To give one ridiculous example, I had a graduate student in anthropology suggest to me that science needs to be democratized and taken away from the scientists and verified and decided upon by the common man. I asked by what method the common man could do such verification and make any such decisions, as the obvious answer to both is Science.

I do not think criticisms of this type are worth much, especially when they are written on a computer, posted on the internet, and then discussed on forums like this. In a dictum: "Science works, bitches."

The irony here is that your argument against the anthropologist is very similar to Hughes' argument against the institutional understanding of science.

The point he's making is that if we reject the institutional understanding and take science to have a special legitimacy because of some property of the scientific method (say, theories are falsifiable by empirical data), the arguments of scientists, and the citing of empirical data don't provide this special legitimacy when the method employed doesn't possess that property. Yet when Hawking does metaphysics, the reverence for science as an institution leads people to treat it as they treat science.

I don't know what sounds anti-science about having a problem with that. Being careful about what we call science is a defence against pseudoscience.

This simply is not true. If this sort of a priori judgement occurs, it occurs because Hawking is a famously intelligent and thoughtful person. Of course people take what he says seriously. However, he is also continually engaged in debates with other scientists, often publicly, and is in no way walled off from questioning by either the institution of science or his own fame.

Additionally, I have heard the exact opposite of the sentiment you stated claimed. His biographer, Kitty Ferguson, ludicrously criticized Hawking's atheism as him going beyond his field. As if because one is not a theologian, one cannot discuss religion. What tripe.

You might think that to be the case but there is no evidence for it being so.

Hawking's pontificating on metaphysics are of no more interest to me than Linus Torvald's on laptop screen resolutions or Richard Dawkin's theoretical thoughts on cosmology.

Of course there is no such implication, nor did I make this claim. But it is absolutely true that certain people are simply better at reasoning than other people. This may be because of biological traits, educational difference, difference of habit, etc., but it is certainly true. Any experience with any human will reveal this to you, I think.

> Hawking's pontificating on metaphysics are of no more interest to me than Linus Torvald's on laptop screen resolutions or Richard Dawkin's theoretical thoughts on cosmology.

I am not at all clear why you would say this. In fact, I think you are committing an argument from authority in the reverse. You refuse to listen to this guys because you assume that they are not authorities. That's just bogus and I am sure you know that. Instead, you should listen to Hawking discuss metaphysics and decide if he is worth listening to. You would, I think, do exactly that if it were philosopher speaking.

Why should I listen to Hawking discuss metaphysics? I only have limited time, and I'm entirely unconvinced that would be a good use of it. It's not that I'm refusing, merely that I have no inclination to because I don't have any expectation of particular insight.

-- The famous "reverse" Ad-Hominem attack? WAT

TLDR: Famously intelligent and thoughful people are frequently full of shit, evil, or amoral. Same rules apply. [1]

_________

[1] Its worth noting [a] ad-hominem is not a per-se fallacy; And [b] its useful to questions motives. But since many serial killers, terrorists, and supporters of the hollocaust could be considered "famously intelligent and thoughtful people", it goes without saying that arguments should be evaluated on the merits.

== Fixed that for ya.

. . . Carry On.

The kind of abstraction that works is greatly influenced by its surrounding context. In more complex issues (say in law), appeal to common sense is sometimes more preferable than using the most fashionable 'scientific theory'. You don't like your spouse? How about teaching her evolutionary biology/psychology?

Dogmatism breeds the act of taking these out of context. Some parts of math works in their internal framework(i.e. math), but taking it out of context is at best, dumb, and at worst, harmful. Having theorems giving infinite-length messages yield certain events of probability one makes all 'realistic' outcomes probability zero. Same for theorems too sensitive to perturbation in axioms that removing a single point turns things upside down.

We don't need 'institutional science', or dogma, or 'mathematics strictly contained in universities', all we need is science, is mathematics, is reason, and understanding their application context.

Such debate often occurs with confusing science with 'opinions of the majority of scientists in academia of what's right'. No, science is not the latter.

[TL;DR] Science and math are useful in a very specified context, and as such is a framework of thinking. Those who take some of their context-dependent results universally and urge everyone to accept it is dogmatic, not scientific.

To rephrase this, science is the only thing we know. Show me something that's not science that we know. Of course, you can't. You've given yourself the answer before you begin to ask the question.

Effective science and humility have to go hand-in-hand. Otherwise you're just creating a new religion with the rubric "science" stuck on it.

"Science works, bitches" -- to answer particular types of questions which have certain properties. Questions about ethics (that is, what one "should" do) can be informed by science, but there is no such thing as a falsifiable ethical framework; an ethical framework must by its nature involve assumptions which are not determined by science.

