natural forces, laws or circumstances. Treating them like sciences lead to absurdities like the Rational Actor that shouldn’t even survive the sciences first contact with actual human beings.
October 1st, 2009 at 4:58 pm
The album is for kids.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Sounds like a philosophy major’s inferiority complex to me.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:01 pm
You have a point, I guess, but it’s a bit like saying we should stop teaching Cartesian geometry to 7th graders because Einstein proved it isn’t always correct. You’ve got to start somewhere.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Sean Carroll wrote a wonderful piece a while ago about what science is and how it works. Of course I can’t find it now. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
October 1st, 2009 at 5:06 pm
“Nothing is ever observed that admits of a definitive, theory-independent observation …..”
How about the experimental evidence for dark matter or dark energy? I don’t believe there is an accepted theoretical model yet to explain these.
“… nor does anything ever happen that can verify or falsify a single proposition in isolation.”
How about Bell’s experiment and the purported hidden-variable nature of quantum mechanics?
October 1st, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Science is “real” as opposed to “pulled out of one’s ass”, the latter which is how a good many US kids are acculturated. It’s a kids album, so keeping the philosophical hairsplitting down to a minimum is desirable.
That said, the seeming inability of many to develop a more nuanced view of Creation as they mature screws up the religious and secular alike.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Here’s the Carroll piece:
Link
October 1st, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Finally a philosophy post. Yeah, the aufbau sucks. The absurdity of logical empiricism is best revealed by statements about the past.
Independent,
He’s talking about something else. The direct observations that lead you to posit dark matter wouldn’t lead you to do that without a large background of theory. Bell’s Theorem was verified, in a sense, by Aspic and Gsin (spelling likely wrong), but that was theory dependent too. Cool shit you bring up tho.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Someone’s read their Feyrabend.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I would imagine people are right that it’s better to just go with the romanticism when talking to children…
But yeah, the scientist as “Noble Pursuer of Truth” mythology hurts more than it helps IMO. You’re setting your own stawman for people like climate change denialists to gleefully knock down… and it’s not hard to expose a seedy underbelly of science. A more realistic picture of how scientific progress happens… with all its problems… would inure us to most of that.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:18 pm
I use the word “Kochist” to describe one of the ideologically blindered adherents of the so-called “Pathogenic Theory” of disease.
Some of the more fundamentalist Kockhists are no different than religious zealots, and refuse to debate me at length.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Congratulations, this officially the geekiest thing you’ve ever posted.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:24 pm
I love it! If people are interested, they should look into the rhetoric of science, an interdisciplinary study of science as a form of knowledge and its intersection with argumentation and public discourse. And while I’m no positivist, one of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Vienna School Carnap cohort Otto Neurath: “Protect the children from metaphysics!”
October 1st, 2009 at 5:31 pm
It’s important to speak in age appropriate terms. Sure, young earth creationism “doesn’t actually contribute anything to enhance our understanding of things.” To a 5 year old, that means “it’s not real”.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Kepler’s laws of planetary motion predate Newton’s gravitation law and laws of motion. Aren’t they are entirely empirical?
October 1st, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Kuhn is frankly full of shit. You’d be better off ignoring his arguments and views on what science is (which is a typical problem for most science historians).
We can come pretty close with good “controls” in experimental verification. Nobody expects perfection – that’s for the Solipsists and Platonics.
“Over-turned” can be correct at times, but it’s also often misleading. Einstein’s General Relativity is more accurate than Newton’s, but that doesn’t mean that Newton’s work is incorrect – rather that Newton’s work becomes incorrect in certain circumstances (like in high-gravity fields, and near the speed of light), and General Relativity encompasses and explains both those situations as well as the ones that Newtonian Mechanics is right about.
That’s a wholly Solipsist argument, and entirely useless. Technically, there’s no argument that can prove that the rest of you all aren’t illusions being projected into my head by the Cosmic Spaghetti Monster, or that my consciousness even exists.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Now, if you want to complain that many adults still have this 5 year old’s view of science, I think you have a strong argument and one which needs to be heard because it affects how our society make decisions.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Independent:
Looks like # 10 beat me to this, but I will state it another way.
