A Genealogy of Scientism

I thought I might tread over this topic once again because, although I’ve trampled scientism into the dust several times since my high school years, I will be presenting on this topic for my school’s philosophy club. However, here I want to try tracing a genealogy, to see where the ball started rolling, where the idea of scientism came from, and who ushered it in as somehow a “respectable position” until finally it was acknowledged by the folk in some bowdlerized form.

Scientism begins with someone who wasn’t all that keen on philosophy, or at least so he explicitly stated despite his continued involvement in it his entire life. The reclusive Wittgenstein laid the groundwork that later scientismists would utilize. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus advanced the position that philosophy was ultimately a kind of linguistic confusion, and that the topics it tried to speak of were beyond specific proposition at all. This was not at all an endorsement of science; Wittgenstein was hardly concerned with trying to explain what counted as knowledge in his little tract, he was only concerned with explaining the futility of philosophy for gaining knowledge in its supposed areas of specialty.

Despite this, it is rather clear how his text was developed by a group known as the Vienna Circle, which included the leading intellectuals Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Menger, and Otto Neurath among many others, to become what is known as logical positivism, the cultural father of scientism. Wittgenstein chose, near the end of the text where he was elaborating on his conclusions, to say that philosophical propositions were meaningless. Even in context it is obvious how the Vienna Circle could construe his statements to support the position they developed. Let me show a few choice quotes that were ceased upon by these young philosophers in particular.

“The propositions of logic are tautologies.” (6.1)

“The propositions of logic therefore say nothing. (They are the analytical propositions.)” (6.11)

“Logical research means the investigation of all regularity. And outside logic all is accident.” (6.3, italics from the text)

“All propositions, such as the law of causation, the law of continuity in nature, the law of least expenditure in nature, etc. etc., all these are a priori intuitions of possible forms of the propositions of science.” (6.34)

“The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.” (6.363)

So, in brief, the Vienna Circle interpreted these propositions to mean the following: there is only one kind of meaningful proposition, which is conditioned by the verification principle. Analytic propositions are simply tautologies, or descriptions of nothing in general but restatements of the rules language follows in being able to describe the world around us. Non-verifiable propositions are simply meaningless, and are not subject to either proof or refutation, but must be simply brushed away in order to get at thought which is meaningful.

For this to make sense, I must obviously explain the verification principle. I think A.J. Ayer puts it most succinctly in his Language, Truth, and Logic:

A sentence can have literal significance if, and only if, it is of such a proposition that its truth or falsity can be practically conceived of as having a tangible, empirical experience which would conclude in its truth or falsity.

Another way of putting it is that a sentence is only meaningful in the case that it would be made true or false by some in principle possible observation we might have of the world. For example, the proposition “There is milk in the fridge” is meaningful because I can perform an observation that would show that proposition true or false, i.e. I can open the fridge and observe its contents and so conclude whether there is in fact milk in the fridge. Ayer would include propositions like “There is a unicorn on the dark side of the moon” as also meaningful since there is some possible way of making the relevant observation, even though we may not all have a space ship at our disposal. On the other hand, propositions like “One ought not murder” are meaningless since there is no possible observation we might have that would make it true or false. In short, a proposition is meaningful in the case that it is verifiable as either true or false.

From the time of the publishing of Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic to shortly after the postwar period, logical positivism quite thoroughly dominated academia. However, it all came to ruin for the simple reason that those who were originally convinced of logical positivism were unable to convince their own students of it, and so academia was shortly filled with intellectuals who were instead contending with the new rise of metaphysics heralded by Quine and “language games” as described by, once again, Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations.*

*Wittgenstein is perhaps the only philosopher in history to be responsible for two very distinct philosophical schools. This is the school of logical positivism that was initiated by his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the school of ordinary language initiated by his Philosophical Investigations. Even more curious is the fact that he really had nothing personally to do with those schools. For instance, after being invited to several meetings of the Vienna School, he explained that logical positivism was a complete misinterpretation of what he meant.

Why was the new generation of philosophers completely unconvinced by logical positivism? For those outside it, it fails for an excruciatingly obvious and simple reason. It is self-defeating! If it is the case that a proposition is meaningless unless it is verifiable, then the principal proposition that defines logical positivism, because it is not verifiable, is meaningless. If it’s meaningless, it can’t comprise a position one maintains.

It would seem that all positivism should be dead by now. So why has it been maintained under new names and by generally unphilosophical folk? I believe it has to do with the new metaphysical turn initiated by Quine, a member of this new generation of philosophers who came after the brief postwar period. Quine, while turning away from logical positivism, was still very much an ardent supporter of scientific knowledge and method above all other forms. For Quine, other forms of philosophy, like metaphysics and epistemology, were just handmaidens to science, and could only be judged to be as significant as they were insofar as they were necessary in order to do science. As such, if a philosophical position would actually impede science, or somehow described scientific knowledge as insignificant compared to something else, it must be judged fundamentally wrong. On the other hand, the more that a philosophy helped clarify in particular science and scientific knowledge, then the more useful it was. Sure, this meant there was a lot of room for groundwork in order to better establish science, but that was really the only point of it all. If you weren’t assisting science by your philosophy, then your philosophy was pointless and unimportant.

