Is Scientific Truth Always Beautiful?
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There's nothing wrong with that as a starting point. Problems can arise, however, when you take that further and make simplifying assumptions. Economics has been particularly prone to that problem; I believe the famous can opener joke dates to the 1960s.
(http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/JokEc.html gives the simplest :) form of the can-opener joke I know: A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Lets build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener...")
By way of contrast, simplifying assumptions in physics have usually gone better. In particular, relaxing them has gone fairly smoothly ("Assume all the mass is concentrated at a point of zero diameter ... oops, I mean in a small sphere of finite diameter ...") On the other hand, one of the core critiques of string theory is based on the suspicion that a key simplifying assumption (only the early terms of certain Taylor series matter) is badly mistaken.
And in climate science, predictions are necessarily based on simplified models; debate can then ensue as to whether or not the models are misleading.
Do you have more info on this please? It sounds interesting.
Those who want truth should join a religion -- science is content to successfully test theories against reality.
http://arachnoid.com/ChildrenOfNarcissus/index.html is a great read.
There are real things to consider about the study of the mind, predisposition and plasticity, dynamic systems versus symbolic computation, etc., and you're comparing p-values between particle physics and studies with human subjects? Armchair theorizing about autism? Calling all of psychology (which spans more sub-fields than one might imagine) a psuedoscience? Disappointing, to say the least.
p.s. The DSM is written by psychiatrists.
Oh, really? Would that be those same cognitive scientists whose therapeutic methods has been shown to be indistinguishable from a placebo effect?:
Link: http://www.brown.uk.com/depression/parker.pdf (warning: PDF)
Title: "Treating depression with the evidence-based psychotherapies: a critique of the evidence"
Conclusion: No reliable evidence supporting CBT over any other method or no method.
> There are real things to consider about the study of the mind ...
First, from a scientific standpoint, the mind doesn't exist. Second, psychologists only describe, they don't try to explain. Third, theories require efforts to explain, and finally, science requires theories.
No mind, no empirical observations, no efforts to explain, no theory, no science.
Prove me wrong -- send me a picture of the mind, or its weight, or its morphology, or its location, or its distance from the brain. I will accept a photograph of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a substitute.
> ... and you're comparing p-values between particle physics and studies with human subjects?
Your objection seems to be that it's unrealistic to compare p-values between psychology and real science. Well, I agree -- that was the point of my example.
> Armchair theorizing about autism?
All theorizing about autism is armchair theorizing, because no one has offered an explanation, only differing descriptions -- the plague of psychology.
> The DSM is written by psychiatrists.
Nonsense. They're involved, as are clinical psychologists and others. In any case, a psychiatrist is a psychologist with an M.D. degree. You're comparing oranges and oranges.
> Calling all of psychology (which spans more sub-fields than one might imagine) a psuedoscience?
It is a pseudoscience until it offers testable, falsifiable theories that define the field itself, something that's not close to happening. BTW this is not only my claim, it is that of many critics of the field over decades.
Psychology, unlike legitimate scientific fields, has no theoretical core of testable claims that defines the field. This is a requirement for the status of a scientific field.
Physics has the standard model. Biology has evolution and genetics. Geology has physics and plate tectonics. Psychology has a number of poorly articulated, untestable anecdotes.
Medical researchers can and do control the activities of medical practitioners. The reason? A clear, tested theoretical core and solid scientific evidence.
Psychological researchers cannot control the activities of psychological practitioners. The reason? No theoretical core and no scientific evidence.
And until this changes, people like you need to stop claiming that psychology has a scientific basis -- it doesn't. The present state of clinical psychology puts the lie to that claim.
Richard Feynman made this general claim long before I or others did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science (discussion)
http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html (article)
Quote: "I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."
And, as proven by the Asperger's fiasco (the opportunistic introduction and hasty removal of Asperger's as a "disease" recognized by the DSM) among other things, nothing has changed.
The problem with comparing p-values between psychology and particle physics is statistical. In psychology, there may be 2 groups of 30 participants being examined with a crucial manipulation. So there's ONE Fisher-type statistical comparison with a relatively few degrees of freedom (because there aren't millions of subjects). In particle physics, they make millions of comparisons (same with genetics studies, etc.) which, by random chance, will result in many statistically significant findings at the 5% level. So they use incredibly low p-values to restrict these Type 1 errors, and still have frequent unreplicable, false findings (see http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=181647). Discussing p-values as if smaller p-values == better science is incorrect, and does not reflect either field or their statistical contexts accurately.
Read this article. It's a model that makes testable predictions about cognition. It's one of tens of thousands. http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/Gentner8...
Fine. Tell me the testable, falsifiable theory or theories that define psychology. There are scientists in psychology, and they publish scientific papers, but this cannot by itself turn psychology into a science.
If I publish an astrology paper, one that meets all the requirements for a scientific paper, have I made astrology a science? No? Why not?
