Open Science and Its Enemies

Good post. In particular, the parenthetical remark in the second footnote was particularly effective in cutting down to a root issue. Being me, I will note that Sir Karl Popper, of the Mont Pelerin Society, was the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies. I venture to suggest that this political intervention lies behind the appeal of falsificationism. Therefore its resurrection in this executive order is unsurprising to me. It is itself a political stance.

It is tempting to comment on the points from the executive order one by one. But rather than be tedious, I will only note that the concept of interest is inherently vague. Credit is an interest. Should papers be anonymous? Conformity to conventional wisdom, which includes economic and political interests narrowly defined, but also all manner of notions about human nature, reality, morality, religion, can be a personal interest…as can the desire to be shocking, attention-seeking. Notions of good manners, collegiality, which can even descend to grammar and vocabulary, can be an interest. Should it be required that each paper resolve those conflicts by being sure to cite and praise the works of every colleague?

An undefinable offense which is nonetheless mandated can be a very useful tool for an administration which can single out offenders. It may be irrational in one sense to single out this person rather than others for attack…but that can make the examples set even more intimidating for the rest. If anyone can be attacked, who can be safe?

“constructivists” or “postmodernists” (who, broadly, believe that those phenomena are the result of social processes, contingent and subjectively derived). The latter camp was obviously correct, at the margin.

As a scientist, I have never understood this belief. What is it supposed to mean that the phenomena which scientists talk about are subjectively defined? If, instead of ‘Western’ scientists, Chinese scientists had first resolved the molecular structure of water, it would contain five oxygen atoms and three sulfur atoms instead of two hydrogen and one oxygen? That the moon would be merely one kilometer above us, very small, and stationary instead of 300,000 km away, large, and rotating around the Earth? That it is a matter of subjective opinion whether viruses exist? I am sorry to say that while we may use different words in different languages, all of those are questions of fact, and getting them wrong would variously have interesting, albeit unfortunate, results for anybody trying their hand at chemical reactions, moon landings, and public health.

I can only assume that an enormous motte and bailey is going on with this. “Through careful historical and sociological study, they traced the construction of those phenomena.” Does this merely mean that a thousand years ago, there were no scientific journals, and now they are so, thus science is a social construct? If not, what does it mean?

The second footnote is perhaps illustrative. With respect, it reveals a thinking that is rigid and disconnected from the practice of research. Instead of logical deduction from first principles, scientific practice is a heuristic process; instead of binary false or correct, we generally deal with probability and levels of confidence. Therefore, there is no contradiction between falsification and skepticism of findings and assumptions.

Part of the problem may also be that people constantly conflate three components of “science”:

(1) The community of scientists and their institutions, including universities, laboratories, societies, and journals. Yes, how exactly we do peer review or format our papers or in what language we communicate is social and to a large degree arbitrary. The community is made up of humans, who sometimes make mistakes or cheat.

(2) The scientific method. It is non-subjective by deliberate design, because it has been developed to include any method that reliably works to resolve empirical questions and to exclude any methods that doesn’t. The only way to claim that it is subjectively constructed is by allowing a hypothetical alternative science that isn’t actually science because it includes methods like praying to the gods for information or ipse dixit.

(3) Scientific knowledge, which is what ultimately really matters in this discussion. Similar to the previous, it is non-subjective by design because it is constantly being revised to exclude claims that have been disproved by empirical evidence. But, again: a heuristic approximation process. The main problem of science communication is that people struggle with changing information; they want The Truth, unchanging, authoritative. Ironically, they lose confidence with those who are honest enough to admit to their past mistakes while trusting charlatans who confidently double down on wrongness.

The trick of those who argue that “science” is socially constructed, be it a creationist or a postmodernist, is to conflate these three components, to insinuate that the arbitrary aspects of the first helplessly contaminate the third. It is like claiming that you can walk through a wall because it was built by a US bricklayer but could have been built in a different way by an Incan artisan. It is howling nonsense.

But yes, the only claim that might be sillier is that postmodernist sociology has in any way led to right-wing attacks on science; well above 95% of academia never took postmodernism seriously even at its height, and most people outside of academia have never heard that that movement existed. The “science reform movement” may be more relevant, although even as a scientist myself, I am surprised at the implication that such a thing exists as a coherent movement. I know there is a very loud minority of colleagues who promote Obviously Bad Ideas like author-pays publishing*, fully open peer review**, and paid peer review***, but again the public at large has no idea they even exist, or even just how peer review works. Most voters would be surprised to learn about the existence of Elsevier or the fact that fruit flies are used in research or the fact that there is more than one species of Drosophilidae. Similarly, what percentage of the population were even on Twitter, following scientists’ discussions among themselves, as opposed to Facebook and Tiktok?

