Philosophy

Alabama and the GOP are discovering what this blog pointed out 15 years ago--if you're going to adopt a policy that embryos are full bearers of moral personhood, then you can't allow in-vitro fertilization (IVF). From my five-part debate with Vocab Malone about abortion in 2009: Once the zygote becomes a blastocyst, it forms into an outer layer of cells, which later becomes the placenta, and an inner cell mass of pluripotent embryonic stem cells, each of which is capable of differentiating into any kind of human cell. Only after this stage does the blastocyst implant in the wall of the uterus, about a week after fertilization, and begin taking nutrients directly from the blood of the mother--a dependency that can itself be of moral significance, as Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist argument shows. As already mentioned above, a great many fertilized ova do not reach this stage. Further, the percentages of implant failure are higher for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure which Vocab's criteria would have to declare unethical, even though it is the only way that many couples can have their own biological offspring. ...

A few prominent skeptics have been arguing that science and medicine should rely upon Bayesian epistemology. Massimo Pigliucci, in his book Nonsense on Stilts, on the Rationally Speaking podcast, and in his column in the Skeptical Inquirer, has suggested that scientists should best proceed with a Bayesian approach to updating their beliefs. Steven Novella and Kimball Atwood at the Science-Based Medicine blog (and at the Science-Based Medicine workshops at The Amazing Meeting) have similarly argued that what distinguishes Science-Based Medicine from Evidence-Based Medicine is the use of a Bayesian approach in accounting for the prior plausibility of theories is superior to simply relying upon the outcomes of randomized controlled trials to determine what’s a reasonable medical treatment. And, in the atheist community, Richard Carrier has argued for a Bayesian approach to history, and in particular for assessing claims of Christianity (though in the linked-to case, this turned out to be problematic and error-ridden). It’s worth observing that Bayesian epistemology has some serious unresolved problems, including among them the problem of prior probabilities and the problem of considering new evidence to have a probability of 1 [in simple conditionalization]. The former problem is that the prior assessment of the probability of a hypothesis plays a huge factor in the outcome of whether a hypothesis is accepted, and whether that prior probability is based on subjective probability, “gut feel,” old evidence, or arbitrarily selected to be 0.5 can produce different outcomes and doesn’t necessarily lead to concurrence even over a large amount of agreement on evidence. So, for example, Stephen Unwin has argued using Bayes’ theorem for the existence of God (starting with a prior probability of 0.5), and there was a lengthy debate between William Jefferys and York Dobyns in the Journal of Scientific Exploration about what the Bayesian approach yields regarding the reality of psi which didn’t yield agreement. The latter problem, of new evidence, is that a Bayesian approach considers new evidence to have a probability of 1, but evidence can itself be uncertain. And there are other problems as well–a Bayesian approach to epistemology seems to give special privilege to classical logic, not properly account for old evidence [(or its reduction in probability due to new evidence)] or the introduction of new theories, and not be a proper standard for judgment of rational belief change of human beings for the same reason on-the-spot act utilitarian calculations aren’t a proper standard for human moral decision making–it’s not a method that is practically psychologically realizable. The Bayesian approach has certainly been historically useful, as Desiree Schell’s interview with Sharon Bertsch McGrane, author of The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, demonstrates. But before concluding that Bayesianism is the objective rational way for individuals or groups to determine what’s true, it’s worth taking a look at the problems philosophers have pointed out for making it the central thesis of epistemology. (Also see John L. Pollock and Joseph Cruz, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, 2nd edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, which includes a critique of Bayesian epistemology.) UPDATE (August 6, 2013): Just came across this paper by Brandon Fitelson (PDF) defending Bayesian epistemology against some of Pollock’s critiques (in Pollock’s Nomic Probability book, which I’ve read, and in his later Thinking About Acting, which I’ve not read). A critique of how Bayesianism (and not really Bayesian epistemology in the sense defended by Fitelson) is being used by skeptics is here. ...

