The Laplace Fallacy (continued)
Recently I had noted earlier, following my reading of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, that between the Galilean/Copernican period and Newton’s Principia no new scientific data (no facts) arose to distinguish between these two theories. Yet by the time of Newton’s writing of the Principia the dispute was settled. This was settled not by facts but by a process that has more in common with religious conversion than than the popular notions of what is comprised by scientific method.
Physics has seen three major revolutions. Following the development or conception of what we in this “late modernity” [aside: more on that later] period call Physics by the Greeks the overriding principles underpinning reality were driven by a belief that the world and cosmic bodies followed geometric and numeric patterns. Observation and insight were interpreted within this framework. During the period noted above, a conversion began to occur. A mechanical constraint arithmetic model replaced the old. This held until the latter part of the 19th to the early 20th century when it too was replaced. Currently the view of how to best understand the universe is one driven by mathematical invariances (symmetries). Data and experiment are not and have not been the driving force in moving persons and communities from one to another underlying model for how to perceive nature. Passion and persuasion and conversion are better descriptions of what occurred.
Yesterday I began to unwind what Polanyi was driving at with his attack on the mechanistic view of nature. He principally objected to the idea that that the all kinds of experience can be understood in terms of atomic data. This is more than just a rejection of reductionist methods of scientific advancement. And it is not something which today is abandoned with the discovery of quantum uncertainty, i.e., the free willed electron. Scientific metaphors have a way of becoming dominant metaphors applied outside of their realm of application. Consider how uncertainty, relativity, and evolution are examples of scientific ideas have been abused when used as metaphor in the social arenas. The scientific community using those ideas has given a strange credence to their application in other arenas. So too has the notion that man and his society is ultimately are just collections of clockwork apparatus. It is the dangers related to those, essentially abuses, of the conception of a comprehensible, mechanistic, deterministic universe applied to social studies (econ and politics) and life sciences that the chief dangers lie.
Consider the following abbreviated example, which I hope to elaborate on later. Man when viewed in a mechanistic way enables one to set aside models of human dignity in favor of man as a consumer. Hedonistic consumerism can replace a more, well, frankly human (and realistic) view of man in society.
Filed under: Ethics & Morality • Mark O. • Science
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Thanks. I still don’t get it. What is different between what you are saying and that reductionism doesn’t always help you to understand a system? Possibly not even in principle? And yes, there are the unknown unknowns, and the adjacent possibles etc etc.
I find it quit disturbing how many people accuse natural scientists, predominantly physicists, of being blindly attached to reductionism and a mechanical explanation for all and everything, resulting in the attempt to explain human behavior as particle physics. This is simply ridiculous. The physicists I know who fit in this drawer are a very small minority (like, one out of a thousand or so). If you are asking for a paradigm shift that recognizes reduction to fundamental principles is not always possible, and even if possible not always useful, this paradigm shift has already taken place, at least some decades ago.
And determinism too has been given up long ago. For one, quantum mechanics is not deterministic but, more importantly, though chaotic systems are ‘in principle’ deterministic, they are ‘in practice’ nondeterministic.
Bee,
I’m not accusing physicists of being blindly attached to reductionism. Actual scientists know that what they are doing is not described as “dispassionately organizing data which are then best fit to theories following general principles like Mach’s simplicity (or Occam’s razor if you will)”.
I’m trying to express how much science is a human enterprise. That passion plays a primary role. That most of the scientific process is ineffable, a process passed by apprenticeship transmitted from master(s) to students. That major paradigmatic shifts (like the three noted above) occur much in the same manner as religious conversion … and not so much dispassionately on the basis of experimental data.
(btw I am (or at least was) a physicist. Now I’m a programmer. I got my degree (doctorate) at U of Chicago in 90.)
Sure, I agree. I think it would help if scientists were to learn more about the sociological effects that can interfere with scientific progress. It’s not that I think stubbornness doesn’t have it’s benefits, I just think that there are some self-reinforcing problems in the academic system that result in too large inertia, conservatism, and occurrence of fashionable topics that remain fashionable and overpopulated long after the promise of the research area has been declining. That btw are all emerging phenomena in a tightly coupled system … 🙂
Bee,
… the sociological effects that can interfere with scientific progress is not “the problem”. Scientific progress and the process is a human (sociological) enterprise.
I might also mention that Michael Polanyi too is a scientist. He was an well known physical chemist before embarking on writing a number of works in the philosophy of science.
Scientific progress and the process is a human (sociological) enterprise.
That doesn’t mean any sociological effect is necessarily supportive to progress. Consider group-think to take an over-abused example. While a well-dosed amount of group-identity is motivational, too much of it leads to a deviation of interest towards protection of the group rather than evolving its principles. I totally agree that science is a sociological enterprise. That exactly why I’m saying it would be good if scientists who practice it learn that!