The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays

The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays

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labreuer posted on r/debatereligion5d

Scientific disagreements occur within a broadly shared epistemic framework. Scientists generally agree on what counts as evidence, what methods are legitimate, what observations would count against a theory, and what would justify changing one's mind. What is your evidence for this claim? One of my mentors is a sociologist and he has had to constantly fight for the legitimacy of qualitative research. The difficulty of qualitative research is that it requires far more expertise than quantitative research. This increase in expertise is often castigated as "subjectivity". The chasm between qualitative & quantitative breaches your "broadly shared epistemic framework", or those four words just don't mean much. Paul Feyerabend blew open "what methods are legitimate" with his 1975 Against Method. He went through a number of dogmas on how science "should" be done and found scientists who violated them. For a fun deep dive, I suggest @Dr. Fatima's video How Galileo Broke the Scientific Method. Feyerabend got a lot of heat in 1975, because philosophers of science were still hoping that they would find something like a single algorithm for theory choice†. However, enough of Feyerabend's argument has been accepted to create serious problems for your claim‡. Imre Lakatos creates serious problems for "what observations would count against a theory". That is a Popperian point and the evidence flowing in from scientists facing problems with their theories did not bear it out. Here's a primer. Here is evidence of the kind of disagreement between scientists which you certainly seem to be saying just doesn't exist: Some years ago I asked the great global historian William H. McNeill to explain his method of writing history to a group of social, physical, and biological scientists attending a conference I’d organized. He at first resisted doing this, claiming that he had no particular method. When pressed, though, he described it as follows: I get curious about a problem and start reading up on it. What I read causes me to redefine the problem. Redefining the problem causes me to shift the direction of what I’m reading. That in turn further reshapes the problem, which further redirects the reading. I go back and forth like this until it feels right, then I write it up and ship it off to the publisher. McNeill’s presentation elicited expressions of disappointment, even derision, from the economists, sociologists, and political scientists present. “That’s not a method,” several of them exclaimed. “It’s not parsimonious, it doesn’t distinguish between independent and dependent variables, it hopelessly confuses induction and deduction.” But then there came a deep voice from the back of the room. “Yes, it is,” it growled. “That’s exactly how we do physics!”[34] (The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, 48) The historiographical method McNeill outlined here is remarkably similar to the hermeneutic circle. There has been tremendous resistance to any sort of hermeneutical science—that is, where the expertise of the scientist cannot be reduced to rigorous method leading to quantification and mathematical / computational work with the resultant numbers. There is a reason that Charles Taylor's journal article has more citations every time I reference it (3900 'citations', up from the 3700 of my last update): Taylor, Charles. "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man." Review of Metaphysics 25, no. 1 (1971): 3–51. The fight continues, to avoid positivistic approaches—that is, approaches which pretend away the fact that contingent social & cultural situation can profoundly influence the "laws of social nature" as it were, and that changes in the social & cultural situation can change those "laws". So, if you want to persist in claiming that there is a "universally accepted method for resolving those disagreements" in science, let's see it. † Hilary Putnam 2004: Epistemic Values are Values TooThe classical pragmatists, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, all held that value and normativity permeate all of experience. In the philosophy of science, what this point of view implied is that normative judgments are essential to the practice of science itself. These pragmatist philosophers did not refer only to the kind of normative judgments that we call "moral" or "ethical"; judgments of "coherence," "plausibility," "reasonableness," "simplicity," and of what Dirac famously called the beauty of a hypothesis, are all normative judgments in Charles Peirce's sense, judgments of "what ought to be" in the case of reasoning.[7] Carnap tried to avoid admitting this by seeking to reduce hypothesis-selection to an algorithm—a project to which he devoted most of his energies beginning in the early 1950s, but without success. In Chapter 7, I shall look in detail at this and other unsuccessful attempts by various logical positivists (as well as Karl Popper) to avoid conceding that theory selection always presupposes values, and we shall see that they were, one and all, failures. But just as these empiricist philosophers were determined to shut their eyes to the fact that judgment of coherence, simplicity (which is itself a whole bundle of different values, not just one "parameter"), beauty, naturalness, and so on, are presupposed by physical science, likewise many today who refer to values as purely "subjective" and science as purely "objective" continue to shut their eyes to this same fact. Yet coherence and simplicity and the like are values. (The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, 30–31) ‡ Penelope Maddy 2007: A deeper difficulty springs from the lesson won through decades of study in the philosophy of science: there is no hard and fast specification of what 'science' must be, no determinate criterion of the form 'x is science iff …'. It follows that there can be no straightforward definition of Second Philosophy along the lines 'trust only the methods of science'. Thus Second Philosophy, as I understand it, isn't a set of beliefs, a set of propositions to be affirmed; it has no theory. Since its contours can't be drawn by outright definition, I resort to the device of introducing a character, a particular sort of idealized inquirer called the Second Philosopher, and proceed by describing her thoughts and practices in a range of contexts; Second Philosophy is then to be understood as the product of her inquiries. (Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method, 1)

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