In my Pillars of Science<\/a> series, I enumerated six aspects of Science that help explain why it works so well.<\/p>\n It should be clear from my analysis that the characteristics of Science are quite flexible.\u00a0 All of the criteria are matters of degree, so that they are met more strongly by some fields of study than by others.\u00a0 Because of this fuzziness, we should expect to find borderline sciences, such as Economics, Anthropology, Psychology, and other social sciences.\u00a0 It is both futile and unnecessary to try to come up with a criterion to draw an exact line between science and non-science.\u00a0 In other words, the question of what counts as Science cannot itself be resolved with scientific precision, and is therefore not a scientific question.<\/p>\n This doesn’t bother me too much because my parents are linguists.\u00a0 So when I was growing up, they made sure I was aware that concepts are defined by their centers, <\/em>not their boundaries<\/em>.\u00a0 For example, if I say the word “chair”, then what pops into your mind is a thing with four legs at the dinner table.\u00a0 You might admit under interrogation that a “beanbag chair” is also a chair, but it’s hardly the first thing you’ll think of.\u00a0 Concepts can be useful even when they’re a bit fuzzy at their boundaries.<\/p>\n Despite their flexibility, the criteria are sufficiently strict that many things don’t qualify.\u00a0 I don’t just mean pseudo-sciences such as astrology or homeopathic medicine, but genuine evidence-based fields of knowledge (\u201csciences\u201d in the archaic sense of the word) which aren’t scientific in the modern sense, because they only satisfy some of the criteria.<\/p>\n For example, History and and Courts of Law, despite their empirical character, deal mostly with unique and unrepeatable events.\u00a0 So they fail the repeatability prong of Pillar I<\/a>.\u00a0 Both of these fields are based primarily on testimony of witnesses<\/em>, although Law Court fact-finding has much stricter rules about admissibility of evidence.\u00a0 Since much of their subject matter can’t be defined with quantitative precision, they don’t do terribly well on Pillar IV<\/a> either.\u00a0 Academics in History do have a truth-seeking<\/a> community<\/a> similar in kind to the Sciences.\u00a0 But in Law Courts, the role of ethics, community, and authority is completely different.<\/p>\n This does not mean that these fields should be held in contempt; their methods are sometimes capable of establishing specific facts with a very high degree of certainty, \u201cbeyond a reasonable doubt\u201d as the saying goes.\u00a0 They simply lack the particular methodology of science, which has a proven track record of almost routinely proving astonishing facts about the world, to a degree that ends rational opposition.\u00a0 If you try to increase certainty by imposing a \u201cscientific\u201d approach on a subject that isn’t suited for it, you risk generating a pseudo-science which jingles the jargon of science while missing its core value: self-correction through rigorous testing of ideas.<\/p>\n Philosophy is nonscientific for a different reason than the empirical humanities.\u00a0 While many philosophers strongly value elegance<\/a> and precision of ideas<\/a>, typical disputes between philosophers are not very amenable to empirical testing.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean that observation plays no role.\u00a0 But the way philosophers typically make arguments, they also rely on controversial background assumptions, which can’t be definitively settled just by looking at the world.<\/p>\n If, despite the potential for controversy, the argument for the position is sufficiently convincing, this can still establish the philosophical position with great certainty.\u00a0 In fact, unless the skeptical thesis that no knowledge is reliable could be refuted with near certainty, the result would be that no field of inquiry could produce near certainty.\u00a0 This potential for certainty does not change the fact that Philosophy operates by a different methodology, which on average<\/em> does not resolve controversies as easily as the methods of Science or even History do.<\/p>\n For this reason a philosophical thesis based on Science will usually have the degree of certainty associated with Philosophy, not that associated with Science.\u00a0 A chain of reasoning is only as strong as its weakest link.\u00a0 So a philosophical argument based on Science should not necessarily trump, e.g. a strong historical argument, simply because Science is normally more reliable than History.<\/p>\n So how do we fit ideas from different fields together?\u00a0 In a future post, I’ll discuss Bayes’ Theorem<\/em>, which is a flexible way to think about all different kinds of evidence-based reasoning, without making specific assumptions about the sorts of evidence we can include.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In my Pillars of Science series, I enumerated six aspects of Science that help explain why it works so well. It should be clear from my analysis that the characteristics of Science are quite flexible.\u00a0 All of the criteria are … Continue reading