Celsus

Hi again Hugo,

Just to condense this down a bit, I hope we can hit on the two major problems at the moment (as I see it). Feel free to reintroduce anything important that I've missed out.

1) A definition of "works" (and this is related to you asking me the difference between the truth and utility of a theory). I know you've been arguing hypothetically, but what exactly constitutes an example of an application of a theory with visible, independently testable results? Atomic theory, in its modern form, is nothing at all like the ancient Greek one, both methodologically and empirically. Its so-called rise and fall is not really a rise and fall, but rather the case of technology making the necessary observations possible, and the results unmistakeable (atomic bombs, nuclear power, etc.). Indeed, I'm still a little puzzled by "success" of the Greek gods that you claim. Successful for what? Independently confirmable through what? (I would think that the Oracle at Delphi or somesuch only creates an esoteric religious belief, and it is hard for you to argue that it "worked" or was "successful" if, indeed, you are attacking the epistemological grounds on which science stands). Likewise, shamans and other ancient traditions (which can easily be subsumed under trial and error, of which they may have hit on some chemical reactions that did work, whereas for the most part, it was all a hoax, or worse detrimental). In what way can the cultural context alter the definition of "success" in an empirical form?--that the theory predicts that the device will work, and it does so exactly according to the theory?

2) I couldn't stomach Popper's Poverty of Historicism (perhaps I misunderstood it). At the same time, a critique of the social sciences is possible because of its inability to come to terms with human agency (at least until recently when concepts like "bounded rationality," "short-termism," etc. rose to prominence against the older "rational man"), with historical specificity (again, this in part is due to Popper, but at the same time, Popper missed the mark originally--and it helps to demarcate the sciences from social sciences, à la Hodgson as previously recommended in private correspondence), and without grasping the ontological nature of the context of the study. I believe a good deal of physics envy was at work, and thoroughly spoiled the social sciences.

3) A plurality of ideas does not apply to the individual (which I suspect you're getting at), merely to the institutions and academies of science--that is variety should be pursued in scientific debate as a whole, but not within the head of the individual. I know I tend to lean towards the [shudder] scientific realist side (but want to avoid the empirical realist pitfalls, or worse, be a positivist!), but that's because it is the realists who care enough about their beloved science not to let the crackpots and charlatans in. At the same time, the demarcation problem in the physical sciences is not as restrictive or inhibitive as it may appear to you. As I said, string theory and multiverses are tolerated (barely), while homeopathy and animal magnetism are not--because while the former does not break known physical laws, the latter do, and so are thrown out, bearing none of Kitcher's criteria, or indeed Ruse's.

• There is much to be said for tolerance of many different and even antagonistic scientific research programmes within an academic discipline or university. But we should not tolerate the existence of inconsistent ideas within our own heads. The policy toward science must be pluralistic and tolerant, but science itself must be intolerant of what it regards as falsehood. Perceived error must be exposed and criticised, not by denying the opponent a voice, but by explaining the mistake to the scientific audience. The role of diversity is not to sanctify or foster contradiction. Tolerance of the right of a scientist to practise, even when we may disagree with his or her views, does not imply discursive tolerance of any method and proposition. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History

4) Bhaskar (another realist) wrote, "To be a fallibilist about knowledge, it is necessary to be a realist about things. Conversely, to be sceptic about things, is to be a dogmatist about knowledge."--although we may not be able to know the real world directly, it does not refute the existence of such a real world. I'm not sure if my probability arguments on the theory of common ancestry hold any weight with you, but then, a rejection (not that I'm accusing you of such) of reality must be dogmatic as well.

5) Whatever happened to metaphysics in all of this? Would metaphysics be able to generate a demarcation problem, or wouldn't it? (I believe you never quite answered this one, but I believe you'll find your answer there.)

Let me know if I've missed anything.

Joel

Dominus Paradoxum

Fortunately for us, the origins of any belief have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it is true. Your arguement is an ad hominem circumstantial. Even if, for example, every man whoever believed in God was raving lunatic, or even if it could be shown that the concept of God inevitably arose because of the pecularities of our evolutionary history, that still does nothing to settle the philosophical issue of whether or not God exists.

In any case, though, even though we are located at opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum, I agree that metaphysics only differs from science in degree, and not in kind. But we must be careful to distinguish between metaphysics in the new-age sense and metaphysics in the philosophical sense, i.e., ontology.

