Tuesday, October 06, 2009
And On .. And On ...
To continue (but, gentle readers, with the end at least hoving into view) with Nick Smyth's response to criticisms of his article at 3 Quarks Daily, next are his following points:5. Your division of theories into "true" and "false" is actually the same as the division between "science" and "pseudoscience". You say that the sciences approach the truth and that astrology does not, and this is all we need for distinguishing science from pseudoscience (Matzke, Pieret).
6. Epistemology, or the task of finding general methods with which to arrive at genuine knowledge, is just as difficult (hopeless?) as the task of defining "Science". You say we have no criteria for "Science", but after centuries of effort we also have no criteria for "truth", so you've just pushed the debate back a step into even murkier territory (John, Namit Arora).
Anyone who has read this blog would know that I most certainly don't think that those other things Nick mentions -- "non-scientific activities (such as artistic creation, engagement with literature, first-personal reflection and moral reasoning)" -- cannot arrive at "truths" or that (with the possible exception of how we actually do "moral reasoning") they can be reduced to scientific explanations.
The problem is: what kind of "truth" are we talking about? Nick has appealed to "clear-cut, widely accepted logical rules," as what will deliver truth. What clear-cut, widely accepted logical rules tell us "true" art from "bollocks" art? Or demarck a "true" emotional response to one piece of music and a "bollocks" emotional response to another piece? If moral rules are obvious applications of logical rules, why are there so many different moral principles, many of which are contradictory?
My claim is not that "truth" is the exclusive province of science; it is that the sort of clear-cut, widely accepted logical rules Nick is talking about help to deliver a certain kind of "truth" but not all the things we call "truth." Nick is slurring over the ambiguity in the word "truth" that is every bit as intractable as the ambiguity in the word "science." If one is too vague to use "in order to exclude certain people and ideas from public life" (from Nick's point 7), so is the other. If one can be used for political/social purposes, so can the other, especially in the limited contexts the law is interested in, as I explained in my last post.
Those kind of rules do show up in science but the causal arrow is pointed in the opposite direction. Such rules are not unique to science but are, instead, so clear-cut, so obvious and so widely accepted, that it is inconceivable that the scientific community, acting as a group, would not apply them.
Nick's argument skills really fail him in this section:
I did a large amount of research in preparation for my initial essay, reading anthologies on ancient and modern science, poring over natural philosophy, and delving into 150 years of the demarcation debate. ... Epistemology may be a daunting field, but if a fledgling philosopher can get up off his arse and read Newton, Bacon, Kepler, Mill, Comte, Darwin, Bohr, Einstein, Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Laudan and Gould in order to say something about science, then a scientist can get off his arse and read epistemology before he claims that truth is not definable.
... While I do not claim to have a fully developed theory of why [scientists'] confidence [in science delivering truth] is justified, many other philosophers do, and we cannot accept this criticism until we have been shown that their projects fail.
Of course scientists think they are discovering truth, not least because they, as a group, do apply those "clear-cut, widely accepted logical rules," perhaps more rigidly than any other group. But most of all, they think science delivers some sort of "truth" because science appears to work. Our knowledge about how the material world operates has clearly and objectively improved over time because of what we call "science," while it is far less clear that the "truth" we garner from art or introspection or moral reasoning has grown greater, though it may have become more refined and more expansive.
I don't think any court could use the kind of "truth" we can get from art "in order to exclude certain people and ideas from public life." But courts can certainly look to the kind of behavior exhibited by the scientific community, including the consistent application of those clear-cut, widely accepted logical rules, and use that, in the limited context of balancing competing claims to constitutional rights, to distinguish "science" from that which is not.
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Labels: Smyth's Bollocks
Sunday, October 04, 2009
And So It Goes
To continue (by rote) with Nick Smyth's response to criticisms of his article at 3 Quarks Daily, I'll turn to his following points:3. Of course you can distinguish science from pseudoscience. Courts regularly do it, in fact, they do it all the time (Nick Matzke).
4. In a legal context, we don't need a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for "science". All we need is a rough, "ballpark" characterization in order to rule out ID-creationism. Methodological Naturalism (MN, the principle that commands us to never invoke supernatural causation) characterizes science in this way, and rules out ID-creationism (Roger Pennock).
I am perfectly aware that courts think they are rationally separating science and pseudoscience, but the question at hand is clearly whether they are actually doing so. A person who simply cites a legal case at this point is a person who has lost the ability to step away from his or her involvement in this particular battle and examine it objectively.
