My original post on the (possible) limits of science generated lots of thought-provoking feedback. On the one hand, some people argued that I was conflating the persistence of statistical uncertainty with genuine mystery:
Of course, there are built in uncertianties in science especially with the study of those messy organic things. However, this doesn't mean that we won't be able to trim those uncertianties till they are so miniscule as to be meaningless.
Others accused me of the opposite mistake. They said I forgot that "we don't know what we don't know":
Dawkins says science can make God highly improbable. In what sense? Science makes God as micromanager of physical things highly improbable already, but God as something completely beyond the physical world with some part of our consciousness reaching out there to Him is impossible for science, even in terms of gross probabilities. To say otherwise is to be overly simple in one's vision.
So here's my latest strategy. It's a truism that the favorite philosopher of every scientist is Karl Popper. (In my own experience, this truism is mostly true.) Popper, so the story goes, stood up for empirical fact when the post-modernists were descending into Deleuze and Derrida and difference. So far, so good: I like a nice conjecture and refutation as much as the next person. So what can Popper teach us about the limits of science?
A lot. Karl Popper famously pointed out that science never proves things true, it merely proves things false (this is the falsifiability doctrine). In other words, scientists proceed in stuttering steps, advancing by saying what theories are wrong. The truth is just what (temporarily) survives.
At first glance, it's easy to not notice how radical an idea this is. But look closer. For Popper, all discovery is really just criticism. Although we think of scientific truth as being somehow more stable than literary truth - literary fashions come and go, but gravity remains - the opposite is actually true. Scientific truth is true precisely because it is open to change, willing to reverse itself and admit its errors.
So back to the limits of science. If Popper's model of science is reasonably accurate - and plenty of scientists think it is - then it's clear that our science has real, if unfathomable, limits. After all, if our knowledge of everything emerges from criticism, from the falsification of yesterday's truth, then the scientific process can only keep going by proving itself wrong. If our truths were ever perfect - if science could ever come up with a theory of everything that wasn't flawed - then those truths wouldn't be scientific, for they wouldn't be falsifiable. According to Popper, a science without limits or imperfections isn't science: it's metaphysics.
Let's keep this discussion going...
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Nop. It doesn't follow.
They wouldn't be falsified, but they would still be falsifiable. We would make predictions, and they would work. Of course, we would never know for sure that it is the final theory; even after a thousand years, a disagreement with its predictions could still be feared. Thus, Popper limits science in the sense that no answer can be ever declared the final one; however, we could still find a final theory. We just wouldn't be 100% sure.
But isn't a "final theory" that can't actually be proven to be final a wee bit contradictory? What, then, might a "final theory" mean? My point was that science can never get to the 100 percent certainty stage, and that its "final theories" will always be tinged with uncertainty, unknowability and the possibility that, one day, they might be falsified. Calling something a final theory certainly implies that it is really final, and won't be overturned tomorrow.
I think Jonah's got this one. But more interesting, dileffante, is your promotion of "faith" -- absolutely, unquestionably, you offer a statement of faith: that even though we, by virtue of it being 100% final, can then never falsify it, you still *believe* it "would still be falsifiable."
Interesting ideas here...Personally, I wish more people had faith in the future falsifiability of their ideas. Maybe then we would get less fundamentalism. Have any physicists confronted this problem when they talk about their final M theory? (or whatever it's called now.)
Jonah: As I got your point initially, I thought you refered to limits of science as "things that won't be completely understood" (like, consciousness, or "imperfections" like in the last sentence of this post). Such limits may well exist, but Popper is not an argument for that. Now, a different point is "things that won't be known with 100% of certainty", and in that case I fully agree, that's Popper, and I'm with you.
BRC: promotion of "faith"?? May FSM keep me free of that!! I'm not stating a "*belief*" that the eventual theory would be falsifiable; I'm assuming it by definition, since, being a Popperian, I wouldn't call it a scientific theory otherwise.
BRC - excellent point.
Rich - good one too: less scientific fundamentalists (dileffante?) AND religious fundamentalists would be nice.
Pardon my epistemological naiveté but is there any fundamentally different path to knowledge besides that of science and evolution: build on conditional grounds until they are swept away by reality.
Faith is no different. The clever faithful simply choose a faith unlikely to be shown false. Though as Wilde said, "Science is the record of dead religions."
I may have been misunderstood... I'm not claiming that any particular theory is 100% true, not I'm prophesying the advent of one such theory. In fact, as I said above, there may well be reasons preventing it. My only point was that a Popperian definition of science is not one of such reasons (it is only a reason for not knowing that a theory is finally true).
As for the charge of scientific fundamentalism, I thank Jesse for the question mark. However, since my understanding of "fundamentalist" and "science" makes "scientific fundamentalist" an oxymoron, I guess I may be one :-)
Rick: I think faith is quite different. I have never seen people giving up a religion because they found facts contradicting its dogmas. Nor do people require religions to provide ways in which they can be tested.
Dil: Yes, conversions from (or to) religion are rare after we become set in our ways. But as a process, like science and evolution, religions do fade away as their premises become untenable.
To be fair Dawkins is after a personal God. He doesn't appear to have much trouble with a Spinozist or a neoPlatonic like God from what I can see, even though he doesn't believe in such a thing.
I'm also skeptical of Popper's view of science myself. But that's an other matter.
It's even worse than you think. Kuhn criticized Popper calling him a "naive falsificationist."