P.S. You might enjoy these articles, even though I'm sure you won't agree with their conclusions.



http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

John Page

Well, god is a very general term but the scenario you outline would certainly seem to explain the form of god that arises as a concept due to evolutionary history.

Of course, people are free to believe in things that are not disprovable - but then evolutionay history might show why such durable beliefs developed, societies adopting them being more succesful because they had faith. Which brings us to the purpose and function of deities in the developent of human society.....

Cheers, John

Hugo Holbling

Joel,

As you wish, i'll try to address what you consider to be the pertinent points:

There you go again, assuming your standards are universal. Even so, it's hard to see how various forms of theism would fail under these criteria.

I won't assume that this account is deliberately simplistic, but i suggest you look into the matter more closely. Atomism was often contradicted at different times by the evidence and by reasonable theory, but appears to have been clung to because the idea that processes could be understood by subdivision was more powerful than the refuting experiments. To account for this methodologically strikes me as wishful thinking.

The hypothesis of the Homeric gods was successful for those employing it; indeed, they pervaded all aspects of life. As a result, i'm still waiting for an explanation as to why scientific models are more real than the gods.

This sentence is a little muddled. I thought i had made it clear that i am not attacking these grounds, but rather seeking to determine if there is a difference between said grounds for science and non-science, so-called. This point is quite subtle (i hope) and i'd rather you didn't miss it and paint me into a corner, particularly an anti-science one.

This comes across as needlessly arrogant.

I see where you're missing me now. Your presupposition appears to be that success can be defined in an ahistorical and culturally-independent way, but i have yet to see it. Go back to my medical example and consider surgery to counter some malady: In some cultures a successful operation would remove the problem, while in others surgical procedures are considered wrong and hence cannot be considered successful. You may not consider them so, as an observer, but you over-rule the patient's concerns and impose your own definitions. Value judgements are not identical in all cultures (or even sub-cultures), nor are the criteria by which an idea is called successful or useful.

So you said, but that smacks of positivism all the same. How about providing an argument to the effect that such a demarcation is helpful and that they differ in epistemological "footing"?

I think i hear the thought police coming. How about justifying this declaration?

Please! This is your worst yet - i can't believe you really meant to say this. Not only have these realists utterly failed to provide an explanation as to why and on what grounds some brave souls should be let in while others have to talk it over with St. Peter, but the history of their discipline suggests that if anyone in the past had been successful in bringing such about, science couldn't be where it is today. The lesson of history appears to be that great scientists were able to succeed only by disregarding any methodological constraints and proceeding in spite of them, achieving redescription on their own terms.

You have it backwards - i think this is a pseudo-problem, but anyone who proposes methodological grounds for science that mean it differs in kind from other epistemological pursuits has to deal with it.

Ah! Coherence again. Perhaps you should make up your mind?

Another excellent suggestion that if applied in the past would have killed science dead. Oh dear.

This is even worse, alas. Russell's Theory Of Descriptions shows that the latter objection is moot, since you needn't assume that knowledge is possible to be skeptical about theories or epistemic frameworks. For the former, an instrumentalist theory may still be mistaken.

My apologies if i seem harsh at this point, but these quotes aren't very convincing and wholly ignore the difficultly at hand. Gwell via komptya an niverennow arta.

This is moving along the lines of Sojourner's mischaracterisation in the Galileo thread: i am not making any such claim, so this is irrelevant (unless you can explain why it should be).

Perhaps it would help you understand me better if you went through some of the difficulties with probabilism? Shall i suggest a few references? As for the "rejection of reality" (a grandiose turn-of-phrase), it doesn't have to be dogmatic if made within the terms of the theory of descriptions or in the manner of the anti-foundationalists - another objection based on a simplistic appreciation of the possibilities, alas.

Heh. Nice dodge. I've been asking you repeatedly to explicate a demarcation between metaphysics and science for several posts now; if none is possible within the former, that merely sets it the same difficulty that science has been unable to surmount. Here's Quine once more to bring the subtlety to your attention again:

"Our dealings" vary historically and culturally, so where is Quine mistaken?

N.B. Any harshness of tone in this post is directed at those arguments i've seen time and again, not you.

DP:

Fortunately for us, the question of truth has no place in the philosophy of science.

