Luke McKinney Doesn’t Like Criticisms of Science

Luke McKinney, writing on Daily Galaxy, takes issue with some criticisms of science depicted by Lee Smolin twelve years earlier in The Life of the Cosmos.

McKinney summarizes and dismisses Smolin’s approach:

His argument that physics can change over time and space is apparently based on an extremely specific strawman argument which depends on separating experimental procedure into initial conditions and laws.  He says you can only arrive at laws by examining a large “configuration space” of possible setups.  In the lab you can set up a large number of tests, in cosmology you can look at a wide variety of situations, so in both you can arrive at laws.  His argument is that since you can’t actually rearrange the stars themselves to set up different initial conditions in each place, you can’t make conclusions about the physical laws there.  He uses many, many more words to describe this idea.

Let’s just be clear: Smolin is applying Roy Bhaskar’s ideas to cosmology. Bhaskar used the distinction between closed systems – where you can predict – and open systems – where you cannot predict, but you can explain –  as an explanation for why the social sciences have not met the same successes as, say, Physics. A key point is that it’s impossible to isolate certain attributes of open systems within a closed system. A good example is nationwide voting – you can’t isolate any the mechanisms involved, because by the time you’ve assembled the mechanisms necessary to test it, your closed system is indistinguishable from an open system. Yes, you can test individual things (e.g. how a single voter reacts to a political ad). But you can’t test the interaction effects. On a side note, it’s only just recently that scientists (such as psychologists) are even considering connections between more than two variables – the complexity increases exponentially.

Bhaskar’s point is interesting to keep in mind, quite valid, and fairly non-controversial. Scientists know that you need to carefully control an experiment to identify a causal relationship between factors. If you can’t isolate the elements you need to perform the experiment, you can’t test it.

An analogy is that cosmology is like Freudian psychology. That it, methodologically it uses the perspective of the individual to create and test theories. Freudian psychology, as well as Jungian and other variants of the time, used introspection and therapy sessions as a way to explore the mind. They gathered a great deal of observational data (of open systems), and then constructed a theory on top of it. However, as Popper, Quine, Kuhn, Lakatos and other have pointed out in the philosophy of science – you cannot validate a theory by gather a great deal of information and perching a theory on top of it. For starters, there are always multiply possible theories for any given data set. And any information that could contradict some element of the theory can always be disregarded (Quine). Then, positivism cannot actually prove anything (Hume’s problem of Induction; Popper), and both the evidence gathered and the standards of proof are a function of the social context (Kuhn). Historically, science has not been a steady progression of every more-accurate theories, as Lakatos and others explain. It moves in fits, with huge effort going into theories later abandoned – and for the most part, forgotten by later scientists.

Another problem with Freud was that his approach was not generalizable. e.g. one explanation for Freud’s narrow focus is that he developed his theories while working as a therapist in Russia. In other words, the only people he talked to when constructing his theory were mentally ill people. That ended up generalizing quite poorly to the rest of the population (leaving aside some of the other glaring problems).

In the case of cosmology, the only things we know – the only tools we have to create and test theories – is the information coming in from telescopes out of an open system, and whatever experiments we can run on Earth. We cannot isolate much of what’s in cosmology. In other words, we only have what’s on Earth to test, and what we can see of the wider world. There is no guarantee that what we demonstrate on Earth actually applies to other planets; what we find out about our solar system actually applies to others. Cosmology has a problem similar to Freud; we’re working with a limited sample, and we don’t know how representative it is of the overall population. You can claim that cosmology is different – that Freud really was dealing with crazy people and obviously what he discovered wasn’t universal, whereas the ‘laws’ cosmology discovers are. But hey, Freud certainly believed his sytem was universal, that it completely explained human behavior. As did a number of people at the time, and even some today (who didn’t get the memo post-Watson/Skinner).

All of this makes this part of McKinney’s next paragraph somewhat entertaining to read:

If you’re going to claim that general relativity stops working beyond some sort of interstate-of-existence line, the burden of proof is on you to show that’s the case – and strawman arguments on the nature of experimentation aren’t going to cut it.

