Kuhn's view of scientific progress would leave us with a mystery: Why does anyone bother? If one scientific theory is only better than another in its ability to solve the problems that happen to be on our minds today, then why not save ourselves a lot of trouble by putting these problems out of our minds? We don't study elementary particles because they are intrinsically interesting, like people. They are not--if you have seen one electron, you've seen them all. What drives us onward in the work of science is precisely the sense that there are truths out there to be discovered, truths that once discovered will form a permanent part of human knowledge.
Steve Weinberg: New York Review of Books, Vol XLV, Number 15 (1998)
The first question about that is how Steve Weinberg figures he knows that electrons have that level of uniformity about them since current science still holds that scientists hardly know everything about any particular electron, that what they do know about electrons is due to their study of specific aspects of electrons such as have interested scientists enough to look into those and whether or not anything like a representative sample of electrons have been observed for a sufficient length of time to determine their uniformity over time and in context, considering that different electrons are found in quite different contexts. There are a hell of a lot of atoms and they are believed to persist for a lot longer than science has had to observe them. Much of what is held to be knowledge about them, held perhaps by Weinberg and certainly by many of the rest of us, rests firmly in the realm of the theoretical and not in physical observation of actual electrons. I question the extent to which what is believed to be known about that isn't, in fact, the product of which ever theory or temporary human paradigm rules the person believing they know it. Just another of those problems with the idea.
Those are just questions about the permanence of the knowledge he and his colleagues believe they have recovered will be in the context in which he made that claim, I have no insight into the validity of what he said, just into the possibility that it is short-sighted, as, in fact, all of all human thinking about everything is short sighted, limited by our limits at any given time and because of the limits of human ability as a species. Not even the collective activity of a number of very clever people will expand past their limits and the limits of what they can devise to extend their reach.
I'd point out something I've pointed out before, the greatest success in finding durable, perhaps permanent knowledge has been among things which are only known to be imaginary in the realm of mathematics and in physics and chemistry dealing with very simple things such as molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. Though the means of producing durable knowledge through mathematical analysis of observation, science,* quickly falls in potency even on the level of molecules and the more that the behavior of systems over time becomes more complex. The assumption that subatomic particles behave in some automatic fashion in ways that are entirely knowable (perhaps believed to be almost entirely known, among some of the more arrogant and less reflective true believers in materialism) and that that assumed character extends to every aspect of reality, including consciousness in living beings and the societies they live in is totally unfounded because that can't be known to be true of any entity in physical reality. That assumption might be tolerable and even useful in dealing with inorganic molecules of relative simplicity and in the smaller objects that modern physics deals in but it quickly becomes dangerous when dealing with living beings and the systems we depend on. We are certainly dependent on the science attempted and sometimes successful when dealing with living beings, especially human bodies, a lesson we are all either learning or not in the scientific management of the Covid-19 pandemic as with the campaigns against Small Pox (the only current success in the eradication of a terrible human disease - if the samples retained for scientific curiosity remain out of the human population) and the still not totally successful polio vaccines. But I'm not sure you can honestly consider that as the same kind of thing that Steve Weinberg does. A good part of the scientific management of the pandemic MUST take into account the reality that living beings do not behave like Weinberg assumes electrons should. That alone should demonstrate the very practical problem of trying to extend the materialist model of reality to everything.
The confidence of physicists, cosmologists, etc. today in the completeness of their knowledge is certainly matched by the confidence of their predecessors in periods that are now known to have not had anything like complete knowledge. I don't think there's any reason to believe that what they're saying today is anything like the last word or even close to it. That modern physics builds on what was previously known doesn't change that anymore than it's all dependent on the facts of arithmetic and the construction of the numbers system from time immemorial. I would like to know more about the impossibility of exactly calculating or coming up with a working representation of non-terminating value for pi and what that means for that number ever having an actual representation in physical reality. But I'd like to know lots of things I never will and which I doubt anyone ever will. One of the things I read about that claimed that, eventually, there would have to be a repeating pattern in the now seeming infinitely non-repeating decimal places so far calculated. I wonder if that's a matter of faith just as what Weinberg says or if there is some actually validated proof of it. My question is how would they know that.
* The relationship between physical objects and mathematics is as mysterious as the relationship between our minds (perhaps the only place where mathematics exists) and our physical bodies in classical dualism, one of the atheists' favorite things to point out. Anyone who wants to claim that that is understood, please show me where that is explained because I doubt it would stand up for long as knowledge.
Scientific knowledge has, in rather rapid order, insisted that the "truth" (i.e., universal discovery of fundamental understanding) will be found in chemistry; then evolution; then biology; then physics; then quantum mechanics; cosmology; genetics (the latest).
ReplyDeleteI'm sure I've left a few out, and started too late (19th century, chemistry) with that catalogue. Fact is, science has "promised" a fundamental truth since the Enlightenment, and has yet to produce one or even get past Hume's observation that knowledge is either analytic or synthetic in empiricism: it's either how much the stone weights (so what?, in the grand scheme of things. Useful knowledge to engineers, but hardly "Truth" with a capital "T") or it's unverifiable ("This flower is beautiful.")
And that was 18th century thinking. When is science going to catch up? Thomas Kuhn's reasoning is not refuted by Weisberg; Weisberg just proves he doesn't understand what Kuhn is talking about. Weisberg wants to save "truth" for science; but he doesn't understand that was never in the remit of science. He is not too clever for Kuhn; the problem is he is not clever enough.
I've seen many a scientist anxious to refute Kuhn's philosophy of science. But they lack even the understanding to know what Kuhn was arguing, much less the insight to refute it. He is to science what 19th century German scholars were to Christianity. And the reaction to Kuhn, as it was to the scholars, is pretty much a form of fundamentalism.
Ironic, no?