The so-called "scientific method" is, I think, rather poorly understood. For example, let us consider one of the best-known laws of nature, often simply referred to as the Law of Gravity:
Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation: Every object in the universe attracts every other object toward it with a force proportional to the product of their masses, divided by the square of the distance between their centers of mass.
Now here is a series of questions for you, which I often ask audiences when I give lectures on the philosophy of science:
- Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?
- If so, how sure are you that it is true?
- Why do you believe it, with that degree of certainty?
The most common answers to these questions are "yes", "very sure", and "because it has been extensively experimentally verified." Those answers sound reasonable to any child of the Enlightenment -- but I submit, on the contrary, that this set of answers has no objective basis whatsoever. To begin with, let us ask, how many confirming experiments do you think would have been done, to qualify as "extensive experimental verification." I would ask that you, the reader, actually pick a number as a rough, round guess.
Whatever number N you picked, I now challenge you state the rule of inference that allows you to conclude, from N uniform observations, that a given effect is always about from a given alleged cause. If you dust off your stats book and thumb through it, you will find no such rule of inference rule there. What you will find are principles that allow you to conclude from a certain number N of observations that with confidence c, the proportion of positive cases is z, where c < 1 and z < 1. But there is no finite number of observations that would justify, with any nonzero confidence, that any law held universally, without exception (that is, z can never be 1 for any finite number of observations, no matter how small the desired confidence c is, unless c = 0). . And isn't that exactly what laws of nature are supposed to do? For Pete's sake it is called the law of universal gravitation, and it begins with the universal quantifier every (both of which may have seemed pretty innocuous up until now).
Let me repeat myself for clarity: I am not saying that there is no statistical law that would allow you to conclude the law with absolute certainty; absolute certainty is not even on the table. I am saying that there is no statistical law that would justify belief in the law of universal gravitation with even one tenth of one percent of one percent confidence, based on any finite number of observations. My point is that the laws of the physical sciences -- laws like the Ideal gas laws, the laws of gravity, Ohm's law, etc. -- are not based on statistical reasoning and could never be based on statistical reasoning, if they are supposed, with any confidence whatsoever, to hold universally.
So, if the scientific method is not based on the laws of statistics, what is it based on? In fact it is based on the
Principle of Abductive Inference: Given general principle as a hypothesis, if we have tried to experimentally disprove the hypothesis, with no disconfirming experiments, then we may infer that it is likely to be true -- with confidence justified by the ingenuity and diligence that has been exercised in attempting to disprove it.
In layman's terms, if we have tried to find and/or manufacture counterexamples to a hypothesis, extensively and cleverly, and found none, then we should be surprised if we then find a counterexample by accident. That is the essence of the scientific method that underpins most of the corpus of the physical sciences. Note that it is not statistical in nature. The methods of statistics are very different, in that they rest on theorems that justify confidence in those methods, under assumptions corresponding to the premises of the theorems. There is no such theorem for the Principle of Abductive Inference -- nor will there ever be, because, in fact, for reasons I will explain below, it is a miracle that the scientific method works (if it works).
Why would it take a miracle for the scientific method to work? Remember that the confidence with which we are entitled to infer a natural law is a function of the capability and diligence we have exercised in trying to disprove it. Thus, to conclude a general law with some moderate degree of confidence (say, 75%), we must have done due diligence in trying to disprove it, to the degree necessary to justify that level confidence, given the complexity of the system under study. But what in the world entitles us to think that the source code of the universe is so neat and simple, and its human denizens so smart, that we are capable of the diligence that is due?
For an illuminating analogy, consider that software testing is a process of experimentation that is closely analogous to scientific experimentation. In the case of software testing, the hypothesis being tested -- the general law that we are attempting to disconfirm -- is that a given program satisfies its specification for all inputs. Now do you suppose that we could effectively debug Microsoft Office, or gain justified confidence in its correctness with respect to on item of its specification, by letting a weasel crawl around on the keyboard while the software is running, and observing the results? Of course not: the program is far too complex, its behavior too nuanced, and the weasel too dimwitted (no offense to weasels) for that. Now, do you expect the source code of the Universe itself to be simpler and friendlier to the human brain than the source code of MS Office is to the brain of a weasel? That would be a miraculous thing to expect, for the following reason: a priori, if the complexity of that source code could be arbitrarily large. It could be a googleplex lines of spaghetti code -- and that would be a infinitesimally small level of complexity, given the realm of possible complexities -- namely the right-hand side of the number line.
