Hey hey hey!! How much does religion affect MIT?

jessiehl
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:37:50 +0000

Whence arises your conviction that work aimed at disproving a reigning scientific theory without a comprehensive alternative hypothesis is not scientific?



It is. As far as I know, however, it is also not intelligent design, it’s just science that some proponents of ID also happen to do.



Really? I wasn’t trying to be glib – that would be real news to me. One might have predicted that after all the talk about “the scientific method” in high school, MIT and other science schools might have a whole class about what this is, but I barely heard the words.



I might have gotten more of it than most people because there are aspects what is put forth and published in brain & cognitive science (my major) that are pretty sketchy and are either not scientific (psychoanalysis) or are poorly-done science because the newness and immaturity of the subfield has led to a lack of rigor (a lot of fMRI-based cognitive neuroscience). The folks who taught classes in fields that had some component of sketchiness were concerned that we understand this sort of thing, so that we didn’t fall into the traps common in those fields.

In fact, it’s partly because of that that I see something dangerous in a view of science that is “whatever doctrines we like at the moment”. Even among smart people, the majority view is not always right. I think that the definition of science is sociological, but that once you’ve got that definition, what goes under that name needs to meet that definition.



I think you DO know about this industry but don’t have enough respect for it. The fact that they are funded by an interest group to which you have objections does not entail that they are unskilled or that the arguments they make are always wrong. The great danger is that the scientific community will get glib about the ways it defends it work and its authority. Don’t you agree that no matter how misguided these people are, science shouldn’t be defended with overly simplistic theories of science?



Oh, I do think that they are smart and skilled, and I think that it is a great mistake on the part of scientists who care about the teaching of science in schools and the public’s scientific literacy to ignore them, or simply dismiss them as idiots, as many do…I think it only makes the public think that the scientific community has something to hide/be afraid of.

Really, I think “It’s not science because we said so, even though we don’t really have a definition of what science is” is rather overly simplistic. :)

Robert Pennock, a philosopher and AAAS fellow who testified for the plaintiff in Kitzmiller vs. Dover to the effect that ID is not science, has some interesting things to say about this issue and methodological naturalism vs. metaphysical naturalism.