Here.
I need to make a confession: I've hit a wall in my study of scientific demarcation. It doesn't help that I've been reading Laudan (he wrote a rather seminal paper: "The Demise of the Demaracation problem." I would link to it, but, alas, you need access to JSTOR or another academic database).
As you probably know, I'm writing mostly about a new "field of science" know as Intelligent Design (ID). I'm trying to come up with a line of demarcation that excludes ID, while still keeping intact most of what we understand to be science. This may seem somewhat easy, but I assure you; it isn't.
Indeed, it's so difficult that most scientists who have some passing understanding of non-naive demarcation theory have given up on it. In the preface to Why Intelligent Design Fails, the editors, Matt Young and Taner Edis, write:
[Critics] generally presume that the primary mistake in intelligent-design claims is philisophical and argue that non-naturalistic ideas should not be given scientific consideration at all. A concentration on philosophy is understandable, given that intelligent design has been scorned by the mainstream scientific community. Nonetheless, intelligent design presents itself as a respectable scientific [emphasis theirs] alternative to Darwinian evolution and natural selection. Hence, although they intend to exclude intelligent design altogether, philosophical critiques emphasizing naturalism in science have paradoxically given intelligent design a measure of intellectual legitimacy despite its overwhelming scientific failure. TOo often, intelligent design has become a philosophical perspective to be debated in typically [sic] inconclusive fashion with only passing reference to the decisive answers from mainstream science [emphasis mine].
Because demarcation has become such a sinkhole in philosophy of science and because most mainstream scientists hold little regard for that philosophy, philosophical responses are given naive and incorrect treatment at best, and no mention at worst, by the scientific community.
I suppose this is somewhat understandable; there is a certain presumptuousness in philosophers--those armchair thinkers--telling highly trained scientists exactly what it is that they're doing. And of course there is Kuhn and--probably more importantly--Kuhn's concussive cultural effects to deal with.
Tom Kuhn, America's most influential addition to philosophy of science made science out to be a rather irrational exercise. At least, that's what the cultural perception of him is. It's hard to separate the man from the myth. He wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and received a celebrity among diverse academic discourses uncommon in philosophy. Who hasn't, after all, come across paradigm shift, Incommesurability, and Geshtalt images in any serious study of the humanities?
Kuhn postmodernized the sciences, and scientists don't like that (understandably). They hold to the tired Popperian notion of demarcation by falsifiability. Of course, the fact that they're willing to hold to such a flawed view may be evidence itself of the sciences' fundamental irrationality. Kitcher, no friend to creation science or ID wrote in his book--a stunning indictment of creationism--Abusing Science:
The time has come to tell a dreadful secret. While the picture of scientific testing sketched above [falsificationism] continues to be influential among scientists, it has been shown to be seriously incorrect. (To give my profession its due, historians and philosophers of science have been trying to let this particular cat out of the bag for at least thirty years ....) Important work in the history of science has mide it increasingly clear that no major scientific theory has ever exemplified the relation between theory and evidence that the traditional model presents.
I'll put it plainly. To say something is "unfalsifiable" or "untestable" isn't saying all that much, and it certainly isn't saying that something isn't science. There are degrees to which all of science is untestable, unfalsifiable.
I won't dwell to long on why this view has been largly rejected by philosophers of science, except to say that there is a naive sort of appeal (Kitcher actually coined the term "naive falsification" to describe this view" to the notion that science is--at its core--about testing hypothesis. It's naive because it ignore the theory-leaden nature of scientific work. Its naive because of the tenacity with which science holds to "falsified theories."
Enter Kuhn and his world of irrationality. Enter Kuhn and enter the ID movement's greatest weapon. The degree to which scientists hold on to the old, tradional "scientific method" model of science is the same degree to which creationists (and their neo-creationist bretheren: IDers) hold to Kuhn's paradigm model. Both sides are wrong.
I'm not sympathetic--in any way--to ID. It isn't science. And even if it were, it wouldn't be good science, as virtually every claim it has or can make has been refuted by biologists. Darwinism isn't crisis (except in the minds of IDers) and naturalism is as necessary and strong as ever within the scientific community.
