We can use “scientific method” if it is more palatable. It is the same thing, however.
The poster doth protest too much, methinks.
Your answer skirts the question. In fact, when you say that you want to understand “how things work”, you mean that you want to understand how things really work, not some inaccurate approximation of how things work; you settle for the inaccurate approximation only when it is the best you can get, not because you desire it as an end. The end you desire is total and complete understanding of how things work – which is what I mean by “the truth” about nature. Science has always sought “the truth” about nature. That is quite compatible with admitting that truth is hard to obtain, that we often have to be satisfied with imperfect models, etc. (In your evolutionary example, the goal of science should be to combine the truths about common descent with the truth about horizontal gene transfer, to come up with a complete picture that is more true, i.e., closer to the reality of nature.)
The goal is still the truth. If scientists thought that nature was a murky mystery, utterly impenetrable, they wouldn’t even try to understand it; they would just pray for God to reveal its secrets.
So what is “the truth” about the origin of life? One possible “true” answer is that it arose by accident, from a sloshing together of chemicals which had no intention to produce life; another possible “true” answer is that the types of matter, the constants, etc. were all carefully calibrated by an intelligence to make life possible. The reigning “internet orthodoxy” (which atheists and TEs would like to impose on everyone) is that the second answer is not allowed in science, and is in no sense a scientific answer. But what if the second answer is the true answer about the origin of life? Then following some mechanical notion of what “science” allows would lead us to the wrong answer. So in such a case, what would be the better outcome? Getting the right answer, by breaking an arbitrary methodological rule, or loyally sticking to a rule and getting the wrong answer? (I’m reminded of Tom Lehrer’s classic remark about “New Math” in the preamble to one of his comic songs, but probably most people here won’t remember that.)
Not quite. Science has always sought testable models of how nature works. That is what separates science from other philosophical pursuits of “the truth”.
You use “scientific method” as if it’s just one thing. This is a myth perpetuated by decades of bad popular science books, and bad histories of science. In fact, science in practice has involved a grab-bag of methods, and many times on these sites physicists, biologists, etc. have confessed that they approach things differently from their colleagues in other disciplines. Historical sciences, for example, perforce must resort to “abductive” reasoning at points – and you won’t see that in classical textbook accounts of the “method” of science (e.g., Galileo’s balls rolling down the inclined plane).
There’s that haughtiness again.
Again, can you point to a scientific theory in the natural sciences that wasn’t derived from the scientific method?
Only since the 17th century. Greek and Medieval natural science were different.
Nonetheless, the purpose of those models has always been to get at the truth about nature. Their provisional nature can be granted, but the possibility that they are the right model must also be granted. So science is always concerned about the truth about nature. Unless you believe there is no such thing as truth, in which case you are a post-modern; but post-modernism is pure acid to any natural science.
You’re missing the point; I deny that there is a such a thing as “THE” scientific method. There are many methods employed in science. I assume you are referring to the usual schtick about gathering data, formulating a tentative hypothesis, devising an experiment which could potentially falsify the hypothesis, carrying out the experiment, and drawing appropriate conclusions. But even that is not an accurate description of everything that goes on in science. Read Meyer’s discussion of the abductive method in Signature in the Cell, for example.
You could also try reading Del Ratzsch’s book on nature and design, where he makes an argument that intelligent design is not automatically outside the scope of science.
“Truth” as I understand it, is a property of sentences of or propositions. Scientists of start studying an area before have a way of coming up with sentences or propositions to describe the phenomena being investigated. So, to me, it seems mistaken to say that scientists are seeking truth. But it seems correct that they are seeking understanding.
It is possible that we may never know that.
Science may never be able to distinguish between those possibilities.
Then that’s a good example illustrating why science is pragmatic, rather than truth-seeking.
That’s a modernist definition of “truth,” the product of fairly recent Anglo-American philosophizing.
I agree. But the point is not what we succeed in accomplishing, but what we are trying to do. You may never succeed in climbing Mt. Everest; you may get only part-way up. But you are not going to lower your goal and rest satisfied with an incomplete accomplishment, if you are a determined mountain climber. You are going to keep trying for the big prize. The scientist may never get the big prize, but the little prizes he wins along the way give him courage and make him think that winning the big prize may be possible. Einstein kept hoping for a unified field theory. Cosmologists keep hoping that one day they will be able to offer a complete history of the universe. The imperfections of knowledge along the way don’t detract from the ambition.
