The Scientific Attitude

by Lee McIntyre

  Others who have pursued a “post-Laudan” solution to the problem of demarcation have encountered a similarly rocky path. In the same volume, Sven Hansson pursues an extremely broad definition of science. Apparently wary of the implications of classifying disciplines like philosophy as nonscience, he instead expands the scope of science to mean something more like a “community of knowledge” and then proceeds to demarcate this from pseudoscience. For all of the alleged advantages of rescuing the humanities from the realm of nonscience, however, the cost is quite high, for now he cannot say that the problem with pseudoscience has anything to do with its bastardization of empirical standards (since at least part of what he now classifies as science is not empirical either).42

  Maarten Boudry takes a similarly questionable step in saying that he thinks there are really two demarcation problems—the “territorial” and the “normative”—instead of just one. The former dispute he dismisses as sterile. It is just a matter of “turf” that concerns separating science from legitimate but nonempirical epistemic endeavors like history and philosophy. According to Boudry, the real dispute is between science and pseudoscience; this is where the normative issue arises, because this is where we face those disciplines that are just pretending to be sciences.43 Yet this bifurcation of the problem of demarcation reveals a basic confusion between saying that a discipline is nonscientific and saying that it is unscientific. Does Boudry mean to identify the “territorial” dispute as one between fields that are scientific and nonscientific? If so, that is a highly idiosyncratic and misleading use of the term. The dispute that he appears to be searching for when he talks about the territorial problem of demarcation seems to be between science and what may be called “unscience.” Yet why would this be the proper alternative to the normative dispute? The more traditional interpretation of the demarcation debate—revealed in most scholarship in the field—is that between science and nonscience, or between science and pseudoscience. These are the terms of art used by Popper, Laudan, and most everyone else.44 Instead, Boudry seems to be creating a new demarcation problem, while saying nothing about why we should ignore the classic problem of demarcating between science and nonscience. But why does Boudry think that he can make a case for the normative battle between science and pseudoscience, when he has not legitimately dispensed with the larger issue of science versus nonscience? The straw-man “territorial” distinction between science versus unscience (history, philosophy, etc.) does not do the job.45

  This struggle to explain whether the problem of demarcation should be between science versus nonscience—or between science versus pseudoscience—may seem like a mere terminological dispute, but it is not. For if we are attempting to distinguish science from all that is not science, it may lead to a very different criterion of demarcation than if we seek to distinguish science merely from its imposter. The important point here is to recognize that, according to most scholars, the category of nonscience includes both those fields that are pseudo-scientific and those that are unscientific. An inquiry can be nonscientific either because it is merely pretending to be scientific (in which case it is pseudoscientific) or because it concerns matters where empirical data are not relevant (in which case it is unscientific).46 (See figure 1.1.)

  Figure 1.1

  This failure to be specific about what one is differentiating science from, however, not only exists in the “post-Laudan” essays by Pigliucci, Hansson, and Boudry, but seems to reflect a deep equivocation in the literature that goes all the way back through Laudan to Karl Popper himself. Remember that in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper says that he is demarcating science from math, logic, and “metaphysical speculation.”47 By the time he gets to Conjectures and Refutations, however, his target is pseudoscience. In Laudan’s essay, he too slides back and forth between talking about nonscience and pseudoscience.48

  What difference does all of this make? It turns out to be crucial. Later we will revisit the issue of necessary and sufficient conditions and learn that the entire question of what is special about science may hang in the balance. We will see that the project of trying to solve the problem of demarcation is hamstrung unless we can specify precisely what it is that we are trying to define (science, nonscience, pseudoscience, or unscience) and, as we have seen, there has as yet been no definitive answer to that. My goal will be to provide a way to say what is distinctive about science without getting tripped up on the problem of providing both necessary and sufficient conditions—or trying to solve the problem of demarcation—because I do not think that these problems can be solved. Yet we still need a way to defend science.

  First, however, let us deal with the problem of those who have misunderstood how science works.

  Notes

  1. There is some dispute over who first came up with the term scientific method. Many trace it back to the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Roger Bacon—not to be confused with the sixteenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon—who along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste first put forward the idea that scientific knowledge should be based on sensory evidence. Francis Bacon later advocated and refined this method in service of the same empirical goal.

  2. See Noretta Koertge, ed., New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 2007).

  3. Later in this chapter we will explore a few of the reasons that philosophers of science, such as Popper and Kuhn, have given for rejecting the idea of scientific method.

  4. Laudan, “The Demise of the Demarcation Problem,” in Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence, ed. Larry Laudan (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 210–222. For an excellent general discussion, see also Thomas Nickles, “The Problem of Demarcation: History and Future,” in Philosophy of Pseudoscience, ed. M. Pigliucci and M. Boudry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 101–120.

