Gobrey, Smith, Hume

Economics could be a science, were there not always a thumb or two upon the scale.

If the economists took their thumbs out of their own eyes, and put them on a scale, that would be a major advance. At least, they would be measuring something.

I think Hume is making a great assumption that there are ‘constant and universal principles of human nature’. It would seem he made this great assumption about constancy and universality before he even read all the history and anthropology of the world – this is jumping to conclusions or beginning your journey at your intended destination.

You may or may not think this is a great folly, but I will tell you about a silly academic book I found the other day which I am sure everyone will agree is a folly. If this book is a folly then Hume is also folly-ing.

The book is the Algebra of Conscience – wherein the author uncovers the mathematical foundations of conscience through the translation of english sentences about conscience into algebra. Into the book the author decides he will translate Crime and Punishment and Hamlet from words into algebra — I can’t read all the algebra but it looks to me like he loses such a great deal in the process that even a grade schooler doing paraphrasing compositional exercises would not lose so much.

I recommend everyone to look at this book to see that in order to avoid such great folly one ought always to proceed with caution before jumping to conclusions about human nature being so very constant and universal that it is appropriate to study with the same sort of scientific method as one might use to study the movement of the heavenly bodies.

Of course it depends what you take to mean by science. Science itself just pretty much means knowledge except via latin roots to sound more authoritative than knowledge which comes from Old English and Germanic. You see people doing this all the time – the latinish word has the same content as a plain english word but the speaker feels more authoritative if they choose the latinish.

But then the loathsome torturer Francis Bacon made his Baconian Method of experimental philosophy prominent and over time a popularised form of this experimental philosophy came to be called science. If we go back to using ‘science’ as meaning its proper meaning of ‘knowledge’, then we can use ‘experimental philosophy’ properly too and stop having these arguments.

So then maybe some economics would be experimental philosophy if the economists did experiments. But then someone might say like the melancholy Jacques “All the world’s an experiment, and all the men and women merely experimenters and experimentees…” And another concur “For what else is the life of man but a kind of experiment in which men in various costumes perform until the experimenter motions them out”.

So this replaces the familiar opposition between art/culture and nature – with this experiment and nature opposition (maybe it is a dialectic?).

But experiment is difficult to define – because the word comes from Latin and Old French – from experiri (to try) with the suffix -ment meaning action/result. This is not a very useful meaning to contrast with ‘nature’ because animals try-act all the time and we would not usually oppose them with nature.

So we need to think of experiment as a type of art wherein a powerful subject/actor puts less powerful inert things or sentient beings on trial.

It makes sense Francis Bacon would do this because he used torture on people – conceivably to put them on trial to get them to tell him something he wanted to know.

However – we find this is quite interesting when looked at in relation to nature — because in experiments something or someone’s nature is put on trial to determine what it is. So we can now define experimental philosophy as an art wherein the experimental philosopher as subject will subjects various objects/natural-forms to various sorts of acts by way of a trial in order to get a result as to what the objects/natural-forms are.

Therefore – the idea that ‘all the world’s an experiment’ is no more correct than saying all the world’s a stage — because one would have to first prove that everyone has the subjectivity of the experimenter.

Many people object to having experiments done on them, or on experiments being done on other people or animals or even on genes. Therefore – we know that not everyone shares the subjectivity of the experimenter.

So , whilst experimenters may desire to think the whole world is an experiment wherein they can experiment just as they please — there is no good reason to trust their word for it. And, in fact, that they would assert this just goes to show that they are not very good at accommodating other understandings of the world — this is no great wonder when you stop to consider that the whole method is started by an awful torturer.

So then Hume makes an additional folly to the one engaged in by the author of the Algebra of Conscience — as well as assuming a mechanical view of humans and the social world as consisting of “regular springs” – he also assumes that all history — both in the doing of and the recording of — is in essence experimental, as in the sense of experimental philosophy. Thus has Hume perpetuated a greater folly than to translate Hamlet into algebra.

“These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.”

* The main likenesses are the subduing of nature and bending it to their own ends by Prospero and the torturer Francis Bacon, and the the setting of the play in an island in the new world like the setting of Francis Bacon’s science fiction secret society utopia book

This is the point where I don’t know if I should feel comfortable or marginalized by having grown up with, and ingrained in the way I think, an overarching notion of Wissenschaft, or Wissenschaften, that is, all the disciplines that deal with the systematic and formal construction of knowledge, rather than having to figure out the exact demarcation of science (archaeology, linguistics and sociology — yay? but history — nay?). I don’t know who Smith is, but I go with them.

ZM @ 155

I think Hume, in his remarks concerning human nature, is just chipping in his ante as an Enlightenment philosophe. They all did that.

Since there is obviously no such thing as a controlled experiment in astronomy, this definition of “science” would suggest that Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus were not scientists and I think that’s a bit daft.

I think here I should mention the long series of blog posts that Paul Krugman has made pointing out the important qualitatively correct PREDICTION he and others who understand what a liquidity trap is made that economists who either deny the possibility of a liquidity trap or deny it’s current relevance did not. Economics does too make predictions. The problem is that large parts of the “profession” don’t want economics to be a science (i.e. they deny falsability).

@ dsquared, that might be an exception that proves the rule. Astronomy is so strongly oresent early science, because its uncontrolled situations were often more ‘controlled’ than anything in a lab in those days. The mechanics of planets are almost perfectly friction-free movement under gravitation, repeating themselves with extreme accuracy. And even their complications are simpler, cleaner than the complications in an earthly lab.

That role continues to the present day, with some physical phenomena showing up in astronomy in a ‘purer’ form than in any lab. Neutrinos, gravity waves, possibly dark matter.

Social scientist would give up a few pinkies to have such a type of ‘uncontrolled’ observations.

dsquared,
“Since there is obviously no such thing as a controlled experiment in astronomy, this definition of “science” would suggest that Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus were not scientists and I think that’s a bit daft”

They are not controlled – but because the heavenly bodies are so far away and very big neither astronomers or anyone else interfere with the conditions of their movements. Just the heavenly bodies interact amongst themselves. Also they are very routine in their interactions more than most things unless you could use great telescopes to look back in time (if that is what great telescopes allow you to do ) before all the orbits were regular. They are so non interfered with and routine people used the heavenly bodies to situate themselves in time and then space with astrolabes and the like.

So maybe this gave the idea of if you studied other things in controlled conditions and repeated your experiments you would find all the rules in every field you could imagine and thus understand the universe.

This worked better in biology than it did in sociology and anthropology and economics.

That snippet from Hume reads like it could have been one of the triggers for Kant’s Idea for a Universal History – which of course includes the famous phrase “out of wood so crooked and perverse as that which man is made of, nothing absolutely straight can ever be wrought.” (In de Quincey’s translation).

Zamfir,

“Addendum: i have no interest at all in casting cootied social sciences from the House of Real Science.”

The problem with this is twofold.

1. First — On The Scientific Subject: Here we have the question of what is a science in the House of Science? And why can’t we put every single thing into the House of Science?

I showed how ‘science’ used correctly just means knowledge – but no-one uses the word science correctly as just a latin synonym for knowledge. Knowledge must come in two parts – the getting of knowledge, and the knowing and telling of knowledge.

On the getting of knowledge — I repeatedly walk down my street — I expect much more repeatedly than any economist repeats their experiment. Therefore have I a great scientist getting knowledge as I walk down my street so repeatedly often noticing the different flowers for the seasons or when the neighbour’s hen is in the front garden? I have not myself noticed I am a scientist, but I will listen to your arguments if you would like to declare me one. If I am sadly not considered a scientist as I walk down my street — then the question becomes – which categories of knowledge-getting are scientific and which are not?

On the knowing and telling as knowledge — there are all sorts of knowledges that no-one usually has as sciences. For instance – is The Life of Johnson a scientific work? Is The Canterbury Tales a scientific work? Is Van Gough’s Sunflowers a scientific botanical illustration? Is Thucydides work scientific? Are all essays scientific? What about sandwiches? Etc Etc

So — then if you think not every way of knowing and every telling of knowledge are scientific — what are the criteria that makes knowledge (or representations of knowledge) scientific or otherwise?

2. Second — On The Scientific Object: Here we have the question of what makes objects suitable for scientific study if only some forms of knowledge are scientific? Are all objects suitable for knowing in a scientific way (as defined by whatever the criteria is agreed upon for 2. above)?

We will go back to my earlier example of the Algebra of Conscience — from the section on translating Crime and Punishment into algebra: “Luzhin is aggressive, but Lebeziatnikov is a coward and inclined to compromise, and neither is sacrificial.
Luzhin corresponds to the expression
(b) (I,2)
and Lebeziatnikov to the expression
(d) (II, 2) A ”

Is Crime and Punishment the right object for algebra?
I would say it is not. If you agree it then follows that some objects are appropriate for scientific study and others are not.

The social sciences like sociology, anthropology, and economics I think all came to be when some sort of mechanical structural view of things was dominant. That is why you had all those silly books with the ages of mankind and some tacked on teleologies for the last chapters.

But I have not ever met a living professor who thinks structuralism is true these days. Structuralism died out of prominence around the middle of the twentieth century — but it is sort of like a ghost because a the social sciences don’t really make sense as sciences unless you accept structuralism as the equivalent to gravity. Without structuralism you may as well just go back to having history which is a very old muse and not a social science.

“History is philosophy learned from examples.” I’ve seen it attributed to Thucydides.

“Since there is obviously no such thing as a controlled experiment in astronomy”

Even better: study of the universe outside our solar system is based on data that is years old when it reaches us — sometimes MANY years old. History, in other words?

Gobry:
Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation.