Since your claim is that psychology is a science, show me the evidence that prevents psychologists from practicing Recovered Memory Therapy. In fact there is no such evidence, and psychologists are free to practice Recovered Memory Therapy. The only difference from the 1990s is that courts of law have ruled that they will no longer hear cases in which recovered memories are the primary evidence. In other words, the social corrections made to prevent further injustices took place outside the field.
> Read this article. It's a model that makes testable predictions about cognition.
"Testable predictions"? False. There are no subjects, no measurements, no control group, and no quantitative statistics.
And you certainly chose a typical psychology paper. It's a description, not a testable explanation, and there is no basis for falsification. And it won't be replicated, for a number of reasons, including that it is not science, it is philosophy.
> It's one of tens of thousands.
Yes, I know. I read them all the time. I can't believe what psychologists thinks represents science.
> Discussing p-values as if smaller p-values == better science is incorrect ...
A typical psychology claim, and false in general. Meanwhile, in the world of science, physicists avoided making any kind of claim about the Higgs Boson until they achieved a p-value of 5 Sigma, or 3×10-7, or about 1 in 3.5 million.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/17/...
As to the p-values typical in psychological work (i.e. .01 to .05), this is what scientists have to say about it:
http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/articles/Kruschke2011PoPSco... (warning: PDF)
Quote: "Despite its routine use, NHST has many deep problems (as will be described later), and psychologists are transitioning away from NHST to Bayesian data analysis."
On that basis, before you try to lecture people on the role of p-values in psychology, perhaps you should become aware that the standard is being abandoned for cause.
Another reference:
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/PP279_Cohen1.pdf (warning: PDF)
Abstract: "After 4 decades of severe criticism, the ritual of null hypothesis significance testing (mechanical dichotomous decisions around a sacred .05 criterion) still persists. This article reviews the problems with this practice, including near universal misinterpretation of p as the probability that H₀ is false, the misinterpretation that its complement is the probability of successful replication, and the mistaken assumption that if one rejects H₀ one thereby affirms the theory that led to the test. Exploratory data analysis and the use of graphic methods, a steady improvement in and a movement toward standardization in measurement, an emphasis on estimating effect sizes using confidence intervals, and the informed use of available statistical methods are suggested. For generalization, psychologists must finally rely, as has been done in all the older sciences, on replication."
Needless to say, in psychology, replication is still nearly unheard of.
Another reference:
http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-laureate-challenges-psychol...
Title: "Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act"
Quote: "Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman has issued a strongly worded call to one group of psychologists to restore the credibility of their field by creating a replication ring to check each others' results. ... 'For all these reasons, right or wrong, your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research,' Kahneman writes. 'I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess.'"
It seems the psychologists to which Kahneman addressed this call to action, have not acted.
> The problem with comparing p-values between psychology and particle physics is statistical.
Now you're making my points for me, and it's not the first time this has happened. The experimental groups in psychology are too small for the prevailing statistical methods to produce anything but conjecture, as the above article shows, and as you point out:
> In psychology, there may be 2 groups of 30 participants being examined with a crucial manipulation. So there's ONE Fisher-type statistical comparison with a relatively few degrees of freedom (because there aren't millions of subjects)
Yep. It's not science, it's anecdote. And the plural of anecdote is not data. Replication would help, but that's an unrealistic expectation.
> Psychology uses indirect measurements of cognitive/behavioural phenomena just like particle physicists. [emphasis added]
Perfect nonsense. Physicists study nature. Psychologists study the mind. The mind is not an organ, it is a philosophical abstraction.
Prove me wrong. Provide a link to a photograph of Asperger Syndrome. Or to a sensitive scale in the act of weighing pathological narcissism (which should weigh more than the everyday kind).
> Did Einstein travel the speed of light?
You are obviously unaware of the copious, repeatable, falsifiable evidence that supports modern physics. And biology, and geology, and medicine.
In case you think I'm psychology's only critic, here is what the sitting director of the NIMH recently had to say about it in Scientific American:
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...
Quote: "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit.
Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." [emphasis added]
Couldn't have said it better myself.
"Replication is nearly unheard of?" Are you kidding? Read a journal. Seriously. You're citing popular news articles as if you understand anything about the field.
Oh, and I'm still waiting for my picture of gravity. But not here, because this thread is no longer worth my time to check on.
When you have a coherent argument, post again. It may interest you to know that the sitting director of the NIMH takes the same position.
> "Replication is nearly unheard of?" Are you kidding?
In psychology, replication is nearly unheard of. Richard Feynman commented on this at length many years ago, and much more recently, the same comments appear for the same reason:
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-laureate-challenges-psychol...
Quote: "Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman has issued a strongly worded call to one group of psychologists to restore the credibility of their field by creating a replication ring to check each others' results. ... 'For all these reasons, right or wrong, your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research,' Kahneman writes. 'I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess.'"
Did you think I just made it up? Psychology is in the midst of a credibility meltdown, and replication is one of the key issues.
> ... as if you understand anything about the field.
I just proved that I understand the field better than you do.
