Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Keep science irrational (conceptual structure of science)

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/an-irrational-con...rn-science

INTRO (Michael Strevens): Modern science has a whole lot going for it that Ancient Greek or Chinese science did not: advanced technologies for observation and measurement, fast and efficient communication, and well-funded and dedicated institutions for research. It also has, many thinkers have supposed, a superior (if not always flawlessly implemented) ideology, manifested in a concern for objectivity, openness to criticism, and a preference for regimented techniques for discovery, such as randomised, controlled experimentation. I want to add one more item to that list, the innovation that made modern science truly scientific: a certain, highly strategic irrationality.

‘Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth”,’ declared the physicist Richard Feynman in 1963. ‘All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements,’ said Stephen Hawking in 1994. And dipping back a little further in time, we find the 19th-century polymath John Herschel expressing the same thought: ‘To experience we refer, as the only ground of all physical enquiry.’ These are not just personal opinions or propaganda; the principle that only empirical evidence carries weight in scientific argument is widely enforced across the scientific disciplines by scholarly journals, the principal organs of scientific communication. Indeed, it is widely agreed, both in thought and in practice, that science’s exclusive focus on empirical evidence is its greatest strength.

Yet there is more than a whiff of dogmatism about this exclusivity. Feynman, Hawking, Herschel all insist on it: ‘the sole judge’; ‘all I’m concerned with’; ‘the only ground’. Are they, perhaps, protesting too much? What about other considerations widely considered relevant to assessing scientific hypotheses: theoretical elegance, unity, or even philosophical coherence? Except insofar as such qualities make themselves useful in the prediction and explanation of observable phenomena, they are ruled out of scientific debate, declared unpublishable. It is that unpublishability, that censorship, that makes scientific argument unreasonably narrow. It is what constitutes the irrationality of modern science – and yet also what accounts for its unprecedented success.

Before I drag you any further down what might strike you as a rocky, obscure and unpromising path, let me furnish an illustration of scientific censorship in action: the case of beauty... (MORE)
Reply
#2
Syne Offline
Really? Modern science is irrational because it is predicated upon empirical evidence?

That sounds like grade-A postmodernist bullshit to undermine science leftists just don't like.
At the very least, this author obviously doesn't understand the difference between theoretical and experimental science, where the former can require speculation and the latter does not. But something doesn't become scientific knowledge without surviving empirical inspection.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  This simple structure unites all human languages C C 0 198 Sep 21, 2019 09:09 PM
Last Post: C C
  Algorithms maximise profits for online retailers by colluding to keep prices high C C 0 285 Feb 28, 2019 08:40 PM
Last Post: C C
  Major anatomical structure overlooked for decades by researchers C C 1 661 Jun 7, 2015 09:26 PM
Last Post: elte



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)