Reliable Process

I would much rather drive a car that's reliable than one that's not. I have two cars: one which has a lot of miles on it and has broken down a couple times recently. The other is newer and runs great. Which one am I more likely to take on a cross-country drive? The more reliable one, duh. It's the same way with things I believe. I would rather give positive assent to new ideas that come from people, places, and processes that are more reliable. Otherwise I might not make it very far in my intellectual wanderings.

One of the chief reasons to trust the scientific method, on a general basis, is that it has proven to be reliable. More reliable than any other method of assessing the world we live in. I think it's this reliability that justifies my trust in the scientific method. But there are a few caveats. The philosopher Alvin Goldman has this to say about how we are justified in believing any proposition: 

A person S is justified in believing a proposition p if and only if S's belief that p is produced or sustained by a process or method M and M is reliable. (Goldman, 1979)

Without going into a huge philosophical debate about all the various theories of justification, I just want to point out that many philosophers do not accept Goldman's thesis. I use it here because I think it serves to support a way in which we can be justified in believing the propositions of science. However, I want to make one slight modification. Goldman's statement is about "A person S" and that person's internal justification. It is not really about scientific justification. I think it's useful for us to take a look at because it describes how a reliable process might possibly be the basis for justification of one's beliefs. There is a difference between these next two propositions: 

a) I believe in the scientific method because it is a reliable process.  

b) When I have believed in some proposition accepted by the scientific community I have found it reliable and therefore I am justified in believing other scientific propositions that have scientific consensus. 

Now, a) and b) are not formal statements and are quite sloppy, but I think they are good enough for my present purposes. a) is an attempt to point to the reliability of everything that falls under the rubric of science. The problem is that not every published study is reliable. Not every experiment is performed reliably and not every scientist is reliable. Scientists are human and therefore human biases comes into play in their research. So if any one scientist is not necessarily reliable, and if every experiment that looks like it follows the scientific method is not reliable, then how can science as a whole produce reliable propositions?

Before I answer that question, I want to take a moment to explain something else. Why is it that I am talking about propositions? The reason is that only propositions have what is called 'truth value'. Rocks are not true or false. Even atoms are not true or false. Only statements or propositions about rocks and atoms are true or false. Our beliefs are about the rock or the atom might be false, but still, the belief is going to have some sort of proposition. I experience light hitting my retina, the optic nerve transmits information about that experience to my brain where it is processed. I then come to either believe that there is a rock sitting in front of me, or I might believe that I am hallucinating, or dreaming, or that someone is playing a trick on me. Philosophers refer to my belief as a propositional attitude. Other propositional attitudes are verbs like hope, know, wish, doubt, regard, feel, etc.

Back to where I was. Proposition a) says that I believe in the scientific method, even though I can have different propositional attitudes about specific papers or hypotheses. When a team of scientists published a report that they had experimental evidence that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light, I did not automatically believe the results. I did not say to myself: this scientific experiment proves that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light because I believe that the scientific method is a reliable process. No, I said to myself, that would mean that Einstein was wrong, and from what I know, this theory of Einstein's has stood up to numerous experimental evidence in the past. I'll just wait until it's confirmed by another scientific team. And, as it turns out, further experimentation showed that the initial experiment was wrong.

By holding out for further confirmation is actually what one should do when one believes in the scientific method. The actual method that the scientific community uses is one in which experiments need to be reproducible. Scientists themselves rely on other scientists to attempt to reproduce their results and affirm their hypothesis.

The scientific method seeks the consensus of the community. Scientific consensus is a little hard to define. Basically it means that different scientists agree that some theory is true or that it is at least reliable. But science is not a democracy. Mostly we measure scientific consensus by looking at published papers in peer reviewed journals on a particular subject to see where different scientists stand. The popular press is not a reliable informant on scientific consensus because the popular press is not as interested in truth as they are in finding interesting things to report. Unfortunately, scientific journals can also favor interesting research for publication, but this is considered a problem in the scientific literature in a way that it is not a problem in the popular press.

But this problem is being addressed. In fact, the scientific method is constantly under revision as we find biases in research and then address those biases. For instance, medical research is plagued by a the problem of the placebo effect. Once this effect was discovered, scientists invented more and more ways of controlling for this effect. Other biases like confirmation bias is also accounted for by using randomization and other statistical methods.

As we can see, the scientific method is not 100% certain, but overall it is reliable. And in certain fields and concerning certain theories there is higher reliability than others. I don't know of any scientific body that would deny that the Earth orbits the Sun. The degree of consensus about this theory is extremely high. Therefore I feel confident that my belief in the theory that the Earth orbits the Sun is justified. There are other scientific theories that do not necessarily have as much consensus. I tend to proportion the strength of my beliefs according to the strength of the justification I have for them. There are a lot of things I believe about the world that come from what the scientific community has discovered. I do not have direct observational proof for many of them, including the proposition that the Earth orbits the Sun. Some years ago, I head about some missionaries who were trying to convince some indigenous population that the Earth orbits the Sun. The locals were not convinced and asked the missionaries to prove it. Think about it. Could you prove that the Earth orbits the Sun? How would you go about doing that?

