Do skepticism and falsification still have a place in science?

I saw this and wondered what the denizens of ATS might make of it.

Source

It's a think piece regarding Karl Popper, the philosopher credited with codifying the concept of falsifiability in modern science andor philosophy.

The article is mostly about the scientific mainstream, but at the end it does touch on some familiar conspiracy topics such as climate change skepticism and the anti-vaxxer movement. So I think that it might be relevant.

In particular, the article discusses (highly relevant, but not in much detail) how Popper's ideologies have caused a main stream science to focus on a position of skepticism rather than exploration.

The notion that science is all about falsification has done incalculable damage not just to science but to human wellbeing. It has normalised distrust as the default condition for knowledge-making, while setting an unreachable and unrealistic standard for the scientific enterprise.

And how politics and money affect scientific research.

Science is profoundly altered when considered analogous to the open market. The notion that scientific theories vie with one another in open competition overlooks the fact that research ambitions and funding choices are shaped by both big-p and small-p politics.

a reply to: AaarghZombies


Ummm...sounds like the incessant whine of consensus rearing it’s anthropogenic global warming head...

Or is that man made global warming...or global warming...or climate change...?

One can hardly keep up with such indecisiveness...posing as science...

Try falsifying that particular conundrum...







YouSir

Why don't skeptics get skeptic about their skepticism? Why aren't the skeptics skeptical whether they are really skeptical?
Why doesn't the doubter doubt whether he is doubting?

This quote...

For all its appealing simplicity, falsification was quickly demolished by philosophers, who showed that it was an untenable way of looking at science.

This seems particularly absurd. Here we have some members of an unrelated field deciding that a discipline's procedures (which they don't use) are not accurate based on some metric which isn't discussed in the article.

it's followed by this sentence:

In any real experimental set-up, they pointed out, it’s impossible to isolate a single hypothetical element for disproof.

which is a real head-scratcher. I have a friend who's working on some really cool stuff involving measuring temperature with color changes in a particular substance (so, for instance, you can get a very accurate reading of a surface temperature just by slapping something on it.) They are constantly testing blends of chemicals versus heat (and in large batches) -- and falsification here is pretty evident.

I don't find the argument particularly compelling and I think that this is because the author tends to lump "research" under a huge umbrella instead of recognizing how many different types of research there are. I understand that the author is indeed a scientist (biology) and does indeed understand research methods, but the article seems more a personal rant than an actual take-down of skepticism and falsification.

a reply to: AaarghZombies
The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that gives science its strength, not any philosophy. Albert Einstein said that scientists are not, and should not be, driven by any single perspective but should be willing to go wherever experiment dictates and adopt whatever works.

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks.

Not saying the article from Scientific American is correct or incorrect, but it is an interesting take on the topic.

a reply to: AaarghZombies

Well they need to justify the utterly ridiculous display of 'science' they've been using to push covid crap somehow.

Falsification is used because confirming anything through the limitations of human senses and measuring tools is impossible.

At best, all we can ever say is we're pretty sure it's not all these things we've proved are wrong...how do they propose we go about proving things right beyond a reasonable doubt?

We tried this, for hundreds if not thousands of years, once the enlightenment rolled around and the idea of falsification arouse, it led to rapid scientific advancement in all fields.

To believe was prove anything 100% correct with our limited senses is the kind of arrogance that harkens back to religion.

I guess it makes sense considering we're supposed to regard scientists as all knowing priests these days or something.

Protip....they're not...

Without falsification, how can we formulate physical laws?

Reminds me of racist math.

originally posted by: AaarghZombies
It's a think piece regarding Karl Popper, the philosopher credited with codifying the concept of falsifiability in modern science andor philosophy.

Popper's technique is a tool which can be used or abused like any tool. The article seems to me points to abuse of the tool as some fault of Popper's, but to me, the person abusing the tool is responsible for its use or abuse.

The article is a mix of things that are right and wrong. It's true that falsification is not absolute, and one example that made a big splash on ATS was the finding of faster than light (FTL) neutrinos, which ostensibly would have falsified the theory of relativity:

OPERA: What Went Wrong

We now have many details of what went wrong at OPERA, the experiment which produced an anomalous result showing neutrinos arriving earlier than expected, widely interpreted in the press as a violation of Einstein’s dictum that nothing can go faster than the universal speed limit, the speed at which light travels.

So one point is that we have an experiment that falsifies relativity, and lots of ATSers were happy to spout that they knew relativity was a bunch of crap all along and so on.