An immediate reaction to this came in the form of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, which forwarded a decidedly anti-realist view of the work of science. In that work, Kuhn argued that scientific revolutions were simply social movements by scientists from one paradigm to another, and that while one could “do science” within one’s chosen paradigm, the decision to embrace one paradigm over another was arbitrary, for the paradigm provided not only particular explanations of phenomena but a whole programme concerned with what counted as evidence in favor or disfavor of a hypothesis, what was important to study, how one did science, and so on.

Clearly, Kuhn’s anti-realist take on science cannot be a direct ancestor of today’s scientism as held by the folk. Then what is its importance? I believe its importance comes in that it calcifies what would become the two predominant positions in academia. One was either a scientific realist, and this in the Quinean scientism mold, or else a scientific anti-realist in the Kuhnian tradition. As such, the “middle position,” which maintained scientific realism but without deferring to Quine’s coordination of philosophy under science, instead holding that there were significant things to know outside of science which may even be unrelated to science (e.g. ethical truths), was completely abandoned for 20-30 years.

What does all this have to do with scientism in the present day? It comes to this. The academic scientists of the present day, especially those who help to inform the popular opinion on science, philosophy, and religion, were taught during their time by philosophers at university that philosophy amounted to one of two things: either that philosophy was a mere handmaiden to science, which actually got things done while philosophers were pretty much just twiddling their thumbs and putting together clever arguments that amounted to nought, or else that philosophy entailed the rejection of science as some sort of fictionalism, despite the incredible achievements of science such as the curing of disease and putting man on the moon. They were simply never made aware of the “middle position” on science. As such, rather than doing philosophy while rejecting these two positions, they rejected philosophy entirely, since they didn’t know of anything else that it might represent.

That is how you get atheist figureheads like Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, and Hawking declaring that “Philosophy is dead” and the only knowledge that matters is scientific. In fact, they push this to its logical conclusion, that the only knowledge is scientific knowledge. They are giving service to the dead philosophy of logical positivism, all without realizing either to whom they owe their philosophical position or that they are doing philosophy in declaring such. It is why scientism fails for the same reasons as logical positivism, but then it is also why these modern positivists are immune to any criticism, because they are powerless to recognize and understand it for what it is.

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The Use of Logic in the Sciences

I believe that my account of metaphysical and epistemological intuiting as foundations of scientific inquiry also provide an answer to the question of why logic-mathematics* are so successful in not only describing what there is in the world, but also why true propositions can be tautologously manipulated in order to provide more true descriptions of the world. For some given proposition regarding what occurs in the world, say that f = ma, if it were true, then we also know that any manipulation of that proposition which is equivalent to the original f = ma will also be true of the world. So, the first question is why f = ma can work to describe something in the world. The second question is why tautologously equivalent proposition can provide further descriptions of what occurs in the world. Though we might really just rephrase that second question as asking why our propositions can be restated in tautologously equivalent ways in the first place, but I’ll get to that in providing an answer to the second question.

*Logic-mathematics is simply my grouping together of all generalized kinds of propositions with the qualification that they are the description of relations between objects. As such, my title, “The Use of Logic in the Sciences” is the same saying “Using Propositions in the Sciences.” This probably also makes it easy to answer the questions as well.

Taking my account of science, then the answer to the first question is that when we metaphysically intuit, we are intuiting propositions. That is, propositions are the content of intuition; it is propositions which we conceive. Thus, when we apply epistemological intuiting, we are making observations regarding the accordance of what’s in the world to our metaphysically intuited propositions. We think in propositions and see by them. Our observations accord to propositions because propositions are fundamentally in order to describe, among other things, observations. The description of relations between objects can include those objects which are out in the world that we know of by our senses.

As such, when we state a proposition like “f = ma,” we are stating some relationship between force, mass, and acceleration, and declaring that they hold together in just such-and-such a way, taking those individual sorts of things as objects in the proposition. This also goes on to explain why science can make use of mathematics, because mathematics deals with a specific kind of propositions, namely those dealing with quantities. However, my account also means that mathematics is not the entirety of science; and this is obvious when explaining what we mean by terms like “force,” “mass,” “motion,” and so on. It isn’t as if you can point to some phenomena in the world, then give an equation, like “5 = 2*2.5” and expect it to be apparent what is meant. Whatever the quantity or degree something is the case, we give a term to that whole continuum of possible degrees, i.e. “force” when we mean anything from zero to infinity.