Stephen Jay Gould (from Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989):
Beyond a platitudinous appeal to open-mindedness, the “scientific method” involves a set of concepts and procedures tailored to the image of a man in a white coat twirling dials in a laboratory–experiment, quantification, repetition, prediction, and restriction of complexity to a few variables that can be controlled and manipulated. These procedures are powerful, but they do not encompass all of nature’s variety. How should scientists operate when they must try to explain the results of history, those inordinately complex events that can occur but once in detailed glory? Many large domains of nature–cosmology, geology, and evolution among them–must be studied with the tools of history. The appropriate methods focus on narrative, not experiment as usually conceived.

The stereotype of the “scientific method” has no place for irreducible history. Nature’s laws are defined by their invariance in space and time. The techniques of controlled experiment, and reduction of natural complexity to a minimal set of general causes, presuppose that all times can be treated alike and adequately simulated in a laboratory…

Historical explanations are distinct from conventional experimental results in many ways. The issue of verification by repetition does not arise because we are trying to account for uniqueness of detail that cannot, both by laws of probability and time’s arrow of irreversibility, occur together again. . . . And the issue of prediction, a central ingredient in the stereotype, does not enter into a historical narrative. . . .

These differences place historical, or narrative, explanations in an unfavorable light when judged by restrictive stereotypes of the “scientific method.” . . .

Thus, historical scientists often import an oversimplified caricature of “hard” science, or simply bow to pronouncements of professions with higher status. Many geologists accepted Lord Kelvin’s last and most restrictive dates for a young earth, though the data of fossils and strata spoke clearly for more time. (Kelvin’s date bore the prestige of mathematical formulae and the weight of physics, though the discovery of radioactivity soon invalidated Kelvin’s premise that heat now rising from the earth’s interior records the cooling of our planet from an initially molten state not long past.) . . .

The firm requirement for all science–whether stereotypical or historical–lies in secure testability, not direct observation. We must be able to determine whether our hypotheses are definitely wrong or probably correct…

Zamfir,

Hmmm, I am not convinced you have happened across the way of determining what is science from what is not science with these two categories:

Not-science: going along and noticing things
Science : going along and cataloguing things

I think you have instead happened upon the way of determining specific cataloguing behaviour from general noticing behaviour of which cataloguing behaviour must be a subset.

People do study streets as it happens, Jan Gehl for example. I don’t see why you think my street is a particularly unimportant street unworthy of study — it’s really a quite nice street I promise you. It would certainly be a very interesting study indeed, a study of my street. In fact — studying a street is actually quite an expansive topic — once I was assigned to do a whole study of just one building , this was a lengthy enough assignment and I didn’t even cover the topic of just the one building exhaustively.

“Understanding that real estate bubbles tend not to have soft landings? Not hard.”

Unless you are Robert Lucas.

Brett Bellmore 10.15.14 at 2:18 pm @ 30:
‘Science is the challenging practice of letting the evidence lead you where it wants to go, regardless of where YOU want to go….’

On the other hand, Uncle Albert said, ‘It is the theory which tells us what we can observe.’ That is, the observer participates in and is part of the observation.

In regard to Science versus knowledge, we generally conceive of Science as specifically social, and organized institutionally, regardless of the Noah-Smithian category a particular instance of it happens to fall into. Its social nature introduces prejudice and politics, the thumb on the scale I mentioned earlier in the case of Economics.

All the definitions of science given above sound myopic. Trying to put together the developments of General Relativity, evolution by natural selection, routine materials characterization, etc. in one algorithm is a fool’s errand. Even worrying about defining big words like “science” is rather pointless. For those who find such definitions comforting, perhaps Bridgman’s is the best:

“The scientific method, as far as it is a method, is nothing more
than doing one’s damnedness with one’s mind, no holds barred.”

“Since most people think math and lab coats equal science, people call economics a science…”

Do economists wear lab coats?

As a working geoscientist who received my original training in pure physics, I’ve come to the conclusion that for purposes of figuring out the object of science as a whole, the experimental vs. observational debate is vastly overrated. It’s essential in some disciplines that just happen to have a huge body of observation — and started out as such — but also offer important space for experimentation, such as biology or psychology, and where the development of the controlled experiment qualitatively changed the discipline and markedly expanded its scope and force. In geophysics, not so much. Sure, you’ll ran across the rare experimental volcanologist once in a while, but as a field, it’s unapologetically observational. My own work could be described as finding ways, or improving existing ways, of turning data into information and knowledge.

I followed the links.

Gobry wrote “Countless academic disciplines have been wrecked by professors’ urges to look ‘more scientific’ by, like a cargo cult, adopting the externals of Baconian science (math, impenetrable jargon, peer-reviewed journals) without the substance and hoping it will produce better knowledge.” Bacon didn’t do math. Bacon’s prose was quite the opposite of jargon. Gobry should be pleased to write essays as stylish yet accessible as Bacon’s! Peer-reviewed journals in the only likely sense meant came long after Bacon. Everybody makes mistakes but misrepresenting something for its opposite is symptomatic of profound mental incompetence. I’m faintly surprised he can boot up his computer.

Smith doesn’t write anything so flagrantly foolish. His discussion of history omits any discussion of how documents and testimony are analyzed, or how historical facts are generalized into narrative. His second “empirics” cites statistical analysis without discussing the epistemic status and function of mathematics in the natural or social sciences. His comments on experiment fail to note the crucial role of scientific instruments. His notion of “natural experiments” as midway between empirics and experiment makes no sense to me. I don’t think you really derive much statistics in those cases, and it’s just history. His discussion of theory doesn’t say anything specific about generalizations nor about simulations. The collective nature of science is unremarked.

Hume was the great Tory historian, which I daresay is an aspect that Hume proponents overlook.

Hume a Tory historian? That’s a new one on me.

Also, Gobry gives zero fucks about science as such (and his understanding of it is at such a primitive level as to render engagement with it unnecessary). He only cares about making sure big bad Neil DeGrasse Tyson doesn’t horn in on Catholicism or whatever.

Hume was the great Tory historian, which I daresay is an aspect that Hume proponents overlook.

What do you think is the significance of this? In my limited exposure to Hume I don’t at all feel a strong pull of class interest.

In my model of the universe we have the self at the center surrounded by a vast expanse of “non-self” with a blurry zone of humanity & ambiguity in between. Observation (science!) of the natural world excluding humanity is relatively straightforward. But the closer our observations get to ‘ourselves’–and that includes humanity–the greater the distortion due to self-interest (desire.) So, social sciences like economics will always be tainted by self-interest, but that’s no reason not to keep working at it.

So, stereotypically, science is the observation of things ‘out there’ and spirituality is the observation of things ‘in here’ and the goal in both cases is to try to distinguish between that which is seen vs that which is wanted or desired.

tomsk @ 37: Do economists wear lab coats?

Apparently, they do, in a manner of speaking, from the evidence offered by TheF79 @ 40. Their donning of lab coats is called “econometrics” and involves much highly-stylized mucking about. (And, yes, I did click thru to skim the Angrist & Pischke article; and for what it is worth, I was once a student of Edward Leamer.)

in other words, your experiment might find a causal mechanism that always works in the lab, but is just not that important in the real world.

Fwiw. This happens regularly in software development, where the peculiarities of one environment will cause problems of one sort and another not seen in another environment. For instance, transient memory leaks.

The confidence of Enlightenment science (and of popular scientism — both of which need to be distinguished from science as currently practised) flows in part from the belief that induction can be bullet-proof: if you collect enough data, you can arrive effortlessly (and infallibly) at general principles. Et voilà, the world’s your oyster.

Hume put paid to that, of course, and with it threatened to scuttle Enlightenment experimentalism. Karl Popper, taking Hume’s argument, was able to rescue induction, but, as I read it, at the price of its once boundless confidence to know (and to control) the world. Not that anybody paid much mind, power being its own justification.

@51
blech. Should read “Popper…was able to rescue experimentalism”, not “rescue induction”.

Jerry Vinokurov 10.15.14 at 4:02 pm
“You can’t run experiments with a different sun, but you can observe lots of solar systems. Surprise, they behave just like GR predicts they’d behave. ”

Which is observational.

There’s not a really important substantive difference between “observation” and “experiment.”

The whole thing about “controlled experiment” is just about knowing what can be folded into some sort of ceteris paribus condition or abstracted away. It’s just that when you control something in a lab, you can often engineer an explicit situation in which external variables are “controlled for.” This is of course very nice when possible, but obviously not the only correct way to do things. How this bears on economics’ status as a science is a somewhat separate question, but it’s not one that Gobry is properly equipped to tackle with his extremely limited view of science.

#11 dsquared

Since there is obviously no such thing as a controlled experiment in astronomy, this definition of “science” would suggest that Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus were not scientists and I think that’s a bit daft.

I think you’ve established that the central thing here is not controlled experiments — though they are often important.

Put it this way — there’s an important difference between astrology and astronomy, and there’s an important difference between alchemy and chemistry.

Which side is economics on? Is economics more like astrology or more like astronomy?

I think it’s on both sides, but on the whole, on average, more like astrology.

Part of the difference is that anybody who wants to can do astrology, but astronomers insist it has nothing to do wit them. But we have a bunch of economists including particularly a lot of teachers who do nothing but astrology and I don’t hear any generally-accepted claim that it isn’t economics.

In all fairness, if our solar system had a dozen or more Jupiter-mass planets that interfered in a major way with other planets’ orbits, and if our sun was deep in the galactic core, close to hundreds of other stars that visibly affected each others’ orbits, astronomy might have spend considerably more time floundering about orbits. We lucked out that there were obvious regularities in the observable data that meant simple theories fit the imprecise observations, and then when the observations got more precise they revealed new regularities that new simple theories fit, so it was a sequence of successes building on successes.