While listening to a recent Token Skeptic podcast of a Dragon*Con panel on Skepticism and Education moderated by D.J. Grothe of the James Randi Educational Foundation, I was struck by his repeated references to Skepticism as a worldview (which I put in uppercase to distinguish it from skepticism as a set of methods of inquiry, an attitude or approach). I wrote the following email to the podcast: I am sufficiently irritated by D.J. Grothe's repeated reference to skepticism as a "worldview" that I will probably be motivated to write a blog post about it.There is a growing ambiguity caused by overloading of the term "skepticism" on different things--attitudes, methods and processes, accumulated bodies of knowledge, a movement.  To date, there hasn't really been a capital-S Skepticism as a worldview since the Pyrrhonean philosophical variety.  A worldview is an all-encompassing view of the world which addresses how one should believe, how one should act, what kinds of things exist, and so forth.  It includes presuppositions not only about factual matters, but about values. The skepticisms worth promoting are attitudes, methods and processes, and accumulated bodies of knowledge that are consistent with a wide variety of world views.  The methods are contextual, applied against a background of social institutions and relationships that are based on trust.  There is room in the broader skeptical movement for pluralism, a diversity of approaches that set the skepticisms in different contexts for different purposes--educational, political, philosophical, religious.  An unrestricted skepticism is corrosive and undermines all knowledge, for there is no good epistemological response to philosophical skepticism that doesn't make some assumptions.Trying to turn skepticism into a capital-S Skeptical worldview strikes me as misguided.To my mind, what's most important and useful about skepticism is that it drives the adoption of the best available tools for answering questions, providing more guidance on how to think than on what to think, and on how to recognize trustworthy sources and people to rely upon.  There's not a completely sharp line between these--knowledge about methods and their accuracy is dependent upon factual knowledge, of course. I think the recent exchanges about the Missouri Skepticon conference really being an atheist conference may partly have this issue behind them, though I think there are further issues there as well about the traditional scope of "scientific skepticism" being restricted to "testable claims" and the notion of methodological naturalism that I don't entirely agree with.  Skepticism is about critical thinking, inquiry, investigation, and using the best methods available to find reliable answers to questions (and promoting broader use of those tools), while atheism is about holding a particular position on a particular issue, that no gods exist.  The broader skeptical movement produces greater social benefits by promoting more critical thinking in the general public than does the narrower group of skeptical atheists who primarily argue against religion and especially the smaller subset who are so obsessed that they are immediately dismissed by the broader public as monomaniacal cranks.  The organized skeptical groups with decades of history have mainly taken pains to avoid being represented by or identified with the latter, and as a result have been represented by skeptics of a variety of religious views in events of lasting consequence. Think, for example, of the audience for Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and his subsequent works, or of the outcome of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. In my opinion, the distinction between skepticism and atheism is an important one, and I think Skepticon does blur and confuse that distinction by using the "skeptic" name and having a single focus on religion. This doesn't mean that most of the atheists participating in that conference don't qualify as skeptics, or even that atheist groups promoting rationality on religious subjects don't count as part of the broader skeptical movement.  It just means that there is a genuine distinction to be drawn. (BTW, I don't think atheism is a worldview, either--it's a single feature of a worldview, and one that is less important to my mind than skepticism.) Previous posts on related subjects: "A few comments on the nature and scope of skepticism" "Skepticism, belief revision, and science" "Massimo Pigliucci on the scope of skeptical inquiry" Also related, a 1999 letter to the editor of Skeptical Inquirer from the leaders of many local skeptical groups (Daniel Barnett, North Texas Skeptics, Dallas, TX; David Bloomberg, Rational Examination Association of Lincoln Land, Springfield, IL; Tim Holmes, Taiwan Skeptics, Tanzu, Taiwan; Peter Huston, Inquiring Skeptics of Upper New York, Schenectady, NY; Paul Jaffe, National Capitol Area Skeptics, Washington, D.C.; Eric Krieg, Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, Philadelphia, PA; Scott Lilienfeld, Georgia Skeptics, Atlanta, GA; Jim Lippard, Phoenix Skeptics and Tucson Skeptical Society, Tucson, AZ; Rebecca Long, Georgia Skeptics, Atlanta, GA; Lori Marino, Georgia Skeptics, Atlanta, GA; Rick Moen, Bay Area Skeptics, Menlo Park, CA; Steven Novella, New England Skeptical Society, New Haven, CT; Bela Scheiber, Rocky Mountain Skeptics, Denver, CO; and Michael Sofka, Inquiring Skeptics of Upper New York, Troy, NY). UPDATE (December 1, 2010): D.J. Grothe states in the most recent (Nov. 26) Point of Inquiry podcast (Karen Stollznow interviews James Randi and D.J. Grothe), at about 36:50, that he has been misunderstood in his references to skepticism as a "worldview."  