From: roy@vaxb.acs.unt.edu
Subject: Understanding science
Organization: University of North Texas
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 16:03:27 GMT


Folks at alt.astrology,

I thought that these humble notes will give astrologers a 
few arguments against outdated positivistic notions of science.

Regards, Roy

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UNDERSTANDING SCIENCE

The understanding of science and scientific method is often 
entertained by philosophers and historians of science. But 
because they rarely agree among themselves, there are as many 
understandings of science as there are philosophers. There are, 
however, three significant perspectives in the philosophy and 
history of science. They are logical empiricism, also called 
positivism, the notion of falsification advanced by Karl Popper, 
and the historiographical approach, also often referred to as the 
Kuhnian paradigm.

Although the three approaches understand scientific inquiry 
differently, they also share basic philosophical assumptions. 
They agree that the ultimate goal of science is the acquisition 
of knowledge and that not all knowledge is scientific. A claim is 
scientific only if there are good reasons such as consistency 
with observation and experimentation which provides the claim 
solid verification. Advocates of the three schools of thought 
agree that scientists seek to discover the laws of nature. They 
are also certain that scientists formulate unified systems of 
abstract concepts and principles that organize and explain 
observation, e.g., theories, such as Newton's gravitation and 
Darwin's evolution. The main controversy, however, primarily 
between logical empiricism and the historiographical approach on 
the meaning of the word "truth," generates differences of opinion 
in the definitions and characterization of the relationship 
between science and technology, and their social, ethical, and 
political implications.

Logical empiricism or positivism

The philosophical presuppositions of modern logical 
empiricism derives from the Ancient Greek ideal of objective 
knowledge. Greek philosophers, as we shall see in later chapters, 
believed that the goal of philosophy (which included all branches 
of learning) was objective--e.g., "true"--knowledge of the 
"nature of being" (their terminology). How, in other words, 
things really are in themselves. They were certain that the 
natural world is independent of human reasoning. The objective 
knowledge they sought was thus believed to accurately mirror 
nature of being. Referring to this ideal of objectivism as 
"theoria," Greek philosophers sought to discover the essential 
and unchanging principles or causes of nature. 

Distinguishing between theoria and crafts, the Greek 
philosophers argued that while theoria studied the principles of 
nature, the crafts addressed professional skills; while science 
dispassionately discovers the truths of nature, technology 
manipulates and controls nature for practical purposes. From the 
perspective of modern logical empiricism this is the distinction 
between pure and applied science. For both ancient Greek 
philosophers and modern positivists, technology applies 
theoretical knowledge to the manipulation of natural forces.

Modern logical empiricism also perpetuates three basic 
tenets of Ancient Greek philosophy. Logical empiricism postulates 
that, one, data obtained in experiments and observations are 
objective; two, there is one universal valid logic for science; 
and, three, through rigorous application of this knowledge 
scientists formulate theories. Their description of scientific 
inquiry clarifies these three fundamental assumptions. Motivated 
by previous knowledge scientists start research with a specific 
question and through observation and experimentation they 
formulate tentative hypotheses. Next they develop experimental 
models that either validate or invalidate the hypothesis. There 
is in this process a continuous oscillation among observation, 
experiment and hypothesis. If equal experiments conducted by 
different people at different times and places give identical 
results, then the hypothesis is accepted by the scientific 
community as true knowledge. This description of scientific 
method distinguishes between data and theory. Data carefully 
collected never changes over time, theoretical explanations of 
that data, however, evolves from generation to generation. 

The writings of Bacon on the problem of "prejudice" or 
"idols," as he referred to it, in science illustrates the 
positivistic ideal of modern logical empiricism. Bacon thought 
that the scientist should abstain as much as possible from human 
prejudices so the mind may grasp the objective reality of nature. 
In order to overcome such prejudices we must first understand 
them. He thought there were four such groups of prejudices: the 
idols of the tribe, cave, market place, and theater. 
 
The prejudices of the "Idol of the Tribe" have their 
foundation in human nature. The human constitution distorts and 
colors the perception of nature. For example, our senses perceive 
the world in ways that limit the objective collection of 
information about that world. We know, for example, that insects 
can see ultraviolet light much better than we do. The butterfly 
view of a flower is thus quite different from ours. Who sees 
flowers more accurately, humans or butterflies? In this sense, 
the limitations imposed on us by our own human nature biases our 
perception of the world. According to Bacon, we must seek to 
identify and overcome the limitations common to the whole "tribe" 
of human beings.

The prejudices of the "Idol of the Cave" result from the 
distortions peculiar to each individual. They are rooted in the 
particular cultural, educational, and family backgrounds of the 
individual. These are the prejudices imposed on us by our 
upbringing (in our own "caves") that limit and bias our 
perception and understanding of nature.

