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Interview with Lee McIntyre: Science denial & post-truth (on our new Dark Age)

#1
C C Offline
Science denial and post-truth (on our new Dark Age)
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/scienc...mes-series

INTRO: Lee McIntyre is interested in the philosophy of the social sciences, as well as attempts to undermine science and the appropriate response to these attempts to undermine scientists. here he discusses science denial, its dangers, what to do about it, why shouldn't it be tolerated, the demarcation question, whether social sciences are really sciences, why we should focus on the failures of science, post-truth, why philosophy of science is useful, do scientific laws exist, falling short of certainty, anti-realism, induction and Bayes, whether he's a mad dog naturalist, and finally why we're in the dark ages of human behaviour... (MORE - the interview)
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(their) SAMPLE EXCERPTS: 'I offer the idea that what is really special about science is not its logic or method, but its attitude toward evidence. The scientific attitude is the idea that (1) scientists care about evidence and (2) they are willing to change their mind on the basis of new evidence. And that's it.'

'Seventy years of awesome success by those who wished to deny the truth about evolution, climate change, etc., did not go unnoticed by political operatives. One day they said "hey, if you can lie about scientific facts, you can lie about anything." Like maybe the outcome of an election? And yes, I think that one of the other roots is post-modernism, which is largely left-wing. Now they didn't intend it. They were playing around with the idea that there was no such thing as objective truth, and that perhaps this meant that anyone making an assertion of truth was merely making a power grab. That all sounds fine when you're in the university doing literary criticism, but at a certain point these ideas began to create the "science wars," where humanists began to attack the idea of scientific truth.'

'What I believe in is the doctrine of underdetermination. I believe that reality is consistent with many different descriptions of it, some of which offer good theories and some of which do not. But even among the ones that fit, there are many that might work. So how can we non-arbitrarily choose one and call that reality? That seems to me what the realists want to do. They are privileging the theories we now have over the ones we might have had, or might have in the future.'

'In the past, I've often referred to myself as a methodological naturalist, because I believe that the methods of natural and social science should be identical. But I think you're asking about a more stringent version of naturalism: the idea that all phenomena at the secondary level can be explained by phenomena at the primary level. Some people take that all the way through physicalism, which is an epistemological commitment that comes out of a very sparse ontology. And there are other proud reductionists out there. But I'm not one of them.'

'I am against any kind of ideological interference in scientific reasoning. To me, "dark age" thinking is emblematic of the type of mind that wants an answer -- that wants certainty at all costs -- and damn when the evidence tells you you're wrong. To me, that's the mark of an incurious mind.'
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#2
Syne Offline
Then scientists should quit talking about their opinions and stick to the evidence. They can't expect most people to tell the difference if they can't keep the two separated themselves. Science denial largely stems from denial of opinions falsely presented under the veneer of scientific authority.
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#3
Yazata Offline
(Jul 24, 2021 06:00 AM)C C quotes some champions of scientism who Wrote: Science denial and post-truth (on our new Dark Age)

That title is awfully tendentious and hyperbolic.

Quote:INTRO: Lee McIntyre is interested in the philosophy of the social sciences, as well as attempts to undermine science and the appropriate response to these attempts to undermine scientists. here he discusses science denial, its dangers, what to do about it, why shouldn't it be tolerated

How did we get in the position where deciding for one's self what to believe or disbelieve is condemned and where those of us who don't automatically believe whatever the professors tell us to believe are classed as a "danger" who "shouldn't be tolerated"?

How did science turn from an open-minded free-inquiry into the workings of the natural world, into a quasi-theological source of revelation and unquestionable authority?

I think that we all know that the answer is the quite recent politicization of science.


Quote:SAMPLE EXCERPTS: 'I offer the idea that what is really special about science is not its logic or method, but its attitude toward evidence. The scientific attitude is the idea that (1) scientists care about evidence and (2) they are willing to change their mind on the basis of new evidence. And that's it.'

That isn't objectionable as it stands. But if McIntyre is trying to suggest that science is uniquely concerned with evidence, in contrast with the rest of life which isn't, I'd say that he's drifting dangerously close to scientism.

Quote:"Seventy years of awesome success by those who wished to deny the truth about evolution, climate change, etc.

Evolution in the broad sense of change over time is obvious from all human experience. I doubt very much whether anyone "denies" it. (that's just stupid.) And Darwin's theory of the origin of species by natural selection is an explanatory hypothesis. It may or may not be true (I think that it probably is in its broad outlines) but that's not something that McIntyre actually knows, unless he possesses the proverbial "God's eye" view of reality.

So right there we have an item of scientific lore slippy-sliding from being an explanatory hypothesis to being something that laypeople are somehow obligated to believe, on pain of being denounced as "deniers", today's equivalent of "heathen".

Here's a question that I'd like to hear McIntyre answer: Why is it so important to him that public, whether laypeople or scientists, all think alike and believe the same things? Aren't we supposed to "celebrate diversity"? Why is intellectual diversity excluded? Can McIntyre see the authoritarian and totalitarian implications in what he's saying?