I think this will be the beginning of a sort of series here on Oberliner. It is extraordinarily helpful for my work to flesh out ideas by writing, and it seems natural to use this blog as a home for that sketching. But, here's the outline; here's what I'll be saying.
FIRST, claims that ID isn't science because it is unfalsifiable miss the point completely. By the standards used to determine the falsifiability of ID, Darwinism is unfalsifiable as well.
SECOND, the base unit for scientific inquiry is The Scientific Research Program. This is the unit that we must use when considering what is or is not science. As pointed out, I believe by Longino, a biologist could have a hypothesis, say, dogs have a certain number of hairs, then that biologist could count every hair on a dog's body. This isn't science, clearly. We need to smash the notion that we can examine individual hypothesis, without considering the background values, assumptions, and constellations of causal agents when considering demarcation.
THIRD, Science is a fundamentally relative field. This is to say, astrology may have, at some point in time, been scientific. It is not any longer.
FORTH, Conditions for science without bite, such as network unification (inquiry is scientific to the degree to which it coheres well with other scientific fields), progress (certain types of progress are inherently "scientific" while others, well, not so much), psychological concerns (Kither's claim that "the primary division is a psychological one between scientists and pseudo-scientists." [emph. his]), and a host of others, are not enough. They may be necessary conditions, but they do not give a complete enough picture, nor do they effectively defeat ID.
FIFTH, Explanatory goodness plays in important, if not crucial, role in choice between competing scientific research programs (SRP).
SIXTH, The production of novel facts, too, plays an important, if not crucial, role in choice between competing SRP.
SEVENTH, Non-naturalistic causal agents are fundamentally anti-scientific. This is not dogmatic, this is based on epistemically responsible modes of inquiry--and science, if it is anything, is epistemically responsible. This is to say, the presence of a supernatural intelligent designer can never be an appropriate causal agent--even if Darwinism were to one day fail.
LASTLY, Rhetorical attacks, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Wiki that shit if you don't know what I'm talking about), while funny etc., do not say anything about the viability of Intelligent Design. There must be a clear, non-ad hominem line in the sand. We must take their claim at face value--that they are not religiously motivated--and still show their "theory" to be the flimsy pseudo-science that it is.
Well, I've got my work cut out for me. But I'd like to end on a less obscure note. Tristero, over at Hullabaloo, pointed out what the actual controversies are in Darwinism:
Russ Doolittle presented an analysis based on individual folds in proteins that clearly resolved the Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes, while a distant relative, Ford Doolittle, argued that the prevalence of horizontal gene transfer at the bacterial level made any such trees questionable, or at best uninformative. Meanwhile, Thomas Cavalier-Smith argued forcefully that gene-based trees miss out on significant evolutionary events, such as the transition that gave the Archaea a radically different membrane chemistry. Almost anyone who touched on the subject (and there were several speakers that did) gave a confused picture of what the genome of a Eukaryote looked like before it first took a mitochondrion on board.
Yet IDers persist in trying to foist their bullshit on science classrooms. What they're really after is naturalism. What they're really after is science. They want irrationality in science. They want to undermine the epistemic primacy of materialism. And the way to do this is tell children that science can be anything.
I'm reminded of Lakatos, when he wrote, in Science and Pseudoscience:
The problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience has grave implications also for the institutionalization of criticism. Copernicus's theory was banned by the Catholic Church in 1616 because it was said to be pseudoscientific. It was taken off the index in 1820 because by that time the Church deemed that facts had proved it and therefore it became scientific. The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1949 declared Mendelian genetics pseudoscientific and had its advocates, like Academician Vavilov, killed in concentration camps; after Vavilov's murder Mendelian genetics was rehabilitated; but the Party's right to decide what is science and publishable and what is pseudoscience and punishable was upheld. The new liberal Establishment of the West also exercises the right to deny freedom of speech to what it regards as pseudoscience, as we have seen in the case of the debate concerning race and intelligence. All these judgments were inevitably based on some sort of demarcation criterion. And this is why the problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophers: it has grave ethical and political implications.
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