As you probably remember from my frequent recent mentions, I've been working my way through a book on probability, statistics, and the philosophy of science, STATISTICAL INFERENCE AS SEVERE TESTING, by Deborah Mayo. This will be my last quote from that book. From p. 367, "It is supposed in many fields of social and biological science that nearly everything is related to everything: 'all nulls are false.' Meehl dubbed this the crud factor." What follows is a description of a psychology survey done by the University of Minnesota in 1966 in which all of the following showed some degree of (often low though statistically significant) correlation -- attitudes toward school, leisure activities, educational plans, parents' occupations, siblings, birth order, family attitudes. religious preferences, MCAT scores, etc. Every null hypothesis is false. Mayo tells us that Meehl here is also eager to explain that this is not what statisticians call a "Type 1 error...
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Readers may recall that I've been writing of late about Deborah Mayo, a professor at Virginia Tech. To restate, Mayo has written Statistical Inference as Severe Testing ; a book discussing statistics, induction, and the philosophy of science. Much of the book is obscure to me, though I skim through what I have to in order to get to stuff where I can gain something. To move forward nonetheless: near the middle of the book she has a discussion of the Higgs boson. Allow me to talk about that today. Back in 1964 Peter Higgs predicted the eventual discovery of a certain particle that would be responsible for other particles having mass. This became known as the "Higgs boson" or, more grandly as the "God particle"! Over the following decades the Higgs boson came to be regarded as an important piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, and the fact that no one had experimentally confirmed its existence became something of a scandal. Then came 2012, and CERN, ...
A 20th and 21st century Canadian philosopher who has not made as large a dent in the fields of philosophy of science and, more generally, of epistemology as he may reasonably have hoped: Ian Hacking died a little more than a year ago, in May 2023, when his heart failed him at the age of 87 at a retirement home in Toronto. Hacking is best remembered as the foremost advocate in the philosophy of science of the view known as "entity realism". This is related to our discussion of the Vienna Circle in recent posts. Consider that in the philosophy of science, in the heyday of the VC and in our own time as well, one central question is "do we need to explain the predictive success of the best scientific theories? and, if we do, is their approximate truth an accurate non-circular explanation?" Scientific realism says "yes we do and yes it is." A theory about electrons may be right because electrons are real, and it may be successfully predictive because it is ...
Philosophers continue to debate issues of causation. It is no longer so much a matter of "refuting Hume." Nowadays, it may be for many more a matter of "refuting Wesley Salmon." So I will say something today about philosopher of science Wesley Salmon (1925 - 2001), affiliated with the University of Arizona early in his career, and the University of Pittsburgh later. Before Salmon turned his attention to the subject, philosophers of science had coagulated around the proposition that scientists don't actually use any idea of causation. Practicing scientists get along well enough with correlation, the thinking went, so the philosophers who write about what they do, can do likewise. But when Salmon delved into the thinking and writing of scientists, he didn't find that at all. He found causal claims to be ubiquitous, and a great concern with how any phenomenon under study, to use a Salmonesqe expression, "fits into the causal nexus" of the world....
I've mentioned before in this blog the book Lost in Math, by Sabine Hossenfelder, a prominent German particle physicist. The idea behind the title of the book is that contemporary physics is too wedded to the beauty and symmetry (even "supersymmetry," like the kind of symmetry that comes from the planet Krypton) and inadequately concerned with the search for data. It may be that physicists have to accept ugly math that does nothing more beautiful than matching the data, in order to move forward. Today I come back to Hossenfelder and her book in order to quote one particular passage, about Karl Popper. It seems plain enough, but in the context of her broader point there is some ambiguity to it. For now, I'll just provide the quote: "What I learn [at a certain conference/workshop she attended] is that Karl Popper's idea that scientific theories should be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it's a philosophy that n...
