Point Counterpoint
by JS
Part two in my response to this.
The section of the speech on nuclear winter is the most convincing part of the argument. It is also involves a particular piece of history that I don’t know very well, so I am forced to take Michael Crichton’s retelling of the facts at face value. Even in this section though, I think we can draw out an important distinction that this speech blurs.
First, you should know that I don’t view science as a kind of pure Aristotelean endeavor. Science is a human process whose end result has very special properties. The core property is falsifiability. Michael Crichton observes:
Science … requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.
To restate: A scientific result is verifiable in some way that is independent of who does the verifying. This is true but incomplete. I’ll ask a simple question, where do these verifiable results come from?
Certainly they don’t appear fully fledged from the minds of scientists. They arise organically out of a process that’s designed to search for these kinds of verifiable truths. Even Michael Crichton references the messy process of science, if only to further blur the distinction between the ends and the means:
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
So what is consensus to science? Certainly a verifiable result provides (trivial) consensus. But the kind of consensus referenced here applies to the process of doing science more than the product of doing science. Consensus forms naturally around hypotheses. Scientists tend to be interested in particular hypotheses as groups. Maybe the hypotheses being explored are relevant to some problem people as a whole are facing. Maybe the problem is a bottleneck in the theory that is preventing an entire field from moving forward. Maybe the problem isn’t any of those things, maybe it’s just a fad.
The point is that consensus forms around hypotheses as a part of the process of science, science as a human endeavor. This has always been the case (as the quote above from Michael Crichton backhandedly admits). It isn’t even a particularly grievous problem, because the end result of science has the verification property, so we often do not have to worry about whatever messy process actually produced a result. We can check it.
So when Michael Crichton says something like:
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus.
Keep in mind that the process of science often has everything to do with consensus, even if the end result has nothing to do with consensus.
Comments
Another way to say what Crichton was saying is perhaps:
It doesn’t matter how many people believed it to be true, once it has been falsified, it is no longer accepted scientific truth.
I believe he means “work” to be the process of falsification, after all just agreeing with accepted consensus isn’t really “work” is it?
- D
PS This is the old “just because it was a majority doesn’t mean they are right” argument … kind of apropro given the latest majority blunder.
You make it sound like scientists do nothing but falsify theories. Also, what majority blunder?
I suspect a sneaky political pot-shot…
Actually it was trap. But JS was too smart to fall into it.
But just fill in the blank with just about any majority blunder you want, there are plenty to go around ….. on both sides of the political aisle and in many other areas as well. (Financial meltdown for example)
Scientists do more than just try to falsify theories, they also formulate new ones when they have falsified an old one. (In the process of falsification they may not succeed, essentially that’s verification.) They also spend a lot of time making sure their data, instruments, data analysis methods (statistics most importantly) etc. are collecting valid and correctly interpreting information so that falsification, verification (or new theory formulation) is based on true empirical evidence and sound methodolgy.
At least that’s how its supposed to work. Agree that its a human enterprise and often the actual doesn’t live up to the ideal, but that’s no reason to stop insisting on the ideal, is it? Once you start down that path its a slippery slope to no standards at all, and I don’t think we (humans) really want to go there.
[...] this week have delayed part three in my series on science. I wanted to hoist the following from the comments (from commenter Dad): Scientists do more than just try to falsify theories, they also formulate new [...]