I would think it would be a better example of how modern scientists – or rather, those modern scientists who insist that design cannot possibly be a scientific conclusion – have lost their interest in the essential questions which drove the scientific quest in the first place, from the days of the ancient Greeks. I would not count that to the credit of those scientists, but would regard it as a failure of courage, nerve, imagination, and hope.
How you doing Jordan! It was good to meet you in St. Louis. Disclaimer – I’ve not read the rest of the posts in this thread. Apologies if I’m off base…
My guess is you are thinking through how to run a class where you need to end up with a working definition of science. I happen to be sitting in the history and philosophy of science class at my university where our biologist is the professor. Before I got to the university (as a philosopher of science), the bio faculty thought it a good idea to start a philosophy course for their majors – pretty awesome, but it means I don’t get to teach it as it is housed in biology NOT philosophy! Anyway, he crowdsources this question with the students and it has been an absolute joy to see the science students struggle with defining the very thing that they are studying… His readings are chapters 1 and 2 from:
and
Chapters 3.2, 2.3, 2.11, 2.16, 2.17, 4.9, 3.7, 5.5, 2.13 from:
But, beware as he has spent 8-weeks working with students to see how difficult it is to define science. It is a long philosophical road to trudge. However, it is neat to see the students (majority science majors) come to grips with the philosophical difficulties of understanding that much of what they do is based upon philosophical assumptions. Assumptions that are are not scientific in nature; they are simply background assumption that make science work, unjustifiable in some ultimate sense apart from the practice of science itself.
As a fun exercise, he brings in various scientists across the campus and asks them the same questions he asks the students about the nature of science to illustrate for students that even at the PhD level, published research scientists have a difficult time defining science in such a way that they actually employ their definition of science in their research. Science is much messier than any definition allows… not something formally or informally inculcated during a science major’s undergraduate tenure.
Cheers!
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Of course, philosophers are not trying to do science, so Weinberg is not saying anything helpful or useful.
The quote also reminds me of Feynman’s purported view that “The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds". Superficially apppealing, but a category error (and probably simply false as well) once you think about it.
You are demanding that we include ID into modern science, not in the natural sciences as they existed over 400 years ago. Therefore, ID needs to meet the requirements of what science is now.
That’s not true. The purpose is to get a scientific model. Scientific conclusions are not claims about ontological truths. We tend to favor scientific conclusions because of pragmatism, in that scientific theories tend to work really well.
I tend to be a skeptic, but I still favor explanations that are backed by verifiable evidence. I am not one who thinks a well supported explanation is on level ground with a completely made up explanation.
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I think it is more of a response to those philosophers who think their work is indispensable to scientists.
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The output of the abductive method needs to produce testable hypotheses that can later test the previous idea. This is what ID lacks.
Let’s look at an example. Einstein used the abductive method to derive the theory of general relativity. Did it stop there? No. The scientific method was used to test the theory with new experiments and new observations.
This same problem exists in the biological sciences. With the glut of new technology available to researchers it is possible to produce massive data sets with thousands and thousands of individual variables. In any massive data set you can find statistically significant correlations between variables, but it may mean nothing. For example, you can map the change in gene regulation for nearly all genes in different conditions and possibly find weak but statistically signifcant correlations. Further testing has to be done to determine the mechanism that underlies the correlation, and that is where the scientific method kicks in.
I’ve already conceded that as science is defined by most scientists (at least, by those scientists who participate vocally in origins debates), ID does not meet the definition of “science.” My point is that those scientists are working from an impoverished definition, and an unnecessary limitation. I mentioned the great scientists of the past to show that brilliant breakthroughs are possible without such limitation.
I would not say that philosophy is directly necessary to science in most cases. It is possible to learn how to do science the way one learns how to do any craft – by learning the ropes from the practitioners. Obviously much competent science is done by workers who don’t know much philosophy and don’t care much about philosophy. I take that for granted – it’s quite obvious from my experience, first as a student of science, and later as someone surrounded by scientists in a university setting. Of the hundreds of scientists and scientists-in-training I have met and talked with, very few have been seriously interested in philosophical questions. I don’t say they are poor scientists because of this fact, but it is a fact.