Thus, an "answer" or "truth" within ethics is a different type of thing than an "answer" or "truth" within, say, chemistry. Coyne glosses over this by assuming the only type of "answer" or "truth" that matters is the type that comes from science or can be verified by science. This is not an isolated misstatement; he has previously said that "Only science has the ability to answer questions" [0]. Rather amusingly, this is a philosophical and non-scientific assumption.

This is why Coyne's response is essentially useless. Science is an awesome tool, but there are questions it can only address within a framework dependent on non-scientific assumptions.

[0] http://vimeo.com/31505142 around the 34:20 mark

Er, isn't that the entire point? Coyne didn't set this trap; Hughes did by contrasting science with ???, where ??? is some as-yet undefined way of apprehending truth. It's incumbent on Hughes to solve that dilemma, not Coyne. And, of course, Hughes doesn't. At all.

But since some theoretical physicists can't tell you why the universe exists and evolutionary psychologists still publish papers, the periodic table of elements, Maxwell's equations, and the theory of evolution are all part of a religion. QED!

I'm speaking broadly here, but qualia are not scientific. My internal experiences aren't scientific. So I'd say that, on one sense, at least half of what I experience is not scientific.

No one actually knows what is going on inside of my head at this moment. Yet I know my own thoughts, emotions and experiences. Science may know that I can experience love, for example. But it can't tell me that I am experiencing love at this moment, as I write this comment, or who I fall in love with.

The question I was responding to was: "Show me something that's not science that we know". My response is that there are lots of things that we, as people, actually know but can't study scientifically.

For example, if I'm hungry and eat a good meal the changes in my brain chemistry that induce the sense of well being that follows are well understood.

That doesn't tell me anything at all about the actual subjective experience of feeling pleasure though. That is something distinct.

Let me make an argument by analogy.

You are saying that understanding the chip architecture and the instruction set of a computer does not allow you to understand what it is like for that chip to run a given program. Is that a fair analogy? Can you improve it?

If this is a fair analogy, then I think it is clear that you are wrong. We absolutely can understand what running a given program is like. We may need to use a different vocabulary and abstract away detail in order to efficiently communicate the idea of running the program (say, talk about a data structure rather than the individual bits that compose it), but that is true in every field. This is basic tool of reasoning.

If that is not a good analogy, please let me know how. I am not satisfied at all that I understand what you mean when you write "the actual subjective experience". I understand what those words mean but I cannot match them with an object.

The problem with this argument is that your conscious perception is actually the only thing you can know to exist. Everything else is sense data fed into that consciousness. You assume that the external world that manifests itself via sense data exists because it appears consistent.

But as I sit here typing this the only thing I can know with certainty is that 'I' exist and am conscious (by definition).

This process of being conscious, of perceiving the world, is what I am arguing is outside the realm of science.

Now I know a number of people are of the opinion that if you have a sufficiently complicated machine, biological or otherwise, consciousness will become some emergent property. And maybe this is so. But just saying 'it emerges' is not science. It's hand waving. So instead we have to just accept that for the moment we cannot speak of it.

Even more to the point: the impetus lies with the proponents of "love as a useful, concrete object" to defend their hypothesis from dissection by neuroscientists. Linguistic and poetic convention have no hold over hard data.

Do you think they'll remain unscientific?

As a matter of fact, there is an interesting book about it: [What We Believe but Cannot Prove](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Believe_But_Cannot_Prov...).

Just off the top of my head, I'd say the most obvious thing that people know that isn't scientific is to make creative leaps and discover/invent new ideas. Science can tell us a lot about how it happens, but there is no scientific formula for creating new, true, useful, or provocative ideas. When people make a creative leap, do they know it's true, in the scientific sense?

Or how about humor? Can you scientifically prove a joke to be funny? I know what I find funny, but humor is not provable, or created following the scientific method.

Demonstrably false. Going by Steve Martin's autobiography, as just one example, stand-up comics routinely submit their new material to controlled tests with sample audiences. Jokes (and performance details) that fail to elicit laughter and post-show satisfaction (i.e. as practical a demonstration of "funny" as any), are judged provably false and left out of the routine.

> Similarly, modern theorists imply, the multiverse has necessary being even though any given universe does not.

No. What's implicit is that arguments of necessary being will not ever be found.

As I'm fond of saying (a bit unfairly): a philosopher is someone insightful enough to ask the fundamental questions and thick enough to try to answer them.

Yeah, he goes too far. There are areas involving qualia that could probably be handled by science eventually but the tools at our disposal are too crude for the moment so the humanities get them. There are also ought-questions in ethics and aesthetics that science isn't built to answer. They ought to stay in humanities too, chiefly because humanists are good at poking holes in arguments for certitude.

Most importanly, /we don't want/ the kinds of Big Why questions Hughes is laying on us. Humanities academics are busy toiling away on little subspecialties and trying to be as methodologically rigorous as possible given the limitations of the subject matter.