This suggests to me that he has in mind a narrower meaning, as Barbara Drescher has interpreted him in the comments below.  My apologies to D.J. for misconstruing his meaning. Michael C. Rush (2010-11-20): You make some good points, but ultimately I am unconvinced, I think. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to use "skeptic" in a manner analogous to how we would use "cynic," "idealist," or "epicure" in the modern sense, as general categories expressing one's dominant tendencies in approaching and assessing the world without requiring absolute fidelity to some ancient philosophy or formulation. Being open to questioning everything does not, it seems to me, imply rejection of everything. As for the skepticism/atheism issue, I think a person could be an atheist without being a skeptic, but I think it would be pretty silly. A "faith-based" atheism isn't of much interest or use. Can a person, conversely, be a skeptic without being an atheist? Clearly, but not, I would argue, a very good one. ...

Vocab Malone, with whom I had a blog debate about abortion and personhood last year, recently came across this comment of mine on the Point of Inquiry podcast with Jen Roth, an atheist who argues for the immorality of abortion: Was Jen Roth ultimately arguing that personhood is something that a human organism has for its entire lifecycle? At what starting point? Conception, implantation, or something else? I find it completely implausible that an organism at a life stage with no capacity for perception, let alone reason, counts as a person. Nor that a particular genetic code is either necessary or sufficient for personhood. I think every point that she made was brought up in a debate I had with a Christian blogger on the topic of abortion, who similarly argued for an equation between personhood and human organism. I wonder if she has any better rejoinders. Does she think that IVF and therapeutic cloning are immoral? IUDs?Vocab claimed that my argument was a "Chewbacca argument," a smoke screen, or a slippery slope argument, but in fact it is none of these.  I posted the following comment in response to him: Vocab:The argument I made is not a slippery slope argument, it's a reductio ad absurdum.  Your position is that the human organism is a person and has a right to life from fertilization to death (and presumably beyond), so you've already gone down the "slippery slope" and must of necessity say that IVF, therapeutic cloning, and IUDs are immoral because they result in the destruction and death of fertilized ova.  My position is that it is absurd to think that these things are immoral, and if you were to avoid the slippery slope by agreeing with me, you would have contradicted a logical consequence of your own position--thus, a reductio ad absurdum by being committed to a proposition and its negation.A slippery slope argument is an argument that says your position is committed to some consequence because there is no criterion that you can use to draw a line to avoid.  For example, if I argued that your position committed you to giving a right to life to all animals, and required you to be a vegetarian, or that it required you to give a right to life to every organism with DNA, and required you to hold a position like the Jain religion that all killing is wrong.As it happens, you never did supply an account of just what it is about the human organism that gives it a right to life or personhood--you offered no constitutive account of what properties entail a right to life or personhood, other than a genetic one.  I made the case near the end of our debate that you are probably implicitly assuming that personhood comes from a soul, and that souls are connected to human organisms at the point of fertilization, but there's clearly no evidence for that position, scientific, philosophical, or theological.BTW, my argument is also clearly not a Chewbacca argument or smoke screen, which is a simple non sequitur.  To think that, you would have to fail to understand that the items I identified all result in the destruction of fertilized human ova.It's important to note that not all slippery slope arguments are fallacious--if there really is no criterion to stop the fall down the slope, the argument is valid.  As Vocab never did explain what it is about human organisms that make them rights-bearers, I think he does face the slippery slope argument I presented unless he can offer some criterion for distinguishing human organisms from other organisms with respect to having a right to life. M! (2010-11-17): Let me be concise and clear: I do think *most* forms of IVF (there's a way to do it that hypothetically would be ethical), therapeutic cloning, and IUD's (they act as abortifacients) are unethical. This is the only logically consistent position to take if one understands that the ontology of the human being is such that all humans are persons and all persons have inherent and inalienable rights, the foremost of which is the right to life. ...

