Tracinski on the philosophy of science

[Robert Campbell]

For three months or so, I've been a subscriber to The Intellectual Activist. Generally, I've found Robert Tracinksi's writing quite good. The prospects of war with Iran are a major concern to him these days, but his responses to the issues are much better thought out than is the case at The Objective Standard, whose "nuke 'em all" rhetoric he consistently avoids.

He's generally been reliable on the current political obsession with purportedly human-caused global warming, although as Michael has noted he has occasionally had to get his licks in about "evasion."

In his Daily TIA of April 12, though, I really think he jumped the rails.

He'd argued in an entry the day before that climatology is not a mature science (OK so far), and that it might resemble chemistry before the phlogiston theory of combustion was rejected in favor of the oxygen theory (maybe--it would be hard to know whether the stages of development are analogous without knowing what mature climatology will be like, and we aren't there yet).

In his April 12 post, he claimed that lots of government funding going to an area of scientific endeavor still characterized by competing schools of thought in the absence of a satsifactory general theory could lead to politicized results (sure could).

But then he lit out after 20th century philosophy of science:

There are three bad ideas that were widely disseminated by influential 20th-century philosophers of science and that I see being relied upon by the promoters of the global warming hysteria today.

The first bad idea is Karl Popper's denial that scientific hypotheses or theories are products of induction.

The second bad idea is instrumentalism: the view that scientific theories are merely useful devices for predicting data, and it doesn't matter whether the claims they make about the world are true or not.

The third bad idea is Thomas Kuhn's conception of changes in scientific paradigms (overarching theories and underlying assumptions about what is a tractable problem or a legitimate solution) as sociological (based on consensus among scientists) rather than epistemic (based on genuine knowledge or sound argument).

These three bad ideas, according to Tracinski, prepare the way for the acceptance of bad theories of global warming whose attractions are primarily political.

In the process, he attributes views to Popper that obviously aren't Popper's. He also fails to provide an alternative conception of hypotheses and theories and how they ought to be arrived at.

His only rejoinder to Kuhn is to charge him with relativism. Which Kuhn is, of course, guilty of. But again Tracinski neither provides an alternative to Kuhn, nor points to anyone else's.

I want to look a little more closely at what Tracinski says about Popper:

The theories come from anywhere or nowhere, from arbitrary speculation or subjective imagination. There is nothing scientific about the origin of theories; rigorous scientific method only applies to the testing of theories. So here, according to this view, is how science works: a scientist draws an arbitrary hypothesis out of his hat, deduces its concrete consequences, then compares those predictions against actual observation. Observation and facts only come in—somewhat obliquely—at the end of the process.

...

So if someone comes up with the speculation that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the primary driver of the global climate, that's as good a theory as any other. There are no special barriers or hurdles it must overcome to be regarded as worthy of further study. Some old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who are deeply immersed in the facts about the global climate and who still think that theories should emerge from the facts might object that human emissions of carbon dioxide are small relative to natural sources of carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide is one of the weaker and less significant greenhouse gases. They might object that there is no reason to believe that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are any more responsible for global temperatures than, say, variations in cloud formation or variations in the intensity of solar radiation. And if they had their way, this speculative new hypothesis about carbon dioxide might not get off the ground.

But if we follow Karl Popper's advice, the carbon dioxide hypothesis is just as good as any other—and once that is admitted, there can be no objection to pouring more and more money and resources into studying this hypothesis.

From Popper's standpoint, the human-generated carbon dioxide hypothesis is "just as good as any other"... until scientists start subjecting it and its rivals to "tough tests." Which Popper thinks they ought to start doing right away... Those who follow Popper's advice should be trying their hardest to collect observations and conduct experiments that could show that their hypothesis is false. If it keeps surviving all of these attempts to falsify it, then it might start deserving a little respect.

Since one of the immediate challenges to a theory of runaway global warming caused by CO2 from fossil fuel burning is the cooling trend that prevailed from 1940-1975--and Popper also warns against trying to save hypotheses from falsification by patching them with ad hoc assumptions--a staunch Popperian would most likely have concluded, quite some time ago, that any straightforward version of the "anthropogenic global warming" hypothesis is false. Time to try something different... cosmic rays, maybe, or solar irradiation.

But Tracinksi doesn't seem to realize that Popper constantly recommended tough tests.

It gets worse.

Even more deleterious is the theory behind this theory, a view not exclusive to Popper but widely accepted: the idea that scientific theories don't have to explain reality as it really is. Instead, a scientific theory is just a "model," like a computer simulation. (This view is sometimes called "instrumentalism.") In this view, it is naïve to expect the formulas and equations developed by scientists to correspond to actual causal relationships in the real world. Instead, these formulas are just convenient mathematical fictions that are used to generate data that approximates actual, observed facts.

What this accomplishes is to erase the difference between a proven scientific theory and an arbitrarily constructed mathematical model—and that allows scientists to rely on computer models as a substitute for a scientific understanding of the underlying causes of the climate.

There are at least two things wrong here.

One is that even a stone cold instrumentalist will reject a theory whose predictions fail to approximate "actual, observed facts."

The second is that Karl Popper wasn't an instrumentalist. He would have argued that precisely because a correct theory needs to explain reality as it really is, it's damn hard to come up with a correct theory. He took the side of Ludwig Boltzmann, who believed that atoms are real, against Ernst Mach, who claimed that it was completely improper to conclude from the success of atomic theories in physics and chemistry that atoms are real. He published a book called Realism and the Aim of Science (not Instrumentalism and the Aim of Science).

If Robert Tracinski wants to criticize Karl Popper, fine. There's plenty to criticize. But he needs to know what Popper actually said before he sets off on that course.

If he wants to criticize Tom Kuhn, fine. (Although he'll find that it's already been done, in depth, by other philosophers of science.)