No, the right wing is perfectly able to despise science and scientists without scientists criticising each other publicly. This goes back all the way to vaccine denialism of the 18th century and is merely taking new forms as new culture war topics are invented.

*) Obviously bad because it is a major hurdle for poorly resourced scientists who now cannot publish, and it changes incentives for publishers towards accepting everything no matter how bad.

**) Obviously bad because it could be career suicide for a postdoc to provide honest feedback on the manuscript of a very influential professor in their field if they have to sign their name to it. Even if in reality that professor isn’t vindictive, the possibility that they are has a chilling effect.

***) Obviously bad because it would multiply publication fees and again lead to perverse incentives and review-for-hire gig workers.

The blithe faith that Science is a transcendent human endeavor and that all of the activites undertaken by (mainstream, credentialed) scientists is a necessary component of this transcendence does not withstand scrutiny.

Strawman much?

Recently I discovered that Latour, for me, has the unique quality that the more I read him, the more I dislike him. It seems to me that in science studies there is almost always a motte and bailey. One the one hand, scientists are people, things get overlooked because of personalities or funding, things get done because of institutional structures put in place by non-scientists (I think this was one of the themes of Science in Action but it might have been another book). On the other hand, somebody somewhere is wrong about something, and it matters. On the one hand, a biography of a scientist can be written that isn’t just a narrative of genius looking beyond the veil, but involves contingency and collaboration. On the other hand, we have seat belts (I swear he uses this example) because government bureaucrats are overly focused on the idea that technology can make us safe, and don’t pay enough attention to the needs of parents. On the one hand, the smallpox vaccine works, on the other scientists supposedly confuse what they’re doing with metaphysical certainty and never heard of Hume, and liberal bureaucrats used the police state to enforce vaccination on the public. There’s always less an attempt to build a knowledgeable community than an attempt to accuse people of failings and to take (in the broad sense) political positions.

J-D,

Nobody doubts that biases exist and are a problem. As I wrote, “the community [of scientists] is made up of humans, who sometimes make mistakes or cheat”. But that motte doesn’t get us anywhere close to the bailey of “the phenomena which scientists talk about are the result of social processes, contingent and subjectively derived”. That statement can only be read to mean that atoms, X-chromosomes, climate, natural selection, and the structure of the glucose molecule are made up and melt away if we adopt a different subjective viewpoint or cultural context. If the sentence isn’t supposed to mean that, then it should have been rewritten to read something like “we all share the same empirical reality regardless of our cultures, but researchers sometimes make mistakes because they have biases”.

But that is the motte-and-bailey trick: what do you mean, Alex SL, I didn’t actually write that in Egypt in 2000 BCE, water would not have had two hydrogen atoms, I merely tried to lead people to the conclusion that the number of hydrogen atoms in a water molecule “is the result of social processes, contingent and subjectively derived” while leaving just enough ambiguity to retreat to my motte of “humans have cognitive biases” when challenged.

somebody wh0…,

I’ve often heard of these tendencies that get perhaps unfairly labeled postmodern (I mean unfair to postmodernism) as being alternately a fringe phenomenon or so last century. While I don’t hear about them as much as I did a decade ago, characters who still argue in this manner such as Daniel Sarewitz and Warren Pearce hold full professorships, as did Roger Pielke Jr., whose work overlapped with theirs, until recently when he left for the American Enterprise Institute.

…yet the science warriors with the actual power, the sailers, pinkers, alexanders and murrays…, which just goes to show how low the bar is to be regarded as speaking For Science: you just have to claim it. Meanwhile, biological anthropologists not getting the Thiel money look on in dismay.

J-D,

But don’t you think scientists should welcome the occasional reminder (even if it comes from a non-scientist) of the existence of this kind of bias and the desirability of guarding against it and correcting for it?

As you say, this provides no excuse for Trumpist charades, but I would note that studies of this sort of phenomenon are precisely what this administration is suppressing in its purges at NIH and NSF. That is to say, it had been an actively funded sector of inquiry, until the past few months.

I intend no general endorsement of Alan Sokal’s work, especially since his stunt, but I’m reminded of how in his reveal he endorsed exploration of ways in which social and political factors can bias the explorations and findings of physical scientists. That was 30 years ago. It’s not a taboo subject!

This is an interesting article but I find the example of a funding statement as an example of a useless and wasteful mandate weird. Who funded the work is a really important disclosure and hardly a huge burden since everybody knows who they are funded by. And if there’s no external funding involved, the funding statement is short and easy to write.

