Chapter XXII: Scrutiny And Skepticism | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

        – Arthur Hays Sulzberger (as paraphrased by Carl Sagan)^I

        The modern term, “skepticism,” like so many philosophical terms, stems from the ancient Greek Sceptics (a profoundly doubtful school of philosophy).^II  Skepticism is the amount of doubt one holds towards a particular claim—one might be ~1% skeptical of the claim that they are not in fact the children of their parents, and ~95% skeptical that the United States will enter into a war tomorrow, as examples.^III  Like the ancient Greek namesake, people today confuse skepticism's role in science, treating it as an unchecked virtue (or worse, as a double-standard to wield against evidence inconvenient to one's own tastes, all the while going easy on evidence that confirms their biases).^IV  This naive view of skepticism most often takes the form of arguing that science is about, “being skeptical of everything,” or, “questioning everything,” (where, perversely, “questioning” always seems to mean doubting, instead of dispassionately falsifying and verifying, claims).^V

        The truth is that, of course, one should not be equally skeptical of all claims.^VI  One should apply equal scrutiny to all claims, which will yield differential skepticism towards them.  Scrutiny is merely the application of your philosophical attention to a problem, and the only fair way to do so is to approach all questions the same way—if you apply more scrutiny to claims you don't like than to others, you will end up with unfair double-standards for contrarian ideas that may well be correct (and / or over-confidence in the weak received wisdom of your time).^VII  Only after one applies that scrutiny to a claim, will one know how skeptical to be or not: perhaps the study that birthed the claim has methodological flaws; perhaps it is merely a popular belief which is directly contradicted by the evidence; or perhaps, despite no obviously apparent issues, it simply disagrees with so many other lines of evidence that one is left unsure of what the signal means.  The sum of the tools in this book are those used to apply scientific scrutiny; do so firmly and evenly.

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 the “Conservativism And Progress” chapter which further cites goodreads for the Sagan paraphrase: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/29905-it-pays-to-keep-an-open-mind-but-not-so, and for Sulzberg's original, “I favor an open mind. I certainly do not advocate that the mind should be so open that the brains fall out,” see The Physics Of Climate Change by Krauss (pp. 83).

II. See The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 294-7, 300, 336-357).

III. The squiggly symbol (~) means, “about,” or, “approximately.”

IV. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 297-298).

V. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 300-303).

VI. For another look at skepticism, properly understood, see the “The Marriage Of Skepticism And Wonder” chapter in The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 293-306). For the history of the use of skepticism in modern science, see The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 438-450) and The Dream Of Enlightenment by Gottlieb (pp. 1-2, 8, 10, 13, 19, 26, 28, 34-35, 83, 108, 150-151, 173, 213, 220-221, 227-230).

VII. See The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 297-298, 300-306).