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AAR, academia, APA, Graham Priest, Karl Popper, religion, William Wainwright
Since my post on Pierre Hadot, I’ve come to realize that genuinely philosophical thought today must include elements of the domains usually called “religion” and “science” (and that those two domains must overlap to some degree). Having done a degree in religious studies, I’ve thought through the concept of “religion” a lot – mostly to identify what a misleading category it is, though of course the phenomena it typically points to matter a lot.
But what about science? It’s intriguing to me that for one of the most highly regarded philosophers of science, Karl Popper, the central problem in philosophy of science is demarcation. That is to say, for Popper, the most important thing philosophy of science needs to do is to distinguish science from non-science.
At first this seems an oddly defensive position to take. Compare “philosophy of science” in this regard to “philosophy of religion.” As William Wainwright’s excellent book notes, “philosophy of religion” means almost entirely different things to analytic philosophers of religion (who usually belong to the American Philosophical Association and continental philosophers of religion (who are much more at home in the AAR). For APA philosophers of religion, the only real problem is God: does he exist or doesn’t he, and if so, what are his characteristics? For AAR philosophers of religion, the problems are more varied. But neither side would dream of saying that the central task of their field is to demarcate religion from non-religion! For the AAR philosophers, that task, if it matters, is a task for religious studies in general, not just philosophy of religion; for the APA philosophers, it is a trivial side matter compared to the object of religion, God.
And yet I would say there is something vital to Popper’s question, a good reason why demarcation might be more important in philosophy of science than in philosophy of religion. Asking the question “what is religion?” is generally useless and gets us mired in pointless debates that do nothing to enlarge our understanding. I don’t think the same is true of the question “what is science?”
What makes science different and important, in my view, is two things. First, it has a normative weight; to say that something is scientific is to say something epistemologically good about it, to say that we have particular reason to believe it. (I referred to this concept of normative weight or normative force before, in discussing dialetheism: to note that even Graham Priest, while arguing that there can be true contradictions, nevertheless agrees that something about contradictions is epistemologically bad.) Second, and more importantly, it seems to me that science in some sense deserves that normative weight.
This is not, of course, to say that science is necessarily superior to everything else or that it’s the only kind of knowledge worth having. Such a claim is self-refuting, as I’ve noted before, since it’s not scientific. Normative claims, including the claim that science has a normative weight, are not scientific either, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
So then what is science? And why does it have this normative weight (if indeed it does, as I claim)? That’s a question for another time – first it’s important just to establish that the question is worth asking.
Amod, I really encourage you to think about submitting further reflections along these lines to the online philosophy event I just reposted today. I don’t have anything to do with it, aside from (maybe) submitting something myself, but I think this post would be the start of a great contribution.
Thanks, Skholiast. It’s a good idea. I’ll have to see where my thinking takes me in the next couple weeks, whether I’ve got enough to make something meaty – I don’t think this post is quite enough on its own.
Most of my philosophy-of-science knowledge is secondhand Popper (and a dash of Kuhn), but I at least have the advantage of seeing how scientists use and apply and reflect this out in the real world. Note the word “secondhand”- I have been lazy, and not actually read any of them, even though I had Kuhn on my bookshelf for years back east.
What is science? For an off-the-cuff definition, I would say it is the pursuit of falsifiable knowledge* through collection and interpretation of empirical data. (I am specifically avoiding the “testing falsifiable hypotheses” phrase: we’re often testing hypotheses, and scientific claims must indeed be falsifiable, there is also exploratory science in which the data comes before the creation of such hypotheses.)
*: Interestingly, I believe the word “stories” could work just as well as “knowledge”, though it is misleading in that it implies fiction. However, the lens of “constructing a narrative” can be a fascinating and revealing way to look at science… it’s the creation of falsifiable stories about empirical things.
I’m leaning toward a definition something like this, but I feel like I need to hammer at it a bit more before I’m comfortable with it. For my purposes, I think the definition of “science” needs to be tied to its normativity – the reasons why scientific knowing is (in general) more reliable than (most?) other kinds.
I’m a little perplexed at the idea that “story” implies fiction – which is the usual rationale for using “narrative” instead. Literature scholars do this all the time, and I would think they would know better. Have they never heard the term “true story”? We speak all the time of “the story of America’s founding,” or “the story of how we met.”
My story -> fiction implication is just based on common usage; I suspect that “when people hear the term ‘story’, their immediate association is with fiction, or at least the possibility of fiction.” I agree that this response isn’t really justified, but my intuition tells me it may be true regardless. In the absence of any data, I’m going to err -at least for now- on the side of perfectly clear technical terminology.
As for the main idea, I like to think science’s normativity IS encoded within my definition, albeit not overtly. It might be clearer (at the cost of succinctness) if we elaborated on what falsifiable means- because that is the crux of why science is “better”. By constantly looking for ways to push and break its own findings, the scientific method does its best to keep the knowledge improving, to challenge assumptions in its drive to be as grounded/practical/empirical as possible.
That’s my first pass, anyways, on why science is normatively better. But as you said in your post, that’s worthy of a whole discussion!
Kuhn? Popper? Are there still folks out there reading these guys for “insights” into the nature of science? Alas! I did a dissertation or “thesis” on Kuhn’s philosophy of science and also discussed the work of Popper and Feyerabend in it. It took me several years to comprehend the inanity and incoherence of their core claims on science!
Popper proliferates inane reversals of conventional views of science: the conventional view (CV) held that the hallmark of science is verifiability, Herr Karl would pronounce that its hallmark is falsifiability.