Here's a link to a fascinating diagram that surely represents a lot of work and thought, https://chrisblattman.com/2014/11/17/positions-philosophy-science/?fbclid=IwAR0N9hy9FqL7Oo4czEp7TZOQ2r2xczO2jpH6TTWS5lEWW7tS1zLFNM07xbs I hope you'll each follow the link and look around at the diagram. I won't try to reproduce it here. I'd either have to make it prohibitively small or crop some of it. Instead, my visual here is a diagram of quarks fusing. The underlying question behind the philosophy of science, as least as it is portrayed in this chart, is the following: is a "quark" (for example) a real thing -- part of the furniture of the universe, like the tree just outside my window -- or is it merely a useful postulate? As you can see if you follow the link, the fellow who prepared the graph takes the distinction between realism and anti-realism to be fundamental. The distinction is represented by a blank space in the middle -- and both positions are rep...
Not long ago, I wrote here about the "process theory" of causality, and attributed it to Wesley Salmon. Today, I'll go a little further, and present a quotation for Salmon's writings on the distinct but closely related question on induction, and the post-Humean debate on induction in the sciences. The idea of a philosopher discussing inductive inference in science is apt to arouse grotesque images in many minds. People are likely to imagine someone earnestly attempting to explain why it is reasonable to conclude that the sun will rise tomorrow morning because it always has done so in the past. There may have been a time when primitive man anticipated the dawn with assurance based only upon the fact that he had seen dawn follow the blackness of night as long as he could remember, but this primitive state of knowledge, if it ever existed, was unquestionably prescientific. This kind of reasoning bears no resemblance to science; in fact, the crude induction exhibit...
I've heard that Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, used the issue of the chemical composition of the Sun to illustrate his idea of questions that could not be answered. Since it is obvious (in Comte's view) that we can never get a sample from the inside of the sun to test, we can never know what it is made of, and such an inquiry should be written off as "metaphysical," not positive. Silly philosophers, eh? It is very easy in hindsight to say that Comte shouldn't have been so dogmatic about the possible reach of human knowledge, or the specific means by which chemical composition can be determined. What about the inside of a black hole? Can we say anything definitive about THAT? If so ... how? since we can't go there? Or, if anyone of us could get within the "event horizon" for a time, we couldn't get information back. In a recent blog post, a physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, considers whether the question of the contents of a bl...
Is it integral to the scientific method that key ideas should be subject to falsification? If we answer "yes," what are we to say about string theory, or the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics, etc.? Here is a discussion of a discussion of a discussion. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/falsification-and-its-discontents/ And that's an illustration of a "popper" above. Get it?
Adolf Grünbaum died on November 15. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh perhaps best known as an outspoken critic of Freudianism and psychoanalysis more broadly. Grünbaum wrote THE FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS:A PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE (1984). This book was in its own way as much a criticism of Popper as of Freud. Psychoanalysis was the paradigmatic case of a pseudo-science for Popper. It was unfalsifiable and thus not a science, but rather a structure of ideas falsely marketing itself as a science. Popper, though, did not maintain that it was meaningless, or valueless. Had Freud considered himself an author of creative, imaginative, prose he would have been on the right side of the demarcation Popper sought to enforce. As Grünbaum tells the story, that was misguided. As the Popperian critique itself became conventional, some of Freud's admirers complied with it, on the master's behalf. And so was born the "hermeneutic" scho...
A recent anthology by philosophers of science challenging the "modern synthesis" in evolution draws an intelligent review from NDPR, here: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/challenging-the-modern-synthesis-adaptation-development-and-inheritanc/ What had to be brought together was some sort of Darwinian account of evolution on the one hand and Me ndelian genetics on the other. The late 1930s and early 1940s were key, and the gelling of the synthesis involved a seminal book by Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1937, and another by Ernst Mayr in 1942 The term "modern synthesis" was attached to such work in the subtitle of a book by Julian Huxley, also in 1942. I'll quote the review directly for some institutional history: During this period significant institution building was taking place, coupled with theoretically significant gate-keeping. The Committee on Common Problems of Genetics, Paleontology, and Systematics, supported by a United States National Res...
The headline of this post, "What Makes Time Special?" Is the title of a recent book by philosopher Craig Callender, one of the co-winners this year of the Lakatos Award, for the best work in the philosophy of science. With due respect to the other co-winner, Sabina Leonelli, my arbitrary spotlight of curiosity today falls on Professor Callender, perhaps in part just because his name looks a lot like "calendar," which is a great name to have if you're going to be writing about Time as a philosophical subject! Callender begins the book in a striking way, "Time is a big invisible thing that will kill you," he writes. That sounds like a slightly morbid and slightly precocious child's effort to philosophize about time. I gather that is what Callender means for it to sound like. I also gather, from only having skimmed the book, that Callender doesn't really present any other view of time more sophisticated than the one he starts off with. It ...