What Matt’s getting at when he says: “Nothing is ever observed that admits of a definitive, theory-independent observation …..” is that all observations are implicity compared to some theory (in the broadest sense this would include intuituve expectations as well as formal scientific theories)
Thus if I knock my coffee cup off the desk and it levitates in mid air, I would judge that to be pretty amazing precisely because it defies the laws gravity ( a formal theory) or my intuitive generalizations that heavy things will fall if they are not supported by something solid. Either way the observation can only be processed if you have some prediction to compare it to. If I had no experience with living on a heavy planet or no theory, I would have not idea what to make of the floating coffee mug, Is it interesting? Is it routine?
October 1st, 2009 at 5:33 pm
@Aqua Regia,
Sully’s use of the term “Darwinist” is absolutely retarded. He uses the word “Christianist” as a pejorative term to describe people that claim to worship “Christ”. The people he describes as “Darwinists” would never claim to worship Darwin or science. On top of it, the young-earth nutjobs use the term “Darwinist” explicitly as a pejorative to describe the people that don’t follow their nutjob world view.
And on Science:
It doesn’t really the work the way most non-scientists probably expect it to.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Nothing is ever observed that admits of a definitive, theory-independent observation nor does anything ever happen that can verify or falsify a single proposition in isolation.
Okay, I’ll bite.
Proposition: John exists.
Event: John falls on your head.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:36 pm
You can do a lot of real science without thinking deeply about such “philosophical” debates – in fact, that is probably what most scientists do. Posivitism is good enough as an intellectual foundation.
Social scientists, of course, spend more time wondering what their field of studies is (or should be) really about than advancing human knowledge of the world.
The respect a scientist gets is due to things like electricity, vaccines and Internet, not to children songs or a sound epistemological stance.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:38 pm
[...] in Daily life, Evolution, Religion, Science at 2:38 pm by LeisureGuy Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post, from which this is taken: I think it’s unfortunate that people trying to enhance the social [...]
October 1st, 2009 at 5:43 pm
That is one dumbass video. i can see my grandkids asking “Gramps, what does ‘real’ mean?
October 1st, 2009 at 5:47 pm
I don’t know about Matt’s take on observation since as the old adage goes if you can spray it’s real. For more.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:52 pm
That quote from Carnap, I think, is fairly inoffensive – depending on what you take ‘based’ to imply (foundationalism? probably not; makes use of? probably) – and something even a radical holist like Quine would subscribe to. And besides, you see Carnap explicitly ascribe to a Duhemian thesis about testing and theories in section 82 (I think that’s where it is) of The Logical Syntax of Language. More implicitly, this is the view offered in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” – see especially Carnap’s claim that only pragmatic concerns can justify our adoption of one or another way of approaching and talking about the world.
This is all just to say that the view of Carnap that’s been propagated in the last century as a lame verificationist – in the mold of Ayer – is bankrupt. The caricature offered by Quine that somehow became received wisdom has been successfully challenged on numerous fronts by some of the better scholars in history of philosophy of science (Alan Richardson, Michael Friedman). The actual picture painted by Carnap’s work and the depth of his influences (including neo-Kantians) suggests a much different and incredibly nuanced picture than is normally taught in our philosophy classes.
So, let’s teach the kids some Carnap!
October 1st, 2009 at 5:52 pm
“He’s talking about something else. The direct observations that lead you to posit dark matter wouldn’t lead you to do that without a large background of theory.”
P. Carbone and Dan F,
That is true. But why stop at just theory. One would suppose that a number of other things such as human consciousness would also be prerequisites. Surely that is understood and doesn’t need to be spelled out. So why is it necessary to spell out that the interpretation of an experimental observation relies on a theoretical background? And if it doesn’t, then Carnap’s definition seems just fine, even if a little cryptic.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:55 pm
The nice thing about just promoting instrumentalist theories of science is that you end up with a slightly larger coalition since a greate number of people who aren’t scientific realists seem to think science is great. No doubt there are always multiple theories that are consistant with observations, but certain theories really do get discarded because of observations evidence. You can always believe god is playing games with us if you want, but I bet Matt Yglesias no longer believes that Velociraptor’s claws were used to tear open dinosaur flesh. The observation about the sharpness of the claws forced Yglesias to change his beliefs about velociraptors.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:59 pm
“nor does anything ever happen that can verify or falsify a single proposition in isolation. ”
I agree with what you almost said correctly; but my thinking that I am thinking is something that happens and it does verify the proposition that I exist. But again, I know what you meant and I agree.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:59 pm
“this kind of naive realism and positivism”
Wow, that is one busy conjunction.