Bloix @27: thank you for the Gould quote. Evolutionary biologists are often subjected to the claim that because they can’t do controlled experiments in labs (nonsense, they do so when it’s possible) evolution has no scientific basis.

Predicting the unknown from the known using a falsifiable hypothesis is science. Darwin predicted the existence of a moth with a 35mm long proboscis based on the flower characteristics of the orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale. Twenty-one years after Darwin’s death, the moth was discovered and confirmed as the orchid’s pollinator. No lab but still science.

All (well, most) of these different notions of ‘science’, conceived as this or that methodological approach, somehow strike me simultaneously as equally plausible and equally wrongheaded.

I find it far more interesting to think about the term ‘science’ sociologically – specifically, as a type of shibboleth demanded by certain gatekeepers prior to one’s admission into that cadre of the elect capable of producing ‘proper’ knowledge. One can only hope that their particular knowledge-community has taught them the right manners and pronunciations, but we all know of course that certain ideas are much easier expressed in one manner of speech than other. Rather than hearing the word ‘science’ as describing a discrete pattern of inquiry, it has always struck me as primarily concerned with patterns of inclusion/exclusion, and deployed as a weapon in the arena of knowledge production.

Those who look to economics for scientistic predictions are not doing so without encouragement from within economics. Essays on economic imperialism (Lazear, Casson and others) suggest without a hint of irony that economics rightly holds “imperial” sway over other social sciences because of its superior scientific qualities, while Friedman, in his essay on “Positive Economics” defends his positivistic claim on the grounds that “The ultimate goal of a positive science is to develop a theory or hypothesis that yields valid and meaningful predictions about phenomena not yet observed”–and economics, in his mind, is capable of doing that.

As to Hume, it is worth noting his juxtaposition of the moral and the natural philosopher in this passage. Though it is decades since I read it, I seem to remember Passmore arguing in Hume’s Intentions that in challenging causality, Hume sought to not so much to debase natural philosophy, as to elevate moral philosophy, by suggesting that both trod on uneasy ground, each subject as much to subjective passions as to objective reason, allowing us to pursue economics as a “science” if we choose, but rejecting any easy imperialism for either economics or the natural sciences.

Per Agog, above, it wouldn’t be surprising to sense antecedents to Kant in this, for it is of course DH who with this argument awoke IK from his “dogmatic slumber”

As a couple of people pointed out, Hume’s remarks on history echo the line, attributed to Thucydides by Dionysus of Halicarnassus, that history is philosophy teaching by example. Thing is, this take on history was so traditional in Hume’s time, I wonder if anybody would have thought the ideas expressed in the paragraph were particularly Humean. Since the sentiments expressed aren’t part of our common sense, they make a more striking impression on us than than they would have on Hume’s contemporaries. What we have here is the situation explored in Borges’ famous story about rewriting Don Quixote.

About Hume as a Tory: Hume claimed that he was criticized because (quoting from memory) “I dared to shed a tear for king Charles.”

My head hurts. Gorby and Noah Smith both specialize in the field of misunderstanding things that most people don’t know are things in the first place.

What is it with Smith who has written several posts on how great “empirics” are, when that’s not even a word, let alone an obvious feature of economics as discussed in everything he blogs about when not writing vaguely about “empirics”?

Is economics a science or is it a technology used to design systems of prediction.
Economists look at exchanges and interactions between entities and design systems to explain those interactions and perhaps predict future interactions. Essentially though those explanations and predictions are really suggestions on how to manipulate those exchanges in order to achieve some goal.
While most economists would say that they start with a neutral slate and a purpose of observing and explaining it seems that most economist start with some fundamental values, judgments, ideas about equity and justice. Are they really explaining how markets work or are they offering models and systems that seek to organize markets to work in some way that reflect a set of preferences on systems of equity and justice.
That seems less a science of observation, explanation,and prediction than a tool or technology designed to promote an outcome. Economics can never escape politics or systems of governance because markets are constructions arising from sets of rules prescribed by society and societal institutions.
Economists may seek the mantle of science rather than the technology of systems design because science implies a search for truth whereas technologies of systems often require a certain type of political advocacy.

Johnson’s religious beliefs underlay all his opinions, so it is not surprising he didn’t like Hume, an atheist. I had forgotten that he didn’t like Burke, but it stands to reason also, since Burke supported the American Revolution and Johnson did not.

As for his politics, he famously remarked that “, “a wise Tory and a wise Whig, I believe, will agree. Their principles are the same, though their modes of thinking are different.” More here http://www.samueljohnson.com/jpolitics.html

Belated responses to Thucydides-related points above…

@Anderson #23 and @Jim Harrison #69: actually the line is attributed to Thucydides by an anonymous, late text that gets attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus; no evidence whatsoever that it tells us anything about Thucydides himself thought, but it’s possible to read it as a response by a fan of his to Aristotle’s notorious put-down of historiography as (unlike philosophy) telling us only about individuals and their individual deeds.

I would argue, however, that Hume is definitely not arguing in this tradition of exemplary history (which was, as Jim observes, very well established as the default for the humanists). Rather, the mid-C18 is precisely when a new awareness of historical difference is emerging, so exemplarity no longer works because the past is nothing like the present, so instead you switch into the claim that there are universal principles or attributes that can be discerned even in this past.

@ZM #24: yes, there’s a long tradition of presenting the development of historiography in terms of Herodotus v. Thucydides – Thucydides is generally seen as the victor, at least until the mid-C20, but the terms in which the conflict is presented change over time. It can be universalising v. cultural difference (which is how Marshall Sahlins takes it in ‘Apologies to Thucydides’ – but still ends up championing Thucydides, oddly enough); more commonly it’s critical analysis and scepticism v. any old story about flying snakes. Really it depends on what you think history should be, so you then pick the intellectual ancestor that suits you and write the history as a teleological progression from that point – or, in the case of some C19 accounts, you see Thucydides as a modern before modernity whose genius was completely unrecognised until von Ranke et al invented Geschichte als Wissenschaft and recognised him as their peer and inspiration.

@jkay #74: well, that’s the conventional account; most of those statements, apart from the exile, have been disputed…

I have a favourite example of the problems of defining a scientific method. In the third century, Claudius Ptolemaeus wrote the definitive smackdown of heliocentrism. He said, basically, if the Earth was actually spinning fast enough to cause day and night with its rotation, it would have to be spinning at thousands of miles per hour in the vicinity of Egypt (where he lived). Now, go outside and throw something into the air. Watch how it doesn’t whoosh away at thousands of miles per hour. Ergo, the Earth cannot possibly be spinning, or at least that cannot be the cause of the apparent movement of the sun, moon and stars.

Ptolemaeus was using advanced math, he was a very learned, thinking man with an open mind to the possibilities of the world, and made an argument that passes every test of scientific methodology I am aware of. And he still managed to reject an absolutely true theory about the universe in a fashion so definitive it was more than 1000 years before anyone seriously contested his claim. Smith is right about “omitted variables” posing a problem for empiricism – and you don’t need statistics or complex math to make that point, you just have to understand why Ptolemaeus was wrong despite doing impeccably empirical, rational, modern science.

Gobry is wrong: Controlled experimentation has nothing to do with many branches of science. Consider astronomy. Smith is wrong too: Repeated observation of unelicited events plays very little role in many modern sciences and is positively misinformative in areas as fundamentally important as medicine. And the discovery that the Earth turns, and Ptolemaeus was wrong, did not involve a single controlled experiment whatsoever. Nor did it involve using many observations to devise better predictive models. Copernicus’ actual figures were worse than the state-of-the-art geocentric model at the time. His main line of argument was that he could explain the retrograde motions of the planets in a more intuitive way.

And as for Hume… if he’s right, where is my Asimovian psychohistory? He is proposing that man is always the same, and by observing his behaviour under varying circumstances we can make a predictive science of his behaviour. Contrast this with Marx, for whom man is the constant who is constrained in his behaviour by his varying circumstances, so we can make a predictive science of history by ignoring the individual almost entirely. Both assumed a largely constant man and a constantly changing world, and the sciences they both believed in don’t exist. So somewhere, something is wrong with their postulates.

It’s not clear to me that science is anything other “math and lab coats” and arguing and the systematic replacement of each generation of scientists by their grad students who can choose to agree with them or not depending on how convincing their arguments are. And honestly, I’m not convinced the math is really required.

If we first construct a theory about what we are going to observe, as it seems we must in order to observe anything coherently, then in a sense every observation is an experiment; the difference between a formal experiment and an ordinary observation is in the degree of our participation, and the line drawn between them somewhat arbitrary.

“If we first construct a theory about what we are going to observe”

Agreeing with gianni, 65 here: it’s not enough to have a theory and observe or experiment; your theory has to be approved by the authorities, otherwise you are a crackpot, not scientist.

@stevenjohnson,

It is very possible that the majority of working scientists, whatever they may do in their own field of research, formally adhere to the notion that science does not describe reality, which can only be experienced, not questioned nor explained. They merely correlate instrumental data.

I can only speak of the scientists I know personally, but none of them adhere to this view. Of course, it’s widely acknowledged that some models get closer to reality than others, but I haven’t met anyone who didn’t think they were trying to get at the underlying truth rather than “correlate instrumental data.” Most scientists that I know are “naive” realists, and a good thing it is too. The use of the word “outmoded” to describe that position is, in my view, unwarranted.

Steve Johnson @ 82: I think science is the body of knowledge about reality attained by systematic study, which means correction of individual errors and generalizations from experience and corrections of generalization from further experience.