Now why can we manipulate true propositions of the world and, making sure they remain tautologously equivalent, still be saying true propositions of the world, knowing that they do so without reference to any additional observations or even the re-consideration of those observations which showed the truth of the original proposition? It is easy to see why that is the case when we analyze what we are doing when we propose tautologously equivalent propositions. For f = ma, we also know it would be true that m = f/a. What we are doing is recombining the descriptions of relations in ways that preserve the same essential arrangement of relations. It seems as if, when we introduce a relation like division rather than multiplication, something must be essentially different, but there is nothing essential to the relations themselves in stating what it is that is essentially the case. In other words, we shouldn’t confuse the signs of our propositions with the meaning; while they are instrumental, they are merely instrumental. Using some particular statement of relation is a means to an end, rather than the end. The meaning is not in the proposition expressed, the meaning is in the proposition understood for itself. (Curiously, it just occurred to me that this is another way of showing that logical positivism is incorrect even regarding what propositions are.)

So we see that logic in the sciences makes sense, and also that mathematics is not sufficient for doing science. We must still introduce metaphysically intuited concepts regarding things in the world like space. Perhaps in a future post I will get around to qualifying, on account of these past considerations, the “scientificality” of certain analyses.

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Intuition, Science, and Confirmation

Karl Popper said that scientific confirmation is impossible. You can keep subjecting a theory to experiments, but the only possible results are that the theory is corroborated (i.e. shown compatible with all presently known observations) or falsified. Of course, he also makes the conceivable falsification of a theory a measure of science (that is, a theory is scientific in the case that there is some conceivable observation which would show that the theory is false for our world), and I’m not sure about throwing that out, but I would like to go on and demonstrate that scientific confirmation is perfectly possible, and while it may in certain situations prove difficult, it certainly isn’t impossible. I would like to demonstrate this by arguing that all scientific inquiry is dependent upon two definite intuitive aprioristic elements and that this, in conjunction with my arguments given elsewhere that our intuitions cannot fail to map on to the world at perfect parity, serves to show that we can have instances of scientific confirmation.

First, what do I mean by intuition? I mean in a very specific sense a priori semantic knowledge. It is knowledge which is comprehended by minds essentially, in that they can comprehend a given axiom or proposition for itself and, in comprehending and conceiving the proposition for itself, can understand the consequences of that proposition being true. It is not known from experience of the world, but acts to structure our experience of the world and give it a meaningful context in which it can be both understood and spoken of, because when we take into account experience what we are doing is proposing a parity between some intuitive model and that which is observed.

This will probably make a lot more sense if I propose some well known examples of this kind of knowledge. There are two systems of thought which are widely accepted to be a priori knowledge, or as I am using the word, “intuitive.” Geometry and math are these two systems, and of course they are related in virtue of both being intuitive. In some instances they can both be used to represent the same thing, e.g. the arc a falling objects follows. I will also note that these intuitive systems of thought are the first a priori element of science; they are the structure onto which experience is cast, as a sheet over a wire model or a painting on a canvas. I will this first a priori element metaphysical intuiting, as it is the intuiting of being, its possible structures and modes.

Now when we do science, what we are doing is something like this. For some given intuitive proposition, such as the axiom that “Two parallel lines extended to infinity on a plane never meet,” we are asking “And is this true of our world?” In order to determine whether a proposition of this kind is true of our world, we invoke the second a priori element of science, which is something like “If such were the case, then we would observe this.” I call this epistemological intuiting. It is the intuiting of the relationship shared between observation and metaphysical structures, or what observations mean for the knowledge of certain propositions.

There is an aptness, then, between what we conceive a priori, and thus free of any “unknown quibbles” (because if it were unknown, then it wouldn’t be known to that degree in the first place), and the “world out there.” We can conceive of certain structures, and then we can ask “Is this true of our world?” and then, by epistemological intuiting, understand what sort of observations will confirm what. It follows then that certain observations fit, or are compatible with, only one possible metaphysical intuiting. That is, for some observation x, only proposition y can describe such an instance. Observation x would then serve as confirmation of proposition y, be it some particular axiom or a many-axiom model.

The above is the case assuming that our metaphysical intuiting and what is possible in the world are at a perfect parity, which I have argued many times in the past. I even wrote an entire paper about it. If what is possible and what is conceivable are at a parity, then there can’t be any “hidden surprises” in the world which we could fail to conceive for ourselves in the realm of metaphysical intuiting.

If we are taking seriously my argument that doing science is something like the above, then there are other thought systems that must be placed alongside math and geometry as “intuitive” forms of knowledge. This would include physics, the analysis of bodies, force, and motion. There would also be chemistry, the analysis of elemental reactions and structures, and then biology, the analysis of living things. I’m also of the opinion that praxeology, the analysis of rational action, counts as just such an intuited body of knowledge. Along with these, we might also want to include psychology, the analysis of emotional states of being. There might be other sciences in the same vein I’m forgetting, though I’m also sure that certain bodies of knowledge are really aggregates of data, rather than being based on metaphysical intuition. In each case, they are concerned with propositions that can be understood in the a priori realm and to which we can ask “But are they true of our own world?”

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The Genesis of an Age

A powerful quote has been percolating in my mind for the last few days, which I found at the TOF Spot of Mike Flynn.

HISTORY MUST BE CURVED, for there is a horizon in the affairs of mankind.  Beyond this horizon, events pass out of historical consciousness and into myth.  Accounts are shortened, complexities sloughed off, analogous figures fused, traditions “abraded into anecdotes.”  Real people become culture heroes: archetypical beings performing iconic deeds.

