Recently I was engaging in a very important task: honing one of my Pandora stations. Anyway, "Dodo", by Dave Matthews, came up and I was really struck by the lyrics:"Once upon a time
When the world was just a pancake
Fears would arise
That if you went too far, you'd fall
But with the
Passage of time
It all became more of a ball
We're as sure of that
As we all once were when the world was flat
So I wonder this
As life billows smoke inside my head
This little game
Where nothing is sure"
It reminded me of a tendency that laypeople have when they argue about contentious science. It comes up especially in discussions of evolution or climate change. Someone will inevitably say something like "well they used to think the world was flat - so you're being really foolish to embrace evolution [climate change] now because someday science could completely revolutionize what we think". A flat earth can just as easily be replaced by a geocentric solar system or any number of other things.
I think this is a very misleading way of thinking about science that completely ignores the historical context in which we live. In terms of the stretch of human history - and the time that it's taken to build up our institutions, traditions, and dogmas - empirical science is a very recent phenomenon. We could date it to the "scientific revolution", but that even overstates the case, because it's taken even longer for science to get the right tools, critical mass of funding and personnel, and theoretical infrastructure to really do empirical science well. You had your Newtons and your Copernicuses, but they were few and far between. The result is that we've seen a lot of revolutionary ideas in science in relatively recent history, and I think this gives the false impression that science will continue to revise our understanding of the world.
If there is some ontological consistency to this universe, we shouldn't continually revise our understanding of our world, at least not radically. And if there's not this ontological consistency, then we really have no business doing empirical science in the first place! I think this has important implications for science over the next several centuries, and I'll outline them below:
1. Major discoveries that alter the way we think about the world will eventually end. We evolved from lower life forms. Our planet revolves around a star. The universe started in a massive explosion and it's expanding at a reasonably predictable rate. The earth has tectonic plates. These things aren't going to be revised. They may be refined, but the insights are probably here to stay. It is in this sense that I speak of the "end of science" in the title - the big exciting discoveries are going to start to reach a stasis.
2. Science will of course continue - and we'll probably have more scientists in the future. But the scientists of the future will more likely be catalogers and engineers. Just because we're going to develop a stable framework of how we view the universe doesn't mean that there won't be new things to learn. For example, we may have the broad strokes of evolution worked out and understood, but we'll never run out of work tracing out the history of individual species. We also will start to place more emphasis on applied science. In the future, we may even be able to start directing evolution - you will hear about "evolutionary engineers". But of course this won't change the theory of evolution substantially. It will be an application of the theory.
3. Some fields will not reach a stasis and will continue to be marked by contention and new discovery for quite a while - string theory and highly theoretical physics that may escape easy empirical confirmation, neuroscience, etc., have subject matters that are so complex they may continue to be fruitful when it comes to new discoveries.
4. Social science will increasingly be recognized as a science, which unfortunately it hasn't in all quarters. People will realize that it's ridiculous to think of studies of the social behavior of birds and apes as "science", but somehow not consider the study of the social behavior of humans "science". In many cases, the study of human society has been far more methodologically rigorous than the study of sociality in other animals. This will dawn on people and social science will gain new respect. As with neuroscience, the complexity and the feedback loops in human society will mean that fruitful new discoveries will persist for quite a while.
5. And finally, my hedge: of course some area that is now considered pseudo-science could end up being real and a lot of new discoveries and fruitful work will happen. It probably won't happen, but it always could. In a similar vein, someone could establish that previously nebulous ideas like the soul or spirit are subject to some sort of empirical verification (think in terms of the metachlorion in Star Wars that gave The Force to the Jedi). If somebody stumbled on a material basis for what was previously considered a spiritual phenomenon, of course that would open whole new vistas in empirical science. Unlike my previous four forecasts, though, there's absolutely no way foreseeing this sort of thing. My first four forecasts are fairly standard - this one gets into Kuhnian paradigm shift territory that is less tractable.
Of course my title is a reference to Francis Fukuyama's famous piece on "The End of History", which promptly crashed and burned. I use the reference intentionally - projecting far into the future and situating ourselves in time is always a fun thought experiment, but you always have to recognize the risks as well. It could all be wrong.
Posts
My advisor has used Bas Van Fraassen some in his work, and in particular recommended The Empirical Stance, which I now have and am hoping to get to this summer.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I understand of Van Fraassen at this point (mostly from reading bits and pieces, listening to some of his lectures, etc.), his position of "empiricist structuralism" argues for a pragmatist view of theory that is empirically adequate... that is justified simply because it "works" with the empirical data in hand. When theory becomes inadequate for the data, you tweak it or replace it. He also spoke in one lecture on the idea that, in a sense, scientific tools "create" new empirical phenomena... and I don't know whether he might also apply this idea to scientific theories themselves. This sort of conception would have interesting implications for your forecasting here. I don't know how much it would change your ideas... it could be applied to mundane sort of "cataloging" work as much as to groundbreaking discoveries. And the idea of the empirically creative aspects of scientific work would certainly have something to say to an increased emphasis on engineering. Where Van Fraassen's work might differ from your comments here is that your conception of empiricism leans heavily on realism (I'm thinking of your paragraph just before the numbered points), where Van Fraassen (from what I understand) defends an empirical anti-realism. I think you could come to much the same conclusions, however, perhaps with simply a differing sense of how one should understand them. You're predicting a sort of stasis based on the limitations that objects of scientific observation present to science. Van Fraassen may simply (if he wanted to argue for some future stasis) base it on the limitations of scientific work rather than on the object of scientific work.
