Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Rezwan]

Ooh! Here’s an even better quote. This book is so much fun:

Scientists and true believers in science are fond of pointing out that science is always open to new ideas, new methods, new knowledge: how otherwise could one explain the progress of science, which has seen the continual acquisition of new knowledge by deployment of continually new methods and the adoption of continually new theories?

This is the same fallacy as that which led to the myth of the scientific method. Hindsight gives a misleading perspective. There may not be a simple cause for what has happened in science in the past few centuries. One might equally explain the course of biological evolution through openness to change, just because as we look back we see that there has been so much change. In point of fact, we believe that biological change is anomalous rather than normal. Reproduction proceeds by duplication of existing genes, with considerable safeguards against errors in duplication, so that organisms on the whole breed true; the challenge is much more to explain variation and novelty than faithful heredity and stasis. The particular course that evolution has taken is a by-product of mutation, competition , environmental change, natural selection, genetic drift, and the like, not the result of any direct natural tendency for biological entities to change.

Similarly, that science has adopted new ideas in no way demonstrates that the adoption of new ideas is somehow fundamentally natural to science.

And:

Nowadays, again or still, even the most forward-peering scientists believe that all the main principles have been recognized and that no major surprises await us.

Carl Sagan, in many respects incisive and critical, wrote in 1978, “this…is written just before – at most …a few years or a few decades before – the answers to many of these vexing and awesome questions on origins and fates are pried loose from the cosmos…there is only one generation privileged to live through that unique transitional moment: that generation is ours.”

Thus, human beings, including scientists, do not function under continual awareness of humanity’s fundamental ignorance; rather, they live under perpetual illusion of fundamental understanding.

Epistemic arrogance. Annoying whenever someone else is exhibiting it. Logical when you’re doing it.

Whoo! The book is mostly about uncertainty in knowledge, human nature (that scientists are human, but the scientific method asks that they not be, that they be truly rational) and the claim that this truly rational process exists and is used, when in fact, the actual process of science is much more human, and there is a constant tension between innovation and conservatism in science.

Enjoy!