Demarcationitis: How easy is it to say what science is and isn't?

Well we have been having this fun little discussion over on my post about the Three Things Philosophy Can Do that Science Can't. We have been discussing exactly what the dividing line is between science and non-science (and pseudoscience, although we really haven't gotten to that in the discussion yet).

My contention is that the esteem in which many of the inhabitants of what Dostoevsky called the "Crystal Palace" hold Karl Popper's falsification criterion is grossly misdirected. But then, the inhabitants of the Crystal Palace are notable for the ease with which they can solve the most intractable problems by simply waving their hand and dismissing them as nothing but this or that, a penchant that lends credence to the criticism that the Crystal Palace is really just a gloried chicken coop.

And then, lo and behold, we find this article, published just today in the Chronicle of Higher Education, addressing just the issue we were discussing in that post, and making a point similar to the one I have been making:

For millennia, philosophers have attempted to erect a boundary between those domains of knowledge that are legitimate and those that are anything but­—from Hippocrates' essay on "the sacred disease" (epilepsy) to editorials decrying creationism. The renowned philosopher Karl Popper coined the term "demarcation problem" to describe the quest to distinguish science from pseudoscience. He also proposed a solution. As Popper argued in a 1953 lecture, "The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability." In other words, if a theory articulates which empirical conditions would invalidate it, then the theory is scientific; if it doesn't, it's pseudoscience. That seems clear enough. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

Epistemologists present several challenges to Popper's argument. First, how would you know when a theory has been falsified? Suppose you are testing a particular claim using a mass spectrometer, and you get a disagreeing result. The theory might be falsified, or your mass spectrometer could be on the fritz. Scientists do not actually troll the literature with a falsifiability detector, knocking out erroneous claims right and left. Rather, they consider their instruments, other possible explanations, alternative data sets, and so on. Rendering a theory false is a lot more complicated than Popper imagined—and thus determining what is, in principle, falsifiable is fairly muddled. The second problem is that Popper fails to demarcate in the right place. 

Creationism, for example, makes a series of falsifiable claims about radioactive dating, rates of erosion, and so on, while the more "historical" sciences, like geology and astronomy, pose theories that are more explanatory narratives than up-or-down (and therefore falsifiable) protocol statements of empirical bullet points. Any criterion had better at least replicate our common-sense notion of "science," and so far no clear criterion has been able to do so. No wonder most philosophers have given up on the task. As the prominent philosopher of science Larry Laudan put it 30 years ago: "If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like 'pseudoscience' and 'unscientific' from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases that do only emotive work for us."

I don't know that I agree with everything in the article, but it makes some interesting and valid points. It is a good read, in any case. Read the rest here.

The Power of Philosophy

Not that I'm a big fan of standardized testing, but it's nice when those who seem to think that everything can be quantified are shown up by those who would likely point out that everything cannot be quantified in the very quantificational instruments the quantifiers have devised to show how smart people are.

Don't show this chart to atheist biologists Jerry Coyne and Laurence Moran, who are always running down philosophy. It shows the newest GRE scores. Note not only where philosophy students rank on the charts, but also where biology appears in relation to it.

Better luck next time guys.

HT: Brian Leiter

Three things philosophy can do that science can't

A number of New Atheist scientists have begun calling the legitimacy and usefulness of philosophy into question. Most of these people have little clue of what philosophy is even for of course--in addition to thinking that science can be used meaningfully to answer non-scientific questions. Here are three things philosophy can do that science cant't:

 1. It can explain what philosophy can do that science can't. Which is another way of saying it can explain how philosophy and science are different. Which is another way of saying that it can tell us what science is and isn't. I have said before that where science fits into the total scheme of things is not a question for an expert in science (a scientist), but a question for the expert in the total scheme of things (a philosopher). Those who professionally deal with what is called "demarcation issue" (where to draw the line between science and non-science) are called philosophers of science. This is a whole specialty within academic philosophy. The question "What is science?" is not itself a scientific question. If there are those who think it is, then they need to explain how you answer it scientifically. Do you take science into a lab and heat it up to see what color it turns? Oh, and who do most scientists  invoke when they see a non-scientist intruder in their midst? Karl Popper, a philosopher. In other words, the very question of the relative value of science and philosophy is a philosophical question.

2. It can provide a justification for the assumptions and methodologies science takes for granted. Science employs assumptions about reality and methods of rational procedure that are not themselves amenable to scientific analysis. Scientists (except perhaps quantum physicists of the Copenhagen interpretation) assume cause and effect. Why? Do they have a scientific reason for assuming it? Of course not. Causation is, in fact, a metaphysical assumption. Questions about it are answered in the discipline of metaphysics, which is not the province of science (in fact the people who are now so enthusiastic about running down philosophy specifically repudiate metaphysics), but of philosophy. Induction, which (somewhat misleadingly) is identified most closely with science is a logical procedure which is actually a branch of logic, which, in turn, is a branch of philosophy. The analysis of scientific analysis is not scientific analysis, but philosophical analysis. If someone wrote a book on the nature and process of cause and effect or induction, it would not be a science book; it would be a philosophy book.

3. It can explain how the results of science should and shouldn't be used. In addition to being very useful in discovering things about the natural world, science is also very helpful in the development of technology. But when it comes to questions of how, when, and whether to use this technology, science is of little help, other than to help make these non-scientific decisions better informed. It takes science to make an atomic bomb. It takes philosophy to figure out whether to use it.

Larry Moran and philosophy envy

If you want to see what passes for intellectual rigor among atheists, all you need do is check out the blogs of Jerry Coyne and Laurence Moran--particularly when they try to take on certain humanities disciplines like philosophy, disciplines in which they not only have no expertise, but which they appear to know little about even from the outside. It is a deficiency they try to make up for by mischaracterizing positions they disagree with and, well, just making stuff up.