But to put this in perspective, we must consider the idea that scientists do not trust other scientists, they trust science. Without context that may appear to be meaningless since other scientists are doing science, right? But, it's intended to make a very important point, that scientists know that any individual experiment can be wrong, and thus other scientists reporting the experimental results can be wrong, as they were in the case of the Opera experiment of faster than light neutrinos. What scientists trust instead of other scientists, is "science" which is not based on any single experiment, rather, it's based on by now thousands of experiments and a preponderance of evidence. We had already done many experiments consistent with the theory of relativity's proposition that nothing can go faster than light as specified in the theory, so we had reason to doubt the "faster than light" neutrino result.

The cause was eventually found to be a faulty connection on some equipment, so the scientists reporting faster than light neutrinos were wrong, but "science" eventually triumphed in showing that the result falsifying relativity was itself false.

The article is mostly about the scientific mainstream, but at the end it does touch on some familiar conspiracy topics such as climate change skepticism and the anti-vaxxer movement. So I think that it might be relevant.

Those are complicated topics.

As I said the "falsification" approach is a tool, which can be used or it can be abused. I do see it being abused like it was when some people were too eager to believe the Opera result of faster than light neutrinos had really falsified relativity, and it's probably used on both sides of the climate debate to make false claims that a single result does not support, but rather, we need to look at the bigger picture and the preponderance of evidence.

So I don't agree with the author that such abuse is any fault of Popper's methodology. Sure you could point to the Opera result of FTL neutrinos and say that shows falsification doesn't work, but that's not looking at the big picture, and I think in the big picture it generally does work.

I'm not really impressed with the article or the author's perspective, but I do have to agree with the claim that "The notion that scientific theories vie with one another in open competition overlooks the fact that research ambitions and funding choices are shaped by both big-p and small-p politics." There are certainly political aspects to the "Climate Change" issue, for example. The solution again is to look for the big picture and the preponderance of evidence, of many results, and not get too hung up on individual findings which may be wrong, though hopefully the problems with those can be discovered as they were with the Opera experiment finding FTL neutrinos.

originally posted by: YouSir
a reply to: AaarghZombies

Or is that man made global warming...or global warming...or climate change...?

Yeah, you do know that they're the same thing, right?

originally posted by: dug88
a reply to: AaarghZombies

Well they need to justify the utterly ridiculous display of 'science' they've been using to push covid crap somehow.

The science is actually pretty sound. The problem is the politics.

originally posted by: Klassified
a reply to: AaarghZombies
The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that gives science its strength, not any philosophy. Albert Einstein said that scientists are not, and should not be, driven by any single perspective but should be willing to go wherever experiment dictates and adopt whatever works.

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks.

Not saying the article from Scientific American is correct or incorrect, but it is an interesting take on the topic.

My issue with this is that the definition of "impossible" is often pre-defined, and is often political. "Impossible" frequently simply means "inconvenient to a specific group" or "Likely to lose you a grant somewhere down the line".

a reply to: Byrd

Alethic relativism argues that truth itself is relative. Which Einstein proved for space and time. With even temperature being relative to the observer.

Past sages like Mahavira (Jainism 527 B.C) taught that every truth is relative. So rather than allow the mind to have a fixed ground to set its roots we should allow it to be free of constraints that allow false views to fester.

originally posted by: glend
a reply to: Byrd

Alethic relativism argues that truth itself is relative. Which Einstein proved for space and time. With even temperature being relative to the observer.

It's a highly criticized idea and with good reason. You can take a four sided building, and put 4 people, each next to one of the four sides of the building. Each person is looking at a different side, so has a different view of the building.

But, I can't conclude from those 4 perspectives that there is not one building just because those 4 people have different views of it. Einstein's relativity works analogously, where different people have different views of the universe depending on their reference frame, but, it's the same universe and you can translate from one reference frame to another using a Lorentz transformation, just as you can walk around a 4 sided building to see all four sides of the building from 4 perspectives. That doesn't mean it's a different building to each of the 4 people as Alethic relativism would suggest, that's wrong, it's the same building, so there is an ultimate truth to the building.

Past sages like Mahavira (Jainism 527 B.C) taught that every truth is relative. So rather than allow the mind to have a fixed ground to set its roots we should allow it to be free of constraints that allow false views to fester.

