Chapter XI: Knowledge As Provisional | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “You have to learn the rules before you can break them.”

        – Anonymous

        “To boldly go where no man has gone before!”
        – Captain James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner)I

        In philosophy of science, no answer is ever perfectly certain such that it can be etched in stone for eternity: we are fallible minds who may always be wrong, or else we wouldn't need any epistemology, for we would naturally be in possession of our knowledge of the world at birth (or otherwise trivially learn it all as we went along).  This epistemological humility sets science apart from most other dogmatic philosophies.  Make no mistake, though—the uncertainty of scientific knowledge is a strength: it keeps its body of knowledge from emulsifying assumptions into dogma, and ultimately makes the state of scientific knowledge more certain than the bodies of knowledge of other philosophies, at a given point in time.  Scientific progress is incredibly quick, by historical standards (let alone evolutionary or cosmological time-scales).  All of modern science takes place over the last few centuries since the European enlightenment (also known as the scientific revolution).II  It is not that nothing was learned before then, but certainly what we know about philosophy of science (and consequently about the world), sped way up during that period.III  Science mainly progresses in rare, large bounds, or paradigm shifts, when a genius figures out a new, deeper law of nature.  For instance, our understanding of gravity traveled from the Aristotellian attractive “unmoved mover”, to Keplerian elliptical orbits, to Newtonian gravitational forces, to Einsteinian curved spacetime—IVeach a deeper theory which explains more phenomena more accurately, but includes the predictions of those which came before it as special cases in a limited domain.V  The rest of work-a-day scientific progress is the filling out of such theories in-between their replacements.  This is itself not trivial work; the discovery of the vaccine is paradigm-shifting, but the invention of a particular vaccine for a particular disease is the stuff of saved lives and Nobel prizes.  Unfortunately, some are defeatist and ready to lay down their arms and admit that certain ideas will never be understood by natural science.  Even one of science's great defenders, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, is surprisingly sympathetic to the idea that the hard problem of consciousness (how it is that our physical brains give rise to a conscious first-person experience) will never be understood.VI  I chalk this kind of defeatism up to what I call my-lifetime bias: those who make the mistake that because a certain scientific problem is not likely to be solved (or even see much progress made) in one's lifetime (or perhaps until long after they are gone), it must not be solvable.  But homo sapiens have interacted with and observed much biodiversity in our 300,000 year run, and for most of that time such biodiversity must have seemed intractably mysterious indeed, yet Charles Darwin discovered the linchpin that connected it all in evolution by natural selection just under a couple of centuries ago.VII  Not nearly as much time as 300,000 years has passed since the enlightenment; there is as yet no basis for claiming that a particular problem will not eventually admit of a solution via the scientific method.  The amount of uncertainty surrounding, say, the general theory of relativity, is quite small and sequestered into a well-understood domain under which its predictive power breaks down.  The humility of science still leaves even its least certain accepted results highly more evident than any religious dogma's assertions could possibly bare, zealotry and faith aside.  In a healthy scientific field, the level of evidence required to graduate from an interesting idea to a fact is certainly higher than any other philosophy requires.  That is the problem with faith and dogma: such inflexibility admits of no progress, but new thinkers and new information always await us in the future; articulated reason itself requires the time and participation that faith does not allow.VIII

        We don't even know all of the questions to ask about the cosmos at a given time, let alone all of the answers.  Are there finite or infinitely many things to know?  It seems there must be finite laws, but must there be finite conditions (or facts)?  How much of the total information do we know, now?  Many say we are far along, at least in physics—I disagree.  I think there is little indication of that, and that we could just as easily be surprised by new realms of physical research tomorrow than discover the theory of everything (for one, I think quantum physics in its current state is less fundamental than most do).  While the project is full discovery, in truth, this state of pure knowledge is the death knell of the scientist essentially his hell on Earth: for what is a curious person to do in a world where all is already known?  Like giving up the scientific project to AI, this is a world where genius would be useless.  Whether we will ever reach such a state or not, we presently have no way of knowing, and so no way of knowing where we are in the progression of such a project.  Happily, all there is to do is keep on with the adventure—applying the scientific method and discovering more.  It is probably the safest bet to treat the process as if one is asymptotically approaching complete knowledge, whether or not we could ever reach it does not bare on whether we should continue the enterprise.  Those who believed themselves to be in possession of complete knowledge in all fields would have a new problem to contend with: the provisional nature of knowledge is such that they could never be sure.  The longer time went by without any anomalous data, the more sure they could be (particularly if the time-scales were comparable to those over which all of that progress had been made since the enlightenment), but there is nothing to fully terminate this process.  And brilliant people would inevitably find themselves barking up the wrong trees trying to make their mark on scientific history by pursuing whatever anomaly they could find (which happens as it is).

