Paul - Mario Pagliaro's blog
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Method: A Testament of Youth?
«As a very old scientist (University College London 1934-39), -- writes Ian Whitfield to Chemistry World -- I am concerned about the decay of scientific method. I read so often 'scientists believe that.' Yet it was the abandonment of belief in favour of the results of experiments that has been the key to science's success. Hypothesis is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for scientific progress. The phlogiston theory was a good hypothesis, but did not stand up to experiment, so we rejected it. Darwin's theory of the origin of species is likewise a good hypothesis, but has never been experimentally established, so it remains a hypothesis, though widely believed.
A second modern fault, rife among nutritionists and medical students, is the old canard that correlation equals causation. Hence all the 'studies' that one week tell us that coffee is good for us, and the next week bad.
I hesitate to mention global warming. To question the major role of CO2 in this is a heresy of medieval proportions. Not perhaps meriting burning at the stake, but certainly loss of all grant support. No experimental evidence is available. (I hope I do not need to enter a caveat that computer models are not independent experiments, merely extension of the hypothesis.) The greenhouse gas theory seems to be a pure case of Humpty-Dumpty-ism: 'Anything I say three times is true'. So many scientists have repeated the mantra that it has become an unquestionable axiom.
We must grant that in highly connected non-linear systems, the design of controlled experiments on Popperian principles is very difficut. We must however find ways to do it. Otherwise science will simply become another 'religion' dependent on faith».
It is tempting -- replies Clive Delmonte -- to sympathise uncritically with Ian Whitfield's desire to return to the 'scientific method' and to move away from belief and, of course, he is right to complain about all the examples he cites. There are problems however. Sir Karl Popper demonstrated that, in many situations, propositions in the natural sciences could never be proved, only disproved, and his work on the meaning of empirical truth in science was further developed by van Fraassen in The Scientific Image, and by others. Oh, how I pine for those happy, sunlit days of my innocent youth, when I could just buzz about 'proving' things».
As you can see, the methodological question is of extreme urgency among scientists themselves and explains too why we organize the Master "Paul K. Feyerabend" on scientific method (Enrolment now open).
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