Wronger Than Wrong

Read the full article:

"Wronger Than Wrong: Not all wrong theories are equal"
By Michael Shermer, Scientific American, November 2006.

Excerpts:

Achieving almost canonical status as the ne plus ultra put-down is theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli's reported harsh critique of a paper: "This isn't right. It's not even wrong." I call this Pauli's proverb.

(I)f an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.

Asimov's axiom, well stated in his book The Relativity of Wrong (Doubleday, 1988): "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins observed on this dispute: "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."

These are great, but then Shermer concludes:

When people thought that science was unbiased and unbound by culture, they were simply wrong. On the other hand, when people thought that science was completely socially constructed, they were simply wrong. But if you believe that thinking science is unbiased is just as wrong as thinking that science is socially constructed, then your view is not even wronger than wrong.

Of course, it is more wrong to suppose that science is unbiased than to suppose it is socially constructed, although I doubt that was the point Shermer was trying to make. Science is a social activity. It depends on experimentalists test hypotheses generated from theories which are usually generated by others. It depends on scientists replicating the results of other scientists. It depends on a social process of interpretation of the meaning of experimental results, which are generally communicated through scientific societies or at least scientific community networks. Scientists get to be scientists through a social process in which they learn a body of scientific knowledge developed by the scientific community, and indeed communicated according to a socially constructed scientific curriculum.

I would also say that it is more wrong to say:

* science is completely socially constructed than to say that science is science is unbiased, and

* science is completely socially constructed than to say science is socially constructed

Having carped at a single word in Shermer's essay, I think it makes a very important point -- that science progresses replacing one theory by another, without ever concluding that some new theory might prove better still. But that progression involves theories that predict more and more, and more and more accurately.

I would also disagree on an epistemological grounds to the idea that theories must be falsifiable. It seems to me that the first job is to try to develop a better theory. When a candidate theory is ready, the next job is to figure out how to test its validity, or at least to find predictions of experimental results that would differ between that theory and the one it is offered to replace. I think that there are examples of good hypotheses that took a long time to test.

Shermer seems also to be against string theory

depends far too much on the aesthetic nature of its mathematics and the eminence of its proponents.

I don't know. Eminent scientists are of course not always right, but they got to be eminent often by being right in the past. And beautiful mathematics is surely not a negative charactistic in a theory. These two criteria seem to be good ones to use in determining whether or not to seek tests to verify a theory.