Quote:did not go unnoticed by political operatives. One day they said "hey, if you can lie about scientific facts, you can lie about anything."

How did skepticism and doubt turn into "lies"? McIntyre seems to be slippy-sliding again. If I don't believe everything the authority figures tell me to believe (and I most emphatically don't) I'm "lying"? How does that work?

Quote:Like maybe the outcome of an election?

Except that there's abundant evidence of electoral irregularities. That doesn't prove that Biden's election was fraudulent, but it certainly raises the possibility. There's far more evidence of 2020 election irregularities than there was for Trump being some kind of Russian agent (virtually none in that case) or for his being "Putin's puppet". Yet the largely imaginary accusations against Trump led to the Mueller investigation and to years of headlines announcing that Trump was done, that he was going down. So why is it so wrong to demand that the electoral irregularities be investigated equally thoroughly?

And what in the world does any of that have to do with science?

Quote:And yes, I think that one of the other roots is post-modernism, which is largely left-wing. Now they didn't intend it. They were playing around with the idea that there was no such thing as objective truth, and that perhaps this meant that anyone making an assertion of truth was merely making a power grab. That all sounds fine when you're in the university doing literary criticism, but at a certain point these ideas began to create the "science wars," where humanists began to attack the idea of scientific truth.'

It wasn't just post-modernism. Another big contributor was feminist philosophy of science. I think that the skepticism about science promoted by both of these was motivated by their sense that scientific findings might go against their beliefs and their agenda. So scientific findings had to be preemptively deconstructed and delegitimatized.

The difference today is that the lefties of various sorts increasingly feel that science is on their side. So far from trying to delegitimatize science, they are suddenly demanding that it become society's unquestioned authority, the modern day equivalent of the teachings of the medieval church. Things that must never be doubted.

Quote:What I believe in is the doctrine of underdetermination.  I believe that reality is consistent with many different descriptions of it, some of which offer good theories and some of which do not. But even among the ones that fit, there are many that might work. So how can we non-arbitrarily choose one and call that reality? That seems to me what the realists want to do. They are privileging the theories we now have over the ones we might have had, or might have in the future.

Reality is what it is and is in no way dependent on what science says about it. Science is descriptive. I agree with McIntyre about underdetermination. But perhaps the proper conclusion there is not to throw out realism (which is what many post-modernists wanted to do) but to adopt a bit of fallibilism about our scientific theories, even the best of them. Our best scientific theories aspire to being true descriptive accounts of the world around us (hence the realism). But that doesn't mean that they are necessarily true or that our best theories a few hundred years from now won't look dramatically different. 

Quote:'In the past, I've often referred to myself as a methodological naturalist, because I believe that the methods of natural and social science should be identical.

Why? Doesn't a subject like history involve a big interpretive element? We don't just want to describe what physically happened, but why it happened. What were people thinking? How did they conceive of things? What were their motivations? I don't see how that could possibly be shoehorned into the methodology of theoretical physics.

Quote:'I am against any kind of ideological interference in scientific reasoning. To me, "dark age" thinking is emblematic of the type of mind that wants an answer -- that wants certainty at all costs -- and damn when the evidence tells you you're wrong. To me, that's the mark of an incurious mind.'

Yes, I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately much of the rhetoric up above seems to run directly counter to that. We shouldn't just assume that the scientists will always be the ones with the unassailable evidence and that it's the little people, the non-scientists, that must change even their most deeply held and most beloved beliefs and ideas whenever they encounter a "scientists say..." story in the media. (On pain of not being "tolerated" in our brave new world.)

We can't escape a world in which a certain kind of mind demands "certainty at all costs" by turning science into 1984's Ministry of Truth.



(Jul 24, 2021 08:33 AM)Syne Wrote: Then scientists should quit talking about their opinions and stick to the evidence. They can't expect most people to tell the difference if they can't keep the two separated themselves. Science denial largely stems from denial of opinions falsely presented under the veneer of scientific authority.

Said much more succinctly than my post and I agree.

One problem is that "the evidence" is oftentimes already front-loaded by the personal interests of the scientists that collected the data. A scientist decades ago employed by a tobacco company would be expected to seek out evidence that smoking cigarettes isn't harmful. Today, a scientist who is a climate change activist can be expected to seek out evidence of the awful effects of climate change. We see it all the time in the "social sciences". The results of probably most sociological "studies" reflect how the sociologists performing the study want things to be, with the "study" carefully designed to deliver those results. It's stuff like this that contribute to the 'reproducibility crisis'.

And when successfully earning a PhD, getting hired and getting tenure is increasingly a function of one's political commitments, one would expect the results of science, including "the evidence" to be biased from the very beginning.

That's what we are seeing now and it's why I'm increasingly skeptical about what the media tells me in the name of science. It's oftentimes of the "Everything you believe about X is wrong!!" genre. There's no end of that these days.
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