(3089/898) Analyzing science

2296) It is high time [laymen] recognized [...] the misleading and damaging belief that scientific inquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man [sic] who turns the handle of a machine of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking, and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all else on a sortie into what can be imagines but is not yet known.

Peter Medawar
Times Literary Supplement (10/25/63)
quoted by M.F. Perutz in
"A Passion for Science" in
New York Review of Books (2/20/1997)
[review of Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
by Ruth Lewin Sime]

2297) Can science be shown to be a superior means of acquiring knowledge? Yes, it can, but only by showing that it is more likely to yield justified beliefs than any other methodology. Thus the real issues is not whether a belief is scientific or pseudoscientific but whether it is justified or unjustified.

We are justified in believing something to be true when it provides the best explanation of the evidence. Science is superior to other methods of inquiry because it usually provides better explanations than they do. The goodness of an explanation is determined by the amount of understanding it produces, and the amount of understanding an explanation produces is determines by how much it systematizes and unifies our knowledge. The extent to which an explanation does this can be determined by appealing to various criteria of adequacy such as simplicity, scope, conservatism and fruitfulness. No one wants to hold unjustified beliefs. The problem is that most people never learn the difference between a good explanation and a bad one.

Theodore Schick Jr.
"The End of Science?" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)

2298) If we believe in science and in its underlying rationality, then we can't stop at some particular place and say, "Beyond this point there be Tygers, paradoxes, the miraculous, the inexplicable." The trouble with science (one of the troubles) is that it isn't divisible; it doesn't take us so far and no farther, where we are forced to disembark and continue the rest of our voyage by miracle and marvel. If we believe in the need for miracles at any point in our journey, then we must give up on science altogether, right from the start. Science is an all-or-nothing thing, like being pregnant. [...] It may, of course, be that our ability to understand the "ultimate nature of things" is limited, but this doesn't mean that there is no ultimate nature of things or that their ultimate nature must be in the realm of miracles. Comprehension does not limit the physical reality of the universe, whatever or however complex (or simple) that underlying reality may be. Once we think comprehension limits physical reality, or even might, we leave science and enter into the gassy regions of metaphysics, the Land of Let's-Pretend.

The Uncertainty of Heisenberg, the Incompleteness of Godel, the wave/particle duality of light and matter, relativity - none of these is paradoxical. The fact that observation and even logic itself are limited, of that the underlying nature of things is merely probabilistic, may be distressing, but there is nothing paradoxical, nothing that contradicts itself. The appearance of a paradox is eventually resolved when better methods and better insights are developed. But the real point is, even if better methods and better insights are never developed, even if we never arrive at the resolution, the ultimate and rational nature of things is there; and it is there even if throughout the universe, in all space and in all time, there is and will be no intellect capable of resolving it. The capacity of minds to comprehend is not what makes reality real.

Ralph Estling
"Two Troubles With Science" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)

2299) [G]ood and kind people tell us that science is inadequate, this because it doggedly refuses to inform us how we should live our lives - by what ethical and moral principles we should live; how, why, and whom we should love; and so on. This complaint is widespread among the righteous.

The trouble here is that science is confused with rationality, as if the two were synonymous, when in fact science is just one subset, one kind of rationality, not the whole shebang. It is a vital part, but still only a part of the whole. As such, it does not deal with all forms of rationality, all logical inquiry and pursuits, such as how we should conduct our lives. That is not its job.

It is not science's job to supply answers to all our questions about why we are here and what to do about it. When it refuses to do so, it is not shirking its responsibility, abdicating its role. It is refusing to usurp the responsibility and role of reason, of which it forms a part, but with which it is not identical.

Ralph Estling
"Two Troubles With Science" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)