Stephen Bond: Why I Am No Longer A Skeptic

link (via Metafilter)

This essay is a mess in several important ways, but I also think it's onto something.

"Skeptics," in this odd sense, are...what? Something like: people who reject pseudoscience and religion. Paradigmatically, they reject things like ESP and UFOs. When I was a kid, the rejection of religion was rather less overt; now it seems like the core of the thing.

I do think that the essay gets something right. Specifically, I think that the "skeptical" movement is eaten up with scientism. They typically don't know much philosophy, so they tend to not understand the logical and epistemological problems associated with trying to justify scientific inquiry. They treat the justification of science as unproblematic. (Dawkins, pointing to technology as justification for science: "It works...bitches." So I guess that's supposed to be an inductive justification of induction...) In my experience, you do encounter many "skeptical" STEM/IT types who are ignorant of philosophy, but are sure that they are too smart for it, and that science doesn't need it, and that you're an idiot if you deny this... And that's all nonsense. So good on Bond for calling "bullshit" on this.

OTOH, the Bond piece goes way off the rails at several points. For example:

Because we perceive the world through metaphors, all observations, theories, experiments, statements and facts have a context, including a political context. Our science is necessarily and unavoidably contaminated by our political system; political ideologies propagate through science, and science on its own is incapable of purging them. This is widely understood by people who study scientists, but less often by scientists themselves, and never by skeptics.

Skeptics like to portray science as a hermetically-sealed, self-correcting enterprise, where false theories naturally yield to conflicting evidence, and the truth will always out. To support this position they always trot out the same old anecdotes. I've lost count of the number of times I've read the heartwarming tale of the old geologist who happily dismantled his life's work once the truth of plate tectonics was demonstrated to him. However, the history of science shows that such tales are the exception, and that old theories, and old scientists, have greater stubbornness. Much more common is the scenario described by Max Planck:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

This "new generation", not incidentally, tends to be armed with new political attitudes.

Yeah, no.

First, note how an important falsehood gets slipped in at the very beginning, as presupposition:

...we perceive the world through metaphors...

 No, we don't.

Well, it's actually not clear we get to say anything very definite about the claim, because it's not at all clear what it means. What is it to perceive x through a metaphor? God knows. Metaphors clearly play a role in our representations of the world, and in our reasoning...but not so clearly in our perceptions. At any rate, this must be a universal generalization to do what the author needs it to do here, and the universal generalization, to the extent that we can make sense of it, is false. Even if we can make sense of some perception being "through" a metaphor, it's clear that not all are. I'm perceiving a clipboard in front of me right now, and that perception is not "through" any metaphor. It might be worth noting here that, even ignoring the perception stuff, not everything can be metaphorical--metaphors eventually have to ground out in non-metaphors. Juliet might very well be the Sun--but the the Sun is a star, and there's nothing metaphorical about that. Similarly: Juliet is represented as being on the balcony, many buildings have balconies, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare is deceased, and so on. Not everything is metaphorical.

The rest of the paragraph is, similarly, disastrous. The next bit might mean that, overall, politics have some significant influence on science; or it might mean that each scientific discovery is contaminated by politics. The former seems true, the latter is simply false. Science provides us with a way of shoving irrelevant considerations to the side and letting the relevant facts/evidence have its say on our beliefs. If we want to know whether timber rattlers eat mice in the wild, then we go and observe some timber rattlers in the wild. If fifty are observed, and all eat mice, and none are observed that do not eat mice, then we have good reason in support of a conclusion. There is simply no room for politics to intrude here. Not all science is so clean and simple, but much is. Politics sometimes influences science, but it doesn't always do so. And there is no doubt about that.

One could go on...

But I'll just point out that, the thing about the Planck quote is: it's false, and actual studies in the history of science show that. It's catchy, it's a good hypothesis, but it isn't true.

The punchline:

Mindless scientism is bad, and it does infect so-called "skepticism" (note: "skepticism" in this sense is not actual skepticism, which is the view that we have no justified beliefs at all). But it would be a profound mistake to leap out of the scientistic frying pan and into the relativistic/social-constructionist/Kuhnian/postmodern fire. There is no sound inference that takes us from the denial of bone-headed scientism to any of those crackpot views.