Monday, May 21, 2012

Scientific Truths Are Not Better Truths Than Just-Plain Truths

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5651

One of the key fallacies of scientism, in the sense of being the most destructive to common sense and personal wellbeing, is to suppose that any theory put forth in the name of science is therefore true, or certain enough to believe as true. The posited theory is, after all, scientific and, so scientism says, there is no better recommendation to truth than this.
This fallacy is field dependent, cropping up in some areas much more frequently than in others. It is rare, though still frequent enough in a mild sense, to find the speculations of chemists being refuted each new generation. But it is common as daylight to find the hypotheses put forth by sociologists, economists, and psychologists refuted not a generation after they are published, but often in the next issue of the same journal.
For example, the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson’s reviews the bad science and scientism behind the recent spate of experimentation “proving” conservatives are dumber/more inflexible/less compassionate/etc. than liberals, theories which are collected in Chris Mooney’s hagiography to scientism, The Republican Brain. (We began a collection of these studies here; please contribute. Also see Mike Flynn’s take on this.)

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I’ll insert my usual plea that soft scientists act more like their hard (knock) brothers. Do not just assemble a one-time shot of data and compute some statistical model and tell us how well that model fits your data, and then assume because this fit is “good” that therefore your conjectures are true.  (emphasis added) This is formally a fallacy and is the weakest kind of evidence there is, but (almost universally) the only kind which is offered.
Instead do two things: (1) find very effort to discover evidence which refutes your conjecture (and then tell us abou it). And (2) as hard scientists (often) do, make predictions of data you have never before seen. If you do both these things, then you can ask us to believe your conjectures. Otherwise, keep quiet.

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