Modern thinking and even science has refuted a lot of so-called "ancient wisdom", such as many forms of relativism, which is now thought to be largely self-refuting and incoherent, according to this course on relativism from the University of California, Irvine:

alethic-relativism

Plato argues you can get from there to the conclusion that relativism actually is false. Aristotle had a different objection. He thought that if relativism were true, then all contradictions were true. But he thought it's clearly false that all contradictions are true. So, Protagoras' relativism must be false. I think it's fair to say that few philosophers today would endorse Protagoras's global relativism. I think it's also true that most philosophers today would agree with Plato that Protagoras' relativism is self-refuting and so incoherent. They might disagree with Plato about just how to formulate the self refutation argument against Protagoras, but they would agree that something like the self refutation argument holds against Protagoras's relativism.

So generally relativism is self-refuting and incoherent according to most philosophers today, and I can think of many examples to refute it beyond their arguments. However, that doesn't mean the more limited forms of relativism are false or self refuting:

They would also agree with Plato that local versions of relativism restricted to something like the domain of morality or to etiquette is at least coherent, that is, self refutation argument wouldn't work against those restricted forms of relativism. To say it's coherent, of course, is not to say that it's true but it's at least not self-refuting. We now consider a contemporary alethic relativism, as it has been developed in the last decade within analytic philosophy. Consider "licorice is tasty". This sentence seems to concern a subjective matter, for tastes vary from person to person. According to professor of philosophy at Vienna University, Max Kolbel, it is an example of relative truth. It is true if for instance speaker say standards of tastes are operative and is false if speaker's based standards of tastes are operative instead. If so, then A and B disagree, but their disagreement is faultless. Neither of them has made a mistake.

So the "licorice is tasty" claim is a relative truth, where two people can have different truths which disagree with each other, and both of them can be right in such limited cases, like personal preference.

So if people disagree about the taste of the licorice, they can have different truths, but if they disagree about the licorice being on the table, or not being on the table, there is likely one ultimate truth independent from their perception. Maybe the person who sees licorice on the table is hallucinating. This is where science can help to identify ultimate truths, which go beyond human sensory perception, for example you can use a camera to get a view of the table top independent from either observer.

It seems to me from reading posts on ATS that it's the lack of constraints that allow false ideas to fester. People post their pet theories of physics and so on without realizing that experiments have already proven some of those pet theories false. It's like trying to think outside the box, without knowing where the box is. For people who have chosen a career in theoretical physics, these constraints set by already performed experiments are extensive and they make it difficult to think of new ideas which have not already been proven false by experiments already performed.

Now if someone can explain why a particular experiment doesn't falsify their pet theory, then we may have an avenue to explore, but I rarely see that when people who are not theoretical physicists post their pet theories of theoretical physics.

By the way, temperature is not a fundamental thing, it's emergent, so it's not a very good example of relativism, there are many better examples in relativity like clock speeds:

Emergent properties

The most common example of emergent properties is probably temperature. When looking at single atoms, there is no such thing as temperature.

Things like temperature and pressure result from systems with many particles. Even a thermometer gives us limited information about the properties of those particles, which is sort of an average value, when what is really happening are there are some particles with the average value, but about half have more than average energy and about half have less than average energy so the system has a distribution of particle energies that the thermometer doesn't show us.

Once you do the Lorentz transformations on those particles, you see there's one universe where you can convert the particle velocities seen by one observer to the particle energies seen by a different observer. It's not two different truths any more than two people looking at different sides of the same building can claim it's not the same building because it looks different to each of them looking at different sides.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Is your reference frame using lorentz transformations for the whole universe the absolute truth compared to the truth of a reference frame of a photon that doesn't experience time. I suggest that its not a matter that relative truths don't exist. It's moreso a matter that our brain prefers to think in absolutes. Prefering a solid ground in which to base its logic.

If we look at the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment it goes down a rabbit hole. Suggesting that not only can observation can affect reality but that effect seems to precede cause. Which is more in line with eastern thought concerning nature of the universe (aka maya).

Relativism comes in a plethora of forms that are themselves grounded in disparate philosophical motivations. There is no such thing as Relativism simpliciter, and no single argument that would establish or refute every relativistic position that has been proposed. Despite this diversity, however, there are commonalities and family resemblances that justify the use of the label “relativism” for the various views we have discussed. Relativism remains a hotly disputed topic still surviving various attempts to eliminate it from philosophical discourse. What is most surprising, however, is the recent popularity of some versions of the doctrine in at least some circles of analytic philosophy.
link

a reply to: AaarghZombies


Science has been Coopted by Politics . END Of Story .

originally posted by: glend
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Is your reference frame using lorentz transformations for the whole universe the absolute truth compared to the truth of a reference frame of a photon that doesn't experience time.

