Cross-disciplinary cross-talk.

So, who’s heard about the science wars?

While the wiki article makes it sound as though the conflict arose and faded during the 1990s, the same clashes continue in a more subdued manner. I think the decline has been partly due to the usual short public attention span; the attempts of scientists and non-science academics to bridge gaps and create demarcations; and the increased tendency for reactionaries to appropriate the language of critical theory to attack ideas cherished by both sides of the science wars.

It’s the second of these that I’d like to address, the attempts or failures of scientists and academics (shorthand for non-scientist academics) to understand what each other is saying, to understand how each side conducts their research, to understand the language used by each side, and to demarcate areas as scientific or non-scientific. Please bear in mind that anything I’m writing comes from the point-of-view of a scientist, who while they’ve been exposed to enough academic language and concepts to have some idea of what’s going on, is still a scientist.

Part of the problem, I feel, is political. Particularly in the USA, but also generally, the ability of science to answer questions and better society is frequently ignored or even called into question. This can be trivially seen in the modern rise of the anti-vaccination movement, and widespread doubt about medical science in general; the denial of the theory of evolution, often in favour of creationist ideas; and the denial of environmental problems, from population growth, to pollution in general, to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

Thus, scientists are often reflexively dismissive or wary of challenges to existing theories from outside of science. Science is very hard. Any modern field requires a lot of background knowledge to even understand what is being discussed, let alone to conduct one’s own experiments or research. It is not like 18th or 19th century science anymore – in the past five or six decades, scientific knowledge has expanded so rapidly that it is not really possible to conduct it as an interested hobbyist or outsider. And the challenges often betray a certain ignorance on the part of the challenger. I attended a conference on science and art, and one of the presenters was speaking about a project her group was planning, using EEG, blood pressure and heart-rate monitors, and other bio-recording devices. These would be turned on or off to create recordings during her students’ daily life, to record their physiology along with their memory.

The entire presentation put everyone’s backs up. For one, she talked about how EEG can ‘supposedly’ measure ‘brain waves’ which apparently ‘change’ during the day, and made light of the ability of anyone to ‘know’ this, or to know that what EEG measures reflects anything of what’s actually going on. But – EEG has been used for decades. Unlike, say, fMRI both EEG and what it’s measuring are quite well understood. The fact that EEG measures frequency and temporal changes in regional neuronal firing is trivial. But her words made it clear that she had never read any literature on the tools she was planning on using, and had no idea of how they were used in science. But the whole idea of the project was intended to critique how science uses its measuring tools. Secondly, many people in the audience looked at her project less as art, and more as an experiment. If one is critiquing the tools and measurements of science, one conducts experiments. But there was no protocol, no controls, no measures set for this project. And we didn’t get it.

It took a sympathetic artist in the crowd, a younger one who worked closely with scientists, to explain to us that this project was not an experiment, was not setting out to disprove anything. That the project simply looked at how we represent data, in the way that artists must make decisions when colouring telescopic photographs of nebulae or diagrams of the brain. Art and science are intertwined in how scientists represent their data, and this project was examining that.

And that’s pretty cool.

But both sides, mostly, didn’t understand anything about what the other was saying. The scientists were exasperated over the ignorance of the artists, and the artists were annoyed at the scientists’ obstinate refusal to understand that their project wasn’t addressing any truth claims.

Part of it, as you can see, is the language used. ‘Critique’ means something very different in science than it does in art. It’s synonymous with criticism, with attacking the way someone has conducted their research or reached their conclusions. In art, it is more of a discussion, a way of examining the artist’s and society’s perspective on a thing.

And part of it is just what people are studying, and what things are amenable to certain kinds of investigation. As you might have heard, the American Anthropological Association removed the word “science” from their long-range plans. This has caused something of a kerfuffle.

The above post, and particularly the discussion, are perfectly representative of what I’m talking about. One side calls the other side “positivists”, as though positivism has had much place in science since the 1960s. However, that all defines how you define positivism. As you can see by skimming down through that wiki article, while most scientists today are falsificationists, following a general view of things as set forth by Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos. But positivism, meaning supporting the scientific method as the best way of answering questions, is still present.

Anyways. One of the commentators I thought was particularly good was someone going by “Sam”. One of their comments included this paragraph:

“As an anthropologist I would probably not be interested in testing a proposition of the order ‘does coffee increase concentration?’. Rather, for me the question would be ‘what do people believe about coffee?, ‘what are the consequences of this belief?’ ‘how does this belief manifest? Do people believe this all the time? . So yes, we are concerned abut validity and truth in our accounts of the world but usually not in assessing the truthfulness of the claims of the people we investigate (not because the latter is not important but because we have other, still compelling, concerns).”

See, that sort of thing helps. A lot of the time it’s hard for people in science to understand how someone might not see the scientific method as a necessary part of any research. But in the case above, one’s procedure of investigation need not be scientific in the sense of hypothesis-testing through experimentation. History and anthropology both resemble traditional natural sciences in that they proceed largely through observation and inquiry, and cannot be directly tested.

Scientists get a bit twitchy because, for instance, modern methods of anthropology often seem to take a step further. Rather than just acknowledging a demarcation, some people do seem to insist that “science” is simply one of many epistemologies, culturally Western, and no more valid for making claims about the world than any other “ways of knowing.” Obviously I disagree – but it’s hard for scientists to wrap their heads around the difference between “valid” and “correct”. Something which is valid is true from one person’s perspective, regardless of the purely historical facts of the matter. As to something being “correct”, well, that’s tricky.

I’m getting a bit far afield here, so I’ll finish up.

What I think we need, and by “we” I mean intellectuals, academics, and others involved in knowledge-based careers, is people who can speak across disciplines. Artists who are into science, scientists with friends involved in critical theory, anthropolgists who work with doctors, and pyschologists who study philosophy on the side.