In this light, if the human brain is better equipped to discover the laws of nature than a weasel is to confidently establish the correctness an item in the spec of MS Office, it would be a stunning coincidence. That is looking at it from the side of the a priori expected complexity of the problem, compared to any finite being's ability to solve it. But there is another side to look from, which is the side of the distribution of intelligence levels of the potential problem-solvers themselves. Obviously, a paramecium, for example, is not equipped to discover the laws of physics. Nor is an octopus, nor a turtle, nor a panther, nor an orangutan. In the spectrum of natural intelligences we know of, it just so happens that there is exactly one kind of creature that just barely has the capacity to uncover the laws of nature. It is as if some cosmic Dungeon Master was optimizing the problem from both sides, by making the source code of the universe just simple enough that the smartest beings within it (that we know of) were just barely capable of solving the puzzle. That is just the goldilocks situation that good DM's try to achieve with their puzzles: not so hard they can't be solved, not so easy that the players can't take pride in solving them
There is a salient counterargument I must respond to. It might be argued that, while it is a priori unlikely that any finite being would be capable of profitably employing the scientific method in a randomly constructed universe, it might be claimed that in hindsight of the scientific method having worked for us in this particular universe, we are now entitled, a posteriori, to embrace the Principle of Abductive Inference as a reliable method. My response is that we have no objective reason whatsoever to believe the scientific method has worked in hindsight -- at least not for the purpose of discovering universal laws of nature! I will grant that we have had pretty good luck with science-based engineering in the tiny little spec of the universe observable to us. I will even grant that this justifies the continued use of engineering for practical purposes with relative confidence -- under the laws of statistics, so long as, say, one anomaly per hundred thousand hours of use is an acceptable risk. But this gives no objective reason whatsoever (again under the laws of statistics) to believe that any of the alleged "laws of nature" we talk about is actually a universal law. That is to say, if you believe, with even one percent confidence, that we ever have, or ever will, uncover a single line of the source code of the universe -- a single law of Nature that holds without exception -- then you, my friend, believe in miracles. There is no reason to expect the scientific method to work, and good reason to expect it not to work -- unless human mind was designed to be able to uncover and understand the laws of nature, by Someone who knew exactly how complex they are.
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I agree. And I am happy about this. I don't think it makes sense to apply the rules of one domain to the evaluation of another. We don't evaluate basketball players with the rules of baseball.
Sure does. And I get worried when those authorities interject into other domains. For instance, Pope Francis is a communist and, therefore, I don't really like his political takes.
Some of them can, some of the chose not to. Much of the time when a big enough change occurs, some subgroup splinters off.
Building consensus in matters pertaining to the Lord of The Universe? That's how you get a crusade going. Forget consensus, we're looking for Truth (and not in your fiddle-faddle science and law concepts of truth. Space travel and infinite energy? Boring).
Again, I see this as essentially saying "Basketball players keep violating the rules of baseball! How dare they!"
I'm too dumb and unread to know what you're saying here. Please clarify.
So, if it ain't Bayesian it ain't right? You say I'm framing things wrongly ... but I think you just propose a different frame than mine and then make a value judgement about the "rightness" of my framing. Could you maybe try to make an argument for why your framing is a better overall approach to the subject at hand?
Editor's pen here: "I don't need to disprove to dismiss." This is correct. Dismissing is a personal choice and I respect it.
"Worked" .... in which domains? What's the scientific take on the concept of justice?
Say it with me .... Physical ...
... Materialism.
I understand the attraction of materialist philosophy. If that's your firmly held position, we're just not going to agree and that's fine. I would love your thoughts on the idea of personal responsibility, however.
So you don't believe I can communicate with a thing you don't believe in. I am shocked, shocked!
So you debugged the program from within it, eh? Pure rationalism triumphs.
I can't buy it. One thing even the most religious and most ... good at logic people ... agree on is that humans are emotional beings prone to all sorts of self serving cognitive failures. I'll admit that my belief in the Magical Sky Man is cooky but it somehow seems a better premise than 'I solved my own brain with my brain"
Comparing one sport to another is still within the domain of sports. The rules are different in any particular case, but it’s not a fundamentally different category where say the laws of physics or other fundamental facts about reality change.
Science deals with reality as we can understand it. Religion seems to not do that so much. The fact that religions don’t tend to come to consensus on much of anything over time is pretty strong evidence there is no underlying system of discovering truth.
You’re leaning hard into nonoverlapping magisteria. It’s not very trad but it is common.
If you read an article on “god of the gaps” you should be able to see your point about “existing methods” is doing the same. Applied backwards, it makes religious believers seem naive. So too using it now.
You’re bringing up Bayes when there’s no need to. It’s elementary logic that you shouldn’t look to “believe what can’t be disproven” vs. “believe what there is evidence for.” The possibility space of the former is infinite; the latter is constrained by reality if you have good standards of evidence. “What must I believe” vs. “What can I get away with believing.”
Not sure how familiar you are with various forms of trad religious legal systems, but I’ll take secular legal systems informed by modern concepts of science and reason. Secular philosophy is rich on the questions of justice and personal responsibility, and scientific principles and findings influence most of us who care to think about such things.
Methodological naturalism is true because it works. Anyone can use it, even the religious. Anyone can run and observe experiments that show the mind-brain connection, and the lack of evidence for any concept of a soul.
I think you’re failing to understand the model here. I don’t need to believe in your god or anyone’s beforehand for you to demonstrate solid evidence something strange is happening via prayer. If your god stretches forth its hand to affect the material world, as so many claim it does, then where is the evidence? Trying to philosophize about the limitations of materialism are irrelevant unless your god never comes into that domain.
You also have the causation backwards: I disbelieve in god because people claim so much about eg prayer but can show so little evidence to back those claims. But even if I had started from a null position, the burden is on the claim being made. Why is the omnipotent creator of the universe such a shy fellow and why do his believers talk him up so much with so little hard evidence brought to bear?
Nowhere did I claim I solved my own brain with my brain. I used tools to disprove certain ideologies to them disprove the one I had been raised with. The facts were relatively easy; the emotions and conditioning were far more challenging.
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