In this post and the one to follow, I will be criticizing Susan Haack’s 2009 paper “Six Signs of Scientism” which recently appeared as a new chapter in the second edition of her book “Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture“.[1]
[The chapter is available to read here.]
The work does not appear to have been very influential outside of philosophy circles, but I choose it as my most recent parade case because it highlights a frequent misunderstanding about Karl Popper’s philosophy of science.
And, since I think Popper philosophy is correct, I consider Haack’s work to be a strong presentation of a faulty view of scientific inquiry.
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As the title suggests, Haack is concerned with ‘scientism’, a term she defines as:
“…a kind of over-enthusiastic and uncritically deferential attitude towards science, an inability to see or an unwillingness to acknowledge its fallibility, its limitations, and its potential dangers.”
What follows is a list of six criticism of popular attitudes regarding ‘science’, many of which I agree with. Indeed, I have written here several times about some scientist’s over-confidence in what their inquiry can yield, and their dismissal of philosophy.
Among the list of six, Haack includes the following:
3. A preoccupation with demarcation, i.e., with drawing a sharp line between genuine science, the real thing, and “pseudo-scientific” imposters.
It is this charge that I will challenge below.
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Part of the trouble with Haack’s writing on this topic is that she uses the word ‘science’ to mean at least two different things.
First, she speaks of ‘science’ to describe an activity:
(1) “Science” (noun) : the process of scientific inquiry.
“…like all human enterprises, science is ineradicably is fallible and imperfect.” (my emphasis)
Then, later, when introducing Karl Popper’s work for criticism, ‘science’ becomes a set of ideas:
(2) “Science” (noun) : claims about how the universe works.
“…as the honorific use of “science” began to take hold in the early decades of the twentieth century, so too did an increasing preoccupation with demarcation … most strikingly, in Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. … Noting that, while no finite number of positive instances could show an unrestricted universal statement true, a single counter-instance is enough to show it false, Popper proposed falsifiability … as the criterion of demarcation of the genuinely scientific.” (my emphasis)
So far, so good. Haack is correct in stating that Popper advocated a distinction between scientific statement and non-scientific statements – a demarcation, if you like big words.
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Having outlined what demarcation entails, Haack advises against the hobby, suggesting that:
Suppressing the demarcationist impulse enables us to see the Popperian requirement that a theory rule something out, that it not be compatible with absolutely anything and everything that might happen, for what it really is: a mark, not of its being scientific specifically, but of its being genuinely explanatory. And willingness to take contrary evidence seriously can also be seen for what it really is: a mark not, as Popper supposes, of the scientist specifically, but of the honest inquirer, in whatever field.
It seems to me that Haack is making a fundamental mistake in logic here. She is supposing that when Popper claims that all scientific theories need to be falsifiable, he is also claiming that all falsifiable theories are scientific.
If we consider the claim “It will rain in London tomorrow”, it is clear that the statement is falsifiable (if it does not rain tomorrow in London).
However I think it is also clear that what we call ‘scientific theory’ – a collaboration of our best guesses about the cosmos – are somewhat more sophisticated than claims about one day’s weather.
The statements of interest for scientific inquiry are those that conjecture patterns. The propositions that assert general principles are equipped to predict the future. Indeed, statements such as “It will rain in London tomorrow” allow no further inquiry because they carry ‘best-before’ dates (in this case, tomorrow). After that, the statement (in isolation, at least) has no future value for us. They becomes items for history.
It is the unrestricted universal statements (as Haack notes herself, highlighted by me in bold above) that are of value to scientific inquiry. Patterns such as “It always rains in London on Mondays” can be falsified any time in the future, no matter how many Mondays produce precipitation.
This trivial example is clearly false, but it is useful in the sense that we have ruled out that this is how the universe behaves. We have learned something universal about the universe: it does not always rain in London on Mondays.
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Distinct from these falsifiable statements are propositions, sometimes subtle in construction, that have no possibility of being shown to be false.
“It will either rain or not rain in London tomorrow” might, at first glance, seem similar in scope to the previous two statements about London weather. However, on closer inspection, this statement is trivially true by nature of its structure.
That statement is unfalsifiable.
I’ll leave the philosophical significance of this distinction for the next part of this critique. For now, simply recognize that there is a distinction to be made.
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Popper was never one to quibble about words, and was frequent to offer advice on the matter:
One should never get involved in verbal questions about words. If challenged by the question of whether a word one uses really means this or perhaps that, then one should say: ‘I don’t know, and I am not interested in meanings; and if you wish, I will gladly accept your terminology.’ This never does any harm. One should never quarrel about words, and never get involved in questions of terminology. One should always keep away from discussing concepts. What we are really interested in, our real problems, are factual problems, or in other words, problems of theories and their truth. We are interested in theories and how they stand up to critical discussion and our critical discussion is controlled by our interest in truth. [2]
I am sure that were he around to read Haack’s criticism of him, Popper would be quick to point out that however we define ‘science’, this has no impact on factual and philosophical distinctions.
If Haack were to offer a criticism of the distinction between falsifiable and unfalsifiable hypothesis, we might be able to learn something from her work. However, this section of her chapter of scientism does not move past the definition of words, leaving us with little else to say.
References
[1] Haack, Susan (Dec 2oth, 2011) “Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture–Essays on Science, Religion, Law. Literature, and Life” (Updated Edition) Prometheus Books
[2] Popper, Karl R (1973) “Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach” OUP p 310 (in ‘A Realist View of Logic, Physics, and History’)
