stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Most people--even most scientists--have a terrible understanding of the philosophy of science. Among non-philosophers, the best you find is somebody who maybe knows a little Popper or something. I'm a layman in those matters too, so rather than elaborate on my position that String Theory is part of science and ID is not, I emailed a guy I know who is a philosopher of science at a respected university. I'll paraphrase my questions, but quote in full his response:
Me: | Quote |
Take a look at this conversation about ID and String Theory. What do you think. |
Him: | Quote |
Steve, you are stepping in deep, very cold, and very dank waters.
In public, when trying to deal with soundbite science, it is
worthwhile saying something like "science is testable", but what that
means is not easy to describe, let alone define. There is no such
thing as a universal scientific method or procedure. Some science is
testable, and some isn't. Some science is empirical and some
(theoretical cosmology) isn't. Some science is quantifiable, some isn't.
In philosophy there's a thing known as a "family resemblance
predicate" in which something is a member of a family of things if it
exhibits *most* of the properties of that group, but not necessarily
all. Science is like that. ID fails to be science for many reasons,
not least being the lack of an active research program and a failure
to discriminate its explanation from one without ID involving only
selectionist explanations. But there's no simple knockdown criterion
for excluding it, and in fact, at one time ID was an active research
program. Granted, that was in the 17th and 18th centuries, but that
only goes to show that what counts as science *at a particular
moment* is relative to the past history and present activities of
science.
So, you are right in that "science is what scientists do", but
there's more to the story than that. Science is (FRPishly) empirical,
explanatory, theoretical, active, historically related cognitive
activities. It is partly political, for it is done by humans, and
they are paolitical animals. It is partly social, for humans are
social animals. But it is also engagement with *nature*, the parts of
the world that aren't us, and *that* is where ID fails - it doesn't
engage with nature, it doesn't do *research*. It just takes an
apriori view, and trawls for ways to make that view seem scientific.
The motto of the Royal Society - the first such society in the world
- is Nullius in verba" - nothing in words. The motto of the ID crowd
is "Omnia in verba" - it's all in the words. |
Me:
| Quote | | Would you say String Theory qualifies as science? Not a theory, not hypotheses, but simply as a part of science? |
Him:
| Quote | String Theory sits uncomfortably at the edge. It is clearly a
progressive research program in Lakatos' sense, but it has no
empirical consequences at present, so it is at best a conceptual
program only. It is within science, but if it doesn't make any
progress, eventually it will be abandoned. So it is the best example
of "science is what scientists do" because if scientists stop working
on it, it will cease to be part of science just in virtue of that fact. |
PS - the question that's really been on my mind tonight is, if you're comfortable with pointers, comfortable with inheritance, and comfortable with templates, are you able to start coding C++ professionally? Or are there yet-unknown levels of difficulty or abstraction which demand more study before turning pro?
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