Wza – Entity Realism is not without its’ own gigantic gaping holes. You can’t spray, or otherwise manipulate, a gravitational lens, for instance, but it’s definitely real.
Constructive Empiricism’s where it’s at. BvF teh ROXXAR.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I can’t wait until Matt has a 3 year old kid.
Scene, Matt catches young Gertrude stealing a pack of gum from the supermarket.
Matt: Gertrude, what did I tell you about stealing?
Gertrude: In this family we don’t steal because although there is no definition of stealing which can be universally applicable, the functional definition, when applied to the society in which both you and I inhabit, allows individuals to more efficiently allocate their scare resources.
Matt: That’s right, now go tell the cashier you are sorry…
October 1st, 2009 at 6:21 pm
I’ll bite and point out that Brett in #18 is mostly full of shit. Certain scientists have a tendency to think that Kuhn is full of shit because they read at an 8th grade level, have no grasp of epistemology, and don’t have the slightest idea what Kuhn is talking about.
It’s worth pointing out that the dominant paradigm in a field can be overturned without overturning the entire theoretical framework. Relativity didn’t overturn Newtonian mechanics; it simply limited their application in certain sets of circumstances. But it absolutely overturned a previously existing consensus view about the universal laws of motion.
It’s also worth pointing out that #22 is a useful rebuttal to anyone who takes these philosophical arguments to their logical extremes.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Matt, you’re being too hard on a video for kids. Let them have a few years of blissful naive positivism. That is, unless you can include the Durheim-Quin thesis into a remotely appealing song.
“Science is real” can be corrected later, but the gist of it is there – the importance on empirical observation, which allows you to state apples are real and unicorns are not.
Burskertype
This is a sort of pedantic correction – Cartesian Geometry can’t be “incorrect”. Einstein used elliptical geometry in the theory of relativity, but the mathematical framework had been developed before, mostly by Riemann (although he wasn’t the first to work on elliptical geometry).
October 1st, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I don’t know much about the philosophy of science, but I know that a popular thread in modern Neuroscience involves Bayesian analysis. My understanding is that we don’t “know” things to be true or not true, we have beliefs that are weighted probabilistic estimates of the truth (truthiness?) of something. The weighting is based on past current beliefs and current sensory input. If a current input conflicts with a belief, there is a mismatch. Either the input or the belief can be re-evuated. For example sensory input is not always a true reflection of the state of the outside world. Optical illusions and all that. Our brains collect sense data, impose it on guesses based on beliefs and create percepts. When the sense data contradicts belief propositions, conflicts occur and beliefs are updated or sensory data is rejected.
This framework has implications for science, religion and for everyday life. In science I know that an observation or experiment that contradicts theory or conventional wisdom has a much greater barrier to acceptance than one that is consistent with theory (.05 probability levels not withstanding). My rough reading of Matt’s philosophy of science summary is, I think, consistent with this Bayesian view.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Matt B at 17 wrote:
No, they’re based on tons of assumptions about what we are looking at when we look into space. All the empirics consist in is the dots of light one sees at night. From there you still need to conclude that the dots are spheres moving around each other, that you measurements tell you what you think they do etc. The only thing that doesn’t involve theory is pure sense experience (and even then, we have implicit theories that we use to interpret that sense experience).
18 Brett Says:
No, Newton’s Second Law is incorrect. The fact that you can’t tell that its wrong under certain circumstances is irrelevant to it being invalid
October 1st, 2009 at 6:36 pm
The First Law of Thermodynamics is: You do not talk about Thermodynamics.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Woah, woah, man. Don’t go knocking on positivism.
