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I've seen/heard a fair amount of people use the argument "science has been wrong in the past, it will be wrong in the future, therefore science today is not a valid source of information". Something about this argument seems wrong to me, I was wondering if anyone knows if there is a formal name for this argument and what the logic for and against it is?
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I don't know any formal name for said argument. I do find such argument reasonable and in some aspects compelling.
I have believed for years that the probability science is incorrect greatly exceeds the probability that it is correct.
We may be able to manipulate actions and reactions for the purposes of medicine, communication technology, home convenience, etc; but when it comes to science explaining why things are the way they are, science is infantile.
Posts: 293 | Registered: Apr 2000
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I think the italicized why indicates a misapprehension of what, exactly, science actually proposes to answer. Usually when such a why presents itself, what is being considered is a point of philosophy, not science. And yeah, if your philosophy makes a claim answerable by science then chances are science is where the correct answer will be found.
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This argument is a form of inductive reasoning:
Science has been wrong in the past Therefore, it will be wrong in the future
Inductive reasoning is not as sound as deductive reasoning because it is not mathematically logical, and relies on inferences which may or may not be true, depending on many unknown variables.
I'm sure science 50 years or 100 years from now will look very different from modern science, just as modern science is different from science a century ago. That doesn't mean science is unreliable; it just means science changes. Science describes, to the best of its ability (which depends on the availability of data and the reasoning of their observers), natural phenomena in the universe. As we find new data with new ways to obtain it, it is very possible, if not likely, that we will have to revise some current scientific theories. Insofar as scientific theories today are not contradicted by any evidence, we can use the same form of inductive reasoning that concludes science is unreliable to assume that these theories are true.
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My favorite example of flawed induction is, I believe, a Chinese parable about the dangers of Confuscianism:
A poor farmer was walking through his drought-ravaged field when he startled a rabbit. It sprang up frantically and ran from him -- directly into an old tree stump. Its neck snapped. He took the rabbit home for supper, and his family ate meat for the first time in months.
For the rest of the season, his fields lay neglected; the farmer kept a watchful eye on the stump, waiting for more rabbits.
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Infantile compared to who knows what, really, since science doesn't know it yet. Infantile compared to all that is knowable in the universe.
In two or three milennia scientists will likely regard the science of our generation as infantile. At what point can science say it has grown up?
Sorta like the Star Trek movie where Bones travels back in time and give the grow-a-new-liver pill to the woman awaiting a liver transplant and refers to our current medicine as barbaric.
Posts: 293 | Registered: Apr 2000
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quote:Originally posted by C3PO the Dragon Slayer: Insofar as scientific theories today are not contradicted by any evidence, we can use the same form of inductive reasoning that concludes science is unreliable to assume that these theories are true.
I see your point. Makes sense. Thank you.
Posts: 293 | Registered: Apr 2000
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quote:Infantile compared to all that is knowable in the universe.
Doesn't that apply to basically everything? It doesn't seem meaningful to call out science as being infantile when every other form of inquiry and field of study is just as young and limited.
Also, you were previously talking about science being infantile only when answering certain kinds of questions. What did you mean by "why things are the way they are"? What is an example of science answering one of these questions in an infantile way?
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"X has been wrong in the past, X will be wrong in the future, therefore X is not a valid source of information"
Start filling in things for X. Road signs, wikipedia, doctors, school textbooks, and so on have all been wrong in the past and may be wrong in the future, so if we were to accept this line of reasoning then none of those would be valid sources of information. And if we eliminate all those sources of information then suddenly we are left with almost no information at all.
This line of reasoning would imply that anything that makes mistakes is not a valid source of information. It would imply that the only valid sources of information are infallible things. Since there are very very few, if any, infallible sources of information in the world, that is a problem.
Fallible information is better than no information, if there's reason to believe it is likely to be true.
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quote:Infantile compared to all that is knowable in the universe.
Doesn't that apply to basically everything? It doesn't seem meaningful to call out science as being infantile when every other form of inquiry and field of study is just as young and limited.
Guess it was not wise to label it infantile. I didn't intend it as a pejorative.
