BioLogos, the website founded by Francis Collins (now NIH director), and dedicated to converting evangelical Christians to acceptance of evolution, is continuing its three-part series on scientism. Alert reader Sigmund is on the case, and has written another guest post (see his first one here). I’m grateful for his efforts, and glad that he’s relieved me from monitoring that infuriating website.
__________
BioLogos vs Scientism, Round Two
by Sigmund
MIT cosmologist Ian Hutchinson continues his series of BioLogos posts with a new installment entitled ‘Reproducibility’, again promising to convince us of the dangers of ‘scientism’.
Hutchinson thinks he’s spotted a flaw in the idea that science is the only way to determine justified knowledge about nature and hence about the world around us. The key point, according to Hutchinson, is in the definition of the word “nature”. If our world consists of both nature and non-nature, then the primacy of the scientific method as a means of determining knowledge is brought into question. Perhaps science doesn’t work as a reproducible means of gathering knowledge about aspects of the world that are outside nature.
So, you may ask, where does Hutchinson draw the borderlines between nature and non-nature? One thing is for sure, Hutchinson is not advocating NOMA. This is not about a distinction between a physical and metaphysical realm. In fact it’s much more mundane.
After writing at length about the accuracy and reproducibility of physics experiments in history, Hutchinson turns to his chosen targets.
Science requires reproducibility. But in many fields of human knowledge the degree of reproducibility we require in science is absent. This absence does not in my view undermine their ability to provide real knowledge. On the contrary, the whole point of my analysis is to assert that non-scientific knowledge is real and essential, just not scientific.
He then briefly lists five academic disciplines—sociology, history, jurisprudence, economics and politics—in which he suggests the scientific method is unsuitable for the acquisition of “real knowledge”.
According to Hutchinson:
Sociologists today acknowledge that sociology does not offer the kind of reproducibility that is characteristic of the natural sciences. Even so, they feel they must insist on the title of science, because of the scientism of the age.
History is a field in which there is thankfully less science envy. Obviously history, more often than not, is concerned with events in the past that cannot be repeated. History is crucial knowledge but cannot be made into a science.
After similarly disparaging jurisprudence (the study of law), economics, and political science, Hutchinson explains why the scientific method cannot produce knowledge in these subjects.
These disciplines do not lend themselves to the epistemological techniques that underlie natural science’s reliable models and convincing proofs. They are about more indefinite, intractable, unique, and often more human problems. In short, they are not about nature.
Leaving aside the point that human culture is still very much part of the natural world, it becomes clear that Hutchinson is making a ‘hard sciences’ versus ‘soft sciences’ argument and suggesting that the latter are unsuitable for the application of scientific epistemology.
But what about the data? Are results produced by research into areas such as sociology really so unreproducible compared to the ‘hard’ sciences? Hutchinson doesn’t provide any evidence to support his assertion, which is curious since it’s easy to find studies on this exact topic. Writing about the work of University of Chicago psychologist Larry Hedges, Massimo Pigliucci, in his book ‘Nonsense on Stilts’, notes that a comparison of experimental data produced by research into either social science or “hard science” (read “physics”), fails to reveal reproducibility as a problem unique to the “soft” sciences. “
It turns out that the replicability of research findings in psychology (and therefore, presumably, the resulting empirical cumulativeness of that discipline) is no worse (or better) than the replicability of findings in particle physics. As Hedges puts it: “What is surprising is that the research in the physical sciences are not markedly more consistent than those in the social sciences.
While social science, historical, economic and political research can and do reveal important aspects of the cultural world, they are, we should note, markedly less reliable than physics research when it comes to predicting future events. However, that is only to be expected when dealing with highly complex systems in which we currently do not know, and therefore cannot control, all the possible variables.
While it is almost trivially easy to point out how the proper application of the scientific method aids the acquisition of knowledge in the academic fields disparaged by Hutchinson, it is instructive to consider how such knowledge has inspired other areas of scientific inquiry.
Consider, for example, the influence of the 18th century political economist, Thomas Malthus, whose famous 1798 “Essay on the Principles of Population”, has been hugely influential in several fields, including Hutchinson’s targeted disciplines of economics, politics and sociology. The essay was inspired by Malthus’ observation that plants and animals produce many more seeds and offspring than will survive to reproduce themselves. Considering whether this observation could be applied to human society, Malthus used a scientific approach to the question by comparing the change in the ratio of birth rates to death rates in various European populations in the 18th century. This allowed Malthus to extrapolate from those figures to future population levels, which exceeded those supportable by available national resources.
