Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science: A History (Third Edition). Thomas J. Hickey

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      4.21 Scientific Truth

      Truth and falsehood are properties of statements, and admit to more or less.

      Tested and nonfalsified statements are more empirically adequate, have more realistic ontologies, and have more truth than falsified ones.

      Falsified statements have recognized error, and may simply be rejected unless they are still useful for their lesser realism and lesser truth.

      What is truth! Truth is a property of descriptive language with its relativized semantics and ontology. It is not merely a subjective expression of approval.

      Belief and truth are not identical. Belief is acceptance of a statement as true. But one may wrongly believe that a false statement is true, or wrongly believe that a true statement is false. Belief controls the semantics of the descriptive terms in universally quantified statements. Truth is the relation of a statement’s semantics to nonlinguistic reality. Furthermore as Jarrett Leplin maintains in his Defense of Scientific Realism, truth and falsehood are properties of statements that admit to more or less; they are not simply dichotomous, as they are represented in two-valued formal logic.

      Test-design language is presumed true with definitional force for the semantics of the test-design language, in order to identify the subject of the test. Theory language in an empirical test may be believed true by the developer and advocates of the theory, but the theory is not true simply by virtue of their belief. Belief in an untested theory is speculation about a future test outcome. A nonfalsifying test outcome will warrant belief that the tested theory is as true as the theory’s demonstrated empirical adequacy. Empirically falsified theories have recognized error, and may be rejected unless they are still useful for their lesser realism and lesser truth. Tested and nonfalsified statements are more empirically adequate, have ontologies that are more realistic, and thus are truer than empirically falsified statements.

      Popper said that Eddington’s historic eclipse test of Einstein’s theory of gravitation in 1919 “falsified” Newton’s theory and thus “corroborated” Einstein’s theory. Yet the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) today uses Newton’s laws to navigate interplanetary rocket flights such as the Voyager missions. Thus Newton’s “falsified” theory is not completely false or it could never have been used before or after Einstein. Popper said that science does not attain truth. But contemporary pragmatists believe that such an absolutist idea of truth is misconceived. Advancement in empirical adequacy is advancement in realism and in truth. Feyerabend said, “Anything goes”. Regarding ontology Hickey says, “Everything goes”, because while not all discourses are equally valid, there is no semantics utterly devoid of ontological significance. Therefore he adds that the more empirically adequate tested theory goes farther – is truer and more realistic – than its less empirically adequate falsified alternatives. As science grows in empirical adequacy, it thereby progresses in truth and in realism.

      4.22 Nonempirical Criteria

      Given the fact of scientific pluralism – of having several alternative explanations that are tested and not falsified due to empirical underdetermination in the test-design language – philosophers have proposed various nonempirical criteria they believe have been operative historically in explanation choice. And a plurality of untested and therefore unfalsified theories may also exist before any testing, so that scientists may have preferences for testing one theory over another based on nonempirical criteria. But no nonempirical criterion enables a scientist to predict reliably which alternative nonfalsified explanation will survive empirical testing, when in due course the degree of empirical underdetermination is reduced by a new or improved test design that enables decidable testing. To make such an anticipatory choice is like betting on a horse before it runs the race.

      Test designs are improved by developing more accurate measurement procedures and/or by adding new descriptive information that reduces the vagueness in the characterization of the subject for testing. Such test-design improvements refine the characterization of the problem addressed by the theories, and thus reduce empirical underdetermination to make testing decisive.

      When empirical underdetermination makes testing undecidable among alternative theories, different scientists may have personal reasons for preferring one alternative as an explanation. In such circumstances selection may be an investment decision for the career scientist rather than an investigative decision. The choice may be influenced by such circumstances as the cynical realpolitik of peer-reviewed journals. Knowing what editors and their favorite referees currently want in submissions greatly helps an author getting his paper published. Publication is an academic status symbol with the more prestigious journals yielding more brownie points for accumulating academic tenure, status and salary.

      In the January 1978 issue of the Journal of the American Society of Information Science (JASIS) the editor wrote that referees sometimes use the peer review process as a means to attack a point of view and to suppress the content of a submitted paper, i.e., they attempt censorship. Furthermore editors are not typically entrepreneurial; they are the risk-avoiding rearguard rather than the risk-taking avant-garde. They select the established “authorities” with reputation-based vested interests in the prevailing traditional views, and these “authorities” suborn the peer-review process by using their preferred views as criteria for criticism and thus acceptance for publication.

      External sociocultural factors have also influenced theory choice. In his Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957) Kuhn wrote that the astronomer in the time of Copernicus could not upset the two-sphere universe without overturning physics and religion as well. Fundamental concepts in the pre-Copernican astronomy had become strands for a much larger fabric of thought, and the nonastronomical strands in turn bound the thinking of the astronomers. The Copernican revolution occurred because Copernicus was a dedicated specialist, who valued mathematical and celestial detail more than the values reinforced by the nonastronomical views that were dependent on the prevailing two-sphere theory. This purely technical focus of Copernicus enabled him to ignore the nonastronomical consequences of his innovation, consequences that would lead his contemporaries of less restricted vision to reject his innovation as absurd.

      Later in discussing modern science in his famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn does not make the consequences to the nonspecialist an aspect of his general theory of scientific revolutions. Instead he maintains, as part of his thesis of “normal” science, that a scientist may willfully choose to ignore a falsifying outcome of a decisive test execution. This choice is not due to the scientist’s specific criticism of either the test design or the test execution, but rather is due to the expectation that the falsified theory will later be improved and corrected. However any such “correcting” alteration made to a falsified theory amounts to theory elaboration, which produces a new and different theory.

      Similarly sociology and politics operate as criteria today in the social sciences, where defenders and attackers of different economic views are in fact defending and attacking certain social/political philosophies, ideologies, interests and policies. For example in the United States Republican politicians attack Keynesian economics, while Democrat politicians defend it. But pragmatism has prevailed over ideology, when expediency dictates, as during the 2007-2009 Great Recession crisis. Thus in his After the Music Stopped (2013) Alan S. Blinder, Princeton University economist and former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, reports that ultraconservative Republican President Bush “let pragmatism trump ideology” (P. 213), when he signed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, a distinctively Keynesian fiscal policy, which added $150 billions to the U.S. Federal debt.

      In contrast Democrat President Obama without reluctance and with a Democrat-controlled Congress signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in 2009, a stimulus СКАЧАТЬ