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From: [email protected] (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re: Science and methodology (was: Homeopathy ... tradition?)
In article [email protected] (Russell Turpin) writes:
>-*-----
>I wrote:
>>> ... Or, to use a phrasing that I think is more accurate, science
>>> is the investigation of phenomena that avoids methods and reasoning
>>> that are known to be erroneous from past foul-ups.
>
>In article [email protected] writes:
>> I can agree with this if you are talking about the less fundamental
>> aspects of scientific method. ...
> ...
>> ... In fact, I don't see the alternative, as I don't think that the
>> fundamentals are capable of experimental investigation. In saying
>> this I am agreeing with the work of people like Kuhn (1970),
>> Feyerabend (1981) and Lakatos (1972).
> ....
>While methodology cannot be subject to the same kind of "experimental
>investigation," as that to which it is applied, it *can* be critically
>appraised. Methodologies can be compared to each other, sometimes by
>the conflicting results they produce. This kind of critical appraisal
>and comparison, together with the inappropriateness of existing
>methodologies for new fields of study, is what drives the evolution of
>methodologies and how we think about them.
As usual, you are missing the whole point, Russell, because you are not
willing to even consider questionning your basic article of faith, which
is that science is merely a matter of methodology and that the highest
purpose of science is to avoid making mistakes.
This is like saying that the most important aspect of business management
is accurate bookkeeping.
If science were no more than methodology and not making mistakes, it
would be a poor thing indeed. What was the methodology of Darwin? What
was the methodology of Einstein? What was, for that matter, the
methodology of Jenner and Pasteur?
In an earlier article, Russell Turpin writes:
>None of the foregoing should be read as meaning that we should
>open the door to practitioners of quackery and psuedo-science.
>Modern advocates of homeopathy, chiropracty, and traditional
>Chinese medicine receive little respect because, for the most
>part, they use methods and reasoning that the kind of research
>Lee Lady recommends has shown to be terribly faulty. (This does
>*not* imply that all their treatments are ineffective. It *does*
>imply that those who rely on faulty methodology and reasoning are
>incapable of discovering *which* treatments are effective and
>which are not.)
First of all, I think you are arguing against a straw man, because I
don't think that anyone here is arguing that quackery, pseudo-science,
homeopathy, chiropracty, and traditional Chinese medicine should be
accepted as science. I, in particular, think the basic ideas of
homeopathy and chiropracty seem extremely flaky.
What some of us do believe, however, is that some of these things
(including some of the flaky ideas) are deserving of serious scientific
attention.
If in fact it were true, as you have stated above, that those who do not
use the currently fashionable methodology can have no idea what is
effective and what is not, then science today would not exist. For all
of current science is based on the past work of scientists whose
methodology, by current standards, was seriously flawed.
It is certainly true that as methodology improves, we need to re-examine
those results derived in the past using less perfect methodologies. It is
also true that the results obtained by people today who still rely on
those early methodologies needs to be re-examined in a more rigorous
fashion by those qualified to do so credibly.
But to say that nobody who fails to do elaborate double-blind studies is
capable of knowing their ass from a hole in the ground and to say that no
ideas that come from outside the scientific establishment could possibly
be worthy of serious investigation ... this truly marks one's attitude as
doctrinaire, cultist. This attitude is not compatible with a belief in
reason.
--
In the arguments between behaviorists and cognitivists, psychology seems
less like a science than a collection of competing religious sects.
[email protected][email protected]
