Epistemic Responsibility in the Sciences Pt. One
The contemporary standard for certifying scientific knowledge relies heavily on observations, descriptions and a hypotheses that yield accurate predictions, but the history of Science shows that generating information using this method does not necessarily equate to knowledge.
The school of empirical philosophy, which became popular in England during the Enlightenment, posits that observation is the only way to arrive at genuine knowledge, or the verifiable existence of a thing. In the Eighteenth Century, a student of this school took empiricism to an extreme, offering many arguments that causes have no empirical presence, and should therefore be disregarded.
One of his most damning observations for the scientific method uses the example of two balls on a pool table. When one strikes the other and the other moves, the customary belief is that the first ball moving and colliding with the second caused the second to move. However, we never observe this cause. We only observe the following:
- The first ball moving preceded the second ball moving (“priority in time”)
- The first ball touched the second ball (“contiguity in space”).
- Finally, whenever the first two conditions are present, the event occurs (“constant conjunction”).
Yet, we nonetheless assert what Hume calls a “necessary connection” between the first ball moving and striking the other, and the other then moving. If we can’t see this necessary connection, how do we know it’s there? Hume tells us that we infer it. Causes therefore exist in the mind.
For those that believe we can learn about the world using our reasoning, as Descartes whose scientific method Hume took issue with, this is not a disturbing revelation. But Hume was not a rationalist. He split the everything in the world into two categories. The first was “matters of fact”, which are like the pool balls above. The second was “relations of ideas”. We can tell matters of fact from relations of ideas because the opposite of a relation of ideas are contradictions. Contradictions are inconceivable, but one pool ball remaining unaffected by another striking it is not inconceivable. Everything else falling in neither of these categories is just our imagination.
The following is a clean set of arguments that I personally constructed to clarify an interpretation of Hume’s much more thoroughly argued philosophy, and may not reflect his exact thoughts:
P|1.1.1: I observe the pool ball strike another pool ball. P|1.1.2: Observed phenomena are matters of fact (whether or true or false). C|1.1: The phenomenon is a matter of fact.
P|1.2.1: I believe the second pool ball moved because the first one struck it. P|1.2.2: I did not observe the cause, but inferred it from the continuity, contiguity and constant conjunction of the two object-events. C|1.2: The inference is in my mind.
P|1.3.1: If the inference is a relation of ideas, than it’s opposite must yield a contradiction. P|1.3.2: The negation of the inference (that the second pool ball not moving after being struck by the first) is not inconceivable. C|1.3: The inference must be a matter of fact.
P|1.4.1: I never observed the inference, so it can’t be a matter of fact (a contradiction with [C1.3]. We could pause the argument right here, but I believe that in the name of spelling out the entire interpretation, we should continue). P|1.4.2: The opposite of the inference is not a contradiction, so it can’t a relation of ideas. C|1.4: The inference is neither a matter of fact nor a relation of ideas.
P|1.5.1: The inference is neither a matter of fact nor a relation of ideas. P|1.5.2: All real, true things are either matters of fact (which are observable) or relations of ideas (which are logical). C|1.5: The inference is imagined …
…it does not exist in a way that is meaningful to knowledge, because we can’t call it true or false by a system of knowledge that draws logical inferences from observed phenomena. The very power of declaring something is observed is that we know at least the observation was true. Similarly for a relation of ideas, but instead of observation we offer a logical coherence as the criteria for truth. An imagined thing such as a cause is therefore useless in a system that demands both true observations and good arguments in order to obtain knowledge.
We can still infer that the first ball striking the other causes one to move the other. But we need to introduce extra premises. For example:
P|2.1: One pool ball struck another. P|2.2: Whenever one pool ball strikes another, the second moves. C|2: The second pool ball moved.
This premise is a rule, or law, and the introduction of premises that are neither purely observed nor purely reasoned is the task of science. However, we never have direct experience or thought of the cause or explanation for the event. So, when abiding by the scientific method, we introduce experiments to insure that our beliefs match reality.
Unfortunately, the history of Science has demonstrated that just because we can accurately predict events based on arguments cobbled together from observation, reason and imagination (like the premises introduced to make the last argument true), doesn’t mean that we have any knowledge of what’s actually going on.