I guess it is a matter of perspective. Looking far enough back in time, science and other forms of inquiry and study may seem infantile to us. Yet the scientists at the time would not feel they were infantile. For information available at the time, they were working on new questions and developing new innovations. They were cutting edge.
My claim about science in the future looking back and regarding our current science as infantile was itself an inductive argument, and thus not reliable. I was basing that argument on what happened in the past and what is happening in the present, and then projecting that it will continue to happen in the future. Perhaps it won't.
Also, I didn't mean to call out science separate from other forms of knowing. I would have included other methods of obtaining knowledge if they had been the subject of the thread.
quote:Also, you were previously talking about science being infantile only when answering certain kinds of questions. What did you mean by "why things are the way they are"? What is an example of science answering one of these questions in an infantile way?
Again, I didn't mean infantile as a pejorative. Science often addresses "why" questions. Attempts to answer them lead to deeper "why" questions, which lead to even deeper "why" questions, etc... Thus, the first question was merely an infant in the chain of questions. If there is almost always a deeper "why," then science has not explained ultimately why things are the way they are. That was why I used the term "infantile" about science explaining why things are the way they are. (I should have used the phrase "in an infant-like state.")
For some examples: it seems people are always looking for or discovering yet another subatomic particle that explains why other particles behave as they do. New forms of matter/energy (dark matter, dark energy) keep altering explanations about why the universe behaves as it does. Biological engineering keeps delving deeper into why the body works the way it does. Genetics looks deeper and deeper into why the genome behaves as it does. Similarly, we could look at geophysics, materials engineering, chemistry, etc....
Posts: 293 | Registered: Apr 2000
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quote:Again, I didn't mean infantile as a pejorative. Science often addresses "why" questions. Attempts to answer them lead to deeper "why" questions, which lead to even deeper "why" questions, etc... Thus, the first question was merely an infant in the chain of questions. If there is almost always a deeper "why," then science has not explained ultimately why things are the way they are. That was why I used the term "infantile" about science explaining why things are the way they are. (I should have used the phrase "in an infant-like state.")
I think this is an issue with "why" questions in any discipline, not just when it comes to science. Is there any way to answer a "why are things like this?" question that doesn't in some way lead to another "why" question?
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"Science has been wrong in the past, it will be wrong in the future, therefore science today is not a valid source of information."
This is a pretty silly argument for anyone to make (and I'm sure some folks around here will get a kick out of hearing me talk like this:) ) for a whole bunch of reasons. One being that 'science' is not just one thing. Science is a way of looking at the world, a way of asking questions and attempting to discover answers. Because of that, it will always be 'wrong in the past' at least to an extent. That's, y'know, the point of science. Built into the approach of science is 'discard the wrong, incorporate the right'.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Jenos: I've seen/heard a fair amount of people use the argument "science has been wrong in the past, it will be wrong in the future, therefore science today is not a valid source of information". Something about this argument seems wrong to me, I was wondering if anyone knows if there is a formal name for this argument and what the logic for and against it is?
This argument is known as the pessimistic induction. It's supposed to be a criticism of scientific realism, the view that science gives us accurate information about the unobservable features of reality.
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Because of that, it will always be 'wrong in the past' at least to an extent. That's, y'know, the point of science. Built into the approach of science is 'discard the wrong, incorporate the right'.
Yep. The kicker is that the alternatives to science are not reliably more right, at least about science-y topics. You have to assess the full panoply of options, and then -- even if none are perfect -- chose the best one to address your needs.
This is a great term paper topic.
Posts: 831 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Jenos: I've seen/heard a fair amount of people use the argument "science has been wrong in the past, it will be wrong in the future, therefore science today is not a valid source of information". Something about this argument seems wrong to me, I was wondering if anyone knows if there is a formal name for this argument and what the logic for and against it is?
This argument is known as the pessimistic induction. It's supposed to be a criticism of scientific realism, the view that science gives us accurate information about the unobservable features of reality.
Ah, thank you! Thats what I was looking for, now I can actually look at the history of the argument and see the real meat of it - the people who I heard say it aren't exactly philosophers of any sort so the true depths of the argument were never explored.
