Philosophy of Science Poll: Emotions

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the wording of the statement, but emotional allegiances do not mean your brain stops.
They mean you are engaged in your work. They mean you care about, are interested in, are excited by, what you are doing. And part of being passionate and engaged and intrigued and emotionally involved means you have some theories in mind, some things you really want to test -- enough to jump through all the bureaucratic, administrative, financial hoops to research it, let alone the troubles you can get into when you do the actual studies.

Where the 'good science' comes in, I think, is being willing to let go of what you thought would happen, in favor of what actually did happen; and then being willing to revise accordingly.

I worked at a medical school, so most of the scientists I knew had strong personal reasons for doing the research they did and pursuing the theories they pursued. If you have a close family member who died of a genetic disorder, you can become pretty passionate about pursuing research about that genetic disorder.

In fact . . . all right, I know I'm digressing here . . . but at one medical conference my husband witnessed two scientists almost coming to blows over competing theories about the same multifactorial, difficult condition they were both researching . . . and they're both fairly prominent in the literature.

I think the emotion fuels the work.

What Anna K said...emotion is the fuel for research, but mind steps in when the evidence point in a different direction (which can be exciting in its own way).

I think the most important thing is to be aware of whatever strong emotional investments one has in one's work. To me, it's similar to the idea that my political science professors would often disclose their political allegiances early on so that any bias could be called out immediately, rather than being obscurely guessed at by students.

Someone like Peter Duesberg - who has demonstrated that he can do really top-notch work but also has let an emotional/irrational attachment to a particular debunked hypothesis - is a good example of the need to be able to recognize deep emotional investment in a theory versus empirical evidence for said theory.

In other words, you can and should never seek to remove emotions from science, but rather work to grow more aware of what non-empirical biases (political, emotional, etc) may be affecting your work or interpretation thereof.

I agreed whole heartedly.

I think primarily due to the use of the word "Allegiance". I agree that emotional connection to your work is a strong motivating factor, and a positive one for the most part. To me the word "Allegiance" suggests a much more......enduring belief.

Even in the case of emotional investment though, I do believe you need to be aware that the investment exists so you can adequately consider your position.

As a sometime dabbler in research into the foundations of quantum theory, this comment strikes a bit of a nerve.

It takes emotional commitment to challenge the Copenhagen orthodoxy when all around you are saying that it is a waste of time. For that matter, it took emotional commitment for Bohr et. al. to actually build the Copenhagen orthodoxy given that quantum theory is not enough to justify the full force of its implications. It took emotional commitment for John Bell to pursue the issue of nonlocality when most of his colleagues believed that his calculation of K meson scattering amplitudes would be viewed as his most significant contribution to physics.

Sometimes, if you don't have enough emotional commitment it can lead you down the wrong path. Bohr could have won a Nobel prize much earlier if he had not allowed Rutherford to discourage him from publishing his theory that the periodic table should be ordered by atomic number rather than atomic weight. The person who originally discovered electron spin (I forget his name, which should tell you something) was discouraged from publishing it when Pauli told him that it was a stupid ides. The credit then went to Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck who discovered it later independently.

That said, emotional commitment to a theory can go to far. For example, most physicists would probably agree that Fred Hoyle should have given up on the steady-state theory by the time that the CMB radiation was discovered, even if he did provide a useful foil to orthodoxy for a while. Closer to home, it is true that some researchers in quantum foundations are so attached to a particular interpretation that they have trouble evaluating other points of view with an open mind. I remember hearing this snippet of conversation at one particular conference (names withheld):

Physicist 1: I hate it when they call it Bohmian mechanics?
Physicist 2: Well, what should they call it then?
Physicist 1: Quantum mechanics!

It is not so surprising that one encounters such attitudes given that many of these people have had to battle hard to get their work taken seriously and have often had to fight for their careers. That said, this type of attitude is still very unhealthy.

So, in short my comment is that you need emotional commitment, and an awful lot of it if you are going against the grain, but not so much that you can't evaluate other ideas objectively.

I would agree, if the statement were a bit more qualified:

Good science means not having an (emotional) allegiance to the validity of any theory.

People get emotional attachments to almost anything into which they put time and effort. But a scientist needs to understand that emotional attachment to a theory is irrelevant to its validity, and that doing good science means open inspection of that validity.

A) I'll advocate my hypothesis strongly, right up until the evidence indicates that it's untenable. At which point I'll toss it like last month's milk.

B) If it's your hypothesis, science is very well-served indeed if I devote myself passionately to proving it wrong. Sometimes I fail. Failure is good -- but not if it's for lack of trying.

My answer was "Enh. Whatever. And I will explain this in a comment."

In some ways it is important that we don't have emotional allegiance to any particular theory or principle. If you're attached to a single perspective, who knows what you'll miss. But it's not strictly necessary for individual scientists to remain emotionally unaligned. It works about as well when all scientists are emotionally aligned, but aligned in different directions.

An emotional allegiance to a hypothesis is fine, so long as it remains thoroughly subordinate to philosophical allegiance to minimum premises necessary to be within the scope (anthropological or philosophical) of Science.

