Lisa Jardine is a historian who clearly understands how science works:
The thought uppermost in my mind was how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth. Whereas scientists are actually quite tentative—they simply try to arrive at the best fit between the experimental findings so far and a general principle.
Read the rest. She ties together the ideals of how science should be carried out with a story from Pepys and an unscrupulous sea captain and modern day creationists—excellent stuff!
A question, PZ.
Would you consider yourself a scientific realist, or do you subscribe to some other philosophical position regarding science…such as no philosophical position at all?
From Jardine’s commentary:
I wonder if it’s really that hard to get by without absolute beliefs, or if most people don’t bother to give it a try. I find that a lot of what I do is based on provisional assumptions. In practice, I might act on these as if they were absolute beliefs, because the alternative of dithering forever is clearly worse than doing something. But I’m also more likely to view outcomes in probabilistic terms instead of simple cause and effect. This motivates me to hedge against catastrophic outcomes and to make contingency plans. I think one of the saddest things about wanting certainty is the despair that occurs when your certain beliefs are proved wrong.
Most people, I think, would rather be certain than right.
Yes, it is nice to find historians who “get” science — but the odd thing is why there are historians who don’t get it. After all, historical “truth” is much like scientific “truth” — modern ideas of how, for example, the Romans lived are different than Victorian ideas on the subject. New discoveries in both science and history cause old theories to be discarded and new ones to be created.
There is a substantial difference between history and archaeology. History deals with written records, archaeology with the physical remnants of the past.
One is a “Liberal Art”, the other is a science.
Like father, like daughter!
Aren’t written records also “physical remnants of the past”? History is/can be just as scientific as archaeology.
They study the contents of the records, not the physical records themselves. Your question is sophistry, and I think you know that.
That is an excellent article. As for Creationists, news of their museum…again.
Just one brief observation: Over in the comments section of Ms. Jardine’s article, a creationist writes:
Nobody, of course, suggested that it is unfair of the creationist to demand of the evolutionist evidence that their hypothesis is correct. Mr. dumb creationist person don’t know how to read but likes using big fancy-pants sounding words like “hypothesis is correct”. At least that is the impression I have gathered from reading Mr. stupid creationist’s comments regarding Ms. Jardine’s article. Have a nice day!
Caledonian:
His question and your response expose your ignorance of common research methodologies used by historians, and funnily enough, I think you know that.
The documents that I study are by definition “physical remnants of the past,” and I’d be a particularly poor historian indeed if I didn’t study them as physical documents. If I don’t know when/where a document comes from and how it is physically put together, I’m not going to be able to place its contents into their proper historical context.
Philosophers are the ones who divorce the contents of a document from the physical document itself, not historians.
I heard her doing part of this on BBC’s Radio4.
She made one important mistake.
She is entirely correct, in that science can be 99% or even 99.999 …% certain that something is so, but never 100%.
What she missed was that science CAN say, with 100% certainty, that some things are wrong, and false.
Like cretinsm, or Phlogiston, or Geocentrism for instance.
And, I think that this is important.
It is why “scientists” are branded as “arrogant” by those who do not understand (and often don’t want to understand).
Sorry, but we (scientists) KNOW that this is wrong, don’t waste our time – may be perfectly true, but the poor dears can’t cope.
Isn’t that sad?
And frightening.
Wrong. All science can do is show that the available evidence is incompatible with the requirements of those hypotheses.
If we take the functioning of our own minds for granted, then logic can prove things wrong with 100% certainty… but we know that our minds can fail. NO conclusions can be held with absolute certainty when reason is used.
Dan: Archaeologists are the scientists of the human past. Historians are just the record-keepers.
Several philosophers and historians have written about history (better: historiography) as a science. To mention a few … Keith Windshuttle’s The Killing of History is one; Bunge tackles the subject in Social Science Under Debate and it is also discussed in Richard Evans’ In Defense of History. All basically come to the conclusion that histiography can be considered (ideally) a science, but for different reasons.
As for philosophers looking at documents content independently of their “embodiment” this is usually true. Not completely, because particularly amongst the study of ancient philosophy there is some attempt to “work around” corruptions of the manuscript. This is not purely a historical task as it once in a while makes use of philosophical understanding to provide the interpolation needed.
“All science can do is show that the available evidence is incompatible with the requirements of those hypotheses.”
This is correct, but I think it means what Tingey says, we can be much more sure that the theory doesn’t work than that it is the right one. It is true that the evidence can be wrong but it is unlikely.
Discussing the usability and meaning of falsifiability, over at the Cosmic Variance blog there is a commentary that relates to this.
The post is discussing the use of Bayesian methods on cosmological data. Ordinarily, a frequentist would say that Bayesian probabilities is about degrees of belief, not evidentiary frequencies. But here Bayesian methods is used (as one of several methods) to quantify Ockham’s razor on competing models to see which model fit the data best and most parsimoniously.
One commentary noted that the method could in principle be extended to incorporate all physics in a sort of metaanalysis, if I understood correctly. In his scenario, bad models would be given essentially zero weight, but not ever be falsified. I’m not sure if that is a good thing.
