“Economic Methodology: Understanding Economics as a science” – Marcel Boumans & John B. Davis
Here’s where I find philosophy of science very interesting in daily life. How can I as a thinker distinguish between scientific and non-scientific statements? This question, known as the ‘problem of demarcation’, also reveals how science progresses.
Imagine you’re a trained ‘logical positivist’. You believe that truths derive from logic, mathematics and empirical verification of the senses. Your physicist friend states: electrons exist. You cannot see, hear, smell, taste or touch electrons. This statement is meaningless to you. Logical positivism comes to a grinding halt when dealing with empirically unverifiable statements. In comes Karl Popper (1902–1994) who says that you will end up not answering anything due to your rigidness. Popper argued that instead of achieving certainty, a scientist must strive to not be wronged. A good theory must forbid certain things (‘If A then B’ forbids ‘if A then C’). The more testable a theory is, the riskier it is. It is riskier to say “Sunrise is at 07:00 tomorrow” than “the sun will come out tomorrow” (hi Annie!). Since there are more ways for the first statement to be proven wrong, its significance is much greater if it survives ‘falsification’—i.e., survives attempts to prove it wrong. What have we learned from Mr. Popper? A theory with no ‘risky predictions’ is not scientific and a scientist must try their utmost to prove their theory wrong—only then can it be crowned a victor.
How then does science progress? Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) wrote about ‘paradigms’ in science. Scientists like you and I are much like puzzle-makers. A statement is scientific if its solution can be found within the established puzzle-making tools we have. Scientists grind away doing ‘normal science’, answering similar questions with similar tools, edging science forward until a regular question cannot be solved with regular tools. We’ve found an ‘anomaly’. We like our normal tools (think of trying to get any older person in your life to change their way of thinking… it’s hard). Science resists adapting new tools until the list of anomalies—or unanswerable questions—grows too much and they are forced to adapt a new ‘paradigm’ of doing science. This ‘paradigm shift’ progresses science into answering newer more difficult questions.
On TV, you might see a climate change denying versus believing scientist. Each may have their own examples. Would one piece of counter-example from the opposite side be enough to disprove your side? This is the implication of Popper’s falsification which Imre Lakatos (1922–1974) found naive. We must accept anomalies and small inconsistencies without disbelieving the general law or principle. The world is full of faulty instruments (how credible is eye-witness testimonies anyways??) and alternative interpretations. Lakatos argues for ‘sophisticated falsification’. Finding a counter-example may lower the value of the truth, but does not necessarily overthrow it.
I’ll do one final part on how scientists study scientists (pretty meta!) through the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and Economics of Scientific Knowledge (ESK)