Vansina

Flynn states that, assuming this paradigm, the great Heliocentrism Controversy is a Genesis Myth, “in which a culture-hero performs iconic deeds that affirm the rightness of Our Modern World-view.” He is absolutely right. In the modern age, we no longer remember the terms of the debate or how one side was decided to be “correct” (nor even what makes one side correct rather than the other), we only know that the Great Patriarch Copernicus presided over an unassailable defense of heliocentrism against the established astronomical body that was firmly in the pocket of the Great Shaitan, the Catholic Church. It is the triumph of modernism over medievalism.

Why has this come to be? We can analyze this popular history in two ways. First, what it is for something to be a “Genesis Myth.” Second, the reason for this propensity to mythologize.

It is no accident to call it a Genesis Myth. For something to be a myth is for it to be a story which explains something we see in everyday life. It is a narrative handed down and protected by a culture to justify the way it is. As such, the Jews and Christians have the story of Creation and the Garden of Eden as told in Genesis to explain the fundamental separation of man from the ideal. Likewise, the Heliocentrism Controversy shows just what is Good and Right about modernism. It cements the values and preaches them at once. We learn from the Heliocentrism Controversy that science leads to understanding, while religion clouds the mind and causes people to hold to incorrect views of the world. Copernicus was right because he defied the Church; the Church was wrong because it was the Church. Never mind that, by our own modern suppositions, they were both wrong.

Truly, what was the controversy about? It was about more than whether or not the earth was the center of the universe. In question was what it would take to count something as the center and the properties of a preferable scientific model. What took place was a debate between two philosophical schools, the Aristotelian and the Platonic. How much weight ought we to give numbers? How much weight are qualities to be given? In producing a scientific model, you can have one or the other; Aristotle saves the qualities, Plato saves the numbers. You cannot have both; science must be one or the other.

As it is, numbers won the day because of how vastly useful they became when Kepler and Galileo went to lengths to produce lists of equations that described natural phenomena (and with Kepler, only a few would be considered useful by us). The qualities became completely disregarded, understand as “secondary qualities,” where the number became fundamental. Whatever could be numbered, was real; everything else was worthless.

Such problems raise their heads when we study the phenomena of color and mind. Neuroscientists appear oblivious when it comes to accounting for subjective experience, while physicists have completely forgotten that “nothing” is not an equation which can be specified.

Are all the gains bad? No. The Aristotelians had some things wrong. However, it seems that the baby was thrown out with the bath water. This brings us to the proclivity to mythologize.

Why do we mythologize our histories? At a shallow level, it may just be that there is so much information to grasp that, short of constructing a simplistic narrative, we would have no understanding of what marks these different periods of human history. I believe that this shallow level is itself a simplistic take. It doesn’t account for why we produce these meta-narratives that we make historical events fit into. It doesn’t notice that the Marxists produce this principle of history into which everything else must fit, and observations are unable to show otherwise. Of course, it isn’t only Marxists that perpetuate this anti-empirical postulate concerning history, it is just that they explicate it. The modernist narrative still employs this science vs. religion narrative. When historical events are analyzed, it becomes a time to tell a good story that confirms our own preconceptions. When we are in the thrall of a myth you cannot challenge its foundations.

But with the setting in of new foundations, eventually comes the idea to demythologize what came before. We get to the modern era by overcoming the medieval era. Equality comes about by overcoming racism and sexism. Science is only possible in overcoming religion. And so on. Without these narratives in place about good overcoming evil, we would have to consider the things for themselves. When you remove this filter of good vs. evil in history, you are left with actors which are wrong but intellectually honest, right but morally ambiguous. Some narratives can be easily questioned, such as the propaganda of war; some cannot, such as the propaganda of modernism.

Theological language becomes worn and brittle, and when on the tongue of those within the thrall of mythological modernism, it is liable to be crudely applied in the grossest of terms. There is no subtlety excused for religion, even while subtlety becomes its own art within the sciences of anthropology and psychology. The religionist is forbidden from using the same intellectual tools available to the modernist; his arguments must remain forever lame and deceitful. Being religious is cause to be ignored. Slack-jawed and misplaced scientific enthusiasm can be excused provided it is anti-religious. These are the conditions to breed the likes of Dawkins and P.Z. Myers, bastions of persistent ignorance. Why? Because they are in the thrall of myth, the myth which denies myth as plainly superstitious, for the dull and weak. They do not see it, and they cannot see it, because it is the blind leading the blind. In order for it to be seen, one would need exercise the theological faculties, but such is forbidden in these minds.

They hail back to the Copernican Revolution and treat this mythical narrative as gospel truth, something which cannot be dissented from short of heresy and ostracism. To question the validity of Copernicus is to question science, and to question science is to question God Himself. We save awe for the most banal of experiences and reject the possibility of the transcendent in order that the age might be transcended in waiting for the coming eschaton, the Golden Age, the singularity.