        An important concept when it comes to the provisional nature of knowledge is replication or reproducibility—that is that, particularly over time, we usually do not hitch our beliefs on a single study which purports an empirical result.  The beauty of science is that one needn't necessarily take someone else's word for it, one may perform the experiment (or a related one) oneself to see if the predictions of the hypothesis or theory in question (or a competing theory, or otherwise some anomalous unexplained data) holds up.  The more a result replicates, the more sure we can be that the initial report wasn't a fluke (the result of chance, unintentional researcher bias, uncontrolled conditions, and any other forms of error and bias there may be) or even fraud.  If a result fails to replicate (particularly with a higher-powered study than the original) then it is considered falsified, or at least (if the new study isn't higher powered) called back into question of further research (in which case we should remain in equipoise, or undecided pending further evidence).IX  Even better, when one can replicate a result (or many different results which correspond to the different predictions of the same hypothesis or working theory), one can be much more certain of their knowledge.X  As a real-world example of the importance of replication, the academic field of psychology (and in particular, social psychology) has spent the last decade in what is known as the replication crisis: many classic results in this field (and many that people were always skeptical of despite the capital-P-R Peer Reviewed journal articles being released in empirical support of them—one famously purported to support the physically impossible extra-sensory perception, or ESP) have been failing to replicate (between about 1/3 and ½ of them, in fact!).XI  Many such effects are small in any event.XII

        The reason for such hesitance as is implied by the provisional nature of knowledge is that we could at any time be in error, awaiting some future researcher, technology, idea, or accumulation of evidence to show us the way.  This does not mean that all scientific ideas are on infirm foundations (as stated earlier, it is actually how we know they are on the firmest of possible foundations).  One should first lower one's level of certainty in everyday beliefs that one develops, before lamenting the provisional nature of rigorous science—the same argument from provision applies to all philosophy, if it is to be properly understood: it is unlikely, but one could (and many have!) learn tomorrow that their mother is not their mother and that they were adopted.  Suddenly, some common-sense belief that one did not necessarily think of as a philosophical or scientific belief has been shown to have been only provisionally true and has now been updated by new evidence (perhaps a DNA test).  When we say we are provisionally sure where Mercury will be in its orbit tomorrow based on Einstein's general theory of relativity, this is the kind of “provisionality” you can bet your life on.  At any given moment in time, your best bet is to bet on the state-of-the-art science (as you understand it, using the tools you learn from books like this one—not as some authority claims it to be).  The full body of knowledge at any given time will be wrong in many ways.  It will be revised and updated in the future, perhaps forever.  But everything else is noise.  The thinker wants to be the closest to the truth as he can be with his beliefs, and the way to do that is to learn and employ the scientific method as one embodies the scientific ethic.

        Respect and revere the great ideas and thinkers that came before you, but do not pray to them.  All of the greatest progress in science comes from courageous paradigm shifts that look at problems in a new way, generalizing old results, and further explaining them in the process.  Never be motivated by turning over old results, but dare to do so when your line of inquiry leads you in that direction.  Boldly go.


Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (Wikipedia) (retrieved 10/28/22) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_no_man_has_gone_before) (though I have not watched read this whole entry, nor watched Star Trek!).

II. See To Explain The World by Weinberg (pp. 145-146) and The Dream Of Enlightenment by Gottlieb (pp. xii-xiii).

III. See To Explain The World by Weinberg (pp. 145-146).

IV. The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 39-40, 227, 251-258, 370, 399-400, 436-437); The Dream Of Enlightenment by Gottlieb (pp. 193-194, 210-212, 219); To Explain The World by Weinberg (pp. 59, 91, 93, 95, 99, 136, 161-173, 188, 190, 212, 215-255, 268); and Our Mathematical Universe by Tegmark (pp. 248-249).

V. It is unfortunate that it is only with 20/20 hindsight that we value the gadfly, the rebel, and the contrarian. Almost every great mind went through a period (or a lifetime) of such criticism (or even hatred) from the mainstream who held deep zealotries against such new ideas, see “Bret And Heather 81st DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Permission to Think” uploaded by B. Weinstein's and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoaKtBMk53Y) (15:31 – 19:54). We seem often to hate our geniuses in our time, leaving our descendants to lavish the praise they deserve. For more on this topic, see “The Sociology Of Scientists” chapter.

