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Science: Why, and How?
Some Basic Ideas in Scientific Method | 1 |
| 1.1 | Introduction: Why Science? |
| 1.2 | Knowledge: Realism and Idealism (Relativism), Common Sense and Science |
| 1.3 | Arguments: Deduction, Induction, Abduction |
| 1.4 | Laws, Theories, Models and Causes |
| 1.5 | Conclusion |
| Further Reading |
PREVIEW In the first two chapters we will present some central concepts in the philosophy of science. We will discuss what knowledge is, and how knowledge claims might be justified. Almost every concept in the field has been the subject of intense debate, and while we cannot introduce these without some philosophical discussion, we will try here to present the consensus with respect to fundamental concepts in the theory of science. Chapter 3 deals with different and sometimes conflicting philosophical views and ideals of science.
After a first primer on the nature of science (1.1), the second section (1.2) introduces two extreme views on the nature of scientific knowledge and the scope of truth: realism and idealism. These epistemological positions have been brought to bear upon the question of how much objectivity science can claim: the present authorsâ answer is an intermediate position, pragmatism. A further question is how scientific knowledge may be different from common sense.
In Chapter 1.3 a number of epistemological concepts, that is concepts we use in our knowledge claims â such as deductive and inductive arguments; laws, theories and facts; justification and discovery of theories â will be discussed. The nature of causal laws is the subject of Chapter 1.4 where we explore some aspects of typically scientific knowledge, such as explanations, laws, observations, and causes.
1.1 INTRODUCTION: WHY SCIENCE?
Demarcating science
In modern societies, science is held in high regard, and the results of scientific research seem almost unconditionally trusted. Laboratory tests count as a guarantee of the quality of drugs, food and cosmetics: logic and mathematics are the hallmarks of certainty and objectivity. No one seems to question the almost magical ability of scientists to estimate the safety of a new nuclear plant in terms of the probability of an accident per million years and health scientists will specify the effects of smoking, overeating, and pollution in percentages. Science is apparently seen as the embodiment of rationality, objectivity and truth (or at least our best approximation of the truth). Most people believe that science and technology have steered us on our way to more welfare, health, freedom and prosperity (Toulmin, 1990) and in our society common sense yields to scientific knowledge: psychological testing takes the place of empathy, evidence-based medicine replaces lore and intuition. Briefly, over the past four hundred years (or so), scientific thinking and research have proved a huge success. âUnscientificâ and âpseudo-scienceâ are (almost) terms of abuse, although there can of course be doubts about the validity of certain pieces of research, such as the suspicion that in climate science data have been manipulated, or in drugs research business interests have distorted published results, and individual investigators have indeed been caught faking or embellishing their data. But these cases are more like aberrations from, or abuse of, a basically correct model, than real worries about the status of science as such.
Strangely enough, philosophers of science have as yet failed to find out exactly what defines science and its methods, what accounts for its success, and how to make an airtight separation between science and pseudoscience. Even more surprising, in light of the omnipresence of science nowadays, some philosophers reject the idea of a difference in principle between science and other social activities: its alleged objectivity is just self-congratulation on the part of the establishment â whatever is accepted as truth is determined by power and propaganda. These philosophers consider the practice of scientific inquiry the subject matter of sociology (see Chapter 5), to be explained in the same way as one might study primitive tribes or groups like Hellâs Angels: acceptance of theories is governed by âmob psychologyâ rather than by objective âscientificâ criteria (see Chapters 4.3 and 4.5). These social and anarchistic approaches tend towards relativism; one theory is as good as the next one, and preferences towards any scientific approach are due to arbitrary, irrational factors.
We will defend the view that scientific practice is not arbitrary and that scientific knowledge has a legitimate claim to truth; that it, in a way, corresponds to an external reality, while at the same time we would recognize that it is subject to a host of social, pragmatic and sometimes irrational influences, and that scientific truth is not something separate from human concerns.
Unification and underlying causes
An impressive feature of science is that it can explain disconnected phenomena as the effects of underlying causal structures. A bewildering variety of chemical reactions, for instance, can elegantly and parsimoniously be explained within the framework of Mendeleyevâs table of elements, which in turn is explained by the composition of chemical elements (atoms, consisting of electrons, neutrons and protons) governing binding and so on. A good example in psychology (although a controversial theory) would be psychoanalysis, which shows how underlying traumas produce neurotic behaviour. Theories unify and systematize knowledge. Everyday phenomena are reduced to something more basic; they can be fitted into a comprehensive theory, and in that way can be explained and predicted (and manipulated in laboratories). That, of course, is a major triumph of science. Reduction also has the somewhat disturbing consequence that these everyday phenomena are âreallyâ nothing but atoms and molecules, that thoughts are nothing but physiological mechanisms, etc. Explaining, for instance, the physiological mechanisms of consciousness or memory seems tantamount to eliminating the interesting aspects of mental life, and reducing real people like you and me to drab machines (for the problem of reduction, see Chapter 2.6).