False analogy. As to gravity, its properties are open to experiment, which leads to theories that can be tested and falsified. Gravity has gone through many revisions over the years -- from being instantaneous action at a distance obeying a 1/r^2 rule, to resulting from spacetime curvature, and all tested, and always open to revision. And the book on gravity is by no means closed -- we need a quantum theory of gravity to be able to unite gravitational and quantum theories.
As to string theory, its practitioners agree that it needs to produce testable predictions in order to become scientific. Which is more than I can say about psychologists, who are in the same position but who insist that what they do is science.
At the moment, physics only understands 4% of mass-energy, while the rest (dark matter, dark energy) is unknown. The difference? Physicists freely acknowledge what they don't know.
The claim that the mind does not exist is a throwback to the dark ages of Behaviorism. They made this claim because they sought to make psychology only about things that can be very easily measured and very easily modeled. They claimed that this was "scientific", and that any talk of the mind was "unscientific". It was the Behaviorists, however, who were unscientific. In their goal to elevate Psychology past the unfalsifiable claims of Freudianism, etc., they made a model that was far too simple, and they ignored all the evidence that a more sophisticated model was necessary, and to make matters worse, they actively acted to suppress science done with more sophisticated models (i.e., Cognitive Psychology), holding the field back by decades.
As to claiming that you can't photograph or weigh minds, this is a non sequitur. You can't photograph or weigh a computer program either. A computer program is a mathematical entity that can be instantiated on hardware, but is distinct from the hardware and is as non-corporeal as is the number 2. The mind is the software of the brain, and Cognitive Psychology is the field that aims to reverse engineer this computer program. Neuroscience, no doubt, has compatible goals, which is why at MIT Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology are in the same department.
In any case, you do the world no favors by promulgating Behaviorism's ill-conceived notion of science and their specious reasoning.
Unfortunately, this is a hotly debated topic. Many philosophers of science would argue that science is the search for truth, and an example of this might be logical positivism. My own personal take is that science is a method (and framework of thought) for making statistically accurate predictions about the world. Somewhat paradoxically then, "truth" becomes approximations of correct, rather than the traditional inviolable assertion.
Yes, but because the stakes are so high, and because of the critical role of science in modern times, the views of philosophers aren't compelling on science's definition any more.
As just one example, society needs to keep superstition out of science classrooms. To do this, and with the aid of expert witnesses, a court of law has recently defined science this way:
Source: McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html)
Summary -- science must have these properties:
1. It is guided by natural law;
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
3. It is testable against the empirical world;
4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and
5. It is falsifiable.
The above is why Creationism isn't presented alongside evolution in Arkansas science classrooms. If you think that's important, then it follows that science should be defined clearly enough to avoid that outcome. BTW the above is only one of many nearly identical legal definitions of science.
Based on the foregoing, a falsifiable idea is not a truth, it is merely an idea that has survived falsification so far.
> My own personal take is that science is a method (and framework of thought) for making statistically accurate predictions about the world.
There's a bit more to it than that. There is the responsibility to test one's ideas against reality, and abandon those ideas that fail the comparison. There is the responsibility to candidly consider alternative explanations for the same observation. There is the responsibility to design experiments sufficiently rigorous that independent, similarly equipped observers are drawn to the same conclusion. And many more.
> Somewhat paradoxically then, "truth" becomes approximations of correct, rather than the traditional inviolable assertion.
For philosophers arguing over tea, no problem. For those who understand the deadly serious role of science in modern times, no way.
Keep in mind that my definition is a simplification of the framework. Everything you said is necessary for generating the most accurate model, but - and correct me if I am wrong here - they are all there to support that final goal.
Note also that this is not how I would describe science to a layperson, or at least not without spending another hour or so going into greater detail of all of the necessary side effects and dangerous pitfalls, but like you are presenting.
I don't want to sound like I'm arguing solely to argue, but if your thesis was correct, the Ptolemaic system could have been tuned repeatedly for greater and greater agreement with reality, but without ever reconsidering the basis of the model, the underlying theory.
History records that we instead abandoned the Ptolematic theory, even though it "worked" and would have been perfectly satisfactory by way of refinements, to support modern astrodynamics. But instead we stopped generating more and more accurate (and complex) models and replaced the entire structure.
It was the same with the ether theory -- after difficulties with the theory arose in the late 19th century, instead of "saving the ether" (an actual expression used at the time), we abandoned the entire structure -- this time 20 years in advance of any plausible replacement, which turned out to be relativity. And relativity turned out to be a much better theory in all respects, even though that wasn't obvious at the time.
This is getting into a complex area, one having to do with the law of parsimony (a.k.a Occam's razor) and theoretical elegance, but science isn't about the most accurate model, it is also about beauty and parsimony alongside accurate modeling.
Actually, science is about the most accurate model, but it turns out that what we mean by "beauty," is actually about simplicity, and thus about correctness.
There is a sound mathematical background behind simplicity and its likelihood of being correct, as outlined in Scott Aaranson's paper:
Not necessarily. The most beautiful theories aren't always the simplest. I'm only objecting to your use of "actually" above as though it were a firm relationship, rather than a desirable outcome that nature sometimes favors.