We do not want the responsibility of answering why people exist or proving that someone's religious fantasies are true. We can give you a historical tour of thinkers who tried to do so, or point out weird side-effects of some of their arguments, or point out some major religious traditions that don't actually care very much about those two questions - we can do all that and more, and I'd argue that's valuable stuff, but we are not going to be errand boys for crypto-creationists.

So, one demerit to Coyne for being a little too dismissive humanities. Infinity demerits to Hughes for trying to make humanities something it doesn't want to be and shouldn't be.

> There are areas involving qualia that could probably be handled by science eventually but the tools at our disposal are too crude for the moment so the humanities get them.

Please give examples of these and explain a) Why, if science cannot be done with these questions, is anything else worth doing? What is the good a method you know does not achieve satisfactory results?

The example I would give here is Freud and the study of the brain. I do not see the point -- except for entertainment -- of psychoanalysis being carried out just because there were not yet good tools for doing science. The better effort would have been to develop those tools rather than talking junk for 100 years.

> There are also ought-questions in ethics and aesthetics that science isn't built to answer.

This is not true, though I agree it is commonly assumed. Other people on this thread have mentioned Sam Harris's work on morality as a counter example to this claim.

If you are going to make decisions about what you ought to do, you had better be working from an accurate model of the world, at least if you want your actions to have the desired consequences. This is a scientific project.

As for more complex subjective questions, I do not see how the humanities are better equipped to deal with these as compared to just basic good reasoning. The same goes for poking holes in arguments. Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory (not to keep stomping on that already crushed horse) in front of chemists and physicists and see what you get. They will have no trouble at all shredding it.

Here's a Greek manuscript. There's a lacuna in the text. What is the most likely correct emendation? If you use a statistical method to answer, explain how you compiled your corpus of comparisons.

>explain a) Why, if science cannot be done with these questions, is anything else worth doing?

Oh my yes, just like football and gourmet cooking are worth doing. Besides which, your science labs are going to need industrial designers and lawyers, and at least a couple historians of science to warn you away from past methodological errors. Which means you also need at least a few scholars of rhetoric, fine arts, philology, general history and archaeology to train them.

>Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory (not to keep stomping on that already crushed horse)

And yet you do. Why do you guys always use psychoanalysis for your examples? Why not numismatics? Why not 16th century Dutch history? Why not philosophy of mathematics, Meso-American archaeology or Song-period Chinese textual criticism?

>Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory…in front of chemists and physicists and see what you get. They will have no trouble at all shredding it.

Or try putting it forward in front of social anthropologists. They will have even less trouble - and they were on to Freud a couple of decades before the alleged scientists in the medical profession caught on.

That describes the basic pattern-matching mechanism employed by the neural networks that constitute our brains. Developments like natural language processing (NLP) continue to turn that mental black box increasingly transparent.

> Here's a Greek manuscript. There's a lacuna in the text. What is the most likely correct emendation? If you use a statistical method to answer, explain how you compiled your corpus of comparisons.

This lacuna is going to be filled using scientific thinking employed by the humanities scholar doing the. He is going to make comparisons to other documents and to other knowledge about the period, language, etc. That is to have some hypotheses about the lacuna, he is going to gather data, and then he is going to analyze that data in the context of the lacuna and propose solutions.

As has been pointed out, there are existing computational systems that do this kind of work. There is a long history of work on this kind of problem from information theory and cryptography.

> Oh my yes, just like football and gourmet cooking are worth doing. Besides which, your science labs are going to need industrial designers and lawyers, and at least a couple historians of science to warn you away from past methodological errors. Which means you also need at least a few scholars of rhetoric, fine arts, philology, general history and archaeology to train them.

I did not make my point clearly. Let me make it again: if your methodology does not produce parsimonious models of the world that can be used to make accurate predictions, then what is the point of doing it? If you cannot produce testable claims of fact about the world, what is the point in doing it?

I was suggesting to you, to take a jocular example, that if you know that astrology does not work, then it is not worth doing, even if it is your only method of making predictions.

Your point about industrial designers and lawyers is a non sequitur in this context. I am talking about methods of discovery and methods of testing knowledge claims.

As to psychoanalysis, the reason I brought it up is that it is still rampant in large parts the humanities: intellectual history, comparative literature, and English the chief problem fields.

Psychoanalysis isn't popular because it gives an accurate depiction of reality. It's popular for an opposite reason. It helps talk about things that aren't present in the world. How do you propose the laboratory to account for that?

Relevant:

"recent advocates of scientism have taken the ironic but logical next step of denying any useful role for philosophy whatsoever, even the subservient philosophy of the positivist sort. But the last laugh, it seems, remains with the philosophers — for the advocates of scientism reveal conceptual confusions that are obvious upon philosophical reflection. Rather than rendering philosophy obsolete, scientism is setting the stage for its much-needed revival. [...] In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer."