Re: Social Science, Science, and Empirical Study

[Luke:] This notion places far too much credit and emphasis on a person’s personal experience and the unaided power of his/her own senses (& ‘scientific’ observations)  What’s to say that this or that persons observations, senses, and experience is any more of a valid proof than anybody else’s?  Case in point, why should my seeing an elephant with my own two eyes make elephants any more real now that I’ve seen it and experienced it?  Why should this be any more valid (and anymore valid for me) than being told about by another person and/or reading about another person’s observations of elephants.  This may be more an issue of reasoning and philosophy, but it’s this funny sort of pragmatist, utilitarian philosophy that many scientists have bought into hook, line, and sinker?  Why should this idea of personal pragmatic philosophy of finding out for oneself  be any more valid scientifically than the observations and words of others on a given subject?  Why at times does the power of this notion seem to trump even the empirical work of others’ research on a topic when these others have the added validation of verifying their personal observations with instrumental readings and, to whatever extent, the power of repeatability and predictions?  Why should personal verification of a fact be any more of a validation for the reality of a given phenomenon than another person’s work?  It seems to me that it shouldn’t.  But what do you think? ...

 

[Mike:] Have you seen the film a beutiful mind?  Here we have a guy, John Nash, who has this imaginary roommate whom only he can see and talk to to.  Were is observations valid?  No, and the reason why was that nobody else could see the roommate.  One's own observations are real and compelling to that individual, just as Nash's roommate was real and compelling to Nash.  But Nash's observations of a roomate are not going to be real and compelling to us unless other people can see him and interact with him too.  Now one does not have to verify everything for oneself.  It is usually sufficient for there to be verification by some trusted others  This was the whole thrust of Thomas Kuhn's monumental work.  Science does not follow some "scientific method" that if applied in isolation by a lone genius will discover the secrets of the universe.  Science is a social activity.  If you don't interact with your peers, go to meetings, present your work, publish, interact via the internet like we are doing now, what you end up doing isn't science, but rather pseudo or "quack" science like what that Wolfram guy spent decades of his life doing. 

 

[Luke:] Problem #2 – regarding such a model – is an assumption that instrumental readings somehow validate one’s sense perceptions and scientific observations; and certainly to a degree they can.  (Furthermore by repeatability and probability-predictions one’s assessments can be further validated via the comparison of results)  However, here’s the problem with such a notion.  If one’s own observations are incorrect (and one’s sense perception have been put off-kilter by a set of unwarranted premises); how then can those same sense perceptions themselves be trusted for correctly taking readings of data gathered through instrumentation?  Let me put it this way; If Postmodern Theory is right and our cultural and personal systems of meaning shape the way we “”see”” the world – and thus take readings and interpret info. from our instruments – then how can any of us be assured that our scientific observations are correct, [even after we’ve gotten comparative results from others’ empirical research, we’ve replicated the results ourselves, and been able to some extent make various kinds of probabilistic or more determinable predictions]?  What really is it in the power of our senses and {active} perceptions to be able to do (supposing that our mental processing shapes the way we perceive the [so-called] real world)?  If we can’t ‘see’ the way things really are, what can we by our sense perceptions do in order to get an accurate assessment of our environment?  What do you think?  [And, perhaps Francesco Ranci could chime in here on the answer to this question also.]

 

[Mike:]  I think the problem here is the idea that there is a "real way things are" that we imperfectly perceive.  What we call reality is itself a mental construct that we use to organize our perceptions.  Reality is a useful construct because we can agree on so many things being real, and that is why we endow it with special status.  Taking the Nash example, we would say that Nash's roommate isn't real.  Why?  Because the vast majority of us disagree with Nash's observation of a roomate.  The key is still utility.  We employ the idea of reality because it works.  The idea that there is a "reality" external to our own collective existence is meaningless.  Why go there? (Note by collective I mean the entire human race.  If all humans vanished from the face of the earth, does it matter whether or not the earth continues on?)