I think this is wrong. When philosophers of science talk about science as an error-correcting enterprise, they don’t mean that science goes out into the real world and corrects ordinary people’s errors. They mean that science is a way of getting better knowledge through correcting previous knowledge (sometimes previous science, sometimes previous earlier knowledge). Civil engineers and inventors, like those mentioned above, don’t go on their merry blundering way, occasionally corrected by science. That’s absurd. Civil engineers and inventors study and apply science itself. Science isn’t optometry, correcting individual errors, or psychoanalysis (unless they’re actually optics or psychoanalysis). There’s no “science” that looks at individuals’ errors and figures out what’s wrong with them so they can be corrected by science.

At least, this way of putting it seems to be likely to confuse.

(Crossposted, posting anyway)

If you want to do science you probably want results that will generalize. Otherwise what’s the point? You might as well study history and speculate about the causes of some revolution or another.

One PhD thesis got a stir in the popular media because he did electron microscopy and photographed one single sand grain from all directions. The laymen seemed to think this was worthless, but some scientists thought it would be good for something. I tend to think his methodology might be useful but the data about his sand grain not so much, until somebody gets at least two more sand grains from the same beach and maybe three from another beach.

So you want to be able to abstract out stuff that’s repeatable from your observations.

When I’ve seen science that worked, it started out with observations and ideas about the observations, and then maybe rough experiments that showed something, and then maybe more focused experiments that got precise results given the background of knowledge.

Like, I spent 3 months in a biochemistry lab. They were looking at a membrane enzyme found in hog liver. The enzyme degraded pretty fast, but they had a crude test of its function. They took an unpurified slurry of ground up hog liver and added a radioactive sample of the protein’s known reactant. After a time, they added a solvent and shook it up a lot, then they centrifuged it and got 3 phases — sediment, water, and solvent. They measured how much radioactivity there was in the solvent versus the water, to get a sense how much active enzyme there was. And they added various things that might keep the enzyme from degrading. It turned out that glutathione worked well, so they tried adding a lot of glutathione to the hog liver before they ground it up. Suddenly they had thousands as much enzyme activity, and it was much easier to study. The crude test was perfectly adequate to get that result.

I spent 6 months in a lab that studied yeast. They had a grant to study a cancer drug. It was a carcinogenic cancer drug, it intercalated in DNA some. The yeast very often had mitochondrial mutants that could not use oxygen and so grew slowly. They had found that when they suspended yeast in distilled water that contained high concentrations of the drug, the surviving yeast were 50 times as likely to have those mutations. Since it was easier to study DNA damage in yeast, they then got the grant.

But it turned out that the drug did not create lots of mitochondrial mutants. What happened was that the mutants were much more resistant to being killed by the drug. Once they found that, they grew lots of yeast and made flasks of partly-purified yeast mitochondria. They added the drug to them, and did chromatography to find a variety of new fluorescent compounds that weren’t in the mitochondria or the drug beforehand. Functioning mitochondria changed the drug into something even more toxic.

Simple qualitative studies that had lots of room for error, gave results that might potentially be useful for medicine. The big problem with the drug for treating cancer wasn’t that it made a few mutations, but that cells that metabolized fast used it to kill themselves. That’s why it was so bad for heart muscle and immune-system cells. I never heard that they actually found a way to make the drug more useful, but at least they started looking at the real problem.

Scientists start with simple models and simple vague realities, and they ring complications on them once they have simple models that they don’t just reject. It’s hard to draw the line between vague observation and real science, because it isn’t anything like a firm line.

I think what ought to make it science, is that you look for ways to test your ideas in case they’re wrong. Looking for tests to make it wrong is central, and that’s hard to do in practice. I again want to recommend the game Eleusis which demonstrates this and provides concentrated practice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_%28card_game%29

So, what’s your second favourite Hume quote?

Jerry:

“Imagine that I concede your point about astronomy being “observational” rather than “experimental.” What then? Are you all of a sudden going to change your mind about the validity of general relativity or the theory of inflation? I suspect not, so why does it matter so much which word you use?”

You seem to have some odd idea, that I believe that ‘non-experimental’ means ‘non-scientific’ or ‘invalid’, or something like that. Since I’ve been arguing against that, I’m not sure where you got that idea.

“I suspect not, so why does it matter so much which word you use?”

Because ‘experimental’ and ‘observational’ are not the same thing. Note that we have different words for that, even in technical fields.

Barry: what are you arguing? Can you boil it down? Is it that “experiment” and “observation” are two different words/ideas both encompassed within “scientific study”? Is it about some kind of difference between “active” and “passive” science?

“the inadequacy of the antirealist, predictivist notions of science.”

“I feign no hypotheses”
– Isaac Newton

@Neville Morely #77.

“the mid-C18 is precisely when a new awareness of historical difference is emerging, so exemplarity no longer works because the past is nothing like the present, so instead you switch into the claim that there are universal principles or attributes that can be discerned even in this past.”

I have a bit of a problem seeing that the assertion that there are universal principles of history is a fundamental challenge to exemplarity. I appreciate that the then prevailing taste preferred principles to cases—it was the Golden Age of capitalized abstractions—but the past remains perfectly legible to a historian like Hume. Forty years ago, I actually read his History of England and don’t recall him making any special effort to recreate the world view of the Anglo-Saxon kings. The past portrayed in those interminable volumes is very like the present since the squabbling princes and barons display the same emotions and confront the same political difficulties reign after reign—that’s what makes ’em interminable, though Hume’s amazingly polished style eases the reader’s journey through more than a thousand years of one damned thing after another. Circumstances change, obviously, but Man does not. Which is why it continues to be possible to learn lessons from the historical record, albeit with the help of theory of human nature to guard against a too literal application of old cases to new situations.

Hume seems very far away from 19th Century historicism in all this. What am I missing?

Jerry Vinokurov@88
I got the impression that Bayesian inference was committed to subjective probability from Nate Silver and Lubos Motl. Too small a sample, my fault.

I am much reassured that physicists and other working scientists aren’t still tangled up in Humean skepticism. Thanks for the happy thoughts.

bianca steele @87

No, sorry, I really do think the corrected information is the science. I know that science then blends in principle with activities performed by everyday people. But that’s the way it was historically. Today professional scientists compare to ordinary people as NBA players compare to an after work pickup game, so there’ll be no problem distinguishing the scientists. Science as a body of knowledge is obviously used by all sorts of people, engineers and inventors included. The kind of error correction I had in mind were errors in describing reality, such as counting forty eight chromosomes in human beings.
And I’m afraid I still think that trying to define science as a method has produced more confusion than enlightenment.

An interview with a scientist publishing a retraction of his results.

http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/As+It+Happens/ID/2555667461/

I’m not sure I understand the observation/experiment cleavage here.

Generally science is about observing things in the attempt to accurately describe how things work. Experiments are a subset of observations. They are observations where you attempt to limit the inputs so you can prove a theory about why the things you have (hopefully) accurately described act the way they do. Experiments aren’t necessary for science (see astronomy) but they make it easier to isolate things.

The key to science is accurate predictions based either on observed correlations, or later on theories about how things work. Economics (macro) invokes a lot of the jargon of science, but I’m not sure it really is science at least at this point. All of the social ‘sciences’ have the problem that humans have lots of variables that are hard to sort out and isolate. Economics has additional problems because it has to deal with abstract things like ‘money’ that are also changed by out of control human variables.

But macro economics seems to currently lack anything like good predictions. It seems to be a few steps above rain dancers–if you dance long enough the rain eventually comes. But that doesn’t mean you predicted it or caused it in any useful way. All the conflicting opinions on Japan, the EU, the USA and China suggest that macro economics just isn’t there yet.

Also, too: astronomy considered as the old-fashioned business of charting the cosmos might well be primarily “observational” as opposed to “experimental” (not so much, really, when you consider the technological sophistication of some of the instrumentation involved). But that’s a small part of the role of astronomical observation nowadays.

The main business is astro-physics, not “astronomy” per se. The comparison of esperimental results from particle physics with the observation and analysis of cosmological phenomena is as “experimental” as you can get.

Astronomy and particle physics also meet at the LHC.

And kudos to JV for consistently making the most sense in this thread (IMNSHO : ) ).

#98 JV

Internal validity is not a term I’ve encountered in physics; it appears to be a term of art in the social sciences.

It’s about a lot of ways you can fool yourself, and how to avoid them.

Like, I talked to a woman who was doing molecular biology, who hated to work with abstract theory. She wanted to actually see the truth. So she went into electron microscopy. Under some circumstances she could see the paths that DNA was laid out in, and study how it folded back on itself. But she found that when she looked at many thousands of examples, she could find anything she looked for. Interpreting pictures of DNA is sometimes tricky. So she found herself doing complicated statistics. She would look for the pictures she would expect to get from two competing theories, and count them, and she worried that the abstract statistical theory she depended on might somehow fail her.

Physicists mostly don’t have that problem. Their computerized machinery can run through billions of examples easily. And the number of possible outcomes is strictly limited. So for example running the LHC involved throwing away billions of samples that could be assumed uninteresting, and looking only at the ones that might represent a Higgs particle. The standard model had predicted everything that could happen and everything that could not happen. The Higgs particle could not happen, so if it was observed more often than statistical chance would predict that false observations would happen, then it was real. It was the only anomaly that was worth looking for, so any other anomalies could be discarded as uninteresting. Anyway there was no reason to expect any other anomalies. The theory that predicted how many false positives to expect could not be wrong because the situation was so simple that there was no room for error. Even though it was new equipment running in an unprecedented energy range, there could not be calibration errors. The predicted false-positive rate could not possibly be so far off as to get the observed rate.

Physics simply has fewer unknowns and far more precise measurements, to the point that there is simply no room to fool yourself, and you never have to worry about that sort of thing.

