Practical Considerations

From a practical point of view, demarcation of the effectual from the unproductive is extremely important in our private and public lives. Because of science’s high status, salesmen exaggerate the scientific status of various claims, teachings, and products. Some concrete examples follow:

Healthcare: Pseudoscience gives rise to bogus and sometimes dangerous “cures”. Doctors, insurers, taxpayers and we patients can suffer greatly if we are unable to distinguish between medical science and medical pseudoscience.

Products: Is a set of loudspeaker cables totally purged of oxygen really worth $6000.

Court testimony: Don’t we want the decisions made in court to be based on the best available knowledge? Especially when we intend to lock up or execute a potential criminal.

Environmental policies: Don’t we want to use the best information and methods to protect ourselves from environmental hazards. Do we want to suppress true progress based on fear and not of reliable investigation?

Science education: Promoters of pseudoscience (notably creationism) try to introduce their teachings on school curricula. Teachers and school authorities need to have clear criteria of inclusion that protect students against unreliable and disproved teachings.

Inter-theoretic Reduction in Science

It’s a commonly held idea, that science progresses over time, and with this progression theories are converging on or getting closer to the truth. The evidence often cited for this idea is that science has a remarkable track record of progress in predicting the behavior of our world, and this fact would be miraculous if science was not discovering an accurate map of reality.

Philosophers have argued successfully against this point of view citing the almost 100 percent failure rate of old theories that have been replaced by our latest theories over the last 100 years. But philosophers of science have responded that, in many cases, the theories that are replaced are absorbed into the new theory, and that the replaced theory was at least “approximately true”.

One justification for believing our scientific knowledge to be true is a view called the coherentist justification of truth. The coherentist theory of justification claims that theories are shown to be more probably true because they are a member of a coherent set of theories. They support each other. They are part of the same story, like the consistent parts of a crime witnesses’ testimony.

But trying to justify a belief with coherentism seems rather lame. First, the idea of coherentism seems to be more of a metaphysical position. Second, a rather effective criticism thrown at coherentism is the isolation objection. Can’t a system of coherent claims be assembled that has no connection to the truth? Like a fiction story that makes sense in every way. A coherent system that has no obligation to relate to anything that might exist outside of itself may completely float in possibility space. It may be possible to erect coherent scientific theories of the world that in no way correspond to the ay that the world actually is. It seems to be possible that one could construct a system of “facts” that are entirely coherent and yet false.

Now, if we accept this criticism, then, if science were on the wrong track, we would expect scientific theories to describe disparate spheres of reality, disconnected from one another. Sociology would not be rooted in biology. Economics would not be rooted in psychology. And the granddaddy of them all, the scientific study of human consciousness would be disconnected from physics.

So this explains the motivation for philosophers of science to want to demonstrate extreme theoretic reduction. One way to rescue coherentism as a justification of scientific knowledge is to show that there is one and only one coherentism system of theories. If scientific theories are converging on one objective reality, the one that we live in, then problem solved. Your theory must be part of this coherent system, or else it’s not scientific. There’s only one game in town. And this situation would be what we would expect given that science is on the right track.

This practice of collapsing an old theory into a better theory is called intertheoretic reduction, and it occurs when a reducing theory makes predictions that perfectly or almost perfectly matches the predictions of a reduced theory, while the reducing theory explains or predicts a wider range of phenomena under more general conditions. A common example of intertheoretic reduction is the absorption of Newtonian mechanics into the broader theory of general relativity.

Two necessary goals of intertheoretic reductionare are to:

1. minimize the number of terms used in the theory (simplify the theory).
2. pull in a broader set of phenomena or different scientific disciplines.

Scientific theory reduction is usually takes to mean one or more of the following 3 concepts. The reduced theory reduces to the reducing theory when:

1. all of the objects of the reduced theory have been translated into the language of the reducing theory
2. all of the laws of the reduced theory have been derived from those of the reducing theory
3. all of the observations explained by the reduced theory are also explained by the reducing theory

There’s a lot of stuff to unpack here and I plan to explain these process, terms and the arguments for and against these philosophical positions in upcoming posts. What does it mean for a theory to be approximately true? To make matters more interesting, theoretic reductionism is related to ontological reductionism. That’s the assertion that reality is composed of a minimum number of kinds of entities or substances (quarks or quantum fields). 

