Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Response to anonymous

The response to the latest comment on the Intelligent Design thread got long enough that I decided to elevate it to a new post.

All I'm trying to do is point out that there is philosophy involved in teaching science since most science classes are taught with the unspoken assumption that the senses are the only valid way that humans can gain knowledge.

No, most science classes are taught with the unspoken assumption that the senses are the only valid way to gain scientific knowledge, which is true by definition. I agree that this definition is often unspoken, and that is indeed unfortunate. But there's no more philosophy involved here than there is in saying that words are the only way to write literature.

(This is what I'm referring to as strict empiricism a la Locke.) It is a philosophical position, yet it's taught in schools without any mention of philosophy.

It's been a long time since I was in school so maybe things have changed, but in my day such topics were only ever touched on in history class, and then only in advanced placement classes, and then only to mention in passing that there was this philosopher named Locke who had these ideas that turned out to be very influential and so forth. Never once did anyone even hint at the idea that Lockian empiricism was "true" in any metaphysical sense.

I think you may have taken the term empicicism differently, so I want to make sure we're communicating right.The problem is that knowledge arrived to by other sources than the senses (usually knowledge of morality) is usually demoted to 'opinion' since it is not obtained by science.

Why "demoted"? And why is this a problem? The fact of the matter is that people by and large agree on what their senses tell them (so much so that we have few qualms about labelling the occasional person who sees and hears things differently as "mentally ill"), and by and large do not agree on much of anything else. This is a distinction worth making.

I'm not accusing you of committing this fallacy; I'm merely trying to point out a problem. Perhaps you haven't run in to this problem as often as I have, but it really bothers me whenever I see it since it's metaphysically sloppy.

Why? It's you saying opinion is inferior to empiricism, not me. I have actually argued the exact opposite.

So in summary: empiricism is very important since without it science is nigh impossible. (Hello aristotelian abiogenesis!) However, when it claims to be the only valid form of knowledge, (what I am calling strict empiricism) it is stepping into the realm of philosophy.

That's a straw man. No one (except perhaps Richard Dawkins -- we scientists have our fanatics too) argues that empiricism is the only valid form of knowledge.

Tell me what you think: what constitutes a valid source of knowledge? How do you know it's wrong to kill innocent people?

So first of all, as a scientist (in the spiritual/religious sense, not the professional sense) I do not know anything to an absolute certainty. That said, I know it's wrong to kill innocent people (and innocent living things in general) because I feel an instinctive revulsion at the thought, and many of my fellow humans also seem to feel the same instinctive revulsion. (There are a few exceptions. The instinct is strong enough that we generally call people who lack this instinct "psychopaths" -- unless they happen to be President of the United States.)

I saw somewhere on your site what could have been a Darwinian explanation of the Golden Rule--that is quite interesting to me since it has the potential to solve what has historically been the Achilles Heel of strict empiricism. Could you also elaborate on that?"

That will have to wait for another post, but the work was done by Robert Axelrod in 1985. You can read about it here and here. The first book was accessibly summarized by Douglas Hofstadter in the final section of this book.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ron said...


Anonymous said...
Hi :)

I absolutely love your blog! I'll definitely bookmark it, keep up the great work.


Thanks. But please stop using my blog to post spam.

Phil said...

Thanks for your answer.

I'll respond to this post later when I have more time, but I'd just like to explain something from the "logic envy" post since the comments seem to be closed on that.

Why is it so important that the religious position be seen as compatible with logic?

I can't answer for all religious folk, but for me (and historically all orthodox Christians) it comes down to certain properties of the Almighty. The gospel of John opens by saying "In the beginning was the logos[...]", referring to the Christ. Logos is a Greek term used by the ancients to indicate logic, reason, or an ordering principle to the universe.

If all that exists comes from a being who is defined by logos, then it is absolutely necessary that the universe make sense.

Granted, I don't think this is the position of your average American churchgoer, but the Christian church has thought pretty hard about these questions for thousands of years.

The Wikipedia article on logos has more.

Phil said...