Note immediately that all empirical claims, and arguably, even some metaphysical claims, become scientific according to this inane criterion! E.g., “I smoked pot today.” would be a scientific claim because it is falsifiable! The predictions of astrologers are also falsifiable! So, they should count as “scientific” by Popper’s criterion. But then Herr Karl pronounces that astrology is the very paradigm of pseudoscience! And he gives the reason that astrologers don’t count falsifications of predictions as evidence which undermines their theories of “astral influences”. But this appeals to a different criterion than falsifiability. It appeals to a new criterion of how one deals with evidence to the contrary. So, Herr Karl, what exactly is the hallmark of science? Is it the falsifiability of claims or the stance one takes towards evidence which undermines one’s claims? The second criterion won’t work either because one can always find episodes in the history of science in which a group of scientists refused to countenance evidence against a prevalent theory.
So, my suggestion to the ghost of Herr Karl is: stick to the conventional view and don’t just play the game of turning things in that view upside down!
According to CV, science proceeds by induction. Herr Karl would pronounce that induction does not guarantee anything and so deduction is the only method of science. Well, this flat out contradicts the practice of science. While some form of deduction is unavoidable, it is inane to dismiss the role of induction (and so much has been done in the science of probabilistic inferences!)particularly in science. Try doing medical science or engineering without recourse to induction!
So, the view that science proceeds by deduction is just another piece of Popperian inanity.
According to CV, science is the antithesis of guesswork and conjecture, Herr Karl pronounces that conjectures are the heart of the scientific method! And so it goes on, Sir Karl’s inane game of turning the CV on its head.
As to Kuhn, there is a fundamental and fatal flaw in his concept of a “paradigm”. It is a bloated and ambiguous concept in his writings. And, of his inane view that “paradigms” are “incommensurable”, and as a consequence there cannot be any progress in “paradigm shifts”, the less said the better!
By the way, has anyone on this forum read “Intellectual Impostures:Postmodern philosophers’ Abuse of Science” by Sokal and Bricmont? I highly recommend it if you have not read it.
I think the Popper-Kuhn-Feyerabend triumvirate of irrationality in science paved the way for all the fatuous nonsense on science in the writings of Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva and other such luminaries of thought!
Popper can’t merely have been saying that every falsifiable claim is and always will be scientific: then everything that’s proven wrong by science is as scientific as what’s proven right. The point is supposed to be that scientific theories are first scientific because falsifiable, but lose scientific status once actually falsified. Else there was no reason Popper would have identified the falsifiability criterion in the first place.
And certainly one can find episodes where people working in biology, chemistry and physics refused to accept evidence against a given theory, which is pretty much the central point of Kuhn’s theory. But according to Popper, insofar as they do that they are not actually being scientific.
A criterion of what constitutes science identifies the hallmark of science. It is the essential attribute of science. If falsifiability is the distinguishing mark of science, then it is an essential attribute of science. In that case, anything which is falsifiable will have to count as scientific.
If you say that scientific statements also have the feature of falsifiability, then you not identified the distinguishing mark of science. You are simply stating that “X and falsifiablity distinguish science from pseudoscience” and that is certainly not what Popper is claiming!
Popper clearly states that falsifiability is the distinguishing mark of science. So, any statement which is falsifiable is a scientific statement. Thus, “I smoked pot today.” would count as scientific since it is falsifiable. If this is unacceptable, it means that Popper’s criterion is too broad and doesn’t capture the distinguishing mark of science.
The central problem is whether there is any distinction between just plain empirical statements and scientific statements and if so, what constitutes that distinction?
Popperian absurdity reaches new heights with his claim that irrefutability is a vice and not a virtue in science! It would follow that all true statements are deficient and suffer from the “vice” of irrefutability! How inane!
If we want to understand science, let’s read scientists and not philosophers! I would any day recommend the Nobel laureate Subramanian Chandrasekhar’s reflections on the nature of science rather than Popper’s!
Amod: “Graham Priest, while arguing that there can be true contradictions, nevertheless agrees that something about contradictions is epistemologically bad.”
What does he mean by “true contradictions”? Does he mean that it is possible to have contradictory statements which are both true? Does he have an example?
“something about contradictions is epistemologically bad.”
Why be vague about this? What “something”? Why not simply say that contradictions yield null information? E.g., “He is over 6 ft tall and not over 6 ft tall.” This conveys null information on the person’s height. And where there is null information, there cannot be any knowledge! That’s what is bad about contradictions!
Thill, I answered some of these questions in an earlier post devoted to Priest: https://loveofallwisdom.com/2010/02/dialetheism/
It appears that there is no end of the promulgation of absurdity in the guise of philosophy.
The law of non-contradiction is a cornerstone of intelligibility of any literal statement.
Trying asserting contradictory statements in every day life, science, and technology and see how far you go in getting people to understand you!
Amod: “For my purposes, I think the definition of “science” needs to be tied to its normativity – the reasons why scientific knowing is (in general) more reliable than (most?) other kinds.”
Well, why does grammar have the weight of “normativity” in relation to the structures or patterns of sentences of a language? Evidently, because it correctly exhibits those structures or patterns!
In the same way, science has the weight of “normativity” because it is veridical or has verisimilitude in relation to reality. And this veridical content or verisimilitude is verifiable experimentally. Further, we would not have any of marvelous forms of technology today if the science underlying those forms of technology did not correspond to reality!