Digressions&Impressions

Two Dogmas of The Image of Science

An image of science (recall these posts on Hume, Williamson, Spinoza) contains a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate. Images of science can circulate within the sciences, in public discussion, and even in philosophy. Here are two dogmas in the contemporary image of science:

(1) While science may be a complex network of collaboration and competition, it also involves a self-correcting and free exchange of ideas.

(2) Consensus is the natural effect of a proper functioning mature science.

Within philosophy, these two dogmas are familiar from Thomas Kuhn's work. Within economics and formal decision theory the dogmas are linked (at least since Aumann (1976), where (1) helps generate (2)).

In some contexts such consensus within science is a species of higher order evidence and generally a cue to defer to the science. And this reinforces how science can settle debate, and thereby open space for public action (assuming that prior to action there is public debate). Lurking in the previous two sentences is the idea that science can provide (some) authority to public policy based on it. So it is no surprise that governments promote institutions that help discover or articulate such consensus. In practice, governments and science, while distinct from each other (and sometimes at odds), frequently lend each other (some) authority by presupposing and reinforcing the two dogmas. 

So far so good. 

But because settled science is so important to authoritative action [and consensus such an important proxy of it], this also creates incentives to generate or organize the appearance of consensus. And there is conceptual space for such organized consensus. For even if one grants that consensus is the natural effect of a proper functioning mature science, this is compatible with consensus also being the effect of malfunctioning science. Let's call the agreement that is the product of malfunctioning science 'ersatz consensus.' (And I'll use 'real consensus' when I distinguish a naturally occurring consensus from the ersatz type.) 

It's worth noting that, despite the way I have phrased it in previous paragraph, participants in malfunctioning science need not have the intent to produce an ersatz consensus. By this I mean two things: first, some strategic agents may well intentionally wish to promote deliberate confusion such that there does not seem consensus at all (think of the tobacco industry on the relationship between smoking and cancer; or the energy industry and man-made global warming, etc.). Second, sometimes an ersatz consensus is the product of the absence of proper exchange of ideas in science (because of bad replication or publication practices, or because of temporary embargoes on circulation of ideas [not uncommon in medical and defense sciences]). So, sometimes ersatz consensus is the effect of top-down organization, and sometimes it's the effect of bottom-up failures of process.

It's not surprising that for outsiders it's incredibly difficult to distinguish between an ersatz consensus and a real consensus, especially if the science is incredibly esoteric and/or interdisciplinary. But sometimes it is very difficult for insiders to know whether the consensus view is real or ersatz in their own science. There need not be anything nefarious about this; all that's needed is that because of say extensive cognitive division of labor even insiders may be unaware (of the nature and extent of) that the process that shapes the exchange of ideas within their own science is malfunctioning. 

Even though I have well known skeptical leanings, I don't want to exaggerate the claim in the previous two sentences. There are forensic techniques that provide signals about such matters. In addition folks in adjoining sciences may have the skill set to notice communicative problems I am hinting at. (In a way that's the story of how the replication crisis got tackled.) But it may take  time to sort such things out.

Notice that so far I have not touched the two dogmas of the contemporary image of the science (although I have hinted that (1) may be an idealization). What I have done is extrapolate some of their mutual entailments. 

As an aside, even without governments nudging us to accept a scientific consensus is authoritative, (2) has very deep roots in the intellectual culture. The Stoic sages and the Spinozistic wise are said to agree, and I am sure you can list a whole number of other examples. But -- pace Kuhn -- it is worth noting that there were scientific periods where within science persistent disagreement over many important issues was not taken to be embarrassing (I think this was common view of late nineteenth century physics if you go look at Poincare, Duhem, Hertz, Mach, etc.). 

For, it is worth noting however that (2) is not self-evident in all contexts. Sometimes different scientific research groups within the same scientific community rely on different auxiliary assumptions or computational shortcuts to generate (say) agreed upon predictions (go check out real-life examples of Quine-Duhem thesis). So even though at one level of description there may be consensus, at another level of description (including the auxiliaries) there is not. I suspect this situation is endemic in a lot of sciences. (Again, over time this may well be sorted out if the auxiliaries start to matter for some reason.)

In addition, in a very neat recent paper, Kevin Dorst has argued (on the Bayesian terrain of Aumann) -- in the context of trying to provide a mechanism for group polarization -- that if evidence is ambiguous we should not expect consensus. (He has a neat scientific example, so go read it.) My view is that in sciences with incredibly robust and mathematically refined background theories (and instruments) such ambiguity of evidence may well be rare, but that in many sciences ambiguity of evidence and, thus, lack of consensus is to be expected and rational. 

Let me stop here for now.

 

 

On Moorean facts (David Lewis), and Poincaré’s Mistake

Poincaré, with all this virtue, made a serious philosophical mistake. In Poincaré’s own work, this error seems to me to have kept him from several fundamental discoveries in physics. (Howard Stein "Physics and Philosophy Meet: the Strange Case of Poincaré," 1.)

One way to describe this mistake--which I think is related to a wider philosophical tradition--is to say that Poincaré construed the function of theoretical work as essentially administrative--an activity of information-processing. The job of the theorist par excellence..-is to find the simplest and most systematic arrangement for storing scientific information--within the limits defined by those assumptions so entrenched as to function as a priori principles, i.e., as “definitions in disguise.”  (Stein, 16)

This mistake is a characteristic one in the empiricist tradition. It involves what seems to me a very odd paralogism. One recognizes--and I cannot say too strongly how right I think this is--that experience is our only touchstone of true information. One observes, with Hume, that the data of experience do not logically entail knowledge of “objective existence” or of the future. In application to the results of science, one draws sophisticated conclusions about the merely hypothetical status of the objects and agencies of scientific theory--e.g., atoms or the ether. But one neglects thereby the earlier insight--the Berkeleyan insight, which precedes Hume--that in a fundamental empiricist epistemological analysis all the objects and agencies of common sense and ordinary life have that same status. In effect, this is to distinguish, whether tacitly or explicitly, between the “reality”--or just persuasiveness--of what the ordinary processes of common sense make of the empirical data, and the reality or persuasiveness of the conclusions reached by the sophisticated processes of science. (Stein 17)

[A]n inadequacy in what may be called Poincaré’s conception of the dialectic of scientific concepts and theories, and of their relation to experiment. And that inadequacy I have earlier associated with what I called a very odd paralogism that recurs in the empiricist tradition: in effect, a double standard of epistemological critique, which occurs with some frequency among empiricist and instrumentalist philosophers of science.....

There is no warrant at all in the instrumentalist view for grading the entities of a theory in degrees of reality or fictitiousness--regarding particles as more real than the ether. This is a double standard that recurs in the empiricist tradition, (Stein, 22, and Stein quoting himself.)

Some over-sensitive historians dislike using judgments like 'mistake' in treating of the past. They mistakenly believe that such judgments are a form of anachronism or hindsight bias. Howard Stein, the greatest living philosophical historian of science,* certainly is not afraid to introduce anachronism when it suits his purposes (including in the quoted passages above). But, that's not what is going on in his judgment that a mistake has been made. Agents, except, perhaps, a divine one, can make mistakes, and worse. Even Homer nods. For, one can specify circumstances in which an agent ought to have known better (given existing best practices, regulations, etc.). Malpractice lawyers make a fine living arguing the details.