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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Notes -
I think a great deal of the credit for Western civilization's successes can be attributed to the completely irrational religious belief that the will of the Universe's creator can be best know by observing its creation, actually.
But again, we're retreating in practicality when there is little reason to believe either in a creator or in the coherence of the universe on their own merits.
But that’s shifting from epistemology to utility.
Religions and religious beliefs certainly have had and do have utility. They certainly have a lot of “reproductive fitness” mimetically and biologically, though there is the significant decline in modernized societies.
How much credit say Christianity gets for contributing (vs. inhibiting) the secular bits of Western progress in science and such is contested. (And of course there are the debates over Islam’s golden era and Eastern religions’ contributions vs. Christianity being uniquely likely to foster say individualism.)
I don’t think ~empiricism required a “completely irrational belief” coming from a religion, but it’s basically impossible to separate out progress in science from religious influence, from the Greeks down through Newton, because everything was so entangled until “natural philosophy” split off sufficiently and science became secular.
We can’t know the counter factual of the past, but even if I’m willing to totally grant that eg Christianity played a critical role in fostering the Enlightenment, Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and other things that led to Western Culture, that doesn’t mean that Christianity in particular or religion in general is useful today on net (or factually accurate).
Well you appealed to getting us on the Moon. Is that not walking us into utilitarian epistemology?
I won't relitigate the influence of Christianity on the Enlightenment since that veers off topic, but surely if empiricism didn't require irrational axioms, you'd be able to produce a foundation without having indeed to resort to appeals to utility that religions can muster too.
IMO it is pretty adjacent to the topic of the original post.
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Yes, the knowledge was useful in that it allowed us to put man on the moon. Many such cases.
But the focus here is not on it being useful; the focus is on it being proved sufficiently accurate to be useful in that endeavor, as an epistemology dedicated to understanding reality.
Proof -> Pudding
We do want the utility pudding, but it’s the evidence of the epistemic success I’m trying to highlight.
In the case of religion, if someone presented evidence of the gift of prophecy then the focus would be on the accuracy of the predictions, not the utility of them. Or faith healing consistently working.
It’s the utility showing the epistemic success of correlating to reality, not the utility per se that would be evidence of divine power (or at least something inexplicable). Even if we don’t understand the causal mechanism, the effects could be systemically demonstrated such that we the faithless would have to worry about our current stance.
In the case of religion, in my experience the practical utility of religion is typically kept separate from factual accuracy of the theology. You’ll hear a lot about meaningfulness and belonging and community as secular evidence religion is good. And these things are often true (I’ve experienced them myself), it’s just not direct evidence of the religious doctrine being factually accurate about the nature of reality.
Here’s a related epistemic irony I still can’t get over: Learning about evolution was a big piece of evidence against the religion of my youth. There were so many battles between the scientifically literate New Atheists and the ignorant Young Creationists, while the religious Intelligent Design types looked down on both as they tried to pretend they had squared the circle and reconciled their theology with a natural origin of mankind.
But now I often find myself siding with trad religious conservatives regarding e.g. average biological and behavioral differences between men and women, because so many secular science aficionados deny evolution above the neck when it’s inconvenient for their political ideology.
The flawed epistemology used by many believers can beat the flawed Blank Slate one in many cases.
I guess the historical precedent of patriotic Christian capitalists being far preferable to godless communists should have kept me from being too surprised this kind of thing can happen.
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