What is Science?
It’s not uncommon for people to confuse science with tools science uses to increase its ability to understand the environment. Philosophy calls the study of our limits of understanding Ontology. All those giant machines, powerful computers, and armies of lab rats are really just attempts to increase the limits of our understanding of the universe. In fact, science itself arose from a need to change the way we came to know things, offering us a way to increase our limits of understanding over existing ways of knowing. Science is just a way of knowing things. It belongs to a larger body of philosophy called Epistemology. Science itself is a simple set of rules designed to overcome the limitations of the three archaic ways we can come to know things, but lets look closer at epistemology’s appeals to knowledge to understand the need for a new way of knowing things.
The four ways we come to know things:
Appeals to Authority – This is when we believe a thing to be true because somebody in power says they are.
Appeals to History – This is when we believe a thing to be true because it has always been thought to be true.
Appeals to Intuition – This is when we believe a thing to be true because it seems or feels like it should be true.
Appeals to Science – This is when we believe a thing to be true because it has been tested and found to be true.
The first three appeals are prone to mistakes, lack mechanisms for self-correction, and are decidedly undemocratic. Science has rules in place to limit mistakes, allow for self-correction, and allow anyone who can read to participate in deciding what the evidence means.
Consider the following instances to understand the problems associated with the older appeals and why they ultimately so failed humanity. I also include a case of how science deals with incorrect findings from within its own ranks.
Appeals to Authority – For over a thousand years the earth was thought to be the center of the universe, despite the fact that the observational data didn’t support this. This incorrect depiction of the universe was declared the truth by religious and state authorities. These appeals are almost impossible to correct, because admitting your fact was wrong opens the door to question why the institution should have authority in the first place. To highlight how difficult it is to change an appeal to authority is after the Catholic Church tried Galileo of heresy in 1633 for showing that earth was not the center of the universe, the Church didn’t repeal his conviction until 1991.
Appeals to History – Almost since the beginning of recorded history slavery and the exclusion of women from politics were seen as the status quo. Even when the U.S. was framing the constitution in the 1790s these two historical appeals were specifically written into the document. Today it seems ridicules that nobody tried to change these appeals, but people had tried for centuries, just unsuccessfully. Historical appeals are very difficult to change not only because they have no precedent for change, but they are actually based on precedent, right or wrong. However, just because we have always done something a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
Appeals to Intuition – Humans are pattern-forming animals and it has served us well for figuring out growing seasons, animal migration routes, and predator evasion. Unfortunately, we can’t turn off this ability and we continue to seek out patterns where none exist, or simplify complex patterns into incorrect simple ones. My field of expertise is social psychology where we have made an art out of designing experiments that cause appeals to intuition to fail. However, the most obvious of these is simply watching the sun and moon travel through the sky. Our intuition tells us they both travel around the earth, but we know this is only true for the moon. The problem with correcting a mistake made by intuition is that you literally are asked to believe something else instead of your lying eyes!
Appeals to Science – The first three appeals have been with us even before we evolved into Homo sapiens. The appeal to science was created to make a more robust and enduring system to understand the complexities of the universe. To correct for authority bias, no individual has any more say in what science facts are than anyone else. The collective of those experts working in the scientific field related to the relevant fact all review and rate any data or findings for their validity. Even as great a figure as Albert Einstein was, he had a great many critics who regularly denounced his work and often these critics were right. For all the great contribution Einstein made to science, he has an equally impressive number of failures that were rejected by science. To correct for historical bias, no finding, no matter how well tested, remains undone in the face of contradictory evidence. Newton’s theory of gravity was tested for centuries earning the highest accolade science can bestow the title of a Natural Law. For 300 years it held this ultimate position until Einstein showed mathematically that the theory of gravity didn’t correctly predict cosmological and photon motions. This of course started a great debate in science that wasn’t resolved until Einstein’s new theory of space-time curvature better predicted the movement of the largest and smallest objects better than Newton’s theory. So science moved Newton’s theory into the lesser role of describing only specific instances of Einstein’s more universal theory. To correct for intuition bias, all findings are peer-reviewed by other scholars. Not only does the author of the new findings have to defend the new findings, they have to describe how they were acquired, so that reviewers can replicate the study. Even after the peer-review process is complete, the final study is published and made available to everyone, allowing even more review and comment from the public-at-large. If a scientist or outside party cannot reliably reproduce those findings they are considered discredited by the science community. In 1987 two researchers at the University of Utah, Drs. Pons and Fleischman, held a news conference to declare that they had achieved the very elusive feat of cold fusion. Cold fusion is the fusing of two atoms (this is what powers the sun) to generate excess energy, but at room temperature. Based on their initial report, it would be possible for anyone to provide all the power needed to run a household for a year from a single gallon of seawater. Think about that for a second and how that might change the world. Of course, the entire world was fascinated by this discovery and it’s potential. Unfortunately, These two researchers hadn’t sent their findings out for peer-review before calling a press conference to announce their findings. Once they made their experiment public, cold fusion researchers around the world tried to replicate the findings. None of them did. When faced with this lack of validation, Pons and Fleischman went back and reran their experiments and began to get worse and worse results each time, eventually retracting the initial paper, but still defending that they had found something. The University of Utah fired them both for scientific misconduct and the scientific community labeled them as frauds. They still continue their work at a small university in southern France, but have never been able to come close to repeating their would-be world-changing experiment.
It’s pretty clear that when it comes to understanding anything of consequence, science provides the best way of knowing the facts, but curiously many people in the world still try and challenge scientific theories and findings. Oddly, if you asked those same people why they challenge science, they invariably claim to be relying on one of the flawed appeals to knowledge. If you were to restate the possible ways that knowledge could be flawed they almost always agree with you. The problem is that most people don’t know that how they get they information is at least as important as the information itself. If you know the information source is relying on a flawed appeal, you should be very skeptical of the information and seek alternate sources for verification. If the information is scientific information that has been peer-reviewed, published, and replicated you can be pretty sure it’s as good as any information available.
To be a truly educated person you must always apply critical thinking to the information you receive, the things that you believe, and the weight you give to any arguments you hear. You will hear a lot of claims of ‘fact’ during you life and you now how to evaluate those claims. Should Obama’s ‘hope and change’ carry any more weight than Palin’s ‘new America?’ How about the Pope’s or some monarch’s claims of divinity? Is capitalism the right economic system because it has always seemed to work the best, or are there other better ways? Should you go with your gut feeling on things, or should you take some time to evaluate the whole problem in a scientific manner? So take some time to think about the ‘facts’ you already know and how you came to know them. Should you still believe them or should you be finding better answers?
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ou're a weird dude, Tenkly. Knife fights with women and you dress your cat up in sweater vests."- ZigmundZag