Veteran software tester Abe Heward has started up a blog on software testing, which I’m sure will also include many items of epistemological, economic, and skeptical interest. He’s already got posts on how the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is relevant to software testing, why good testers aren’t robots (and the flaws in one company’s attempt to treat them as if they were), and on opportunity cost and testing automation. Check it out at www.abeheward.com.

The prominent skeptic Martin Gardner, mathematician, philosopher, magician, and writer, died today at the age of 95 (b. October 21, 1914, d. May 22, 2010). He was one of the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), and had been part of the earlier Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal along with CSICOP founding members Ray Hyman, James Randi, and Marcello Truzzi. Long before that, he wrote one of the classic texts debunking pseudoscience, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (the Dover 2nd edition was published in 1957). For many years (1956-1981) he was the author of the Scientific American column, “Mathematical Games” (taken over by Douglas Hofstadter and retitled “Metamagical Themas”), and he wrote a regular “Notes of a Psi-Watcher” column for the Skeptical Inquirer right up to the present. His 70+ books included a semi-autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm, a book explaining his philosophical positions including why he wasn’t an atheist, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, and an annotated version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland works, The Annotated Alice. He had been scheduled to appear by video link at the upcoming The Amazing Meeting 8 in Las Vegas, where a number of other skeptical old timers will be appearing on discussion panels. His death is a great loss. I never met Gardner, but was first introduced to his work reading his “Mathematical Games” column in the late 70’s, and then his Fads and Fallacies and Skeptical Inquirer columns. Gardner, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and James Randi were the first major figures I identified as skeptical role models. One of the great honors of my life was receiving the Martin Gardner Award for Best Skeptical Critic from the Skeptics Society in 1996. A Martin Gardner documentary that is part of “The Nature of Things” may be found online, and Scientific American has republished online its December 1995 profile of Gardner. Here’s a transcript of a February 1979 telephone interview between Martin Gardner and five mathematicians (thanks to Anthony Barcellos for transcribing it and bringing it to my attention in the comments below). Various tributes: ...

On the last day of my class on Scientific Revolutions and the law, one of the students in the class, Lijing Jiang, gave a presentation titled “To Consider the Heavens: The Incorporation of Jesuit Astronomy in the Seventeenth Century Chinese Court." Her presentation was about how Jesuit missionaries in China brought western astronomy with them, and how it was received. This added a very interesting complement to the course, as much of the early part of the semester was about the Copernican revolution (using Kuhn’s book of the same name). Part of what happened early on in astronomy was a division between cosmology and positional astronomy, with the former being about the actual nature of the heavens, and the latter being about creating mathematical models for prediction, to be used for navigation and calendar-setting that incorporated features not intended to represent reality (like epicycles). These two types of astronomy didn’t really get reconnected (aside from the occasional realist depiction of epicycles in crystalline spheres) until Galileo argued for a realist interpretation of the Copernican model. And that didn’t fully catch on until Newton. In China, calendar reform was very important as they used a combination of a lunar month (based on phases of the moon) and tropical year that had to be synchronized annually, and an unpredicted eclipse was considered to be a bad omen. The Chinese had gone through many calendar reforms as a result of these requirements, and they considered that theories needed to be revised about every 300 years (in other realms as well, not just astronomy). The Jesuits happened to bring Copernican astronomy to China in the late 16th/early 17th century, with a goal of impressing and converting the Emperor. They got their big chance to make a splash in 1610, when the Chinese court astronomers mispredicted a solar eclipse by one day, which the Jesuits predicted correctly in advance. But this turned out in a way to be poorly timed, as the Counter-Reformation decided to start cracking down on Copernican heliocentrism after 1610, making it a formal doctrinal issue in 1616. The Jesuits in China thus switched to the Tychonic system which was geometrically equivalent to the Copernican model but geocentric. Multiple factors persuaded the Chinese to maintain a relativistic, anti-realist understanding of positional astronomy beyond the Scientific Revolution. In addition to Taoist and Buddhist views of life involving constant change and their past experience with calendars suggesting revisions every 300 years, the Jesuits presented another example of apparent arbitrariness in cosmological model selection, and they continued to stick with the Tychonic model as the western world switched to heliocentrism. You can read Lijing Jiang’s blogging at Science in a Mirror, where she may post something about her presentation in the future. ...

