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Claims that the "the science isn't settled" with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works.
The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general.
[...] Those who demand the science be "settled" before we take action are seeking deductive certainty where we are working inductively. And there are other sources of confusion.
One is that simple statements about cause and effect are rare since nature is complex. For example, a theory might predict that X will cause Y, but that Y will be mitigated by the presence of Z and not occur at all if Q is above a critical level. To reduce this to the simple statement "X causes Y" is naive.
Another is that even though some broad ideas may be settled, the details remain a source of lively debate. For example, that evolution has occurred is certainly settled by any rational account. But some details of how natural selection operates are still being fleshed out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Dunbal on Friday September 16 2016, @01:05PM
Well science comes from scientia which is "knowledge", it's the same root as our word "sentience". While the scientific method itself is not science, as you pointed out, this method does in fact guarantee that claims (hypotheses) that survive this method's test can indeed be considered (or at least cannot be proved NOT to be) "knowledge".
If I claim that our solar system is surrounded by giant space goats - well without science, my claim is just as valid as the opposite claim - that there are NOT giant space goats. However if I wish to scientifically prove that we are surrounded by giant space goats, I must design an experiment that would help prove this case. For example, if there were giant space goats I would expect to hear the bleating of giant space goats. So I would build an interplanetary space goat bleat detector, at which point someone would point out that there is no air in space and thus bleating is impossible, throwing out my hypothesis. Therefore I could not claim that giant space goats exist because of bleating. In fact the opposite could be claimed - that giant space goats do NOT exist because there is no bleating (or indeed no air) coming from space. So I would have to think up another question - "what if I could see these giant space goats?" and try to prove that question, and so on and so on.
At the end of the day I would have a set of clear, reproducible experiments that would either support or not my hypotheses. Every time my hypothesis lost support I would either have to modify it (ok, they are INVISIBLE NON BREATHING giant space goats) or throw it out completely. Thus "knowledge", rather than conjecture or mysticism, is attained.
(Score: 5, Funny) by fadrian on Friday September 16 2016, @01:07PM
For example, if there were giant space goats I would expect to hear the bleating of giant space goats.
In space, no one can hear you bleat.
That is all.
(Score: 1) by gmrath on Saturday September 17 2016, @04:43AM
True: In space, no one can hear you bleat. The hypothesis that there are giant space goats may need to be tested another way; for example, looking for evidence of giant space goat scat. All organisms leave behind physical evidence (scat of one kind or another) and much can be learned by studying such evidence. Perhaps the in-depth detailed scientific study of potential space goat scat may shed light on what is between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Or, perhaps the what's in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. There seems to be some kind of droppings out there. . .
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday September 16 2016, @05:27PM
While the scientific method itself is not science, as you pointed out, this method does in fact guarantee that claims (hypotheses) that survive this method's test can indeed be considered (or at least cannot be proved NOT to be) "knowledge".
"Guarantee"? No. The scientific method doesn't (and can't) "guarantee" anything. It can't even guarantee that when you test hypothesis A and get a negative result that A is false, because your experimental design, data collection, etc. could be flawed in various ways -- ways that accord with the scientific method broadly speaking, but which will create misleading results in that case. There's this bizarre misunderstanding of Popper's falsificationist arguments that somehow truth has a weird methodological bias, i.e., that scientific experiment can be used to show that hypotheses are definitely false, but cannot be used to show they are definitely true.
A moment's reflection shows this makes little sense. In reality, a "test" of hypothesis A in an empirical experiment can never be evidence that A is definitely true nor that A is definitely false, because both a positive and a negative result can be flawed in all sorts of methodological ways. At best, a negative result serves as a likely clue that "pursuing more research on hypothesis A is probably less likely to bear future rewards" than directing research in another direction around a more promising hypothesis. And a positive result should serve as a clue that "pursuing more research on A is probably fruitful."
Alas, the way our modern scientific method functions is practice is a lot less useful than this. Instead, a positive result in many fields these days is trumpeted in the media as "Science proves A!! (And A likely implies B, and B is connected to C and D, too! Thus A, B, C, and D are likely!)" Verification through independent confirmation is rarely done, which is why we've seen so many stories in recent years that say something like, "60% of findings in field X turn out to be false!" We've overlooked one of the major methodological changes in the Scientific Revolution: independent confirmation. Scientists, philosophers, and all sorts of people have been doing experiments for thousands of years -- but it was in the 17th century or so that scientific correspondence allowed scientists to practice confirmation, which led to a lot less "confirmation bias" where researchers inadvertently influence experiments to give themselves the results they want.
And meanwhile, a negative result is not lauded, sometimes ignored, and often not even published, denying the most important value in hypothesis testing, i.e., helping other researchers to realize where less fruitful avenues of research lie. (Or, even worse, it results in "publication bias" where you might have 20 labs trying out hypothesis A, but 18 of them fail and don't say anything, while the 2 that get "significant results" publish, a process with standard tests of significance which can greatly decrease the chances of finding reliable "knowledge." Or you have people who keep trying various tweaking of experiments and hypotheses, hoping to get a positive result. But without knowing all the failures, you may not be able to evaluate that, when a "positive result" is achieved, it's actually significant or merely a statistical ghost.)
Bottom line: science is a cultural practice. There are lots of variations in methodology, from field to field, from lab to lab, from person to person. There are lots of judgment calls. Overall, the hope is that collectively the errors introduced by individual bias in the overarching "method" will be found and corrected, but our modern scientific "method" (=as practiced!) has numerous flaws which show this is NOT the case in a lot of fields. People play around with "p-hacking" and claim to find "significant results" which are nothing more than statistical coincidences. The failure to fund and recognize the importance of confirmation studies and publishing negative results leads to a lot more uncertainty in the "knowledge" science supposedly generates.
And all of the preceding assumes that there is one good and wondrous ideal "scientific method" that could work better, but philosophers of science mostly doubt that to be true. There are aspects of method that can make things better or worse, but ultimately there's a lot of subjective individual decisions made in the process of science which may or may not result in reliable "knowledge." And frankly, it doesn't help when we create little historical "myths" about the victories of science over ignorance -- we laugh about ether and phlogiston and epicycles and think of the "idiots" who held fast to these bizarre notions (or so they seem today), but most of the time these represented the best "science" of the time, derived from what was thought to be "reliable knowledge" at the time. And the "pioneers" we now laud for coming up with a better theory were frequently derided as quacks by the scientific establishment historically. Once you start looking at science historically, it becomes clear that method (and "science") gets increasingly hard to define and delineate.
(BTW -- none of this should be read as a criticism of "science" in general. Various aspects of the scientific method are some of the better options we have, in an epistemological sense. But despite the fairy tale we tell middle school students, there's not really a best, efficient pathway to secure accurate "knowledge" through one single, simple method.)