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My concern here is with the book pop. sci.

book Quantum Leaps in the Wrong


Direction: Where Real Science Endsand Pseudoscience Begins by Wynn & Wiggins.
However, this isnt a review. I will deal mostly with the first chapter (The Road to
Reality: The Scientific Method). This is for 2 reasons. First, one cannot begin to answer
the implied question of the books title without being able to identify science. The
reason The Scientific Method (TSM) is the subject of the first chapter is because the
authors use their description of it to identify science and subsequently pseudoscience.
Second, there is probably no aspect of the scientific endeavor so thoroughly
misunderstood yet reinforced systematically as is the notion that there is TSM. A main
point to this blog is bridging gaps between research in the sciences and what the general
public is led to believe about it. Key to doing so is, of course, the methods scientists
employ.
I am not about to answer that, but I can give the answer the authors give in their
opening chapter. The authors begin with the claim Everyone uses scientific reasoning
to some degree and follow with a simple example: you hear a noise in the middle of the
night, investigate the cause, and find some evidence. They then reformulate this
example:
Lets look at this example in a more systematic, yet extremely useful, way. Science
begins with OBSERVATIONS: You have OBSERVED a noise in the middle of the night.
If your general understanding, or HYPOTHESIS, about the cause of the noise is
correct, you could PREDICT [it]. You perform an EXPERIMENT when you get up and
look for evidence of such a chase. If the result of the EXPERIMENT is not the one
youve PREDICTEDthen your general understanding is clearly inadequate and must
be reformulatedas a REVISED HYPOTHESIS. If the result matches the
PREDICTION, this supports (but does not prove) the validity of your HYPOTHESIS.
(p.3)
The problem with the authors assertion that Everyone uses scientific reasoning to
some degree is related to why the claim science begins with observations is
misleading. Everybody does do what the authors describe: we observe/perceive the
world around us and we make inferences, guesses, predictions, etc., about it. However,
scientists rely (ideally) on logic to make inferences, design experiments, interpret
results, etc. Evidence accumulated in various fields over several decades clearly shows
that humans systematically make incorrect inferences in regular ways, struggle with and
see as counter-intuitive the logic scientists use, see patterns and causes where none
exist, and in general do not naturally think in a way required for scientific research.
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This may be disheartening, but the real issue is whether the authors give a decent
explanation of the methods and processes used in research. Again, this is related to the
first claim: the first serious problem with the authors account is that scientific research
begins with observation. It doesnt. Everybody sees things move. Virtually no culture
ever produced somebody like Aristotle who developed a theory of motion. And even
though his theory was wrong, neither he nor anybody else for the next ~1,000 years
bothered to test it. Partly this is because almost all cultures, including the Greeks, held
cultural worldviews that made the notion of scientific inquiry (had it been proposed)
pointless and/or idiotic. For example, many cultural belief systems have posited an
unchanging or endlessly repeating cosmos. Things happen the way they do because they
always have and always will- end of story. So whats the point of investigating natural
phenomena (a criminal charge leveled at Socrates for which he was convicted and
executed)? On the one hand, then, we find the reasoning required in the sciences is
counterintuitive and is not how most people think. On the other hand, worldviews made
applying such reasoning to observations in an attempt to develop scientific theories
practically impossible anyway.
We are so accustomed to taking the sciences for granted that Im sure the above sounds
like both an absurd and extreme claim. To make it easier to swallow, consider how we
have lived for most of the over 150,000 years our species has existed: no ability to
sustain a population as large as an ancient village, no writing, little to no farming or
domestication of animals, little to no technological developments, etc. For over 100,000
years, humans lived as they always had: in small groups leaving behind mere hints, such
as burial sites or rudimentary tools, that they ever existed. It took thousands and
thousands of years for humans to go from using stone to using iron, but we went from
Newtons alchemy to nanotechnology and computational quantum chemistry in a few
hundred years. While we are often taught about the scientific advances of cultures as
far back as Egypt and spanning the world from the Aztec empire to ancient China, there
were none. Technological developments are not science.
However, neither is it the use of observation and reasoning in the way described in
chapter 1, and shown by what is left out of chapter 2: Scientific Reasoning in Action.
While the authors sketch of developments in physics after the advent of science in the
17th century is a fairly accurate simplification up to the early 20th century, what they
gloss over shows how wrong their description of TSM is. Namely, they use the example
of the atom to show the success of testing and revising hypotheses in the development of
atomic theory from Democritus to quantum physics.
This is so vital to understanding both modern science and why the authors presentation
is so off that it bears examining. The development from classical physics to modern
physics wasnt due to any revised hypothesis. To see why, we have to look back to
Newton and his contemporaries. Newton held (like the Greek atomists) that everything
was composed of parts or particles. Light presented a problem. It didnt appear to be