I'm not going to go into it right now. You can search the Internet for an answer. But I would just like to point out that the theory, in it's modern form, was first published by Copernicus in 1543, but the first observational evidence was not found until 1727 by James Bradley, and not again until 1838 by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel. It took that long until we had telescopes powerful enough to do the needed experiment. Although Galileo had good reasons (which he published in 1610) to believe that the Earth orbits the Sun, his evidence was not conclusive. It wasn't until after Bradley and Bessel that we would have scientific consensus on the matter. Sometimes it takes a long time for the scientific evidence to become great enough for consensus. So far, no one has found good evidence to reject this theory. Astronomers still believe that the Earth orbits the Sun. And yet, in early 2014 a documentary came out in favor of geocentrism, which is the idea that the Sun orbits the Earth.

I'll stick with the scientific consensus. The scientific method got us to the Moon, Mars, and even outside our heliocentric solar system. It gave us cell phones, microwaves, cars, computers, and the Internet. If you can read this blog, thank a scientist.



End Notes:

• Goldman, Alvin, 1979. “What is Justified Belief,” in G. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
• Pappas, George, "Internalist vs. Externalist Conceptions of Epistemic Justification", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/justep-intext/>.

A Wanderer's Guide

When the Thirty Years War started in 1618, Rene Descartes was 22 years old. This war spanned most of the rest of his life. Instead of becoming a lawyer like his family wanted, he joined the army. So by the time he wrote his the book that changed the course of western philosophy Discourse (1637) (the full name is Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences), he had spend the past 19 years of his adult life in the midst on an ongoing war. Descartes was also a great mathematician. I mention these parts of his biography because, to me, they help make sense of his project. He sought order and certainty in an uncertain world. He attempted to give the whole world the kind of order and certainty that mathematics can provide. In this quest he systematically doubted everything he could until all he was left with was his doubt. Doubting his senses was easy. We've all been fooled at one time or another by our senses. But there was one thing he could not doubt, that was his doubt.

We're kind of stuck. Stuck with our own brains, bodies, and other brains and bodies. We have a few holes in our head that allow us to experience some of the world outside, but we cannot always rely on these holes to give us accurate information. Descartes was so convinced that his senses were not good guides to knowledge that he sought a sure foundation through reason and came up with "I think, therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum). Too bad reason isn't any better of a guide through this world than our senses are.

In this battle of ideas, John Locke had a bit of a different solution. He wrote that knowledge is "the perception of the connexion and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas" (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)). Instead of seeking ideas that were clear and distinct, as Descartes had done, he allows for those holes in our head to contribute to our ideas. Locke's famous analogy is to a blank piece of paper that our perceptions essentially write on. When we are born our mind is a blank slate and our experiences write on that slate. Then we can use our reason to compare our various ideas and try to decide which are agreeable to us. Repugnant ideas are to be cast aside. But in a sense, this is exactly what Descartes was trying to do. Descartes knew that he had a bunch of false ideas about the world and he was looking for a way to figure out which of those were trustworthy and which were the false ones. 

Instead of a cave, like Plato had proposed, I prefer to think of myself as wandering around in a forest. I would be happiest if that forest was Kings Canyon in California, or the Coastal Redwoods like these in Muir Woods National Monument:

There are bears and other dangers and it's easy to get lost. Our perceptions of direction and distance can be unreliable when we are hiking in the forest. But if we are prepared, and especially if we have a good guide, or guides, who can show us around, we can enjoy ourselves and discover some wonderful things about this world. 

I'm not really prepared to supply some final resolution between Descartes and Locke. The debate they were engaged in has been going on ever since the 17th century. What I do want to propose is that there are some good guides we can follow as we wander around. The scientific method has probably gotten us further than anything else through this forest of uncertainty. The scientific method relies on both our senses and our reason. Together they can help us overcome the limitations that either alone can offer.

A child sees a butterfly and starts to follow it. Fully engaged in using her senses, purposely pursuing her prey, she runs from one flower to the next, around trees and over a stream. After half an our of this she finally looses interest. She turns around only to find herself hopelessly lost. Yes, our senses alone can lead us astray. But reason alone, without actually looking to see what's out there is also of little use. As the father sits in front of his tent in the woods, he isn't going to get any closer to finding his daughter before the night comes. It takes both open eyes and a keen mind to survive in the woods. 

Sometimes our senses do deceive us, but we can analyze the situation with our reason and overcome these limitations. We can ask someone else to take a look and see what they think. We can recognize biases in our reasoning and come up with way to overcome these biases. Careful observation, detailed notes, statistical analysis, and having someone else try to replicate our data are just some of the ways we can gain a more useful understanding of the world we live in. 

Go out and go hiking somewhere. But don't go unprepared.