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.
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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.