Relativity is a model of the universe that seems to work pretty well, though I wouldn't claim it's any kind of absolute truth. It's possible to prove something is false, but scientifically it's difficult to prove something is true, including relativity. The best we can say is that so far many experiments are consistent with the relativity model.

What you have stated about a photon not experiencing time is a nonsensical statement based on a misunderstanding of the theory of relativity. The incorrect thinking goes something like this: time seems to get slower and slower as you approach the speed of light, and for a photon traveling at the speed of light, therefore, it's implied time would stop.

I can understand the thinking, but that's wrong.

Relativity is based on reference frames where the observer is at rest, who looks at the rest of the universe from their reference frame, and you can compare for example, a clock in your reference frame to other clocks in the universe to see how fast they are running. The Lorentz transformation works for those reference frames.

However there is no reference frame where a photon is at rest in the theory of relativity, so it's a nonsensical statement to say "a photon that doesn't experience time", since speaking of falsifiability, I would say that's falsifiable for some of the same reasons that Alethic relativism is falsifiable, they are both self-refuting and incoherent (with some limited exceptions in relativism like the taste of licorice example).

Why is time frozen from light's perspective?

Time is not frozen from light's perspective, because light does not have a perspective. There is no valid reference frame in which light is at rest. This statement is not a minor issue that can be approximated away or overcome by a different choice of words. This statement is fundamental to Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, which has been experimentally validated thousands of times over the last hundred years. The whole framework of Special Relativity is based on two fundamental postulates:

1. The laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames
2. The speed of light in vacuum is the same in all inertial reference frames.

If there were a valid reference frame in which light was at rest, then that would violate Postulate 2 because the speed of light would be different in various reference frames (i.e. the speed of light would be c in some frames and zero in its rest frame). And if Postulate 2 is discarded, then the entire theory of Special Relativity is discarded, because Special Relativity is derived from these two postulates. Asking the question, "If we just pretend that light has a reference frame, then what would happen?" will only lead to nonsense answers. Once you pretend that, you have thrown out all of Special Relativity, and you are just left with nonsense and science fiction. In all reference frames that actually exist, light travels through space and time in a normal way just like any other object.

Do photons experience time?

What would the world look like in the reference frame of a photon? What does a photon experience? Does space contract to two dimensions at the speed of light? Does time stop for a photon?. . . It is really not possible to make sense of such questions and any attempt to do so is bound to lead to paradoxes. There are no inertial reference frames in which the photon is at rest so it is hopeless to try to imagine what it would be like in one. Photons do not have experiences. There is no sense in saying that time stops when you go at the speed of light. This is not a failing of the theory of relativity. There are no inconsistencies revealed by these questions. They just don't make sense.

I suggest that its not a matter that relative truths don't exist. It's moreso a matter that our brain prefers to think in absolutes. Prefering a solid ground in which to base its logic.

In the limited case of relativism, like whether "licorice is tasty" I have no problem accepting relative truths. In the case of a building where two people look at it from two different sides and say it looks different so it's not the same building, and there is no absolute truth to the building, that's false. We may not have all the answers to the absolute truth of the building, but we do have enough information to falsify the erroneous beliefs of the two different people looking at it from two different angles and concluding it's not the same building because it looks different to them.

If we look at the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment it goes down a rabbit hole. Suggesting that not only can observation can affect reality but that effect seems to precede cause. Which is more in line with eastern thought concerning nature of the universe (aka maya).

Quantum mechanics is interesting, but many people try to make unjustifiable extrapolations from quantum mechanics, that it simply doesn't support. I'm familiar with the delayed-choice quantum eraser, which as Sean Carrol notes about claims of effect preceding cause (yes I've seen the claims):

The Notorious Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser

the “delayed-choice quantum eraser,” an experiment that has caused no end of confusion...

It’s kind of a cool result, but it’s not like we’re building a frickin’ time machine here...

There’s no need to invoke retrocausality to explain the delayed-choice experiment.

" What is most surprising, however, is the recent popularity of some versions of the doctrine in at least some circles of analytic philosophy.
link"

Self-refuting and incoherent ideas can be popular. Human history is full of such examples, I grant you that, but it doesn't mean they are not self-refuting and incoherent. That applies to time stopping for photons as well as Alethic relativism.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thank you Arbitrageur for your time and efforts. I feel as if I have been spanked. You truly are a great benefit for ATS.