First of all, courts do not claim to be separating science and pseudoscience, as such. Courts proceed case-by-case, assisted by precedent, to determine the facts and the law as applicable to the case before it. Specifically, the questions courts seek to answer are: is this "expert" applying the "generally agreed" standards of science sufficiently well so as to be exempt from some of the rules of evidence; and is this "science," that is being promoted by the government, actually an attempt to violate the constitutional rights of some person or group? In the first category, the court is interested in only one person and that person's behavior as it will be on the stand in that case. In the second, they are interested in the behavior of the government in choosing to teach some claimed "science" at taxpayer expense. In that context, the content of the "science" is primarily relevant to the motivations of the government officials and agents who are promoting it.
The courts will not "banish" anyone from science, as Nick claimed in his original article. That same expert may come back to testify in another case, either on a different subject or, perhaps, with further evidence that his methodology is accepted within science. The IDers are free to do some actual science and demonstrate, with empiric evidence and logical arguments, that they are right ... much the same way that plate tectonics, originally spurned by scientists (for good reasons), eventually won the day. Furthermore, the courts in the US are only interested in a limited number of potential "pseudosciences" in the second category: creationism, "scientific racism, "scientific anti-Semitism," and the like, that have been given government sanction. In short, courts are interested in cases where government is dressing up the violation of the constitutional rights of some of its citizens in scientific garb, specifically to evade the constitutional ban against such action. Courts have no interest in general questions of what is "science" and what is "pseudoscience."
Thus, courts are not concerned with some esoteric philosophical definition of science and non-science, they are interested in the pragmatic balancing of the rights of people in the case before them. The right of a litigant not to have his or her case decided because of some artful but empty bafflegab generated by someone who happens to have some academic credentials, but has more appreciation for money than honesty. Or the right of people to be free of religious proselytization by government under the false colors of science.
The courts are, contrary to what Nick states, rationally making a distinction between science and non-science. They are just doing it on different and more limited premises than what Nick is interested in.
As to Nick's attack on Methodological Naturalism in his response to the fourth point, I pointed out in my last post that, if, as he says, the terms "natural" and "supernatural" are "hopelessly obscure," he can hardly claim that Dembski's assertion -- that design, chance, and natural law are mutually exclusive and exhaustive list of types of explanation -- is empirically falsified by showing instances where "natural law" and chance combine to explain the world. The most he can claim, given the logic of his premises, is that those terms are incoherent.
Now, I think I have a definition of "natural" that fills the bill for purposes of Methodological Naturalism but it is my own and I am not a professional philosopher and do not have the time and resources to work out all the implications. I have run it past professional philosophers and scientists and have not had any significant objections to it yet. I offer it here as a possibility.
"Natural" is that set of phenomena, that we empirically observe, that, as far as we can tell, operate in a "lawlike" manner and, therefore, permit prediction of future phenomena (or "retrodiction" of past phenomena within a framework consistent with the lawlike behavior of phenomena). "Supernatural" is that set (which may well be empty) of events that do not operate in a lawlike manner and do not permit prediction/retrodiction.
Note that this does not rule out the action of a god being lawlike. It is Catholic theology (not always observed on the ground) that God sustains the material world from microsecond to microsecond ... in other words, that every phenomena (with the theological exception of human "free will") is an act of God. But that's where the "methodological" part of Methodological Naturalism comes in. Quite simply, as far as science goes, what difference would it make? We don't know how gravity works but so what? We know it is predictably associated, in predictable ways, with mass, and we can make reliable predictions based on that. We label that a natural law and do science based on it, even if we don't understand it. What scientists don't do is accept their ignorance as a reason to assign a cause to the lawlike phenomena.
Let's take an extreme example. Say we found that intercessory prayer worked in a lawlike manner -- one prayer, one healing. Would the scientific community collectively fall down on its knees or would it look to other lawlike explanations first? Would it explore psychological factors, brain activity and chemistry, even the carbon dioxide exhaled by the prayer in the course of his or her utterance? Even if we exhausted the entirety of our present means of scientific investigation, would the scientific community as a whole give up looking for another lawlike phenomena to explain the result? I don't think so ... any more than we've given up looking for the explanation for gravity.
