This took me back to the ancient Greeks.
Along the way, I also read up on what we consider to be science, today. There is a wonderful book (which I lent to someone) either by a Notre Dame professor or by the Notre Dame press on the theory of scientific research.
Thus I met Karl Popper, figuratively speaking.
Sir Karl (eventually he received the British honor of knighthood) wanted a means of distinguishing real science from pseudo-science. That sounds like an interesting proposition, doesn't it? Are the theories of Sigmund Freud, the God of Psychoanalysis, psience or pseudo-psience.
Popper figured Freud to be hokum.
Here's how he did it.
He asked whether any of Freud's theories said anything capable of being tested. When you test a theory, you try to see whether some claim that it makes is false. If so, the theory is wrong to that extent. If the proposition withstands testing, it may remain provisionally valid until a further test shows otherwise, or a new theory supplants it.
But what happens if a theory is incapable of being tested? For example, an astrologer says that all people born under the sign of Taurus will have the following fate, or certain personality characteristics. There are billions of people in the world and no doubt some of Taurines will have that fate or characteristic. Does that prove the theory?
Not quite, for what about all the other Taurines who lack that fate or characteristic. The proposition cannot be tested, yet there are millions of people who enjoy reading the astrology columns printed in newspapers, and "Are you a Libra?" is said to remain a useful pickup line or conversational ice-breaker in bars catering to folks who don't think "What do you think of Wittgenstein?" is apt to be as useful.
Unfortunately for Freud, there was no practically no way to test anything he said, or wrote, or did, and a lot of people bit.
Freud told amazing stories. He and Einstein were seen by many as the two greatest scientists of the early 20th Century world. Hitler drove them both out of Europe.
Einstein said, here is my theory. If correct, it predicts that such-and-such will happen. But, said Einstein, if such-and-such doesn't happen, my theory is wrong, alas. Look for it. Freud didn't do that. He was a talk-therapist, not a scientist.
Smart people have been looking for a long time, and so far, I'm told, they haven't succeeded in falsifying any of Einstein's theories' predictions, which suggests that it is fairly rigorous, as scientific theories go, just as Newton's has proved to be. A high degree of confidence exists as to its correctness, but not certainty, also just as Newton's.
As with Newton's Theory of Gravity, despite millions of chances, no apple has yet fallen up.
Freud, on the other hand, has been discarded. In psychiatry school these days they teach pills, not Freudian slips, repression, and the interpretation of dreams. Psychoanalysis today is mainly the province of under-educated talk therapists and over-educated Gypsies.
What brought this on is the quote below, from the Volokh Conspiracy on Popper, falsificationism, and the new old fable, Intelligent Design, i.e. Creationism with a new label. Old vinegar in new wine bottles.
Intelligent Design is the new term for the catechism. God created me and the world, and please don't tell my anything different. And, Oh yes! Let's teach it in the schools. We'll re-write the texts.
Hitler re-wrote his texts, but that's another part of the same story that we'll have to reach another day.
See Hitler's Scientists by John Cornwell, Penguin, 2003. A Christmas gift I'm now reading, from Robbie, my 30 year old son, a graduate in Mechanical Engineering from Cal (B.S.) and Stanford (M.S.). Mr. Science, his high school teacher called him.
Here's the quote, by Jim Lindgren, Dec. 27, 2004:
Karl Popper & Intelligent Design.--
Rand Simberg has a good post on Intelligent Design (ID) (tip to Instapundit):
How science works is by putting forth theories that are disprovable, not ones that are provable. When all other theories have been disproven, those still standing are the ones adopted by most scientists. ID is not a scientific theory, because it fails the test of being disprovable (or to be more precise, non-falsifiable), right out of the box. If Hugh [Hewitt] doesn't believe this, then let him postulate an experiment that one could perform, even in thought, that would show it to be false. ID simply says, "I'm not smart enough to figure out how this structure could evolve, therefore there must have been a designer." That's not science--it's simply an invocation of a deus ex machina, whether its proponents are willing to admit it or not. And it doesn't belong in a science classroom, except as an example of what's not science.
I've made my position on this subject quite clear in the past. ID, and creationism in general should be able to be taught in the public schools. Just not in a science class--they need to be reserved for a class in comparative religions.
