THE POINT-COUNTERPOINT PUBLICATION FOR DECEMBER 7, 2011

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Why does science produce facts about the world? What’s special about the scienti!c method? Sure, scienti!c facts are generally approximations to the truth, and we don’t have com-plete knowledge of nature, but science has an astonishingly im-pressive track record nonetheless. How does the scienti!c meth-od produce approximately true knowledge of the world around us? "e self-correcting nature of the scienti!c method plays a role, as does the overwhelming value it places on empirical data. But these both spring from a deeper and more important truth about the scienti!c method: it relies on inductive reasoning ap-plied to the world around us.

Inductive reasoning is the idea that the more o#en some-thing has happened before, the more likely it is to happen again. So, for example, we all think it’s extremely likely that the sun will rise tomorrow, since it rose yesterday, and the day before, and throughout all of history. Similarly, every time you’ve been hun-gry and you’ve eaten, you’ve felt less hungry, so eating will prob-ably make you less hungry in the future as well. Ultimately, this is how we know everything that we know about the world, and we use inductive reasoning so o#en that we hardly ever think about it. It doesn’t have to work, though: just because something happened before doesn’t mean that it’ll happen again the same way, nor that it’s more likely to happen again at all. A#er all, as every investment banker knows, past performance does not guarantee future results, and statisticians have been dolefully chanting “correlation is not causation” for centuries now. Yet we do use induction quite frequently and very successfully.

"e scienti!c method rests on an untestable belief: apply-ing inductive reasoning to our perceptions can actually give us knowledge about the world. We shouldn’t hold that against sci-ence, though. It’s a basic fact of logic that you can’t draw any sort of conclusions without taking some statements for granted; logicians and mathematicians call these unproven statements axioms, and you always need a few of them, even for basic stu$ like addition and multiplication.

Of course, the fact that all systems of belief have fun-damentally untestable statements at their core must mean that they’re all equally arbitrary and none of them should be taken as a more legitimate way of looking at the world than any of the others, right? Well, not quite. "ere’s a way out of this: not all axioms are created equal. We may have to pick some axioms without logical justi!cation if we want to get somewhere, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no way at all to pick out our axi-oms.

"ere’s that great untestable belief up there, that belief in the power of induction to tell us about the world. As untestable be-liefs go, it’s the best one available. Forget science for a moment

here — that claim is the weakest one you can make that will still allow you to stumble through this world with some hope of un-derstanding what’s going on. To see what I mean, try to imagine not believing that perceptions and inductive reasoning can tell you about the nature of reality. How does your day look?

You wake up, and you go to the kitchen and pour out some cereal into a bowl. Except that you’re not sure that the bowl will hold your cereal — sure, it seemed like it did yesterday, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Hell, you don’t even know that your cereal is in the box at all. For that matter, how do you know that the %oor will support your weight? Or that there is a %oor? In fact, you aren’t even sure that eating the cereal will make you less hungry…

Still not convinced? "ink I’m being silly by making judg-ments about statements that are untestable in principle? Fine. Have a look at this pair of untestable statements:

S&'&()(*& A:Applying inductive reasoning to our perceptions gives us pretty

good information about the world around us.

S&'&()(*& B:!ere is a unicorn in my basement that hangs out there, but only when nobody is looking, and it never leaves any evidence that it’s

been there.

If you don’t think that it’s possible to make judgments on the relative merits of untestable statements, then you have to say that Statement B is just as good as Statement A — and that’s just strange. It certainly seems like Statement A is much more plausible than Statement B, even though neither one can ever really be “tested.”

So science is based upon an untestable belief, just like ev-erything else! But it’s got the best untestable belief — one that you already believe, and that you could hardly a$ord not to be-lieve. And that’s really the only core belief that we need in order to start doing science, whereas other systems of belief seem to require a lot of bells and whistles in addition to a belief in the power of induction. "e scienti!c method, in short, is special because it is based on a lack of faith relative to other systems of belief: we take as little on faith as we reasonably can when we do science.

POINT: ADAM BECKER

"e scienti!c method, relying on induction, o$ers the best means for explaining our natural world.

Volume 25 Issue 10

"e author is a sixth-year Ph.D. student in the Physics Depart-ment at the University of Michigan. His blog is online at www.FreelanceAstrophysicist.com.

T'# P(,#. (& S!"#$!#

"e scienti!c method is a human-made miracle. It has maxi-mized our ability to understand the universe in such a simple way, and it is mind-boggling that it took hundreds of centuries for humans to develop scienti!c methods. Any aspiring scientist does not pursue a !eld of research merely because he or she is in-terested in the mechanisms of certain phenomena. As humans, we are constantly looking for an ultimate explanation, itching to answer the great “Why?” We want to !nd the narrative that will show us how the physical world works and where the universe is heading. Developing this worldview through scienti!c methods is limited.