None of this is necessary, even for the non-religious. It is only that it is easier to take this line about things.

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On the Construction of Scientific Propositions

What are we doing when we do science? What is the principle that unifies our movement from observed phenomenon to hypothesis of mechanism? I think I have some idea that relates the principle to an easily understood kind of phenomena which we are given to studying in grade school.

Suppose we observe a phenomena which is represented numerically by this;

5, 9, 17, 33, 65, 129, 257, 513, 1025, 2049, 4097…

and the pattern holds. Now a man named Newton comes along and has the idea that the relationship of an antecedent number to its consequent number holds in this;

∆: n –> 2n – 1

This is an expression of likeness. Now what is actually occurring are the phenomena; ∆ is not what’s actually happening. ∆ is a mere description of what occurs, a likeness of the nature of the represented objects. Is what Newton is doing similar in principle to what we do when we postulate that f = ma? There is an expression of relations between different concretely actualized objects. The question is whether this relation is true.

Suppose we find out that as numbers get closer to 10^100, they will begin to decrease at a rate equal to the square of difference between the antecedent and that number. Such a difference in our case might be noticed after several hundred revolutions, so our Newton would be wrong about the formulation. However, if the formula had actually been something more like

∆2: n –> 1.0001n – .0001

then such a fact would be practically impossible to notice for most occurrences of that series of objects, since it would take several million occurrences of the objects in a series for such a difference between that and the actually true formula to be noticed. Only after closer analysis of observations would such a difference between the accepted formula and reality be noticed; and this gives you an Einstein.

Laying out scientific laws in this way, it is easier to see why a given universe might be understood as the predication of a set of axioms that describes the relationships which hold between objects in that universe. If in our universe f = ma holds, why can’t m = fa hold in some other universe? It is just a different axiom. Different consequences would follow, but then that is just the nature of axioms to do so.

Now this brings around the rationalistic element of scientific inquiry. If doing science requires us to postulate and affirm (or else just falsify) some axiom we hold before our mind, then we need to be able to understand what that axiom entails would be observed if it were true. (This is to leave aside for now axioms that entail fundamentally unobservable phenomena in the material world, i.e. black holes.) Unless such a rational element to the mind exists, an axiomatizable framework subsistent on pure reason by which empirical observations might be compared to, then science should be impossible. In this way we can see that the scientific method is dependent on metaphysics, and this is why metaphysics “from observation” is to miss the point of what metaphysics is about in the first place.

Even if our minds are tabula rasa, the canvas on which experience is painted is still some definite thing that is able to have a painting be painted on it by the nature of the canvas. Try painting a picture on air; you’ll notice that this is impossible. It requires the right material for a painting to be done. Granted, you might do so with different materials, but there are still materials which work better than others; in this case, canvas will perform better than air.

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Metaphysics and Science, Part 1

What is the relation between metaphysics and observational science? I believe that, in answering this, we can also provide a robust theory which can produce models of confirmation beyond mere lack of succumbing to falsification á la Popper.

Here is an example of which the principle lends itself to explaining what could be done in all other areas of scientific inquiry.

Suppose we know it is the case that there is a triangle. Now there are certain things we know of a triangle due to our metaphysical knowledge (i.e. what a triangle is) which tells us what that triangle must be like in certain conditions. For example, we know that in Euclidean space the interior angles of the triangle will add up to 180. This means we can express the relationship in this way;

∆ –> 180 (interior angles)

There are properties of triangles that must follow in certain instances which we can determine merely from our metaphysical knowledge of triangles (i.e. our knowledge of triangles that is not inducted). For instance, if you have a Euclidean triangle, for which one of the angles is 90 degrees, it follows that the length of the sides can be expressed by a certain formula. The principle of knowledge and deduction from our inducted knowledge in this case holds for all other scientific endeavors.

Consider that, if it is the case that we can make a triangle in which the interior angles do not add up to 180 degrees, then we know that space is not Euclidean, at least not everywhere.

Example of the experiment: Put three objects in space that can aim lasers at each other very precisely over very long distances, like at least several lightminutes. Create a laser-triangle. Add up the interior angles. If the interior angles are not 180 degrees, then we have confirmed that space can bend.

Of course there are certain assumptions that build into the experiment; the assumption that light travels in a straight line and would follow the contours of space, that it might not be bent by other forces within the universe, and so on. Granting these assumptions, we could postulate that, void anything unknown, space is (at least sometimes) non-Euclidean.

While this isn’t as entirely “confirmational” as we might like, this sort of experiment, in line with our metaphysical knowledge of triangles, produces some definite knowledge of what must be the case provided some other systems are in place. This also highlights where our metaphysical knowledge meets empirical knowledge, of which more will be said in the next part.

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Scientific Misidentification of Correlation

Or alternately, how it often occurs in science that studies commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. But I’m going to here call it Scientific Misidentification of Correlation, since that’s a lot shorter and gets more to the problem of the point.