I'm speaking largely from ignorance here, but if nothing else you can take this comment as a recommendation of someone else to read.
Van Fraassen sounds a lot like Milton Friedman's "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (http://academic2.american.edu/~dfagel/Class%20Readings/Friedman/Methodology.pdf). It's short - you might be interested in reading it. I haven't read it in a while, but it has been unsettling for a lot of even empirically minded economists because he basically says "it doesn't matter if your theory is realistic or not - it just has to predict reality".
ReplyDeleteI think within certain bounds it's a reasonable point. It's almost like what I was saying to Sam on your blog about philosophy, only in this case with science. Science is a search for truth, but it is also just as legitimately a tool. And sometimes it's both. The Van Fraassen-Friedman perspective is very much the "science as tool" perspective. Insofar as I would criticize that, all I could really say is that I'm thinking of something else - not just our ability to predict, but our ability to understand reality.
I was actually thinking about this in the shower after posting (I often post in the morning... and I often have second thoughts about what I post in my morning shower!). A lot of talk about empiricism historically has focused on the observer - it has been epistemology heavy. Can our perceptions be a reliable basis for knowledge? Can the way we sense the world be dependended upon at all. If you have any doubts about this, then you have to have a loosey-goosey, pragmatic approach to empiricism.
I'm really thinking from a more ontological perspective, as you suggest. If there is a consistency to reality, then I don't really care about problems in our perceptive abilities. It doesn't matter if they're imperfect - so long as they don't SYSTEMATICALLY distort (and this is a big concern), it doesn't matter that our imperfect ability to perceive reality worsens the resolution of our picture of reality. In econometrics lingo, it's an issue of bias vs. efficiency. Bias is a worse problem than efficiency. Bias means that your estimate is actually off base. Inefficiency means that the confidence you have in that estimate is low. As Keynes once said (paraphrasing some eminent Victorian - if forget who): "I would rather be roughly right than precisely wrong".
This is the empiricism I'm talking about - is observation sufficient for understanding reality. Of course there are lots of other issues. Sociologists of science talk a lot about male-dominated science and discursive distortions of scientific findings, etc. All of these are valid things to think about. I don't think any of them overthrow the foundation of empirical science.
Two other thoughts I had:
ReplyDelete1. We think of flat earth theories and geocentric solar systems as being "pre-scientific", but in some ways they really weren't at all. Have you ever looked across a landscape? Looks pretty flat to me. I also don't feel myself moving - but I see the Sun move across the sky every day. That's empiricism. That's nothing if not scientific. It's not empirical science that pushes the question very far. But it's not like it's superstition or anything - it's based firmly on observation. Someone might tell me that maybe the horizon suggests a curvature to the Earth, but in an unsophisticated world I could easily retort that we have a harder time seeing things that are farther away. This sort of blows a hole in my whole post. This suggests that round earth theories and the heliocentric solar system aren't discoveries based on a new embrace of empiricism - in fact empiricism is very old, we've simply improved our empirical skills and techniques over time. It stands to reason that further improvements of empirical skill and technique might indeed lead to further revolutions and breakthroughs. Kinda makes me want to say "disregard previous post", but instead I'll just say "keep both of these things in mind". One thing I hate is when people infantilize historical figures. Humans from previous eras were not dumb. Given the constraints they faced, flat earths and a geocentric universe made sense. They had more important issues to delve into - like keeping their families fed. It wasn't the lack of an empirical mindset that caused them to embrace bad theories.
2. My other shower thought was about another "breakthrough discovery" that I considered potentially including as a future prospect, but decided not to. That was the prospect of discovering alien life. I decided not to include it, because while this would introduce a social revolution, I don't think it would really revolutionize our understanding of the world. That revolution was accomplished in the 1860s by Darwin. As soon as we developed a viable theory of the evolution of species, we had a viable theory for life on other worlds. It's no matter a question of scientific validity, but rather a question of probability. How many are there? How far away are they? How advanced are they? Will we ever meet them? Etc. etc. Discovering alien life would not change our understanding of how the world works any more than discovering a new species on Earth would. It would be exciting. It would have major implications, but I don't think it would rank up there with evolution, the big bang, general relativity, or the periodic table. That's why I didn't include it in the blog post.
And by "1860s" I should say "late fifties (Origin of Species) and early seventies (Descent of Man)". My bad - I think I was thinking of Marx.
ReplyDelete