Demarcation problem
The demarcation problem in the philosophy of science is about how to distinguish between science and nonscience,[1] and more specifically, between science and pseudoscience.[2][3] The debate continues after over a century of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields, and despite broad agreement on the basics of scientific method.[4][5]
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Ancient Greek science [edit]
An early attempt at demarcation can be seen in the efforts of Greek natural philosophers and medical practitioners to distinguish their methods and their accounts of nature from the mythological or mystical accounts of their predecessors and contemporaries.[6]
Aristotle described at length what was involved in having scientific knowledge of something. To be scientific, he said, one must deal with causes, one must use logical demonstration, and one must identify the universals which 'inhere' in the particulars of sense. But above all, to have science one must have apodictic certainty. It is the last feature which, for Aristotle, most clearly distinguished the scientific way of knowing.[2]—Larry Laudan, Physics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis, "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem"
G. E. R. Lloyd notes that there was a sense in which the groups engaged in various forms of inquiry into nature set out to "legitimate their own positions,"[7] laying "claim to a new kind of wisdom ... that purported to yield superior enlightenment, even superior practical effectiveness."[8] Medical writers in the Hippocratic tradition maintained that their discussions were based on necessary demonstrations, a theme developed by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics.[9] One element of this polemic for science was an insistence on a clear and unequivocal presentation of arguments, rejecting the imagery, analogy, and myth of the old wisdom.[10] Some of their claimed naturalistic explanations of phenomena have been found to be quite fanciful, with little reliance on actual observations.[11]
Logical positivism [edit]
Logical positivism held that only statements about empirical observations and formal logical propositions are meaningful, and that statements which are not derived in this manner (including religious and metaphysical statements) are by nature meaningless (see the verifiability theory of meaning also known as verificationism).[12] After the Second World War, key tenets of logical positivism came under attack by philosophers such as Nelson Goodman and Willard Van Orman Quine. Nicholas G. Fotion comments that, "By the late 1960s it became obvious that the movement had pretty much run its course."[13] Most philosophers consider logical positivism to be, as John Passmore expressed it, "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes."[14] By the late 1970s, its ideas were so generally recognized to be seriously defective that one of its own main proponents, A. J. Ayer, said in an interview: "I suppose the most important [defect]...was that nearly all of it was false."[14]
Falsifiability [edit]
Falsifiability is the demarcation criterion proposed by Karl Popper as opposed to verificationism: "statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable observations".[15] Popper saw demarcation as a central problem in the philosophy of science. Unlike the Vienna Circle, Popper stated that his proposal was not a criterion of "meaningfulness".
Popper's demarcation criterion has been criticized both for excluding legitimate science… and for giving some pseudosciences the status of being scientific… According to Larry Laudan (1983, 121), it "has the untoward consequence of countenancing as 'scientific' every crank claim which makes ascertainably false assertions". Astrology, rightly taken by Popper as an unusually clear example of a pseudoscience, has in fact been tested and thoroughly refuted… Similarly, the major threats to the scientific status of psychoanalysis, another of his major targets, do not come from claims that it is untestable but from claims that it has been tested and failed the tests.[15]—Sven Ove Hansson, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Science and Pseudo-Science"
In Popper's later work, he stated that falsifiability is both a necessary and a sufficient criterion for demarcation. He described falsifiability as a property of "the logical structure of sentences and classes of sentences," so that a statement's scientific or non-scientific status does not change over time. This has been summarized as a statement being falsifiable "if and only if it logically contradicts some (empirical) sentence that describes a logically possible event that it would be logically possible to observe."[15]
Postpositivism [edit]
Thomas Kuhn, an American historian and philosopher of science, is often connected with what has been called postpositivism or postempiricism. In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn divided the process of doing science into two different endeavors, which he called normal science and extraordinary science (which he sometimes also called "revolutionary science"). "In Kuhn's view, 'it is normal science, in which Sir Karl's sort of testing does not occur, rather than extraordinary science which most nearly distinguishes science from other enterprises'…"[15] That is, the utility of a scientific paradigm for puzzle-solving, which suggests solutions to new problems while continuing to satisfy all of the problems solved by the paradigm that it replaces.