It’s not a taboo subject!

No, indeed, and if I suggested that it was I apologise.

There are many things I am aware of and yet for which I find it valuable to have the occasional reminder. Am I over-generalising to suppose that the same is true for others?

Since the “Experts” thread is closed and the topic is kind of related, may i be forgiven for a slightly OT remark.

Do you know the book “Trust us we’re experts – How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future”? It’s an example of criticism from the left of supposedly corrupt or manipulated science, of the kind that fascists like RFK Jr. are now tapping into. The book seems to have been well researched and no doubt the phenomenon is real. But in retrospect perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to frame the problem as an “us vs the experts” issue.

I am well familiar with that kind of critique of science. It was until recently a truism that the scientific establishment was aligned with the powers to be, and from a leftist point of view it was an obvious target of criticism. Few of us saw it coming that big money would decide it was better to destroy the scientific establishment than to attempt to control it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Us%2C_We're_Experts
https://www.prwatch.org/books/experts.html

MisterMr,

I am not, of course, a philosopher of science, but I find it difficult to see the difference in principle.

For STEM, take a statement like, “the moon is ca. 384,000 km away and made of rock”. All reasonable people would have to agree that this is an empirical question that is either true or false and falsifiable, allowing for some error bars because of the “ca.” and the distance slightly changing over time. At least if we find that the moon is only 1,000 km away or that it is four light years away or that it is made of cheese, it is tentatively falsified. (Until somebody finds the error in our measurements, thus no contradiction between falsificationism and maintaining some uncertainty.)

But the statement only makes sense and is falsifiable to the degree that the reader understands concepts like “km” and “moon”. Hidden behind that sentence are centuries of both other research and shared definitions. You and I know well what a kilometer is and what “away” means, but even if we need to do so because we are coming from a very different cultural background, we can look up the Ur-meter in Paris, go down the history of science rabbit hole to understand the methodological details behind measuring astronomical distances, and clarify the meaning of “rock”.

Now, how is non-STEM different? I had to think for a moment to remember what PMC is, as it is not part of my active vocabulary. But we can make the question of whether the PMC is a class a falsifiable, binary true or false statement by agreeing on definitions of the concepts PMC and class and having standards for collecting and evaluating evidence. Sure, somebody can then say, that’s not what I mean with class; but so could somebody come and say, that’s not what I mean with moon. The only difference is that people are more motivated to quibble over definitions in politically charged areas than they are in those that are not politically charged. For a similar problem in what should be a simple STEM question, consider the mental contortions creationists went through to weaponise a caricature of information theory for their purposes.

Dishonest actors can always try to twist definitions or muddy the waters more generally, be it in STEM or in the social sciences. The methodologies are also often necessarily different, as it would not be ethical to do controlled, double-blind experiments on an entire economy affecting many human lives as we can do on, e.g., a chemical process. but I do not see how a question of humans and society existing and behaving in the empirical world is epistemically different from atoms or algae existing and behaving in the empirical world.

Values, however, are a different matter.

@Alex SL 20

In my opinion, there is a difference, which is that “humanistic” disciplines deal with complex objects, and those complex objects do not have a clear delimitation in the same way the moon has a clear delimitation, so that it would be weird for someone to say “no, by moon I only mean that part of what other call moon that lies 12kms under the surface”, but is not weird to say “by PMC I only mean those people who have degrees and a managerial role” or “by PMC I only mean those who have a PHD and earn more than X”.

The problem is that the moon is a “thing”, whereas classes are a way to describe an emergent phenomenon that is complex and multifaceted and therefore today the first definbition of the PMC might make sense, but tomorrow the second definition of PMC might make more sense etc..
Another difference is that if we are measuring the distance from the moon in KMs or in yards, we are still measuring the same thing and with a simple multiplication we can go from a measure to the other, but with the different definitions of the PMC we are literally measuring two related but different things.

Now, what is the correct conceptualisation of the PMC? Well, it depends on what we want to know, which ultimately is a matter of values.
Note that I’m not saying “if I’m a leftie I choose this definition because it gives results that suit my own agenda”, I’m saying “the correct definition of classes depends on the social dynamic that I want to investigate”, that is a completely different argument, but unfortunately leaves a lot of space for people who just want to prove their own agenda.

Since this sort of problem is ubiquitous in social sciences, but not in STEM, I think many STEM guys tend to mistake the problem for a problem of bias, but in reality it is a much deeper problem, that doesn’t exist in STEM stuff because, basically, we only can have STEM-like sciences where this problem doesn’t exist.