McKinney makes a couple of mistakes, which merely show is ignorance of philosophy. First of all,  The argument against the nature of experimentation that Smolin levelled at cosmology, courtesy of Bhaskar, is not a strawman. A straw man is a misrepresentation, and – while I haven’t read Smolin’s book – I’m fairly confident that he is not misrepresentating the nature of experimentation. Now, Smolin (and Bhaskar) may be wrong about the impact of open & closed systems on the types of experiments that can be run and the conclusions that can be made. But that charge is quite different from dismissing his argument as based on a strawman.

Second, I would bet that Smolin does not, in fact, claim that general relativity will “stop working beyond some sort of interstate-of-existence line.” Such a claim actually is a strawman. No, I would speculate that Smolin is only claiming that we cannot know whether general relativity will remain the same “beyond some sort of interstate.” This claim is epistemological, not theoretical – based on the nature of knowledge, not the content of knowledge. The claim is fairly limited: we do not have the tools to prove that general relativity – or other ‘laws’ of physics – work the same way across the entire universe.

Well, no. Of course we don’t. Hume demonstrated than centuries ago. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn’t understand “the problem of induction.” Scientific laws are not absolute, and nor are they probablistic, either. They are theories about how the world works which (i) have not yet been disproved, and (ii) we do not expect them to be disproved. That does not mean they cannot be, or that they will not be. It is a social convention, part of the scientific “paradigm”, as Kuhn calls it. Theories accepted as “as good as true.”

The upshot – or why McKinnon wrote the post – seems to come down to the rather standard Positivist smack-down of metaphysics:

It’s all very intellectually stimulating, but mainly demonstrates the difference between metaphysics and useful physics. […] You can say that the plank constant is a variable over time and space, but when we want to build an bridge or a fusion reactor we’re going to stick with our silly, provincial, non-new-book-publishing “actual physics.”   And that’s the difference.

Yes, the difference is that philosophy – and incidentally, this isn’t metaphysics, it’s epistemology – can’t be used to build bridges. I’m agog at the insight. That’s like saying that English can’t be used to predict financial crashes. Or that Biology can’t be used to build spaceships. The purpose of philosophy is not to build bridges. That’s why we have engineering and physics. The purpose of philosophy – well, I guess that depends on who you ask. I’d say the purpose of philosophy is to contextualize our present reality; to make us aware that there are other possibilities that what we currently believe. But no doubt that my post-Nietzsche relativism bias; in the time of Kant, people would say that the purpose of philosophy was to arrive at absolute truth.

Of course, this whole debate – about the limitations of science in general, and Cosmology in particular – seem incidental to the topic of the book as summarized by Wikipedia. Smolin’s book looks to be his pet theory, summarized. If I wanted to be charitable, I would assume that McKinnon was so irritated by Smolin’s criticisms of science because Smolin used them to try and negate the authority of conventional cosmology in order to push his own (baseless) theories. That is, if you’re trying to convince someone to accept a theory both against conventional wisdom and without proof, you have to destroy both conventional wisdom and the standards of proof upon which conventional wisdom relies. If you claim that “it’s impossible to know anything about cosmology, so why don’t you accept my theory as equally valid”, most people would look at you funny. It’s also the same argument that Creationists have employed against Evolution – “You can’t say that theory theory is completely accurate, so why don’t you accept Creationism as equally valid.”

Such an approach is, of course, quite invalid. For starters, it’s representing truth as binary – something is true, and you have proof, or something is false, and you don’t. When one starts arguing about both the nature of truth and what can be accepted as proof, such binary distinctions become meaningless.

It would be more productive, I think, to debate the philosophy of science after reading books actually on the philosophy of science as opposed to criticising the philosophy of science when it’s misused to buttress baseless theories.

Of course, I haven’t read Smolin’s book – so I really don’t know if Smolin even does that, or if that’s why McKinney is irritated enough to blog about a book written in 1997.