Being modern, argues Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern (1993, Harvard Univ. Press), involves drawing a sharp distinction between “nature” and “culture,” through a process of “purification” that separates everything into one or the other of these categories. It also involves breaking with the past: “Modernization consists in continually exiting from an obscure age that mingled the needs of society with scientific truth, in order to enter into a new age that will finally distinguish clearly what belongs to atemporal nature and what comes from humans, what depends on things and what belongs to signs” (p. 71). But hold on a moment–who actually advocates that kind of a sharp division between nature and culture, without acknowledging that human beings and their cultures are themselves a part of the natural order of things? As the 1991 Love and Rockets song, “No New Tale to Tell,” said: “You cannot go against nature / because when you do / go against nature / it’s part of nature, too.” Trying to divide the contents of the universe into a sharp dichotomy often yields a fuzzy edge, if not outright paradox. While Latour is right to object to such a sharp distinction (or separation) and to argue for a recognition that much of the world consists of “hybrids” that include natural and cultural aspects (true of both material objects and ideas), I’m not convinced that he’s correctly diagnosed a genuine malady when he writes that “Moderns … refuse to conceptualize quasi-objects as such. In their eyes, hybrids present the horror that must be avoided at all costs by a ceaseless, even maniacal purification” (p. 112). Latour writes that anthropologists do not study modern cultures in the manner that they study premodern cultures. For premoderns, an ethnographer will generate “a single narrative that weaves together the way people regard the heavens and their ancestors, the way they build houses and the way they grow yams or manioc or rice, the way they construct their government and their cosmology,” but that this is not done for modern societies because “our fabric is no longer seamless” (p. 7). True, but the real problem for such ethnography is not that we don’t have such a unified picture of the world (and we don’t) but that we have massive complexity and specialization–a complexity which Latour implicitly recognizes (pp. 100-101) but doesn’t draw out as a reason. The argument that Latour makes in the book builds upon this initial division of nature and culture by the process of “purification” with a second division between “works of purification” and “works of translation,” “translation” being a four-step process of his advocated framework of actor-network theory that he actually doesn’t discuss much in this book. He proposes that the “modern constitution” contains “works of translation”–networks of hybrid quasi-objects–as a hidden and unrecognized layer that needs to be made explicit in order to be “nonmodern” (p. 138) or “amodern” (p. 90) and avoid the paradoxes of modernity (or other problems of anti-modernity, pre-modernity, and post-modernity). His attempt to draw the big picture is interesting and often frustrating, as when he makes unargued-for claims that appear to be false, e.g., “as concepts, ‘local’ and ‘global’ work well for surfaces and geometry, but very badly for networks and topology’” (p. 119); “the West may believe that universal gravitation is universal even in the absence of any instrument, any calculation, any decoding, any laboratory … but these are respectable beliefs that comparative anthropology is no longer obliged to share” (p. 120; also p. 24); speaking of “time” being reversible where he apparently means “change” or perhaps “progress” (p. 73); his putting “universality” and “rationality” on a list of values of moderns to be rejected (p. 135). I’m not sure how it makes sense to deny the possibility of universal generalizations while putting forth a proposed framework for the understanding of everything. My favorite parts of the book were his recounting of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (pp. 15-29) and his critique of that project, and his summary of objections to postmodernism (p. 90). Latour is correct, I think, in his critique that those who try to explain the results of science solely in terms of social factors are making a mistake that privileges “social” over “natural” in the same way that attempting to explain them without any regard to social factors privileges “natural” over “social.” He writes to the postmodernists (p. 90): “Are you not fed up at finding yourselves forever locked into language alone, or imprisoned in social representations alone, as so many social scientists would like you to be? We want to gain access to things themselves, not only their phenomena. The real is not remote; rather, it is accessible in all the objects mobilized throughout the world. Doesn’t external reality abound right here among us?” In a commentary on this post, Gretchen G. observed that we do regularly engage in the process of “purification” about our concepts and attitudes towards propositions in order to make day-to-day decisions–and I think she’s right. We do regard things as scientific or not scientific, plausible or not plausible, true or false, even while we recognize that there may be fuzzy edges and indeterminate cases. And we tend not to like the fuzzy cases, and to want to put them into one category or the other. In some cases, this may be merely an epistemological problem of our human (and Humean) predicament where there is a fact of the matter; in others, our very categories may themselves be fuzzy and not fit reality (“carve nature at its joints”). [A slightly different version of the above was written for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Gretchen G. for her comments. An entertaining critique of Latour’s earlier book Science in Action is Olga Amsterdamska’s “Surely You’re Joking, Monsieur Latour!", Science, Technology, and Human Values vol. 15, no. 4 (1990): 495-504.]

