You can do science without believing the science
One remarkable and, to my mind, wonderful thing about science is that you can do very good science without even thinking that the science you are doing is literally true. Many great scientists have been scientific anti-realists.
7 comments:
"you can do very good science without even thinking that the science you are doing is literally true"
That principle is probably valid for just about any human endeavor. A politician can be a total cynic and not believe one word of his campaign speeches, and yet end up accomplishing great things while in office. A preacher can be the biggest hypocrite in the world, and yet still bring thousands to Christ.
I can still recall my fall-on-the-floor shock when Howard Cosell, probably the greatest sportscaster in all history, near the end of his life said that he never thought what he was doing was at all important or meaningful because "it's only sports!"
I'm curious about this. Can you give us some examples?
David,
I was a close friend of astrophysicist Ron Lee (who sadly died last year of cancer), who repeatedly explained to me that no serious cosmologist ever thought that the more esoteric concepts related to the Big Bang were actually true in the sense that they described real world events, but were rather the best description in human terms of the mathematical models constructed to explain the current state of the universe.
Curiously, the process made sense while he was describing it.
But would science have arisen if anti-realism was the dominant metaphysical position in the early Modern era?
B. Prokop,
But the model-building attitude of scientists is nowise analogous to the cynicism. It is just appreciation of what science actually is.
I have found in interesting that while you do find people in physics saying "It's only a model," no one in evolutionary biology ever says this. Why?
Victor, which great anti-realist scientists do you have in mind? Newton perhaps with his 'hypotheses non fingo' or Mach with his resistance to atomism or the 'shut-up and calculate' attitude of the Copenhagen school? As you hint in your previous comment, outside of fundamental physics (and maybe cosmology judging from Bob) most scientists are realists, surely, just as most mathematicians are said to be platonists. It's only among philosophers of science that we find anti-realists. And I think this comes down to human psychology rather than the relative persuasiveness of philosophical argument. See Ian Hacking. But I may be wrong.
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