Luckily the settling of this issue is not of interest to me in the black-and-white terms of debate on these fora. Instead, i'm fascinated by Kirilov's account.

I'd just as soon you didn't assume as to my position on said spectrum, although you can do as you please. In this discussion, as so many others, i hardly see any point in agreeing with Joel when i can get so much more from adopting even the most hopeless case. Even so, if you support the latter point then why don't you offer some argument to help me out?

Thanks, but i've read them already many times. I recommend Laudan's A confutation of convergent realism in Philosophy Of Science, Eds. Curd and Cover. Also of interest is the following piece, Explaining The Success Of Science by Brown, in which a point is raised that i suspect Joel would enjoy (even though Brown goes on to differ in moving towards Popper's view):

It seems strange to remove teleological explanations from evolution but allow them to remain in the philosophy of science. What say you, Joel, to this wider (and anti-realist) application of the evolutionary paradigm?

Luiseach

I apologise in advance for the interruption to the flow of this fascinating conversation, but I have a clarification question for Hugo regarding the issue of 'truth.'

In your view, how does 'truth' differ from 'knowledge'?

Ta.... ;-)

Dominus Paradoxum

It doesn't eh? Then what's all this fuss over scientific realism? Is that not the thesis that scientific theories are true?

Nice try. Other cultures would not deny that surgery could fix the problem, they would simply regard doing so as immoral. You are confusing 'sucess' of surgery (in medical terms,i.e., whether it achieved what the doctors desired it to)with the question of wheter or not a medically successful surgery is a good thing. If we simply ignored their beliefs and did the surgery, it would still work just as well as it would for a patient in our culture.

You seem to be saying that exact thing. Else what of your claim that beliefs which developed within a certain cultural framework cannot be valid a-historically? And just what, may I ask, is this seeming insistence on a two-valued logic? Mign't it be that that theories are true and false in degree. Can't we say that Newton was more right than Aristotle, and Einstein more right than Newton? And why must it be that scientific realism holds or fails globally? Might not some current theories be a better depiction of reality than others?

Hugo Holbling

Only on a simplistic reading.

Thanks for your dismissal of the patient's wishes. Since medicine is intended to bring about health and well-being, both of which are defined by the patient, it seems you are the confused participant.

I didn't say that, but thanks for mischaracterising me. I actually asked Joel to provide a response to the question of how they could be ahistoric, as proposed by Feyerabend.

No. I don't insist on these terms; rather, they are enjoined upon us by those who want to make metaphysical claims about reality. Since we are investigating whether or not we can avoid these, we can apparently only use utility.

That depends on how you define "better", as i've already said.

Hello again, Luise. I don't want this thread (which is, after all, about the philosophy of science and trying to avoid metaphysics) to become any more autistic than it already is, so i'll answer you by PM. My apologies, but if we go over truth again i'll just leave.

Edit: I can't PM you, alas, as you haven't enabled it. If you want to e-mail me to talk this over, please be my guest. I hope you appreciate my unwillingness to go over it in this thread.

Dominus Paradoxum

Then perhaps you can explain what the 'complex' one is.

It would bring about the physical heath and well-being of the patient, the mental health of the patient is another question. But the point is that medical procedures do what they are intended to do quite well, irrespective of culture.

That's a nice way of affirming and denying the same thing.

And how do you expect that theories could make valid observational predictions unless they were true?

