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Re: Social Science, Science, and Empirical Study by Mike Alexander 20 July 2002 14:35 UTC |
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[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.
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