Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Midgets on stilts

DM: It's a bit more striking to see someone who is so utterly out of touch with reality. The next time you have a medical condition, I'd like to see where your skepticism and scientific anti-realism go...into the crapper.

SH: Danny, if you think for one moment that this is a defeater for my position, then you haven’t given it very much thought.

There are at least three things wrong with your comeback, of which I mention one right here and save the other two for later.

All we need for a scientific theory to work is for there to be a regular conjunction between one phenomenal event and another.

From this we ordinarily infer a cause/effect relationship, although that isn’t necessary.

And the appearances can be at several removes from the underlying and unobservable reality.

Unless you happen to be a naïve realist who believes that objects really are smaller at a distance, and oars really bend in water, then even you will have to admit a discrepancy between appearance and reality.

And the problem is that all we have are appearances to go by. We can artificially enhance our senses, but that merely introduces another filter. It presents us with just another appearance.

Danny’s position isn’t much different from the flat-earther. After all, the earth looks flat to the earth-bound observer.

DM: Call me a pragmatist about scientific methodology, seeing it as a tool. If it works to produce things for us that meet our needs (eg medicine), then we use it until better tools come along.

SH: Notice how Danny has retreated from his original position. His original position was predicated on the alethic progressivity of science: reliable “knowledge,” “falsifiable” and “unfalsifiable.

Now, however, the question of truth has suddenly dropped out of the equation.

To speak of the scientific method as a tool sounds a lot like instrumentalism rather than realism.

DM: So far, your theology and philosophizing has done squat for the human race as far as meeting needs and saving lives and mass-producing food and etc. etc. etc.

Even if that were the case, it’s irrelevant to the truth-value, or lack thereof, of scientific theorizing.

DM: Hardly. You don't know my views on the philosophy of science and demarcation. I haven't bothered to engage with you on it, as I stated long ago, since you're a scientific anti-realist.

SH: Actually, Danny has expressed a philosophy of science in the very course of this exchange.

DM: As I said there, why cast pearls before swine? Why get into contextual disputes with someone who doesn't subscribe to any of the contexts?

You always want to move the ball back into your court, because it's the only one with the 4' rim. Thus, making "slam dunks" on the court of scientific anti-realism is your bag.

SH: Danny’s persistent problem is that he thinks he can make a straight-line appeal to the scientific evidence without bothering to ask himself, much less answer for himself, what sort of cognitive access the percipient can have to the scientific evidence in the first place.

Before you can appeal to observables, much less unobservables (strings, elementary particles, the prehistoric past), you must deal with the observer. That’s why we can’t move on until this preliminary question is addressed.

DM: Why should I bother distinguishing Popper's change of views on evolutionary theory and falsifiability with someone who thinks that such knowledge goes through "too many layers" of perception to be real?

SH: Fine, ignore Popper and stick with the veil of perception. What’s your way around the veil of perception?

DM: As Calvindude has hinted at here, some theories are later found to be "false". What neither of you in your theorizing allow for is that when the prior theories are shown to be false (viz. creationism by evolution) the new theory must accomodate the observational data of the old, as well as provide a better explanation for other phenomena.

SH: A couple of problems with this claim:

1.It confuses the theory with the significance attached to the theory. Both Einstein and Bohr could agree on the nuts-and-bolts of quantum theory, but differ over its significance; both Penrose and Hawking could agree on the basics of cosmology, but differ over its significance.

You can assign either a realist or antirealist interpretation to the very same theory.

If you—as a realist—are going to say that a given theory is a true description of reality, then I—as an antirealist—will simply say that you attach a false significance to the theory.

2.You also sidestep the question of how, in the history of science, contradictory theories can both be successful. That’s a problem for realism.

DM: n this sense, scientific theories are evolving, but they are selected for by their utility and scope.

SH: Notice his choice of words. Selected for “utility” and “scope” rather than veracity.

DM: You spent a lot of time talking about your analogy between a CD's encoding of a live performance and the performance itself. The binary data in a CD is a language which can be correlated to the frequencies of the music. What strikes me as odd is that, as observations are made through layers of perception, you fail to argue that there is some fundamental disconnect between the "language" of perception and that of reality. You simply posit that these layers exist (which I don't deny), and that by their existence, a correlation to reality is somehow not itself dependable as knowledge.

SH: Nice try, but as usual I’m at least one step ahead of you since I’ve already addressed that line of objection on several occasions.

1.Yes, we use our senses to perceive our senses. That, of itself, doesn’t imply that our senses are reliable in a truth-conducive sense.

A color-blind man must rely on his defective sense of perception. That’s all he has to go by.

2.What you fail to see (pardon the pun) is that I’m critiquing scientific realism from within.

So, yes, for purposes of an internal critique, I assume a perceptual viewpoint. And given that very perspective, the ironic result is that indirect perception is the best that we can salvage by taking perception as our point of departure and point of reference.

3.Since, however, using the senses to perceive the senses is a circular exercise, then the illusory objectivity of such self-referential descriptions would not, when you make allowance for that imponderable, draw us any closer to reality in the raw, but removes us by yet another degree of separation from reality in the raw.