Most other sciences deal with more complicated topics, correspondingly more complicated theories, and more difficult measurements. So it’s easy for bias to creep in to them, which is of course impossible in physics.

. . . bias . . . which is of course impossible in physics.

LOL

Perhaps since no one agrees on what is science and what is not science the term science is rather useless. I am not sure why there was such a vogue for using this very undefined term, especially by people in disciplines where they are meant to come up with great elaborate categories of things. You would think such people could categorise what science is , and what is not science easily enough, since they do it with elements and animals and plants etc continually – but they have not.

Therefore I suggest it is best to give away altogether this vogue for calling things science (likely just to lend an air of authority since no one can define science properly) – and go back to natural philosophy, natural history, and experimental philosophy and so on, which are much firmer categories than the word science is.

Therefore I suggest it is best to give away altogether this vogue for calling things science (likely just to lend an air of authority since no one can define science properly) – and go back to natural philosophy, natural history, and experimental philosophy and so on, which are much firmer categories than the word science is. –ZM @113

That’s fine, but then you wind up undermining modernity’s faith in itself that it really was on to something historically unique. Capital S science was supposed to be the path that would lead us forevermore out of the land of superstition, dumb tradition, and mere belief.

I do think it a bit odd that this conversation took so long to get from “observation” to measurement. And, it also seems — though perhaps I’m wrong about this — that there’s a reluctance to place theory at the center of science. –BW@112

You’re probably got something here, especially if you replace the word *theory* with with another word that better describes what the reluctance is really about: metaphysics. To speak of the metaphysics at the beating heart of all scientific production is to speak of that which cannot be spoken of.

phenomenal cat,

“That’s fine, but then you wind up undermining modernity’s faith in itself that it really was on to something historically unique. Capital S science was supposed to be the path that would lead us forevermore out of the land of superstition, dumb tradition, and mere belief.”

You say that like modernism is still our period. Post-modernism started before I was born – so modernism is just a past era like the Renaissance now.

I always wondered what made us post-modern. Some said ‘the literature is so reflexive’ this is not correct, lots of literature is not reflexive and Shakespeare and Jane Austen and others were reflexive ages before post-modern reflexive writers.

Others said – ‘we don’t believe in grand narratives’. So I think back – and I don’t find any grand narratives in king Lear or the Canterbury tales either. Moderns were just very easily taken in I feel by the people who made up grand narratives. It is quite funny that they were taken in in this fashion out of their need to feel superior to past people or other cultures . I am sure there must be a saying that epitomizes this sort of gulliblility based or wanting to feel superior, but I can’t think of one.

ZM,

I hear what you’re saying, but POMO is a non sequitur in this context. It’s a term that comes out of art history departments in the 60’s, gets picked up by architecture departments in the 70’s, moves into lit. departments in the 80’s and achieves mass consciousness in the 90’s.

The topic under consideration is science and you better believe the issue of a “grand narrative” is a live one here; else how do you explain the inability of all these very intelligent people (on this blog and over the last 4 centuries) to reach a real consensus on what science is and how to do it?

temp @116

Quantum Bayesianism seems to connect antirealism and subjective probability and Bayes. But as you say probably due to the availability of the internet and the unavailability of scientific journals.

L.M. Dorsey @118

Predictivism, not predictability, the notion that science is making a prediction, then carrying out an experiment to falsify the prediction. It’s not even science if you can’t make a prediction then carry out the experiment. And yes, Popper had trouble with declaring Darwin to be scientific. But it’s always nice to find an admirer of Popper. Perhaps a quote from The Open Society and its Enemies? To really understand a writer, I always find it specially helpful to look at their first book.

@122 “I’ll give you an analogy: Europe’s best minds spent no less than 10 centuries trying to nail down the basic mechanics of just how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost fit together and what the hell that meant to the average schmuck on the street.”

No, they didn’t. They figured it all out in 325 AD and have not changed it since. That’s why it is called dogma, not science.

Isn’t the problem when people talk about science, that they want it to be a thing, but in fact it is a process. Science never “arrives”, but it “travels”. That is where the Chicago School went wrong, they think they “know” things.

A jeremiad against science by P E Gobry? No thank you very much. I’m flummoxed here. Bewildered and perplexed. What kind of stage in human development are we living through ?

JV, tou description is rather wrong on the LHC:

1). There were major statistical problems precisely because a vast amount of data was collected.

2). Running new instruments at new energy levels is not simple, and it’s likely that problems will arise. And when collecting billions of data points, looking for a few anomalies, very rare misbehavior is a major problem. Do you not remember the FTL neutrino?

Scott: “Gobry is wrong: Controlled experimentation has nothing to do with many branches of science. Consider astronomy. Smith is wrong too: Repeated observation of unelicited events plays very little role in many modern sciences and is positively misinformative in areas as fundamentally important as medicine. And the discovery that the Earth turns, and Ptolemaeus was wrong, did not involve a single controlled experiment whatsoever. Nor did it involve using many observations to devise better predictive models. Copernicus’ actual figures were worse than the state-of-the-art geocentric model at the time. His main line of argument was that he could explain the retrograde motions of the planets in a more intuitive way.”

As Temporary Name pointed out, this is simply not true. Now, it’s because you can’t get controlled experiments in many situations, but that’s what life – and science – has to deal with.

BTW, go ask experts about how many times controlled experiments have been misleading. That’s why the term ‘external validity’ was coined.

A science allows one to make accurate predictions, where it is unambiguous today as to what counts as validation of the prediction. This is a necessary condition, though it is not sufficient. Much of economics fails this condition, so it is not a science.

Jerry: “I don’t believe I ever mentioned the LHC? I think you’re responding to J Thomas.”

Yes, I typoed. Sorry.

BTW, ‘internal validity’ is what physicists do when they conduct runs of an experiment under different conditions, seeking to measure (and ideally control) factors which might make their results inconclusive. For example, calibrating instruments to give the same results (or have known adjustment factors) at different temperatures and over time.

#128 Barry

JV, tou description is rather wrong on the LHC:

I think you’re responding to me.

1). There were major statistical problems precisely because a vast amount of data was collected.

OK, maybe physicists do need to consider the various ways they can accidentally bias their results.

2). Running new instruments at new energy levels is not simple, and it’s likely that problems will arise. And when collecting billions of data points, looking for a few anomalies, very rare misbehavior is a major problem.

Yes, that certainly makes sense. I am not a physicist so all I have seen is from the popular media and science blogs etc. They tend to say the Higgs boson is definitely real, there are no other anomalies because after all the Standard Model is right apart from not predicting the Higgs Boson, if there were any anomalies it would be big news. And if there were any they would have been found by now. The sort of comments that spectators make. I’m sure the actual physicists do better.

Do you not remember the FTL neutrino?

Yes. They got a result that did not fit theory, so there was a tremendous effort to find their mistake. Eventually something was discovered which could have explained it, so then everybody quit.

Of course it deserved that level of effort because it would be so important if it was true. But something about the process would worry me if it was, say, economists doing it. Like, say a whole school of economics got upset about Piketty, and they looked hard for flaws in his work, and each time they thought they found a flaw they got excited but then it turned out not to be sufficient but finally they found one they could point to, to say he was wrong. And then they all relaxed. It would leave me wondering if they were biased. But luckily physics has only one school, the correct one, so that isn’t an issue.

reason @ 125

I think the problem is that science is, at its core, successful guessing. People, who want to explain the success, are reticent about the true prerequisite, which is curiosity. Most humans are believers and are impressed by the promise of successful, hence powerful belief — they want science to vindicate explanatory belief with proofs — hence the emphasis placed on Popper’s predictions as tests of theory.

It is much harder to get at the difficult balance of understanding and puzzlement, which is science in motion, even for many would-be scientists, who long for fame as the discoverers of some nameable truth.

I thought what Brett Bellmore said about science being hard, because it required letting the evidence speak, and what Anarcissie said in reply about science as a social activity, were very smart.

People, especially people in social groups, want to know things, to share a positive doctrine and purpose, to have answers, to share a faith. Economics isn’t a science, because economists are too busy being civic priests and augurs, legitimizing the political order, to be curious about how the actual economy works or to notice its salient features. It isn’t that economists are prevented from doing controlled experiments — they can, just as they can walk thru a supermarket with their eyes open, but won’t.

It is hard to trade a theoretical doctrine for a theory of puzzles. And, hard to keep a theory of questions from ossifying into a system of answers.

People had invented the social roles of the knowledgeable authority, the wizard, priest or physician, long before there was much of genuine knowledge for them to know. Kepler’s day job was as a court astrologer, and he struggled to accept the observable reality that that the motion of the planets described elliptical orbits, because it violated his neo-platonist prejudices. Jenner struggled for years to elevate the folk knowledge that infection with cowpox conferred immunity to smallpox, and marry it to the semi-accepted practice of prophylactic inoculation with smallpox, to create vaccination. He had to overcome both the social resistance in the hierarchy of medical science, and his own propensity to get distracted with spurious notions, like a supposed relation with horse pox.

People want science to be identical with propositions of sure knowledge, when it would be accurate to identify it with puzzlement, which often requires shedding the notion one already knows the answer, an answer approved by a high-status social group. Academic science makes its own use of social processes, with sometimes mixed results.

Trader Joe:

“While this profession seems to employ virtually all of the skills the collective wisdom here has applied to “science” and “scientists” (i.e. observation, controlled and external experimentation, data collection, modeling) I doubt anyone, themselves included, would label their work as science nor them as scientists.”

Read ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’.

@140 Barry

I’ve actually always meant to read that book and have never quite gotten it to the top of my reading list…thanks for the additional push to do so.