ID fails the Methodological Naturalism test on at least a couple of grounds: 1) if you study ID and its proponents, it is easy to see that their attempt to explain "apparent design" in living things ends with the explanation "Goddidit." Ignorance (to the extent that we are truly ignorant of the causes of the phenomena ID proponents point to) is sufficient grounds, as far as they are concerned, to assign the cause to God. Judge Jones documented this at length in his decision. While they pay lip service to extraterrestrials (a "natural" phenomenon) as possibly being the "Designer," they actively refuse to explore not only who that might be (and how they came into being), but how the extraterrestrials came to be in a position to design life on Earth and how, when and where they actually achieved this design. In fact, they call such questions "theological." This is quite different than the behavior of the scientific community, either in fact or in my little thought-experiment above.
And 2) they have failed to empirically show that "design" in living things operates in a lawlike manner -- i.e. the very point Nick was ultimately making against Dembski. They cannot give us any (to use an overworked word) algorithm for separating "design" from chance, some other lawlike phenomena, or the combination of both.
In the end, Stephen Jay Gould was right: (from his testimony at the McLean trial) "Science is what scientists do." Science is not a "thing" "out there" waiting to be "discovered" by some philosopher diddling with definitions. It is behavior. We can say many things about the behavior that is scientific and the behavior that is not but we cannot tell you what "science" is in some completely rigorous way -- not least because it will change with the abilities of humans to empirically investigate the world. That makes for messy and perhaps, to Nick, unsatisfying "definitions" of science and its opposite. But to say that we cannot distinguish scientific behavior from non-scientific behavior is deny that we can know ourselves.
More as I can get to it.
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Labels: Smyth's Bollocks
Saturday, October 03, 2009
By the Numbers
Okay. I have apparently been driving Nick Smyth to some level of distraction by not adhering to the rules of a 10th grade debate class exercise. So, let me go through his response to the criticisms of his original article at 3 Quarks Daily in order (but not in one fell swoop in consideration of my select group of readers). The first two criticisms Nick addresses are:1. You do not need to define science in order to define pseudoscience (Richard Hoppe, John Pieret).
2. Science and pseudoscience are categorically different things. An essential feature of science is that its assertions are empirically refutable, and ID-creationism is not refutable or testable. The only parts of ID that are refutable are its assertions about evolution, and thus when we refute them we are only testing evolution, not ID (Nick Matzke).
... no human being can reasonably be expected to accept the label "pseudo-scientist" when it is applied by a person who cannot define "science" as well.
In passing, I should just note that 1) Nick has placed this in the context of the law and how it should deal with question of creationism in science classes and 2) the courts are not interested in gaining the acceptance of any individual or group in the underlying logic of the law. We do not ask murderers if they "accept" that murder is wrong before putting them on trial and we do not ask "tax protesters" if they assent to the notion that government can demand that they pay taxes before we throw their asses in jail (ala Kent Hovind) for refusing to do so. Similarly, we need not ask creationists' assent that they are promoting religion in the guise of pseudoscience before banning their blather from public school science classes.
Nick's "solution" to the inability of creationists to understand and/or admit that they are doing "bad" science (as opposed to pseudoscience) is to explain it at length. As an example, Nick would have us point out that Dembski's "first and most crucial claim" -- that three forms of explanation -- design, chance, and natural law -- constitute a mutually exclusive and exhaustive list of types of explanation" -- is false because:
... we observe species of fruit flies changing over time in labs. How do we explain this? Why, by a combination of chance and natural law: by natural selection! Dembski's principle is refuted by a coherent explanation of an empirical phenomenon: it is refuted empirically.
ID and the sciences can be compared on the same sorts of scales, and that ID comes out the loser. How could two categorically different types of theories be compared? The very notion is absurd. Rather, they must share some crucial features, and this is why we should be skeptical of the categorical distinction itself.
Next, hold that thought of Nick's about "natural law" in mind because later, in Nick's point 4, he will tell us that the concept of "natural" is "hopelessly obscure." If so, I cannot see how he can then use the concept of "natural law" to show that Dembski's claim is false ... other than by saying that "natural law" is undefinable. Conversely, if we can cogently talk about "natural law," we can cogently talk about "methodological naturalism," the core of which is that scientific explanations must appeal, at least at some level, to "natural law."