Sure, it’s not technically, TRUE, but it is damned useful.
October 1st, 2009 at 7:09 pm
“positivism…. it’s not technically, TRUE, but it is damned useful.”
The scientific method is useful, and empirical knowledge based on the scientific method is useful. But I don’t see how positivist cheer-leading for them adds anything useful to the mix.
October 1st, 2009 at 7:17 pm
You really don’t want to go down that route. Thanks to science we can obliterate the planet, we have obliterate our atmosphere, we can kill each other ever more efficiently and do so because we now require more resources per person, diseases can travel around the world in days, moreover we can now make them even more resistant and deadly thanks to scientific anti-viral drugs or any drugs. Everything gives you cancer (thanks for inventing it science!) and it’s better than even money that we will eventually be made obsolete by our own scientific creations.
October 1st, 2009 at 7:19 pm
That doesn’t change the fact that it’s still useful, and holds up under testing, within that particular range beyond which it no longer works as an explanation.
October 1st, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Re: To understand why science is so impressive what I think you really need to do is not talk about how it’s “real” (whatever that means) but put it as a social practice alongside other social practices aimed at explaining the world. You’ll see that science is impressively progressive—when old theories get overturned by newer ones, our capabilities as a society and as a species are enhanced in really noteworthy ways
What the F*ck?
I don’t care about whether a body of knowledge is ‘progressive’. Who does care about that? I care about whether it’s true: i.e. whether it corresponds (in the case of science) to the way nature actually works.
Science does that. Depending on whether you believe in the religious/supernatural you may believe that there are other aspects of reality which science _doesn’t_ explain, but it’s unquestionable that the natural sciences provide true answers to the questions which they are equipped to answer (which are a h*ll of a lot of questions). These answers would still be true to nature, even if there were no human societies around to understand or make sense of them.
Where does being ‘progressive’ even enter in to it?
October 1st, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Heh. I had to read down 27 comments to get to anyone who actually knows anything about what Carnap really says. It’s certainly true that anyone who thinks Carnap was an Ayer-style positivist about science, or that he rejected Duhemian holism about testing, doesn’t know anything about Carnap.
But I’d add one more thing. Not even people who grossly misunderstand Carnap think he was ever a “scientific realist.” It chaps my hide that that lazy post-Kuhnians have conflated a perfectly good distinction between “positivism” (which was always a form of anti-realism) and “scientific realism.”
October 1st, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Re: but put it as a social practice
What?
It’s not a social practice, it is a body of knowledge about the world. The fact that biological information is carried in the DNA code, that DNA is made up of the four bases that pair according to certain rules, and so forth, would be true even if Watson and Crick had never discovered it. The same goes for, of course, mathematics and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge. So in what sense can they be called a social practise?
October 1st, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Hector, so far you are arguing that scientific knowledge is true because it is true.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:00 pm
the rest of you all are illusions being projected into my head by the Cosmic Spaghetti Monster, or that my consciousness even exists.
This explains, like, everything. I knew something like it was true.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Hector, I don’t think Matt meant politically “progressive”, but rather a building-block system of knowledge.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Hector,
Although science is, roughly, a body of knowledge (or partial knowledge) there must also me a mechanism to add to this body. Without a social mechanism the “body of knowledge” wouldn’t exist or couldn’t be expanded.
So, yes, the structure of DNA is part of science. But without the social mechanism of science the structure of DNA wouldn’t be there.
(If by ‘body of knowledge’, you mean all truth about nature rather then human understanding of the rules of nature, then the social process of science gives human access to the body of knowledge)
October 1st, 2009 at 8:29 pm
The Quinean theory-dependence business that Matt seems to be promoting here is rather one-sided and, on its own, a bit obscurantist. Modern philosophy of science is Bayesian, though, and, as Mr. Cube up at 35 observes, it puts theory-dependence in a bigger and more useful framework, as it does Carnap’s verificationism. It’s not either-or.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:30 pm
The limits of Science are just an artifact of the limits of language. Naive Positivism is our best hope to describe the world outside our wills. We’re animals and these things (language and science) are tools. Not metaphysics.