made of parts. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, Thomas Young famously showed that
light had properties only waves exhibited and no particle could. Experiments from
Young onwards continually showed that light was a wave, and later that it was an
electromagnetic wave. Enter Einstein, who showed that all electromagnetic waves were
made up of particles. Now we had a problem: waves cant be particles nor particles
waves. But we had tested and confirmed the hypothesis that light was a wave and tested
and confirmed the hypothesis that it wasnt. So which hypothesis was right? Neither.
The problem was the entire theoretical framework of physics. Centuries of amazing
success came to an abrupt halt and the foundations of the oldest and arguably most
distinguished science collapsed. Classical physics was replaced with a physics (quantum
physics) so bizarre that one of its founders (Einstein) spent much of his life trying to
show it cant be correct. The only reason physicists didnt reject quantum mechanics
from the start as a ludicrous fantasy was because experiment after experiment kept
confirming two hypotheses that were mutually exclusive.
Perhaps THE central component of the authors explanation of scientific research and
TSM is runs as follows:
Each time a hypothesis withstands these tests, its credibility increases. Each time it
does not, the hypothesis must be either revised or discarded. Scientists must be open to
either possibility (p. 3).
Were this true, we wouldnt have modern physics. Because what we discarded wasnt a
hypothesis, but the framework of physics itself.
To be fair, the authors account is more nuanced than your generic description of The
Scientific Method. However, in their well-intentioned attempt to demarcate
pseudoscience and science for the public, the authors have to promulgated a conception
of scientific inquiry that is almost as inaccurate as it is pervasive. According to this
conception, there is a singular scientific method, that it consists of testing hypothesis
that are independent of theory and can be interpreted independently of theory, and that
scientific knowledge advances in a more or less linear way (i.e., new findings either offer
more support for some theory or allow us to improve the accuracy of theories by
incorporating new information). In reality, scientists develop, test, and interpret the
results of said tests in terms of theoretical frameworks. Thats why nobody ever thought
to test whether light was neither a particle nor a wave. Sometimes, what has to be
rejected isnt a hypothesis, but a method or even the foundations for some field (as in
the case of classical physics), but the complex relationships between hypotheses,
theories, methods, and interpretations of findings make it very difficult to determine
what should be rejected much of the time. Nor are scientists always sure when
something should be considered science rather than e.g., metaphysics. This doesnt
legitimize pseudoscience, of course. Just because the borders between what is and isnt
science can be fuzzy doesnt mean we arent able to say that organic chemistry is a
science and astrology isnt. Rather than trying to depict the scientific endeavor as
consisting of something other than it is, the authors should have shown the ways
pseudoscience consists of things that the sciences do not.
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There are some excellent, non-technical reviews of the scientific literature on this,
including:
Gilovich, T. (1991). How We Know What Isnt So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in
Everyday Life. Simon & Schuster.
Sutherland S. (1992). Irrationality: The Enemy Within. Constable
Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1996). Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our
Minds. Wiley.
Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our
Decisions. HarperCollins.
There are also a few textbooks on argumentation, logic, and/or probability that
approach their subject matter at least in part through the ways in which common
fallacies and human cognition fail us here. The best is Hacking, I. (2001). An
Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic. Cambridge University Press.
Finally, for an account of how logic and inference come into play at various levels within
the sciences, the following is a short list intended to give some idea (especially for those
who read them). It is not meant to be even a representative sample of recent works, as
this would require hundreds of citations.
Beltrametti, E.G., & Cassinelli, G. The Logic of Quantum Mechanics. (Encyclopedia of
Mathematics and its Applications: Mathematics of Physics Vol. 15). Addison-Wesley.
Street, A. P., & Street, D. J. (1986). Combinatorics of Experimental Design. Oxford
University Press, Inc.
Dickson, W. M. (1998). Quantum chance and non-locality: Probability and non-
locality in the interpretations of quantum mechanics. Cambridge University Press.
Jaynes, E. T. (2003). Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Cambridge university
press.
Bovens, L., & Hartmann, S. (2004). Bayesian epistemology. Oxford University Press
Popa, R. (2004). Between necessity and probability: searching for the definition and
origin of life. (Advances in Astrobiology and Biogeophysics). Springer.
Howson, C., & Urbach, P. (2006). Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach. (3rd
Ed.). Carus.
Doya, K. (Ed.). (2007). Bayesian brain: Probabilistic approaches to neural coding
(Computational Neuroscience). MIT Press.
Burdzy, K. (2009). The Search for Certainty: On the Clash of Science and Philosophy of
Probability. World Scientific.
Eells, E., & Fetzer, J. H. (2010). The Place of Probability in Science (Boston Studies in
the Philosophy of Science). Springer.
Ben-Menahem, Y., & Hemmo, M. (Eds.) (2012). Probability in physics (The Frontiers
Collection). Springer.
Courgeau, D. (2012). Probability and social science: methodological relationships
between the two approaches. (Method Series Vol. 10). Springer.

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