But for purposes of these two points, the problem is how we know Dembski's claim is false? After all, does the "microevolutionary" changes in fruit flies prove that "macroevolutionary" changes between species can be accomplished by chance and natural law? (Yes, I'm aware that such usage is bogus but that has never stopped creationists before.) In addition, as Nick tried to remind me (which neither I nor Judge Jones needed), simply demonstrating that something is not science is not demonstrating that it is religion. In the same way, simply demonstrating that Dembski is wrong does not prove that ID is false. Do we really need to produce empiric evidence against every argument made by IDers? Given the ubiquity of "irreducibly complex" structures and processes in organisms, it will be a long time before we can do that.
What is doing the heavy lifting here anyway? ... the empiric evidence or one of those "clear-cut, widely accepted logical rules" that Nick appeals to? ... in this case a version of the fallacy of the excluded middle. Even if it is the empiric evidence, then we have an epistemological rule "thou shalt not ignore the evidence" that is the real reason for judging Dembski's argument is bogus. But these rules are just what the ID movement fails to adhere to. As far as I know, no one in the movement has criticized Dembski on this point. This is clearly different from the practice of science where, to paraphrase philosopher of science David Hull, "Scientists rarely refute their own pet theories. But that's all right. Their fellow scientists will be happy to oblige."
Nick asserts that it is impossible to tell what pseudoscience is unless we can perfectly define science but, unless Nick can point to any science that tolerates logical fallacies or the denial of evidence, then we can say that any purported "science" that does those things is not science because it does not operate by at least part of the epistemology that all sciences share. Nick's project to enumerate those rules is perfectly fine but we need not wait until he succeeds (if he ever does) in order to say that some claims are not "science."
Nor do I think we can say that these rules Nick appeals to deliver "truth." For the most part, they help us to avoid obvious errors. But avoiding errors does not guarantee that you will arrive at "truth." You are more likely to be right than if you don't apply them but you can still wind up wrong. But telling people that their beliefs are false because they do not adhere to such rules is even more problematical than telling them that their beliefs are not science.
More later, as I get to it.
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Labels: Smyth's Bollocks
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
TruthTM
I have come to accept that we shouldn't dwell on the semantics of the prefix "pseudo", here, but rather that we should just ask ourselves how we would feel if we were the target of this kind of accusation. That is to say, what if someone walked up to you and accused you of being a "pseudo-person".
I find it incredible that Smyth somehow thinks that people will feel less "exclude[ed] ... from social and political power" if they are told by government that their religion is bollocks than if they are merely told it is not science and, therefore, their religion cannot be taught in secular science classes.
Nick makes the assertion that, in order to make "a valid demarcation of 'science' from other fields ('non-' and 'pseudo-science') [we] must provide necessary and jointly sufficient criteria for science'." I've already responded that I think that science is a sorites heap and the existence of gray areas is no bar to speaking intelligibly of broad categories. But don't forget that Nick is doing exactly the same thing himself. It is, according to Nick, an "obvious truism" that science "deliver[s] truths about the world" and religion (in the form of creationism/ID) doesn't. I would like to see his necessary and jointly sufficient criteria for TruthTM.
Even if we grant Nick's contention that a satisfying philosophical definition of science is necessary to demark it from non-science, as a social criteria for determining what may, under our Constitution, be imposed by the majority on the minority in the area of school curriculum, Nick's scheme is a disaster.
It is clear that Nick thinks there is a demarcation to be had between science and the sort of religion that many people in the US hold to. The question is why he thinks its better social policy to defend the broader, even less easily definable categories, that, in fact, go to the very heart of religious belief, than defending the less fuzzy categories that do not strike at the core of people's constitutionally guaranteed right to believe in the religion of their choice?
More to follow as I can get to it.
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Labels: Smyth's Bollocks
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
We're Gonna Be Here a While
There's nothing like a challenge to get me moving. Nick Smyth showed up here and laid some snide on me:I can't help but suspect that you can't think of ways to respond to my specific critiques aimed at your points. I made three (three!) in the new response and there is nothing about them here.
That's all I have time for this morning but I'll come back to this, I hope, later today with a few more thoughts, as well as corrections of Smyth's misconstruals of my criticisms.
Let me finish what I started before about the US Constitutional scheme and respond to some comments Nick made to my post earlier today. Nick says in his post at his blog:
I concluded with an obvious truism, one that even most IDers would support: scientific practices, as diverse and indefinable as they may be, seem to deliver truths about the world. This is what is important about them. The alleged "pseudosciences" (astrology, ID-creationism) do not deliver such truths.