The reason he is remembered as one of the founders of modern science is that he abandoned the aesthetic criterion in favor of the messier, uglier, facts.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/wp-content/uploa...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/wp-content/uploa...
Good luck with your anti-psychology campaign!
You seem to be unaware of the incontrovertible fact of logic that a proposition can be both true and falsifiable.
Also, you strangely ignore the fact that science aims to produce models that make reliably true predictions. E.g., "If I drop this pencil it will fall to the ground", or "The sun will rise tomorrow morning at 6:27am", or "Information shall never travel from point A to point B faster than a quantum of light."
True predictions are "truths", and science is chock full of them. Furthermore, science's aim is to produce more and more such truths with every passing day.
I will let philosopher David Hume explain it: "No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."
To summarize, we can never say that all swans are white (a truth) but we might be able to prove that claim false.
> What does "false" mean but "not true"?
The statement that an assertion is false follows different rules than the statement that an assertion is true. And a theory that's supported by evidence can always be proven false by new evidence -- the point being that no theory ever becomes true in perpetuity (except in mathematics). More detail here:
That said, I think Popperian falsificationism is rather questionable as a philosophy of science, once you prod at it more than a little.
Of course it's incompatible. If there is no such thing as truth in science, that eliminates truth as a goal. And there is no such thing as truth in science.
> Falsificationism is simply a methodology for finding where theories are non-truthy and amending them accordingly.
No, this is not so. Falsification doesn't cut away those parts of theories that aren't representative of absolute truth, it cuts away the theories in their entirety.
Astrology wasn't modified to become astronomy, instead astrology was demonstrated to be false and abandoned.
The ether theory wasn't "amended" to become relativity, it was falsified in its entirety and abandoned.
Falsifiability is not an editor's red pencil, it is a test against reality, and if the test fails, the idea is abandoned.
> ... the whole point of falsifying theories is that we don't want false theories, but theories that are... less false.
No. This isn't what falsifiability means. Falsifiability means that our ideas must be testable against reality, and only those ideas that survive the test remain standing ... to be tested again, later on, with new evidence. But we never declare a theory proven, beyond doubt (which would support your apparent notion about science).
You're confusing epistemology and ontology here. There are things in the world which are physically true or false. That you cannot conclusively prove a particular proposition is true is an epistemological/methodological issue which is not incompatible with the existence of external reality, or the idea that the purpose of our methodologies is to more accurately model said external reality. And yes, one way we do that is by incrementally pruning theories; and another way we do it is by replacing entire theories. I've read Kuhn, so I don't have any conception of science as an incremental ratchet or anything.
Put differently, there is an objective reality, and science is a method for investigating it. The fact that you can't declare victory, having arrived at a flawless transparent understanding of the objective reality, is not a good argument against either the existence, or the claim that the purpose of science is to attempt to model it. Without that basis science makes no sense in the first place, and you're at social constructivism.
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> There are things in the world which are physically true or false.
We're not discussing the world. We're discussing science.
> Put differently, there is an objective reality, and science is a method for investigating it.
(a) False as stated. (b) You skipped the part where we address the role of truth.
> The fact that you can't declare victory ...
Meaning discover absolute truth? That's not science's criterion for victory.
> ... or the claim that the purpose of science is to attempt to model it [ "it" apparently meaning "arrive at a flawless transparent understanding of the objective reality" ].
That is not science's purpose. That's religion's purpose. Science has realistic goals, religion doesn't.
> Without that basis science makes no sense in the first place ...
Maybe not to you, but to a scientist, it makes perfect sense.
This conversation reminds me why Richard Feynman disliked philosophers so much. Philosophical debates can produce anything except a working vaccine.
Derails.
(I understand that the theorem applies in the context of "consistent" formal systems, and that falsification is about the process of refining models of systems to be more consistent. It's interesting that the emergent properties of the pursuit of falsification bring about a paradoxical system in the limit.)
I can't speak for philosophers, but as to scientists, the issue of falsification and irreducible uncertainty are separate in nearly all cases. Remember that the Incompleteness Theorems address true assertions that cannot be proven within reasonably complex axiomatic systems -- that's a fair remove from empirical science, just as mathematics is.
> To me, at least, it seems to suggest that falsification is a flashlight that for whatever reason fails to illuminate certain otherwise possible paths.
Not at all. Falsification is a very reliable test that can be used to eliminate theoretical assertions from any further consideration, as in the classic "black swan" example already given above. It's unambiguous.
> It's interesting that the emergent properties of the pursuit of falsification bring about a paradoxical system in the limit.
No, neither paradoxical nor ambiguous. A classic falsification has properties that eliminate theories from consideration, period, full stop. Examples abound -- the Ptolemaic system, the ether theory, phlogiston, and so forth.
Yes, absolutely. Empirical science is driven by observations of nature. Axiomatic systems are much more self-referential. It is the self-referential property of axiomatic systems that lie at the heart of the Incompleteness Theorems.
> Isn't the point to learn how all of this universe works together?
