{"id":3058,"date":"2011-05-28T11:30:14","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T11:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=3058"},"modified":"2011-05-28T11:30:14","modified_gmt":"2011-05-28T11:30:14","slug":"reliable-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/reliable-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"Reliable Knowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"

How little scientists know who only know science!\u00a0 Thanks again to Norm<\/a>, I learn about some statements by a retired professor of chemistry, Peter Atkins<\/a>, about how we know what we know.\u00a0\u00a0 Atkins is quoted as saying:<\/p>\n

The scientific method is the only reliable method of achieving knowledge.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, first, it is worth saying that the scientific method does not produce reliable<\/strong> knowledge.\u00a0 One of the two defining features of science is that scientific claims are defeasible:\u00a0 they may be contested, questioned, challenged, and even overthrown, if the evidence warrants.\u00a0\u00a0 There is nothing inherently reliable about any scientific claim or theory, since new evidence may be found at any time to overthrow it.\u00a0 The history of science is littered with examples.\u00a0\u00a0 (The second key feature is that anyone may do this contesting; science is not, or rather should\u00a0 not be, a priesthood.)
\nOne could perhaps defend Atkins’ statement by saying that the abstracted method – first announcement of a claim or hypothesis about the world, then running experiments in the world aiming to falsify the claim, then objective revision or retraction of the claim – may lead to reliable knowledge over the long term.\u00a0\u00a0 But, as Paul Feyerabend argued from examination of historical records of scientific disputes, actual living, breathing scientists rarely follow any such method:\u00a0 they merely use whatever argumentation techniques best suit their material at the time in an attempt to win support for their claims, and they typically maintain their personal support for their own claims despite any contrary evidence.\u00a0 Given such diversity of actual scientific argumentation practice across disciplines, across time and across issues, I think it only a foolhardy person who would seek to demonstrate that an abstraction from these practices was guaranteed to\u00a0yield reliable knowledge about the world. (I speak as someone who has tried to do just this, under some severe assumptions as to the types of knowledge\u00a0and the types of argument used.\u00a0 See reference below.)\u00a0
\nSecond, it is worth noting that Atkins appears to have overlooked other means of achieving knowledge. Pure mathematics, for example, produces new knowledge by means of deductive reasoning, not using anything resembling the scientific method.\u00a0 Many argue that such knowledge is<\/strong> reliable, since once demonstrated claims cannot be overthrown (at least, not overthrown using the same assumptions and same rules of inference).\u00a0 Most theories of theoretical physics in the modern era – from Isaac Newton\u2019s theory of gravity, through Einstein\u2019s relativity theories, right up to contemporary string theory and brane theory \u2013 are mathematical in kind, developed by mathematicians from their intuitions and using deductive reasoning without recourse to experiment or anything approaching the scientific method. Newton, for instance, famously assumed that the physical laws which governed the motion of planets around the sun also governed the swings of pendulums here on earth, an assumption for which he had not a skerrick of evidence (and nor could he have had), and which is completely counter-intuitive.\u00a0\u00a0 We western moderns do not think it counter-intuitive because we have each received a decade of indoctrination at school in the objectively-weird notions of physics since Newton; without talk of mystical (and never fully explained) forces called “gravity” we too would find this assumption obviously without basis.\u00a0
\nIn fact, most of our knowledge of physical Nature comes from these mathematical theories, even in Atkins’ own field of chemisty (where the very abstract mathematical theory of groups finds application).\u00a0 Of course, we aim to test<\/strong> such mathematical theories by means of experiment, but a test is for the purposes of acceptance or rejection of the theory.\u00a0\u00a0 Once tested, the knowledge we have of Nature is from the theory, not usually from the test.\u00a0\u00a0 Arguably, it is mathematics, not the scientific method, which provides the knowledge we have.\u00a0 In the case of string and brane theories, for example, no experiments to test these theories have yet been undertaken, and perhaps none could be undertaken even in principle (since the theories concern dimensions of space-time inaccessible to us).\u00a0\u00a0 In this case, not only the knowledge but even the acceptance or rejection of the theory, is from the mathematics, and not from something called a scientific method.\u00a0\u00a0 (And on what mathematical<\/em> basis would we accept a mathematical theory of nature?\u00a0 Perhaps on its elegance or mathematical beauty, or its simplicity, or its profoundness, or its tractability, or its computability.)
\nIt is worth noting here, also, that in many cases, mathematical or computational models in science provide our only means to apprehend the Nature they are intended to model or describe.\u00a0 We cannot know whether string theory, for example, describes the natural world well or not because we have no other way to apprehend or observe that part of the\u00a0world it purports to describe.\u00a0\u00a0 It it is therefore moot to say that such theories are “reliable” or “effective”, since how could we tell?\u00a0
\nAtkins also ignores knowledge about actions, as distinct from knowledge of facts (know-how, rather than know-what<\/a>).\u00a0 For example, our knowledge about technologies and how they work – surely an important part of knowledge about the world – is typically gained not through scientific experiment aiming to test some explicit prior hypothesis, but through building prototypes and exploring the properties of these human artefacts. \u00a0This process of creation and exploration is closer to play than to anything a philosopher of science would term the scientific method.\u00a0\u00a0 Similarly, an artist’s knowledge of some object (real or imagined) may be gained by drawing or painting it, using drawing as a form of thinking<\/a>, again an activity very much like play.\u00a0 To argue that any such knowledge gained by the artist is not knowledge, or perhaps not knowledge about Nature, would be reductionist (and, I think, perverse).\u00a0
\nAnd Atkins has also ignored, as Norm points out, the insight and knowledge\u00a0 about the world provided by the humane disciplines – theology, literature, philosophy, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 As I have argued before<\/a>, getting things done in the world requires, inter alia<\/em>, a knowledge of how people and groups behave and function. \u00a0 The best source of such knowledge is not science or the scientific method (despite the pretensions of academic social psychology), but literature, TV dramas, and films.
\nReference:<\/em>
\nP. McBurney and S. Parsons [2001]: Representing epistemic uncertainty by means of dialectical argumentation. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.<\/em> Special Issue on Representations of Uncertainty. 32 (1-4):<\/strong> 125-169.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How little scientists know who only know science!\u00a0 Thanks again to Norm, I learn about some statements by a retired professor of chemistry, Peter Atkins, about how we know what we know.\u00a0\u00a0 Atkins is quoted as saying: The scientific method is the only reliable method of achieving knowledge.” Well, first, it is worth saying that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,50,71,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-getting-things-done-intelligence","category-mathematics","category-religion","category-science","p1","y2011","m05","d28","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}