There are infinitely many possible theories that fit the available data and life is too short to investigate all of them dispassionately. Some degree of emotional allegiance is necessary in order to proceed with testing a theory, especially in the face of opposition. See in particular âThe Passionate Scientist: Emotions in Scientific Cognitionâ by Paul Thagard, as well as some other related articles by him.

In an ideal world be drive to find the truth by strong emotion but they would be entirely unemotional about what form that truth takes. We don't live in an ideal world so the best anyone can do is to keep the ideal as a goal and to try to compensate for their own emotions and the emotional attachments of others.

Allegiance is probably too strong of a word, but I think it's perfectly appropriate to have an emotional investment or connection to a theory, as long as you are aware of the emotion and can put it aside once the evidence is strong enough that you should.

I strongly disagree, but it may simply be the wording that causes me to disagree rather than the spirit of the statement. Having a strong emotional allegiance to something is not the same as having faith in something. Emotional allegiance, as has been noted above, causes one to fight for a cause, but you can still sever emotional ties when the data rejects your theory. Faith can be lost, but it's not taken as a given that data will destroy faith, so it is poor science to have faith in a theory because then you will not reject it solely on scientific criteria.

But this is probably a pretty nit-picky distinction, as I'm interpreting the above commentators as saying pretty much the same thing, just from differing angles.

Well you try fitting a question about a strongly loaded word into 140 characters :-)

What I really meant was to question exactly what was meant by allegiance. Blind allegiance is problematic, strong emotional attachment, or passionate defence is fine as long as you are able in the end to walk away based on the evidence. In the context of talking about Natural Selection it seems to me that the word "allegiance" makes the whole thing sound like a tribal debate, not a reasoned argument. If it becomes that surely we've lost?

The stronger I feel about how I want an experiment to come out, the more obvious my bias is, the harder I work to demonstrate it's wrong. It's hard to compensate for the biases you're not aware of.

If you *really* love an idea, you want to throw everything you've got at it before anyone else does and see if it still stands.

"The character of Kepler's intellect was very singular. He was originally led to favor the Copernican hypothesis almost as much by Sun worship as by more rational motives. In the labours which led to the discovery of his three Laws, he was guided by the fantastic hypothesis that there must be some connection between the five regular solids and the five planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This is an extreme example of a not infrequent occurrence in the history of science, namely, that theories which turn out to be true and important are first suggested to the minds of their discoverers by considerations which are utterly wild and absurd. The fact is that it is difficult to think of the right hypothesis, and no technique exists to facilitate this most essential step in scientific progress. Consequently, any methodical plan by which new hypotheses are suggested is apt to be useful; and if it is firmly believed in, it gives the investigator patience to go on testing continually fresh possibilities, however many may have previously had to be discarded. So it was with Kepler. His final success, especially in the case of his third Law, was due to incredible patience; but his patience was due to his mystical beliefs that something to do with the regular solids must provide a clue, and that the planets, by their revolutions, produced a 'music of the spheres' which was audible only to the soul of the sun -- for he was firmly persuaded that the sun is a body of more or less divine spirit."

-- Bertrand Russell

personal tastes and preferences should be supressed when presenting/discussing the results - but hardly during the research work because these are the actual motivators behind many research programs. As long as you are don't take yourself too seriously its perfectly normal to be hopeful (that the breakthrough awaits in some particular direction).

Need commitment, but not so much that you can't have it changed by evidence.

Hi Chad,

It is nice to see people talking about passion in science with folks hastening to add that allegience should not blind one to disconfirming data. That is a very sensible and well reasoned perspective which is therefore of lesser interest. As my time is limited, I was more interested, however, in exploring the issue of how great ideas become science against disconfirming evidence.

Before there was a double helix there was a tripple helix with different nucelotide forms and the phosphate sugar backbone on the inside. Before there was a divergence free field equation for gravitation there was a non-divergence free equation. Before there was a positron anti-particle there was an association of the proton and electron via the spinorial field equation of Dirac.

I am specifically talking about allegience to deep theories in the face of ostensibly disconfirming evidence.

I'm trying to talk about the scientific heros who make us uncomfortable by taking an advance on truth and who stick to a correct theory through a period of disconfirmation. Take smallpox vaccine in the 18th century.

"[Benjamin Jesty was] hooted at, reviled and pelted whenever he attended markets in the neighbourhoodâ"

Try imagining actually writing the grant to inject your own family wth cowpox to prevent smallpox. I'm talking about a different concept of science. I mean 'allegience' when it's warranted. Not enthusiasm. Selection has scientfically earned our allegience even though I believe it is neither fully correct nor complete. It is a vision of science many years before it was denatured by adminstration and giants roamed freely.

Best,

Eric

You have to believe, emotionally, in your theory or experiment to put in the effort needed to pull off the work necessary to get results and write them up. But you do have to be prepared to abandon that emotional attachment once it is proved wrong, or even if it seems OK but it is time to move into a new area.