So, this doesn’t make the sort of extremistic relativism that is associated with postmodernism true, but partially explains where they come from, e.g. if I only accept a definition of classes that os based on Marx I will only always see only the problems that were relevant for Marx, but not the rest (this was IMHO the actual concern they had and the reason they are sometimes considered righties).

Again, I don’t really agree with that sort of extreme relativism, also because at some point it became just an intellectual fad, but they were referring to a really existing problem.

The exchange on philosophy of science in the comments is not really very far from the OP. The ix points in the Gold Standard EO simply fail to address the best standards of science. The OP is correct in that I believe.

Exploring some issues further? MisterMr@19 “Does the PMC really exist? Is it really a “class”?
The answer to this question depends very much on the point of view, and in these kind of subjects it seems to me that some relativism makes sense.”

But to my knowledge, the point of view does not matter one bit. I know of no notion of PMC that is coherent enough to attempt to actually use in any perspective at all. It is not clear why only some professions count or why only some managers count. It isn’t clear what it means to be a class. There is no way to estimate the numbers of PMC, changes in their composition by recruitment, the overall position in the income and property distribution, generational longevity, access to political office. What could “the social reproduction of capitalism” mean when it is somehow detached from production for profit?

Any rhetorical usage of PMC that seems to make sense I suppose can be said to depend on “values” in the sense of personal emotional response…but I think that practice commits to denying reality objective existence, except without the rigor of Platonist mathematics. Whether social or natural sciences, there is a commitment to confronting objective reality via some sort of reliable methods. I suppose you could insist that is a “value” to think that there is even an objective reality—but isn’t that proposition rather a very abstract conclusion turned into a premise? As I recall Bishop Berekeley complained how people misunderstood that denying objective reality left the conventional perceptions not only unchallenged, but privileged against the claims of science (in general.) Seems to me that was the point then, and now.

But looking from a different perspective, it is a little surprising that the distinction between the laboratory experimental sciences and the historical sciences is overlooked. The discussion of the Moon forgets Theia. If there was no Theia, the scientific understanding of the Moon is not so clear cut. For that matter if one defines a moon as a body the orbits the center of a planet itself orbiting a star, is the Moon (like Charon) a moon? How divergent from the center of the planet can the so-called barycenter, the center of mass orbited by the two objects (planet and moon) be, before we need to take into account?

The acronym STEM itself can be baffling, if you scrape away the patina from common usage. Science—as if there is a single scientific method. It is not crazy to speak of the Sweet Science. Technology—the practical definition as stuff you can find in catalogs with price lists is well, practical. But as an actual thing in itself, “technology” is even more amorphous and abstracts (see W. Brian Arthur?) Engineering—Draw a Venn diagram of “engineering,” “architecture,” and “art.” Also, I think it reasonable to say that finding novel solutions is as creative as devising an experiment…or composing a tune or writing a poem. Mathematics—It appears that Platonist mathematicians more or less assert that Numbers are Forms, the Gods of the True Reality. It also appears that they are Satanists, who believe but do not worship. Thus the rest of us heathen need not be proselytized.

„In my opinion, there is a difference, which is that “humanistic” disciplines deal with complex objects“

If science wasn’t able to successfully deal with “complex objects”, it would be pretty useless.

Wikipedia “clarifies”:

Starting with the ten- or eleven-dimensional spacetime of string or M-theory, physicists postulate a shape for the extra dimensions. By choosing this shape appropriately, they can construct models roughly similar to the standard model of particle physics, together with additional undiscovered particles,[65] usually supersymmetric partners to analogues of known particles. One popular way of deriving realistic physics from string theory is to start with the heterotic theory in ten dimensions and assume that the six extra dimensions of spacetime are shaped like a six-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifold. This is a special kind of geometric object named after mathematicians Eugenio Calabi and Shing-Tung Yau.[66] Calabi–Yau manifolds offer many ways of extracting realistic physics from string theory. Other similar methods can be used to construct models with physics resembling to some extent that of our four-dimensional world based on M-theory.[67] Partly because of theoretical and mathematical difficulties and partly because of the extremely high energies (beyond what is technologically possible for the foreseeable future) needed to test these theories experimentally, there is so far no experimental evidence that would unambiguously point to any of these models being a correct fundamental description of nature…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory

If bringing up string theory etc was a bit a bit pretentious… even basic astronomy deals with “things” like the moon that were named, defined and observed pre-theoretically but it also deals with phenomena like gravity and momentum, which weren’t, and in this respect I don’t see the difference with social sciences.

