I intend to expand upon the questions proposed by Descartes, Hume and Popper. Knowledge requires definition as to what it is and how it is used. We don’t know what we don’t know but we can speculate based upon the limitations of what we do know or can state with a degree of certainty. I will examine the function of scientific doubt as a method and highlight where each of these men has utilised it, and to what purpose, then formulate my own insight into what it is useful about it now. Since we are dealing with three great minds that lived at different times (16th to 20th Centuries) and experienced science in different ways it is important to examine the method more than the situational examples.
What is knowledge?
Knowledge of the functions and principals of the physical universe is utilised by us, not invented by us, leverage existed as a principal before the lever. Man has by harnessing the principals of the universe gone on to apply them in creating great wonder but is incapable of exceeding them. Knowing is subject to further granular discovery within these innate principals but remains sufficient for harnessing them to create wonder if and only if this wonder does not rely on rules that are changeable; it would be impossible to create the quantum processor without first establishing a method of successfully predicting what it will produce. We see breakthroughs in science as the invention of a product or process that was not possible before like mobile phones making it possible to converse over large distances without the need for a wire but these things are better reframed as that which is and has been entirely possible since the formation of the universe but had not been reality until very recently.
Any device that we can theorise that conforms to the principals of the universe can and will be, if desirable, built sometime in the future. This is not wild speculation, for centuries inventors understood the principals of aeronautics before the first aeroplane was built, this is the understanding of principals preceding the exploitation of them. It is true that through observation the utilisation of a particular phenomenon can precede the understanding of the principals involved; like for medicine, where tribesmen used plants to cure illness long before scientist found out how this was possible (Butler, 2009), but that only indicates a lack of knowledge of them, not their absence. For the idea that there is no innate knowledge (Britannica, 2014) what about the offspring of absentee parents in the animal kingdom? Superprecocial animals are born able to run or fly or eat or swim without being taught to whereas altricial animals require nurture (Ehrlich et al, 1988). By this observation we can determine that knowledge of function or instinct is transferrable before observation is possible.
Representing
Mathematics is a way we understand the physical attributes of forces and substances that interact within the universe. Just as the word horse stands in place of a horse when used in the absence of the creature then we can say that mathematics stands in place within our understanding of the aforementioned interactions. 2+2 is 4 only because we use 2 and 4 to represent things that we can understand through some form of observation; it is of no matter that there are complicated mathematical forms that can go beyond any physical truth such as the folding of paper which is physically possible up to 13 times but theoretically possible exponentially because the fundament of mathematics remains rooted in a the basic inference of observable phenomenon which I have described. a problem we can highlight is that these representations may not be complete, 4 boulders gives no indication of anything other than the number of boulders, it does not speak to the nature of each boulder and the differences between the boulders.
Hume’s criticism
Hume doubts that accepting all that can be known is that COGITO (Descartes, 2008) even if true leads to establishing knowledge of anything else since establishing further truths will rely on accepting the truths of things that were doubted in the journey toward COGITO. Hume feels that reasonable scepticism is paramount for philosophical enquiry – begin with the clear and self evident truths, review frequently conclusions and examine accurately the consequences (Hume, 2008). Inductive reasoning relies on the premise that what has frequently happened under a certain set of circumstances will occur again and that we can build our prediction of the future upon knowledge that is not certain but has a high percentage chance of occurrence. This is not as desirable a situation as being able to know for certain what will happen (in the case of a deductive argument) but it is intuitively sufficient. Hume attempts to highlight that it is not.
For the example Hume gives of bread the flaw in his argument is one of definition; what resembles bread in every way perceptible is not bread by definition, a piece of wood could be made to look like a loaf to the eye but it is not a loaf because it is inedible. That which we refer to as bread is bread by the very fact that it is nourishing, if it were not it would not be bread. It is by the nature of what the bread does that we know it as bread, this is not to say that all items are defined by such measure as being what they do or are even referred to as such for a clock tells time and would still be called a clock (rightly or wrongly) if its hands did not move. In this way we can see that the properties that Hume ascribes to the bread are not the properties that make it nourishing, which was his point.