Scott Martens @79

Nor did it involve using many observations to devise better predictive models. Copernicus’ actual figures were worse than the state-of-the-art geocentric model at the time.

To amplify what Thornton Hall said:

The acceptance of the heliocentric model did involve using a great many observations to test the predictions of different theories. These included, among other things, the careful, higher-precision observations of Tycho Brahe and his assistants, the observations of the phases of Venus by Galileo (and the moons of Jupiter, which demonstrated that at least some celestial objects did not orbit the Earth directly), and the observations of the position of the Sun over time made using projection devices built into 17th Century Italian churches (see Heilbron’s The Sun in the Church). And, of course, Kepler used the observations of Brahe to devise a better predictive model in the form of elliptical orbits and what are now called Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion. The fact that Kepler’s modification of Copernicus’ model significantly outperformed both Copernicus and Ptolemy in terms of observations matching its prediction was actually pretty important.

No, they didn’t. They figured it all out in 325 AD and have not changed it since. That’s why it is called dogma, not science. –Harold@123

Oh, really? Did you ever hear of a guy named Luther? Or, you know, the whole of medieval scholastic philosophy? What was it that Descartes was writing against and seeking to overcome with his demonstration of *method*?

ZM@124 Disreputable people, huh? Like whom, for example? I don’t know, I’m kinda stumped as to who these people of ill-repute would be. Anyway, it’s hardly a matter of one hero knowing everything and committing to the herculean task of citing ALL their SOURCES. These narratives are produced socially over very long periods of time by lots of people.

And if science is just knowledge then we can all pack it in and go home. There’s certainly nothing more to talk about. Science is the same as what some indigene in the bush does and knows–is that right? That’s definitely an interesting question.

Anthropocene works as an epoch descriptor, I suppose; POMO not so much. Yes, the Greeks did some science-y stuff. In that way they were kind of modern, don’t you think?

Theology is the queen of the sciences.

They are arguing “from authority” (not observation) — notice all the books!

@152 to be fair to the philosophers, a fair number of them would agree that science is “what scientists do.”

More generally, the discussion here is not worthless philosophizing. For example, comments like the following are quite instructive:

“You don’t know about internal validity? Moron.”

Imagine if Jane Goodall or Charles Darwin concerned themselves with “internal validity”? Whatever it is, you won’t find it on an island or in the rainforest simply looking at things and writing down what you see.

Thornton Hall:

““You don’t know about internal validity? Moron.””

I’d appreciate it if you’d not put words in my mouth.

I’d also appreciate if you actually read the thread, and see what I ended up saying to Jerry.

Barry @ 155:
Thornton Hall was overdoing it, but you certainly seemd to be implying that Jerry was an ignoramus for not knowing the term “internal validity.”

I’d agree with Jerry that “internal validity” is not a term of art in (at least some of) the physical sciences, though some of the individual concepts are certainly known. The references you provided are very much from a social sciences and psychology point of view (all but one of the references in the Wikipdia article are to social sciences or psychological texts).

From the point of view of astronomy, some of the concepts in the Wikipedia article are quite well-known and intensively discussed — e.g., selection bias, for which we have terms for specialized forms, like Malmquist bias and the Scott effect — while others — e.g., maturation, repeated testing, diffusion, compensatory rivalry — are completely irrelevant. (No matter how many times I observe a galaxy, it’s not going to know about it, and its properties aren’t going to change because of it.)

So when you say that “An experiment gives much more internal validity”, I get the impression this may be coming partly from ignorance of how observational sciences work (and what kind of problems they do and don’t have to deal with).

(Yes, I am placing a certain emphasis on observation vs experiment as a sometimes meaningful distinction, though fundamentally Jerry and I are in agreement.)

@158:

Well, yes, of course.

The question then might be: What is the utility of meta-physical/ epistemological/ even (perhaps, some kinds of) methodological considerations?

Not meaning to come off as smart-assy here. I am completely serious. I have very reluctantly come to conclude that most philosophical speculations/ analyses are pretty much epi-phenomenal.

That’s a philosophical positition, too, of course, fwiw.

And I love philosophy, having read voraciously since being captivated by Hume’s Enquiry at eighteen or thereabouts (sixty-three now) and then going on to Nietzsche and others (even spending a good deal of time in the garden of Walden II and its environs).

Philosophy, including philosophy of science, is very interesting.

Unfortunately, it might be that, for the most part, it is only interesting.

Phenominal cat #158 – typing as a chemistry graduate who got no training in philosophy of science or how and why you did experiments when at university, some training in metholodogy and philosophy of science would have been useful. Instead I had to learn it all afterwards, but since I haven’t had a career in scientific research you could say it’s been a bit of a waste. Certainly other scientifically educated people have agreed with me, a better knowledge of these issues would improve their scientific capabilities etc. Which of course is not an endorsement of the post-modern guff upthread.

@162 Ok… I guess… my reading of the links is that internal validity is a quality that only applies to experiments. Saying that experiments have more internal validity than observations seems to be like saying that baseball players have higher batting averages than basketball players.

The reason I think it is an interesting comment in the first place, is that what makes economists so dangerous is not that they are ignorant about how humans behave in the market (and they are) but that they think they know something about other subjects, when they don’t. Apropos of the OP, Noah Smith does this all the time. He expounds on the morality of the Spanish Empire without the slightest bit of knowledge of the role Jesuits played fighting for the interests of indigenous peoples. He calls an Asian blogger important because:

America is in the middle of a huge, titanic, epochal change. It is changing from a nation of mostly white people (with a few black people) to a fully multiracial nation.

This is in the same post where he claims to like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog–which he obviously has never read. (The Confederacy was 40% African American, by the by.)

The confusion when a hard science person is ignorant of “internal validity” demonstrates a false confidence in one’s knowledge of how those sciences work, and is of the same kind that makes Smith’s blogging so infuriating.

Perhaps it is just different terms for the same thing? Perhaps Barry is not an economist?

In any case, it’s the prejudice against just watching how things work that I find interesting and think is very important. Another example is recent Krugman, claiming that every single causal claim in economics carries a model, whether implicit or explicit. So simply watching one market transaction cause an outcome and writing about it is sophistry, in his reading, because it’s hiding the model that is in the background.

Was I not an economic researcher in college when I noticed that my dorm with private bathrooms was much less friendly that older dorms where people had to share bathrooms? Did I need a model of markets to be able to claim a causal connection between more stuff and less well being? (This has recently been replicated: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/10/shared-bathroom-creates-college-friendships.html)

So any model has to deal with that observation, right? Or does my observation never get assumed away in the name of “internal validity” that requires experiments?

And yet, so much great science is built on just that: observations in search of a model. To me, it’s obvious that Piketty’s lasting influence will be the fact that he took the effort to compile so much data. The r and g nonsense should have been left in the original French, where I’m sure it makes sounds good over a cigarette and a cafe au lait. In English, like most economic theorizing, it just sounds like bullshit.

Noah Smith link: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/heroes-of-blogging.html

I think he was so wrong about Spain, he took this one down: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/before-nazis-there-were-spanish.html

Krugman on how the model with the right answers is the right model but you have to have a model to get the right answers (don’t you dare come in here without a model): http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/the-state-of-macro-six-years-later/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

@ZM #160: if you conceive of history as a unilinear succession of different, clearly defined periods, then clearly classical Greece was not the start of the Modern Era. But if you take a more cyclical view, then it’s possible to see classical Greece as a modern period, analogous to rather than identical with later European modernity. Periodisation isn’t objective; it’s a way of telling different stories about the past.

Um, by ‘grandma relative’ I meant to type ‘grand theory’…

#168 Peter Erwin

Single-blinding, in the form where some details of the subjects are hidden from the researchers, can certainly be done. If you’re worried that people on your research team might, e.g., unconsciously — or even consciously — bias their classifications of some objects or subsets of the data so as to support a hypothesis they favor, you can arrange it so they don’t know which subsample different objects belong to when they’re classifying them.

Sometimes you can do that, sometimes you can’t. It’s worth doing when you can.

It’s possible to bias your results by the application of your model. When it’s complicated, how you decide which complicated outcome belongs to which theoretical result, and what proportion of them has statistical meaning, can itself include as much bias as unconscious tendencies to put outcomes into the expected bins.

#164 Jerry Venokurov

I do understand it; it’s just that there’s more than one way to “control” for things. You can do so manually by limiting the values of some of your parameters, or you can do it statistically by filtering out subsets of your data.

Yes. And remember that recently climate deniers (including our own Brett Bellmore) argued that temperature readings were wrong because the researchers filtered some of the data? They claimed that the researchers intentionally removed data that proved there was no temperature change, and artificially made it look like temperatures were rising. The researchers should instead just use the raw data.

But no, wait, they thought the researchers should throw away the data that’s too close to cities because growing cities are growing heat islands that make it look like temperatures are rising when they aren’t. The raw data has to be filtered to remove bias.

The question whether we increase bias or reduce bias when we filter our data is not in general easy to answer. It depends on the model and the goals.

#163 Thornton Hall

Another example is recent Krugman, claiming that every single causal claim in economics carries a model, whether implicit or explicit. So simply watching one market transaction cause an outcome and writing about it is sophistry, in his reading, because it’s hiding the model that is in the background.

“One man’s experimental error is another’s Nobel prize.”
“Some things must be seen to be believed. Most things must be believed to be seen.”

Was I not an economic researcher in college when I noticed that my dorm with private bathrooms was much less friendly that older dorms where people had to share bathrooms?

Did you know that students were randomly assigned to dorms? It could have been that for one reason or another unfriendly people tended to be assigned to your dorm. When you connected the unfriendliness to the private bathrooms, you implicitly had a model. You could have looked at some other aspect of the architecture, or at the location, or whatever. There could be very good reasons you chose the one you did — I don’t claim it was arbitrary or unreasonable — my point is that it didn’t happen in a vacuum. You did have reasons which predisposed you to notice that one.