MisterMr, it was you who claimed at 22 that hard science doesn’t have to deal with „complex objects“, only with simple things (?) like the moon, and I objected to that. At least don’t misrepresent the debate.

Regarding PMC, I already addressed that at 21.

Final remark: while celestial objects are not influenced by how human physicists call them, people may very well be influenced in their attitudes and self-image and behavior by social science. This is indeed an important distinction.

It would be polite to comment on the OP’s attack on the Open Science community and the post-modernist movement(s). But I don’t really know much about either. Post-modernism has always reeked of very old fashioned idealism to me, which compellingly disinterests me in pursuing the subject. On social constructivism, I can only remember that money and marriage are social constructs. It seems to me foolish to deny they are somehow therefore not real. And it seems positively misleading if you read in any notions of people individually, not even Lycurgus, constructing them according to their point of view or values.

But in the exchanges in the comments on the fundamental subject, gold standard science (the ostensible topic of the EO,) some relevant issues and examples have come up. MisterMr@13 raised the issue of point of view (implicitly, values) in the form of relativism. I still have to push back against any approach that seems to acquit STEM of any problems with relativism and point of view. Linear perspective in painting is all about the point of view and geometry and also about art, the fusion of STEM and the humanities before STEM was even named?

Relativism as a cultural phenomenon or meme stemmed from the cultural devastation of the Great War, but also from Einstein’s theories of relativity, after all. It was the pop science justification for all manner of things. STEM therefore is not immune from tangled issues of perspective or point of view or values. In Einstein, we find that point of view is clarified by the notion of a frame of reference. That is not an intuitive concept, easily derived from everyday experience.

For that matter, Newton’s laws are not intuitive either. Even the first law isn’t. We now say that the outside force of friction brings moving objects to a halt, as in every day’s well nigh universal experience. But the notion of impetus being used up was the intuitive version that fit common sense. The law of universal gravitation defied the intuition that gravity was the force pulling things down. But the sun, moon and stars don’t fall, ever. People didn’t see the moon as subject to gravity, not from their point of view. You don’t have to go far in Newtonian mechanics before it becomes useful, even necessary, to talk of fictitious forces. How many people remember the difference between centripetal and centrifugal forces? And of course, there was the question, does the Moon really only exist if people are looking at it? When they’re not too busy debating whether trees falling in a forest make a sound, that is. And, action at a distance? Again, a lot of this to me still seems like musty idealism. Quantum woo is still with us.

The distinction between momentum and kinetic energy is not intuitive, which is to say, is not immediately perceived in an individual perspective. The notion of a field is definitely counter-intuitive. In a sense, classical physics died with Faraday and Maxwell? So we can’t just dismiss it as some nonsense limited to Einstein and Bohr in my opinion. (It’s doubtful Mary Hesse would have thought I understood her, but her Forces and Fields is illuminating I think.)

Moving on from that disagreement with the formulation @13, Alex SL@20 wrote “But we can make the question of whether the PMC is a class a falsifiable, binary true or false statement by agreeing on definitions of the concepts PMC and class and having standards for collecting and evaluating evidence.” I agree that the specific example of the purported PMC is both useful in illustrating the issues and being very directly relevant to current political discussions.

I do not agree that falsifiability of a binary statement is correct, as insufficient. (Popper and the Pelerin Society strike again! Von Hayek’s reactionary skepticism was admittedly also a part of Pelerin’s thought collective.) You can falsify any particular definition of PMC. But you can always devise another definition. (Paging Duhem and Quine!) With a little bad faith, this can and does go on and on. You might try to to salvage falsifiability with the notion of a degenerating research program (Lakatos) but, Feyerabend knew better. (As for anarchism, well in practice to get things done you need government, practical authority, and that includes science.)

MisterMr@22 also had a good rebuttal, in example form. “the correct definition of classes depends on the social dynamic that I want to investigate” To be more precise, social dynamics, change, presents the panoply of phenomena for which we generalize notions as explanation. (Yes, this does smack of Baconian induction.) Wasn’t it Aristotle who said that all sciences rest on loosely defined concepts?

This is certainly true of physics, where such fundamental concepts as energy and entropy are amazingly hard to pin down without exploring a maze of historical experiences, experimental data, exegeses of usage and perhaps most of all, connections to other phenomena and theories about them.

If we had a scifi quantum computer that could use an infinity of virtual pathways to calculate the outcome of any experiment proposed to it, we might call it the Oracle. Nature is a unity, but science is not. The Oracle’s results would still need a presentation, a version of Euclid’s axiomatization of previous mathematics. That struggle for coherence would still be a necessary part of science in my view.

