So there's a specific way that science tends
to be taught in grade school. The story is one
of progress in which newer generations of scientists
make bold discoveries that demonstrate conclusively
that the older beliefs were wrong, and then people
become aware of the errors of their past, correct
it immediately, and then just keep progressing
forward until the next big discovery. This process
by which these changes... change in views of
what's right and wrong, the discoveries and so
on. The process by which these are made is called
the scientific method. A lot of this should sound
familiar, right? This is one where you form a
hypothesis, run some objective experiment that
is either consistent with the hypothesis or falsifies
it. If falsified, then you revise your hypothesis,
run another experiment, do it all over again.
And each step brings you closer and closer to,
quote unquote, the truth, right? As a scientific
community, scientists keep each other in check.
They do that by running independent experiments
to confirm results of another, right? This is
the ability to kind of reproduce the results,
right? To show that it wasn't some weird fluke
or something, right? There wasn't some one -off,
right? Well, there are two experiences in my
own life that shattered this view, right? Okay,
the first came as an undergrad. I was lucky enough.
through the honors program there, to do some
independent research with a cognitive psychologist
on... memory, perception, all kinds of cool stuff,
right? So part of the research left me in the
dreaded biomedical library at UCLA. That haunting,
like, I think it was like 10 stories of research
articles just stacked on top of each other. This
was back in the days when not everything was
digitized. So, you know, you sometimes had to
physically copy these articles to take it back
home with you if you're going to do that. And
reading through so many of these articles in
neuroscience and cognitive science, psychology,
biology, right, I learned that the scientific
methods seem to be more of a suggestion than
a rule in scientific research. I regularly saw
this in the conclusions of these papers that,
you know, though the experiment did not fit the
hypothesis at all, like the results of the experiment,
right? The experimenter had all kinds of explanations
for what might have happened other than the hypothesis
just simply being wrong, right? It was something
about the equipment or maybe the experimental
design or maybe some, you know, fluke luck thing
or some unknown factor that they haven't discovered
yet, right? It also became fairly evident to
me quickly that no one seemed to be recreating
any of the experiments done. At least it wasn't
published. Maybe there are people doing it, but
it wasn't published material, right? So the closest
I saw was experiments that copied some of the
experimental design of another, but maybe added
some new elements to it. So it essentially was
a different experiment measuring something different,
but they were building off of some interesting
design that another experiment did, right? So
it was essentially a different hypothesis that
was being tested and with a very different experiment.
So that was the first experience that made me
question, like, oh, is it really how I was taught
in science class? Like, is this really how it
happens? The other experience actually came much
later in graduate school when I was taking a
philosophy of science class. This was at Boston
University. And I read Thomas Kuhn's Structure
of Scientific Revolutions for the first time.
Now, Kuhn is not actually a philosopher or a
scientist. He's actually a historian and went
through the records to kind of make better sense
of what kind of happened when there were these
major paradigm shifts in the sciences, right,
when these scientific revolutions. happened,
right? You know, Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton,
you know, Einstein with his theory of relativity
and so on. And as I read through these scientific,
you know, the history of these scientific revolutions,
I saw that scientific progress did not happen
in the way that it was taught in the science
classes I took back when I was much younger,
right? At least not according to Kuhn, right?
there were tensions between those wanting to
hold on to the older paradigms, the older frameworks
for understanding the world, and those that wanted
to embrace the new. And these weren't settled
through any rational discourse, but rather by
the older generations holding on to the older
paradigms. dying out, and then the newer generations
having a preference for these newer frameworks,
and they end up in the positions of power in
these scientific institutions. And so as a result,
people just shifted in that way. It almost sounds
as if it wasn't necessarily through rational
discourse at all. It just seems a matter of preference,
right? Now, to be fair, right, it wasn't quite
like just mere preference, but... At least in
terms of the scientific community and how the
scientific community seems to ebb and flow in
preference for certain frameworks over others.