âCriticismâ: keeping an open mind
Another meeting point for science and culture is that science has been associated with a critical attitude, open-mindedness, and Western liberal democracy (e.g., Popper, 1966). Historically, the rise of empirical critical investigation and the rejection of authority have gone together on several occasions. It was characteristic of Protestantism and the associated New Learning movement in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, which combined a politically progressive (if not subversive) demand for freedom of speech and the press with the development of science, mathematics and medicine (see Schafer, 1983). It could be argued that science is a characteristic of modern society: a rejection of dogma, a critical attitude towards authority, the feeling that in thinking for oneself an individual can find the truth. Others, however, see science as the stronghold of political oppression: it has been identified (especially in psychology and the human sciences) by, among others, Marxists and feminists with repressing human concerns in a methodological straitjacket, providing the establishment with ideological legitimations and/or the technological means for maintaining the status quo of capitalist exploitation and unthinking technocratic dominance (Marcuse, 1964; Weizenbaum, 1976; see also Chapter 5).
More generally, science has been part of the project of modernity (e.g., Toulmin, 1990), seeking rational criteria for conduct in a wide range of human activities. Thus, it has received its share of postmodernist criticism, which rejects the idea of universal criteria for rationality (Feyerabend, 1975; Rorty, 1979).
This kind of debate on the proper place of science, its limitations and strengths, may be elucidated (if not decided) against the background of a principled account of the nature and limitations of knowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular. Philosophers call the special branch of their trade that deals with evaluating the claims of knowledge epistemology.
1.2 KNOWLEDGE: REALISM AND IDEALISM (RELATIVISM), COMMON SENSE AND SCIENCE
Realism
Knowledge is, according to most authors, justified true belief. Of course, one may ask how to fixate beliefs, and what constitutes justification. In broad outline, two possible grounds for justification have been proposed: one, idealism, focusing on the knower, the individual or social processes leading to knowledge claims; the other, realism, focusing on the known, the object of knowledge.
Realism says that knowledge corresponds to reality; more precisely, that the terms for our theories refer to, âcorrespondâ with, real things in the world. Scientific realism is probably the (largely implicit) image most working scientists would have of what empirical investigation really is (see Chapter 3). It is sometimes assumed that reality consists of elementary atomic facts, which are reflected in observation statements, plus the logical connections between them. Such observation statements thus represent elementary states of affairs (âfactsâ) in the world, and they are connected by tautological logical rules, so that the build-up of knowledge makes a kind of mental blueprint of the world â a theory. Language reflects reality in a mirror-like fashion â like a picture, or perhaps more accurately, like a blueprint (see Chapter 3.3 for the early Wittgensteinâs picture theory of truth). The common view of truth in realism is correspondence: theories are true if they correspond with nature. The unsolved (and unsolvable) problem, however, is that there is no measure of agreement between language and reality, if only because it would have to be put into language, in the form of a theory. Hence objectivity, in the sense of letting the world speak for itself, and objective knowledge, as gathering its reflections in the mirror of our theoretical representations, are an illusion. When we ask whether some theoretical term is objectively real â for example, whether personality traits really exist â we can only give the answer in the form of a statement.
Idealism and relativism
The alternative, idealism, holds that the world as we know it is somehow a creation of the mind. Our knowledge is a subjective product, and does not necessarily correspond to an outside world; it is not even clear what the concept of an outside world exactly means, if it is construed as independent of a knowing subject. Idealism tends towards relativism: if knowledge is a subjective construction, then every subject or every group, every historical period, or socio-economic class may have its own truth.
Idealism is the classical alternative to realism. If all knowledge is a subjective construction, there is no rational, objective way to choose between different points of view. If theories are completely in the eye of the beholder, and have no relation with reality, then anything goes. Idealists like Berkeley, Kant and Descartes were forced to introduce God or Universal Human Nature in order to arrange for some correspondence between representations in individual minds and the represented things in the world.
The common view of truth in idealism is coherence: theories are true if they are consistent with the rest of our knowledge. The idea has some plausibility in, for example, mathematics: mathematical proofs are true when derived from a theoremâs axioms. Mathematics is a self-contained construction of the mind: its truth cannot be checked by empirical means â it makes no sense to start to measure actual triangles in the world to see whether their angles always add up to 180 degrees. Rather, we can deduce this result from a web of other internally cohering statements.
Relativism is a more modern term that emphasizes the collective nature and social determinants of ideas, and the impossibility of universal, objective knowledge. A position close to idealism and relativism is social constructionism: it is believed that much of science is a human construction, a reflection of social interactions in a collective of researchers and society at large, more than a reflection of the world. In Chapter 4 relativism (anti-realism) is discussed, and Chapter 5 looks at the social and psychological influences on theory choice.
The dilemma: the impossibility of âobjectiveâ knowledge
So, we seem to have two equally unattractive options: idealism â where the mind makes up the world, or perhaps entirely confabulates it; or realism â assuming that the world, as it is in itself, independent of human exploration and theorizing, is accessible to us. The latter option, which assumes that there is some criterion for matching a âGodâs eye point of viewâ (Putnam, 1981) with our own view, is of course paradoxical. As Rorty (1979: 298) puts it, it involves the notion âthat we are successfully representing according to Natureâs own conventions of representationâ, rather than âthat we are successfully representing according to our ownâ. In other words, there is no criterion for comparing our theories directly with the world, since any such comparison...
