I came across two good posts today on a subject that is dear my my heart, and that is Epistemology and it's subsection, the philosophy of science.
At Right Thinking People, Trodwell writes:
People who confuse a passing familiarity with a few of the elements of scientific terminology, with a fundamental understanding of science, tend to come a cropper when they attempt to apply scientific precepts to unscientific areas or methods of inquiry. The problem, as it always is with pseudoscientists, is that they approach science as a religion rather than as what it really is - a method. This is because, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, those who fail to understand science see it as magic. And to paraphrase Carl Sagan (since we're on a paraphraseological roll here), what the co-opters are hoping to do is to acquire the credibility accruing to science, without strict adherence to the method that is the source of that credibility. ... The utility of any hypothesis lies in the extent to which it explains observed phenomena. The credibility of the scientific method derives from the willingness of scientists to modify or discard any theorem that fails to adequately explain observable phenomena. Newtonian physics was modified by Maxwell's equations, and both later found further refinement in Einstein's work on special and general relativity. Other lacunae in Newton were resolved by subsequent work on quantum electro- and chromodynamics. Each of these theories still contain complexities and asymmetries that will almost certainly be resolved by further refinements or, perhaps, by chucking the whole lot if somebody comes up with a more elegant theory that explains everything at once. But this is the strength of science "the willingness to alter hypotheses to explain new data, or if necessary to discard them entirely and start over.Now it's true that in our day and age we are subject to a great many claims every day that use scientific garb in an effort to enhance their credibility. An actor in a white coat telling us about nine out of ten dentists is just such an effort, and it could fairly be called a right wing capitalist abuse of science. Tradition, however, is immune from this criticism. It is more of a heuristic than a hypothesis because it is not subject to testing and refutation. It either seems like a reasonable guide to you, or it does not. If it does not, however, I wonder how you can seek to enshrine or protect your own contributions to anything. Utility, the holy grail or radicals, is a terribly slippery subject, meaning different things to different people. It is difficult to see how it can be meaningfully applied to any collective endeavor because people's tastes and pleasures and their balance of them are so idiosyncratic. What is pleasureable and useful to a six year old is boring and crude to a senior citizen. Then there is also the endearing problem of trying to institute a tradition of utilitarian thinking, an oxymoron that just makes me smile. Utility seems to me to fall into what Trodwell is writing about in a large way. It seems to offer what he calls the "mystic credibility" of science because it suggests objective measurement but fails to deliver it. Tradition is similarly untestable - by man, anyway. But then tradition never made any claims to be measurable or scientific anyway. If it is a measured good, it's measurement is Darwinian survival over time. Meanwhile, at Right Reason, Roger Kimball writes glowingly about Australian philosopher David Stove:
Stove was that rarest of creatures: a genuinely independent thinker. His allegiance was always to the best argument, the most persuasive reasoning. This made him difficult to categorize, impossible to pigeon-hole. Stove's favorite philosopher was David Hume. Stove saw in Hume a man devoted to intellectual sanity, to patient reasonableness, to what Hume called "the calm sunshine of the mind." But Stove's admiration did not prevent him from criticizing Hume. For example, Stove showed that Hume's attack on inductive reasoning proceeded from "deductivism," from a conviction that the only arguments that were really compelling were those that were valid in the strict logical sense of the term. This had the effect of sharply depreciating Hume's faith in observation and experience--odd for a philosopher who was an avowed empiricist. But Stove shows that it was precisely the combination of deductivism, on the one hand, and empiricism, on the other, that led to the distinctive irrationalism that has infected modern philosophy of science from Popper forward. ... In some respects, Stove was a paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. He prized reason highly, sought to expose superstition, and could have adopted Kant's formulation of the Enlightenment motto--Sapere aude!, "Dare to Know!"--as his own. But about the Enlightenment as about everything else Stove was the opposite of doctrinaire. "Enlightened opinions," he saw, "are always superficial." Consider the Enlightenment's attack on religion and established authority as nothing more than a repository of superstition. "If," Stove argues, "priests, kings, soldiers, doctors (and so on) were nothing more than Enlightenment can see in them--if they were, in plain English, confidence men--then virtually the whole of human history would be unintelligible." If one side of the Enlightenment was embodied in Voltaire's demand "Ecrasez l'infame," another side was embodied in the French Revolution and its witch's brew of "revolutionary republicanism, regicide, anti-religious terrorism, and the deliberate destruction, for the sake of equality, both of thousands of innocent people and of high culture in any form."If nothing else, "enlightened opinions are always superficial" is a great quote to remember, as the example Kimball gives us shows:
Among educated persons today, any suggestion that aspects of Darwinian theory are suspect is instantly met with contempt, pity, derision--anything but a mind open to rational persuasion. Crackpot creationists are anti-Darwinian, ergo anyone who challenges Darwinian dogma must be a creationist, a crackpot, or both.That's a busted syllogism, plain and simple. Yet you'll hear it tossed off at any cocktail party you care to attend and woe to you who dares question it. I have yet to read anything by David Stove, but his name just climbed upwards on my rather endless list of books to read. For more about Stove, see here. The site includes links to some of his works, including The Worst Argument of All Time and Helps for Young Authors.
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