To explicate this, it’s critical to understand the limits of the human mind. Neuroscience is useful here for two reasons: (+) it gives us the grounds to understand what in the universe we can perceive and, consequently, understand, and (,) it approaches the subject of consciousness-an area the scienti!c method can-not grasp.

To understand our brain’s limits in understanding the uni-verse, it’s helpful to consider the brain of a bat. Although we can never know “what [it is] like to be a bat” (as philosopher "omas Nagel concluded), we can certainly speculate that its conscious experience is drastically di$erent from ours. For starters, a bat has very poor eyesight. It must rely on echolocation in order to navigate its environment. From this alone we can conclude a di$erence in our respective perceptual worlds. If a bat were to evolve so it could design something similar to our scienti!c method, it certainly could not use vision as the basis of observa-tion (observation being the !rst step in the scienti!c method). "ere is an entire !eld of physical phenomena in the universe that lies outside the bat’s comprehension. Simply because our hypothetical bat cannot use the scienti!c method to understand visual phenomena, these phenomena are not any less “real” or less worthy of study.

Such perceptual worlds are known as umwelts. Because they vary by species, we can conclude that there is no objective way to observe the universe. Some animals see more or fewer colors; others can smell from impressive distances and some even detect magnetic !elds. Our brains constrain what we are able to infer about the universe; to this end, we are very limited by our senses. We cannot go around proclaiming that the scienti!c method is a !nd-all cure-all; we have to acknowledge the bounds of the human umwelt. For example, dark matter - a mysterious sub-stance that composes a majority of the universe - lies completely outside the human umwelt.

As we desperately try to assert our beliefs in the world, ei-ther for some existential comfort or when scrambling to form a research presentation, the human mind is bound to be biased.

Yes, inductive reasoning (which characterizes scienti!c rational-ity) is an extremely powerful tool; however, it is far from perfect. "ree types of biases show up in any research. First, scienti!c researchers (or any curious being) will use whatever informa-tion is most accessible—the availability bias. Con!rmation bias arises when people seek out information that !ts with prior be-liefs. "ink of Robert Anton Wilson’s quote, “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.” (And see what I just did here? I found a quotation that con!rms my own belief.) Lastly, similar to the con!rmation bias, there is the predictable-world bias: individu-als seek to !nd order and patterns in phenomena, even if there are none.

Induction also troubled philosopher David Hume. He ar-gued that it is impossible to be certain that assumptions we base on previous experiences will ever hold true in the future. Fur-thermore, our only basis for justifying inductive reasoning is in-ductive reasoning itself, a disturbing regression that undercuts the project altogether.

So what is there to do when our methodology hits a brick wall?

Consciousness—the experience and sum of mental process-es—is an elusive concept, lying outside the scope of the scienti!c method. We cannot study consciousness inside other people be-cause it is a subjective experience. "ere is no region in the brain that is responsible for creating the uni!ed experience, and so far there is no explanation as to how a physical process can give rise to the experience of a thought, emotion or sensation. "is is where reconsidering the scienti!c method is vital. If we wish to fully explore the basis of our reality—consciousness itself—we must be ready to employ a new, rigorous paradigm that allows for the study of the subjective experience. And don’t be fooled by the scientists who have made metaphysical assumptions about consciousness, be it reductionism (the mind is reducible to the physical brain) or dualism (the mind and brain exist on two dif-ferent planes). Nobody knows, and our current model certainly won’t answer it.

If we want to predict the trajectory of a rocket or the behavior of a cray!sh, the scienti!c method is appropriate. But as our understanding of the world grows, we’ll !nd that the current sci-enti!c method no longer !ts us. We must adapt and be ready for great shi#s in our thinking.

COUNTERPOINT: RYAN DOUGHERTY

December 7, 2011

"e author is a junior in LSA. He blogs at themindexperience.tumblr.com which aims to make neuroscience and psychology more accessible to the public.

"e scienti!c method and induction have distinct limits; we can never fully explain our natural world.

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Ancient Greek Philosopher Plato did not see value in measurement or observation. He believed that solely relying on reason was the key to knowledge. www.experiment-resources.com

Aristotle, considered a father of modern science, believed that thought and reasoning as scienti!c tools needed to be backed up by observations of the world. www.experiment-resources.com

Philosopher Francis Bacon championed inductive reasoning, thinking it would ensure man’s complete understanding of the world. How Stu! Works

Newton is quoted as saying “To explain all nature is too di"cult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‘Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave the rest for others that come a#er you, than to explain all things.” Wikipedia

A recent discovery by CERN research center found that neutrinos, a very small particle, appeared to move faster than the speed of light. $is discovery challenged a Newtonian principle

- that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, meaning time travel could be possible. Christian Science Monitor

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FIVE THINGS about the Scientific Method

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