[FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

[Prof David West]

I will try to reduce it to three elements:

1) Once upon a time I had hoped that that Peirce in specific and Science in general might provide some "sense making" tools/insights that I could apply to fields of inquiry like alchemy, mysticism, and altered states. I am concluding that the hope is untenable as Science and Peirce have excluded them, deemed them "unworthy." They are not Real, by definition, hence can never be Scientific or addressed Scientifically. In parting ways, I imply, rather snidely, that Science is capable only of addressing the "easy problems."

2) If Science / the Scientific approach merits privilege should it not, at minimum, "eat its own dog food?" Should it not be Scientific? The empirical evidence suggests it is not.

3) At the fringes (e.g. quantum stuff) Science is necessarily Philosophical (metaphysical) and metaphorical. The Fringe exists as Science evolves into the future and as Science has evolved from the past.  From philosophy you came and to philosophy you will return.  :)  Also, philosophy is, in some sense, meta to Science. You can have a philosophy of science but not a science of philosophy.

Ignore for the moment the labored attempt to make an analogy between programming and scientific theory. I will restate that at another time in a clearer manner (if warranted by the discussion).

davew



On Thu, Mar 12, 2020, at 2:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> In trying to infer an arc from your post, I reduced it to these bullets:
> 
> 1) preclusion of some lines of investigation
> 2) science is not scientific
> 3) physics devolving into metaphysics
> 4) practical questions science can't answer ("dangerosity")
> 5) robustness and polyphenism in computing
> 6) extrinsic, arbitrary evaluations of scientific theories
> 7) philosophy in science vs. philosophy in meta-science
> 
> I'm largely ignorant of how evolution and natural selection work. But 
> it strikes me that everything you pose here can be viewed from an 
> evolutionary stance. I don't want to throw words at them individually 
> because when we do that, the bubble of words balloons out of control. 
> So, I'll just take overly concise swipes.
> 
> (1) Every investigation we actually take precludes investigations we 
> *might* take because the investigation *modifies* reality. It's a 
> matter of constrained resources (including time and space), 
> serialization, and a generalization of the idea that the experiment 
> modifies the experimental subject. So, preclusion will happen in 
> science *and* any other behavior you choose. (If you consult Brigham 
> Young, you preclude consulting Hui Neng, at least at that one time.)
> 
> (2-5) Any collection of concrete things can be organized to form a 
> predicate from which one extrapolates. From broken shells on the beach 
> to words from dead people. Such assemblies, and the inferences they 
> inspire, are a little bit analogous to bubble universes -- or alternate 
> realities. If the collection "hangs together well", then some 
> inferences are difficult to avoid. If the collection is sparse and 
> divergent, then any given inference is just as "likely" as any other 
> inference. Inversely, a motivated collector will selectively gather the 
> starting collection so as to make her favorite inference more "likely" 
> in the implied universe/bubble/reality.
> 
> (6-7) This is really the complement to (1). The evaluations of 
> scientific theories (or globs of knowledge in any other way of knowing) 
> are endogenously defined by the evolving population of other theories. 
> I doubt they are so much arbitrary as *wandering* and inertial, the 
> scoring/eval of one generation has historical dependence on its lineage 
> of predecessors. To establish the extent to which they are (or are not) 
> arbitrary, we'd need to follow the evaluative methods, the scoring 
> functions, across a statistically significant number of generations and 
> develop quantitative ways of measuring their dependence on past scoring 
> functions. That we have trouble doing that isn't because we can't or 
> don't want to do it. It's because science is a *young* discipline. 
> Rather than bemoan our limitations, we should be working to 
> circumvent/overcome those limitations and make some progress.
> 
> On 3/12/20 4:00 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > 
> > Privileging "Science' — "Scientific Thinking" — "Scientific Method," even to the extent of deeming it the "best available" tool for acquiring knowledge and understanding, raises some, to me, interesting questions.
> > 
> > The first and most obvious, is why certain questions and lines of investigation will axiomatically be excluded from consideration and therefore need not be raised. A lot, if not most, of the things that really interest me have been excluded from scientific consideration — by scientists.
> > 
> > Other questions:
> > 
> > Why does Science have this status when Science is not done scientifically? Feyerabend is my favorite critic, but there are many others, Kuhn and Knorr-Certina immediately come to mind, that document what appears to be a pretty "open secret" that Science is not scientific.
> > 
> > Is Physics, or more specifically Quantum Physics and Quantum Cosmology, dead? The claim is made that physics espoused in String Theory or Quantum Loop Gravity and the various interpretations of Quantum physics are no longer Science but mere philosophy.
> > 
> > Why is Science more demanding of orthodoxy than even the most rigid religion?
> > 
> > Why does it seem there are no clear scientific, Peircian Consensus, answers to questions like, "Just how dangerous is Covid-19? (This is a softball question, I pretty much know the answer.)
> > 
> > I have seen a lot of scientists on the list channeling, and paraphrasing, Giambattista Vico, "One truly understands only what one can create." (Who was a political philosopher.). Most recently, Marcus, who knows only what he can program.
> > 
> > Using programming as a metaphor for science — without any criticism of Marcus — and using as an example what is often considered the very first computer program, Lady Lovelace's calculation of the Fibonacci Numbers. (What was published was not really a program, it was what we could call today a Stack Trace.)
> > 
> > Most computers are embodied Turing Machines, including the "infinite tape" passing beneath the read-write head. This means there are, quite literally, an infinite number of programs that can calculate Fibonacci numbers. Most apparent argument for this statement: I could write the program in any of a thousand different programming languages and the compiled sequence — the string of ones and zeros — would not be identical across those programs.
> > 
> > There is no way to determine if one program is "more correct" or "better" than any other except by positing arbitrary criteria; e.g. number of machine cycles consumed, memory 'footprint', time of execution, readability of the source code.
> > 
> > Something analogous could be said about scientific theory (I think) in that, scientific theories are judged on the basis of extrinsic, arbitrary, criteria.
> > 
> > And this raises my final question (at least for now), although philosophy may not be essential or integral to the conduct of science, why is it not central to questions about meta-science, i.e. the determination of the extrinsic criteria used to evaluate scientific theory and similar meta-questions about science?
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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