Affirming the consequent has this structure of deductive argument;

1) X, therefore Y

2) Y

3) Therefore X

An example of this could be

1′) If it rains, then the ground would be wet

2′) The ground is wet

3′) Therefore it rained

Now what I wish to point out is that such an argument, if inductive, is not fallacious. However, inductive arguments leave room for deductive footwork, so where an inductive argument is all that can be supplied to support a conclusion, what a deductive argument shows holds reign over what is attempted to be shown by the inductive argument. So inasmuch as scientific studies present an argument as deductive (and they often do, sadly), they commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. It is these types of supposedly scientific studies that I am speaking about here.

Suppose some scientifically-minded person tries to explain why we see red as we do by recourse to a description of how electromagnetic radiation of a certain wavelength is perceived by the eye and then interpreted by the brain as “red.” The first problem with this account is that it supposes correlation is necessarily causation; that because we can correlate the experience of “seeing red” with some occurrence in the brain, that “seeing red” and that occurrence in the brain are not merely correlated, but one and the same thing. But this is to make the rather strong claim that “the sight of red is strictly identifiable to this material brain state,” which leaves behind no hint at why that certain occurrence in the brain gives exactly the experience it does, because in reality, the knowledge of either the experience or the brain state gives no ability to know what it correlates to. If a person was unaware that “seeing red” was correlated to some certain occurrence in the brain, they would not know that some brain was “seeing red” even if they saw (and could perfectly interpret) a picture of the brain in that exact state (assuming there is some single identifiable state that “seeing red” always leads to).

It affirms the consequent to assume that because we come to understand what “seeing red” correlates to in the brain, that what we know of the brain would lead to knowing what that experience would be if we didn’t first have that experience.

Let me try an analogy. Suppose there is a person kept in captivity who’s senses can be turned on or off at will by some scientist. At no single time would the scientist allow the person to have more than one sense on at a time. This person then could have the sight of an orange, but not smell it, and could later smell the same orange, without seeing it, and they would never know to correlate the sight of an orange with the smell of an orange. While we (assuming my readers can both see and smell) know to correlate the sight of an orange with the smell of an orange, because we understand that they have the same source (namely, an orange), if we did not experience both of these at the same time we could not make the correlation. We who have all our senses could move from the smell of an orange to a picture of it in our mind, but our hypothetical captive couldn’t. They are not in the right conditions to make the induction of correlation, and there is no way to work from merely the sight of something to understanding what it would smell like, or visa versa.

Which is why I stress that the correlation between an experience and its attendant brain state do not necessarily follow. My experience does not, by itself, inform what the brain state picture should look like, and the brain state picture would not inform me what the experience is. I could only link an experience and a brain state after having the prior knowledge that the correlation holds, like how we know that there exists a correlation between the smell of an orange and the sight of an orange because we have had both experiences result from the same object. A person in the same circumstances as a captive, who can only look at a picture of a brain states and have different experiences could not make the correlation between them, even if they are in fact related.

Despite this truth, it still happens that people assume we’ve come to explain something by being able to induct the correlation between something and another thing. However, this is manifestly false, as we see in how brain states and experiences do not inherently lead to information about the other.

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Analogues to Creationists

Sorry it’s been so long, I’ve been busy with my family.

Somewhat in the vein of my post People Just Aren’t Interested, I’ve been having experiences with people who fit an analogy to how creationists more or less simply refuse to see the reason and evidence of evolution. Not meaning to enter into undue psychologization, but I think it is more or less untenable for anyone to reject evolution, both because of the vast evidence and explanatory power that the theory of evolution holds, but because there is in principle no contradiction between evolution or a reasonable religious narrative about history. While I do admit some sympathy to creationists, who are otherwise honest people, their creationism exists mostly due to a blind spot created by a socially acceptable prejudice against the ordinary reasoning that would lead to one accepting evolution. In short, the reason people can find it intellectually veritable to accept creationism over evolution is because of 1) insular circles of common believers and 2) a doxastic method that holds certain values about what can count as truth which unfairly precludes certain beliefs where others can be admitted under the creationist’s otherwise ordinary doxastic method. (A “doxastic method” is how a person will examine a concept and test its veracity.)

The short explanation is that creationists just don’t care about objectively weighing the value of their system of belief oriented around the issue of evolution vs. creation, and so their analysis will necessarily be one-sided, concluding in a sought after ignorance. This is why debating a creationist their creationism can be so frustrating; they have a totally different method for debating evolution than people have for anything else. They aren’t interested in explanatory scope or evidence when it comes to evolution. They weight their values differently.

And the problem with this paradigm is that its arbitrary to hold this sort of doxastic method about a single issue, because such a doxastic method cannot hold throughout the entirety of one’s worldview. It would necessarily lead to certain contradictions and has the “one must just have faith” problem; “having faith” is too basic and unwarranted a concept to ground complex systems of belief (i.e. religion).

But I think there are certain analogues to creationism we can examine, where you have proponents of a certain doxastic method opposed to some component of a complete worldview that makes getting through to them more or less impossible.