I agree both with Simberg's view of Intelligent Design and (generally) with his view of science, though Simberg is talking about the older, traditional view of how science works (the Karl Popper view). More common these days is the Kuhnian view of science (anomalies, rather than strict falsifiability)--and there are still other views of science that are more akin to postmodernism. Much theorizing in the social sciences these days follows more or less Milton Friedman's simpler test of a theory--how well it fits the data. One occasionally sees other views, such as the plausibility or truth of the premises of a theory.
One thing that strikes me about Intelligent Design is that it must have been much more intuitively appealing before the failure of socialism. Socialism in the 1920s--1940s was in part based on the idea that the world had become so complex that central planning was necessary to deal with this complexity. Yet Von Mises was arguing just the opposite, that as the world became more elaborate, no one could plan it. ID seems to be based on an assumption that most conservatives reject in the economic sphere--that as the economy gets more elaborate, to work well it must be the product of the intelligent design of a master planner.
UPDATE: At Blurred Brain is an interesting post
pointing out something that pro-capitalists have been saying for at
least a century, that capitalism is all about planning--planning by
millions of planners in an economy.
More at Rite Wing TechnoPagan, Catallarchy, and a Physicist's Perspective,
who points out that not all science fits the Popper criteria, which is
why I mentioned other theories of science and stated that I "generally"
(not completely) agreed with Simberg. Imago Dei argues that "We can have knowledge of things without falsification." Ambivablog asserts:
But, Jim! The whole point is that "divine" intelligence, or whatever you want to call it, is everywhere at once and can be trusted. (Like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand?) Only humans would be stupid enough to come up with the idea of central planning!
End quote.
RS Comment:
Perhaps we ought to tell kids, students, let's say from pre-school on, that they are natural-born scientists. Infants have to figure the world out by their own built-in scientific measuring devices: eyes, ears, touch, taste, smell, and feelings, all hard-wired into the greatest computer yet invented, complete with Artificial Intelligence and fuzzy-logic.
Kids are great scientists, until we beat it out of them with phony stories, that is.
Science is usually presented as a book of science. What's in this book must be science, otherwise it wouldn't be called a science book. Straightforward. Common sense will tell you that.
Why isn't science presented differently? Such as by describing it, even to little kids, as a game of questions and trying to find the answers, where you get a gold star whenever someone says something that you can show isn't true, but not by saying it's untrue because this is what someone told me. That's the game. We could do that.
Richard Feynman has a wonderful story in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Bantam/W.W. Norton, 1985, on his experience with being appointed to the committee that reviewed science books sold to California school districts. Wonderful in the sense that it will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who thinks how we think is important. Tears of laughter, among the other kind.
In sum, Feynman was given 300 pounds of science texts to read in time for the next meeting of the committee to approve science texts for California school kids. That amounted to seventeen feet of book shelves in his basement. But not to worry. The Committee would be happy to provide Feynman with someone to help him read them.
Feynman couldn't figure out how to do that. So he read them himself. And almost had apoplexy, they were so nonsense packed.
He showed up for the meeting feeling strange because he hadn't actually read all of the books. Some of them had nice covers, with authors names and nice science titles, but the pages were blank. So he couldn't report on their contents.
But that didn't stop the other committee members from giving favorable recommendations to the blank books.
It was the practice of the book publishing companies, when they didn't have their book complete in time for the annual review of books, simply to submit a cover and blank pages, so they'd be in the running to win the contract, which they would win, because the committee members were in on the game. They would forgive the well-known, respected publishing houses because the committee members knew that the publisher would eventually produce a proper science book. So they'd recommend it anyway.
I don't want to deprive you of the pleasure of reading Feynman, so I'll just say that his story continues and goes downhill from there. The chapter is called "Judging Books By Their Covers," at p. 262.
Feynman was, and remains since his death, our greatest popular exponent of eliminating the phonus-balonus from what passes for science in the world today. He is also our greatest popular advocate for the proper use of reason, in general, and not only in the scientific disciplines. I have to use the qualifier 'popular' to account for all the many less-well-known people in schools and other places throughout the land who are trying their level best to use their reason, despite considerable odds, as against Intelligent Design, for example.