Like a man sewn into a VR suit, that’s his only frame of reference even if he knows it’s fictive. Subtract that and you end up with less rather than more.

DM: If our brains fundamentally change the nature of reality, there is absolutely no way for us to know it. Likewise, there is absolutely no way for us to prove it false. This is an unfalsifiable concept, like all of your 4' rim court abstractions.

SH:

1.I’m a dualist. I believe that dualism is demonstrable on introspective grounds. There is more to knowledge, including self-knowledge, than sensory perception.

2.There is no way for the percipient, left to his own devices, to escape his subjectivity and compare appearance with reality.

But divine revelation can supply an Archimedean point of comparison and contrast.

You, however, have sealed yourself away from that resource, like a clam. So you’re self-exiled to your epistemic shell. Hope you enjoy the view in the dark.

DM: To continue my tirade on the futility of philosophy, see Babinski's excellent collection of quotes here.

SH: Those who mock the philosophy of science are still operating with their own homegrown philosophy of science. The only difference is that theirs is a philosophically inept philosophy of science.

If a creationist were to talk in this country-bumpkin fashion, he’d be greeted with intellectual scorn.

But it’s okay to be a country-bumpkin just as long as you’re a Darwinian hayseed.

8 comments:

  1. Your philosophy of science undergirds your view, meaning, and use of science. If he's going to say that the philosophy of science is meaningless, then he ought to give up science altogether because science would become meaningless. This reminds me of the atheists that have tried to prove that the laws of logic are relative.

    BTW: Steve,

    Can you recommend a good book on the philosophy of science?

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  2. A good place to start would be J. P. Moreland's Christianity & the Nature of Science.

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  3. See also The Philosophy of Science (audio) by Michael Butler.

    Go here for four of those lectures.

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  4. I wonder what experimental research Michael Butler has conducted. Or Moreland for that matter. Anything there?

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  5. Steve,

    Unless you happen to be a naïve realist who believes that objects really are smaller at a distance, and oars really bend in water, then even you will have to admit a discrepancy between appearance and reality.

    And the problem is that all we have are appearances to go by. We can artificially enhance our senses, but that merely introduces another filter. It presents us with just another appearance.


    We cannot escape this same problem within the field of theology or anywhere else -- what if we're just brains in a vat? This is a long-standing issue, as is the problem of other minds, and many other questions of philosophy. And your own position is not one in which these questions are given some solid solution -- proving other minds, or proving that our senses are reliable and that we aren't in the Matrix. Instead, you retreat to the skeptical vantage when it comes to science, but the same "naivete" when it comes to theology -- that your experiences and sense knowledge of the Bible/revelation/etc are reliable knowledge, whereas scientific knowledge is not. You have a double standard.

    SH: Notice how Danny has retreated from his original position. His original position was predicated on the alethic progressivity of science: reliable “knowledge,” “falsifiable” and “unfalsifiable.

    Now, however, the question of truth has suddenly dropped out of the equation.

    Not really, just taking an end-around approach. My position is and always has been that scientific knowledge is definitionally tentative and subject to falsification. Thus, what we "know" in science may be falsified tomorrow. The very nature of such "knowledge" evades absolutism. My point is that in using this knowledge and in continually testing and refining it, we have drawn the best conclusions that we possibly can, the most reliable conclusions that we can, and the best results for humanity...much better than merely armchair philosophy.

    And that is why, when you accused me of a parareligious view of science, I don't really mind the "stigma" -- I come back with a functionalist definition to religion: that whatever we see as the most important and useful thing we have can be considered our religion. The modern view of the functionalist definition is of course that a true religion must have some element of the supernatural involved. However, I'm allowing the functionalist definition to work here, and I'm using the pragmatic approach to return your scorn to your own lap -- that if I "worship" science, at least what I have devoted my life to studying and knowing has and will continue to do tangiable good for human beings. Is there a more noble quasi-religion to have?

    Danny’s persistent problem is that he thinks he can make a straight-line appeal to the scientific evidence without bothering to ask himself, much less answer for himself, what sort of cognitive access the percipient can have to the scientific evidence in the first place.

    This same question applies to your study of the Scripture, and your experiences of "revelation". All of those things go through the same senses and perceptive layers. What gives them more veracity? What makes your position coherent to reject sense knowledge that is filtered through methodological naturalism and continual refinement and selection...but accept sense knowledge gleaned from a bunch of dusty scrolls of unknown origins, and the way you feel (still sense perception) upon reading them and praying and such?

    Before you can appeal to observables, much less unobservables (strings, elementary particles, the prehistoric past), you must deal with the observer. That’s why we can’t move on until this preliminary question is addressed.

    Your view is that man is corrupt (the observer) and thus his sense perceptions unreliable; but, for whatever reason, you hold the double standard explicated above. You say we could be brains in a vat on the one hand, but objects in God's universe on the other.

    SH: Fine, ignore Popper and stick with the veil of perception. What’s your way around the veil of perception?

