David Berlinksi on Physics and Metaphysics
| December 21, 2008 | Posted by Granville Sewell under Intelligent Design |
The discussions on multiverses and string theory bring to mind the following comments of David Berlinski (in “Was There a Big Bang?”):
“Standing at the gate of modern time, Isaac Newton forged the curious social pact by which rational men and women have lived ever since. The description of the physical world would be vouchsafed to a particular institution, that of modern physics; and it was to the physicists and not the priests, soothsayers, poets, politicians,…that society would look for judgments about the nature of the physical world…In exchange for their privilege, the physicists were to provide an account of the physical world at once penetrating, general, persuasive, and true.
Until recently, the great physicists have been scrupulous about honoring the terms of their contract. They have attempted with dignity to respect the distinction between what is known and what is not…
This scrupulousness has lately been compromised. The result has been the calculated or careless erasure of the line separating disciplined physical inquiry from speculative metaphysics. Contemporary cosmologists feel free to say anything that pops into their heads. Unhappy examples are everywhere: absurd schemes to model time on the basis of the complex numbers, as in Steven Hawkin’s ‘A Brief History of Time’; bizarre and ugly contraptions for cosmic inflation; universes multiplying beyond the reach of observations…theories of every stripe and variety, all of them uncorrected by any criticism beyond the trivial.”
31 Responses to David Berlinksi on Physics and Metaphysics
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KRiS:
I am very sorry that you think that I am practicing “intellectual dishonesty”, but you are free to think as you like. It is perfectly true that I had not understood well the context of your point in my post #27 (maybe because I often write in a hurry). I understood it better after your post #28 (as I have explicitly said in my post #29), and in that same post I tried to “make some order”. What is there of intellectually dishonest in that?
You may believe that I pass everything under a ““it must be right, so how can I interpret it that way” filter”, but luckily you are not my epistemology teacher, nor my analyst. I can only say that I believe very much in a sincere search for truth, that I take very seriously the criticism of others, and that I would never consciously support something which I believe is not true, exatly at the level where I am debating it.
What I tried to express in my post #29 is simply that I had not understood what you meant because I had not understood that you had shifted to a purely logic discussion, while I was focused on an empirical onr. For me, that is a very important distinction. Again, I am perfectly aware that you acnnot prove an hypothesis logically false by a negative test of the kind we were discussing, but that was never my purpose. I quote from my post #29:
“I think there are still some misunderstandings, so I will clarify better my position.
First of all, I am discussing empirical science, and not a mathematical theorem. You should understand the basic difference. In empirical science, and especially in biology, we are looking for “best explanations”, not for absolute demonstrations.”
Does that make sense? Is that intellectually dishonest? I mean simply that, while to prove something false in mathemathics you would need an infinite set of tests (and that’s why mathematicains try to demonstrate theorems logically, and not empirically), a series of repeated failure in trying to support a theory empirically in empirical sciences has great importance for the credibility of the theory. In other words, empirical theories need empirical support. If they cannot find it, that’s not a good sign, even if one can always hope that sometime, somewhere, that support will be found.
Why do you object to that concept? I find it simple enough. Again, I am in no way denying your point that “negative tests are not, in fact, logically valid tests of a hypothesis”. I fully understand this, and I admit it. As you correctly point out, I am so convinced of that that I “pointed out so clearly exactly what the logical flaws are”. And that was not because I “forgot that we were analyzing a statement made by you rather than one made by me”. It was just because I believe that true. But I had not realized what you implied about those conclusions, and I have tried to clarify why we were arguing different things from a similar conclusion. Again, I don’t think there is anything intellectually dishonest in that. The key is in your word “logically”. If you have read something of what I have written here at UD in the last months, you should know that I always make clear distinctions of the level of the discussion, strictly separating logical arguments from empirical ones.
Moreover, I was frank just from the beginning, affirming that some of my tests were positive and other were negative. For some reason, you have stuck to the “logical” (and IMO non relevant) problem with the negative ones, and never discussed the positive ones. I could suspect you of intellectual dishonesty for that, but I don’t, and I accept your explanation that you had not time.
Finally, I have tried many times to point out that predicitons are not the “basis” of a hypothesis. Explanation of known facts and internal consistency are the true basis of a scientific hypothesis. Good predictions are a “support” for a hypothesis. I can’t understand why you don’t want to recognize that a negative prediction, if repeatedly verified, is an empirical support for the predicting hypothesis, a potential falsification of the same, and an empirical lack of support for the alternative hypothesis, which would require the negative test to become, sometime somewhere, positive.
My best wishes to you.