Also thanks to everyone else who was pointing out the fallacies one could use to argue against it. Whenever I heard that argument used I'd simply throw back modern medicine as a counterexample as to something from science they obviously shouldn't use if you can't follow scientific conclusions, but the formal explanations make it a lot easier for me to try and argue against it.
Posts: 76 | Registered: Aug 2009
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quote:Originally posted by Jenos: I've seen/heard a fair amount of people use the argument "science has been wrong in the past, it will be wrong in the future, therefore science today is not a valid source of information". Something about this argument seems wrong to me, I was wondering if anyone knows if there is a formal name for this argument and what the logic for and against it is?
This is a type of composition fallacy (the assertion that because some subset of a group have characteristic A, all members of that group will have characteristic A).
It's also a good example of cherry picking, i.e. selecting cases which support your bias while ignoring all the cases which contradict your point. "One could just as easily say, science has been right in the past, science will be right about things in the future, therefore science is certain to be right today."
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quote:Ah, thank you! Thats what I was looking for, now I can actually look at the history of the argument and see the real meat of it - the people who I heard say it aren't exactly philosophers of any sort so the true depths of the argument were never explored.
I can recommend some sources if you like.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Jenos: I've seen/heard a fair amount of people use the argument "science has been wrong in the past, it will be wrong in the future, therefore science today is not a valid source of information". Something about this argument seems wrong to me, I was wondering if anyone knows if there is a formal name for this argument and what the logic for and against it is?
This argument is known as the pessimistic induction. It's supposed to be a criticism of scientific realism, the view that science gives us accurate information about the unobservable features of reality.
Pessimistic Induction has been used frantically against political polls in recent years, especially as they have become surprisingly accurate and exposed means by which to determine electoral outcomes. So it's neat to see an extrapolation of the phenomenon in other places.
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Originally posted by Dr Strangelove: If it's done right. If not, it is incredibly obnoxious to read and grade. [/QUOTE] Yea i feel for you. Reading all those freshmen and sphomore papers.... Makes my skin crawl just thinking of their existence...
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My Freshmen year composition teacher didn't let us write essays about abortion because she was sick of grading the same two essays. The Pro-life kid in class was pissed because he really wanted to write a pro-life essay. I was pissed off because I wanted to write a "the abortion debate is meaningless" essay which I suspect would have been, if not original, at least not any more tedious to grade than whatever topic I ended up picking instead.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote:Ah, thank you! Thats what I was looking for, now I can actually look at the history of the argument and see the real meat of it - the people who I heard say it aren't exactly philosophers of any sort so the true depths of the argument were never explored.
I can recommend some sources if you like.
I'd appreciate that very much, I'm woefully uneducated in knowing where good philosophy writings can be found.
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posted
Peter Godfrey-Smith's book Theory and Reality is a good starting place. A classic paper on the subject is L. Laudan, "A Confutation of Convergent Realism."
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Just thought I'd bump because (potentially) half of our upcoming midterm is about the Laudan article.
Posts: 2705 | Registered: Sep 2006
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I mentioned this in the JonHecht's thread where we've been arguing epistemology, but my contention is that the problem of pessimistic induction goes away with a slight conceptual change about the purpose and progression of science (or any interaction). Instead of viewing scientific theories as "more right" or closer to the truth with each successive theory, we can view the progression of science as theories that are less in error than previous theories. We don't know what an ultimate theory of everything will look like, and we haven't in the past. It's also true that scientific theories are overturned regularly. It's also true that some of our most powerful current theories cannot in the end be correct (not completely), including general relativity and quantum theory. But we do know that over time each new theory accounted for some subset of interactions in ways that were in error under fewer conditions than the theories they replaced. It is precisely this that gives us warrant for accepting them.
It's also worth noting that it's misleading to think that because new theories replace older theories that the older theories were "wrong". That's an over-simplistic view. Newtonian mechanics is still relevant for a large subset of our interactions with the physical world, and is still very effective under those conditions. Relativity is just able to account for more than Newtonian mechanics could.
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"Science was wrong in the past. Science will be wrong in the future. Hence Science is not a good source of information."
on the other hand we can easily point out that....