In his 1876 autobiography, Charles Darwin mentions the key insight provided by his reading of this work:
In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work.
Perhaps one of his BioLogos colleagues could remind Hutchinson of the name of that theory.
We await a promised further installment of this series, this time based on the topic of ‘Clarity’, the other key factor that, according to Hutchinson, limits the scope of science.
Whenever I point out that the “standards” used to verify the “evidence” use to justify belief in an historical Jesus Christ of Nazareth are laughably pathetic, apologists for both Christianity and history complain that, if we apply the same standards to history that we do to “hard” sciences “then we wouldn’t know anything at all about history.”
My response is, “No. It is true that we know damned little about history. By pretending that this bullshit you’re dredging up is significant, all you’re doing is fooling yourself into believing falsehoods about history.”
That, to me, seems to be the true dividing line. Real scientists do the best they can to demarcate what they are and aren’t justified in believing. Woo-meisters decide what they want to believe in, and then put all their effort into justifying their beliefs.
Cheers,
b&
Who’s expecting the standards of the “hard” sciences to be applied to bibilical “history”? I’d already be content if the academic standards of actual history would be consistently applied to biblical history.
Yep. Actual historians and archaeologists do know about and apply science and scientific reasoning to what they do.
Biblical – or, as it’s now called by non-Christian archaeologists, Syro-Palestinian – archaeology is still getting out from under Albright. Biblical history hasn’t really started the getting-out-from-under process, but the archaeologists are dragging them along.
The fallacy of ‘THE scientific method’. The scientific method is not a cookbook protocol to doing science. Quantum physicists use different scientific methods than evolutionary biologists than historians than organic chemists. The inference by Hutchinson that the scientific method is some specific and universal set of intellectual tools is wrong. Although setting up the problem this way makes it a simple, albeit kind of stupid, exercise to rail against scientism.
While the details certainly vary from discipline to discipline, the principles and key elements are all the same.
There’s observation of one kind or another, and publication of the observations along with the methods used to make the observations. There’s also an attempt at an explanation of those observations, along with predictions or suggestions for other tests that can be used to further refine understanding. And there’s the whole peer review process, whereby others with an interest and expertise in the same field double-check the published results and attempt to reproduce the results for themselves — and, of course, publish their own findings for others to critique.
That’s the scientific method — at least, the parts of it which really matter. I think you’ll find all true sciences hold it sacred, even if they have their own preferred hymns to sing while practicing the rites.
Cheers,
b&
Ben I agree with you. I even do science for an actual living and am familiar with the process. However, Hutchinson didn’t write that essay for practicing scientists. Ask a lay person what the scientific method is, and you will get much more than peer review, suggestions of other experiments, etc. So when Hutchinson attacks ‘reproducibility’, it’s because most people accept that as a standard of the scientific method (and in many fields it is). Each field has its own set of norms that are considered the scientific method. We can extrapolate the least common denominator of all fields to come up with some universal ‘scientific method’, but I expect it will be so generic that it would include many practices that are not scientific, like creationism or astrology.
Any definition of science that was broad enough to include creationism or astrology would also be broad enough to include epicycles, humors, and phlogiston. And you could definitely make a valid argument that all of those should fall under the “science” label.
But, once you expand the label to that point, you need another qualifier, one that indicates the merits of the particular theory in question. This other indicator would point to the Standard Model as being on very firm ground, Newtonian Mechanics as practically unimpeachable at everyday scales (but flat-out worng at quantum and relativistic scales), and creationism, astrology, epicycles, humors, and phlogiston as being so faulty as to be worse than useless.
Cheers,
b&
The catch there is “extrapolate from the lowest common denominator”. That sentence lacks the step where you then check against the real world whether the extrapolation worked or not. Which is, after all, the whole point.
(This is why “entities” in Occam’s razor refers to conceptual entities rather than physical objects – not for abstruse philosophical reasons, but because if you it the first way it produces useful results and if you do it the second way it doesn’t.)
“The scientific method” has changed a few times. Each time, it’s been replaced by something of the same name. (I think the next one will be everyone going Bayesian, only two hundred years after Laplace’s spectacular successes with such.)
Highly unlikely IMHO, since bayesian methods do not map to theories and testing. You need frequentist methods to test parameters properly.
Bayesian methods seems great in order to develop hypotheses or for comparing parsimony though.
<iTechnically, the entire frequentist cookbook can be derived from Bayes, so the droning Bayes advocates can claim all that too! This doesn’t solve the problem of telling you what the hell your prior actually is, of course. I can’t find the study, but it’s one in geology, where Bayes is all the rage, and quantifying the tendency to work out the answer then double-count the evidence by putting it back in as your new prior …
By education, I am an attorney and a political scientist.