October 1st, 2009 at 9:40 pm
re: “nor does anything ever happen that can verify or falsify a single proposition in isolation.”
#27 is exactly right in spirit but not quite in letter: the Carnap TMBG quote is rather from “The physicalist langauge as the universal language of science” (translated into english under the title “Unity of Science”). But the sentence immediately after the one the original post dumps on is:
“Verification in science, however, is not of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of statements”
which is exactly the view endorsed in the original post.
More importantly: seeing 50 comments on a Carnap post is quite heartening to me — I’m an academic, and I’ve written articles and a book about Carnap. I’ve often had the impression that people couldn’t care less about Carnap-related stuff, but this post and these comments prove otherwise.
October 1st, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Feynman had it right – “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
October 1st, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Is Matt coming out as a Rortian pragmatist?
October 1st, 2009 at 10:30 pm
This post is not very well-written. I can’t really tell what it even means.
October 1st, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I’m inclined to agree with #4 and #52, that all this excruciatingly hair-splitting philosophy of science doesn’t amount to much at the end of the day. One might also be forgiven for suspecting that the philosophers who generate it are really just jealous of scientists who actually accomplish things, and so are ever searching for a way to feel superior to them (throwing around a word like “naive” is a real indicator here). Consider two observations, each not overly theory-laden:
1) Most scientists aren’t versed at all in this kind of philosophy, and couldn’t recognize Kuhn, Feyerabend or Carnap from three brands of beer. Yet, they manage to get a great deal done, producing ever-more-improved theories that can be ever-better tested in the real world (RWOT, TM). Since the world, and the progress of science practice, would continue pretty much the same whether these philosophies did or never did exist, that strongly suggests they don’t have much purchase in the real world.
2) As one can see just from this comment stream, there doesn’t seem to be any agreed-upon, reliable way to say that one view or synthesis is “better”/”more accurate”/”more true”/”what have you” than another. So, how are we to know that any philosophy is not just so much nonsense? What’s the mechanism for a reality check? You may find this xkcd comic instructive http://xkcd.com/451/
So, I think students of philosophy would do well to remember who does the real work in the world, and be appropriately respectful (perhaps starting with Matt).
October 1st, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Re: 53, Matt’s been out as a Rortian pragmatist for some time.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:11 pm
My “If you really really want to cling to Young Earth Creationism there’s no argument that can compel you to change your mind”
What if God was making the argument, really laying into em and making good points, do you think the Creationist would crack?
“Ok, God, you win. I am officially a Darwinista. Now go away, you are troubling me.”
October 1st, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Why Does the Sun Shine is a pretty old song. Still catchy though.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:35 pm
The logical positivism of Ayer (but apparently not Carnap) was just as much a cultural thing as anything else – hence why the noisiest scientists are still logical positivists long after that movement fell apart. I imagine a prime source of Matt’s grievance was the fact that anyone (child entertainers or not) actually takes seriously such a long dead idea.
It doesn’t help that the (cultural?) postmodernist movement has now caused those at the scientific end of things to interpret anything less than “the only reason there are doubts in science is because we haven’t done all the experiments yet”, (i.e any usage of the words “theory-dependent” or “observer-relative” or “anti-real”) as the equivelant of saying “science is a lie”.
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:04 am
Lakatos >>> Kuhn
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:14 am
Wow it is so clear that almost none of you are scientists.
Real science = disprove hypothesis, get drunk, go back tomorrow and disprove it again. Rinse and repeat.
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:25 am
What you say, while in some sense true, is no less naive than the arguments you denigrate.
The key issue in science is whether its theories allow specific non-obvious predictions that can be empirically verified. Thus, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity became a big deal when the preiction about its gravity bending light was empirically verified.
This seperates it from all other known sets of theories, beliefs, or ideologies: –theories are only considered “valid” or useful as long as they offer the best empirically verifiable insight into “meter readings” of external reality.
Compare this to Republican dogma about taxes, or the drivel of “fresh water” economists, and you may understand the difference.
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:27 am
Re: #61 Aqua Regia
The way you stated the practice of science is illogical or highly inefficient.