 

[Luke:]  Problem #3 – determination and goals in one’s science.  I will grant that empirical demonstration is important.  Although, I would like to know how such demonstration works in more of an indeterminate natural world, as such would be the case with our cosmos?  Can there be any more to it than just intellectually ‘convincing’ another person (i.e., rhetorical persuasion) that an idea works, (especially since our concrete practical empirically-scientific observations and senses are so much tied in with our own mental and cultural systems of meaning)?  If it is not , then wouldn’t one’s science be acting in no more than a superficial manner regarding empirical investigations and one’s own concrete, practical demonstrations of scientific principles?  What do you think?

 

[Mike:]  The current issue of Scientific American has an article on an alternative  to Dark Matter.  It is an excellent example of how new ideas evolve.  The author developed an alternative to Newton's law of gravity that explains properties of galaxies without having to assume the presence of a great deal of invisible "dark matter" needed to explain galaxies with Newton's law.  The theory explains new observations that had not been made at the time it was formulated (i.e. it made successful predictions).  It is, as currently formulated, inconsistent with relativity, and when applied to problems for which relativity is useful (like gravitational lensing) if doesn't work so well.  The author makes use of comments like "time will tell", showing the social, uncertain nature of science as an interactive, iterative project  involving  many individuals and evolving over many years.

 

[Luke:]   But Science is still about the episteme of trying to understand the nature, processes, and phenomena of the universe primarily.  Only secondarily is it about how we use it   They (science and technology) are different due to the fact that … just because all scientists may use praxis and techne in their understanding of the universe [and this means that all scientists can be engineers of a sort, at least to the degree in which their doing or making something allows them to understand the principles of nature] … not all engineers are (or even can be) scientists (even with all their lifelong projects of praxis and techne lumped together).  Would a small-town car mechanic from the 1950’s be a scientist?  Would a blacksmith from PreModern times be a scientist? 

 

[Mike:]  They could be scientists if they wanted to be.  Most people are simply not interested in "trying to understand the nature, processes, and phenomena of the universe".  Those who are interested, and are willing to master the necessary tools (praxis), and interact with other like-minded individuals, become scientists.  (This last thing is important, practical men with a scientific bent who do not interact with other scientists often become cranks). 

 

As an example of a practical man who was also a scientist, consider Sadi Carnot, a French engineer in the early 19th century.  Like other engineers of his time, Carnot was interested in increasing steam engine efficiency.  Joule had shown in the 18th century that heat and work are interchangable.  A fixed amount of work (such as that obtained by an object falling a specific distance) when completely disipated by friction, produced a proportional amount of heat, as measured, for example, by a temperature change in a known quantity of water.  A steam engine is a device that converts heat into work.  Although it was easy to convert work completely into heat, the reverse was much more difficult.  Early steam engines converted only a small fraction (say 5 or 10%) of the heat prdouced by burning fuel into work.  Engineers would like to do better.  How much better was possible?  Can 100% of the heat produced from the fuel be converted to work?   

 

If some law of nature prevented one from doing better than some limiting efficiency, an engineer trying to do this would be wasting his time.  So it was in his interest for the engineer to discover this law of nature (if it existed) that imposed such a limitation.  Carnot approached this problem by developing a theoretical "idealized" heat engine that employed frictionless components and an ideal gas as a working fluid.  By working through the logical consequences of such a device, Carnot developed the fundamental concepts of "energy" and "entropy" that together produce a fundamental limit on the efficiency of the ideal heat engine (a real-world engine would necessarily be worse).  These concepts provided the foundation of the science of thermodynamics.  So was Carnot a scientist?  Yes he was.

 

There are lots of examples of science being created as a side effect of trying to solve some practical problem.  One of the greatest scientists of all time, the French chemist Louis Pasteur, believed that science should serve society and devoted his life to solving practical problems.  Yet by doing so, he made major discoveries in basic science, founding the fundamental fields of stereochemistry, microbial physiology, and immunology.