Which universe? That of nature, or that of intellectual representations? They differ in some very basic ways.
> Suppose we solve gravity, QM, and the rest, then we'll have a complex system of rules which nevertheless must be incomplete and therefore flawed.
Most people who understand Gödel's work will argue that the effect of the Theorems is overstated with respect to what we can reliably know about nature.
If we find a TOE (Theory of Everything), it will probably remain incomplete, not because of Gödel, but because of irreducible observational imperfections.
If anything, that view is unpopular among philosophers, where various kinds of social constructionist views are more prominent. Those views emphasize (as you do) that we cannot have unmediated access to the real external world, so instead they focus on the sociological processes by which scientific theories get proposed, popularized, abandoned, etc.
It is indeed true that science can produce a working vaccine.
There is no rational response to your argument. That's why I replied as I did. Philosophy isn't a science, amenable to scientific debate and a conclusion based on evidence, which is why philosophical arguments have the character they do -- interminable and inconclusive.
> that science is a method for discovering facts about the external world.
Necessary but not sufficient. When a theory about observations is proposed and then tested, it is then that we cross the threshold of science. "Discovering facts about the external world" is not science, otherwise my saying "stars are little points in the night sky" would qualify as science. It doesn't, because no testable, falsifiable explanation is proposed.
My saying "I have a cure for the common cold -- I shake a dried gourd over the patient" is not science, both because it doesn't consider other explanations and because it doesn't propose an explanation. I have "discovered a fact about the external world" but what I have done is still not science.
Science is not "discovering facts about the external world". Science must include falsifiable explanations, explanations that are cast out if they fail subsequent tests.
> Arguing that via the scientific method we've arrived at a fairly good understanding of how humans evolved which is likely true in important parts is, in fact, quite the opposite of being a Creationist.
That's true only if we try to explain what we have observed, and accept the possibility of falsification of our explanations. Creationism and evolution don't differ as descriptions, they differ as explanations, and by the property that a falsification would destroy the nicest-sounding theory.
The above is what separates science and philosophy -- in science, concrete statements lead to concrete procedures for weeding out indefensible ideas.
"[The Big Bang] is a much more exciting story to many people than the tales which other people used to make up, when wondering about the universe we lived in on the back of a turtle or something like that. They were wonderful stories, but the truth is so much more remarkable. And, so, what’s the wonder in physics to me is that it’s revealed the truth is so remarkable.”
This is nonsense. I graduated from MIT and I and all my classmates would be shocked to learn that science is not about truth. And furthermore, stating such nonsense is just fodder for critics of science. After all, why worry about climate change if climate change theories don't represent the truth? If it's not true that climate change will likely cause the deaths of many millions of people, then we need not worry.
Your notion of truth is too highly constrained. Science makes models, which are approximations of reality, but accurate approximations are a form of truth. Using models, we build such things as TVs and airplanes and vaccines that work. Things that work are a form of truth.
He's talking Truth with a Kappa T, as in Newtons Laws were true but not True and as in Einstein's modifications were truer but we still don't Know if they are True.
You seem easily shocked.
I think all your classmates will be shocked and dismayed to hear what you're claiming in their name. My statement about the relation of science and truth is hardly controversial, and it is not a meaningful debate topic among the educated.
Philosopher David Hume famously said, "No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."
Now I ask that you read the above quotation carefully and repeatedly until it sinks in. It lies at the heart of modern scientific thinking and its frequency of quotation reflects its importance to the issue of scientific truth.
1. All scientific theories must be falsifiable by new evidence. This is a requirement for all legitimate science, and this key scientific idea is written into law. One example: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html
2. By definition, truths cannot be falsified.
3. Therefore science cannot be a source of truth.
Which part of the above didn't you understand?
> Your notion of truth is too highly constrained.
This is not my notion, it is how science is defined -- see above.
> ... but accurate approximations are a form of truth.
Ah. Now I see the problem. You don't understand what "truth" means. Truth is not an approximation, accurate or otherwise -- it is a superlative statement of fact.
> Things that work are a form of truth.
Confirmed -- you're using a private definition of "truth". People used willow bark to cure headaches for thousands of years before they had any idea why it worked. Is that truth? Yes, according to you.
Let's say I'm a quack doctor and I believe I have a cure for the common cold. My "cure", my "truth", is that I shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. My "cure" always works -- it might take several days, but it's perfectly reliable -- it's a "truth".
Should I get a Nobel prize for my discovery, my "truth" about the common cold? Or should I be drummed out of the medical profession?
> I graduated from MIT and ...
Self-respecting college graduates know better than to try to offer their academic status as an argument in support of their views. It's like saying, "I can't be responsible for this car wreck -- I have a driver's license!"
A college degree is as much a licence to be articulately wrong as articulately right.
You think wrong. In fact, I know for a fact that if I had asserted the sort of stuff that you are asserting in a public space in my dorm when I was a student, that I would have been showered for the offense.
> My statement about the relation of science and truth is hardly controversial,
It's not controversial; it is patently wrong.