If on day 1 a hypothesis is disproved, why is the scientist wasting time doing it again on day 2?
The answer is that the hypothesis wasn’t disproved. Its likelihood was diminished (Bayesian, again).
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:32 am
Late to the party, I know. But:
“science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.” That’s just not the case. It’s not how science works in practice and it doesn’t work in principle, either. Facts and theories are interdependent.
First, there are a fair share of scientific anti-realists running around still, so the view isn’t dead by a long shot. Second, philosophers often ignore (and often rightly) what practitioners of a particular field say about their field. Artists are good at art, but often they suck at philosophy of art. Scientists are good at science, but often suck at philosophy of science (they’re not as muddled as the artists but have a tendency to be more dogmatic (and all this is my own experience, of course)).
I don’t see how the “facts and theories are interdependent” is relevant in your statement.
Also, Carnap was one hell of a philosopher, and contemporary philosophy owes him a great debt.
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:05 am
If on day 1 a hypothesis is disproved, why is the scientist wasting time doing it again on day 2?
Grant doesn’t run out until day 3.
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:06 am
@ 63;
That seems highly optimistic. You’ve never been asked by your boss to do something you already know won’t work?
I’m being snarky obviously, but I have a larger point. Like politics, science is the slow boring of hard boards. It is often inefficient, sometimes it even goes backwards. But it is the best we’ve got.
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:07 am
@bm “Modern philosophy of science is Bayesian.”
Well, maybe if you spend a lot of time at Western Ontario. But elsewhere, not so much.
@51 Well, I think you have a few fellow-travellers here. But still, I think there is a lot of interest in philosophy of science.
__________
Someone above mentioned Michael Friedman. He’s really very good. If you’re interested in positivism, have a look at his _Reconsidering Logical Positivism_
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:16 am
Again, you pull one out that surprises me, bravo.
Inspired by the Swedish beauties?
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:52 am
Me I am a Feyrabend fan. But this anything goes is tricky, because there are facts. There are things that are unexceptionably true, and they accumulate. You can say, and it is funny to say, that Newton was wrong. But, of course, he wasn’t.
It is, if you have the whole reality thing going on, disturbing that there are three different incompatible physics paradigms in play right now.
But really weird shit, like PET scanners, work. So there are actual facts that are actually true that allow us to understand shit we never could understand otherwise.
In a world where antimatter is demonstrably real, where we know for sure that if you go fast enough time slows down I am very much a proponent of Anything Goes.
But I am deeply committed to reality.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:51 am
A couple of people have asked why any of this philosophy of science discussion matters (’show those scientists some respect!’)
The simple reply is that it matters because it has some fairly serious implications. The problem of demarcation – what counts as science and what is only pseudo-science? – is at the heart of e.g. recent disputes involving Intelligent Design being taught in schools; the Catholic Church’s excommunication of Copernicus; any number of other real world events with real world consequences.
Of course, these discussions are unlikely to be ‘useful’ to a scientist (until such a time as she is excommunicated and/or comes into conflict with a pseudo-scientist); but that doesn’t change that fact that they matter.
October 2nd, 2009 at 6:04 am
Carnap is nothing more than interesting history of philosophy, much like Ptolemy is interesting history of astronomy.
October 2nd, 2009 at 6:28 am
I don’t believe this post. It starts with an exquisite exposition on the philosophy of science and then slides into the laziest of lazy scientism. Matt, if you had really internalised what you had said at the start then there is no way he should have said what you did at the end.
Science needs a metaphysical and methodological framework to operate and this framework is laden with assumptions, some of which are contingent. Scientists are confusing their necessary assumptions (necessary in the sense that SOME assumptions must be made) with the knowledge they are discovering.
The assumptions have become integrated into their belief systems and they have a decided tendency to get nasty when anyone offers rational challenges to their assumptions, _especially_ a science based critiques.
What is breathtaking is the arrogance, an arrogance cloaked in an entirely false humility–for which science has a horrible history. It is sad indeed to see it being played out here.