Well, maybe not that last. That often seems to lead to trouble. But you get the idea.

Non-manifest truth, induction, and theories

Last week I wrote about the idea that truth is manifest, obvious to those who look without prejudice.  Several things come of this, including the conspiracy theory of ignorance, and the idea that others who disagree with what you claim to be true are in some way sinful, prejudiced, or mislead.

It also leads to the idea of science via induction.  Popper’s opposition to this idea is one of the main features of his philosophy of science, and I’ve not yet found a reason to disagree with him.

Induction proceeds like this: I see things occurring in the world.  For example, I might see a white sheep.  Eventually, I will observe many white sheep.  Therefore, as a general rule, sheep are white.  Every white sheep I see ‘verifies’ my theory of the whiteness of sheep.  Observations, he argues, cannot have any value except in light of a pre-existing theory, even if the theories are ‘sheep wool has colours’, ‘white is a colour found with sheep’.  Rather, what we start from is a theory – ‘sheep are white’ – and then proceed to test that theory via observation.

I’ll try to return to this question of induction vs. deduction via theory more, because I think it is very important.

Truly scientific theories, according to Popper, are not formulated by observing the self-evident truth of things.  Instead, theories are first formulated based on prior theories, which have either been refuted or not.  Falsifiability, whereby a theory can be refuted, is a necessary component of any scientific theory, according to Popper.  We cannot support our case through bulk of observation (where would our cut-offs be for the number of necessary observation?) but must instead attempt to refute our theory.  Theories which have survived many strict tests are then to be considered better approximations of the truth than ones which have been tested less rigorously.

I’ll finish by describing some conclusions Popper has drawn regarding scientific theories.

1. It is easy to confirm or verify theories by observation, when we look for confirmations.  If you’ve ever heard of confirmation bias, then you will understand why that is.

2. Confirmations count only if they result from risky predictions.  If your observations run counter to what you would have expected before formulating your theory, so that you expected to find a result which would have been impossible in light of your theory, they can be said to ‘confirm’ the theory.

3. Every valid scientific theory is prohibitory.  The theory should lay out things that cannot happen if the theory is correct.  And the more things the theory forbids, the better.  A very general theory, under which many things are possible, is not as testable as one which greatly restricts possible events.  This is similar to the idea that it is easier to make a list of objects which aren’t in a closed box than to make a list of the items which could be in the box.

4. A theory which cannot be refuted in any way is not a scientific theory.  Irrefutability is a weakness, not a strength, because a theory which is correct no matter your potential findings is meaningless, because it either prohibits everything or nothing.

5. Every sincere test of a theory is one which attempts to falsify or refute the theory.  Testability is a measure of falsifiability.  Not all theories are equally testable – ones which are more exposed to refutation, which are ‘riskier’, are more valuable if we find ourselves unable to refute them.

6. Confirming or corroborating evidence is only valid if it results from a serious attempt to falsify the theory.  A theory which survives multiple attempts to refute it can be said to be confirmed or corroborated by the evidence.

7. Theories can be modified post hoc to accommodate a refutation of part of that theory, but this lowers the theory’s value as it is no longer as prohibitory as before.

This last point is sharply debated, especially by Thomas Kuhn.  When I get through Popper and have some time to tackle his major book, I’ll try to address some of their disputes.

Manifest truth and ignorance

I’ve been reading Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper, so a number of my posts for the next while will draw heavily on the material presented in this book. In it, Popper lays out his philosophy of science, his dismissal of the idea of inductive logic, and his demarcation between science and pseudoscience. There’s a bit more to it than that, but I’m only a couple chapters in.

Here, I plan on discussing two interrelated ideas: one, the idea that truth is manifest and the subsequent idea that there is a conspiracy of ignorance.

Essentially, Popper claims the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment were based off of an optimistic epistemology, that man was able to discern truth and acquire knowledge simply by casting off prejudice and bias and using his observational abilities to see the truth manifest in Nature. Further, man possesses rational faculties which allow him to intellectually intuit the difference between truth and falsehood. Popper, while noting the origin of these ideas in Parmenides, Socrates, and Plato, places most of the blame for the idea of manifest truth on Descartes and Bacon.

Descartes thought the truth was manifest because of veracitas dei – what we clearly and distinctly see to be true must be true, otherwise God would be deceiving us. Bacon declared the veracitas naturae – the truth of nature – and that anyone who reads the open book of nature with their mind unpoisoned by prejudice will see the truth.

Now, obviously this attitude has its problems. The primary one regards error. If the truth is manifest, how can we ever be in error? By wilful and even sinful refusal to see the truth, through inculcated prejudice from tradition or culture or dogma, or through active conspiracy from others to conceal the truth.

The conspiracy theory of ignorance “interprets ignorance not as a mere lack of knowledge but as the work of some sinister power, the source of impure and evil influences which pervert and poison our minds and instil in us the habit of resistance to knowledge.”

This attitude has prevailed throughout much of history, in institutions such as the Church, Marxism, and even among some atheists. As an atheist, I often encounter a belief among believers that I am simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of god, rather than having reasons for my sincere non-belief.

Sincerity often plays a part in this – when we ‘know’ something, we often wonder how others who do not agree with our view can do so. If the truth is obvious, something must be wrong with those who do not see it. They must be stupid, or vicious, or wicked, or mislead. Personally, when it comes to less ambiguous questions (such as the age of the Earth) I am more inclined to blame ignorance of the facts rather than any of the above.

So if I’m arguing (along with Popper) that truth is not manifest, how do we gain true knowledge? If there is no wilful or conspiratorial ignorance, how is there error? Well, I’ll save that for my next post.