Madness in the method: why your notions of how science works are probably wrong

[Andres Ramos]

You know what the scientific method is until you try to define it: it’s a set of rules that scientists adopt to obtain a special kind of knowledge. The list is orderly, teachable and straightforward, at least in principle. But once you start spelling out the rules, you realize that they really don’t capture how scientists work, which is a lot messier. In fact, the rules exclude much of what you’d call science, and includes even more of what you don’t. You even begin to wonder why anyone thought it necessary to specify a “scientific method” at all.

 

Article from physicsworld

[L. Garrigue]

To try to have simple first principles on which you can rely, because it's efficient and intellectually satisfying. But when the first principles are not adapted anymore there is huge inertia on destroying them, and it's understandable because they enabled us to know everything we know and build something really strong... so we are trying destroy those first principles with electronic circuits and water building will come next

[Andres Ramos]

So true. I guess you experienced this yourself a lot since you are working in the academic world.

[L. Garrigue]

I talk very little about ITC there, but indeed those people are closed, they are the only ones I don't manage to convince

[Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal]

I still have to read the article but I'm sure I'll like it (I quickly saw a reference to the American pragmatics which are my two greatest philosophers of science).
One thing I've learned is that the method is mostly designed by philosophers, but, most scientists aren't philosophers, and, in fact, they don't trust them. Scientists argue that only fellow scientists should tell them how they should do what they do.

That almost makes sense, except it doesn't.

If it did, then engineers would tell scientists that they don't need them, and they can invent and build stuff without needing to know how the universe from which the things are made works.
That is, the techniques to apply to each scientific field is one thing.. the method is something else. Because that method connects the criteria for the techniques with the so-called epistemic value of the results. 

Edited December 10, 2020 by Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal

[Andres Ramos]

22 hours ago, Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal said:

I still have to read the article but I'm sure I'll like it (I quickly saw a reference to the American pragmatics which are my two greatest philosophers of science).
One thing I've learned is that the method is mostly designed by philosophers, but, most scientists aren't philosophers, and, in fact, they don't trust them. Scientists argue that only fellow scientists should tell them how they should do what they do.

That almost makes sense, except it doesn't.

If it did, then engineers would tell scientists that they don't need them, and they can invent and build stuff without needing to know how the universe from which the things are made works.
That is, the techniques to apply to each scientific field is one thing.. the method is something else. Because that method connects the criteria for the techniques with the so-called epistemic value of the results. 

You pointed out something interesting. The scientific method was not deliberately developed but rather adopted by scientists. Thus their method is rather something that proved very well to manage physical things. To think that it is capable of explaining the wheels and gears of the universe is an a priori statement that literally comes out of nothing else but the trust in the immense success of the technical progress that took place in the past centuries. But both areas have no relation to each other basically.

In the end it's belief, as always.

[Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal]

56 minutes ago, Andres Ramos said:

In the end it's belief, as always.

I think this is the key statement.

Knowledge is (canonically) defined, since Plato, as "Justified True Belief". Therefore, every token of knowledge is, first and foremost, something we believe in. The honest distinction between what we know, and what we believe, is the certainty attributed to one and the other, whatever the reason for doing so. The justification for the promotion of mere belief to the status of knowledge is, in the end, a psychological justification, despite the attempt to make it an objective one, as "the method" so tries.

To a extent, I think of modern Science as the religion of the 21st century. We are all believers in the scientific theories, even though, the huge majority of humans have not even a clue about why things are they way we are taught they are. From the point of view of the ordinary person being simply and directly taught--or informed about--a scientific fact, it is the faith in "science" which causes him to stamp, individually, the label of knowledge to the now adopted belief on what was learned. 

Granted, the cast of scientists make sure (supposedly at least) that they gathered sufficient justification to grant status of knowledge to the propositions they broadcast, but then, everyone else, which is 99% of humanity, just follows suit. It is in this dynamics that modern science is, in my opinion, an adapted form of religion.

And then, as it had to happen, people, and to a large extent even scientists, are contaminated with dogmatism, just as in good old actual religion.

That is way I'm a big supporter of this relatively new thing known as "Bayesian Epistemology", which essentially states that knowledge is not ultimately about the truth (hence, a token of knowledge isn't implicitly "(certainly) true" just because it is "known"), but about its operational value, or practical utility.  In there, every proposition isn't either true or false, but is given a certainty value which is refined all the time in an endless loop, and the body of things we know are just those propositions whose (current) certainty value are above some usability threshold. Reasoning, conflicts and contradictions are solved in the way probabilities are (for in this case, the certainty of a proposition if the Bayesian probability of it being the case).