Every young-Earth creationist organization that I've ever investigated has some version of AiG's denial and, to the extent you believe polls, anywhere from a third to almost a half of the American public is willing to treat YEC as "truth." ID adherents, though they will pay lip service to the truth-value of science, also decry "materialistic science" by which they mean, if you study what they say to friendly audiences, the very science that Nick claims they will respect.
Worse, in terms of Nick's scheme, as a religious belief, American governments and their employees are not permitted, under our Constitution, to call creationism "bollocks," as was shown in the recent case of James Corbett. Note that there is a structural asymmetry here under our Constitution. It is perfectly all right, as the court in the Corbett case found, to say:
"Therefore, no creation, unless you invoke magic. Science doesn't invoke magic. If we can't explain something, we do not uphold that position. It's not, ooh, then magic. That's not the way we work."
"Contrast that with creationists. They never try to disprove creationism. They're all running around trying to prove it. That's deduction. It's not science. Scientifically, it's nonsense."
Nick also says in the comments that I:
... claim that the courts need to keep hammering away at the "science" question [to keep creationism out of public schools in the US]. When you prove that something is nonscientific, you do not prove that it is religion.
Lastly, for the moment, Nick says at his blog post:
We should only teach children truths. Therefore, we should teach them about the sciences, and pass over astrology and creationism in silence. We do not need the demarcation project, we should abandon the search for a definitive "scientific method", and we should recover the older idea that the value of the sciences lies is the value of truth.
That might be a tad difficult if we started out by claiming that all the supporters are full of bullocks.
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Labels: Smyth's Bollocks
Constitutionally Ignorant
Well, the long anticipated response of Nick Smyth to criticisms of his article at 3Quarks Daily is up at his own blog and I can't muster much enthusiasm for another round of discussion about it. There's not much new there and what there is, at least in the case of my criticisms, suffers from a lack of understanding of the original critique.Let's start with the big one, since this whole discussion is in the context of whether there is a definition of "science" that would exclude creationism from public school science classes in the US. As I said before, I suppose that Nick, as a Canadian, may not understand the American constitutional scheme and he has proved me right. His main contention, as you'll remember is that we cannot make a distinction between "science" and "pseudoscience" (or the more correct term, "non-science") but we can make a distinction between "truth" and "bollocks." He then says:
I cannot believe that a supreme court judge in America could fail to see the logic of don't teach false things in schools.You may well be able to convince a Supreme Court Justice that it is bad public policy to teach false things in schools, but the Supreme Court does not decide (at least officially*) between good and bad public policy. That is the job of the legislative and executive branches of government, subject to the will of the majority. This is further complicated by the fact that public education in the US is decided by local elected school boards subject to the will of local majorities.
The Supreme Court (in this context) is limited to protecting the rights of the minority as defined by the Constitution. The logic that the Supreme Court is permitted to exercise is restricted to what follows from the premise that the majority can dictate the public policy except to the extent that such policy violates a constitution rights of any minority. Nothing in the Constitution gives anyone a right to "truth" (as even a quick glance at our political history and Supreme Court jurisprudence would reveal).
The Constitution, however, gives the right to be free from religious proselytization by the government. The Supreme Court has ruled that dressing religious concepts up in pseudoscientific garb and teaching it in science classes is religious proselytization. If we concede that there is no distinction to be made between science and non-science, then there are no constitutional grounds to bar the majority from teaching what they want in public schools with their tax money.
That, of course, is no evidence that a distinction can, in fact, be made between "science" and "pseudoscience" but it does indicate that Smyth deeply misunderstands the context of the debate in the US.
That's all I have time for this morning but I'll come back to this, I hope, later today with a few more thoughts, as well as corrections of Smyth's misconstruals of my criticisms.
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* There are, of course, political claims (not least in the area of church/state separation) that the Supreme Court has engaged in policy-making but it is generally agreed that, if such claims are true, it is a bad thing under our Constitution.
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Labels: Smyth's Bollocks
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Dust's Up!
Nick Smyth has been continuing the discussion of my criticism of his article at 3 Quarks Daily, entitled "Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks," in the comments here.The gist of his claim is that "science" is impossible to define and, therefore, there is no basis for denying anyone the right to call whatever activity they want "science." Instead of defending any definition of "science," as opposed to non-science/pseudoscience:
... truth is what matters, and that all we need to say about creationism, astrology and the like is that they are extremely bad truth-tracking programmes. They are, in a word, bollocks.My contention is that he is, at least as far as solving the problem of how to keep creationism out of public school science classes, simply pushing the problem back one step ... to distinguishing truth-producing epistemology from epistemology that does not reliably produce truth. I am not denying that such epistemology exists, just that it suffers the same problems that distinguishing "science" from "pseudoscience" suffers from.