Anyway, I don’t think this distinction presents a terribly fruitful line of debate.

Amen to that.

Did you know that students were randomly assigned to dorms? It could have been that for one reason or another unfriendly people tended to be assigned to your dorm. When you connected the unfriendliness to the private bathrooms, you implicitly had a model. You could have looked at some other aspect of the architecture, or at the location, or whatever. There could be very good reasons you chose the one you did — I don’t claim it was arbitrary or unreasonable — my point is that it didn’t happen in a vacuum. You did have reasons which predisposed you to notice that one.

That counts as “dealing with Thornton”? Why and how?

My economic model was what? I have no idea what y0u mean!

Yes, I made the choice to believe that the causal factor was bathrooms when it could have been something else, but claiming that is a model is begging the question. You seem to be saying that a model is defined as “think that attributes causality”, which makes Krugman’s claim a mere tautology.

(By the by, I agree I am not arguing against what Krugman really strictly meant, which is to say I am choosing to not understand him.)
J

@stevenjohnson 121

Thank you for the clarification. Not “an admirer” tout court, but how can you not admirer a man who taught himself ancient Greek to read the fragments of Parmenides (the fragments of Parmenides) — tho the idea that ancient Greek (or any language) is susceptible to autodidacticism…

The quote is, I think, from Conjectures and Refutations. But I agree about first books, at least those of “thinkers”. As a philosophy instructor of mine once remarked, you have to keep a close eye on their opening gambits. It’s where the “slight adjustment” is made that pulls the world inside out.

@ZM #166: just to be clear, I’m not advocating a cyclical view of an ever-recurring modernity as a historical fact, but simply noting that one could represent global history in these terms – the successive rise and fall of civilisations, with each of them passing through a modern phase before starting to decline, and that various writers have made precisely this claim, including the idea that classical Greece experienced a form of modernity. Yes, periods are usually linear in Western chronologies, but not invariably; the main thing is that periods aren’t actually real, they’re just ways in which we imagine the past, and it’s always possible to do this differently.

Likewise, while I remain endlessly fascinated by Thucydides, I don’t myself think that he offers universals in the way he’s commonly assumed to, nor that Herodotus offers mere stories; my point was that this is how they are conventionally understood and represented.

J Thomas @ 178: Well, but what we talk about as scientific method is mostly about how we test hypotheses. There’s very little there about how we come up with hypotheses in the first place.

My little theme through this whole thread has been how weird I find it that the discussion, from the OP on, latched so determinedly on the observation and experiment, and seemed to neglect the theoretical. Because I would say that what distinguishes science from, say, folk wisdom, is that science does its best to move beyond finding correlations to developing an analysis that says something about what is not observed. It’s that guessing at an underlying mechanism that we call inference that puzzles the philosophers of science, but it is also that characteristic that distinguishes science from more casual ways of knowing things.

It may be that Thornton Hall noticed a correlation between the “friendliness” of dorms and how elaborate the dorm plumbing was. People have been noticing correlations for millenia. A lot of useful human knowledge over the centuries has come down to craft, based on noticing correlations and coincidence.

What may be said to distinguish science is systematically testing correlations and trying to find an analytic model that “explains” the correlations in a powerful way, a way that allows us to manipulate the world and gives us technology, allows us to teach each other that knowledge and leverage that knowledge to learn more.

Having a good theory prepares one to be curious. It’s a strong theory that allows one to develop hypotheses in a formal sense, but even more importantly, it is a strong theory that allows a scientist to figure out out to observe, measure and interpret the results. I’m not saying that a scientist cannot usefully observe and measure in advance of a strong theory; scientists have been systematically accumulating data, classifying things, and looking for measureable constants for centuries. Finding a system of biological classification that seemed to work was a huge advance, for which Carl Linnaeus is duly honored as a great scientist. That system and its apparent relationship to a tree of life tantalized scientists and sent some into rhetorical paeans to evolution. But, the truly great thing was Darwin finding an apparent mechanism, of descent, variation and natural selection. It was finding a theory, which allowed biologists to generate incredibly productive hypothesis, that allowed the discovery of ecological systems and dna and aided the understanding of natural history.

B.W. @179:

Ida thought you knew this. The problem is not observation vs. experimentation or induction vs. deduction. but the difficult problem of accounting for “abduction” (Peirce). What makes some set of concepts such that they are worthy of “empirical” testing, and how are such ideas generated. Of course, no set of concepts can be completely “operationalized” and completely verified via predictive criteria, else you end up with a Rube Goldberg apparatus. But just why do certain concept-sets emerge as worthy candidates for selection and rejection in empirical terms and others remain hopeless or errant. That’s why the philosophy of science tends to appeal to the history of science. And why the complex inferential structure that we refer to as “science” is rooted in a broader project of human understanding, orientation, and practice.

I want to once again suggest people play the game Eleusis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_%28card_game%29

A card game. Players take turns playing cards that either play or fail to play depending on a rule which depends on the cards which have played before. If the card plays, put it beside the previous last card that played. If it fails, put it below the previous card. So every player can see at a glance the entire previous history of the game. The dealer writes down the rule but does not show it to anybody. A player wins the game by correctly guessing the rule.

A rule of thumb is that rules should be set up so that about a quarter of the cards in the deck will play at any one time.

Here’s what I consistently see happen when people start playing the game. Say we start with a very simple rule. Spade Heart Club Diamond and repeat. After a lot of cards have failed to play, the cards that do play will be

AS 2H 3C 4D 5S

People think they know the rule. Part of what’s going on is that they don’t like to play cards that fail, so they choose the ones that are most likely to play. But eventually somebody makes a mistake.

AS 2H 3C 4D 5S 6H 7C 8D 10S

Then everybody gets upset. How can that play? It doesn’t fit the rule! But it does. People are likely to start thinking about more complicated rules.

AS 2H 3C 4D 5S 6H 7C 8D 10S JH KC 2D 3S

They might decide that it’s the first or second number that works. It takes awhile for them to get the point that they want to look for cards that won’t play. Somehow people think of cards that won’t play as failed experiments. But eventually they do get the rule.

Say the next game the rule is black follows red follows black and something about numbers. Not unlikely the beginning cards that play will be

AS 2H 3C 4D 5S

People get surprised and kind of upset to find that 6D plays.

This can be played as a game of perfect information. Everybody knows everything except the rule. And still people tend to guess rules that are far more restrictive than the real rule, and they tend to add complications to their guesses when they find errors.

When they only see part of the data, it’s even easier to assume that the rule is more restrictive than the real rule, and that apparent failures are because of the hidden data. They can predict what the hidden data has to be, to fit their guessed rule.

It’s a good game. It’s worth it to play this game long enough to get good at it. Play with a variety of people so you don’t fall too much into the same habits.

It’s unfortunately easy to make rules that nobody can guess. Occasionally players will feel like they’ve accomplished something by doing that, but it just makes the other players cranky.

The game is unrealistic in that the dealer tells players when their guessed rule is right. That’s part of what makes it a fun game instead of an unsolvable philosophical conundrum.

Some aspects of this discussion remind me of the cultural relevance debates that took place in American universities during the 60s and 70s. To the extent that you get only what you’re aiming at — never mind, for a moment those individual eureka moments that change the perception of the researcher — it doesn’t seem to me that asking scientists how, and with what intention they go about choosing the objects of their research should be looked upon as a form of lèse-majesté. When sociology and psychology wind up being wholly-owned subsidiaries of the internal security apparatus, and economics winds up being the staunchest defender of the status quo since the Roman Church, questions about their legitimacy as scientific disciplines more or less ask themselves. About physics, I haven’t a clue, but I do wonder why it is that we have H-bombs in our national arsenals, but not fusion power reactors in our backyards. Is it really only because an explosion is easier to conceive of and experimentally confirm than a controlled reaction, and must therefore logically precede the controlled reaction in the chain of research? I don’t know the answer, but I think that the question is entirely legitimate. If that leads to impertinent epistemological doodling in some quarters, why not just accept it as the cost of doing some very important business?

William Timberman @ 185

There’s a great scene in the recent film, Boyhood, where the ne’er-do-well father is having his son over for a sleepover and they’re talking late at night. The little boy wonders aloud if there’s really no magic in the world, no elves and such. The father, clearly in sorrowful pain at being present for this moment though he’s been absent for so much, rises to the occasion and says,

What if i tell you a story about how underneath the ocean there was this giant sea mammal that sang songs and it’s so big that it’s heart was the size of a car and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean, you’d think that’s pretty magical, right?

And, the son says, “so no elves?” And, the father says, right, no elves.

There’s a lot of ambivalence about science and its displacement of magic, a wish for science to be magical and meaningful, a nostalgia for a religious understanding of the world, and just a weariness with the deafening crescendo of scientific and technological advance.

A lot of people have a reduced form understanding of scientific method, where it is all just post hoc, propter hoc, searching for rules that fit the sequence of events, as in the card game J Thomas describes. There’s a whole pseudo-controversy underway, led by people, who think technological advance is slowing because we don’t have flying cars, while others wonder why the iPhone 6!?! isn’t cheaper already and whether robots are going to eat everyone’s jobs just after everyone dies of Ebola. Meanwhile, we cannot collectively come to grips with climate change and peak oil, because certain decline is so uncertain. What can you do?

john c. halasz @ 186

I love it.

It’s not just a matter of why we don’t have this instead of that, which in any case is a question with more relevance to applied science and engineering than to so-called pure science. The influence of funding, of whose dream, or rather whose carefully calibrated and therefore somehow mundane intention governs the process of research is relatively trivial, and therefore easy to see.

