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BGonline.org Forums
OT: Who's your chemical daddy?
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: OT: Who's your chemical daddy? (mamabear)
Date: Monday, 16 June 2008, at 5:41 a.m.
let me know if you consider economics a science.
Yes, sure.
It's not clear from what you say here where you place philosophy. I read the stuff occasionally and actually like Camus, but have the typical engineer's contempt for it.
That's ok. Engineers are not alone there. It was a philosopher who said "science is what we know, philosophy is what we don't know," and a sociobiologist who said "philosophy consists of the history of failed models of the brain." But the last chapter of Bertrand Russell's thin book Problems of Philosophy (1912) makes a good case, I think, that philosophy is useful even if it never answers any of the questions it asks.
Science, natural sciences, social sciences, mathematics and philosophy are imposed categories of areas of inquiry; they inform each other and may not have precise boundaries, which may change over time. So when you say
I don't buy much stock in what any [philosophers] say,
In which category are you putting ethics, aesthetics, logic, epistemology, political philosophy, the various philosophies of mind, science, physics, biology, law, economics, language, etc., and (what remains in the modern era of) metaphysics?
What you said about trying to fit reality to "inerrant beliefs" is exactly what I said about Lysenko's work, and in fact doing that is now called Lysenkoism. Scientists can be guilty of it on a smaller scale when their work is corrupted by the financial interests of the source of their paycheck ...
Lysenko was a well-connected political hack and a scientific fraud. That points to one way that science can be corrupted, if that's the word, especially (perhaps) in a country like the USSR where politicians decided who was a scientist and judges decided who was a poet. Certainly, scientists are human and may have venal, financial, egoistic and ideological interests, and some are simply dishonest. I don't think that's in dispute. On the other hand, the very nature and aim of scientific inquiry in an open society demands and promotes an atmosphere in which the truth -- "facts," if you like -- will out.
Unfortunately we need not go to Russia to find examples of bad science and bad scientists (or of good science and good scientists) twisted by financial and political interests and ideological ends. For some good examples, well-addressed, see Chris Mooney's The Republican War On Science (2006), Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981) and Daniel J. Kevles' In the Name of Eugenics (1986/1995).
For a shorter example, take the case of George Deutsch. In October 2005, Deutsch, a 24-year-old political appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters, sent a memo to one of NASA's website designers. Henceforth, Deutsch commanded, everywhere a NASA's scientist had written "Big Bang," the phrase would be replaced with "Big Bang Theory" because, Deutsch wrote, the Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion" and "it is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."
Our resident astronomer might share an opinion about what's wrong with that. Or see the Feb. 4, 2006 discussions at cosmicvariance.com and badastronomy.com.
... and rational people can differ markedly. That's fine as long as when more evidence becomes available, everyone is willing to admit it into the discussion.
The lack of such willingness does seem to be a problem.
"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California." -- Edward Abbey
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