Michael Strevens

This was an interesting book. It does not fit nicely into my usual genres - or into my expectations of how a book should be organized. The organization worked; the book was interesting; but in a a sense its credibility was contradicted by its topic.

The scientific method seems to be strange and difficult for most people to understand. I'm not entirely sure why; it seems pretty natural to me. Perhaps I'm merely properly indoctrinated, in spite of never having been a working scientist. But on the other hand, perhaps I'm merely on the autistic spectrum, and have an unfair advantage in keeping certain common human thought distortions out of my thought process.

At any rate, the thesis of this book is that the scientific method is both unnatural and irrational - except that it works far better for its purpose (developing accurate knowledge of the world) than other, more natural means of understanding. Strevens suggests that developing such a method - and using it long enough for its practical advantages to become obvious - was always extremely unlikely, but had somewhat of a better chance in Europe in the aftermath of the religious wars - people had gotten into the habit of compartmentalizing domains of knowledge, separating religion from politics, because the alternative seemed to be yet another round of religious wars. Thus separating observed data from everything else, while doing science, or at least while reporting on scientific work, seemed less unnatural at that time than it ever had before.

The book starts by discussing the views of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn about how science works, first contrasting them with each other, and then demonstrating that neither adequately describes the actual behaviour of some/all/most scientists. He then gives his own version of how science really works - or at least of the basic rule that must be followed for science to work at all.

In particular, he postulates something he calls the iron rule of explanation: scientists may only attempt to resolve their differences of opinion by conducting empirical tests. No fighting, no shouting, no revealed scripture, no appeals to past masters. Just empirical results. They may - and generally will - differ about what those results mean - but that can only be addressed by gathering and reporting more results. They may use any means they like to come up with theories, or ideas of what data to gather - but when they report the data, they are expected to sterilize it - not tell us that they think their results are in accord with Scripture, or that their experiment was inspired by a dream. At least, not tell us this in the scientific literature - they can say whatever they want in a memoir, or at the pub over a beer.

Paradoxically, leaving out extra sources of information results in better results. (At least, it's paradoxical if you truly believe dreams, divine revelation, etc. etc. provide useful information on the topic at hand.) Strevens uses a stronger word here - "irrational" rather than "paradoxical"; in my opinion, that word choice weakens his argument somewhat.

Unfortunately, Strevens is arguing for his position using the methods of the humanities. And not even the more data-minded of those methods. (We see examples, not statistics.) To me, this seems to be rather weak evidence.

Of course his approach is somewhat inevitable - he's a philosopher, after all. But I suspect he also doesn't get it - in the sense that he can't imagine being motivated to do science himself. Non-scientifically, I suspect that because he doesn't truly get it, his model of the motivations of scientists is likely to be somewhat inaccurate. (I imagine him as me, trying to understand the values and motivations of fashion designers, beyond the obvious one of making money.)

In any case, that doesn't really matter. His iron rule is a worthy addition to the existing theories of how science really works. But I don't think his methodology - or that of Kuhn for that matter (I haven't read Popper) is going to convince anyone of anything they didn't already want to believe. All 3 descriptions of how science really works are probably best regarded as "just so" stories - science speak for explanations not subject to empirical investigation.

That said, all three of them may be useful for potential scientists in understanding what they are, ideally, supposed to be doing. Or more correctly, how they are supposed to go about seeking knowledge, and some of the ways in which that search can go astray.

I'm not sure what (if anything) is useful for those prone to bastardize the word science, or one of its sub-fields, with pseudo-intellectual mashups like "creation science" or "indigenous physics". Mostly I just ignore them.… (más)

Although I’m persuaded by Streven’s core idea that modern science depends on a strict separation between empirically collected data and speculative explanatory theories, I feel like he pushes too hard to find examples everywhere in history. While some of his examples are perfect (e.g. how Eddington revealed all his data about the Einstein eclipse, even when it apparently contradicted his conclusion), I question how much the “typical” scientist really adheres to this rule. This is especially obvious in the “soft” sciences, where “data” is itself subject to interpretation, but even in a field like microbiology, it’s hard to deny how much of the data collection is influenced by “paradigms” like the Central Dogma.

That said, I’ll take away the main point: that science is nothing more than data methods of the data collection logic that ties it together.… (más)