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:06 am
I’m not going to read all (or in fact any) of this thread, so I apologize if this is redundant. But I would note that after thinking about this issue for quite a while (meaning years), I drew the conclusion that science is ultimately good and true to the extent it reliably generates novel, useful, and accurate predictions (e.g., “If you do that, then that bridge will fall down”). Of course “useful” here has to be interpreted generously, such that it captures the ability of science to create a sense of wonder, or satisfaction of curiousity, or so on, without necessarily having immediate implications for more ordinary tasks (e.g., building bridges).
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:25 am
Young Earth Creationism is not going to advance any naturalistic attempt to understand the world, clearly. (I am a non-theist by the way.) The controversial Numbers-Nelson
dialogue (which shouldn’t have gone out on Science Saturday)
http://brainwaveweb.com/diavlogs/21107
was interesting because Paul Nelson is a Young Earth Creationist, yet he is clearly an intelligent and sophisticated thinker. We should be finding ways of facilitating these kinds of conversations in the public discourse along side the natural history that Science is developing rather than insisting that the only ‘legitimate’ way to think about the world is the positivistic view-from-nowhere of the natural sciences.
Quite apart from that neo-Darwinism claims a great deal in deed. Some of us are not so sure that all of those claims are quite right and some sharp critiques have been advanced. Lumping all of those critiques with the Young Creationists and burning the books (as Charles Maddox advocated) will work for a while, but the damage to science will be all the greater when the bubble bursts and the correction comes (as the Church discovered over Copernicanism).
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:51 am
Right. Creationism cannot, in the end, be defeated
in argument by a recitation of the evidence for evolution–the creationist rejects the facts adduced as facts.
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:56 am
DTM: that you have thought long and hard on this I think is revealed in your comment, which (to me) gets to the essence of the issue. It was a point that Feynman reiterated again and again.
October 2nd, 2009 at 8:23 am
[...] Drew Miller comments that the post sounds like a ‘philosophy major’s inferiority complex’ and there might be some truth to that but also an appreciation of the power of the natural sciences. Unfortunately the history of Enlightenment philosophy is of great minds getting dazzled by the efficacy of science, ruining their ability to think straight. I left these comments on his post. I don’t believe this post. It starts with an exquisite exposition on the philosophy of science and then slides into the laziest of lazy scientism. Matt, if you had really internalised what you had said at the start then there is no way he should have said what you did at the end. [...]
October 2nd, 2009 at 8:50 am
Jack (36):
[Kelper's laws are] based on tons of assumptions about what we are looking at when we look into space. All the empirics consist in is the dots of light one sees at night. From there you still need to conclude that the dots are spheres moving around each other, that you measurements tell you what you think they do etc. The only thing that doesn’t involve theory is pure sense experience (and even then, we have implicit theories that we use to interpret that sense experience).
There’s lots of wrong packed into there. First, spheres have nothing to do with it. The laws apply to masses of any shape.
Second, the planets don’t circle each other, they orbit the sun. This is something that can be deduced, as planets alternately appear on either side of said star.
Third “that the measurements tell you what they think they do” is an assumption so broad as to beg the definition of science. Suffice it to say that the observation of a planet’s orientation relative to the Earth in the night sky is a patently obvious indication of its location relative to the sun, provided that the sun’s location relative to the Earth can likewise be observed. Look! There it is now! Problem solved.
Fourth “The only thing that doesn’t involve theory is pure sense experience” but by your previous statement, you still have to assume that even pure sense experience tells you what you think it does. Anyway, this statement is also so broad as to discount anything ever written or spoken as not “real” regardless of the content of the statement.
Last, Newton’s laws of mechanics are not “Wrong” vis a via relativity. They are merely limiting cases of more general theory. They also represent limiting cases of quantum mechanics. Inasmuch as they correctly account for 100% of humanity’s pure sense experience* (taste and smell excepted, but they are not typically scientific inputs), they are indeed correct. So makes them infinitely more useful than the sum output of Carnap his ilk. I’ll second what Feynman said — philosophers, go back to whatever it is you’re good at and leave science to the scientists.
*OK, they don’t account for the intermediate light travelling from the thing to our eyes (although Newton did a good job describing optical mechanics as well, but they do account for what our mind “sees” when it integrates the signals from our retinas.