> and it is not a meaningful debate topic among the educated.
It's not a topic of debate amongst most scientists because most scientists don't typically debate such issues of philosophy. In my experience, if you asserted that science did not aim for truth, most scientists would just roll their eyes and get back to work.
> Now I ask that you read the above quotation carefully and repeatedly until it sinks in.
Please, spare me!
> 1. All scientific theories must be falsifiable by new evidence.
Yes, that is true.
> 2. By definition, truths cannot be falsified.
Putative truths can certainly be falsified (or at least the sort that are falsifiable can be), and scientific theories are putative truths. Putative truths that turn out to be true, as it turns out will never be falsified, despite their falsifiability. Saying that a scientific theory can be falsified does not mean that we know it is false. It means that we can't know for certain that it is 100% true. But that is a far cry from the assertion that science does not aim for truth.
> 3. Therefore science cannot be a source of truth.
Nonsense. Just because we cannot know for sure that a scientific theory represents a true proposition, does not mean that it doesn't represent a true proposition. If a certain theory actually represents a true proposition, then it was a source of truth. Furthermore, scientific theories, even when they don't represent propositions that are 100% true do let us make true predictions.
For instance, we know that in some sense, Einstein's theory of gravity cannot in some sense represent a true proposition, but in every other respect, it is as true as any truth we have ever known. 100% of the predictions made by this theory of gravity have turned out to be TRUE. So to say that science cannot be a source of truth is utter nonsense. In this case, it has been an unerring source of truth, more true than anything else the world has ever known. Likewise for quantum mechanics.
> Which part of the above didn't you understand?
I understand it all, and what I understand is you are in the thrall of your own specious argument.
>This is not my notion, it is how science is defined -- see above.
There's no one definition of science.
> Ah. Now I see the problem. You don't understand what "truth" means. Truth is not an approximation, accurate or otherwise -- it is a superlative statement of fact.
That is not what "truth" means. You are asserting falsities with an air authority, nothing more.
A true proposition is a statement of fact. There are many other forms of truth, and multiple senses of the word "true". A compass can be true if it points you in the right direction. A clock can be true even when it is never perfectly accurate. A scientific theory can be true when it lets you build TV sets that work, or predict that a pencil will fall when dropped. "True proposition" is not the only meaning of true, and furthermore, even if you were going to apply only that definition of true to scientific theories, you have neglected that even "false" theories lets us construct many true propositions.
> Things that work are a form of truth.
> Confirmed -- you're using a private definition of "truth".
I most certainly am not. It is you who are. In fact, your notion of truth is utterly naive.
> People used willow bark to cure headaches for thousands of years before they had any idea why it worked. Is that truth? Yes, according to you.
Yes, it is true that willow bark cured headaches for thousands of years. Did it cure them 100% of the time? Of course not. Still, it is true that it cured them.
> Let's say I'm a quack doctor and I believe I have a cure for the common cold. My "cure", my "truth", is that I shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. My "cure" always works -- it might take several days, but it's perfectly reliable -- it's a "truth".
That is not true, because there is no correlation of cause and effect, other than perhaps due to the placebo effect, in which case that cure is true to the degree that the placebo effect is effective.
> Self-respecting college graduates know better than to try to offer their academic status as an argument in support of their views.
Nonsense. Credentials are useful or there would be no reason to ever get them.
>A college degree is as much a licence to be articulately wrong as articulately right.
Credentials of course don't guarantee correctness. But they often provide a reason to trust someone's opinion, or at least to pay attention.
And? The topic is science, not how youngsters punish behaviors they don't understand.
> In my experience, if you asserted that science did not aim for truth, most scientists would just roll their eyes and get back to work.
That's because scientists don't have time for philosophical debates about resolved issues.
> There's no one definition of science.
All definitions of science agree that falsifiability is a requirement. And science is now defined in law, to prevent people trying to squeeze into the world of science by claiming that it's not strictly defined.
> Credentials of course don't guarantee correctness. But they often provide a reason to trust someone's opinion, or at least to pay attention.
No, they don't. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.
"Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion" — Richard Feynman
I saw no point in refuting all your incorrect arguments once by one. An education would have done this, but that's clearly lacking.
How about I go poll about 20 working scientists tomorrow whether they seek truth or not, and get back to you? You know, real scientists, the kind who have PhD's (i.e., credentials) and get paid to make discoveries?
> I saw no point in refuting all your incorrect arguments once by one. An education would have done this, but that's clearly lacking.
Clearly. I'll go demand my money back.
That won't work. MIT did their part, but as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
But since you haven't tried to defend your claim that science is a search for truth, let me do it for you. Let's say for the sake of argument that science is a search for truth. Science, in the modern sense, has existed for about 300 years, but it hasn't uncovered any truths yet. So why do people continue to support such a complete failure? If science was a machine meant to uncover truths, it would have been scrapped along ago.
Prove me wrong. Identify a truth that science has uncovered. To save time, I'll propose an example -- evolution, a very well-supported scientific theory. Is evolution now true? Let's assume that it is. But if so, that means all the working evolutionary biologists are cheating their granting agencies and should be tried for fraud.
