Reg Prescott

Oh gosh! Would you like to bet that (1) No one ever took Newtonian mechanics to be true? (I'll just need one counterexample, right?), and (2) No scientist has ever claimed that truth/reality is the object of scientific inquiry? (again, one counterexample should suffice, right?) Money for nothin' and yer chicks for free!! What do you wanna bet: how about everything you own? You can "straighten me out" any time you like, pal. This sure beats work

@ beecee As for quotes, I suppose I could mention Newtonian mechanics, which was regarded to be true with almost unquestioned certainty for two centuries or more. Now, we know better. Or J.C. Maxwell who proclaimed, roughly, that the luminiferous aether is the most highly confirmed entity in all of science. But instead, compare this (fairly typical) quote from the previous page... ... with your own assertion above that evolution "is as certain as anyone could wish for...and only a fool would deny that". You do see the tension? "As certain as can be" seems hard -- to say the least -- to reconcile with the claim that science always assumes itself to be wrong. This tension, I'd suggest, arises from a conflict between the following two intuitions: (1) Science is a fallible business. Everyone concedes this. Given the history of science, and its graveyard of abandoned theories, it is simply not plausible nowadays to claim that we, in this day and age, somehow occupy a privileged position; that our own most cherished theories will not one day also come crumbling down. And (2) When we forget about the larger picture sketched above in (1), and zoom in on any particular deeply-entrenched theory, evolutionary theory, say, it does appear that the evidence is "overwhelming" -- as it is typically described. How could it possibly be wrong? Only a fool would doubt it! Everyone admits to the fallibility of science; few are willing to concede that their own pet theory may be deeply flawed. It seems the fallibility always lies with someone else's theory. "Try the folks down the hall. My theory is just fine, thank you very much". "If there is one thing we can learn from the history of science, it is that the scientific theorizing of one day is looked on by that of the next as flawed and deficient. The clearest induction from the history of science is that science is always mistaken - that at every stage of its development, its practitioners, looking backward with the wisdom of hindsight, will view the work of their predecessors as seriously deficient and their theories as fundamentally mistaken. And if we adopt (as in candor we must) the modest view that we ourselves and our contemporaries do not occupy a privileged position in this respect, then we have no reasonable alternative but to suppose that much or all of what we ourselves vaunt as "scientific knowledge" is itself presumably wrong." -- Nicholas Rescher "The ephemeral nature of scientific theories takes by surprise the man of the world. Their brief period of prosperity ended, he sees them abandoned one after the other; he sees ruins piled upon ruins; he predicts that the theories in fashion today will in a short time succumb in their turn, and he concludes that they are absolutely in vain. This is what he calls the bankrupcy of science." -- Henri Poincare (Note: None of this is meant as a criticism of science. It is, rather, a criticism of what I see as your misrepresentation of science).

No one denies that science changes. It clearly does. The question here pertains to the nature of this change. An interesting parallel can be drawn between the more traditional, steady, gradualistic conception of evolutionary change vis-à-vis the punctuated equilibrium (PE) model of Gould and Eldredge. Popper's model of scientific change -- the one you appear to be defending -- resembles the former; Kuhn's model resembles the latter. On the Kuhnian model, as with PE, prolonged periods of stasis ("normal science") are typical. Orthodoxy, or mainstream theory, goes largely unquestioned. Challenges to mainstream doctrine (dare I say "dogma") are not welcome at all: cast aspersions on the reigning hegemony and one is liable to wind up very ill indeed. And judging by your own claims in various places on this site, beecee, to the effect that evolutionary theory has attained virtual certainty, as well as the often vicious hostility evinced to skeptics, I say we chalk up a point for Kuhn. But these lengthy periods of stasis in core doctrine -- on the Kuhnian account -- are punctuated by occasional bursts of crisis, sometimes resulting in massive conceptual change ("revolutionary science") when all hell breaks loose, criticism of orthodoxy flourishes, and a new orthodoxy eventually takes its place.

SamCogar mentioned above... ... to which Phi for All responded... I'll probably not win any friends by saying this, but I'd say Sam is, on this point at least, largely right, and Phi largely wrong -- with no disrespect intended to any of our members. Phi's sentiments reflect a vaguely Popperian view of science, one that is often repeated by scientists who, in many cases, quite understandably due to other commitments, are unable (or even unwilling) to keep abreast of developments in the history and philosophy of science. Popper's view goes something like this: Science can be described as a process of "critical rationalism" or "conjectures and refutations". Scientists are highly critical of their own theories, constantly subjecting them to "severe tests", and as soon as observation conflicts with theory, the theory is deemed falsified and must be rejected. There's a fascinating old black and white clip on Youtube of Richard Feynman teaching "the Scientific Method" in which he -- whether he knows it or not -- might as well have been reading directly from Popper. The last fifty years or so of research in the history and philosophy of science expose this view as woefully inadequate. Thomas Kuhn, for example, proposes a highly influential model, far more accurate than Popper's, in my view at least, under which science is bifurcated into "normal science" -- the vast majority of scientific work, and "revolutionary science" -- which, though rare, does indeed resemble the Popperian landscape. In times of normal science, in any given discipline, the overarching theoretical framework -- the "paradigm" in Kuhn's jargon -- is, by and large, not challenged (or "questioned") at all. Rather than being subjected to severe testing, it is simply taken for granted. Normal science is extremely conservative, dogmatic even. The word "dogma" is bound to ruffle feathers in some. For Kuhn, though, this dogmatic acceptance and defence of orthodoxy (i.e., the mainstream) is a key ingredient in what makes science so successful. It's precisely because scientists rally around the core tenets of the paradigm, discouraging dissent, that progress is made in what he terms "puzzle solving" -- reconciling recalcitrant evidence (cf. falsifying evidence) with theory. (As opposed to philosophy, say, where everything is up for grabs, a hundred flowers bloom, arguments seemingly never end, and progress is hard to discern) Scientists go to extreme lengths to protect their best theories from falsification. Examples illustrating this in the history of science are plentiful. What usually happens, as history attests, when observation/data/evidence appears to be at odds with theory is not abandonment of the theory (good theories are hard to come by, after all), as Popper insisted, but rather the theory is tweaked, blame is put somewhere else -- on background assumptions and so-called auxiliary hypotheses -- or else the intractable evidence is just left on the back burner as an "anomaly". In normal science, if anything is tested/challenged at all, it's not the reigning paradigm itself, but the scientist. If the scientist fails to make puzzling data/evidence fit the theoretical framework then that's her problem; the theory is just fine, thank you very much. (There's a marvellous clip of Richard Dawkins on Youtube where, unbeknownst to himself I guess, he says almost exactly this. Shout and I'll link). So is it true that mainstream science is "questioned all the time"? I don't think so. This is seen most starkly in the case of evolutionary theory (ET). Richard Dawkins -- him again -- is on record for claiming that to question evolution, one must be either "ignorant, stupid, insane, or... [wait for it] wicked". This is nonsense, of course. I could name several (non-religious) first rate thinkers who have expressed skepticism over the regnant neo-Darwinian hegemony. The reaction is invariably savage, to an almost staggering degree. The dissenter will be misrepresented (usually as a Creationist), ridiculed, and finally silenced. What Dawkins might have said instead is "Any ET skeptic will be portrayed as ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked".