Thursday, September 16, 2010

The Limits of Science

Anthony Gottlieb on the limits of science from Intelligent Life Magazine:

Good sense is the most fairly distributed commodity in the world, Descartes once quipped, because nobody thinks he needs any more of it than he already has. A neat illustration of the fact that gullibility seems to be a disease of other people was provided by Martin Gardner, a great American debunker of pseudoscience, who died this year. In the second edition of his “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science” (1957), Gardner reported that most of the irate letters he received in response to the first edition criticised only one of its 26 chapters and found the rest to be fine. Needless to say, readers disagreed about which chapter was the faulty one. Homeopaths objected to the treatment meted out to themselves, but thought that the exposé of chiropractors was spot on, and vice versa.

No group of believers has more reason to be sure of its own good sense than today’s professional scientists. There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition. What makes a method of enquiry count as scientific is not that it employs microscopes, rats, computers or people in stained white coats, but that it seeks to test itself at every turn. If a method is as rigorous and cautious as it can be, it counts as good science; if it isn’t, it doesn’t. Yet this fact sets a puzzle. If science is careful scepticism writ large, shouldn’t a scientific cast of mind require one to be sceptical of science itself?

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

Singring said...

Complete, utter nonsense.

'There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition.'

Apparently Mr. Gottlieb has never spent five minutes ina science class or reading a science book. EVERYTHING is science is questioned - including the validity of the scientific method itself. As a man knowledgable in history, you must know this, Martin.

If Mr. Gottlieb wants to question science, good for him! Bravo!

But what is his alternative? What does he propose is a ebtter way of detecting truth and how does he intend to demonstrate the validity of his approach?

It's easy to slander science, its much harder to come up with a better alternative. People have tried for 500 years. I wonder why so far, they have mnopt come up with a better idea.