Obviously, since the discovery of evolution and DNA lead fundamentalist Christians to stop believing in the literal truth of Genesis. /s
Within 30 seconds? Nah.
You really like to tell other people what to think, don’t you? Are you sure you’re not a televangelist?
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Fundamentalism is a reactionary movement. The guy who invented it chose to reject novel scientific discoveries that were already known to him, and cling ever closer to the core principles-- the fundamentals of christianity.
Catholicism, at the time, had invented a whole theology that was inconsistent with the idea that planets had moons. Did they know that such moons could be observed? Not at the time.
I feel like you are mixing epistemologies with weird outcomes. Science doesn’t tell us what’s true in a Platonic or Aristotelean (or intuitive-to-a-two-year-old) sense. Science is in the prediction business, not in the existential angst business. Theories have a descriptive element to them because we wouldn’t be able to get our minds around them otherwise, but the descriptive element is just a metaphor.
So when you talk about “incorrect” premises, that’s philosophy, not science. Science doesn’t create knowledge by arguing conclusions from premises, it gathers evidence for premises by demonstrating their conclusions.
The reason we agree that statements about invisible pink unicorns controlling particle physics are untestable is because we agree we do not have access to noumena (what is really, really Real™). So how can you say that scientific theories tend to fall apart when their premises aren’t “correct”? A scientific theory falling apart and it’s premises not being correct are two ways of saying the same thing (within the epistemology of science).
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Science is in the prediction business, not in the existential angst business.
In a sense, and that’s how some religious scientists square their faith with their science – they can believe that behind it all is their god(s) and the science is just an illusion or whatever. But that is kind of intellectually unsatisfying; science isn’t just about prediction, but about creating models that can reasonably believed to reflect reality to the best of our abilities.
So when you talk about “incorrect” premises, that’s philosophy, not science.
Science was derived from philosophy and so the distinction isn’t that meaningful. Science can reason about its models with the tools it already has.
Science doesn’t create knowledge by arguing conclusions from premises, it gathers evidence for premises by demonstrating their conclusions
Scientific models are based very much on premises, though. The predictions they make are from arguing conclusions from premises. That’s why they can often look like just math. But again, what distinguishes science from math is that the premises are based on empirical observation and that the predictions need to again be empirically verified.
A scientific theory falling apart and it’s premises not being correct are two ways of saying the same thing
Yes, I agree.
how can you say that scientific theories tend to fall apart when their premises aren’t “correct”?
Because they do, Classical physics could handle neither the observations that lead to relativity nor to quantum theory. It premised that neither the speed nor size of a body mattered (all else being equal). Those premises were incorrect; that’s why it fell apart.
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So you have a method of testing whether a scientific model reflects reality other than it’s ability to make successful predictions about reality? What is that?
So
A = B; and
A happened because of B
That’s nonsense.
The statement “It fell apart because the premises weren’t true” requires a standard of truth that is outside of science, which I thought was contrary to what you’ve been saying this whole time. But then you say:
I think this whole discussion I’ve misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that science provided the only route to truth about phenomena. If you think that philosophy is also a valid method to approach truth about the real world then I imagine much of what I said was just confusing and pointless.
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From Susan Haack “Six Signs of Scientism”. LOOS & EPISTEME, III, 1 (2012): 75-9
David Abrahamson’s Second Law of Criminal Behavior is a classic example: “A criminal act is the sum of a person’s criminalistic tendencies plus his total situation, divided by the amount of his resistance,” or: “C = (T+ S)/R.” The highly mathematical character of contemporary economic theory has contributed to the curious idea that economics is the “Queen of the social sciences” – a title to which psychology would seem to have a much more legitimate claim. But too often those elegant mathematical models turn out to be based on assumptions about “rational economic man” true of no real-world economic actors. And, sadly, policy recommendations based on flawed sociological statistics or flawed economic models often acquire an undeserved status because they are perceived as “science-based.”
This reminds me of the kinds of literary theorists that Alan Sokal was parodying in “Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”
inasmuch as they may have believed that adopting a jargon filled, denser prose style mad their work more scientistic.
Haack’s essay is insightful, yet abstruse. I can’t help thinking that some people who deploy this term as an epithet have a much more socially destructive motivation in mind.
While we’re on the subject, you ever notice how creationists like to claim that life is too complex to have evolved naturally, and so it must have been created by a god, but then, when you ask them how god supposedly did this (what specific mechanisms god used, etc.), they just get mad at you? What’s up with that?
It’s like they’re using the complexity of life as evidence of god while dodging the question of how/why life came about and came to be so complex. Not very scientific.
So you have a method of testing whether a scientific model reflects reality other than it’s ability to make successful predictions about reality? What is that?
I don’t, but if one model makes more successful predictions than another, it’s pretty disingenuous to not think it is because it reflects reality better. Pretty much all the arguments in science are in the areas where one can’t show that one model is more predictive than another because we don’t yet have the experimental ability to make an experiment that could really show that one is more predictive than another.
The statement “It fell apart because the premises weren’t true” requires a standard of truth that is outside of science
Okay, why do you think classical physics fell apart it wasn’t for the fact its premises were incorrect?
I thought you were saying that science provided the only route to truth about phenomena. If you think that philosophy is also a valid method to approach truth about the real world then I imagine much of what I said was just confusing and pointless.
From the start, I’ve said that the word “philosophy” means many different things in context. In common parlance, “philosophy” is generally thought to mean the stuff where Plato or Kant or whomever debates the nature of what it is to be “good” and what not. That doesn’t seem to have accomplished much. On the other hand it can also refer to science itself (which didn’t really see itself as being anything other than a branch of philosophy until well after Newton).
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Any idea about reality we’ve discarded because it didn’t match the evidence: an idea about reality that didn’t match the evidence. We observed that it didn’t match the evidence, so we stopped relying on it to give us accurate information. So you are asking me why a theory didn’t make accurate predictions about reality. But not making accurate prediction is the default state for all ideas, there’s no reason to ask why.
There are two whys:
- Why did the theory make good enough predictions of reality that we used it for a long time (and maybe continue to use in situations where it is still good enough)? Because science basically breeds facts the way husbandry breeds animals.
- Why did people internalize the ideas of the theory, believe them to be real descriptions of reality, making them hard to let go of and leaving us searching for an explanation when they are found to stop working? Because humans search for gods.
Believing that science gives us real descriptions of real Reality ™ (it’s really real!) is pretty much theology.
It’s not disingenuous. Take the development of wave-particle duality for light. At some point people argued over whether light was a wave or a particle. Then people decided it was kind of both. A professor of mine one said, “One generation’s anathema is the next generation’s veridical paradox is the next generation’s cliche”. At first people didn’t think light could be both a particle and a wave. Then people “paradoxically” insisted it could. Now it’s just something everyone knows…
But the whole thing is avoided if people just accept what you call a disingenuous view: Light was never a particle, it was never a wave, it was never a wave-particle duality. Light is what light is and we will never have some kind of magical direct access to what that is. We will only grasp towards it and try to understand it using metaphors.
No part of the scientific process requires us to have beliefs about underlying reality. In my observation, though, most people like having beliefs about underlying reality. It’s why we imagined a god throwing thunderbolts from the sky to explain lightning, and it’s why physicists imagine a world made of strings or tiny billiard balls or waves to explain the fact that their equations successfully predict the results of experiments.
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