James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (about which I’ve blogged previously) talks about how the state imposes standards in order to make features legible, countable, regulatable, and taxable. J. Stephen Lansing’s Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali describes a case where the reverse happened. When Bali tried to impose a top-down system of scientifically designed order–a system of water management–on Balinese rice farmers, in the name of modernization in the early 1970s, the result was a brief increase in productivity followed by disaster. Rather than lead to more efficient use of water and continued improved crop yields, it produced pest outbreaks which destroyed crops. An investment of $55 million in Romijn gates to control water flow in irrigation canals had the opposite of the intended effect. Farmers removed the gates or lifted them out of the water and left them to rust, upsetting the consultants and officials behind the project. Pesticides delivered to farmers resulted in brown leafhoppers becoming resistant to pesticides, and supplied fertilizers washed into the rivers and killed coral reefs at the mouths of the rivers. Lansing was part of a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation in 1983 that evaluated the Balinese farmers’ traditional water management system to understand how it worked. The farmers of each village belong to subaks, or organizations that manage rice terraces and irrigation systems, which are referred to in Balinese writings going back at least a thousand years. Lansing notes that “Between them, the village and subak assemblies govern most aspects of a farmer’s social, economic, and spiritual life.” Lansing’s team found that the Balinese system of water temples, religious ritual, and irrigation managed by the subaks would synchronize fallow periods of contiguous segments of terraces, so that long segments could be kept flooded after harvest, killing pests by depriving them of habitat. But their attempt and that of the farmers to persuade the government to allow the traditional system to continue fell upon deaf ears, and the modernization scheme continued to be pushed. In 1987, Lansing worked with James Kremer to develop a computer model of the Balinese water temple system, and ran a simulation using historical rainfall data. This translation of the traditional system into scientific explanation showed that the traditional system was more effective than the modernized system, and government officials were persuaded to allow and encourage a return to the traditional system. The Balinese system of farming is an example of how local knowledge can develop and become embedded in a “premodern” society by mechanisms other than conscious and intentional scientific investigation (in this case, probably more like a form of evolution), and be invisible to the state until it is specifically studied. It’s also a case where the religious aspects of the traditional system may have contributed to its dismissal by the modern experts. What I find of particular interest here is to what extent the local knowledge was simply embedded into the practices, and not known by any of the participants–were they just doing what they’ve “always” done (with practices that have evolved over the last 1,000 years), in a circumstance where the system as a whole “knows,” but no individual had an understanding until Lansing and Kremer built and tested a model of what they were doing? [A slightly different version of the above was written for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Brenda T. for her comments. More on Lansing’s work in Bali may be found online here.] ...

