Part 1: https://mander.xyz/post/13579080
this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Science is a specific social activity that humans engage in (emphasis on social). Science is not the same as fact-finding, or philosophizing, or reasoning. It’s a particular method of peer review that generates shared public knowledge.
Again, “science” is something humans do together. Experimenting, investigating, puzzling, hypothesizing, intuiting, discovering, and knowing are all things you can do alone.
Science is a particular method of peer review...?
This thread prompted me to revisit what I think "science" means, and I've been through a number of different Wikipedia pages, dictionary definitions, etc. but that inquiry just reinforced that this "science == participation in the institutions/communities of science" idea just doesn't seem to hold up.
Where does this idea come from? I keep seeing this "science is this very particular thing, it's not just forming falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them," but then when I look it up, the sources I find say exactly the opposite.
EDIT: To respond, backwards, to the edit below, I guess...? That's not really a gotcha, and not really what I was saying, lol. Please read the whole thread.
I think this theory of science is so prevalent in this thread because you have to adhere to it in order to dunk on Elon Musk.
I doubt most of these ardents would have taken this position in a random thread about sea cucumbers or something.
I like dunking on Musk as much as the next guy, but the amount of double-think people are willing to commit to to do it is always pretty off-putting to me.
It's like every ArsTechnica article on SpaceX has people come out of the woodwork to say that their accomplishments are trash and not even worth reporting because of Elon, which, like, you have to be delusional if you don't think SpaceX is absolutely killing it.
Lol I think you're onto something. Maybe better off sticking to sea cucumber posts.
It did make me learn some things, though. The person who I was responding to told me to "See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science," so I did, and I learned about the Demarcation Problem, Logical Positivism, and some new Karl Popper ideas. So, it has not led to a collaborative discussion, but it was pretty interesting, and I'm much more confident now about what's reasonable to say about what "counts as Science." Time well spent, IMO.
(In case you were wondering: Any activity performed while wearing safety goggles or glasses is technically science.)
See any textbook on the Philosophy of Science.
For example, here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Science is a complex epistemic and social practice that is organized in a large number of disciplines, employs a dazzling variety of methods, relies on heterogeneous conceptual and ontological resources, and pursues diverse goals of equally diverse research communities.”
Your desire to collapse all fact-finding into the concept of “science” is misguided. If everything is “science” then nothing is “science.”
Oh thanks for editing in an example-- that wasn't there when I wrote my reply, but what did you think of the other Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy links I provided?
That article that you linked (Scientific Pluralism) is an interesting read, but it's more about the importance of diversity in the scientific community... it doesn't really address the Demarcation Problem, and it doesn't discuss peer review or anything as far as I could tell.
Mentioning in passing that "science is social" (which is IMO uncontroversially true in a non-demarcation way, btw) is a few shades away from "any textbook will tell you that science is a particular process of peer review." I think the Science and Pseudo-Science entry that I linked is more germane.
I’m not sure what we are arguing about here. The concept of “science” is fairly new and most people we would think of as “scientists” throughout history, such as Newton, actually considered themselves natural philosophers, hence the P in PhD. The modern concept of science arose as a kind of description of something humans do together. “Science” doesn’t mean figuring out the truth. That wouldn’t make any sense, because philosophy, logic, mathematics, etc, are all concerned with figuring out the truth as well. Science is an institution, a social endeavor (except when it isn’t — need counter examples). The Royal Academy of Sciences was created for that reason, funny enough — because Francis Bacon had pointed out that “science requires an intellectual community” (let’s be honest, humans are fairly dumb on their own — standing on the shoulders of giants and all that).
Anyway, in the mid 1950s there was a now famous work by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which added an extra layer to the debate when he pointed out aspects of “science” that seem to be… not about finding the truth at all. But I’m guessing you already know that. Human beings are driven by many motivations, after all, and finding the truth is rarely one of them.
Anyway, the demarcation problem, yes: it’s very difficult to come up with a definition that perfectly picks out legitimate science without also applying to pseudo nonsense (see Pigliucci‘s Nonsense on Stilts). That said, we know what is and isn’t science. We are just having trouble coming up with a perfect definition that works every time.
Incidentally, having trouble defining science is literally my position. Science is something we do that isn’t as tidy and uncomplicated as “figuring out the truth.” It clearly involves some sort of methodology and it clearly involves people checking each other’s work and so on and so forth, and it’s different from math and different from astrology. You tell me how you want to define it, but it sure as shit isn’t “doing stuff in one’s garage alone without writing it down or reproducing the results,“ which is what Elon Musk seems to think.
Well that's a reach. I had to buy a new laptop charger and find facts about what voltage, etc. I needed... I certainly don't consider that fact-finding exercise to be science, and I don't think I said anything to suggest that.
But okay, I don't have a textbook handy, but let's see what we can find out about the Philosophy of Science:
Philosophy of Science - Wikipedia
Seems to pretty clearly indicate "lots of interesting and useful ideas, no consensus." Peer review mentioned 0 times. The "Defining Science" section links to a page for the demarcation problem, so let's go look at that.