Where philosophy is relevant is where scientific theories border on metaphysical assertion – as many versions of cosmology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, etc. now do. Someone needs to check the tendency of a number of scientists to slyly or unconsciously slip metaphysical preferences into their works and premises and/or to claim that their empirical results prove or support some favored metaphysical or religious conclusion (i.e., that there is no free will, no soul, no immortality, no God, no teleology in nature). Someone needs to be on guard, ready to blow the alarm trumpet when ideologues like the Four Horsemen get on their horses. And someone needs to remind the public that nothing that science has shown so far establishes that nature is not designed.
For example, whenever someone writes, “Science has not yet explained how life arose from non-life,” metaphysics is being slipped in (whether the scientist or science champion is conscious of it or not). The word “yet”, in the context of origin-of-life research as it is usually conducted, alters the meaning from “Scientists do not know how life arose” (metaphysically neutral statement) to “Scientists do not yet know by what path of chemical accidents life first came into being, but they are working on it and will one day discover it” (metaphysically non-neutral statement, as it presumes, rather than merely conjectures, that life could have arisen by accident and that no design was needed). So the rigorous philosopher would ask scientists to refrain from inserting the word “yet” into such statements.
This sounds like you are asking for religious thought police to control scientific expression.
Those breakthroughs are brilliant because they passed testing through the modern scientific method.
I think you are confusing the science for the person. Of course people have metaphysical beliefs, but that doesn’t mean the science does.
You are just being pendatic. I have yet to win the lottery, but that doesn’t mean I expect to.
How could you have read my statement with comprehension, yet come up with an inference like that?
For one thing, we were talking not specifically about religious people, but about philosophers. I spoke of “rigorous philosophers” not of religious authorities. A rigorous philosopher spots the metaphysics implied in “yet”, and points it out.
No one is saying that a scientist doesn’t have the legal right to use the word “yet” in such statements, or that religious authority should control what scientists say. My point is not about legal rights or speech control, but about the implicit content of statements made on the authority of science, or pretending to represent what is known by science.
Coyne etc. can use the word “yet” all they want, and I won’t be taking them to court over it. What I will do, however, is point out to readers and listeners that in inserting the “yet”, such writers and speakers step beyond their expertise as scientists, and into metaphysical territory. No one has to follow them there, not even if they have published 400 articles in top science journals or have won a Nobel Prize. In such claims, their scientific expertise counts for nothing.
I’m in these debates to puncture pretensions, far more than to defend ID, or to prove that ID is science, etc. It really matters far less to me to convince the world that ID is science, than to show the philosophical presuppositions underlying those who want to keep ID out of science. If teleological explanations are ruled out of modern science by convention, i.e., by the rules of the game, then fine – but let the world know the price of this exclusion as far as human knowledge goes; it means that many of the statements that scientists and science popularizers make about origins – statements which those writers very much hope the world will consider as true (a word Jerry Coyne uses) – are based on ruling out certain possibilities in accord with the rules of a game, not on anything anyone has actually demonstrated about the way nature really is.
The idea of forcing the Bible into high school science classes is odious to me. Even the idea of forcing ID into the science curriculum is odious to me. At the same time, if it ever happens (as happens in popular expositions of science) that the word “yet” is used in situations such as I gave in high school science class (perhaps in a textbook, or in a teacher’s statement), that also is odious to me. If we are going to exclude metaphysical and religious bias from science class, the exclusion has to be done even-handedly. Let science be taught purely as a high-level craft, a set of how-to rules or practices handy for discovering interesting relationships between things, and I’m fine with that. But if is taught as a body of knowledge, as a set of statements that we know to be true about nature, then it will inevitably tacitly introduce some metaphysics and epistemology, i.e., some philosophical contents, and at that point, the curriculum could benefit from review by philosophers, not for the detailed technical stuff but for the rhetorical framing.
Are you saying that we don’t have knowledge of what causes infectious diseases or the tides?
No, I’m not being pedantic, because in the case I’m talking about, the writers do expect that one day (maybe far in the future, but eventually) an account from mindless chemicals to life by accident will be available. Otherwise, why should such people demand from the State millions of dollars of funding for origin-of-life research? For a project that they in their heart of hearts think will likely never yield an answer? No, the people involved in the field think that an answer will come, and that when it comes, it will show that no design was necessary. That’s why they use “yet” – and the word’s implicit promise subtly affects readers. It certainly affected me, during all those years when I read massively in popular science (in books written by Ph.D.s in biochemistry, astrophysics, etc.). Only when I later studied philosophy did I learn how to detect these subtle influences on my thinking.