Heh--I see you turned off anonymous comments. I thought it would be obvious enough who I was since I sent you an email and posted on your blog within the same hour, but now you can be sure.

Ron said...

I see you turned off anonymous comments. I thought it would be obvious enough who I was

I didn't turn off anonymous comments because of you. I turned them off because I was spending too much time deleting anonymous comment spam. I would have preferred to leave anonymous commenting on.

The gospel of John opens by saying "In the beginning was the logos[...]",

Well, that's interesting. I never knew that "Word" was a translation of "logos". In that case I'd recommend taking a look at what Karen Armstrong has to say about logos and its counterpart, mythos in her excellent book:

We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved [interesting choice of words there IMO] two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential. They were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence.

The necessity and complementarity of mythos and logos is a bit of ancient wisdom that I think would serve mankind well in this day and age.

the Christian church has thought pretty hard about these questions for thousands of years.

I wonder if Christian doctrine really does include a rejection of mythos in favor of logos, and if so, when, how, and why that happened.

Phil said...

First off, I think I should apologize for jumping to conclusions. I ended up arguing against something (Locke's strict empiricism) that you didn't even believe in the first place, which was rather fruitless and made me look foolish. I made the assumption that since you said The central tenet of science in which I choose to place my faith is that experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth. that you must believe that science is the only valid way to gain knowledge, but it seems that the phrase "ultimate arbiter of truth" does not mean quite what I thought it meant.

I wonder if Christian doctrine really does include a rejection of mythos in favor of logos, and if so, when, how, and why that happened.

I wonder what would make you say that. If you look over literature of Christendom, it's pretty clear that mythos is a well-accepted way of communicating truth. (I would take issue with equating mythos with "speaking"--I think it's a gross oversimplification.) Mythos is the use of story to explain something. If you were to posit that it was "rejected by Christian tradition", you might have a hard time explaining Dante's Comedy, the Faiere Queene, and the works of Tolkien.

But I don't think that was your point.

Anyway, I'll continue the discussion on my blog.

Secretwallaby said...

A couple weeks ago you wrote a long post in response to JM Reynolds about the definition of science. The jist of the discussion seemed to be an argument over the definition of science. I have a few comments/questions pertaining to that...

The definition of science is relying on experiments to determine truth.

Relying on experiments has seemed to be an effective way of coming determining how the world works. It has lead to a great many technological advancements. It has helped us predict future events. It has helped us delve deeper into the workings of the physical world. However, this process of experimentation seems to be a bit sticky...

How do you know when you have done an experiment that you have come to truth? When I do experiment X, I get outcome Y, for example. Now, the truth that I know is that I get Y everytime X happens, nothing more, nothing less. However, no good scientist will stop there. A good scientist will then take that outcome and make a theory based on this hypotheses. He will make a good many assumptions, and he will take other outcomes, and then he will make some claim about how the world works. However, as we have seen over and over, sometimes these assumptions are very poor models. So, at best, this truth seems to be a progressive understanding of how physical things interact with each other.

Let us take a rather silly example... A person takes a rock and drops it: it falls to the ground. Now, the Aristotelian will say, "See we have come through experimentation to see that like attracts like! There is earth in both the ground and in the rock! We have come to understand this important truth." While the Newtonian would say, "See we have discovered the truth that the mass of the earth is attracted to the mass of the rock!" Now both of these scientists have discovered "truth" through experiment. Each of these scientists came to their conclusions of truth about the world, not so much based on their experiments, but based on their philisophical world view. Aristotelian philosophy is deeply wrapped up in like-attracted-to-like. Newtonian physics came from a view of an ordered universe started up by an ordered God.

So, it seems then, that one can't go about doing science--discovering truth through experiments-- without a philosophical frame work. What happens then if that framework is wrong? How does one know if that framework is wrong or right? Should that be an important investigation for all scientists? Should only one philosophical framework be accepted by science? That would seem to be utterly opposed to what science is trying to do. If by using a different philosophical framework one could come to better truth (understanding of how the world works) through experimentation, then one should use that framework!