Demarcation Problem - Wikipedia
"The debate continues after more than two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields."
And the article basically continues to that effect, IMO: Demarcation is difficult, unclear, and there is no consensus. Peer review mentioned 0 times.
Maybe it's just Wikipedia that has this misconception. Let's check some other sources.
The Philosophy of Science - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
Re: Demarcation problem:
Starting to sound familiar. Lots of opinions from Aristotle to Cartwright, none of whom highlight peer review or acceptance by the institutions as criteria. The page does talk about empiricism, parsimony, falsification, etc. though, consistent with other sources.
Glossary - "science" - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
This one is simple:
Let's look at the checklist.
Science is embedded in the scientific community - UC Berkeley, Understanding Science 101
The page heading sounds pretty prescriptive, and that's about the closest I can find that claims "if it's not peer reviewed, it's not science." The body (IMO rightfully) describes the importance of community involvement in science, but doesn't say anything like "it's not science unless it involves the community."
Take this excerpt about Gregor Mendel:
So yes, sharing his findings with the world was why it was able to have an impact, but I don't think it's reasonable to interpret that he wasn't doing science while he was working in isolation, or that it only became science retroactively after it was a) shared, and b) accepted.
Let's take a look at another textbook and see what it says:
1.6: Science and Non-Science - Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science
This chapter suggests that you can take two approaches to demarcation:
For theories - They're clear that there are no clear universal demarcation criteria, but offer these suggestions:
For changes - This pertains specifically to whether a change to "a scientific mosaic" is scientific or not, which necessarily pertains to a scientific community. But I'd argue that this analysis seems pretty clearly downstream of a priori participation in a scientific community, not attempting to define science as such.
Didn't read the whole textbook, so I might still be missing something, but the focus in the chapter is still definitely on the properties of the inquiry, not on the scientific institutions surrounding it.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Also looked at the entries for Scientific Method and Pseudo-science, which seem to be consistent with the other sources
TL;DR/Conclusion
So I'm still getting a really strong signal that:
So... Do I still seem misguided? Are Wikipedia and UC Berkeley and this textbook called "Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science" and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy all also misguided? Or am I just interpreting them wrong?
Like I started this investigation feeling 100% ready to learn that my concept of "what Science is" was misguided... But idk, I did a bunch of reading based on your suggestion, and I gotta say I feel pretty guided right now.
If you wanna throw something else to read my way though, I'll happily have a look at it.
I did follow your link to UC Berkeley (the first one I clicked), and wouldn’t you know it, as I expected, they claim the following:
Huh, look at that. Apparently involving “the scientific community” is part of science.
Again, this is from your link, which you didn’t read, I assume because your patron saint, Dunning-Kruger, frowns on reading.
That's not like a big gotcha, lol... I actually said "Let's go look at that checklist," and had a link to it (in a quote). Those checklist items correspond directly to section headings, and I quoted and responded to the even-more-strongly-worded section heading directly.
In fact, I included it as the best evidence I found for your point: That if I read any textbook on the philosopy of science, it will spell out how "science" is "a particular method of peer review." Well... I found some evidence that kind of points that way, and a whole boatload that suggests that that isn't really thought of as part of the Demarcation Problem. I wasn't going in trying to "be right," that's just what I found.
Like I put quite a bit of work in good faith to try to understand where you're coming from, but I don't feel like you're trying to meet me half way.
Look, here’s my point more concisely: can you name one scientist, just one, whose work isn’t subject to peer review? I can’t think of any. Given that science is ostensibly just the activity that scientists engage in, and all of them do peer review, that’s probably important, right?
When I look around my University I see people doing something, let’s call it “science.” I’d like to define this activity to distinguish it from other, similar activities. The fact that my efforts encounter a Demarcation Problem means the definition is more convoluted than simply “empirical investigation” or “fact finding”. If science could be captured with such broad strokes, there wouldn’t be a demarcation problem!
Elon Musk seems to “think” (and I use this word loosely) that science is when people do experiments or try to figure out the truth, apparently without reproducibility or peer review. But if that were the case, there would be no debate, no demarcation problem, no counter examples.
What we need to do is describe what scientists do that non-scientists don’t do with sufficient rigor to distinguish the two groups. As I said, peer review seems to be an indispensable feature of science. Do you have your own definition or suggestions?
P.S. just for future discussions, please don’t use Wikipedia for philosophy or mathematics. It’s a good resource of dates and names but that’s about it. For philosophy you can use textbooks or the Stanford Encyclopedia.
Everyone is always a fan of going over to a dictionary and making only one definition of a word "the true one" because it falls in line with their particular argument of the moment.
We can use any sound or collection of letters to describe any phenomenon you please, and I’m not against using “science” to mean “empirical inquiry” or whatever. Just keep in mind you’ll be referring to something different than philosophers of science who use that word. That’s why we have multiple words for similar phenomena, and if you ignore the definitions then you can’t make yourself understood.