The long, long history of science and technology (conjoined twins that they are) tells us a materialist framework for the prophecies of the Oracle are needed, however counterintuitive. That’s why people might ask the Oracle for the results of question like, does being born under the sign of Mars make you a better athlete? Or, does intercessory prayer work? How many people use ESP? What sex roles are genetically programmed by an (imaginary) EEA? What would be the rational expectations for a proposed economic policy?

Tm@33 tries to finesse MisterMr@31, who correctly observed “the existence of Pluto doesn’t depend on its definition, whereas the PMC either exists as a class or doesn’t exists at all.” Tm wrote “These categories don’t have an objective existence independent of the human observer. They are either useful or not useful, depending on the purpose of study, but asking whether they exist is a category error.” This is backwards. Pluto is a question of definition as a planet, a wanderer in the sky, because of its real behavior. The so-called PMC is a definition in search of a phenomenon.

Big questions take thought. Good writers can think concisely. My apologies.

Stj 36: “ You can falsify any particular definition of PMC. But you can always devise another definition.“

Again, this is a category error. A definition isn’t falsifiable, it’s not true or false because it’s not an empirical statement – it’s either coherent or not, useful or not. “Pluto is a planet” is true or false depending on how we define planet, but the definition of a planet itself is a human construct. Pluto is not a planet because it was defined that an object’s mass has to meet a certain condition to count as a planet, and Pluto doesn’t meet that condition. However Pluto is considered a dwarf planet according to a different definition. The universe doesn’t care about these definitions, only humans do.

Alex 20 did not of course say anything about falsifying definitions. The error is stj’s, not his.

I’m sorry but if we have to clarify fundamental matters like this, we won’t get far with this debate. I don’t think there’s any point continuing this.

Seconding Tm at 37 and 38; definitions are not falsifiable, but agreeing on what we are talking about is required as a first step for any discourse or investigation at all, but that doesn’t mean scientific knowledge is a a social construct except in the most banal way (i.e., it is inferred by humans, because, by who else would it be?).

One of the people I follow on Bluesky posted the following today:

?”the idea of the ‘science wars’ as this huge battle between scientific realists and villainous postmodernist philosophers who call everything a social construct and deny objective reality seems to be largely a myth
?
the more reasonable claim – that whatever reality is, the scientific process itself is a social construct – calling that a war would be silly. that’s a sweep, obviously correct, barely anyone would bother to disagree

as far as i can tell the ‘science wars’ happened in the shadow of that more reasonable claim, a few dinosaurs trying to disprove that science is a social construct by arguing against the idea that reality itself is a social construct. winning the battle with the straw-man but losing the war”

That raises the question in my mind, if the whole point of postmodernism was merely to argue that the scientific process itself is a social construct in the same way that, say, bricklaying and farming are social constructs while bricks and combine harvesters have objective existence, and that is something so banal and “obviously correct” that “barely anyone would bother to disagree”, why was it necessary to define a movement called postmodernism to advance such an uncontroversial point? What is next, a movement called Hydronism where a generation of philosophers makes a career out of stating that water is wet?

No, this only makes sense as the motte-and-bailey I referred to at the beginning of this thread. A claim that that can be variously exciting as understood by one’s followers and by part of the media (but ridiculous) and at the same time obviously correct (but banal) as a defense to be used the moment one is seriously challenged. It is like those Sophisticated Theologians who exist only to explain to atheists that God is Obviously just an Impersonal Ground of Being and Not a Person, you silly fool, and we have always understood that for centuries, so none of your arguments against a personal or falsifiable god have any weight at all, but who for some perplexing reason never explain that to their flock who pray to the person God to grant their football team a victory in the finals.

I mean, I wish postmodernist philosophers had made an effort in every interview to resolve the misunderstanding and clarify that they do not claim that molecules and genetic drift are social constructs. But if they had, what would have been the point of the movement?

So about “complex” and not complex objects of study, after some reflection, I’d say that: uman sciences objects WOULD have a greater level of complexity of natural sciences (I’ll explain why later), but in practice this mean that human sciences have to rely on a big layer of abstraction, bigger than natural sciences need.
This layer of abstraction is where the “relativism” part comes from, and the reason it doesn’t apply to natural sciences.