The prejudices of the "Idol of the Market Place" stem from 
distortions introduced into our thinking by the imprecision and 
inadequacies of human language. In the "market place of ideas" 
the ill-chosen word, the misconstrued meaning, the lost nuance, 
compound the problem of communicating exactly what we mean.

TheTheThe prejudices of the "Idol of the Theater" are the dogmas
of philosophical systems which have nothing to do with reality. 
They are artificial constructs that can only imperfectly imitate 
the reality of nature. Philosophical thought is like a stage 
play. Both pretend to be real but in fact they are poor and 
inadequate representations of reality.

Popper's notion of falsification

Popper was an Austrian philosopher of the first part of the 
twentieth century who sought to define science by distinguishing 
it from pseudo-science. He argued that the verification 
procedures and predictive capability of the inductive method was 
not the right criteria. He pointed out that all scientific 
systems, including the most obviously pseudo-scientific, such as 
Marxism and psychoanalysis, can always supply enough evidence 
supporting their claims. Psychoanalysts can always point out to 
case studies that validate their theories, and Marxists, even 
after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe still hold on 
to their "scientific" theories. 

Popper thus claimed that mere supporting evidence, e.g., 
empirical verification, in the form of observations and 
predictions of outcomes does not make a theory scientific. In 
fact, he argued, science was exactly the opposite of 
verificationism. The failure of Marxism and psychoanalysis was in 
the fact that everything can be explained and verified in the 
context of these theoretical systems. One can not, in other 
words, falsify their hypotheses. For that reason they are pseudo-
scientific systems of knowledge.

On the other hand, argued Popper, if the theoretical 
structure of real science is true then no specific phenomena can 
contradict the theory. If it does then the theory is no longer 
scientific. Einstein, for example, stated that certain phenomena 
could not happen if the physics of relativity was true, such as 
that light will not travel in a straight line when passing 
through a gravitational field. Should light, however, not bend 
under such conditions then the entire theoretical structure of 
relativity is mistaken.

Falsification not verificationism characterizes true 
science, concluded Popper. True scientific method results from 
the construction of falsifiable theories, e.g., theories that 
search for evidence that falsifies their assumptions. The degree 
of scientism of a theory is thus directly proportional to the 
ability to falsify its statements. Theories that can not be 
contradicted are pseudo-scientific. Popper called this criterion 
for science the "demarcation criterion."

A close study of Popper's falsificationism, however, reveals 
serious flaws. The statement that it is possible to predict the 
outcome of the American Cup by inspecting the liver of pigeons is 
not scientific merely because that statement is falsifiable! Many 
typically pseudo-scientific movements (marxism and phrenology, 
for example) are falsifiable. No matter, however, how scientific 
their methods pretend to be, the scientific establishment does 
not recognize them as scientific. They are not scientific merely 
because of their scientific procedures but because they violated 
scientific dogmas. Moreover the history of science has shown time 
after time that when scientists encounter falsifications or 
anomalies in their theories, they regard them as exceptions which 
they hope to explain in the context of the theory as they gather 
more evidence and knowledge. This issue brings us to the core of 
the historiographical approach of Thomas Kuhn.

Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolution"

The historiographical understanding of science and 
technology of Thomas Kuhn, a contemporary historian of science 
and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, are that 
there is no such thing as pure objective knowledge, that 
scientific method is not based exclusively on induction, and that 
science does not grow by accumulation of knowledge but rather by 
disruptive changes in the organization of knowledge. From Kuhn's 
perspective science does not have one universal logic, science is 
not value neutral, and observation and experimentation will never 
be totally objective.  

Every scientist at the long course of the history of science 
believed he or she was more objective than the scientists of the 
previous generation. In historical perspective we know, however, 
that they were discredited by following generations. Are they all 
talking about the same natural word? Nature has remained 
basically unchanged but every generation has a different 
understanding of nature. Is objective knowledge ever possible?

One of the arguments of positivism was a distinction between 
theoretical science and applied technology. Our knowledge of 
history, however, points out that technologists often create 
tools without any knowledge of the way they work or the 
theoretical fundamentals they imply. Humans have since antiquity, 
for example, manipulated metals. They lacked, however, 
theoretical metallurgical knowledge until quite recently. Arguing 
that there is no clear cut distinction between science and 
technology, historians who identify with Kuhn's philosophy of 
science rather divide the history of the relationship between 
science and technology into four distinct periods. The period of 
Ancient Greece through the 15th century, the Scientific 
Revolution (1540-1750), the Modern Age (1750-1940), and the 20th 
century (since 1940).

During the first period (Ancient Greece to the 15th  
century) science and technology were, indeed, pursued separately. 
Philosophy was entirely theoretical and had little or nothing to 
do with the crafts. During the period of the Scientific 
Revolution (1540-1750), however, science and technology were  
intimately  related.  Scientists wanted to understand nature in 
order to exploit it ("Knowledge is power.") Scientists were 
technologists and vice versa. In the modern period up to 1940, 
scientists and technologists constituted two distinct 
communities: the scientific and the technological, each 
generating their own research and knowledge. Since the 1940s both 
fields fused again. Scientists and technologists have no choice 
but to work together. It is not a love match but a marriage of 
convenience.

