Argument against the scientific method

Another potential problem is an artifact of specialization. Specialization, can define a lot of detail about a piece of the puzzle. This is very important. But postulating in the context of that detail does not always extrapolate into the correct context of the biggest picture.

Looking at the big picture is different than focusing on a detail in terms of extrapolating theory. Let me demonstrate this with an example. The big picture in this example will be photgraph. What we will do is zoom in and focus on a detail in the picture.

In this case, we see a female face. Athough we can see the details of her face, one is not able to place that face in context of the whole pixture, since you don't know the big picture. We can nevertheless theorize in the context of the details and our expertize. She is a house wife.

In an attempt to prove our detailed theory, we zoom out so more of the picture is seem. Now we notice a young women with sweats clothes, sort of like a dancer. We will need to change our theory, since we can now see her face in the context of a body and clothing; the bigger picture. Next, we try to postulate about this women based on these expanded details. Since she has sweat clothes we postulate she is a person working out at home, since the bias of the housewife lingers.

To test this new theory, we zoom out even more and notice she appears to be in a large room with a wooden floor and there are other females also in dancer sweats. To posulate now, we need to know much more than our specialty, which was faces, since the bigger picture involves faces, bodies, clothes, wood floors, other dancers, etc, thing we may not be fully trained for. You know something about these other things, but feel better in we own habitat where we are an expert. This will bias the theory. Now based on this bigger picture, we she is still a housewife who is trying out for a part in some local dance theatre.

Rather can complete this all the way, via few more zoom outs, to the prima ballerina for a major ballet company, one may notice as the picture zooms out from the speciality piece, to a bigger and bigger picture, the best theory needs to change context. Theories that work fine in a smaller pond may not work in the biggest pond. The specialist may not be able to go all the way into the biggest pond, since he is not trained for that.

The scientists of a century ago had it easier in the sense that there was less science, allowing a better handle on the bigger pictures. For example chemistry and physics had a continuity. Now they use separate ponds, with quarks not having to explain chemical bonding.

Today there is so much data and science, it is harder to define the forest because of the trees. We postulate based on a patch in the forest and call that the universal forest. It is nobody fault, with education not offering a secondary path that starts at the biggest picture and tries to work inward toward the details.

Say we started at the biggest picture of the prima ballerina. This sets the context for everything in the picture. There is less room for speciality postulates that appear to work very well at the level of the detail. Relative to the above example, the very first housewife inference would not have been allowed if we started in the big pond. But it was totally valid in the smallest pond.

 

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It's more or less an opinion, so how can you say that it is not accurate? If it correctly presents their thinking at the time, then it is accurate in that sense. I don't see much "jargon" in this, it's just their viewpoint of the way they think the scientific method is being taught.

A better question is whether the response is USEFUL or adds insight in the context of the debate you were having.

I agree to some extent with them in that the Western mind has been trained to revert to pure rationalism to solve difficult problems in virtually all situations whether the "hypothetico-deductive schema" as they call it is appropriate or not.

It is a powerful tool when you are trying to solve a specific problem in science or engineering, AND when you have enough data with enough accuracy to be useful. When trying to INNOVATE on the other hand, in trying to come up with a completely new understanding of climate, or a completely new climate simulation method (just examples), the "scientific method" is not so useful. A purely rational approach is the refuge of the technician, it is not such a useful too for the innovator.

So I think we need to know more about the context of your debate, were you discussing how to deal with one specific set of climate data, or something broader?

 

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By turning on my computer and then taking the elevator down to the lobby to get my mail. That makes two successful tests in one day.

Bullshit. Absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence when the evidence should be there.

If I'm told that there's a cat in a box but that I can't open it to confirm this I can always take an x-ray of the box. If the x-ray shows an empty box(or a box with a dog in it) it is an absence of evidence that there is a cat in the box, but it's also damning evidence that there isn't one in there.

 

Not really. Assuming that falsifiability is an essential element of the scientific method, the problem is that falsifiability is unfalsifiable. Because if it were false, it couldn't falsify.

 

@ughaibu --

By turning on my computer I'm verifying that the products of the scientific method work, and if the products work that is evidence that the method itself works.

 

@ arioch,

So if someone said there were radio waves a few hundred years ago, and someone else said, "come on woo-woo wheres the proof?"

How would they show the proof.

seems like a valid statement to me.

In case you were wondering there was no evidence of radio waves a few hundred years ago. It is only recently that we know everything.

@ everyone else,
The scientific method is flawed however. In the above scenario radio waves could not be proved 200 years ago. Does this mean they didn't exist? That is ridiculous.

To prove radio waves existed we needed to show they did with REPEATABLE experiments showing POSITIVE results.

We may be a few hundred years away from proving that minds can communicate with each other. This can be dismissed by many of you because your grade 11 textbooks claim it is not possible, however that is only due to a flaw in the scientific method.

Imagine that many psychic researchers are always finding positive results in their work. We could form a hypothesis something like, "Dark matter carries thoughts from one person to the next." Then we must be able to perform experiments with repeated success.