  5. The classic source for Logical Positivism at its peak is A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1952). For an interesting history of its long slide afterward, see P. Achinstein and S. Barker, The Legacy of Logical Positivism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), which goes into some depth about the particular problems the approach faced, especially when the Logical Positivists realized that some of their own statements could not pass a credible version of the verification test.

  6. Chapter 2 will provide a longer discussion of the problem of induction and the issues it creates for scientific reasoning. In short, the problem of induction is that one cannot be certain of any statement that is open to later refutation by empirical evidence.

  7. Strontium-90 is a radioactive particle produced by atomic fission that is absorbed into the environmental food cycle, where it competes with calcium and settles into the bones of those who ingest it. Before the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty, there were hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests worldwide. In one study in St. Louis in 1963, baby teeth were found to have fifty times the level of Strontium-90 as those born in 1950. The half-life of Strontium-90 is 28 years.

  8. Actually, it may not, for the problem of induction technically undermines not just the certainty but also the probability of inductive statements. For more discussion, see chapter 2.

  9. Here we might still have to do some more investigation to figure out why Gabriel does not have Strontium-90 in his bones. Was he born before 1945? Was he born in 1994 but did not live near a nuclear reactor? But the point is that the reasoning is deductively valid. Once we know that he does not have Strontium-90 in his bones we can rule out that he was born between 1945 and 1991.

  10. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 36.

  11. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959). It is fascinating to note that although virtually every scholar characterizes Popper’s concern in the demarcation debate as one between science and nonscience (or pseudoscience), Popper does not himself use either of these terms in this book. Where he comes closest to defining demarca
tion (in section 4), Popper says that it is meant to “distinguish between the empirical sciences on the one hand, and mathematics and logic as well as ‘metaphysical’ systems on the other.” This makes clear that he did not intend science to be distinguished just from “metaphysical speculation” but also from other “unscientific” inquiries like math and logic, which is perhaps where the idea of nonscience comes from: it is an amalgam of pseudoscience and unscientific inquiries. Later in his Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), Popper begins to use the term “pseudo-science” more or less interchangeably with “metaphysics” as the sole contrast for science, with the term “nonscience” still unmentioned. So why use it now? First, it has come to be used as a category term in a debate that has outgrown Popper. Second, it seems faithful to Popper’s original meaning. As we will see, however, it makes a great deal of difference whether we see the demarcation debate as one between science and nonscience, or between science and pseudoscience. I prefer the term “nonscience,” even though it is not used explicitly by Popper.

  12. The full text of Act 590 can be found in But Is It Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy, ed. M. Ruse (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), 283–286.

  13. See Lee McIntyre, Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age (New York: Routledge, 2015), 64.

  14. For more on the positive evidence in favor of evolution by natural selection, and the absence of such evidence for creation science and its successors, see pp. 40–41 and 175–180.

  15. This was not, however, seen by all as an unfettered benefit. For doesn’t it open the door that something like astrology might come up with a falsifiable prediction and therefore be accepted as science? Worse, to the extent that astrology has already been proven false, doesn’t this show that it must be falsifiable, and so therefore scientific?

  16. This essay appears as the preface to Popper’s volume Realism and the Aim of Science (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983).

  17. Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations,” in Conjectures and Refutations, 46.

  18. Scientific method is just one way for there to be a methodological demarcation between science and nonscience. Falsification is another. Perhaps there are more. As we have seen, there are also attempts to demarcate science from nonscience based on nonmethodological criteria, such as the Logical Positivist’s idea to draw a distinction between statements that are cognitively meaningful and those that are cognitively meaningless (though since this uses the verification criterion, one could argue that this too was an attempt at methodological demarcation).

  19. Kuhn had a hand in arguing against the simple idea of “scientific method,” through his claim that all observation was theory laden. See his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

  20. The closest Kuhn ever came to a criterion of demarcation was in his commentary on Popper entitled “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, vol. 14, ed. Paul Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974), where Kuhn wrote “it is normal science, in which Sir Karl’s sort of testing does not occur, rather than extraordinary science which most nearly distinguishes science from other enterprises. If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science which Sir Karl ignores” (802). But cf. here Tom Nickles, “Problem of Demarcation,” 109, who calls Kuhn’s idea of puzzle solving within normal science “Kuhn’s criterion.” See also Sven Ove Hansson’s entry “Science and Pseudo-Science” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in which he explicitly calls Kuhn’s views on puzzle solving his “criterion of demarcation,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/.

  21. Kuhn gives an account of “normal science”—which he argues is what the majority of scientists do most of the time—in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

  22. In Feyerabend’s book Against Method (London: Verso, 1975), he claims that “anything goes” in science and that it practices “methodological anarchy.”

  23. For an enjoyable history of these efforts, see Peter Achinstein and Stephen Barker, eds., The Legacy of Logical Positivism: Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).