More importantly, his criteria actually produces a demarcation between "science" and "pseudoscience." I've asked him what truth-producing epistemology that he is discussing (but has declined to define) "science" does not employ. My point is: if science employs truth-producing epistemology and pseudoscience, in whole or in part, does not, that is a basis for distinguishing "science" from "pseudoscience." His "truth programme" is, itself, I think, a way of telling one from the other. It is not necessary to completely define "science" in order to distinguish it from other truth-claims as long as we have a marker that is consistently found in one and not consistently found in the other. I need not define every characteristic of those organisms within the family Suidae or of devices for holding money to know a pig from a poke.
On another level, his attempt to use epistemological arguments, rather than a demarcation between science and pseudoscience, as a social argument against creationism is deeply impractical. Despite at least one hundred years of experience (as far as creationism goes), he insists that creationists will somehow be more amenable to accepting epistemological principles that refute their beliefs than they are in accepting that part of "science" which refutes them. But anyone who has followed the "controversy" knows that creationists regularly deny the epistemological basis of "science" as it is practiced (though they don't use the word, since they know their target audience's eyes would glaze over -- which is, I think, what would happen generally no matter which side raises it).
In, what is to me, a telling admission on Smyth's part, he accuses me of:
... skepticism about epistemology [which is] is not wise. It amounts to saying that we cannot say what "truth" is at all. This is relativism! In effect, you undermine the entire discipline of science by denying it the right to claim truth-status over other fields. If you look into it, you will find that there are clear-cut, widely accepted logical rules that are not "fuzzy" and which can help us do epistemology correctly.Quite apart from the irony of accusing me of relativism when his original argument, that there is no such thing as "science" but that it is only a social claim to prestige, is precisely the argument made by Steve Fuller in his defense of ID, I think this assertion leads to the refutation of Smyth's point. I fully agree that we have epistemological methods that produce (within the limits of human knowledge) greater and more reliable "truth" than other methods. But I maintain that is why we can speak about the "discipline of science" and its "truth-status" in the first place. If we can't define the "discipline of science" (and, necessarily, what counts as "non-science"), then we can't talk about its truth-value, since there is no "there" there that to could be discussed and evaluated. If we can rationally talk about those things, then Smyth's contention that science cannot be defined -- at least sufficiently well to distinguish it from pseudoscience -- is refuted.
Anyway, Smyth is promising to produce a response at his own blog, which I will doubtless respond to, so, if your eyes have not already glazed over, you might want to review the discussion ... or else skip reading this blog until the dust clears.
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Labels: Smyth's Bollocks
Thursday, September 24, 2009
There's Bullocks In Philosophy, Too!
Nick Smyth has posted an article at 3 Quarks Daily, entitled "Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks," that John Wilkins calls "infuriating but thought-provoking." I confess that I find it mostly confusing. Smyth wants to replace any talk about a demarcation between science and non-science/pseudoscience with a demarcation between "truth" and "bollocks."According to Smyth, the current way of opposing creationism is deficient.
[M]any of us will continue to oppose religious/mystical/creationist "cranks" in the name of Science. One of our main lines of attack will be territorial: we will accuse them of being on the wrong side. Science is over here, we will say, and you are over there, and we all know what that means.
The most interesting thing about this manoeuvre is that almost no-one performing it—scientist, philosopher, or otherwise—will be in possession of a single defensible definition of "science". In other words, they won't know what they're talking about.
In place of any such attempt, Smyth proposes:
Want to keep creationism out of schools? Point out that we shouldn't teach bollocks in schools, and that constitutional freedom of religion cannot imply that false things should be taught as if they were true things. Want to keep government funding away from creationists? Point out that the government shouldn't fund bollocks. I could go on, but Reisch, Pennock and others seem to think that once we abandon formal demarcation we are left with "no difference" between molecular biology and talking snakes. This is clearly absurd.
The only rational and intellectually honest thing to do is to forget about demarcation and to give authority to powerful, accurate and consistent explanatory programmes. In other words, we must recover the original sense of "science" as a diverse, evolving set of human activities that are only important because they produce systematic knowledge. Otherwise, that clever creationist is going to come along one day and point out that a central pillar of our rejection of his doctrines—the concept of "pseudoscience"—is bollocks.