At least in the moments when this tension arises,
it's not as if people just suddenly become enlightened
by some new discovery. Rather, there's a genuine
tension and there's a struggle between maintaining
some of the older frameworks and adopting some
of the new. In other words, these shifts in scientific
paradigms weren't through some scientific method
or some definitive experiments that objectively
showed one to be true and the other false. All
this, of course, simply confirmed what I was
already picking up on from my own experience
in research in the sciences. Does that mean that
science is nothing more than a collective working
under some, you know, group preference or something
like that? No, no, no, no, no. Clearly, there's
a difference between what people do in the sciences,
collectively anyways, and in what some people
might say is a pseudoscience, right? And the
difference is marked often by something like
the scientific method, right? Experimentation,
falsification of hypotheses, predictive power,
and so on, right? But it does raise real questions
about exactly what the demarcating line is between
science and not science, between certain methodology
that we might uphold as a good way of learning
something about the world around us and some
other ways of approaching it that are not so
good, right? If it's not merely the employment
of the scientific method, then what exactly is
it? Clearly, there is something. There is a difference,
right? There is a difference between the medical
sciences and all the advancements and the predictive
power that medical sciences have and whatever
the hell it is that astrology is doing, right?
And clearly, there's a good reason to put a trust
in one over the other. Like, there's a good reason
to put trust in the medical sciences, like if
I have cancer and I'm looking for treatment,
rather than the astrological signs. At least
I think there is a good reason to. prefer the
medical sciences, right? So then the question
then is, what is it? What is the difference?
Because if you can't give an explanation of why
we should trust one over the other, then now
you have a free -for -all. Now you can't really
convince other people to prefer one over the
other. The answer to the question is just not
as simple as what I was taught in high school.
I imagine there's a good answer. but it's not
the oversimplified kind of inaccurate, you know,
presentation of the sciences that I got when
I was younger. Rather, I imagine there's something
more to it, right? And that's what's explored
in the philosophy of science, right? You'll begin
to realize this as well as you kind of dig into
the questions, right? That, you know, there is
something different about what the sciences are
doing. as opposed to astrology. I'm just using
that as an example. There's a reason that a lot
of people were skeptical of psychology in its
early days. There is a reason that people were
skeptical of, in fact, most of the social sciences
and humanities as being included in the sciences
in any sort of way. And reasons why we might
be a little bit more willing now to accept at
least... empirical psychology uh and in at least
in the way that ideally it might or maybe should
be practiced right into the sciences and not
others right and so it's important to kind of
get to the roots of those questions because mainly
for each and every one of us right like we want
to know what we can trust like i i need to know
whether or not I can trust what it is that a
scientist is telling me. I need to know whether
or not I need consensus in the sciences to be
able to believe it. I need to know, I mean, these
are important decisions, life -altering decisions
that we're trying to make here, right? Decisions
we're trying to make about climate change, decisions
we're trying to make about policy with regards
to crime rates, with regards to, I don't know.
With regards to epidemiology, right, and vaccination
policies. These are real -life matters that we're
trying to deal with. We need to know where we
can get our information from, what we can trust,
what we should rely on as the source and arbiters
of truth. And one of the ways in which we're
going to differentiate between what we can trust
and not is which one uses better methodology.
And so it's clear that, at least for me anyways,
I have good reason to trust what the scientific
community kind of comes to a conclusion on, at
least, you know, arrives at some sort of consensus
on, right, where the majority of the scientific
community agrees on something, right? I put faith
in it. I trust it to some degree, but it really
begs the question, like, why is it that I trust
it as opposed to something else? Right. And so
those are the kinds of questions that we're trying
to really unpack and make better sense of in
the philosophy of science. The point being this,
science might not be exactly what you might think
it is, but it doesn't mean we should just throw
it out altogether. How are we going to make sense
of navigating those two extremes? Well, we're
going to have to talk about it in more detail
by taking. and unpacking some of the discussions
that have been had in the philosophy of science.