According to Kuhn it is not method, either of the 
verificationist of falsificationist types, that makes a system of 
knowledge scientific but rather the paradigm that permeates 
scientific activity.

Scientists of all ages, consciously or not, carry into their 
research laboratories a view of the world that is meta-
scientific. Such world views not only determine the subject and 
method of study but also hold the basic and often unconscious
scientific assumptions that are not testable or even questioned. 
Their obviousness is such that with only rare exceptions 
scientists are totally unaware of them. According to Lakatos, a 
contemporary British philosopher of science, these world views 
are protected by a "belt of testable hypotheses." It is this 
protective belt that is refined by experimentation and 
observation not the world view itself from which it derives.

New or controversial knowledge is tested not against the 
protective belt but the meta-scientific world view. The belt is 
there only to protect that view. The protective belt requires any 
new knowledge to undergo such a scrutiny and demands that it can 
be denied at almost any stage if it contradicts the meta-
scientific world view. The experimental subjects, setting, and 
procedures, as well as the analysis of the data are just some of 
the tests the new knowledge has to undergo. If the new knowledge 
does not conform to the meta-scientific world view it will not 
pass the scrutiny of the protective belt. The orthodox scientists 
may argue that the cases-studies or control groups were 
inappropriate, that the data fail to explain more significant 
assumptions, or that the procedures, collection of data, results, 
and predictions were wrongly inferred.

According to Kuhn in understanding science we ought to focus 
not on the protective belt but on the Weltanschauung (paradigm, 
structure, culture, or world view) of science. Science is carried 
on by people who socialize, belong to a community, and have 
economic/political interests. They are not isolated embodiments 
of neutral methodological procedures. A scientific community 
agrees on fundamentals, goals, views of the world, research 
methods, that are often unconscious and that they do not 
question. It is the guiding map without which there is no sense 
of direction or order. In science, according to Kuhn, such is 
also the function of the paradigm.

Kuhn also employed the notion of paradigm to explain 
progress in science. He argued that science progresses not 
because it is cumulative, as the positivists argued, but rather 
because it is disruptive. Science evolves through revolutions or 
disruptive changes in the paradigm that organizes the scientific 
facts, not by the accumulation of data that validates the 
paradigm.

At first, science is indeed cumulative. Scientists gather 
evidence and reason in favor of a theory or structure. In doing 
so a theory becomes a  closed self-explanatory system. They 
develop a "community" around this structure (they publish 
journals, have political interests, develop specific 
terminologies, etc). At some point, however, argued Kuhn, a 
contradiction or "anomalies" arise within the established 
structure of knowledge. More research follows and a new system or 
paradigm emerges that contradicts the established or "normal" 
theory. When enough evidence is available and some scientists 
accept it, the new paradigm separates itself from the orthodox 
structure. If in the long run the new paradigm attracts most of 
the scientists in the field, (a process often involving social 
conflict) the field is reorganized into a new structure. Kuhn 
called this process, the structure of scientific revolutions. He 
also argued that science progresses not through the careful 
accumulation of facts but rather through such disruptive 
paradigmatic changes or revolutions.

Moreover, ideas are not the only factors involved in 
establishing new paradigms within a scientific field. Social 
forces and tensions must also be taken into account. Put another 
way, those involved in developing alternative scientific 
hypotheses are not merely thinking entities. They are also social 
beings who in order to further their ideas need funds, grants, 
research facilities and, above all, intellectual stimulation via 
seminars, conventions and other communication channels, including 
journals and newsletters.

Once discontented scholars threaten the status quo in a  
scientific field, established scholars tend to become more 
conservative in their views and to boycott the malcontents by  
creating difficulties in the publication of research and denying 
either entrance to the academic institutions or tenure. Striving 
for scientific credibility in an unfair competition within a 
hostile environment, the discontented separate themselves from 
the status quo. They establish their own institutions and 
channels of communication. They, indeed, constitute a separate 
social organization. According to Kuhn, if the emerging paradigm, 
first, successfully explains the problematic phenomena that the 
old paradigm failed to explain and, second, wins the adherence of 
most of the scholars in the field, a scientific revolution takes 
place. 

Historians of science who take Kuhn seriously deny that 
science can ever be isolated from the social, religious and other 
Baconian prejudices. Weber, Merton and Hooykaas, for example, 
have argued exactly that. For them, science is an off-spring of 
religion and inseparable from civilization. These issues are 
pretty clear when we study the Scientific Revolution. The history 
of science, indeed, reveals that the logical empiricism 
understanding of science has no historical validation.

Bibliography available upon request.