Richard Feynman has said many wise things about the nature of scientific research. His emphasis on the importance of doubt is very insightful:
Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
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I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
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I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
However, doubt can be taken too far (medan agan).
Once upon a time, there was something I trusted.
Eliezer18 trusted Science.
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I trusted that if I did what Richard Feynman told me to do, I would be safe.
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That’s the trust I’m trying to break in you. You are not safe. Ever.
Not even Science can save you.
This was my reply to
I agree with your general view, but I came to the same view by a more conventional route: I got a PhD in philosophy of science. If you study philosophy of science, you soon find that nobody really knows what science is. The “Science” you describe is essentially Popper’s view of science, which has been extensively criticized and revised by later philosophers. For example, how can you falsify a theory? You need a fact (an “observation”) that conflicts with the theory. But what is a fact, if not a true mini-theory? And how can you know that it is true, if theories can be falsified, but not proven? I studied philosophy because I was looking for a rational foundation for understanding the world; something like what Descartes promised with “cogito ergo sum”. I soon learned that there is no such foundation. Making a rational model of the world is not like making a home, where the first step is to build a solid foundation. It is more like trying to patch a hole in a sinking ship, where you don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch. I view science as an evolutionary process. Changes must be made in small increments: “Natura non facit saltus”.
One flaw I see in your post is that the rule “You cannot trust any rule” applies recursively to itself. (Anything you can do, I can do meta.) I would say “Doubt everything, but one at a time, not all at once.”
Robin Hanson said something similar:
To have the best chance of succeeding in a radical project, you should instead choose just a few related dimensions on which to make radical choices, and then make conservative conventional choices on all the other dimensions. This strategy minimizes the chance that some other project dimension will go badly wrong and take down your central radical idea with it.
I believe that science, technology, language, and culture are all governed by evolution. See:
- Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress, Lamb and Easton
- Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution, Cziko
- Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Dennett
- The Evolution of Technology, Basalla
Scientific method itself evolves. The idea “Doubt everything, but one at a time, not all at once” follows naturally from this view of science. Evolution is (usually) incremental.
I think Feynman himself would endorse the more moderate rule “Doubt everything, but one at a time, not all at once”, rather than the extreme “Never trust anything”:
The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
We never have absolute certainty, but there are some things about which we can be “pretty damn sure”. We give these things our conditional, temporary trust, while we focus our doubt on the current object of our attention.
We must patch and upgrade our sinking ship one plank at a time.
Filed under: Evolution, Philosophy of Science | Tagged: doubt, Fenyman
Well doubting things one at a time is a bit too narrow, but it would be reasonable to only doubt chunks that are small enough to let doubt them and still remain sane.
Well doubting things one at a time is a bit too narrow
By “one thing”, I mean something like “one basis vector in a spanning set of orthogonal basis vectors” or “one axiom in a set of independent axioms” or “one LPU“, speaking metaphorically. But I would certainly agree to doubting two or three things at a time. At this level of abstraction, it’s hard to count things precisely.
Peter,
the ship metaphor is a good one, it goes back to Otto Neurath:
“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”
Neurath, Otto. “Protokollsätze” in Erkenntnis, Vol. 3, 1932/33, pp. 204-214
the ship metaphor is a good one
I adapted it from Hume’s discussion of personal identity (1739). I bet Neurath did the same.
At first I thought your statement “I believe that science, technology, language, and culture are all governed by evolution.” was provocative. I’ve been groomed in this Popperian-Lakatosian view of scientific endeavour that assumes the process is a rational one, that scientific knowledge “evolves” (in the pre-Darwinian sense, i.e. gets better with time, closer to the truth, etc.)
On second reading, though, I think the rationalist view of scientific progress and the Darwinian one can be reconciled in this way: if the evolutionary “pressures” on scientific theories are predominantly “rational” (e.g. the peer-review process? :-) ) then “rational progress” and “survival of the fittest” will coincide.
So this assertion of yours is actually a testable hypothesis, I think, provided one could characterise “rational progress” in a sufficiently coherent way. You could then look at whether the theories that survive are actually the most rational.
A case in point is String Theory vs. Loop Quantum Gravity. I was listening to Lee Smolin on CBC last night and he made a convincing case that the String Theorists of today are akin to the Ptolemaic Astronomers of the middle ages (he didn’t use that analogy, though), fiddling with infinite numbers of “free variables” to get the results they wanted.
Any bets which of these theories will survive? If peer review has anything to do with it, it won’t be Loop Quantum Gravity!
I certainly don’t see any conflict between an evolutionary view of science and a rationalist view of science. The selection mechanism in science is primarily experimentation. There is progress in that scientific theories get better at predicting the outcomes of experiments.
An evolutionary view of science makes testable predictions about the scientific process. It predicts multiple independent simultaneous discovery and it predicts incremental progress. I believe that the historical evidence supports both of these predictions.
I came here because of your pointer at Overcoming Bias. I think you’re on the right track with your idea of Incremental Doubt. It’s the same idea Bartley promoted in “The Retreat to Commitment“. I was surprised above that you mentioned Popper and omitted Bartley (Popper’s student). Popper’s Epistemology is Critical Rationalism: “Doubt everything (except this rule).” Bartley’s innovation in Pan-Critical Rationalism was to change the formulation to “Doubt everything, even this rule.” In “Retreat to Commitment” he demonstrated how you could systematically evaluate even your most fundamental approaches to thinking.