Kuhn's view of demarcation is most clearly expressed in his comparison of astronomy with astrology. Since antiquity, astronomy has been a puzzle-solving activity and therefore a science. If an astronomer's prediction failed, then this was a puzzle that he could hope to solve for instance with more measurements or with adjustments of the theory. In contrast, the astrologer had no such puzzles since in that discipline "particular failures did not give rise to research puzzles, for no man, however skilled, could make use of them in a constructive attempt to revise the astrological tradition"… Therefore, according to Kuhn, astrology has never been a science.[15]—Sven Ove Hansson, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Science and Pseudo-Science"
Popper criticized Kuhn's demarcation criterion, saying that astrologers are engaged in puzzle solving, and that therefore Kuhn's criterion recognized astrology as a science. He stated that Kuhn's criterion leads to a "major disaster…[the] replacement of a rational criterion of science by a sociological one".[15]
Feyerabend and Lakatos [edit]
Kuhn's work largely called into question Popper's demarcation, and emphasized the human, subjective quality of scientific change. Paul Feyerabend was concerned that the very question of demarcation was insidious: science itself had no need of a demarcation criterion, but instead some philosophers were seeking to justify a special position of authority from which science could dominate public discourse.[16] Feyerabend argued that science does not in fact occupy a special place in terms of either its logic or method, and no claim to special authority made by scientists can be upheld. He argued that, within the history of scientific practice, no rule or method can be found that has not been violated or circumvented at some point in order to advance scientific knowledge. Both Lakatos and Feyerabend suggest that science is not an autonomous form of reasoning, but is inseparable from the larger body of human thought and inquiry.
Thagard [edit]
Paul R. Thagard has proposed another set of principles to try to overcome these difficulties, and believes it is important for society to find a way of doing so. According to Thagard's method, a theory is not scientific if it satisfies two conditions:
- The theory has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and faces many unsolved problems; and...
- The community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations.[17][18]
Thagard specifies that sometimes theories will spend some time as merely "unpromising" before they truly deserve the title of pseudoscience. He cites astrology as an example: it was stagnant compared to advances in physics during the 17th century, and only later became "pseudoscience" in the advent of alternative explanations provided by psychology during the 19th century.
Thagard also states that his criteria should not be interpreted so narrowly as to allow willful ignorance of alternative explanations, or so broadly as to discount our modern science compared to science of the future. His definition is a practical one, which generally seeks to distinguish pseudoscience as areas of inquiry which are stagnant and without active scientific investigation.
Laudan [edit]
Larry Laudan concluded, after examining various historical attempts to establish a demarcation criterion, that "philosophy has failed to deliver the goods" in its attempts to distinguish science from non-science—to distinguish science from pseudoscience. None of the past attempts would be accepted by a majority of philosophers nor, in his view, should they be accepted by them or by anyone else. He stated that many well-founded beliefs are not scientific and, conversely, many scientific conjectures are not well-founded. He also stated that demarcation criteria were historically used as "machines de guerre" in polemical disputes between "scientists" and "pseudo-scientists." Advancing a number of examples from everyday practice of football and carpentry and non-scientific scholarship such as literary criticism and philosophy, he saw the question of whether a belief is well-founded or not to be more practically and philosophically significant than whether it is scientific or not. In his judgment, the demarcation between science and non-science was a pseudo-problem that would best be replaced by focusing on the distinction between reliable and unreliable knowledge, without bothering to ask whether that knowledge is scientific or not. He would consign phrases like "pseudo-science" or "unscientific" to the rhetoric of politicians or sociologists.[2] Laudan's argument has been criticized as relying on the assumption that any demarcation criterion has to provide a single necessary and sufficient condition for science,[19] while his arguments at the most establish that there has to be one necessary criterion and one possibly different sufficient criterion.[20]
See also [edit]
References [edit]
- ^ Resnik, David B. (2000). "A pragmatic approach to the demarcation problem". Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A 31 (2): 249–267. doi:10.1016/S0039-3681(00)00004-2.