Those who are rushing to judgment in favor of anthropogenic global warming are not following Popper's advice.

And I rather doubt that Kuhn has had much influence on them (Kuhn's greatest popularity was with social scientists, even though Kuhn considered the social sciences to be entirely "pre-paradigmatic," like astronomy before Ptolemy).

Meanwhile, the three philosophers that Tracinski cites in his downward-sloping narrative of 20th century hell-in-a-handbasketude--Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend--are all dead. He doesn't mention a single philosopher of science who is active today. Could it be because most of those now practicing would not serve to confirm his worries about galloping decadence and rampant irrationality?

I have to wonder how much of Robert Tracinski's rendition of Popper or Kuhn is based on first-hand knowledge of their writings, and how much comes from talks or publications by persons affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute (back when he was still in good odor with that organization).

The latter is not a good substitute for the former.

Robert Campbell

[Ellen Stuttle]

Super post, Robert. Bravo!

This glitch is too funny to let pass without chortling:

Time to try something different... comic [sic] rays, maybe, or solar irradiation.

"Comic" rays might be the best hypothesis of them all, especially since it isn't even clear that there is a long-term warming trend. ;-)

Ellen

___

[Brant Gaede]

A proper hypothesis is not arbitrary.

Conjecture and speculation or theorizing (not a theory) are useful to set up experiments or mine for data that might lead to a hypothesis which might lead to a theory. Etc. Etc.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

A proper hypothesis is not arbitrary.

Conjecture and speculation or theorizing (not a theory) are useful to set up experiments or mine for data that might lead to a hypothesis which might lead to a theory. Etc. Etc.

--Brant

One of the hallmarks of a good scientific theory is its fertility and productivity. A good theory will lead to questions and abductions which will lead investigators to find even more -facts-. In short a good theory leads to a corpus of facts well beyond the facts that were used to establish the theory in the first place.

Even a good theory that turns out to be -wrong- will take investigators to a better place. Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory lead Hertz to experiments requiring technology sufficiently good to notice the Photoelectric Effect. While Hertz could not explain the phenomenon at that time, like any good physicist he carefully described what he saw and wrote it down for others to ponder. Later, Albert Einstein in studying the photoelectric effect abducted to the concept of quanta of electromagnetic energy in free space -- in short the photon (although Einstein himself did not use that term). It was Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect that put Planck's quantum hypothesis on the map and also lead to Einstein receiving the Nobel Prize.

Maxwell's theory conceived of charge as a continuous substance. In fact charge is carried by -particles- (the electron) and partial color charge is carried by quarks (discovered much later). Maxwell's electrodynamic field theory is sound in extenso, but at the subatomic level is wrong. Classical electrodynamics cannot account for the stability of atoms. Bohr's assumption of discrete orbits (made in 1913) finally lead to a theory of atoms which was consistent with observation. Likewise, Maxwell's classical electrodynamic theory does not predict nor does it account for tunneling (potential barrier penetration). Even so, Maxwell lead both Einstein to produce The Special Theory of relativity AND the heuristic account for the photoelectric effect which ultimately lead to the theory of photons and a sound account of the interaction of radiation and matter.

Newton's theory of mechanics and his theory of optics (Newton invented the -reflecting- telescope) lead to telescopes that were so precise that the anomalous motion of Mercury was discovered. This is one of the finding which later show that Newton's theory of gravitation was incorrect, except in the context of the weak gravitational field. Later on Einstein conceived of gravity as a manifestation of the geometry of the spacetime manifold, rather than a force acting at a distance in a Euclidean manifold. Even so, it was Newton's incorrect theory of gravity that lead to a better theory of gravity.

In addition to leading to more facts and perhaps better theories and good theory will also lead applied scientists and engineers to better and better technology. The Phlogiston hypothesis and the Caloric hypothesis we discarded not only because they lead to contrary to observation predictions, but even more they lead to a dead end in the questions produced and the insights gained. The idea of fluid -substances- underlying what is observed is effectively gone, relegated to at most a pedagogical device for aiding in visualization. That is why aether is gone from modern physics. It lead to a dead end. Even if the Michelson Morley experiment had not killed the aether dead in 1887, it would have been morphed into some kind of a field theory to account for radiation and gravitation. The correct explanation of the photoelectric effect would have killed the aether hypothesis eventually.

So to recap a bit: A good theory must not only make good predictions, but it must lead to further discovery of facts and better insight and understanding of what is currently known.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited April 22, 2007 by BaalChatzaf

[Robert Campbell]

Ellen,

For ease of understanding, I changed it to "cosmic."

But it would have been fun to leave it as mistyped.

Robert Cambpell

[Daniel Barnes]

Robert C

>In his Daily TIA of April 12, though, I really think he jumped the rails.

More like jumped the shark.

I second Ellen's comments - a superb job. Tracinski is breathtakingly uninformed and misleading here. I think he may even realise at some level what thin ice he is trying to skate over. For instance:

"Some old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who are deeply immersed in the facts about the global climate and who still think that theories should emerge from the facts..."

Love that "emerge"! If read aloud it would no doubt be preceded by a sudden attack of throat-clearing. :devil:

>I have to wonder how much of Robert Tracinski's rendition of Popper or Kuhn is based on first-hand knowledge of their writings, and how much comes from talks or publications by persons affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute (back when he was still in good odor with that organization).

Surely not much can be first hand. Mind you even the worthy Sokal and Bricmont got Popper bang up wrong in their otherwise excellent "Fashionable Nonsense." They cited the usual suspects (eg Stove, Putnam) which suggested they too did not do too much first hand reading. So it's not just the ARI (but of course they would have been no jolly use either). Sigh. Like Rodney Dangerfield, we Critical Rationalists just don't get no respect.