VI. See Enlightenment Now by Pinker (pp. 22, 425-428).

VII. See “Hypothesizing Reciprocal Altruism Therapy For Cats” by Steven Gussman (Footnote Physicist) (2021) (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/06/hypothesizing-reciprocal-altruism.html#FN4A) which further cites The Selfish Gene by Dawkins (pp. 1, 359), which in its turn quotes zoologist G. G. Simpson.

VIII. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. xviii, 36-37, 245 – 263); Enlightenment Now by Pinker (pp. 390-391, 393, 401); “Humility” by Barnaby Marsh (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27185) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 501-503); and The God Delusion by Dawkins (pp. 2, 16, 18-19, 38, 45).

IX. Another term for equipoise is to remain agnostic towards a hypothesis until convincing evidence comes down on the matter. For a spectacular essay on this topic, see “Equipoise” by Nicholas A. Christakis (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27066) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 303-305).

X. These are the numological networks of cumulative evidence that Saad talks about, see again the “Empiricism” chapter (especially footnote XV) which further cites “Charles Darwin And Nomological Networks Of Cumulative Evidence” by Saad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4x1YWM8s8).

XI. See See “Daniel Kahneman — Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” Michael Shermer and Daniel Kahneman (Skeptic) (2021) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CFjERpwFys) (6:14 – 13:54, 34:59 – 36:28). See also “Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out Of Excuses” by Ed Yong (The Atlantic) (2018) (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/) which reports on the ½-replication-rate result of “Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation In Replicability Across Sample And Setting” by Richard A. Klein et al. (COS / OSF) (2017 / 2022) (https://osf.io/ux3eh/) (though I have not yet read this study); and the following February 9th, 2021 tweet from psychologist Rolf Degen: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1359147371075108868?s=20&t=Zp1zBxSmf_SLI9WE2zq4Hg which displays the 64%-replication-rate from “Replicability, Robustness, And Reproducibility In Psychological Science” by Brian A. Nosek et al. (PsyArXiv Preprints / Annual Review Of Psychology) (2021 / 2022) (https://psyarxiv.com/ksfvq/ / https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-114157) (though I have not yet read this paper). See also “Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies: So Why Can't The Journals That Publish Them?” by Ed Yong (The Atlantic) (2018) (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/scientists-can-collectively-sense-which-psychology-studies-are-weak/568630/). Note that I have argued that the real “crisis” was whatever academic psychologists were doing before they noticed these weak replication-rates and began repairing their field as a result, see my November 19th, 2018 tweet: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1064591091612176384. For More on the so-called replication crisis, look forward to the “Psychology” chapter in the “Ontology” volume.

XII. See “Bad Data Analysis And Psychology's Replication Crisis” by Christopher J. Ferguson (Quillette) (2019) (https://quillette.com/2019/07/15/bad-data-analysis-and-psychologys-replication-crisis/).

Comments

  1. Change Log:
    Version 0.01 11/1/22 3:01 AM
    - Inserted common footnote 0

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    1. Version 0.02 11/1/22 3:04 AM
      - Changed the title from "The Provisional Nature Of Knowledge" to "Knowledge As Provisional" in line with the table of contents. I am not sure where the longer statement comes to my mind from, if anywhere in particular--it does still appear in the body text.

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    2. 11/1/22 3:07 AM
      I am not totally decided which title to stick with in the end...

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    3. 11/5/22 3:08 PM
      - Removed "great attractor" from the "Aristotellian attractive 'unmoved mover' 'great attractors'" sentence

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    4. Version 1.00 1/8/23 8:54 PM
      - Fixes:
      "CH 11
      FN 1 [CHECK]
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      nor read this whole article
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      Italix my blog
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      “Humility” by Barnaby Marsh (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27185) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 501-503)
      FN 9 [CHECK]
      “Equipoise” by Nicholas A. Christakis (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27066)
      FN 10 [CHECK]
      ch link
      which further cites
      FN 11 [CHECK]
      See “Daniel Kahneman — Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” Michael Shermer and Daniel Kahneman (Skeptic) (2021) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CFjERpwFys) (6:14 – 13:54, 34:59 – 36:28)
      Multiple italix
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      - Changed title to "1st Edition"

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  2. TO-DO: Consider adding to footnote vii the TO-DOs from: https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/11/chapter-xix-elegance-and-complexity.html?sc=1705122668125#c6220407584991278890 re. evolution unifying biodiversity

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