    Scientific progress and knowledge is predicated upon sense reliability. You know this. It is a presupposition. It doesn't mean that we access the "raw" form of reality, but that there is a correlative relationship between "raw" and "perceived". Thus the "veil of perception" is taken to be non-distorted. Consider it one medium upon which is written a language of our brains (perception), which, when decoded, reveals "raw" reality. Do I really have to explain this to you? You know this is the position of those who hold to any form of scientific realism -- that our perceptions are reliable correlations to reality, even if encoded in a different medium.

    If you—as a realist—are going to say that a given theory is a true description of reality, then I—as an antirealist—will simply say that you attach a false significance to the theory.
    But you will still hobble in to apply the "falsely significant knowledge" to your broken body when you need it, eh?

    You also sidestep the question of how, in the history of science, contradictory theories can both be successful. That’s a problem for realism.
    Exbeliever went over that a bit here as he talked about how both quantum theory and general relativity are true within their spheres of description, but not universally or absolutely true, but give us knowledge nonetheless:
    If it were the case, then, that human minds did not accurately reflect the structure of the world, it is still possible that human minds would be able to gain "knowledge" (i.e. the power of prediction) about the world even though they were unaware of how the world really operated. Just like a scientific theory does not have to be "true" to give us knowledge about the world, the human mind does not have to reflect the structure of the world in order for humans to gain knowledge about it.

    In other words, it could be the case that human minds understand the world through Perception X. The world actually operates, however, through Perception Y. Even though Perception Y is the case, Perception X is such that it provides humans with a consistent ability to make predictions (i.e. gain knowledge) about the world. We know things through Perception X that are true not because Perception X is the case, but because Perception Y can also be understood in terms of Perception X.

    Similarly, I see no reason to believe that a coherent, rational structure of the world and a mind that reflects this is necessary for communication.


    A better theory must come along which does the same job as both did in explaining phenomena at their scale, and reconciles the scales without contradiction. What I think this comes back to is what you define as "reliable knowledge" which I admitted up front was not universal and absolute. So? It still works to describe phenomena as well as we possibly can (at the moment) and gives us the power to predict phenomena in the future. It is thus something, versus the nothing offered by theology, as a tool whereby we can relieve pain and help human beings.

    DM: In this sense, scientific theories are evolving, but they are selected for by their utility and scope.
    SH: Notice his choice of words. Selected for “utility” and “scope” rather than veracity.

    Their veracity, or truth-value, increases as they evolve. They are not necessarily going to approach universal Truth, but they will describe the phenomena of reality more accurately and precisely with time, thus they are more true than previous theories...and it continues on from there.

    1.Yes, we use our senses to perceive our senses. That, of itself, doesn’t imply that our senses are reliable in a truth-conducive sense.

    A color-blind man must rely on his defective sense of perception. That’s all he has to go by.


    I don't think you get what I imply: you aren't presenting any reason for us to believe ourselves color-blind.

    I’m a dualist. I believe that dualism is demonstrable on introspective grounds. There is more to knowledge, including self-knowledge, than sensory perception.
    This seems odd as a solution to the problem of perception. You posit another fundamental substance of which we are composed...fine, whatever, but how is it that this substance has perceptive powers which are not as internally circular and as externally unverifiable as "just" matter?

    There is no way for the percipient, left to his own devices, to escape his subjectivity and compare appearance with reality.

    But divine revelation can supply an Archimedean point of comparison and contrast.

    What does divine revelation "perceive" like, Steve? How do you perceieve it differently than any other sensation, feeling, brain fart, etc.? How can you show that this isn't part of the Matrix? Answer: you can't.

    You cannot remove what you call "divine revelation" from your senses either. You wouldn't know it at all if not for your senses.

    Those who mock the philosophy of science are still operating with their own homegrown philosophy of science. The only difference is that theirs is a philosophically inept philosophy of science.
    Presupposing the reliability of the senses is inept? Why?

    If a creationist were to talk in this country-bumpkin fashion, he’d be greeted with intellectual scorn.
    No, they're greeted with intellectual scorn because they believe that dinosaurs were "Jesus ponies" that Adam & Eve rode around the garden 6,000 years ago.

    But it’s okay to be a country-bumpkin just as long as you’re a Darwinian hayseed.
    Well, maybe not "okay" in the philosophical sense, but evolution is certainly the only scientifically coherent explanation of the history of life and biogeography. Why do you creationists love to use "Darwinism" so much? Whether I thought God's or Zeus's guiding hand was causing mutations (which we only perceive as random), or just the laws of physics...and that they are then selected for naturally, why the distinction? You reject both. You should scorn "common descent" or "evolution" in general, not just Darwinism.

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  6. Barry,

    Don't hold your breath.

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  7. Barry Sylveira said:
    I wonder what experimental research Michael Butler has conducted. Or Moreland for that matter. Anything there?


    I know that Butler nor Moreland that well to answer you specific question. But, would it matter if they had not done anything themselves to talk about the Philosophy of Science?

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  8. Moreland has a degree in Chem.

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