Progressives act this way about economics. The reason for this is because progressives do not so much think that the elementary economic models of supply and demand are wrong and can be better explained by some other paradigm, but just that they do not care what economic science has to say about anything. For politicians it can be attributed to plain cynicism in regards to the weaknesses of an elected corpus of representatives who serve for a definite period of time, but for the “true believers” or progressivism there is simply no rational explanation for their beliefs except by resort to the obscuring filter of a doxastic method which sits between their otherwise ordinary, reasonable selves and political issues (especially when it comes to “the rich”).

That particular brand of atheists who live by an epistemological or ontological scientism are the same way with regards to plain philosophical reasoning (especially when it comes to religious belief). They utilize their scientism as a one-size-fits-all defense against ratiocination that opposes what they belief. What it looks like is this;

Philosopher: There is reason a, b, and c for this.

Scientismist: [Not having any good argument against a, b and c] How can you verify that?

Philosopher: I just did. My arguments serve to demonstrate what I am defending.

Scientismist: No, I mean, how would you set up a scientific experiment which would objectively tell us which of these hypotheses is true?

Philosopher: What are you even talking about? This is philosophy, not science.

Scientismist: That’s just a cover for your inability to prove your hypothesis is true.

It is at this point that you can see why chess grandmasters can lose to chess newbies; they make a move that makes so little sense they can’t think of how to reply. Because philosophers so rarely understand where the scientismists come from, they’ll keep bombarding their position with rational, philosophical arguments when the scientismist just plain isn’t interested in that sort of thing.

So here’s what we know; scientismists are to philosophy as progressives are to economics as creationists are to evolution.

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The Meaningfulness of Scientific Propositions, Part 2

Part 1.

In the last post we concluded that we can distinguish between substantially and virtually meaningful propositions. Substantially meaningful propositions (SMP) are those propositions asserted in virtue of some known premises; virtually meaningful propositions (VMP) are when the proposition is asserted about some possible object which could fulfill the (implicitly or explicitly) specified condition/s without being about any particular thing. SMP’s are not propositions which are transitive when the premises do not hold, or in short, they are not true outside their context. The substance of the propositions refers to the meaning, not to the words; hence we can distinguish between “there is a beverage I do not like on this table” if I say it because there is some green tea on my table (and I do not like green tea) and “there is a beverage I do not like on this table” if I say it in the sense that such a proposition could meaningfully refer to some real, but not necessarily actualized, being.

Science never operates without observation. This means that whatever is asserted as some scientific fact, it is based on the accumulation of observations and some logical principle that ties those observations together. The set of observations and the principle that ties them together are both premises of a syllogism that lead into some conclusion, i.e. “This drug has this effect on the human body.” If the observations were different or the principle was different, it might be asserted otherwise.

If science is dependent on observation and logical principle, then that means any scientific fact (by which I mean non-trivial conclusions based on scientific research) is always an SMP. We can refer to hypothetical scientific facts, but these are not actual scientific facts per se (and would be VMP’s). Since scientific facts are SMP’s, this means that their meaning is true only in virtue of the observations and principles that build into them. In one sense, this means that apart from the attendant observations and principle of unity, any scientific fact would be entirely meaningless; without the evidence we have for saying that light is both in some way like a particle and a wave, it would mean nothing to say that light was like such, because there would be no reason to say it. There is a tenuous sense in which we could maintain possibly scientific VMP’s, but they would require VMP’s that are also the premises (i.e. some hypothetical observation that could conceivably be made).

So, while we have good reason to believe that scientific facts are meaningful, our problem is that the nature of positing particular principles of unity to describe some set of observations will never get to the final “smallest” individual entity. Each scientific proposition propels past itself towards a new set of observations that will be made, because once you have something under your thumb you can observe it; if there is something to be observed, what will be observed is its behavior; if something observed exhibits a behavior, that behavior will have to be explained by some next principle of unity, which will yield another proposition. This proposition will likewise be observed to have a behavior, yielding another proposition, and so on ad infinitum.

An example might be found in physics. Physics first generalized about gases, liquids, and solids, before generalizing about atoms. These generalizations about atoms gave way to the positing of sub-atomic particles, which in turn were further explained by more sub-atomic particles. Currently the search is on for the Higgs boson, but I warrant that if this particle is found it will exhibit a behavior which the scientific community will try to describe, which will require some further particle. And so on with continual inference. What is paradigmatic about this physics example is that the nature of the atom is only inferred, and these inferences allow us to make ever finer inferences, such that we are basically inferring the nature of neutrinos and quarks based on what we’ve observed of minute collections of atoms and flinging them into each other with assumptions made about their nature from prior discoveries.

Thus, science is essentially incomplete, because it is impossible to complete; each bit of knowledge reveals some new bit of mystery, all the way down. This is not cause for despair, for it merely means that our mastery of the universe will continue increasing. While this means science will never come up with some total description of the universe and way of material being, for each proposition becomes a new premise to some further proposition, my conclusion is that we will find currently unimaginable applications from physics and the like for the rest of history.

