Chapter XXXII: The Laws Of Philosophy Of Science | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “In the demon haunted world world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that

        stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”

        – Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan^I

        It is fashionable to claim that one cannot place limits on scientific inquiry and that anyone who tries is doomed to fail—that the scientific project is irreducibly stumbled-upon, with no hard-and-fast laws that must be abided.^II  This is nonsense; of course the epistemology of science is a normative theory!  It is true that our knowledge of epistemology evolves over time.^III  It is also true that this means that even epistemological knowledge is provisional (though I contend that it is necessarily much firmer than the bodies of knowledge it supports).  But both of those arguments are true of our knowledge of any topic; this has not stopped us from explicitly stating the three laws of thermodynamics^IV or the four laws of behavioral genetics,^V for example.  Nor has it stopped us from placing our utmost available confidence in the ultimately provisional theories of gravity or evolution.  When it comes to ontology, we formulate the laws and concede their provisional status.  But, crucially, the most well-established laws (those whose status we are much more certain of than most), have the highest burden of evidence in their falsification: most physicists will ignore a paper claiming to defy the conservation of energy and most biologists will ignore those claiming to defy evolution by natural selection, not because they are bad scientists, but because they know the probability that those ideas are wrong (and that this new researcher is a genius of such a caliber as to discover as much) is exceedingly lower than the probability that he is simply wrong or mistaken.  Nonetheless, they recognize in the broadest sense that one could falsify and supplant these ideas, and they should hope that one who does will able to grab their attention.  Epistemology should be no different: we should explicitly state those laws that the sum total of our millennia of scientific inquiry imply, place them on their firmest footing, and allow those who want to falsify these to do so explicitly as part of the ongoing process of small-P-R peer review (and the laws can then be footnoted, revised, or discarded as necessary).  The free-for-all state of things right now allows a physicist to hand-wave away, say, his failure to satisfy, mechanical philosophy in a way that he (or any philosopher) would never be allowed if the mealy-mouthed rejection were of, say, the law of increasing entropy.  Here, I propose what I believe the three laws of philosophy of science ought to be.^VI

                The First Law: Conduct
                        • The scientific ethic

                                ◦ Dispassionate objectivity

                                ◦ Intellectual honesty

                        • Scrutiny yielding skepticism

                        • Conservativism And Progress

                        • peer review

                        • Methodology

                        • Descriptive vs. normative theory

        The first law of philosophy of science is the law of conduct: it is a non-starter if a thinker is not intellectually honest in their pursuits as they attempt to dispassionately and objectively study their topic of interest.  Further, one must support the liberties of expression pre-requisite to the conduct of science.  One must be familiar with the difference between normative and descriptive theory, how their field's methodology relates to the scientific epistemology it is implementing, and one must judiciously apply scrutiny in small-P-R peer review and in self-review to yield one's skepticism towards a given hypothesis.  In short: one must follow the scientific ethic.

                        The Second Law: Nature

                                • Ontology

                                • Cosmos

                                • Natural philosophy

                                • Empiricism

                                • Consilience

                                • Reductionism and emergence

                                • Provisional knowledge

                                • Elegance and complexity

                                • Determinism

                                • Mechanical philosophy

                                • Laws vs. facts

                                • Approximation

        The second law of philosophy of science is the law of nature: it must be agreed upon that what exists (and what we are studying) is the natural world.  That is, one single, large, overarching place which exhibits patterns within that show that it follows deterministic, mechanical laws, and which is reducible to a single fundamental theory underlying all complexity.  This enforces the primacy of empirical evidence (which then suggests the reality of the provisional nature of the state of knowledge at a given time and place) and its use in graduating hypotheses to theories by checking one's ideas against the ontology to see if they are in possession of a genuine explanation.^VII

                        The Third Law: Formalism

                                • Reason

                                • Logic, mathematics, and computation

                                • Common sense

        The third law of philosophy of science is the law of formalism: though it is okay for a scientific idea to begin as a philosophical argument or picture in accordance with reason, it is at its best, and most complete, when formalized.  The cosmos is an orderly, regular place, and it is these laws that scientists seek to formalize, be it in the language of a logical or mathematical equation, or a computational algorithm.  When science builds upon common sense (or defies it), it does so by clarifying the accuracy, and increasing the precision of such ideas.  A scientific hypothesis should be (or otherwise make) more-or-less precise predictions that may be falsified or confirmed empirically.  One must themself be logically consistent, as well as one's hypotheses.

        Despite the likelihood that giants of the scientific world will disagree with the concept of writing such a chapter as this, I encourage the reader to check again each decade, past and future: I believe these laws will undeniably continue to underlie proper scientific research (that is, the most successful projects, discoveries, and scientists will not tend to be threatened by them).  As you can see, we are largely able to boil down the other thirty-one chapters of this book into just three simple laws; this is itself an example of elegance and consilience.  You may notice further connections between the “different” concepts reviewed in this book; my view is that this is a good thing, that it suggests that each piece fits together well without forcing, further suggesting that the whole is the truth of the cosmos.

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 Demon Haunted World by Sagan and Druyan (pp. 434).

II. See “In Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science)” by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/05/in-defense-of-philosophy-of-science.html) which is a rebuttal to some of Weinbeg's views in To Explain The World by Weinberg.

III. See “In Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science)” by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/05/in-defense-of-philosophy-of-science.html#FN33A) which further cites To Explain The World by Weinberg (pp. xi, 9, 214, 248, 254-255, 267).

IV. See for example 3 Laws Of Nature: A Little Book On Thermodynamics by R. Stephen Berry (Yale University Press) (2019).

V. See The Blank Slate by Pinker (pp. 372-380, 392-393, 449-450, 477, 480) which further cites "Three Laws Of Behavior Genetics And What They Mean" by Eric Turkheimer (Current Directions In Psychological Science) (2000) (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-16079-005), "Why It Is Hard To Find Genes Associated With Social Science Traits: Theoretical And Empirical Considerations" by Christopher F. Chabris et al. (AJPH) (2013) (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/ajph.2013.301327), and "The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics" by Christopher F. Chabris (Current Directions In Psychological Science) (2015) (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721415580430) (though I have not yet read these papers).

VI. My first and third laws will be uncontroversial, while my second is set, since the mid-twentieth century, to be highly controversial. Having often made arguments elsewhere in this volume, and respecting the particular scope of this volume, I will only remind the reader that every scientific theory prior to (and indeed after!) quantum physics has fit the law of nature unless it was otherwise understood to be an approximation based on partial-ignorance (not the falsification of deterministic mechanical philosophy).

VII. See the “Empiricism” and “Laws And Facts, Theories And Data” chapter.