As an engineer, you might be familiar with these ideas already. There is this thing known as "fuzzy logic" which is sort of the same, but there difference here is that this is not just about making a logical calculation on a computer, the way IA does it, but about a way for all us people to think about belief systems, knowledge, the truth and best way to handle that.

 

 

 

 

 

[Andres Ramos]

What a great statement Fernando. It seems you have been dealing with those questions since long. They caused me some "clicks" in my head, especially what you said about certainty matches perfectly the process how a theory is adopted in mainstream science. Actually there is no detailed process thst specifies EXACTLY the acceptance criteria to match for a theory to be adopted. Of course a theory must be based on the currently accepted knowledge, it must have specifications for falsification, a.s.o, but the moment when the scientific world says, "Yes this is true. We add this to our knowledge standards" is blurry, it's creeping in somehow. This merely is the growing of certainty you mentioned above a threshold that no one really can specify.

Another interesting analogy came to my mind after reading your post. If scientific knowledge is based on a experienced certainty then it has some analogy with quantum mechanics where the location and trajectory of an electron is also based on probability assumptions. Scientific knowledge in this sense is regarded as more objective if the probability of being objective is more positively valued as in other cases. Thus scientific knowledge maybe is a probability wave in itself. In my thoughts your "certainty" equals my "probability".

This is even more fascinating since the certainty or probability is based on  trust and not on hard objective acceptance criteria.

[Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal]

Hi @Andres Ramos

I've certainly spent a lot of time thinking about these things. 

I grew up in a spiritist church, reading books filled with a lot of very detailed information about the spiritual world, and, in particular, it's deep involvement in the physical universe and its processes. At a certain age, around early high school, I wouldn't recognize much of a difference between, say, the explanations of the brain in the biology class and that of the mind in the church's book on the subject. But then, when entering college, I've learned about the scientific method and I kind of flipped. I pictured a bunch of spiritual scientists in a lab, experimenting with the beyond and figuring out the stuff I've been reading about for years. After all, the church is called "Basilio Scientific School". I even studied Biochemistry mostly with the interest of studying the connection between the molecular biological processes and the hierarchical network of spiritual fractions that direct those processes.  However, when, in my mid twenties, I finally made my way to the very top of the church, hoping to join that lab I imagined as a kid... it just wasn't there.  What I've found instead was a bunch of mediums using automatic writing to channel in the knowledge later put on the books.  Quite similar in fact to the messages received through ITC at the times a great connection was made, as with INIT and The Seven Ethereals, to name one example.

I know that most, or many at least, would argue that you can't do better than that. While there were no scientist in the group which organized the channeled messages, they were very well educated. Some even teachers. And this started in the 40s, here in Argentina, and I don't think they could have found an Argentinian scientist willing to help with that at the time. In fact, even Allan Kardec did something similar (organize and write down channeled messages), a hundred years earlier, and his was a scientist.

For a long time I wondered how could they have done better. And concluded that you can do much, much better. Eventually, in the late 90s, I made a formal plan which I proposed to the church, but they just didn't see a problem needing a solution.

In the process, I've met a church's colleague who shared my view and we wrote a book which attempted to at least formalize all the church's knowledge into a comprehensive theory, but again, they just archived it. Fortunately, my colleague ended up writing a much (much) better version of the book and he just published it himself: https://thespiritualtheory.com/

One thing that I've learned in the quest to figure out a way to scientifically integrate channeled messages, is that the difficulty is not just in the fact that the current research techniques, used in the various fields, do not readily cover this type of evidence, but, far more importantly, in the epistemic stance (the way to view and think of science) of the scientific community. That is, science is above all a social activity, even if it tries to operate objectively, and the human factor is larger than any method.

In fact, you summarized the prominence of the human factor above the (scientific) method very well in your last sentence:

"This is even more fascinating since the certainty or probability is based on  trust and not on hard objective acceptance criteria."

I can even attest to that first hand. Once I was discussing--I don't recall what--on the "physics.org" forum (I think it was free will), when I brought up the subject of mediumship, and as the tsunami of negative responses flooded in, I directed them all to the Winbridge Research Center (https://www.windbridge.org/), which have been conducting the most serious and definitive research on mental mediumship, with results that make it completely impossible to deny mental mediumship, or at the very least the so-called super-psi field, objectively. Yet, not a single one of them even bothered to look at their work.

 

 

Edited December 15, 2020 by Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal