On Dawkins, Myers, Philosophy, Science, Theories, Facts, etc.

I just finished reading this post by Mike Flynn (via Siris), cleverly titled "The Imperial March." The post, inspired by the PZ Myers post I linked earlier, takes Myers and Richard Dawkins to task for their ignorance of philosophy (something I've also noted before). My favorite part of Flynn's post:

Consider Dawkins' comment in the first quote: Questions about the existence of the supernatural are actually scientific questions. And then we can ask by what scientific principle this is known? Perhaps the philosopher running beside the locomotive can tell the engineer who, by all appearances has never given this question a moment's thought. No body of knowledge has within itself the competency to examine its own foundations -- although only Mathematics has a rigorous proof that this is so. Physics, which in the original meaning was any knowledge (scientia) of physical bodies, and so includes biology and all the rest, is grounded in metaphysics, which simply means "behind the physics." And that is right where The Metaphysics appears in compilations of Aristotle's works, right after The Physics. It deals with those ontological and epitemological preconditions.

Science as we know it measures things. Some folks think that because they can measure Stuff really really accurately that they are therefore Experts on Everything from theology to barbeque sauce or even in other branches of science. But to measure is to quantify, and quantification belongs to matter (rather than to form, agency, or finality). Therefore, if you focus exclusively on that-which-can-be-measured, you focus exclusively on that which is matter. Like anyone whose only tool is a hammer, after a while everything starts to look like a nail. But in what way does Dawkins suppose that the "supernatural" (whatever he means by that) is a measurable, material body? Heck. Forget about the existence of the supernatural. The existence of an empirical universe is not a scientific question. It is an a priori assumption necessary if one is to do science in the first place. Even the existence of natural laws is not a scientific question, but an assumption scientists must make before they will look for them.

This is a point I've often tried to make to the Dawkinsians I know in person (Dawkins, when he comes here, spends a good deal of time with people I know, because they're kindreds or something). Dawkins wants science to replace religion, because he believes that all religious questions are scientific questions, and science has shown itself to be better at answering scientific questions than religion. The latter part of that statement is obviously true: science is better at what it does than any other institution or system we humans have previously invented. That's why we've been able to go to the moon, wipe small pox off the face of the Earth, and talk to each other on the internet, or in our darker hours, flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the first part of the statement, that all religious questions are scientific questions, is where Dawkins goes wrong in big way. Science isn't built to answer metaphysical questions. That's not what science does. One of the worst (intellectual) things a scientist (or anyone for that matter) can do with science is conclude that it proves the truth of materialism. That's equivalent to saying that linguistics proves that all there is to existence is language, because all linguistics studies is language. There's no way to avoid the circularity of this argument, and it's one that Dawkins and his fans make all of the time.

Now, I don't think anything Flynn says in his post suggests that philosophy of science itself is important to science. Where Dawkins, Myers, and others go wrong is not in their science, to the extent that any of these self-appointed spokespeople for atheism are doing actual science anymore. They go wrong when they try to do philosophy based on what they know about science. It is undoubtedly true that in 2009, science is much more relevant to the doing of philosophy than philosophy is to the doing of science, but science can only answer certain kinds of questions, and can only inform philosophy on those types of questions. Where science leaves off, philosophy is often the best vehicle for continuing on.

I do have to say that I think Flynn is wrong in saying that evolution is not a fact, and thus that Dawkins and Myers are right when they say that it is (even if they don't know why it is, as Myers' quoting of Gould seems to suggest). "Evolution," in its barest biological sense, refers to a set of observable events. Now, I haven't read The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory since I took a philosophy of science course in grad school (and from what I understand, there's a fairly large literature, with which I'm not at all familiar, on how to interpret his philosophy of science anyway), but I'm pretty sure that for Duhem there were different kinds of facts (concrete facts, theoretical facts, practical facts, maybe some others¹). It seems reasonable to consider evolution a concrete fact in the Duhemian sense. But Duhem was talking about physics, as the title of the book suggests, so maybe that's not the case. However, in say, a Wittgensteinian sense, evolution is, as a set of observable events, a fact of the world. Theories of evolution are not facts; natural selection is not a fact. These are explanations of facts. Evolution itself, that is the physical, and more specifically genetic, change of organisms and their offspring over time is the set of facts being explained. At the very least, I think this is an arguable position, and it therefore behooves philosophers not to dismiss it out of hand simply because Dawkins is so ignorant of philosophy in general.

1 If I remember correctly, this distinction, specifically the one between theoretical (which are mathematical) facts and practical facts, is very important in his overall discussion of theories and what they do in physics. For example, I'm pretty sure I remember him arguing that there are always a whole bunch of theoretical facts that correspond to a single practical fact, which would have all sorts of implications for how you test theories.

Philosophy of Science, Who Needs It?

This post at Siris, and the post it links to at Pharyngula, reminded me of my first methods course, lo these many years ago. The first week or two of the course were spent on the "philosophy of science" and the "scientific method," including a lot of definitions of important concepts like "fact," "theory," "law," "hypothesis," and "model." After those first two weeks, the only concept we actually used in discussing research methods was "hypothesis," and we used that concept in both a very loose and very specific sense: what you start with when designing an experiment. A hypothesis, which in the beginning of the course had a very exact meaning in relation to those other concepts of the scientific method, suddenly became just a position statement of one sort or another, of some level of exactness, that you then tested with whatever study you were conducting.

Later, when I took a philosophy of science course, we spent a lot of time talking about falsification. This was a word I had heard often in the methods courses I had taken (by this time, I'd taken 2 or 3). First, I learned all about Popper's concept of falsification, and then I learned that falsification had some serious theoretical problems, as the Quine-Duhem thesis had shown. Apparently individual hypotheses couldn't be falsified. This would seemingly pose a problem for all those scientists using the methods I'd learned in my methods course, because those methods were all about falsifying individual hypotheses. That's what those methods do. This was disconcerting to say the least.

Finally, I started working in a lab as an undergraduate research assistant, and talking to the researchers, grad students and faculty, about all of this confusing stuff I had been learning in my methods and philosophy of science courses. From them I learned that actual practicing scientists, by and large, don't know much about philosophy of science (several had never heard of the Quine-Duhem thesis, though they all knew who Popper was). It was at this point that I had an epiphany: scientists just care about doing science, and since it turns out that doing science doesn't require knowing much, if anything, about the philosophy of science, most scientists don't really care about philosophy of science. "So you say we can't falsify individual hypotheses?" a scientist might ask, and when the philosopher of science replies affirmatively, the scientist will say, "Well, acting as though we're trying to falsify individual hypotheses has gotten us pretty far, scientifically, so phooey on you!" The scientist will then conduct his or her next experiment designed to falsify an individual hypothesis.

Which brings me to the question, who needs philosophy of science? Now, I will admit having read some very interesting papers on the philosophy and history of science. They've often helped me to place certain scientific ideas and findings in their historical and theoretical context, particularly when those ideas and findings are in sciences far removed from my own knowledge base (e.g., physics or microbiology). What's more, I've read some interesting papers by philosophers attempting to apply approaches from one science to another. For example, a couple years back I read a paper about the role of causation in physics, and the implications for the role of causation in the social sciences. It was really interesting stuff. I've yet to hear of anyone applying it, in any way whatsoever, to their work in the social sciences, but it was still a fascinating read. But finding something interesting, or learning something about another science (that I probably could have learned by reading a book about that science, but I'm lazy), isn't quite the same as actually being relevant to science or scientists and their work. So I wonder, aside from a few exceptions (Popper's falsification being the obvious one), to what extent does the vast majority of philosophy of science matter to the doing of science? I doubt it matters very much. And if it doesn't really matter to scientists, to whom does it matter?