  24. For instance, that it was possible to maintain strict objectivity and that there was an absolute distinction between facts and values.

  25. Laudan, “Demise of the Demarcation Problem,” 216–217.

  26. All of this, of course, is a classic problem in any decision procedure, where we want to include all and only those things we favor and exclude all and only those we don’t. Examples include deciding whether to shoot down a plane (is it enemy or ally?), allow an inference to be accepted (is it valid or invalid?), or remove a tumor (is it cancerous or benign?). A perfect decision procedure makes no errors (either false positives or false negatives), which is what many are searching for with a criterion of demarcation between science and nonscience. Unfortunately, the rate of false positives is inversely proportional to the rate of false negatives, and vice versa. By reducing one, we cannot help but increase the likelihood of the other.

  27. Notice that Laudan is here making a sort of “meta-argument” not only that past philosophers have failed to solve the problem of demarcation, but that doing so would require providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for science. He is, in other words, making the idea of providing necessary and sufficient conditions its own necessary condition for solving the problem of demarcation. Presumably, he also believes that if one could provide the necessary and sufficient conditions of science, this would be sufficient for solving the problem of demarcation. Therefore, if one adds these two claims together, one gets the fascinating larger claim that one has solved the problem of demarcation if and only if one provides the necessary and sufficient conditions of science. Less artfully, this says that providing the necessary and sufficient conditions of science is itself a necessary and sufficient condition for solving the problem of demarcation. For more on the delicate question of necessary and sufficient conditions in the demarcation debate, see chapter 4.

  28. Hansson, “Science and Pseudo-Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

  29. Laudan, “Demise of the Demarcation Problem,” 218–219.

  30. See Robert Feleppa, “Kuhn, Popper, and the Normative Problem of Demarcation,” in Philosophy of Science and the Occult, ed. Patrick Grim (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 142. Popper writes, “a system is to be considered scientific only if it makes assertions which may clash with observations.” Conjectures and Refutations, 256.

  31. Recall here Popper’s claim that evolutionary biology was not testable (see note 8 in the introduction).

  32. This quotation is taken from Popper’s “Falsifizierbarkeit, zwei Bedeutungen von” ([1989] 1994), 82, cited in Sven Hansson’s article “Science and Pseudo-Science,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/.

  33. Quotations are from Hannson, “Science and Pseudo Science.” See also Frank Cioffi, “Psychoanalysis, Pseudoscience and Testability,” in Popper and the Human Sciences, ed. Gregory Currie and Alan Musgrave (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 13–44.

  34. Larry Laudan, “Science at the Bar: Causes for Concern,” in Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 223.

  35. Tom Nickles, “Problem of Demarcation,” 111.

  36. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 64–71.

  37. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 69. For further discussion, see chapter 8.

  38. Massimo Pigliucci, “The Demarcation Problem: A (Belated) Response to Laudan,” in Philosophy of Pseudoscience, 17–19.

  39. Pigliucci, “Demarcation Problem,” 22.

  40. Pigliucci, “Demarcation Problem,” 25.

  41. Pigliucci, “Demarcation Problem,” 25.

&n
bsp; 42. Sven Hansson, “Defining Science and Pseudoscience,” in Philosophy of Pseudoscience, 61–77.

  43. Maarten Boudry, “Loki’s Wager and Laudan’s Error,” in Philosophy of Pseudoscience, 79–98.

  44. Recall that although Popper does not use the term “nonscience,” it is closest to his original meaning in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. See note 11 in this chapter.

  45. Although Boudry does not us the term “unscience” in his essay, I am claiming that he ought to, for the term “nonscience” seems a misnomer for the territorial dispute he has in mind.

  46. For a careful rendering of this distinction see Tom Nickles, “Problem of Demarcation,” 101–120, and James Ladyman, “Toward a Demarcation of Science from Pseudoscience,” 45–59, in Philosophy of Pseudoscience.

  47. One might think of these taken together as constituting nonscience. See note 11 in this chapter.

  48. See Laudan, “Demise of the Demarcation Problem.”

  2    Misconceptions about How Science Works

  It is a popular myth that science inevitably leads to truth because it uses empirical evidence to prove a theory. It is another that science has no bearing at all on what we should believe because everything it proposes is “just a theory.” Actually, these two misconceptions go hand in hand, for they seem to reflect the idea that science is all or nothing: that we can either be 100 percent certain that our theory has been verified by the evidence or we are completely at sea because—until the definitive experiment has been done—one theory is just as good as any other.

  This false idea that science must discover truth, and that a theory cannot be accepted into the scientific pantheon until it is absolutely verified by the data, means that those who do not understand science might feel justified in rejecting any scientific knowledge that falls short of this standard. But this is a radical misunderstanding of how science works.