For example, suppose that I have a sport car, it is bright red, it can reach 450 km/h, and it costs 300 000$.
We can explain why it is bright red with the chemical properties of the paint of its surface, we can explain those properties through the atomic structure of the molecules, and we can explain atomic structure through quantum physics (I suppose).
We can explain how it reachs 450 km/h throughs mechanics, and the mechanic properties of its components through chemstry, and down there again to quantum physiscs; this is a pair of steps more complex than the color part.
But if we want to explain the price, this becomes way more complex: the price is not a characteristic of the car itself, but a value imposed over it by society. We are good materialists though, and we know that everything, including society, is made of quantum particles, so we have a few steps: we can use history and anthropology to explain how we got to a society that has a market for luxury sports car, and explain the behaviour of the whole number of people who are part of this market through psychology (of each single person, so we have to know their lives too), then since psychology is still a human science we can explain it through neurology and perhaps evo-psych (to explain status-seeking behaviours), plus again history and anthropology for this specific kind of status-seeking behaviour; from there we go to biology, from which through I suspect a lot of complexity we go to chemstry, and from that again to quantum phisics (we will probably need geology too at some points to explain why some materials are more expensive than others).
Obviously it would be impossible to have that level of complexity in a theory, so what economists do is tho have a simplifying assumption of (ill-defined) rational behaviour of actors, and use this simplyfication for their theories.
Because this is a simplification, it won’t work for everything, so for example there will be problems in economics on how to concile rational actors with behavioural economics, how much changes in GDP refer to “real” changes in income (ideally measured in wellbeing, tha however we can’t measure) etc. .

Generally natural sciences either don’t need the same layer of simplifying assumptions, or, perhaps, the choice of what to simplify is less dependent on values, so this problem applies to human sciences but not to natural sciences, where in some sense it’s true that there are abstractions going around, but in a trivial way, hence the postmodern assertion of relativism makes more sense for human sciences than for natural ones.

Also, STJ can answer for himself, but if we ask whether the PMC is a class or not, the question is whether there is a group of people defined by cultural capital (defined somehow) and arguably income that shows a similarity of attitudes, so we can have different definitions of the PMC and for example if we define it as “people with at least a degree and at least an income of 500 000$ yearly” we can see if this group of people really act as a class (if they all have similar political opinions, for example), and if they don’t we can define it as “people with at least a PHD and at least 50 000$ of income yearly” or other similar definitions, and see if any of this definition is cohesive or not.
So the sentence “You can falsify any particular definition of PMC” is not literally perfect but it makes a lot of sense.
In fact it might turn out that on different fields of politics (tax preferences, ecology, gender politics etc.) the best results in terms of cohesiveness come from slightly different groupings, or that the best definition in terms of cohesiveness changes in time.

All of this, for clarity, refers to good faith differences in points of view, and not to people who purposefully chose to avoid evidence because it pisses them off (e.g. creationists) or people who just use this problem of relativism to push their politic agendas (e.g. trumpists).

Compromise position: the PMC is a class-in-itself but not a class-for-itself.

MisterMr@42 As to the issue of the complexity of hierarchy of explanations? First, I have to add that some phenomena emerge. Chemistry addresses the interactions of atoms in the form of ions, molecules and crystals. But surfaces emerge on a different scale, for liquids or crystals. A property such as temperature or pressure is not a property of atoms and molecules as such, but of ensembles. Temperature and pressure may be said to act as factors (forces?) despite not being characteristics of any individual atom or molecule or crystal. I imagine Susan Haack and Nancy Cartwright would be offended at my taking their name in vain but their work so far as I am acquainted with it seem to be advances on Popper.

Second, as to complexity in general, it seems to me that any particular branch of science tends to rely on rather loosely defined concepts. And loosely defined concepts also seem to create their own complexity. Again, this kind of complexity is found in the natural science as well as social sciences. The issue is whether the concepts are generalizations from experience, or impositions. I see that I forgot to add that such problematic concepts must be corrigible. To rephrase? The methods of laboratory sciences and the historical sciences may be different, but the underlying unity of nature trumps the apparent distinction of natural and social sciences. (As if people weren’t part of nature!)

And as to my remark about the falsifiability of any definition of PMC? That was meant largely to highlight the problem of using falsifiability as a touchstone. (A touchstone was a device to test the purity of a substance, usually by magical means despite a handful of practical examples like using a diamond to cut stones purported to be diamond.) Again, we seem to be back at the parenthesis in footnote 2 of the OP.

Hate to Be That Guy but “there’s a literature on this” (start with EO Wrigh)…

My point is, there is a reason people never agreed for a workable definition of “class”, and similar problems are common in human sciences.

This is the reason that, in Kuhn parlance, human sciences never seem to graduate from the situation where there are competing paradigms.

I gave my opinion on what the reason is, probably there are better explanations.