Do you see where this is going? There are no truths in science, but that is not at all surprising, because truth is not the goal of science. This, by the way, is how I reply to religious fundamentalists who say that science is just a bunch of theories, and no final truths -- that is correct, and it is by design, not by accident.
> You know, real scientists, the kind who have PhD's (i.e., credentials) ...
Where do you get these ideas? Science is not about credentials, it is about evidence. Were this not so, Einstein, the un-degreed patent clerk, would not have been published in 1905. But as it happens, he was published. The reason? He sent his work to scientists like himself, people who care about substance.
Is it your assertion that science is not at all about scientists? The vast majority of scientists have serious credentials, and, in fact virtually all job openings for scientists require these credentials.
As for Einstein, he had a PhD at the time that four of his Annus Mirabilis papers were published, though it is not that uncommon for PhD students to also have papers published. In science fields these days, however, their professors would typically be coauthors, whether they actually had anything to do with the research or not. There are, of course exceptions.
As for science not being about credentials, of course it is not about them. Credentials are just one of the many tools that are used for getting the job done.
> Prove me wrong. Identify a truth that science has uncovered.
It is oh so easy to prove you wrong! Here I go: In five seconds when I drop this pen, it will fall from my fingers to the ground. I can even accurately predict the velocity with which it will hit the ground, and the amount of heat that will be produced as a consequence. Here I go....
There I was correct. Science gave me a truth. There are millions more where that came from.
As for evolution, yes evolution is true. Just because I can't prove something to a logical certainty does not make it not true. In fact, that's just Philosophy 101. Knowledge does not require provability; it only requires justified true belief.
(There are some caveats with "justified true belief", but I'm sure that philosophers will have that worked out sometime in the next few millennia. In the meantime, that definition of knowledge works well enough for me and for all the scientists that I've chatted with about the subject.)
As to there still being details to be worked out, that doesn't detract from trueness. If I have a clock and I say that it correctly tells the time within plus or minus one minute, if the clock does live up to that claim, then my theory that I can use it to measure time is true. With that theory, and my working clock, I will always know the time plus or minus one minute. None of this contradicts the fact that I might desire to own a clock that will tell me the correct time, plus or minus 30 seconds, or 10 seconds, or 10 milliseconds, or 10 microseconds.
Better theories and better equipment allow me to produce more precise facts. Less precise facts are still facts.
Edit: I will admit that one might typically not use the word "true" to describe a theory, which is a model, except for ones that we have extreme confidence in, such as gravity, QM, and evolution. If we do use the term "true" for theories of lesser confidence, then we are using the term "true" in the sense of a true compass rather than a true proposition. We might more typically use the term "accurate". But an accurate theory is "accurate" specifically because it produces true propositions with high reliability.
Additionally, we can also rephrase any accurate theory to be a true proposition by stating it something like so: "We will be using a scientific model, which we will describe as follows: .... This model lets us make predictions with an accuracy given by the following statistics, and the following caveats: ....
What are you going on about? I never said that science isn't about scientists, I said it isn't about authority. Do try to read before inventing positions for the other person.
> As for Einstein, he had a PhD at the time that four of his Annus Mirabilis papers were published
False. Check your history.
> In five seconds when I drop this pen, it will fall from my fingers to the ground.
I said a scientific truth, not a single observation. You haven't the slightest idea what "truth" means. Science requires more than one data point, and it also requires an explanation, and you certainly are not qualified to explain why your pencil takes the path it does. And were all that not so, gravity would still suffer from being a provisional set of ideas that are incompatible with quantum, another very well-supported theory. I understand this is all outside your education.
> As for evolution, yes evolution is true.
Evolution is a scientific theory, it is not true now, and it will never be true. Were this not the case, if evolution had been declare true, then all those evolutionary biologists could be sued for fraud. The reason? They are still working out evolutionary theory, the theory that you think represents truth.
> As to there still being details to be worked out, that doesn't detract from trueness.
Jesus Christ! This proves that you have no idea what "true" means, with respect to science. Why do you think scientists insist that what they craft are called "theories"?
Science requires falsifiability -- this is so everywhere, and it is not a debate topic. Because science requires falsifiability, there are no truths in science, because truths cannot be falsified -- that property is reserved to theories.
Source: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Quote: "Falsifiability is the ability of a theory—a working framework for explaining and predicting natural phenomena—to be disproved by an experiment or observation. The ability to evaluate theories against observations is essential to the scientific method, and as such, the falsifiability of theories is key to this and is the prime test for whether a proposition or theory can be described as scientific."
Couldn't have said it better myself.
It is you who apparently have no solid education, nor much exposure to actual scientists.
If you want to become educated, perhaps you should read this book, written by a scientist and endorsed by Dawkins, another scientist. It's called "Why Evolution is True":
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/a-nod-fro...
Or if you want a quicker education, watch this three minute video, where Richard Dawkins says these sage words: "What science is about is finding what is true in the real world":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TOsfBSuqdk
I'm sure that you're a smart guy, but you are also a condescending ignoramus.