Celsus

Hello again,

I knew it wouldn't take me long to disappoint you. Here we go again:
Sorry, not my standards, but various philosophers of science's standards. Kitcher's criteria, as with really any observation about science is simply that--an observation. That is, Kitcher is not imposing the standard, but drawing it out from his own historical analysis of scientific theories. What differentiated Darwinism from Lamarckism? What made one fall and the other rise? (And of course, Kitcher--and I'm searching high and low for my copy--argues that the Darwinian synthesis established the criteria that made it a bona fide science. Similar to this, Ruse has argued that some early applications of Darwinism, particularly Huxley's evangelical offshoot, held the trappings of religion but they were eventually restored (or discarded) by the Darwinian synthesis. So I understand where your critique is coming from, but I still want to know what you would count as "working" or not. Mainly because you've given examples like Feyerabend's Greek gods, and I still don't understand what you mean by them being equally functional(?) to the people as modern science might be to us.
[...snip Atomic theory... I think that's a dead end--we'll have to agree to disagree... and I think that both of us know that atomism has also been superceded--which I would attribute it to the fecundity that technology that made a more "real" observation possible]
Independent testability? Fecundity? What exactly is wrong with those as a feature of demarcation?
I apologise. However, I thought you are questioning the nature of science, but your questions must themselves have some epistemic footings yes? And what are they?
No. Call it firsthand experience if you like, but I hardly regard a tumour left to grow to the size of a small pig as on an equal footing to what modern medicine would do. I have slides and slides of my dad's surgery where Africans (who necessarily went first to the shaman and later to our hospital) arrived with their infections, tumours, cancers, gangrene, etc. left far too late, causing permanent damage. And again I stress that if they had come in time, arrogant Western medicine would have nipped it whereas humble African traditional practices mostly did nothing to stop them, or in fact, made it worse by giving them the impression that they were going to get cured. Much of the problem with new age beliefs in alternative medicines is that they equate ancient with truth, and this is actually an antiscience belief because it does not acknowledge that people can build on the discoveries of others. And again, this is rooted in traditional medicine's lack of fecundity--thus leading to a stagnant nonscience that relies mostly on the placebo effect (which, yet again, is something that science has subsumed through double-blind, independently testable and repeatable trials).
Again, I think you place the "value judgement" criterion on too high a level. We'll keep moral values out of this. Science is nonteleological, but you can't resist bringing it into the topic. The ahistorical critique misses the mark as well--historical specificity relates to aspects of the social sciences, whereas physical, chemical, and biological characteristics would be hard to determine as historically dependent (beyond the Planck time of course).
Hmm... I'm not sure what to say, because I don't know how else to explain fecundity. Historically then: Rostow's stages of growth model, for all its faults, recognised that something happened about the time of the Industrial revolution (stage 2 of Rostow), in which living standards dramatically increased (the death rate plunged). What would we attribute this to? Sciences like epidemiology, medicine, and so forth were maturing, in which a (sorry to use the word again) real change did take place in our understanding of physiology. The concept of "progress" in this sense is, as you rightly critique, susceptible to value criticisms, but that does not change the fact that something real occurred in the process. And that real change was in the sciences themselves, moving beyond just causality to answering questions about "why?"--specifically, germ theories of disease etc.
Hmm... I accept your point, but it is open to abuse. And further, in what respects is methodology tied to available technology? I presume you're thinking of Galileo here, and that's fine. But "crackpots and charlatans" still abound, rehashing the same old discredited perpetual motion devices, cold fusion power, homeopathic medicine, animal magnetism, etc. Perhaps I have some faith in the inexorable progress of scientists? I don't know. But I certainly know there are different qualitative levels from which science operates: physical laws being the simplest and most inviolable, while biological laws have the most exceptions (e.g. Pasteur's "Law" of biogenesis). And crackpots continually are the ones with not avant garde methodological practice, but usually poorly thought out, violating some known law, and immediately thrown out (e.g. the US patent office automatically rejects any patents for perpetual motion devices). Great scientists stand on the shoulders of others, not work in some closed off room violating established laws. I believe you might be a little too influenced by Kuhn?
Ok. So are we observing science or defining science? Or defining based on observation? I've confused myself again.
Sorry, wasn't clear earlier about how crackpots and charlatans violate the known laws (regularities) of science).
Would it? Methodological constraints serve to get people into scientific forays. Geniuses can go on to break them, but don't always succeed. Remember Dennett? Cranes and skyhooks.
Er, whatever that meant, I hope it doesn't mean "You are a complete buffoon and a waste of time to boot." I'll stop there for now. I would like to see some references on probabilism. As for Quine, on what grounds does he believe the ancients viewed their gods with the same sense perceptions as we do our science? For example, in what sense were the actions of the Greek gods independently testable?

Joel

Hugo Holbling

Since i have neither the time nor the inclination to continue discussing basic philosophy of science, truth, naive realism or in defending myself from the charge of relativism, i'll contribute no more to this thread. The purpose throughout was to critique Gill's essay on the specific point that an epistemological distinction between ostensibly metaphysical and non-metaphysical claims cannot be made. Since no-one is willing to address it, i give up.

I'll send you an e-mail shortly, Joel, with some references for you.