And another thing that has been nagging me about the metaanalysis idea is that it in itself doesn’t seem to be parsimonious since it doesn’t get rid of old or bad theories, at least until after extracting the values for the best parameters. Perhaps that is enough to place the idea in the paper bin, at least for now. But it gives another perspective on falsifiability.
The next time a creationist mentions the large percentage of Americans who support the teaching of Creationism, you can bring up these stupid American stas
That should have been “stats”. Note to self: spellcheck carefully when calling someone stupid.
This gives me a chance to bring up one of my favorite topics: the evolution of clocks. Paley’s teleological argument about encountering a watch on the heath is much discussed, but people rarely use it to make the point that clocks evolved! Sure, not by the random genetic mutations mechanism that most think of as the basic force of change in evolution, but instead by “cognitive mutation” in which successive designers tried out novel features in order to achieve progressively better designs.
There is a good argument to be made that the process of scientific discovery (of which the discovery of better clock designs would be an example) is in fact a Darwinian process, with random cognitive generation of new variants, starting from an earlier plan, with selection of those variants that are in fact improvements.
I know this comes dangerously close to the memetics idea that is so out of favor in some circles, but thinking this way has helped my own thinking about problem solving generally.
Caledonian:
I guess all that time I’ve spent (as a historian, of course) measuring paper dimensions and comparing handwriting samples so that I can talk about the contents of documents in a historically meaningful way has been a complete waste of time, then. Or maybe I should have left it to the archaeologists, since you seem to be telling me that they’re so much better and smarter and more intellectually useful than historians.
“Just record-keeping” is a relatively mindless act collecting information for the sake of collecting information. It has exactly nothing whatsoever to do with the practice of history as an academic discipline.
But thanks anyway for telling me how pointless and superficial my job is, even though you apparently don’t have the slightest clue what it actually entails. I really appreciate that.
OK. As an archivist and historian I need to weigh in now. To both Dan and Caledonian: don’t diss the recordkeepers. Recordkeeping is not a “mindless act” – it’s a conscious decision on someone’s part.
Think about these questions. What constitutes a ‘record’? Is it just any text reproduced on some material that is capable of displaying text (paper, computer screen, stone)? What makes a record, a record? Is it just old written stuff accumulated in some archive somewhere? If so, how old is old? When does something become a record? Why do we create records in the first place? Nothing about this is mindless.
Recordkeeping can be complex and difficult. Making a decision about what constitutes a record and how long it needs to be kept and who should have access to it is something that people struggle with every day. Anybody who pays taxes and has to keep records to justify their tax claims struggles with this. Anybody who works in an office and creates or manages textual documents struggles with this.
As to the whole history == science thing. I’m ambivalent about this. I think historians utilise scientific methodologies in some of their work but they also use other methods in producing history. History is a conversation or dialogue between a (constructed) present and a (constructed) past. These constructs are based on evidence (garnered from records and the products of other disciplines such as archaeology) but they are also narrativised (if that’s even a word) because history is basically a story we tell ourselves about the past. It’s a story based in truth but it’s still a story.
What I think this debate really comes down to is whether or not you think telling ourselves stories about the past is a good thing (I happen to think it is). BTW stories =/= fairystories.
Artifacts are true primary sources — records are generated by humans, for humans, and as such are riddled with bias, prejudice, delusion, and straight-out lies.
History is much narrower in scope than archaeology, extends less far into time, and frankly is less sophisticated even in principle alone than archaeology. It’s merely a lesser discipline. I’m afraid all of the self-justifying chest-thumping in the world won’t change that.
Well duh, Caledonian. That’s what makes history interesting and challenging and broad in scope. It almost sounds as though you assume that historians just make lists of things people said, and take them at face value.
Good historians use all kinds of relevant evidence and all kinds of good reasoning to formulate and evaluate various hypotheses about what actually happened.
You seem to think that disciplines have hard-and-fast boundaries and methodologies. They don’t. Good scientists follow the relevant evidence, irrespective of disciplinary boundaries. Your essentialism about disciplines is staggeringly naive.
Oh, and by the way, records are artifacts.
An archaeologist who ignores relevant written records is an idiot. A historian who ignores relevant artifacts of other kinds is an idiot, too. Historians often have both kinds of evidence available; archaeologists often don’t. And this somehow makes history a lesser discipline?
What an astonishing idea. It’s like saying that evolutionary biology is cheapened if it takes molecular data into account.
No, it isn’t.
That’s ludicrous.
No amount of pontificating on your part will change the fact that you’re an annoying troll—or worse, a sincere crank.
Caledonian:
What you say is all, of course, blatantly false, and both historians and archaeologists will tell you so. Probably a lot less nicely than I will, too.
I’m afraid that all the pretentious wankery in the world isn’t going to grant you the intellectual high ground.
Since you apparently never let the fact that you clearly don’t have the slightest bloody clue what you’re talking about get in the way of a good pontification, then I’m not at all surprised that you’d denigrate an entire academic discipline, and by extension those who practice it, without assuming the burden of knowing anything about how it’s actually done out here in the real world.
Any idiot can believe that an entire discipline is simplistic and superficial without any valid justification whatsoever, but it takes a real idiot to presume that the people who practice that discipline are as simplistic and superficial as he is.
Any idiot can write a post vigorously attacking strawmen he attributes to the people he dislikes, but it takes real dedication to write more than one. I congratulate you, sir!