Ptolemy was a mathematician and observational scientist who lived in the Roman Empire during the second century A D. One of his great accomplishments was reliably describing motion of the planets through the sky. By the time he introduced his system, equally talented scientists dating all the way back to Babylon and Egypt had done much of the work. For thousands of years, however, there were moments in the celestial cycle that vexed even the brightest minds. Namely, at different times of the year some planets move backward in the sky.
Ptolemy was an expert geometer and introduced the notion of “epicycles” to account for this behavior, allowing us to predictably map the motion of the planets at all times of day, during all days of the year. It looked like something this:
To the Modern viewer this looks quite unlike the neat, simple ellipses that appear in today’s textbooks. Most who think carefully might say the image above diagrams a concept that is obviously false, yet it is conceptually sound and corresponds just as accurately to the predictions as our current, heliocentric model does, so long as you add to it the concept, now demonstrated as imaginary, that the Earth is the center of the Universe. More disturbingly, to anyone on the ground all our senses indicate that the Earth is in fact the axis around which all the celestial bodies rotate.
If we read Hume as I have above and take the Pytolemeic model as an instance, we should grant him some credit. Here, reason extrapolated from sense perception has utterly failed. This case is especially damning to advocates of a scientific method that allows us to infer from our observations, because the the imaginary rule that Ptolemy made is not as delicate as the one that appears in argument [2], because argument [2] depends on an assumed premise that does not appear. Hume called this assumption the “Principle of the Uniformity of Nature”, which dictates that the laws of Nature are the same at all times and all places, which of course can never be proved. Rather, Ptolemy’s assumption corresponds to what is plainly obvious.
Historically minded readers might wonder, if there were no observations to prove Ptolemy wrong, why did Copernicus offer an alternative model that we now call the Solar System? The theory did have a flaw, but the flaw may be undetectable to scientific method as it is widely known and practiced. Every few decades or centuries, astronomers would have to “update” the model by adding more epicycles. After thousands of years, the model went from the above to that picture below:
Not only is the process of regularly updating a theory intuitively dissatisfying, thinkers from England starting in the Middle Ages and going right up to Hume’s immediate intellectual ancestors began arguing not only for the scientific method we popularly use, but a method for judging the scientific method. The most famous instance is now known as Occam’s Razor, which states that between two competing theories that appear correct, the simpler one ought to be chosen (notice that this is not an empirical judgment at all, but an aesthetic one).
Then came the Copernican Revolution which thinkers like Kepler, Galileo, Newton and even Descartes and Hume still glory in. Whew! Close call! I would celebrate this new found era of Enlightenment all the more if not for the fact that we found ourselves here by the exact means that people of the Middle Ages found themselves glorying in the Ptolemaic System — a set of accurate descriptions and predictions which are almost never modified in essence, but constantly tweaked using the same theoretical foundation. In the field of astronomy, concepts like “dark matter” and “dark energy” demonstrate this tendency in our current paradigm, according some astronomers.
The philosopher Anthony Kenny believes that this accumulation of data and refinement of theories is the very thing that distinguishes science from philosophy. For science, he says, progress is defined by adding more data to a single paradigm in a cooperative effort by many minds. Philosophy on the other hand is the organization of concepts, regardless of whether or not new information is introduced, and is usually the product of individuals.
I regret that this blog may so far come off as a denigration of science or the work of scientists. In truth, I admire the work that scientists are doing now just as I do for the scientists of the past, who are sadly mocked or forgotten in our time. Really the point is to spotlight the potential danger of relying on wholly one means of understanding the world. It may seem inconsequential when talking about the movements of lights in the sky o so far away, but it’s not in our habit to restrict the scientific method to the most inconsequential of curiosities. At a societal and personal level, many if not all of us make judgments about people and other living things that science may have less to say about than we think. Instead of referring to horrors of politics or marketing, I’ll offer a personal example to conclude this section.
When I was younger I worked in an art supply store in downtown Manhattan with a young woman from Russia who, to all outward appearances, seemed both happy and successful. She was a better artist than I ever was and also on her way to completing and M F A at Hunter college. I treated her as the image that she projected of herself. Many years after leaving New York, I found out that she killed herself only a short time after last we saw each other. But all the while I knew her, there was no tell and my inference that she was a generally content and well-balanced person proved true. Despite appearance and reasoning, I didn’t know what I thought I had.
Certainly a rigorously philosophical perspective would have been just as foolish as my scientific one, but there are more ways to look at the world than just these two. Although she’ll always be a better artist than me I turned out the better scientist, and at no benefit to her.