The "error" theory is a special case in the old debate between "cognitive" and 'non-cognitive" meta-ethical views. Cognitivism holds that there are moral properties or moral facts, and that the aim of normative ethical discourse is to describe them, and preferably to be right about them, in something like the same way that there are bodies and events we call "astronomical," (stars, planets, collisions, the collapse of a star into a black hole) and the aim of discussing "astronomy" is to describe them, and preferably to be right about them. For example, the wrongness of murder may be a fact in the world. If it is then the goal of the sentence "murder is wrong" is to name that fact. Non-cognitivists claim that there aren't any moral properties or facts, so they can't be described, rightly or wrongly. But it also generally adds that this doesn't mean normative ethical statements are wrong. It just means that su...
A 2013 anthology, PHILOSOPHY OF PSEUDOSCIENCE, contends that Karl Popper was in essence right on his crucial contentions over falsifiability and science. Here's a link. Specifically, Popper contended first that it is important (as a task within the broad domain of epistemology) for philosophers to distinguish between what is science and what isn't; second that what is science must be in principle falsifiable; third that the falsifiability is linked to the good reasons why sciences are prestigious activities -- the reasons why the word 'science' is worth co-opting. Those views have gone out of fashion, for a lot of reasons. Susan Haack, for example, argues that the "demarcation problem" is of little significance. Philosophers should stop arguing over what deserves the label "science," in part because she believes falsifiability is also good as a rough guide to valuable thought in a lot of fields of scholarship one wouldn't want to put on ...
There has been much talk of late about a "replication crisis" in psychology. Important experimental results, sometimes results that have generated considerable bodies of literature, peer-reviewed and otherwise, have turned out to have been resting on sand when subjected to rigorous efforts at replication. One notorious example involves the "power pose" (standing, feet apart, hands on hips, chin up). Striking the power pose was supposedly proven to have a range of valuable psychological effects, including the reduction of stress. Except that it doesn't. The effect was the consequence of data mining and statistical noise. Such failed replication efforts have reopened talk about whether psychology deserves the title "science" at all. Fortunately, for those of us who will to believe that there IS such a science, some important results have survived efforts at replication. This is especially so it appears in the study of cognition, a very Jamesian bra...
I have now and then wondered, as my mind wandered, whether there can properly be said to be such a creature as the "philosophy of chemistry." Biology has philosophical controversies specific to itself: the explication of the concept of natural selection for example, or the age-old reductionism-versus-holism thing. Physics, likewise, has its own philosophical controversies. Indeed, much that goes by the name "philosophy of science" seems actually to be a philosophy of physics.The nature of space and time. Statistical mechanics, etc. But chemistry? Wouldn't any effort to assign specific philosophical controversies to chemistry inevitably veer in one or the other of those directions? So I mused. Bu t it appears there really is a "philosophy of chemistry." Philosophers working this field debate whether chemistry is the study of substances or reactions -- stuff or events. In the words of Joachim Schummer, " Substance philosophers define a che...
Bertrand Russell wrote somewhere (probably in The Problems of Philosophy ) that the problem with adopting "common sense" as a philosophy is that "common sense leads to science and science undermines common sense." That seems to me both true and important. So much so that I won't ruin it with gloss.
I'm torn on the value of Bayesianism in the philosophy-of-science context. I won't discuss my own conflicted position, but I will say that Michael Strevens covers the field pretty well in this article: http://www.strevens.org/research/simplexuality/Bayes.pdf There are, on Strevens' telling, three big points: 1) that a scientist's "epistemic attitude to any scientifically significant proposition is, or ought to be, exhausted by the subjective probability the scientist assigns to the proposition;" 2) that this subjective probability conforms to the standard mathematics of probability; and 3) that Bayes' conditionalization rule is an instruction as to how one ought to update one' subjective probabilities as new evidence arises. And, by the way, yes the "r" does appear where I've put it in Strevens' name. That isn't a typo.