"Science has been right in the past. Science will be right in the future. Hence science is a good source of information."
Science has produced a system where I can flick a switch and light comes on.
Amazing.
Other sources of information, while with various levels of validity, have not produced such a definitive proof.
The Bible, for all its truth and wonder, will not allow us to produce light when needed without the aid of a source of fire.
You can sit in front of a light bulb and no matter how free of sin you are, no matter how pious and pure, no matter how many times you've been born again, you can pray all you want, and that bulb will not light up with out some science connected to it.
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"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together" - Isaac Asimov.
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Current science is wrong. Superstition is wrong. But if you think that science is just as wrong as superstition, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
So in short, Jenos -- your counterargument should be that the use of science is LESS WRONG as a "source of information" than any other source of information out there.
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quote:Other sources of information, while with various levels of validity, have not produced such a definitive proof.
Actually, many sources of information have a similar degree of seemingly definitive proof. For instance, when I was very little my mom told me that if I flipped a certain switch, the light would go on. And so I tried it, and it worked! At first glance this would appear to be definitive proof that my mom was a very accurate source of information. But as time went on, I learned that she could make mistakes.
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quote:At first glance this would appear to be definitive proof that my mom was a very accurate source of information.
But, as you got older, you realized that first glances cannot, by definition, constitute definitive proofs of epistemologies. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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You are wronger than wrong to compare your mother with all of science as a source of information. You are also wronger than wrong to compare a very small child with a full grown adult as an interpreter of information. Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:For instance, when I was very little my mom told me that if I flipped a certain switch, the light would go on.
My mother told me that if I was well behaved that a powerful man with supernatural powers would reward that behavior. It was very convincing, but alas, armed with more powerful epistemologies and a more developed sense of reason, it has been demonstrated to my satisfaction that this man doesn't exist.
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quote:But, as you got older, you realized that first glances cannot, by definition, constitute definitive proofs of epistemologies.
Well, yes, this is more or less my point - a sense of awe that science told us how to make a lightbulb light up does not really constitute definitive proof of how trustworthy it is.
Many sources of information can do the same thing (if you don't like my mother as an example then wikipedia is another, or a textbook on lightbulbs, or the collective American education system, and so on), or other similarly awe-inspiring things, and plenty of them are probably not so trustworthy.
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The beauty of it is, trying different experiments to decide how effective your epistemology is = science. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Tres, I agree that the modern wonders created by people of science does not prove science is the best or the greatest, or the only source of information that we can use.
However, it does point out that it is a source that can and has been right in the past. It is not, as the original post hints, a useless waste.
Its track record is not perfect, but it is one of the few sources of information that seeks to correct itself.
Every other source of information has been wrong in the past, and will be wrong in the future, with the possible exception of divine inspiration, or divine writings, and even those have had errors in their interpretations.
And while scientific debate can get hot and heated, it has yet created a religious war where death and torture were used by folks using those writings as their infallible guide.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Tres, I agree that the modern wonders created by people of science does not prove science is the best or the greatest, or the only source of information that we can use.
However, it does point out that it is a source that can and has been right in the past. It is not, as the original post hints, a useless waste.
Agreed.
quote:And while scientific debate can get hot and heated, it has yet created a religious war where death and torture were used by folks using those writings as their infallible guide.
This doesn't really relate to its validity as a source of information though. Astrology, as far as I know, also hasn't started any wars.
(And vice versa, if the question is what source of information leads to more violence, I don't think religion has yet created a nuclear bomb, or chemical weapons, or tanks, etc. while folks using the writings of science did.)
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quote:And vice versa, if the question is what source of information leads to more violence, I don't think religion has yet created a nuclear bomb, or chemical weapons, or tanks, etc. while folks using the writings of science did.
Well, this is a bit of a dodge. Science has provided the means for more powerful sorts of violence, but that is IMO a rather distinctly different observation. (That science has provided the means for practically everything, whereas religious epistemologies are absolutely terrible at providing any useful mechanisms for understanding the world, means that science is generally responsible for anything on Earth that requires tool use.)
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