When Hume defies us to prove the rational process of predicting future events based on observations he is doing so at a time when science has made breakthroughs but is not yet sufficiently understood in general by the masses. Just as Newton’s theories were incomplete as were Einstein’s as will other scientist be ad infinitum. There will possibly be a point in time when enough can be known for a rationalisation of this process; for instance it is a stronger inductive argument that the sun will rise tomorrow than it would have been to predict its rise in Hume’s time because we understand the forces that shape the universe to such a degree that our current scientists can predict with an amount of certainty when the big yellow hydrogen reactor in the sky will convert all its material to helium and cease to be as about 6 billion years from now (Cain, 2012). It is in knowing more about the past and the present that we arrive at inductive conclusions with greater confidence. If we look at a timeline of science we can plot a trajectory from Newtonian physics on gravity which works perfectly within the boundary between low gravitational fields and relativistic fields onto Einstein’s theory of general relativity which works within a larger boundary but maybe not within a singularity such as a black hole and onto quantum and string theories which may yet further expand the discipline (Rennie, 2013). In this way we can say that science is always working within sufficient knowledge that is no less applicable or substantive an explanation for phenomenons when it is partially refuted. That is not to say that this knowledge cannot be rubbished entirely by new theories but in that case the observable phenomenon has not altered, only our explanation of it; our observations are still correct but our theory is wrong. In a case such as at a racetrack the punters are attempting to use statistics to induce (predict) a result based on regularly observed past events like a winning or the record of a jockey combined with a measurements like the conditions, but other factors that cannot be known play a role in changing the outcome of the event; for more regularly predictable sporting events such as tennis matches the odds reflect the higher probability of inductive success. We cannot say what can be known fundamentally but we can be surer through inductive reasoning based on high probabilities of success. Human behaviour will remain unpredictable for the time being but there is no reason to think that it will forever be that way, research into genetics may yield results that unlock our very desires and physics may someday portray all sentient beings as no more than complex machines in a predictable universe reacting only to stimulus (Determined). These are examples of outcomes that are changeable but for science the outcomes are more predictable because they are more consistent, it is this consistency that we rely on even if we do not fully grasp the mechanisms that underpin it and it is this consistency that drives us to make theories. We do not have a theory of tennis because the observable outcomes are not consistent enough.
Popper’s insight
Popper ignores the idea that science sets out to make theories from observations, from his writing we can see that he believes those theories come before any observation or method (Popper, 2008), I don’t completely agree with this in that observation is constant even if it is not conscious or disciplined; just in being a being in the world we are observing the attributes of the physical universe all of the time. For me Popper is arguing the finer points of whether the process of creating a theory is validly within science before a disciplined method is applied more than whether observation precedes theory or vice versa. Popper does make the point that any theory can be backed up by verification data if the subject wishes it to be and it is through the opposing data that we can clarify the falsehood of a theory which could otherwise be said to be true. It seems intuitive to us in this age that this would always be the case, but Popper points out where using other disciplines as an example it is easy to fall into thinking validation only is sufficient.
Conclusion
The opening title is true. This is of no matter; science can be wrong but remain a sufficiently usable tool of progress and understanding. Descartes, Hume and Popper are all correct in their criticisms of science, of knowledge and of each other and still science is not destroyed by doubt, it is enhanced and driven by it. I refer entirely in this essay to the period of science as we know it to be between the years that these philosophers were active right up to the present day because Descartes project was to deconstruct and reformulate the canons of knowledge that had existed prior to his time and changed radically with the threat to rationalism from empiricists, these canons are of little use to science as we recognise it now and still remain in the realm of philosophy. Aquinas, Augustine and most of the Greek philosopher’s works remain pertinent in enquiries into the human experience but may have little ground left to stand on scientifically.
Descartes, Hume and Popper highlight the shortcomings of theories that speculate on what cannot be known, I think modern science has a lot more confidence in saying that it can know things only to a percentage of certainty but that percentage holds true enough of the time that it is useful, I also think that scientist are much more open to the idea of saying in answer to a question “we don’t know” or “we are not sure” than they ever have been before. It is important that the distinction between what is definitive such as Descartes cogito (deductive) and Darwin’s evolution (inductive) is that Darwin’s work is presented as ‘the THEORY of evolution’ (Darwin, 1998) just as Newton’s, Einstein’s and Hawking’s work are. This very important inclusion of the word THEORY frames them as sufficient yet subject to revision; this indicates that scientists themselves appear very much aware that the opening title is true.
Paul Simon Wilson
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