What if we were only successful 75% of the time. How many "coincidences" equals proof? If 75% success rate was considered proof by science then we might be centuries ahead in the research of telepathy, as 75% hit rates are fairly easy to achieve.

75% of proof is not proof though according to the scientific method. So until the scientific method is changed, or physics eventually catches up to telepathy by accident, or from a roundabout way. We won't be allowed to discuss the topics in our grade 11 textbooks.

 

I take it, then, that you're a verificationist, and reject the requirement for falsifiability.

 

@ Fraggle Rocker,
I do not expect anyone here to realize the extent of controls used in psychic experiments, but double blinds are common. People dealing with receivers do not know what is to be transmitted etc.

That does address many concerns people have. No matter how above board the experiments with correct controls, competent staff, there is no possible way of ruling out coincidence. Also people will always assume fraud.

Psychic research was a lot more prominent in the earlier half of the 20th century as the discovery of radio waves made the idea of a similar apparatus in our brains plausible. Psychic research is now limited to probably a dozen universities worldwide.

There were some very well documented telepathy experiments that exceeded critics demands in all aspects. There were lab coat settings, and careful double blind controls with competent staff. The results were well beyond chance.
People were brought in to sleep in locked rooms where they were monitored with cameras. The "senders" (only 1), were sent to another locked room where a sealed envelope was then opened by them. They proceeded to broadcast that picture to the sleeping mind of the receiver.
The sleepers would be woken up during REM sleep (during dreaming), and could often describe scenarios pertaining to the pictures. However nobody videotaping the patients recollections knew what was in the photo until after the results were final.
This experiment met all controls and defied many odds. If you were to prescribe it to chance you would be looking at over 75000:1 odds.

There was a documentary done on this while it was being done, however I am unsure where to find any clips from it, however watching a person describing his dream while you are looking at the picture that was broadcast was very convincing.

There is nothing hard about telepathy, and both senders and receivers were just ordinary people.

I live in Toronto, and the funding is so poor in this avenue of research that most participants in experiments are volunteers, and adequate controls and observations were not the easiest to maintain. Our entire set up was only three rooms totaling under 1000 square feet. I believe I can demonstrate an above 90% hit rate on precognition, which is one venue of the paranormal that cannot be viewed as fraudulent. If you can predict an event before it happens, and have no influence on the event, it would be hard t say it is fraud.

When I spoke of the grade eleven textbook version of the scientific method, it is the grade 11 method I was referring to.

You are correct in stating that we do hold many theories that are not based on repeated success in experiments.

PSI experiments would be subject to more scrutiny based on its reputation, and theories are always based on some repeated success of grade eleven scientific method. The scientific method require repeated success. However you were correct in stating that many theories use repeated success of a few experiments to expand on a larger theory.

I am aiming criticism at the scientific method mainly because it does not alow for probabilities. You could get 50000:1 odds that something is true based on competent, double blind, controlled experiments and science will say it was the 1 tiny chance that was the correct choice, and the 50000 was all fluke.

I am not overly critical, as it does hold sway over enough people who accept the results. I accept the 50000:1 odds as proof, as do many others. Maybe my complaints should be directed to PEOPLE who are too close minded to even explore the probabilities.

I have another thread open here on LENR. LENR is real, and has been reproduced hundreds of times all over the world, and has open support from NASA. We have a new energy source. People won't believe that either. I swear you need to smack some people in the head with a rock before they will open their eyes.

Skepticism can be healthy, but it can also be a disease.

 

@kwhilborn --

Either you lack reading comprehension or you're deliberately attempting a straw man argument because I already addressed this.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when the evidence should be there. In your example there's no evidence that should be there, therefore in that case absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence, however the statement doesn't always work.

And sometimes it is, but it's not a blanket statement that you can make to cover any sort of bullshit you care to believe in.

Straw man argument. Just because the scientific method would have failed to verify something before the knowledge or the technology required to do so is not a flaw in the method, it's a flaw in the humans using the method. Come up with a better argument and we'll talk.

Irrelevant. The technology and prior knowledge necessary for this didn't exist at that time. Remember that science builds on previous knowledge, so lacking that knowledge there's no way they could have possibly discovered radio waves.

No, that's not why it can be dismissed, in fact we have two...well possibly three...very good reasons for dismissing that claim. One is that there's no evidence for it, and no, don't post links to all of the studies, I've read most of them and there are maybe three or four credible studies that didn't show a negative result. Anything which can be asserted without evidence can be just as easily dismissed without evidence.

The second reason is that there is no proposed mechanism, none at all. You lot just say "oh well it's true because of x, y, and z studies showing that they guessed cards right more than fifty percent of the time" but you never propose a mechanism, beyond some of the greatest perversions of quantum mechanics that I've ever seen, by which telepathy could work.

That certainly would take imagination because it demonstrably doesn't reflect reality...the bit about parapsychologists consistently having successful results I mean.