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:40 am
@Chris Dornan: I think your argument might be more convincing if you had something more substantive to say. YEC is sterile and you admit that, but it should for some reason be listened to anyway? You have unspecified vague concerns about “neo-Darwinism” (which if you have any knowledge of the field you know is a loaded and misleading term) but you’re unwilling to identify them more specifically or provide any evidence of why you think it might be flawed. Gee, it’s so hard to understand why nobody wants to engage with that!
And then you compare science to a repressive church practicing censorship (on the basis of the views of one eccentric old guy of no particular prominence with no authority to do diddly-squat — yes, obviously that’s *just like* the Index Librorum Prohibitorum), when you must surely know that a paranoid persecution-complex theory of the “scientific establishment” is a giant flashing warning sign of pseudoscience.
But hey, if you really want to advance the legitimacy of a non-scientific worldview, maybe you should try inventing a means of mass communication that doesn’t rely on scientific findings about electromagnetism, the chemistry of semiconductors, etc., and communicate your points by, I don’t know, mass telepathy or something. The ability to accomplish your goals without relying on the instrumentalities of science would go a long way toward establishing the credibility of whatever methods you *did* use.
And, in fact, the mere fact of your success, if verified, would immediately lead science to coopt your methods and turn them into a new domain of science. (If science is considered as a religion, it is the most promiscuously syncretistic religion to have ever existed. And also the only one whose miracles work.) But if you want to call that goalpost-moving, I won’t argue — after your success, that is.
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:56 am
I don’t mean to be a philistine, but this song is trying to introduce science to people who may not, in fact, know that unicorns are not real. That is the sense that “real” is being used in the song title.
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:00 am
But I’d add one more thing. Not even people who grossly misunderstand Carnap think he was ever a “scientific realist.” It chaps my hide that that lazy post-Kuhnians have conflated a perfectly good distinction between “positivism” (which was always a form of anti-realism) and “scientific realism.”
Seriously, I don’t understand what the lot of your are arguing about since the majority doesn’t seem to understand this distinction.
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:46 am
Landru,
If you don’t understand philosophy then just shut up. Everyone else here knows what “naive realism” means, and it’s not what you think.
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Matt, it’s a simple message, so they’re leaving out the whistles and bells.
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:18 pm
@Paulie Carbone 82
Do you do much teaching? Because you’ve got a great pedagogical style going, there; it would be a shame to have it go to waste.
So you, and a lot of the other commenters, have a much more developed/educated understanding of the technical/formal/official meaning of terms like “naive realism” than I do. Yeah, I won’t dispute that for a moment; you’ve all probably read 50 times as much as I have, at least. But, what has all that hard work bought you? What does your superior knowledge allow you to actually accomplish in the real world that a relatively ignorant schlub (like me) cannot?
Let me make clear that when I say “accomplish” I’m not talking about anything necessarily practical or purposeful, like making philosophy-powered toasters. I’m setting the bar really, really low for you: in what way does your superior knowledge allow you to produce any noticeable effect at all in the real world? that someone with lesser knowledge could not? If this doesn’t have an answer, then why should anyone believe that philosophy of science is anything other than a hermetically sealed club of tweedy insiders who talk only among themselves? [Note in advance: accusations of ignorance in others, even if true, do not answer this question and will receive zero credit.]
In short, as Wendy’s once put it, where’s the beef? If you can’t answer, then I think you’re the one who should shut up.
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:47 pm
From Leiterblogs
There’s also obvious future potential for whenever somebody comes up with a decent philosophy of economics, which can help it fix up its glaring problems.
We get all that (and more) and we get to be correct as well. Which is a big part of why people do it. Now, back under the bridge.
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Me pimp book.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
@ Landru
A philosophical question (sorry):
What’s wrong with something if it does ‘nothing’?
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:30 pm
My four-year-old and five-year-old love these vids. The one on the elements especially. The other day they asked for a printout of the periodic table so they could learn it.
When they say “science is real” they are comparing it with magical thinking.
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:27 am
[...] Shared Carnap and Scientific Realism [...]