However, there is another problem I wish to highlight; there must come some point where the human mind is simply unable to really understand some area of study any deeper. This is because each individual proposition, the deeper one goes, requires some knowledge about the propositions that build into it, but the mind can only hold so many propositions in check at once. Now this limit probably won’t be reached for a while, but the limit does exist; even currently, it is impossible for an individual to study deeply into more than one discipline in a lifetime. Such specialization will increase, until it comes to the point that each individual acts like a node within some greater body, each understanding only their little amount and no person being able to understand the whole.

That is the problem, but I can imagine a solution which will push knowledge further based on my distinction of SMP and VMP. But that’s for the next part.

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The Meaningfulness of Scientific Propositions, Part 1

I want to start talking about what it is that we mean when we speak about atomic and sub-atomic particles, waves, statistical indeterminacy, and such. However, before we get to that, we need to talk about the Gettier problem of knowledge.

What makes an article of belief knowledge? Typically, the account of Western philosophy has been that knowledge is justified true belief. Something counts as knowledge if the proposition is justified to the individual, true, and it is a belief. Gettier gave a story which seemed to have an individual who had a belief that was justified and also happened to be true, yet intuitively we wouldn’t think to call their belief knowledge. Here’s the story I want to focus on;

Smith has applied for a job, but, it is claimed, has a justified belief that “Jones will get the job”. He also has a justified belief that “Jones has 10 coins in his pocket”. Smith therefore (justifiably) concludes (by the rule of the transitivity of identity) that “the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket”.

In fact, Jones does not get the job. Instead, Smith does. However, as it happens, Smith (unknowingly and by sheer chance) also had 10 coins in his pocket. So his belief that “the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket” was justified and true. But it does not appear to be knowledge.

I was always bothered by this story, not because I have any special attachment to the description of belief as justified true belief and I think this story seems to set my intuition against such a description, but because it so obviously misses an important principle. When Smith concludes “the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket,” this is not to the elimination of his belief that “Jones will get the job.” Smith still believes that Jones will get the job, and in virtue of this belief does he believe the other thing. The logic looks like this;

1) Jones will get the job

2) Jones has 10 coins in his pocket

3) Therefore, the man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job

That the conclusion is true because Smith also has 10 coins in his pocket is unimportant. In fact, it’s just trivial; it might as well have been some belief about “the man with brown hair” or “the man wearing glasses,” but Smith is still believing that Jones will get the job. Any parts of the descriptions about Jones that Smith forms articles of belief about in reference to getting a job are only descriptions about Jones. The meaningful content of the conclusion is really this;

3′) Jones, who has 10 coins in his pocket, will get the job

This is because the former conclusion is only a proposition in virtue of some other statement. As such, the former conclusion has its meaning, in the way Smith formulates the proposition, founded on the meaning of the first premise, that Jones will get the job. This means that the logic of the former argument is invalid, because (3) as meant to be understood is meaningless, because Smith only understands “the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket” to have its meaning because he believes Smith will get the job. The meaningful content of the proposition cannot be separated from its foundation, or how Smith understands it to be true.

As such, it means that the Gettier problem is just a paradox, solved by some clarification of semantics.

The greater implication for such a solution to Gettier’s problem of knowledge is that how something is understood to be true, or more basically, how something is known, is part of the content of knowledge. So, for instance, when I say

4) There is a can of Diet Coke on my table right now

5) I dislike Diet Coke

6) There is a beverage which I dislike on my table right now

that last statement has its meaning in virtue of the preceding premises, and so cannot be separated from them and be meaningful on its own.

Now of course I do not mean that general statements like “There is a beverage which I dislike on my table right now” to be generally meaningless, but it lacks the meaning that would make the proposition true if it turned out that green tea was on my table (and I also dislike green tea). Though the two propositions would be semiotically identically, they would have different meanings, depending on which they are true in virtue of. In fact, the two propositions are also meaningfully different from the generalized “there is a beverage which I dislike on my table right now” if I’m not meaning the proposition in virtue of something I know about the beverage except that I dislike it. But in this case, the meaning is virtual; if the statement were to be true, it would have to be justified by something, and so would have meaning relevant to what it is justified by; having justification in virtue of some substantial set of premises, the proposition would then be substantially meaningful.

So we are able to mean something in our propositions even when we don’t mean them in a justified way (as knowledge would be). It is just that we can distinguish between at least these two types of meaningful proposition;

Substantially meaningful – the proposition is asserted in virtue of some known premises

Virtually meaningful – the proposition is asserted about some possible object which could fulfill the (implicitly or explicitly) specified condition/s without being about any particular thing

This defeats the possibility of transitivity, so that we can’t mistake “the man with 10 coins in his pocket” who is Jones and “the man with 10 coins in his pocket” who is Smith.

Here’s something I wish to note, that will be relevant for our upcoming discussion on sub-atomic particles and such. For a proposition to be (at least possibly) scientific, it must be intrinsically tied to some possible experiment or set of experiments. And experiment is nothing but some specialized sort of observation with some control to bring to light some particular effect being conjectured about. This means that all scientific propositions must be in virtue of something else known through observation.

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