Science today normally operates with a framework of methodological naturalism. However, there are other frameworks, and a framework that accepts an Intelligent Agent setting up and interacting with the physical world is a reasonable philosophical framework. It is not contrary to science -- relying on experiments to discover truth -- it merely suggests that perhaps a different framework should be explored and used as a foundation. If we were all still Aristotelians we would still have a poor understanding of the physical universe. Perhaps if we stay as Methodological Naturalists and refuse to work outside of that box, we will be cutting off a better understanding of truth through experiment...

Ron said...

How do you know when you have done an experiment that you have come to truth?

Because that's how I've chosen to define truth. :-)

But I'm guessing (by the example you give) that you really meant to ask a different question: how do you extrapolate from specific experimental results to general truths? That's actually a very good question. The best answer I know is the one David Deutch puts forth in chapter 7 of his book, The Fabric of Reality. (Note that I don't agree with the rest of the book.) I'll add it to my agenda to write up a blog entry about it.

Let us take a rather silly example... A person takes a rock and drops it: it falls to the ground. Now, the Aristotelian will say, "See we have come through experimentation to see that like attracts like! There is earth in both the ground and in the rock! We have come to understand this important truth." While the Newtonian would say, "See we have discovered the truth that the mass of the earth is attracted to the mass of the rock!"

That is not a silly example at all. That is actually a very good example, but it has nothing to do with philosophical frameworks. That is a very straightforward example of two competing theories seeking to explain the same experimental results. It is very easy to disprove the Aristotelian theory with a some additional experiments. For example, the Aristotelian theory (as you've described it) would predict that a water balloon should fall more slowly than a rock. I encourage you to actually do this experiment for yourself.

a framework that accepts an Intelligent Agent setting up and interacting with the physical world is a reasonable philosophical framework. It is not contrary to science

Certainly it is a reasonable philosophical framework, but it is contrary to science because as a framework it puts the Intelligent Agent (interesting that you chose to capitalize it BTW) outside the bounds of scientific inquiry. It is now part of the framework, part of the axioms, and therefore by assumption beyond dispute. You are now by definition not doing science because the central tenet of science is that experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth. But no experiment can ever show that the Intelligent Agent does not exist because that is no longer allowed by your philosophical framework.

You can't have it both ways. Either you can assume God (let's not mince words here -- everyone knows that who the Intelligent Agent really is) exists (i.e. you can have faith), or you can try to prove it experiementally. You cannot do both.

Eric said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ron said...

metatheories that imply no empirical difference to their nullity

Alan Sokal would be proud.

the Imperceptible Gigantic Robotic Hamster

Did you mean the flying spaghetti monster?

Ron said...

Hm, I didn't know that authors could delete their own posts. I may have to switch blog providers. I don't want the record to be that malleable.

Since my response to Eric is rather confusing without the context, I'm taking the liberty of reposting it:


You can accept ID as a scientific theory instead of an axiom, if it claims to provide a tangible difference to non-ID. Where you arrive at pure conjecture/opinion is when you have metatheories that imply no empirical difference to their nullity. I.e. if I believed that the universe was run by the Imperceptible Gigantic Robotic Hamster. My belief might make an empirical difference, but such a concept itself does not.

Now, if ID is correct, a major empirical difference that would demonstrate it's truth is if you can demonstrate material things best fit some kind of non material (metaphysical) purpose, i.e. beauty, justice, etc (concepts that assume there is more than just the physical universe). I say this because one can always pull the emergent card for seeming material purposes. However, if everything seems pretty metaphysically purposeless, then I'd say you're safe in assuming some kind of non-ID worldview.

(Yes, there is a reason why you're suddenly getting so many pro-IDish posts, it's a conspiracy>:)

Eric said...

I deleted the comment because I decided I actually didn't want to join the discussion. I didn't notice you'd replied.

Anyways, I don't get what you mean by your Sokal reference, but if you're saying that the quote was jargony gibberish I can rephrase it:

ID is only opinion if it doesn't necessarily imply anything testable.