@ughaibu --

Not at all. If we had come up with atomic theory but when we built the bomb it didn't go off, or imploded instead of exploded, or we found out that atomic theory was completely wrong in describing the atom, that would be a mark against the scientific method. And if more of these missed than hit then it would definitely be a serious problem.

As much as many here would like to make you think otherwise, science is not a religion because science actually works. It produces results.

 

Well, in that case it should be clear to you that science cannot demonstrate its own principles, because falsifiability is unfalsifiable.

This has nothing to do with the matter to which I'm responding. There is no serious argument against the statement that science requires untestable assumptions.

 

The scientific method is the best method we have for investigating the physical universe. It is indeed a method, and it is indeed followed more oe less closely, by scientists as they "do" science.

Observation yields facts.
A hypothesis is constructed which explains (relates) those facts.
The hypothesis is tested against additional observations (new facts) and either confirmed or rejected.


The key to understanding the whole thing, semantics aside (most of the posts above centered on mere semantic issues) is that scientific explanations (hypotheses and theories) are probabalistic statements. The two probability values such a statement can never take are 0 or 1. They all fall somewhere in between. Some are more likely than others, but likelihood analysis is different that a truth assessment. The concepts of truth and validity often get brought into the discussion of the scientific method, but they really have nothing to do with it at all - they are characteristics of the formal logic of the arguments being proposed, not of the nature of the knowledge produced by the scientific method. Another way of saying this is that uncertainty is always a part of a scientific explanation.

Finally, I will say that one of the indications that the scientific method is the best we have is simply that it works. It produces.

 

@ughaibu --

Way to skip over the part of the post where I explained how the scientific method is falsifiable.

 

The long quote simply explains that exactly what it is has never been completely and simply explained. It is a lot of methods and is generally understood to be that.

There is no doubt but what the Earth is heating, but that we are the cause of that is disputed by economic interests who would be harmed by trying to control it. The preponderance of evidence is that we are causing it, but there is no way science can, with our present techniques, conclusively prove that.

brough
http://civilization-overview.com

 

No fat chicks?

Apparently because they want the cows—

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Most intelligent and wise: They come for the cows.
(Season 1, Episode 1 — "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe")​

—and not the Omega Mu kind.

 

None of which changes the fact that falsifiability is itself unfalsifiable. Also from your "premise"; the assumption that the present is the same as the past and that the future will be the same as the present, and the assumption that classical logic is in some relevant sense correct, are both extra-scientific philosophical requirements. That science has requirements, which are not themselves within the remit of science, is entirely uncontroversial.

 

It is if you have conducted a sufficient number of experiments which would reasonably be expected to produce evidence of presence, if whatever is being investigated were indeed present.

The point of that old saw is to address argument from ignorance (I haven't bothered to check, therefore I have no evidence, therefore whatever does not exist), and not the reasonable interpretation of experiments producing negative results. If you read it as literally as you seem to be doing there, you end up with inanity. You would have to insist, for example, that we have no evidence that drinking water does not cause AIDS. After all, those billions of people who have drank water and did not come down with AIDS are simply an "absence of evidence," no? And not to be construed as evidence that drinking water does not, in fact, cause one to develop AIDS?

A clearer wording would have been "absence of experiments is not evidence of absence." A bunch of experiments that returned negative results, are not an "absence of evidence" in any meaningful sense. They are exactly the presence of evidence (of absence).

More to the point: theories must be falsifiable to qualify as "scientific theories." Any other theories, are not science.

The scientific method itself is simply a method, not a theory. It does not, on its own, make any assertions whose truth value is up for evaluation, in the first place.

That said, it is usually paired with naturalism (it would be largely useless without at least some weak form of naturalism - else there are no underlying laws to learn, no expectation of repeatability or explicability, etc.). To some extent, naturalism is a philosophical, rather than scientific, theory. However, it does include various scientific hypotheses (no supernatural forces affect nature, etc.) which can indeed be falsified. If anyone, anywhere can produce a single piece of clear evidence of a supernatural being intervening in nature, then naturalism will be dead. This has not occurred, and so the evidence of said absence has become a veritable mountain.

Meanwhile, if you take naturalism as a given, you can then infer scientific hypotheses from the scientific method, and test them. I.e.: application of the scientific method should result in successively better theories (in the sense of being better able to predict more and more phenomena). If you don't get that result, then you have evidence that the scientific method doesn't work. This has also not happened, despite hundreds of years of trying.

 

Again, I'm not so sure that's quite correct. However:

... you have gone in a circle there. You imply that the only basis on which to argue that some "method" is "best" is exactly through verification via the scientific method. But if we accept that premise, we don't need to test the scientific method in the first place, or construct arguments in its favor. You have already assumed that it is not only the best, but the only, method of producing such arguments.

So, you are going to have to pursue some larger framework, if you want to advance arguments about how the scientific method measures up to some other (unspecified, at this point) alternatives. This is the realm of philosophy. And there are many other bases on which to advance arguments about the relative merits of methods of inquiry.