"Science" is a silly term that obscures more than it clarifies.
Why do we care about "science"? There are science perverts, who care about some practice under the umbrella of "science" the way foot perverts care about feet, but surely the societal "we" is not a pervert. We care about "science" because it produces things that are useful to us, like the internal combustion engine, and computers, and transistors.
The transistor is both a work of engineering and an epistemic proof: there can be no transistors without engineers who know how to build them. Sometimes discoveries are made by accident, but most of the time they're generated by a paradigm in basic research. Researchers (and engineers) make up stories about their funny little characters, such as "electricity" and "doped silicon", and then ask: assuming that these stories are true, what else would follow from them? Sometimes the transistor follows. The value of the paradigm - even if it is later disproven - is in the prediction and production of engineered artifacts. Truth claims are entirely beside the point; to say that a research paradigm "is true" is a type error.
This engineering-centric perspective solves a number of issues with the science-centric paradigm:
- The purpose of a paradigm is not to be true, but to
be acted upon. A paradigm is just a story that exists for researchers to yes-and until it collapses. In domains that are not directly useful to governing bodies, this looks like predicting eka-germanium and inventing the transistor; in domains that are, this looks like
Buck v. Bell.
- "False sciences" are things that don't bear fruit. You can tell parapsychology is fake because nobody's worked out a way to make money on it. (If parapsychology is real but unmonetizable, it comes from a force that resists monetization. If fairies are real, they're repelled by cold iron; if orangutans have language, they don't show it to humans, because we'd put them to work.)
- Psychology is basic research applied by the fields of marketing and policing. (The founder of the field of public relations was, infamously, Freud's nephew.) It is thus proper to be extremely suspicious of it.
- Believing in the literal truth of currently accepted scientific paradigms is a strategy that, evaluated by its own merits, would've failed at most points before today. The right side of history is the one that would not have believed in the literal truth of the four humours or the luminiferous aether, both of which are false.
- Why does "the scientific method" care about replicability? Is this something that scientists have to take on faith? In the early history of the science of chemistry, this would not have been observable; there's an anecdote in Lawrence Principe's book
The Secrets of Alchemy where he recounts trying to replicate an early chemical synthesis and failing. The synthesis as written was incorrect, and under current alchemical paradigms impossible; but the alchemist who wrote it down was from such-and-such a region and would've gotten his pots from such-and-such a place, the geological properties of which are now known, so they would've contained contaminants that participated in the reaction. But replicability matters
if you are a practicing engineer, trying to produce the same dye or the same transistor as part of an industrial process that could be sold to other engineers or performed in factories at any time anywhere in the world. Sometimes failures of industrial processes lead to new discoveries that impact replicability -
disappearing polymorphs may be an example of this.
- "The scientific method" is the tradecraft of industrial research, which obviously varies depending on the domain.
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