- ^ a b c Laudan, Larry (1983), "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem", in Cohen, R.S.; Laudan, L., Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 76, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 111–127, ISBN 90-277-1533-5
- ^ Lakatos, I.; Feyerabend, P.; Motterlini, M. (1999). For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence. University of Chicago Press. p. 20. ISBN 9780226467740. LCCN 99013581. "The demarcation problem may be formulated in the following terms: what distinguishes science from pseudoscience? This is an extreme way of putting it, since the more general problem, called the Generalized Demarcation Problem, is really the problem of the appraisal of scientific theories, and attempts to answer the question: when is one theory better than another?"
- ^ Gauch, Hugh G., Jr. (2003). Scientific Method in Practice. pp. 3–7. ISBN 978-0-521-81689-2.
- ^ Cover, J. A.; Curd, Martin, eds. (1998). Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. pp. 1–82. ISBN 978-0-393-97175-0.
- ^ Lloyd, G. E. R. (1983), Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 79–80, ISBN 0-521-27307-2, "Faced with ... competition from a variety of more or less exploitative rival healers, the doctors responsible for many or most of the Hippocratic treatises unite, at least, in their desire to turn the practice of healing into a τἐχνη.... [N]ot only do they reject interference in most cases from priests and prophets, they also criticise many current practices and assumptions."
- ^ Lloyd, G. E. R. (1983), Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 215, ISBN 0-521-27307-2
- ^ Lloyd, G.E.R. (1986), The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science, Sather Classical Lectures 52, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 117–118, ISBN 0-520-06742-8
- ^ Lloyd, G.E.R. (1986), The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science, Sather Classical Lectures 52, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 141–147, ISBN 0-520-06742-8
- ^ Lloyd, G.E.R. (1986), The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science, Sather Classical Lectures 52, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 213–214, ISBN 0-520-06742-8
- ^ Lloyd, G.E.R. (1979), Magic Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origin and Development of Greek Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–27, ISBN 0-521-29641-2
- ^ Smith, L.D. (1986). Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance. Stanford University Press. p. 314. ISBN 9780804713016. LCCN 85030366. "The secondary and historical literature on logical positivism affords substantial grounds for concluding that logical positivism failed to solve many of the central problems it generated for itself. Prominent among the unsolved problems was the failure to find an acceptable statement of the verifiability (later confirmability) criterion of meaningfulness. Until a competing tradition emerged (about the late 1950's), the problems of logical positivism continued to be attacked from within that tradition. But as the new tradition in the philosophy of science began to demonstrate its effectiveness—by dissolving and rephrasing old problems as well as by generating new ones—philosophers began to shift allegiances to the new tradition, even though that tradition has yet to receive a canonical formulation."
- ^ Nicholas G. Fotion (1995). Ted Honderich, ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 508. ISBN 0-19-866132-0.
- ^ a b Hanfling, Oswald (2003). "Logical Positivism". Routledge History of Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 193f.
- ^ a b c d e f Hansson, Sven Ove (2008). "Science and Pseudo-Science". In Zalta, Edward N. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 ed.). 4.2 Falsificationism.
- ^ Taylor, C.A. (1996). Defining Science: A Rhetoric of Demarcation. Rhetoric of the Human Sciences Series. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 41. ISBN 9780299150341. LCCN 96000180.
- ^ Why Astrology Is A Pseudoscience, Paul R. Thagard, In Philosophy of Science Association 1978 Volume 1, edited by P.D. Asquith and I. Hacking (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1978).
- ^ Demarcation: Is there a Sharp Line Between Science and Pseudoscience? An Exploration of Sir Karl Popper's Conception of Falsification, Ray Hall, web version of slides, The Amaz!ng Meeting II, Las Vegas, January 17, 2004.
- ^ Thagard, Paul (1988), Computational Philosophy of Science, MIT Press, p. 159; Derksen, A. A. (1993), "The Seven Sins of Pseudo-Science", Journal for General Philosophy of Science 24 (1): 20; Mahner, Martin (2007), "Demarcating Science from Nonscience", in Theo, Kuipers, General Philosophy of Science - Focal Issues, Elsevier, pp. 521–522
- ^ Lutz, Sebastian (2011), "On an Allegedly Essential Feature of Criteria for the Demarcation of Science", The Reasoner 5 (8): 125–126
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