The Blackberry arguably arose out of a vision that judged corporate — i.e. hierarchical — control foremost among the needs which it might prove profitable to satisfy, The iPhone arose out of a different vision altogether, that of providing us as individuals with a tool to deepen our interactions with the world, and therefore increase our leverage over it. As it turned out, that vision proved equally profitable, so Steve Jobs is now no longer considered a hippy humanist, but a visionary fit to reside in the corporate pantheon one niche over from Bill Gates and the founders of RIM. A revealing story about complex motivation, this, but not exactly the story I was trying to tell.

We’re encouraged to believe that what motivates pure research is a kind of naive curiosity, even though we’re hip to the fact that motivating and governing are two different things, and freely accept as a limiting condition of modernity that an Oppenheimer without a Groves is simply not on. What do we make, though, of an Einstein who refused give up on his pursuit of a Unified Field Theory? The bit about God not playing dice with the universe tells us, if it tells us anything, that intention, much less a general curiosity and careful observation, were never the whole story about how science gets done. It also tells us that we should be a little more humble in our assumptions, and a little slower in coming to conclusions about something that has a habit of turning itself inside out just as we thought we had it figured out.

Thanks, BW. I too collect apocalypsos (as a sort of nervous habit, rather than a full-blown hobby) but never thought to look in the Druidic liturgy. I should get out into the (full) moonlight more often, I guess.

“He clearly expects that secular rationalism will age into corruption and meaninglessness as surely as a boy entering manhood transitions imperceptibly but with tragi-comic inevitability from exuberant growth to terminal decay.”

Yes. Toynbee’s view, while not exactly au courant, has a lot going for it. His rep died the death of a thousand cuts from critics picking mostly on his many imprecisions, and from a general turn away from the idea that you can derive regularized rules or laws of history.

I am with Neville Morley on this one. The Hellenistic Period, coincident with the ascendancy of the Alexandrine dynasties, can certainly be seen as a late, “modern” (postmodern, even?!) stage of Greek culture.

Obvious parallels to our own time. Are we living in the end stages of a latter-day “hellenistic” era?

So, the birth, maturation, life, senility, and decay of organism-like entities—with more-or-less discrete identities in space and time—is a silly idea?

Got it.

I have a pretty good idea of what is silly.

William Berry,

“So, the birth, maturation, life, senility, and decay of organism-like entities—with more-or-less discrete identities in space and time—is a silly idea?
Got it.”

A tree starts as a seed then grows then depending on its nature and environment at some point starts to die and decay. That is the life time of a tree. But the tree is just one tree in the forest – so while the tree is just a young shoot there are many other towering trees, and different sorts of trees with different life cycles, and there are lots of little grubs in the soil and between layers of bark, and birds flying about and singing and nesting and so on. The forest is the all these things and the interrelationship between them – maybe it will last for thousands upon thousands of years – only to be destroyed by a logging company not by all the trees and grubs and birds somehow timing their decay together.

any way , what I meant was silly is the idea that a forest or human community has to stick to the life cycle of a tree – a human community is intangible and made up of lots of various people with agency and languages and arts and technologies etc. There are constraints, contingencies etc – but there is no natural law like gravity (which is not a law, but you know what I mean) that says human communities must adhere to certain stages like a man who is born, matures, grows old, and dies. Of course it is a nice metaphor and sometimes is fitting – but this does not make it a law like gravity.

Also – It is not polite to say I remind you of a couplet from Pope without mentioning which one, just think of how this would weigh on my mind. Which couplet does William Berry think I remind him of? How can I defend myself if you do not even write what couplet it is?

William Berry @ 200
What are you talking about domains and entities for? What is the point you are trying to make? ZM makes some very good points about what I would describe as the difference between an individualistic approach and an ecological approach, and rather than responding to these points it seems you are just chucking some words at her. That doesn’t prove anything.

#199 ZM

any way , what I meant was silly is the idea that a forest or human community has to stick to the life cycle of a tree – a human community is intangible and made up of lots of various people with agency and languages and arts and technologies etc. There are constraints, contingencies etc – but there is no natural law like gravity (which is not a law, but you know what I mean) that says human communities must adhere to certain stages like a man who is born, matures, grows old, and dies.

Trees are highly-evolved organisms. What if we were to instead consider sponges? Sponges can do a lot of self-assembly. If you separate a sponge into individual cells and then give them a quiet place, they are likely to build themselves together into a new sponge with a new shape to reflect their new location. Pretty soon they’re back to pumping water and filtering it for food. If you mix cells from two sponges of the same species you can get a mixed sponge. They work together. Do sponges die of old age? Probably not.

For that matter, do trees die of old age? It appears some do not. Apple trees kind of act like they do. An old apple orchard makes little apples and doesn’t grow very well. Is it that they have a lot of dead wood etc that they must live around? Is it that after a long time producing apples they are running out of some trace element? Maybe after a long time in one place, a variety of parasites have found them and are sucking away their vitality? Maybe old age is inevitable for some tree species but certainly not for all.

Maybe what WB was getting at, is that there are things that do some homeostasis. When things change around them, they respond to maintain a sort of identity. And under some circumstances they do that very effectively, while with others they start to get out of tune or fail to respond. Some “advanced” systems make fresh copies of themselves that result in something like a reset key — if their past history has led them into a homeostatic dead end, they can die and be replaced by a new one which lacks that baggage. But less advanced systems must survive as best they can.

For things like ecosystems and human cultures, it’s all fuzzy. How many cultures are in competition, and how fast do they replace each other? If it’s only a few and they compete slowly, that doesn’t give a lot of opportunity for them to evolve. But then, how do you decide where one sponge leaves off and the next begins? Maybe our concepts of evolution are too specific. Maybe we don’t see the whole picture.

If life had somehow developed without cell membranes, so it was harder to be sure where one thing left off and the next began, we might have a more generalizable concept of such things. Or, I mean, our cell-less analogues might.

#187 Bruce Wilder

A lot of people have a reduced form understanding of scientific method, where it is all just post hoc, propter hoc, searching for rules that fit the sequence of events, as in the card game J Thomas describes.

Here’s the thing, and I think this is very important: People tend in practice not to be very good at that. With practice they get better. And this game is one way to get practice with feedback about what works.

We are so good at seeing patterns, how can we be bad at science? I think maybe society has set it up that way. People latch onto random patterns, and believe in them, and over a period of time we see which people with which random beliefs prosper. Society wins in the long run when people believe irrational things at random, and test out how those beliefs affect their survival.

That might be good for society in the long run, but it’s good for *you* *personally* to learn how to hold multiple hypotheses at once and how to test them effectively. You are better off if you play Eleusis.

J Thomas,

“If life had somehow developed without cell membranes, so it was harder to be sure where one thing left off and the next began, we might have a more generalizable concept of such things. Or, I mean, our cell-less analogues might.”

Very funny ;)

phenomenal cat,

1. It is a very interesting topic the topic of individuals and communities. I always forget which way around the saying goes – is it ‘you can’t see the forest for the trees’ or ‘you can’t see the trees for the forest’ (now I’ve written it down I think its the first?). Marx was the only person who wrote all his books, even his great friend Engels seemed to like to write about similar things differently. Nonetheless, imagine our great surprise if we found Marx’s works were actually dated to make him a contemporary of Chaucer. Marx might have written all his books, but they were left unread and only dusty manuscripts sold by lot after he passed away and thereafter kept in some minor archive somewhere. That was not the case though, Marx and his works became quite famous and influential. Part of writing history is recording famous things or making things famous you think should be famous like E P Thompson’s stockingers. Anyway, in history you can tell about general social things, famous things, unappreciated minor figures etc. all together if you wish to.

2. Oh, I see – you were not so much arguing against what I said but saying that it would be difficult to achieve. I guess I think it is already apparent to some extent because of post-modernism etc but you think people still correlate modernism with science so it would be difficult to go back to saying natural philosophy. Well I am not really going to go out of my way trying to encourage people to replace science with the term natural philosophy , even people who grow succulents in laboratory beakers might find my insistence on the term natural philosophy outlandish . So you’re probably right there, post-modernism has not yet gone backwards far enough for a renaissance of the term natural philosophy and experimental philosophy, unless I am just before my times and next antipodean autumn it will be very fashionable (you must allow me some hope). I see you have written the saying you can’t see the forest for the trees here, so that is probably the right way around for the saying.

3. Fredric Jameson I think has written that he thinks post-modernism is the heightening of modernism. I think this is because he is a Marxist and primarily associates modernism with capitalism. I think it is more of a departure from modernism – I think people realised that what might be called the modern project failed and was doomed to failure/an illusion, as well as being wrongheaded and implicated in a lot of wrongs. On the other hand Bruno Latour looks at scientists and sees they are human like anyone else and wrote his We Have Never Been Modern Book. I don’t think that still having science means the modern project is continuing the way it had – I think the authority of science is greatly diminished and there is not really the same sort of expectation of transformation by some great radiant modern scheme. Also, with modernism there was generally the idea of progress via scientific methods – but we have all sorts of problems , the biggest being climate change. While science is needed to provide information on how we can change to non-climate changing economies and be sustainable – at this point things are not looking especially good. Hopefully things might take a turn for the better, through people acting, but we are really not in a place where we can equate our progress in science with progress in human wellbeing – if anything the opposite has occurred we’re just putting off the awful for some decades if we don’t change.

4. I only asserted Ancient Greece was in the age of antiquities because you said that Ancient Greece could be modern since they had science. I did not think you were unaware of historical reckoning I thought you were claiming normal chronologies were wrong and you had a new sort of chronology. I do not agree ancient Greece is modern.