But to take on Smyth's arguments on his own terms, his dismissal of demarcation commits, I think, the error of assuming that, because we cannot know exact boundaries of any particular category, we cannot know what we are talking about.
Day and night imperceptibly merge into each other at dusk and dawn, but can we not tell night from day tolerably well despite the existence of twilight? Science, like most human activities, is a sorites heap. There are many of them. What is the exact dividing line between democracy and tyranny? Should we then stop talking about them and speak only of government and "bullocks government"? Must we decide that molehills are indistinguishable from mountains? In science, what is the definition of "species" that does not exclude too much, or include too much? (A shameless plug for Wilkins' new book.) What is the "bright line" between "variety" and "species"?
To say that, because there is no bright line definition to precisely separate one category from another, we cannot speak intelligibly about those categories would reduce us almost to complete inarticulateness.
The real question here is how precise our definition has to be to serve the purpose we want to fulfill and, of course, what our purpose is. Since Smyth himself raises the question of how we keep creationism (or other religious content) out of public school science classes, I'll concentrate on that, especially as it plays out in the United States, under its particular (if not peculiar) constitutional scheme. (Smyth is a Canadian and may not have understood that context but, if so, what justification does he have to pronounce on what Judge Jones wrote?)
First of all, I don't see how Smyth's alternative helps us at all in terms of keeping creationism out of public school science classes. His "solution" is as follows:
We can go back 150 years and recover our epistemological focus. We will discover that truth is what matters, and that all we need to say about creationism, astrology and the like is that they are extremely bad truth-tracking programmes. They are, in a word, bollocks.
Someone once famously asked "What is truth?" How are we, philosophically or legally, to answer that question? And what is the "proper" epistemology? Creationists, such as Answers in Genesis, have their own answer:
The 66 books of the Bible are the written Word of God. The Bible is divinely inspired and inerrant throughout. Its assertions are factually true in all the original autographs. It is the supreme authority in everything it teaches. Its authority is not limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes but includes its assertions in such fields as history and science. ...
By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.
According to their epistemology, it is evolution that is "bullocks." And in a democracy, why shouldn't their definition of bullocks prevail if they are, as they are in many places in this country and around the world, in the majority?
The problem, then, has just been pushed back one step by Smyth. Instead of deciding what is science and what is non-science/pseudoscience, now we are required to decide which epistemology best produces "truth," a category even less capable of a bright line definition than "science."
Smyth seems to recognize this in the comments:
You're right that the ultimate success of the strategy I advocate depends on the establishment of some epistemological ground rules. Indeed, I have been whinging--annoyingly--about this on 3QD for years now: science requires philosophy, and this is one of the (many) reasons why.
Yet, I think this particular post is better read as an address to you, I, or any other "scientifically-minded" person. Do you believe that creationism is pseudoscience? If yes, then tell me what science actually is. Hey, it turns out you can't. Alternately, do you believe that creationism is false? Well, clearly you do. So, why not specify the grounds on which you think it is false?
But the issue before the court in Kitzmiller was not whether creationism is false -- which Smyth certainly must have known because the very sentence before the part of Judge Jones' decision that Smyth quoted is:
After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.
The question Judge Jones was answering was more limited than the one Smyth wants to address: 'is ID sufficiently like science as it is presently practiced that its roots in and support for religion must be ignored in determining whether it violates the First Amendment separation of church and state?' Government teaching of science is a legitimate "secular purpose," even if the science contradicts some religious tenet. But the reverse is true as well and, if some scientific result supported a religious tenet or contradicted an atheist position, the state could legitimately teach that as science.
Thus Judge Jones was, by the nature of the case (not to mention the arguments of the parties), required to determine whether or not ID was within the parameters of science as presently practiced.
Ironically, the way that courts go about this task -- which they also do in deciding whether a person who claims to be an "expert" in science can testify to his/her "opinion" rather than be limited to testifying about "facts" as every other witness is -- has to do with the epistemology the "expert" uses and whether or not other "scientifically-minded" people (i.e. scientists) accept the "expert's" methods as within present-day scientific practice, even if they disagree with the conclusions the "expert" reaches.
In other words, the law applies the very criteria Smyth is groping for. And in what way is Smyth's proposal not a demarcation criteria, since it is the same as what Judge Jones ultimately applied?
This is long enough, so I'll close here. But I may come back to address other things I think Smyth got seriously wrong.
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Labels: Smyth's Bollocks