Another interesting development is that a physicist named Sean Carroll, a senior research associate in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology has pointed to the results of our experiments in particle physics, and has asserted that all of the forces having any possible influence on us at the large scale have been identified, and are part of quantum field theory. This would underpin the metaphysical claim of coherentism with some real science. Look for more posts on Dr. Carroll.

The List

As the battle lines over science and pseudoscience are being drawn, one can’t help but notice that the problem is multidimensional. By that, I mean that human endeavors designed to claim knowledge use such a variety of techniques that one cannot draw a picture of the situation on a piece of paper.  I would like to simply say that intellectual pursuits run gamut from rigorous testing to wild speculation, and many have, but that is just one dimension. And that’s my point. We can’t simply draw an image of a thermometer using PowerPoint, and place all fields of claimed knowledge somewhere on the scale ranging from hot (evolution theory) to cold (astrology). The problem is messier than that.

This is not to say that we can’t handle the problem. Economists, engineers and physicists, especially those trained in math, often use multidimensional space to get their hands around a problem like this, even if we can’t get our heads around it. Massimo Pigliucci suggests this approach in a response to Laudan’s three metaphilosophical questions concerning demarcation:

Demarcation should not be attempted on the basis of a small set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, because “science” and “pseudoscience” are inherently Wittgensteinian family resemblance concepts.

A better approach is to understand them via a multidimensional continuous classification based on degrees of theoretical soundness and empirical support, an approach that can in principle be made rigorous by the use of fuzzy logic and similar instruments.

That last part about fuzzy logic is a little weird, but Pigliucci’s suggestion to classify truth claims or theories using multiple degrees of theoretical soundness is right on the money. And here is where the fun begins.

What should these dimensions be? Clearly some activities, like salsa dance or bowling don’t even try to make truth claims about our physical world. Others like science fiction or art deco may represent or abstract some aspects of our world but are under no obligation to correlate with “reality”. This should be a dimension. 

Then we get to activities professing to make truth claims, and here is where the problem gets muddled. This problem is so huge that I plan to stop philosophizing and just present a list that I have compiled. One could write a book on each listed item, and opinions are manifold. The list is in no particular order. I have selected these items based on how familiar I expect they will be to people, how well they represent a particular genre, and how provocative. 

While pondering the list, think about how fruitful this activity has been, how rigorous, how good the methods are, how aligned with the evidence, how well accepted, how refuted, how superstitious, how biased or how riddled with fraud. And now, the list:

Astrology, Journalism, General Relativity, Clairvoyance, Holocaust Denial, UFO-logy,
Divine Intervention, N-Rays, Hubble's Law, Intelligent Design, Evolutionary Psychology, Psychoanalysis (Freud), Bacterial Theory of Disease, Eugenics, Christianity,
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Acupuncture, Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion,

Bible Archeology, Social Science, Numerology, Islam, String Theory, Moon Landing Conspiracy,
Organic Foods, Dowsing, Magnet Therapy, Marxism, Telekinesis, Vitalism, Telepathy,
Perturbation Theory, Homeopathy, Quantum Field Theory, Remote Viewing, Massotherapy
Newton's Laws of Motion, Channeling, Ancient astronaut, Homosexual Conversion Therapy

Hypnosis, Polygraphy, Heliocentrism, Geocentrism, Classical Mechanics, Phlogiston

Quantum Mechanics, Big Bang Cosmology, Economics, Expansion Cosmology,

Voodoo, Precognition, Continental Drift, Crop Circles, Evolution Theory, Cold Fusion, 
Free Energy, Gravitational Shielding, Roswell UFO incident, Electromagnetic radiation and health, Thermodynamics, Standard Model of Particle Physics, Spontaneous Generation (of life)

Climate change Denial, Psychic Surgery, Ghost Hunting, Biorhythms, Chiropractic, Faith Healing

Aristotelian physics, Luminiferous aether, Hollow Earth theory, Metaphysics,
Consciousness Studies, Mathematics, Ganzfeld Experiment, Bible Prophesy, Bible Archeology,
Spoon Bending, Vaccine Denial, Criminal Science, Steady State Theory, Alchemy

 

The History of the Demarcation Problem, in an Insolent Nutshell

In the 17^th century the Enlightenment hit, especially the British Isles. Gone were the days when Plato could sit around in his toga and just make stuff up, claiming that the path to true knowledge was human reason, and that everything was made of earth fire and water. We started to force natural philosophers to prove their claims by empirically testing them. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience, especially experience based on perceptual observations by the senses. This technique works very well, and the world blossomed.