With respect to an idea, it means testable and potentially false. Truths are not "potentially false".
> It's called "Why Evolution is True"
This is the kind of popular writing designed to appeal to morons who doubt the evidence for evolution. It's a different topic entirely, and a different meaning for "true".
> It is you who apparently have no solid education, nor much exposure to actual scientists.
Guess again, rocket scientist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus
A quote: "... named Scientist of the Year by the Oregon Academy of Science in 1986."
And I am not the topic. If you had any kind of intellectual training, you would avoid wandering off into the woods so regularly. Case in point:
> ... this does not imply that scientists do not seek truth.
This is not a conversation about scientists, it is a conversation about science. It is science that won't deliver truths, and this is by design. Scientists can do whatever they please -- which is why we need science to control their behavior.
> ... They most certainly seek theories that make true predictions ...
If a theory makes a true prediction, then it is not a theory. This is Science 101.
> ... written by a scientist and endorsed by Dawkins, another scientist.
If you learn anything during your visit to this planet, it should be that science is not about titles and authority, it is about evidence.
That's just laughable nonsense. Theories make true predictions all the time. The theory of gravity predicts that when I drop my pen it will fall, and that is a true prediction. As always, science is about making true predictions, and consequently is about truth.
> With respect to an idea, it means testable and potentially false. Truths are not "potentially false".
You keep claiming to be oh so more educated than me, but talking to you is like talking to someone who read half of a logic book in high school and didn't absorb it all too well, and missed any of the nuance for how logic is actually used, and then has convinced himself of his own expertise.
In formal logic, propositions are either true or false (or they may have no truth value at all), but we don't know the truth value of all propositions. Additionally, there are propositions for which we can know their truth value, and yet cannot prove their truth value using logical deduction.
A good scientific theory is expressed in a manner in which we might logically prove that it is false, but we can never logically prove that it is true. On the other hand, it is taken by scientists to be the case that a strong inductive argument can ultimately be made to establish the truth of a theory.
As mentioned above, an inductive argument does not provide a logically deductive proof for the theory, but is rather considered to be a probabilistic proof, which will eventually converge upon virtual certainty, given enough confirming observations. Note that we can still be 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% certain of a truth of a theory using inductive reasoning, and yet it will still be logically "falsifiable".
You will note that nothing here about falsifiability implies that a falsifiable proposition is not true. In fact, there are an infinite number of true and yet falsifiable propositions. Science, in particular, aims to find, via the scientific method and empirical induction, TRUE falsifiable propositions in the form of theories, and to use these theories to produce TRUE propositions in the form of predictions about real events in the world.
With regard to any other assertions you have made, they indicate profound misconceptions for which I am no longer interested in dissuading you from. I will however put my money where my mouth is. I have worked professionally with scientists every working day of my adult life. I have implemented software for an X-ray space telescope, I have adapted brain imaging software to help analyze radio astronomy data, and I am currently working at one of the most prestigious biology labs in the world.
I have already pointed you at two famous biologists who say that evolution is a TRUE theory. When faced with facts that you do not like, you poo-poo them, with such assertions as "science is not about titles and authority". Well, it's certainly not about what you spout out of your butt either. I have given you plenty of reasons why your position that "there is no such thing as truth in science" is wrong. I have backed this up with my own argumentation, and with the argumentation of two famous scientists. I am also willing to put my money where my mouth is. I will bet you that I can find at least ten more real, working biologists, who have research positions at the aforementioned world-famous biology lab to go on record as supporting the statement that evolution is a true theory. And I will pay you ten to one odds if I cannot.
How much do you want to bet?
Mr Lutus's argument is that scientific theories cannot be truths because they must be falsifiable, which means that they are potentially false and a truth cannot be potentially false.
My argument is that "falsifiable" only means that a theory is potentially false with respect to our limited knowledge. A theory can certainly be both true and falsifiable, however, since all that entails is that the theory is true, and yet we don't have all the evidence that would be required to conclude that it is true with the iron-clad power of a logically deductive argument.
On the other hand, we might certainly have enough evidence to conclude that the theory is true beyond any reasonable doubt using an empirically inductive argument. Although empirically inductive arguments can never eliminate all doubt, they can eliminate all reasonable doubt. Consequently, we are entitled to conclude, given enough evidence, that a scientific theory is true. Such a theory is still falsifiable, even though we know it to be true (beyond all reasonable doubt), because there is still the logical possibility for the theory to be false, no matter how remote this possibility is.
I claim that science strives for (and succeeds in) finding such inductively proven theories.
It should not be the case that exploration of an outcome is excluded on the basis that it is not perceived as beautiful. However, that there are patterns among the laws of nature was one of the fundamental discoveries of our species and a guiding principle of modern science.
Richard Feynman said[1]: "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."
[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
But as a shorthand, "This is a beautiful theory" is a lot like "This is a theory that seems like it SHOULD -- or at least COULD -- be right".
In short, science critic != movie critic.