People are dumb. They make mistakes, they mislead themselves, they are merely boundedly rational in a complex world, they think fuzzily, they rely on heuristics that generalize poorly, and they are prone to over-reliance on superstition and maladaptive instincts and pat hackneyed answers. If you want to know something, don’t walk up to an arbitrary person and ask them to figure it out for you.
In reading and complaining about Kevin Chang’s articles on Intelligent Design in the New York Times, it strikes me that what people misunderstand the most about science is this: We as scientists expect people to be wrong, including ourselves. The scientific process is not about finding the truth, but rather noticing and recovering from the stupid mistakes we make, faster and better than anybody else can.
The infrastructure of science, what makes it science, is no more philosophically complicated than that: it’s the transparency, the public statements of hypotheses and results, the checking each other, the arguments, the peer review. It’s not falsifiability and what’s a “theory” or a “fact”, it’s not positive and negative heuristics and research programmes, it’s not atheism and materialist bias in interpreting reality, it’s not logical consequences and induction and deduction or even abduction. Science is all about listening to other people when they tell you you’re full of shit. It’s about saying everything in a framework designed so that other people can check it. And it’s about responding gracefully when they do, inevitably, tell you your shit-levels are a bit high, sorry, revise and resubmit, thank you very much.
That’s the crucial point where ID falls on its face. It surely doesn’t manage to be judged by the same criteria as scientific research on evolution, or its believers would have vast bibliographies of reasonable papers in peer-reviewed journals. Which they do not.
So when you get right down to it, ID’s attempts to evade the scientific community’s steady and consistent stream of invective, calling them vacuous and wrong, is just another way of letting people stay stupid longer.
But things like “theory,” “fact,” and “falsifiability,” (or at least, the last one) are the logical consequences… or at least, the necessary conditions… for someone telling you you’re full of shit.
But you’re right, I suppose that in talking about “theories” and “falsifiability,” you kind of lose the forest for the trees. And the forest is a forest of invective. Indeed.
This is not to say that scientists, as members of some much-vaunted Community, are nicer than other people, or are trying to be right. Indeed, I know a number who I might say (on an unflattering day) seem to be avoiding saying anything at all for fear of being told they’re saying nothing at all.
Hell, I seem to be one of those, myself. But that’s neither here nor there.
In an ideal world, though, the forest of “invective” might be better-described as “distributed continuous editorial commentary”, don’t you think? Including internalized editorial commenting?
Yeah: I mean, I think I basically agree. Practically, science is this ongoing process of comment/learning/teaching/boasting. I think your “distributed editorial commentary” is perfectly accurate.
I guess my only point was that the editorial commentary usually occurs (can occur) because most of the editors agree, on some level, about some of the basic principles involved. I mean, they agree that they can only edit “that which is editable.” They can only comment on “things that make themselves open to commentary.” They share a certain set of minimum standards which allow them to maintain this “science” thing — they form an epistemic community, if you will. And one of the concepts that join them is something like “falsifiability” (that is, “edit-ability,” or “open to comment”), in one of its many guises.
But yeah, ultimately, it’s a distributed comment-driven process. Which is why the whole ID thing rubs so many scientists the wrong way — it has the feel of a party-crasher, someone who doesn’t want to participate at all, complaining about how the party isn’t being conducted the way they want.
When I think about science as a “social activity,” I think about people as social animals. They exist in relation to each other and as part of groups that exist in relation to other groups. Okay, I’m saying things that we already agree on probably.
But what I’m trying to do is dissociate the social activity from the cognitive activity. The doing from the knowing, reasoning, judging mind.
Damnint. I have more to say but I have to go to a freakin’ soccer game. I’ll be bahck.
Why is this debate over Intelligent Design even happening? Who is attracted to the idea?