Computational reproducibility, while indeed nice to have, is sometimes a real pain in practise.

To pick a topical example, large language models run on GPUs can have the problem that you’re not guaranteed the order in which the computation is performed, and hence the floating point rounding errors.

Now, if this was a physics simulation or something, we might do a bit of numerical analysis to show that the rounding errors don’t matter. Here … not so much. We can say that the LLM output we got is a sample from some statistical distribution. Can a third party check that … welp, you are now in deep water.

If I recall correctly, the FreeBSD operating system went to a lot of work here to make builds reproducible, in the sense that compiling the program twice will give you a bit-for-bit identical executable. (For those readers wondering why — the issue here is that the government might have secretly compelled the operating system vendor to put in a security back door that isn’t in the source code). The fact that this was demonstrably hard does not bold well.
Like, have you ever tried getting some other research projects code to compile? There are probably a ton of subtle version dependencies to sort out,

Alex SL @40
I haven’t been following every twist and turn in this discussion, but IMO the more distinctive point of “postmodernism” — if it had one — was not the banal claim that the scientific process is a social construct but the critique of “metanarratives.”

David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), borrowed (with appropriate acknowledgment) from Ihab Hassan a table of “schematic differences” between modernism and postmodernism, suggesting it as “a useful starting point” for discussion (pp. 42-43). One of the contrasts listed is ‘narrative/grande histoire‘ (modernism) vs. ‘anti-narrative’/petite histoire‘ (postmodernism). I’m not sure the table as a whole is all that illuminating, but a skepticism of, or opposition to, “grand narratives” is something I associate with postmodernism. Since I think grand narratives have their place, I’m not esp. sympathetic to this position, but it is something one could at least argue about (assuming a definition or examples of “grand narratives” could be agreed on). This is admittedly tangential to the discussion here re science, but whatever.

About the rejection of so-called grand narratives by post-modernism? It seems to me to be a skeptical epistemology that rejects some concepts a inherently illegitimate, while simultaneously exalting some others. A concept of class as referring to a group of people with a given role in the production process that imposes a set of fundamental interests (to which individuals will respond with due variations according to individual personality and the vicissitudes of their biographies, which include their family relationships and friendships) that therefore means once can and must consider class as a social force or structure or institution, irreducible to individual mental processes…that kind of concept is verboten, so far as I gather.

On the other hand, some undefined notion of “power” or “narrative” is presumed to play the same role in meaningful explanation. What happens in people’s heads (many who are not ever named?) is indeed a kind of small narrative. The thing is, is it a good narrative in scientific explanation?

It makes me think of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber at least dived into naming names (Baxter floats up in my memory.) But really, I’m not even sure that capitalism has a spirit, nor that Protestantism has an ethic. Judging how one questionable force generates another questionable force doesn’t strike me as a profitable enterprise. Obviously it may be objected that Weber preceded post-modernism. I confess I’ve always wondered why post-modernism shouldn’t be replaced with the catch-all term, post-Marxism. Thus pioneers in rebutting Marx were pioneers could be read as pioneers in post-modernism?

Alex SL@47 Well, I agree that the notion of science as the hypothetico-deductive method (as Bunge for one calls it) is much more realistic about science than Popper’s falsification (or Lakatos’ fixup.) But I disagree that we start with such definitions, not least because the concepts formulated in a definition, are drawn from experience. (Or history, people like Guizot and Thierry?) To be useful in even talking about the vast world of experience imposes a necessary imprecision and vagueness, i.e., complexity. Maybe each branch of science can be roughly demarcated by the set of notions it works with, rather than precise definitions?

If you try to model science in general as an axiomitization process, where precise and unambiguous definitions are homologous to axioms…well, mathematical language is its own beast and it must still be translated, which as we all know, means betrayed. Again, I don’t see it as a category error to claim definitions can be falsified. I do see so-called definitions and classifications and hypotheses and so on as concepts than can be clearly distinguished in dictionaries, but not in actual language. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m really arguing with you.

J-D: “In a planet’s orbital zone there are no other bodies of comparable size except for those which are gravitationally dependent on the planet”

Another way to express this is to say that the planet’s mass dominates the orbit (yes, I’m not a physicist). I didn’t want to make it unnecessarily complicated and the details aren’t relevant for my point.

engels: “Once capitalism is smashed and the bourgeoisie is overthrown sociology will become much more like physics … One difference with zoology is that the point of theorising about class isn’t to interpret the world but to change it”.

The point of class theory is to smash capitalism, but until capitalism is smashed, we won’t agree on class theory. I think that’s what’s called dialectical materialism.