Philosophy of Science

I was exposed, at a young age, to the Creationism vs. Evolution debate, being in a church where the proponents of the former were in the majority. Something that aroused vicious and boiling rage within me was arguments that the other side's position was out of bounds because it conflicted with Philosophy of Science (hereafter abbreviated PoS). Evolutionist arguments along these lines amounted to saying that Creationists were mockable for believing in silly myths long since discredited by Science, and also that Creationists weren't allowed to answer back or query whether their myths really were discredited by Science. To have Creationism face prosecution but be denied defence seemed monstrously unfair and dishonest to my aspiring young scientist self who, naively, believed you should look at things according to the evidence. It also seemed incongruent with the argument that Creationism is discredited by Science - if the evidence is for you, do you really need to resort to rules-lawyering to get one over on the other side? (Creationist arguments that Evolution didn't count as Science were even sillier, and best left unmentioned.)

This, and atheist attempts to shanghai Science into their service by opposing PoS to faith, caused me to grow up viewing Philosophy of Science with contempt and disgust, as a tool of dishonest men or mere quibble of philosophers, a worthless parasite trying to hijack the glamour of Science. PoS is, after all, Philosophy and not Science, and as I wished to be a scientist and not a philosopher, I resolved to ignore it.

When I was an undergraduate chemist, my father (a scientist and Kantian idealist) opined that it was a shame that PoS was not taught in Science courses at university, because scientists should know what the background was for what they did. I disagreed, although was unable to express myself well.

In my final year as a chemistry undergrad, I had to carry out a research project. Hitherto I had never understood superstition and belief in fairies. Research gave me understanding. Getting reactions to work was like wrestling, or taming an animal. The official line is that variations in results were caused by imperfect control of reaction conditions, unnoticed errors, etc., or just "experimental noise" (a phrase every scientist understands, I think more intuitively than rationally). But the upshot was that I had to tame the experiment to my will by repetition and variation; when I got it to work, I was working to a degree by instinct. It was like cooking or art. I wrote up a procedure that had worked for me, but later attempts by others to reproduce my results did not do well. I kept my faith in a normally-deterministic universe (a subset of faith in God), but it was like faith in God can often get - detached from everyday life and rationalised away to the point of irrelevance.

I should confess I was never a good experimentalist, though. I eventually went into theory and became a computational chemist. It had bothered me occasionally that you can't prove that God (or the Devil) won't interfere with your experiment, and thus, you can never say for certain that the laws of Science will be the same from one moment till the next; but for a theoretician the same philosophical problem is posed by the system administrator as well. (A lesser version of the same problem is caused by the existence of co-workers.) The answer is the same - as a human being, you "know" the system admin (and/or God, who has root access to the laws of Physics) wishes the system to run smoothly and is not going to maliciously screw up your results, nor allow hackers (and/or the Devil) to screw them up for you. It's just something you can't prove.

As a doctoral student I found myself one day meditating on the limits and nature of the knowledge you can get by scientific experiment. With a shock, I realised I was engaged in philosophising about Science, and thus engaging in an activity I had hitherto not regarded highly. This caused me to mellow towards PoS significantly; although I still disagree with my father, and think that PoS need not be taught in the universities - loathing of PoS didn't stop me from becoming a scientist. It is scientific method that is important for Science; PoS is a philosophy of knowledge implied by that method. My error was in mistaking PoS for rank positivism, whereas in reality it has its place in any worldview where the world is normally mechanistic, as a meditation on how to examine the machina mundi. Atheists sometimes put forward the idea that non-atheist philosophies are wrong because of the success of Science - that the mediaevals who coined the phrase machina mundi were wrong and benighted and superstitious because investigation of the machina was more beneficial than they ever dared to dream, and the one true philosophy is that which accepts only the machina and nothing more. It is this sleight of hand that turns PoS ("this is how to examine the machine") into positivism ("it is meaningless to talk of anything except the machine") and which took me in and confused me.

So, I guess, this is basically a long-winded apology to Karl Popper et al. (not that he ever knew) for all those years when I thought of "Philosophy of Science" in terms too obscene to type out here.

EDIT: On further research, the phrase machina mundi was coined by Lucretius, who was a materialist; the more pious scholars of the Middle Ages liked the term a lot, though, and used it frequently.