It’s a bad misconception about evolution that it proceeds in a linear progression of one successfully evolving species after another displacing its immediate ancestors. Such a conception of human history is equally mistaken, and is often criticized with terms such as “Whiggish history” or “determinism” with a variety of adjectives (technological, social, cultural, historical). That includes the history of science, where the first version we often hear is one that has been rationally reconstructed by looking back at the successes and putting them into a linear narrative. Oh, there are usually a few errors thrown in, but they’re usually fit into the linear narrative as challenges that are overcome by the improvement of theories. The reality is a lot messier, and getting into the details makes it clear that not only is a Whiggish history of science mistaken, but that science doesn’t proceed through the algorithmic application of “the scientific method,” and in fact that there is no such thing as “the scientific method." Rather, there is a diverse set of methods that are themselves evolving in various ways, and sometimes not only do methods which are fully endorsed as rational and scientific produce erroneous results, sometimes methods which have no such endorsement and are even demonstrably irrational fortuitously produce correct results. For example, Johannes Kepler was a neo-pythagorean number mystic who correctly produced his second law of planetary motion by taking an incorrect version of the law based on his intuitions and deriving the correct version from it by way of a mathematical argument that contained an error. Although he fortuitously got the right answer and receives credit for devising it, he was not justified in believing it to be true on the basis of his erroneous proof. With his first law, by contrast, he followed an almost perfectly textbook version of the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific method of formulating hypotheses and testing them against Tycho Brahe’s data. The history of the scientific revolution includes numerous instances of new developments occurring piecemeal, with many prior erroneous notions being retained. Copernicus retained not only perfectly circular orbits and celestial spheres, but still needed to add epicycles to get his theory any where close to the predictive accuracy of the Ptolemaic models in use. Galileo insisted on retaining perfect circles and insisting that circular motion was natural motion, refusing to consider Kepler’s elliptical orbits. There seems to be a good case for “path dependence” in science. Even the most revolutionary changes are actually building on bits and pieces that have come before–and sometimes rediscovering work that had already been done before, like Galileo’s derivation of the uniform acceleration of falling bodies that had already been done by Nicole Oresme and the Oxford calculators. And the social and cultural environment–not just the scientific history–has an effect on what kinds of hypotheses are considered and accepted. This conservativity of scientific change is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it suggests that we’re not likely to see claims that purport to radically overthrow existing theory (that “everything we know is wrong”) succeed–even if they happen to be correct. And given that there are many more ways to go wrong than to go right, such radical revisions are very likely not to be correct. Even where new theories are correct in some of their more radical claims (e.g., like Copernicus’ heliocentric model, or Wegener’s continental drift), it often requires other pieces to fall into place before they become accepted (and before it becomes rational to accept them). On the other hand, this also means that we’re likely to be blinded to new possibilities by what we already accept that seems to work well enough, even though it may be an inaccurate description of the world that is merely predictively successful. “Consensus science” at any given time probably includes lots of claims that aren’t true. My inference from this is that we need both visionaries and skeptics, and a division of cognitive labor that’s largely conservative, but with tolerance for diversity and a few radicals generating the crazy hypotheses that may turn out to be true. The critique of evidence-based medicine made by Kimball Atwood and Steven Novella–that it fails to consider prior plausibility of hypotheses to be tested–is a good one that recognizes the unlikelihood of radical hypotheses to be correct, and thus that huge amounts of money shouldn’t be spent to generate and test them. (Their point is actually stronger than that, since most of the “radical hypotheses” in question are not really radical or novel, but are based on already discredited views of how the world works.) But that critique shouldn’t be taken to exclude anyone from engaging in the generation and test of hypotheses that don’t appear to have a plausible mechanism, because there is ample precedent for new phenomena being discovered before the mechanisms that explain them. I think there’s a tendency among skeptics to talk about science as though it’s a unified discipline, with a singular methodology, that makes continuous progress, and where the consensus at any moment is the most appropriate thing to believe. The history of science suggests, on the other hand, that it’s composed of multiple disciplines, with multiple methods, that proceeds in fits and starts, that has dead-ends, that sometimes rediscovers correct-but-ignored past discoveries, and is both fallible and influenced by cultural context. At any given time, some theories are not only well-established but unified well with others across disciplines, while others don’t fit comfortably well with others, or may be idealized models that have predictive efficacy but seem unlikely to be accurate descriptions of reality in their details. To insist on an overly rationalistic and ahistorical model is not just out-of-date history and philosophy of science, it’s a “coloring book” oversimplification. While that may be useful for introducing ideas about science to children, it’s not something we should continue to hold to as adults.