Are debatable scientific questions debatable?

[Tonington]

The title of this thread is the title of a paper by John Ziman, appearing in Social Epistemology. The focus of the paper is the difficulty most scientists have in integrating their rigorously obtained expertise into issues of public concern. I found the article very intriguing, as a former student in Arts, and now a student in Science. This will be my summary of the Ziman paper.

The problem is structural. Knowledge and debate in science move through tight channels. Editorializing is not allowed. What you say with your words must be shown with your data, or it isn't worth saying. The new questions that scientists pursue arise from questions asked by the original researcher(s) that not all of the data shows, but hints at. Above all, the conclusions and method are reviewed, revised, and refereed by peers in the field.

That's an overly simplistic explanation of the workings of science, but something I've learned is that it's hard to engage the public(and posters) when they have to wade through the minutia of full dissertations.

What it all boils down to is discipline. The discipline of science has a rigid conformation, while public debate is malleable. Science moves for the most part very slowly, while public opinion can change as often as the weather, and often because of it.:lol:

What is known scientifically is a very different thing when asked of in public, and when asked of in science. I liken it to a line from Jurassic park by the crazy chaostician Dr. Ian Malcom:

I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it.

The scientific power being brandied about by journalists, by politicians, by lawyers, by citizens, is without discipline. The rhetoric is very different from the science they wield. The lapse rate I mentioned earlier of both scientific knowledge and public knowledge is a problem. Something can quickly be repeated many times in public until it becomes 'common knowledge', while it takes much longer-many studies of the particular issue-before the issue is even close to settled in science.

The constrained nature of progression, what can be said with the data in hand, and the different rhetorical styling.

The short answer to the question is:

Debatable

:lol:

 

[Kreskin]

Interesting topic Paul.

I think I've mentioned to you before that I have a website. On my site I have two PhD scientists and three specialized physicians. The five give advice to members. What I'm finding is the 2 PhD's often don't agree with each other, and the three doctors are sometimes at odds with each other. Some of these people are at the top of their professions/science in Canada. One of the PhD's said to me that in the end she supports what she says with peer reviewed literature but ultimately it is still a personal opinion. She often writes that disclaimer when she responds to members.

Just thought I'd throw that in because I found her observation interesting, as well as the fact that they often don't agree with each other.

 

[Tonington]

That's part of what I said earlier. While the scientists in the know are still debating that a causes b, in public we get claims and assertions that something is true all the time. Vitamins, anti-biotics, gmo's, nuclear energy, stem cell therapies, the list is quite long.

I'd put a disclaimer on that sort of thing too. Medicine like many other fields is a mix of art and science. Two oncologists might hail from different paradigms, where one favours chemotherapy, while the other favours radiotherapy. I'm sure many people might assume that a 'cancer doctor' does both equally well. And it would be a mistake for anyone reading that to then go out and pursue medical treatment favouring one doctors proposal because they wrote better.

 

[Kreskin]

That's part of what I said earlier. While the scientists in the know are still debating that a causes b, in public we get claims and assertions that something is true all the time. Vitamins, anti-biotics, gmo's, nuclear energy, stem cell therapies, the list is quite long.

I'd put a disclaimer on that sort of thing too. Medicine like many other fields is a mix of art and science. Two oncologists might hail from different paradigms, where one favours chemotherapy, while the other favours radiotherapy. I'm sure many people might assume that a 'cancer doctor' does both equally well. And it would be a mistake for anyone reading that to then go out and pursue medical treatment favouring one doctors proposal because they wrote better.

That's a good way of putting it. It's a mix or science and art.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

I read Ziman's paper carefully. Twice. I think it's an insightful piece of work. What he seems to me to be saying is that science, despite its claims to objectivity and purity, is still a human enterprise and thus suffers from all the same weaknesses any human enterprise does: ego, fashion, error, styles, rituals, and so on, all of which put limits of various kinds on how it proceeds, what it investigates, and how its results are presented. On one level that ought to be perfectly obvious, and I think any practicing scientist would recognize it, but there's a difference between the scientists' view of science and the public perception of science, which is also part of what Ziman deals with. I suspect John Q. Public thinks science deals in objective truth, which is actually false, it deals mostly in probabilities and utility. Relativity and quantum theory, for instance, two of the most successful scientific theories we've ever produced, cannot both be "true" in any absolute sense, and real science wouldn't make such a claim anyway, because they're fundamentally inconsistent. But they're close enough to whatever the truth really is to be useful. Within their well-understood limits they have unprecedented predictive accuracy, they've spectacularly passed every test ever devised for them.

Ziman implicitly raises another important issue too, the matter of imagining alternatives. Modern neo-Darwinism, for example, is another spectacularly successful scientific theory, but what if there's another explanation that works just as well that nobody's thought of? That question could be asked of any scientific theory, and it's the epistemological issue that lies at the heart of it all: how do we know what we know? Despite the spectacular success of science, there remains the possibility that it really has nothing to do with reality, whatever that actually is, at all. String theory's a good example of that. It's generated some very creative mathematics, but so far it hasn't produced any predictions that quantum theory and relativity don't also make, there's no known way to demonstrate that it's really an accurate conception of reality. It might be just a calculating trick, as Lee Smolin has more or less claimed in his book The Trouble With Physics.

 

[iARTthere4iam]

The public has an unrealistic understanding of what science is and what it is not. To the layman a scientist is some one who may be smarter than average and has lots of knowlegde. The rigors of scientific research and peer evaluation are very misunderstood. Writers such as Asimov, Arthur C.Clark and Sagan and others have done a great deal to disseminate science information for the masses but never quite convey the magic that is the scientific method.

 

[scratch]

The public has an unrealistic understanding of what science is and what it is not. To the layman a scientist is some one who may be smarter than average and has lots of knowlegde. The rigors of scientific research and peer evaluation are very misunderstood. Writers such as Asimov, Arthur C.Clark and Sagan and others have done a great deal to disseminate science information for the masses but never quite convey the magic that is the scientific method.

Why couldn't the gentlemen you mentioned "quite" convey the magic?

 

[Scott Free]

You mean science isn't as seen on Start Trek?

Gawsh.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

...the magic that is the scientific method.

I expect most scientists would strongly object to that choice of words. There's nothing magical about it at all, it's the very antithesis of magic. It's simply a method we've developed for testing nature to see how it behaves and making generalizations about the results. And, I might point out, it's the only reliable method we've ever found for testing the truth content of ideas. It's not applicable to all ideas, but if you want to make empirical claims about the nature of reality, science is what you want.

 

[Tonington]

Why couldn't the gentlemen you mentioned "quite" convey the magic?

There's a certain amount of exposure that I think people need, to get a better grasp of the concepts, before they can understand what science actually does and can do.

Even the most gifted scientists, with a talent for passing on their knowledge, will run into problems with that.

I know I've heard plenty of comments in the past from people about polls for instance. After one course of introductory statistics, it's pretty straight forward, though obviously still nuanced