I would not besmirch the word “knowledge” by applying it to jurisprudence.
Political science, by contrast, consists in large part of data driven statistical analysis. I’d be happy to call that knowledge, and indeed to call it science.
There you go with the scientism thing of asking for evidence.
That’s just, like, your scientism, man.
I cannot understand Collins. He wants to convince the literalist biblical fanatics about the truth of evolution, and does this by getting people to attack science/the scientific method in various ways?
I’m sure there’s no projection going on there in any way whatsoever.
well, maybe a smidgeon.
We can’t reproduce exploding stars either, but we still consider the studies of supernovas to be part of science, even hard science.
First, as Hutchinson should know, science doesn’t deal in “proofs”. However, science does use models – and so does sociology, economy, and even history. Some of them even use mathematical language to describe those models, just like what Hutchinson considers “real” science.
Maybe the most important feature of science isn’t the reproducibility, but the model-based reasoning, coupled with empirical testing.
Furthermore, people who study supernovae demonstrate that they’re doing science by making predictions concerning what particulars (radiation characteristics, neutrinos, etc…) they expect to observe for supernovae involving stars of various sizes, etc.
To the extent that economics strives to be a science, the discipline should strive to make predictions as well. For example, economists like Case and Schiller pretty much predicted the bursting of the housing bubble (not that it was difficult – they just had to look at their data), and Krugman has gotten much (not all) of the post financial collapse economics correct. Unfortunately, in economics, ideology still usually triumphs over a record of correct predictions.
Incomprehensible
Nitpick: Ian Hutchinson is certainly not a cosmologist. (Have to protect disciplinary honor here.) He’s an engineer, specializing in plasma physics.
This is misleading. Having read many of Ian’s papers (including his Ph.D. thesis), I would say he is best described as a physicist specializing in plasma physics. Sure, his title is Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, but he was a past president of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society. I may disagree with everything he writes about religion, but he is an excellent physicist.
Since all of this kind of “scientism” talk is defensive and reactive to factual challenges to magical beliefs there is little to learn.
These folks just jump from one rhetorical trick to another.
However, it does help to unpack some of the general ideas that relate to fact-based knowledge. Our ideas include the following:
– It is all about data that predicts — often other data.
– There is no such unified thing as “science” or even the “scientific method.” If something produces predictive data it’s good, if not, it’s abandoned as useless. If prayer was predictive — great.
– Data is always specific to very narrow domains. Of course, the very hard human endeavor to wrest knowledge from reality is always flawed and imperfect and usually failed, no matter what the domain of knowledge.
I’ll give Hutchinson due credit. He is doing a tolerably good job of knocking down that “scientism” strawman. Of course, it would have been better if he had not erected it in the first place.
I doubt that he is actually trying to “convince us” of anything. I don’t think his essay is directed at scientists. It seems to be directed at theists, and is an attempt to prop up their beliefs in case the criticism from scientists is shaking them.
Does Hutchinson believe that archaeology and geology are not sciences? They would seem to fit his description of non-science.
If so, that’s nonsense.
“He then briefly lists five academic disciplines—sociology, history, jurisprudence, economics and politics—in which he suggests the scientific method is unsuitable for the acquisition of “real knowledge”.”
I believe the man is wrong, all of these fields can be investigated using the scientific method, at least by my definition.
The scientific method, is, I think, the following: Observations and previous knowledge are used to construct a hypothesis, which is the specific question to be investigated.
The most important part of the scientific method comes next, and this is the part which is completely antithetical to religion,and that is the deliberate search or inclusion of factors which would disprove one’s hypothesis. Call them controls, whatever. These are the investigative inclusions that, to paraphrase Feynman, help to keep us from fooling ourselves. This is the essence of science – the honest and hopefully thorough process of designing one’s experiment so that all the confounding factors, biases, etc can be examined.
Data is collected, conclusions drawn. That is the scientific method in short.
All of the five academic disciplines Hutchinson lists – sociology, history, jurisprudence, economics and politics – can use this scientific process: Observation leading to a carefully constructed hypothesis which measures an outcome of some kind, and, most importantly, the inclusion and investigation of criteria which would prove the hypothesis false. Peer review is an extension of this principle.
This honest effort to prove one’s own hypothesis false is the anvil upon which scientific knowledge is forged. It is the essence of science and is surely applicable to every field that Hutchinson asserts is outside the purview of science.