It just grates on them that there are other methods and modes of inquiry out there other than the purely scientific. There are humanities disciplines out there like philosophy, which just cannot be allowed to exist as legitimate and distinct academic disciplines. The answer? Just proclaim (with no evidence whatsoever, despite the fact that they talk a lot about evidence) that the questions that have traditionally been part of the province of philosophy are amenable to scientific investigation.

Coyne and Moran are both professors of biology, Coyne at the University of Chicago, and Moran at the University of Toronto. They're mad as Hell that humanities scholars are criticizing their naive views about what are properly theological and philosophical questions and they're not going to take it anymore.

Their chief strategy in defending themselves against charges of philosophical naivete seems to be to emphasize just how naive they are.

I'll deal with Coyne later, but Moran is on something of a roll over the last couple of weeks, producing a series of posts in which he demonstrates just how out of his depth he is.

In a post responding to a graduate student who wrote an article in Scientific American defending the humanities, he declares:

Science is a way of knowing that is evidence based and requires rational thinking and healthy skepticism. It's the only successful way of knowing that has ever been invented.

The statement is either too specific to be true or too broad to be meaningful. If he means that there is a form of reasoning unique to the natural sciences or that originated with the natural sciences, then the claim is just plainly false. If he merely means a method of academic inquiry that reflects the three specific criteria he mentions, then the claim is utterly without force, since these criteria are common to most if not all academic disciplines.

In fact, ten bucks says Moran can't name a single traditional academic discipline that a) doesn't appeal to evidence of some kind, b) doesn't employ any kind of rational inquiry in some form, or c) doesn't at least have some minimal level of critical standards that distinguish between the acceptable and unacceptable (and fake academic disciplines like "women's and gender studies" don't count) Their practitioners may employ these standards well or badly, but they are their standards nonetheless.

There may be epistemological procedures unique to the natural sciences; in fact, there most certainly are, but they are not of the broad kind that Moran includes in this absurd declaration. Nor did any of his criteria for scientific reasoning originate with the natural sciences. All of them originated in philosophy--just one respect in which science is dependent on that discipline. The philosopher Francis Bacon was one of the first champions of induction, followed by later philosophers who assisted in honing it, like John Stuart Mill. American philosopher C. S. Pierce pioneered the study of abduction (which, more so than induction, is what seems to drive the process of scientific discovery). There are many, many others.

Moran also seems oblivious to the fact that science didn't even exist as a distinct discipline until around the turn of the 20th century. What did it call itself before that? Natural philosophy. In fact Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Darwin all thought of themselves as natural philosophers. Science itself was birthed in philosophy and continues to receive corrective criticism from it from the likes of Karl Popper (who, temporarily forgetting their animus toward philosophers, scientists are constantly appealing to as the arbiter of where science begins and ends), Thomas Kuhn (primarily a sociologist), and other philosophers of science.

Moran's claim is more than false; it's silly. There was really no successful way of knowing before the onset of science as we know it in the 17th and 18th centuries? Really?

A far better definition of science would be something like this: "Science is an activity that consists in the explanation, prediction, and control of empirical phenomena in a rational manner. By 'scientific reasoning' we mean the principles of reasoning relevant to the pursuit of this activity. They include principles governing experimental design, hypothesis testing, and the interpretation of data." Even here there are problems, like whether science actually explains things or whether it merely or describes and predicts them. But it's a whole lot more meaningful than Moran's.

Moran asks three questions at the end of his recent post:

1. "Has philosophy, by itself, solved any of these problems (the existence of God, morality and ethics, mind and body, and epistemology)?" The short answer is, "Yes." But what Moran really means, as is evident in other posts, is "Are any of the proffered solutions that are non-controversial?" The answer to that is, of course, "No." But that proves nothing. Can we criticize science in the same way? Has science solved the problem of gravity? What exactly is "dark matter"? How do gravity and the strong nuclear force work together, and what explains them both? Is there a unified field theory that is fully accepted by all scientists? And what's the deal with the relativity and quantum theory? These are theories that deal with the fundamental elements of the reality: space, time, and mass. Why don't they agree?

Scientists who live in glass houses ...

2. "What kind of true knowledge [sic] has philosophy discovered?" I answered this in the comments section of Moran's blog. So far, no word from Larry. Here's what I said: "The Law of Identity, the Law of Excluded Middle, the Law of Non-Contradiction, the existence and distinction between univocal, equivocal, and analogous terms, the distinction between contradictory, contrary, subcontrary and subalternate statements, and the rules for logical validity. And that's just one branch of philosophy.

3. Can anyone give us an example that will cause us to consider philosophy as another way of knowing? Yes. Plato's dialogues in which he employs the methodology of dialectic.

Moran scoffs at the whole idea that there is even such a thing as scientism, even as he engages in it with impunity. Moran says science is even fit to deal with "questions about the supernatural." As C. S. Lewis once asked, how can a discipline whose domain is the natural say anything about what is beyond nature? Science has no more business delving into religion than a shoe salesman has flying an airplane.

Here's the definition of scientism, given by John Wellmuth, a philosopher, in 1944: "the belief that science, in teh modern sense of that term, and the scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford the only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real." If that's not Moran's position, then he's doing a pretty good job making it look like it is.

Now that we've answer Moran's questions, let's ask him one:

If science can address questions outside the empirical, such as religious questions, what scientific experiment could confirm or disconfirm the existence of God? If you think you can, then aren't you assuming the existence of God is falsifiable? And if it is, then aren't you committing yourself to the position (if Popper, the scientist's favorite philosopher is right) that religion (or at least philosophical theology) is within the bounds of science? And if that is the case, then can we teach it in schools now?