Skip to main content

The Scientific Attitude - Lee McIntyre ****

Like many with a science background, I generally struggle to take philosophy of science seriously - it can too inward-looking and generally more fond of using impenetrably big words than having any true meaning. However, Lee McIntyre manages to make his take on the scientific method and the demarcation between science and either non-science or pseudoscience (we'll come back to that split) genuinely interesting.

Most of us come across the idea of the scientific method - the approach taken by scientists that gives science that 'special sauce' that makes it so good at doing what it does. Rather like the way that some physicists like to say that time doesn’t exist (until it’s dinner time), philosophers of science like to say the scientific method doesn’t exist - but then can’t help but acting as if it does. I think this is because they (and many scientists) want 'the scientific method ‘ to be a step-by-step series of rules, but Lee McIntyre makes it clear it’s something more like ‘Empirical evidence is key, and if evidence contradicts our theory then we change the theory.’ He calls this the 'scientific attitude' - but for me that's splitting hairs (I suppose that's what philosophers are for): it is a particular kind of method, based on principles rather than rules.

For the non-philosopher, McIntyre spends an inordinately long time trying to pin down whether this approach should be a necessary, sufficient or necessary and sufficient way of demarcating science from either non-science or pseudoscience. The distinction between the two of these opposing categories is whether we are merely trying to distinguish science from 'fake science' (e.g. climate change denial or intelligent design) or from legitimate disciplines which are not and never will be science, such as literature or music. Deciding demarcation is perhaps more interesting to insiders - the rest of us really just want to stop the pseudo-scientists and to get the 'soft sciences' onto a better scientific basis (give them more of a scientific attitude, McIntyre might say). 

 This latter is a point the book addresses at some length, as social science areas such as psychology, anthropology, sociology and economics use the tools of science but do not yet always do so with a properly scientific attitude. McIntyre interestingly suggests that these fields could model themselves on medicine, which went from being pretty much a pseudoscience to a true science relatively recently.

 There is a lot of good stuff here, but it could have been better. There is too much angels-on-a-pinhead worrying about demarcation, where we could have done with a lot more examples both from pseudoscience and the social sciences (I'd have liked to see some more detailed economics examples, for example). The coverage was too high level - it's the stories of specifics that engage us. Even so, as someone who generally struggles to take much philosophy of science seriously, this book interested me and helped me think a little more about what science is, how we should defend it against pseudoscience and how we should improve the near-science fields such as psychology and economics.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more