Interview with Dr. Henry Bauer - Part 1

Why are you sorry when you've done nothing wrong?!


Why would you have thought that? It's not that I don't want to look at that, as it seems very interesting, I just don't recall doing or saying anything that would have led you to the conclusion that I would! It's all good, though, Chris, I appreciate the charitable sentiments! If I find the motivation, I'll check out your link.

I just meant I'd misunderstood when you said you wanted to look at the referenced paper - thinking you meant the book referenced at the end of the paragraph I'd quoted, rather than the Laudan paper he'd referred to earlier.

Anyway, being English and a former commuter I tend to apologise even when someone barges into me because they're not looking where they're going ...

[Laird]

I just meant I'd misunderstood when you said you wanted to look at the referenced paper - thinking you meant the book referenced at the end of the paragraph I'd quoted, rather than the Laudan paper he'd referred to earlier.

Fair enough!

Anyway, being English and a former commuter I tend to apologise even when someone barges into me because they're not looking where they're going ...

Haha. On a side track, I googled this (sorry), and came up with this fascinating article: Why do the British say 'sorry' so much? Some interesting excerpts (not wanting to derail this thread - if anybody wants to respond, let's move the discussion to a new thread):

British society values that its members show respect without imposing on someone else’s personal space, and without drawing attention to oneself: characteristics that linguists refer to as “negative-politeness” or “negative-face”.

[...]

As a consequence, Brits may sometimes use ‘sorry’ in a way that can seem inappropriate to outsiders, including Americans. The British will say ‘sorry’ to someone they don’t know because they’d like to ask for some information, or to sit down next to them – and because not saying ‘sorry’ would constitute an even greater invasion of that stranger’s privacy.

In one study, Harvard Business School’s Alison Wood Brooks and her colleagues recruited a male actor to approach 65 strangers at a US train station on a rainy day and ask to borrow their telephone. In half the cases, the stranger preceded his request with: “Sorry about the rain”. When he did this, 47% of strangers gave him their mobile, compared to only 9% when he simply asked to borrow their phone. Further experiments confirmed it was the apology about the weather that mattered, not the politeness of the opening sentence.

(Again, sorry (ha) about the potential thread derailment)

Well, if it's not specific, then what stops some random nobody from declaring themselves a "scientist" (or "fruglebunder") following "the scientific method" (or "the way of the fruglebunder"), and how would you decide whether or not their claim was true?

Is this a problem? Are there bands of feral 'scientists' practicing something which is different from what 'real' scientists practice?

Linda

[Laird]

Is this a problem? Are there bands of feral 'scientists' practicing something which is different from what 'real' scientists practice?

Well, some people claim that parapsychological research is not real science but "pseudoscience", whereas parapsychologists themselves would claim that they are practising legitimate science. How would something as minimalist as "science is what scientists do" help us to determine who's right in this case?

There is an online survey of the literature in this area, entitled "Science and Pseudo-Science", in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here. (It's quite long, so I'm not promising to read it either!)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/

It appears from that article that Popper didn't abandon the criterion of falsifiability:
However, in what seems to be his last statement of his position, Popper declared that falsifiability is a both necessary and a sufficient criterion. “A sentence (or a theory) is empirical-scientific if and only if it is falsifiable.” Furthermore, he emphasized that the falsifiability referred to here “only has to do with the logical structure of sentences and classes of sentences” (Popper [1989] 1994, 82).
Popper, Karl, [1989] 1994. “Falsifizierbarkeit, zwei Bedeutungen von”, pp. 82–86 in Helmut Seiffert and Gerard Radnitzky, Handlexikon zur Wissenschaftstheorie, 2nd edition München:Ehrenwirth GmbH Verlag.

[Laird]

Furthermore, he emphasized that the falsifiability referred to here “only has to do with the logical structure of sentences and classes of sentences”

What on Earth? I thought that science was supposed to be empirical; that makes it sound entirely analytic. Alright, I'm off to read more about this in the article...

P.S. I finished reading a brief while ago the Laudan paper that Henry Bauer referenced and to which I provided a link in an earlier post. It seems to make a strong case, but I would like to look into countervailing views before endorsing it outright. I think Vortex in the interview offered a fairly pragmatic view of that which constitutes "the scientific method", so that gives us further food for thought.

[Laird]

What on Earth? I thought that science was supposed to be empirical; that makes it sound entirely analytic.

Oh, I see now. The immediately following sentence clears up my confusion:

A (theoretical) sentence, he [Popper] says, is falsifiable if and only if it logically contradicts some (empirical) sentence that describes a logically possible event that it would be logically possible to observe (Popper [1989] 1994, 83). A statement can be falsifiable in this sense although it is not in practice possible to falsify it

Well, some people claim that parapsychological research is not real science but "pseudoscience", whereas parapsychologists themselves would claim that they are practising legitimate science. How would something as minimalist as "science is what scientists do" help us to determine who's right in this case?

Is that all that this is about - scientists can be mean to other scientists, so they are looking for ways to defend themselves a priori (in a "we are so doing real science"..."are not"..."are so" kind of way)?

It seems pointless to try to figure it out a priori (is that a philosophy thing?). It seems to me that science does it in an easier way - figure it out post hoc by looking at where useful* results have been produced. 

Linda

* knowledge is progressive, it distinguishes between ideas which are true or false, it allows us to make predictions, it tightly constrains the possibilities, it generates novel information and observations

[Laird]

Is that all that this is about - scientists can be mean to other scientists, so they are looking for ways to defend themselves a priori (in a "we are so doing real science"..."are not"..."are so" kind of way)?

It seems pointless to try to figure it out a priori (is that a philosophy thing?). It seems to me that science does it in an easier way - figure it out post hoc by looking at where useful* results have been produced. 

Linda

* knowledge is progressive, it distinguishes between ideas which are true or false, it allows us to make predictions, it tightly constrains the possibilities, it generates novel information and observations

Well, that's a lot more useful than "science is what scientists do". I'm glad you've offered something with actual meat on its bones, especially your footnote. I'm not sure how specific a definition it is but then I think that the borders of science are anyway rather fuzzy; that it bleeds into philosophy amongst other rational pursuits.

Isn't it more useful to ask: based on the methods used, can we consider the results reliable? And if not, what can be done to get there?

This leaves open for methods that may not be typically called scientific (though reliability must still be established).