What does the success of science involve?

What does the success of science involve?
by Ed Thompson

In a Wiki-entry entitled Scientific Realism, the question that is the title to this piece was posed somewhat rhetorically. This essay offers an answer to this question.

In ITOE, Rand said that:

Measurement is the identification of a relationship in numerical terms ... relationships which exist in the universe ... even if the appropriate standards and methods of measurement are not always as easily apparent nor the degree of achievable precision as great as in the case of measuring the basic, perceptually given attributes of matter.

What does that mean? It means that science, whether observational or investigative, is the attempted measurement of real relations. Is that naive? No. Do professionals talk about it as if it were naive? Yes. Does that make any kind of a difference to its truth-value? No. In fact, only if one first buys-into Kuhnian Constructivism and Heisenbergian Precisionism (i.e., wrong ideas explained below), does any of this discussion even reach the coffee table.

We should probably look at some concrete examples of science but, more importantly, before we view concrete examples -- we should discover the appropriate standard for judgment (of them). The reason that this is important is because if we inadvertently adopt a wrong standard -- like looking through a distorting lense -- we will necessarily err in our judgment, no matter what kind of concrete example we view. The appropriate standard for judgment of actualized science is found in Francis Bacon:

Now the true and the lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.

And Spinoza, writing a few decades later, confirmed this appropriate standard for judging science when he said such things as:

Fourthly, because health is no small means to achieving this end, the whole of medicine must be worked out. And fifthly... because it is possible to gain more free time and convenience in life, mechanics is in no way to be despised.

And, to put the nail in the coffin as to what is an appropriate standard for judging science, D.H. Mellor wrote, in 1977:

A century of electromagnetic theory has transformed radio from the merest speculation to the firmest of facts. A modern Moore could as well have appealed to radio waves as to hands to show the existence of the external world. No contractor whose transmitter fails can get away in court with a Popperian defence of its failure as merely demonstrating the scientifically falsifiable character of the bold conjectures underlying its design.

This standard seems dangerously close to pragmatism, and that is partly justifiable. While science's proper aim is to measure real relations in order for human benefit -- let me repeat that science's proper aim is to measure real relations in order to benefit humans -- a lot of the theorizing in the history of science HAS been pragmatic.

Even the changing definition of something -- upon retrospective account -- appears as contextually-pragmatic for the scope of knowledge known at earlier times. Rand's take on this is that what we take for a thing's essential characteristics is heuristic. We "take" what "works" (at our contemporary level of knowledge).

Now that we have the appropriate standard for judging science -- because we've made ourselves aware of its final end or aim -- let's look at some concrete examples, paraphrasing heavily from Audi’s Epistemology.

THE EXAMPLE OF NEPTUNE

The planet Neptune was discovered when scientists were measuring real relations. The observed orbit of Uranus was not as expected and so scientists hypothesized the existence of a more distant planet as the best available explanation of the data (abductive inference). At the turning point -- where observations were unexpected -- we could have just threw up our hands and said that science isn't about measuring real relations (i.e., we could have thrown out Scientific Realism and went back to Mysticism to explain things).

History is repleat with such turning points where we could have just stuck our heads in the sand, complaining about our human deficiency of effortless omniscience. Thankfully, most folks didn't do this (though radical fundamentalists of the religious and secular varieties still do).

THE EXAMPLE OF NEWTON'S GENERAL LAWS OF MOTION AND GALILEO'S SPECIFIC LAW OF GRAVITATION

Kuhnian Constructivists (KCs) and, more specifically, Heisenbergian Precisionists (HPs), complain that Galileo's Law of Gravitation -- the uniformly increased acceleration of roughly 9.8 m/s^2; instead of a small scale of acceleratingly-increased acceleration (due to minute increases in gravitational attraction as a falling object nears the Earth -- didn't measure real relations. They complain of this outside of a human context for the proper aim of science.

The KCs and the HPs would admit, for instance, that humans can -- standing on the shoulders of Newton and Galileo -- that we can shoot cannon balls across fields and make them land in baskets (without first firing them on that field). But these hyper-intellectualizers aren't happy enough with that. And, in doing so, they've moved away from the final aim of science which is -- for repetition -- to measure real relations in order to benefit humans.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH KUHN?

Kuhn wrote this nonsense:

... in paradigm choice, there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.

What's wrong with this nonsense is the appeal to social metaphysics. Science is to be judged not by it's unmistakably growing body of knowledge; but by our current knowledge of the "formerly-imprecise" -- imprecise by our new and unmistakably improved understanding! -- thinking of historical groups of scientists. William Whewell preemptively refuted this wrong notion when he said -- though not in so few words -- that nature isn't theory-free, but only theory-invariant:

The principles which constituted the triumph of the preceding stages of the science may appear to be subverted and ejected by the later discoveries, but in fact they are (so far as they are true) taken up into the subsequent doctrines and included in them. They continue to be an essential part of the science. The earlier truths are not expelled but absorbed, not contradicted but extended; and the history of each science, which may thus appear like a succession of revolutions, is, in reality, a series of developments.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH HEISENBERG

Heisenberg wrongly worshipped absolute (read: context-free) precision which, not coincidentally, culminated in the wrong Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. I once coined the term: the Heisenberg Fallacy for a fallacy appealing to this impossible standard of precision. When one makes this thinking mistake that Heisenberg did, then one necessarily takes Hume's wrong view -- though for different reasons -- that "all knowlege degenerates into probability." The solution is to remember the final end of science -- which, I should hope by now, doesn't require further repeating.

Reference:
Audi, R. (2003). Epistemology. London: Routledge [indexed under: knowledge; scientific]
Hume, D. (1740). A treatise of human nature. p 179
Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. p 93
Mellor, D. H. (1977). ‘The Popper Phenomenon’. Philosophy. p 196
Rand, A. (1967/1979). Epistemology. New York: Meridian. p 39
Whewell, W. (1837). History of the inductive sciences. ch I, p 7

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