Science requires reproducibility. But in many fields of human knowledge the degree of reproducibility we require in science is absent.
Hutchinson’s reasoning sounds a lot like the old (and idiotic) creationist argument against both evolution and the Big Bang. He confuses the required characteristics of acceptable methodology with the nature of the phenomenon being studied. If reproducibility of the phenomenon is required for the study to be scientific, then a lot of cosmology, astrophysics and geology goes out of the window.
It seems the arguments supposedly supporting the notion that sociology, history, jurisprudence, economics and politics are not REAL sciences would have to also conclude any massively complex or chaotic system cannot be examined scientifically either.
Astrophysics (supernovae) has already been mentioned. As another example, you can’t exactly run a controlled, repeatable experiment with weather and atmospheric sciences, but that doesn’t mean we predict the weather based on the writings of a nomadic, middle-eastern tribe from several thousand years ago or engage in philosophical speculation in order to determine if conditions are favorable for generating tornadoes.
And twice in the same day, I’m confronted with the exact same argument:
“Science doesn’t know everything, therefore Jesus is totally real.”
Once from a scientist who should know better; once from a theologian who should know better.
I get angry at this sort of nonsense. Angry. Because it’s the worst kind of sophistry.
Even if science knows nothing, how does that have anything to do about you being able to defend your beliefs that there existed an historical person named “Jesus” who lived in a precise time and place, who violated the laws of physics in VERY specific manners, and who is any-second-now going to come back and give the world a beat-down.
One thing has precisely and exactly nothing to do with the other thing. Knocking history as a science (and even more bizarrely as “non-natural”) does not help your cause. Makes it worse.
It’s not even a bad tu quoque logical fallacy. It’s worse than that. It’s a strawman disguised as a tu quoque logical fallacy wearing an “excluded middle” logical fallacy like a hat.
I hope Hutchinson hasn’t given up his day job.
Does jurisprudence not seek corroborating witnesses? And in responsible investigative journalism (which, seems to me, is a subsidiary of history) does the same not hold?
Further to history & gathering primary source material (=evidence/data), I hope that I don’t seem tedious in making reference to Herbert Hoover again. He wrote in his Memoirs that at the end of WWI he gave one of his associates $50K to collect documents relating to that conflict, motivated by alarm that a great deal of the documents surrounding the French Revolution had disappeared (<a href=technically, it appears that the funds were channeled thru Stanford). The collected documents formed the beginning of what became the Hoover Institute for War, Revolution and Peace (which, remember, Hitch was a fellow of).
Others seem to have covered most of the issues with Hutchison’s misconception of “reproducibility”. I’ll note that the problem is an old one; the classical form is the River of Heraclitus, which in turn is addressing the basic problem of identity in the Ship of Theseus. The mathematical tool of mutual information provides a metric space that gives a philosophical (though seldom practical) way of resolving it.
As a consequent philosophical result, perfect reproducibility isn’t an absolute requirement for doing “Science”; instead, the closer the reproducibility, the easier the math becomes.
Oddly, Hutchison himself notes “Observations of interest may occur only at certain times (for example eclipses) or in certain places (for example in a specific habitat), over which we might have little or no control. But it does require that multiple examples exist reproducibly.” Yet, he fails to recognize that much of sociology, history, and economics exhibit this sense of reproducibility.
As an example of that sort of historical reproducibility, compare Julius Caesar (or any of the Twelve, for that matter) with Jesus.
We know exactly what Caesar looked like — aside from the busts and statues, there are so many coins minted during his lifetime that you can buy one yourself for about a month’s rent. We have his autobiographical account of his conquest of Gaul and archaeological digs confirming the details in that account. We have letters he wrote, letters others wrote to him, and letters others wrote about him. We have monuments and buildings and roads and aqueducts and bridges and all manner of other public works projects. And we have the accounts of historians from every generation after his up until the present day.
For Jesus? We have no physical artifacts, we have no contemporary records, and we have no records that even the sorriest of apologists tries to date to less than a generation after the “fact.” (Realistically, there might not even be anything from the first century at all.) The official biographies can’t agree on what year he was born, what year he died, or even the day of the week he was crucified (even though they agree that the day of the week was significant). They don’t agree on who Joseph was, they don’t agree on how long his post-crucifixion ministry lasted, they don’t agree on his demeanor at his trial, they don’t agree on his last words, they don’t agree on who his disciples were…in short, they don’t agree on anything. And the non-canonical biographies, contemporary with the canonical ones, diverge even further.
“One of these things is not like the other….”
Cheers,
b&