Strong forms of empiricism emerge. A group of scientists who called themselves the Vienna Circle, still reeling from Einstein’s theories and quantum mechanics, created the idea of verificationism. Verificationism is the ides that a statement must be empirically verifiable or it’s meaningless.

A philosopher named Karl Popper broke from the Vienna Circle. Popper noticed that the Vienna Circle had mixed up two different issues, meaning and demarcation. The Vienna Circle had proposed verificationism as a single solution to both questions. In opposition to this view, Popper observed that many meaningful theories are not scientific, and that, a criterion of meaningfulness doesn’t necessarily coincide with a criterion of demarcation. Popper was also irritated by unscientific theories created by the likes of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, where the authors kept changing auxiliary theories (moving the goal posts) in order to keep their pet theories alive. Thus, Popper urged that verifiability be replaced with falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation. Popper claimed that, if and only if a theory is falsifiable, then it is scientific. This idea has become very influential.

There are problems with this view however. Falsifiability blesses too many theories that are falsifiable but wrong, and it excludes some potentially good hypotheses like string theory. And Popper never explains why a theory that has survived falsification is any better that one that has never been tested.

Then Thomas Kuhn came along in 1962 and really made trouble for science: He challenged the  prevailing view of progress in science. Everyone had accepted that science was making progress by accumulating true facts and theories about reality. Kuhn argued that our scientific theories were not progressing toward some version of the "truth". Kuhn exposed the way that science really worked. Science was better described with an episodic model where periods of steady “normal” science are interrupted by periods of “revolutionary” science. Normal science consists mostly of solving little puzzles During the revolutions, the discovery of experimental anomalies lead to a whole new paradigm that change the jargon, rules of the game and the roadmap directing new research. Our theories are rarely updated or corrected, they're just tossed away. Kuhn criticized Popper for defining science only by its scientific revolutions, which tend to be scarcer. 

Around that time Paul Feyerabend took the challenge to extremes. He decided that the very question of demarcation was sinister: Science itself had no need of demarcation. Instead some authors were attempting to fashion an unjustified position of authority for science in an attempt to dominate public discussion and policy. Feyerabend asserts that science doesn’t occupy any special place in terms of either its logic or method, and no claim to special authority made by scientists can be maintained. Within the history of scientific practice, no rule or method can be found that has not been violated circumvented or otherwise mangled in order to advance scientific knowledge. Additionally, Feyerabend claims, correctly in my opinion, that science is not an independent form of reasoning, but is inseparable from the larger body of human thought and inquiry. Despite Feyerabend’s many insights, when you read his papers, they are so over the top that it’s hard to believe he is being serious.

Paul R. Thagard tried to simplify things in 1988.  Thagard proposed that the following criteria are usually the case:

1.       science is simple and unified;

2.       science is progressive insofar as it predicts novel facts; and

3.       Adherents to science attempt to develop it so as to solve puzzles, evaluate it with respect to alternatives, and are open to confirmation and falsification.

Around the same time, Larry Laudan made an alternative suggestion. Based on failed historical attempts to define demarcation in science, "philosophy has failed to deliver the goods". Laudan suggests that the demarcation between science and non-science is a pseudo-problem that would best be replaced by focusing on the distinction between reliable and unreliable knowledge, without bothering to ask whether that knowledge is scientific or not. I whole heartedly agree with this sentiment, but what a thorny task this is. It seems like asking the question, “Can we devise an oracle that can predict the outcome of any given scientific endeavor?”

In 1995, in a court case involving Daubert vs. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the judges finally needed to decide what was and wasn’t science. Not able to wait while philosophers hemmed and hawed, seven members of the Court agreed on guidelines for admitting scientific expert testimony. The testimony must be the result of empirical testing, subjected to peer review and publication, the error rate must be known, there must be standards and the theory or technique must be generally accepted by a relevant scientific community. These practical criteria seem like a spectacular start to me.

So there you have it. The problem remains, although the problem itself is better defined than it was 100 years ago.