Burke on Definition 25 May 2009 I was discussing whether science or religion can be defined, when I was reminded of this: No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They are incapable of exact definition. But, though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable. [Edmund Burke. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770, Select Works, Vol. I, p39] Definition is one of those things that we are supposed to be able to do before we commence our discussions, so as to agree upon terms, at least since Cicero. But it transpires that we are as often as not arguing about definitions. Having just given my talk again about Feyerabend, I am reminded that the nature of what is science is as contestable as that of what is religion, and in both cases one either cannot define it, but merely point to it, or one can only say that it is something historical, which, like a mammal, shares a common ancestor culturally. Philosophy Religion Science
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Definitions: look up a word in the dictionary, and you get… more words. Everything seems to have a context. Well, at least everything that can possibly be thought of. If context is pre-existing (in time), then everything that can be thought of also has a taxonomy, even if there’s only something pointing to it. That would include science and religion. So… does meaning = taxonomy? Or… are we just playing with hammers and nails? 😉
An excellent post, only a handful of lines but it demands reply. However when one starts to formulate a reply one realises that it is going to become an, at least, 150 page academic dissertation and that’s not including the necessary extensive footnotes and literary references. I will however restrict myself to one moderately short polemic. You write: the nature of what is science is … contestable … and … one …cannot define it, but merely point to it, or one can only say that it is something historical, which, like a mammal, shares a common ancestor culturally. A very true observation but one that unfortunately in the hands of second class and blinkered scholars leads to two, still all too common, cancers in the history of science, both of which you have on many occasions criticised, ‘presentism’ and the ‘Whig interpretation of history’. Discerning a common ancestor, the blinkered scholar only considers those aspects of the past that he perceives to be closely related to that which is considered science in the present, neglecting or ignoring all things, which have in the process of time been rejected from the cannon as no longer scientific according to the latest definitions. Thus ignoring a very substantial part of those human activities that contributed to the evolution of that which we now call science. This restrictive interpretation then leads on to the Whig fallacy that science is some sort of triumphal march of progress proceeding in measured steps from its primitive origins to its glorious present. Replacing the widely rooted and multi-branched tree of the evolution of science with a Great Chain of Scientific Being. On Burke I will just ask; but when does dark become light?
While we cannot draw a precise line, what demarks non-science from science, that does not mean that there are some things which are clearly non-science and some things which are clearly science. At this point, I run up against a difficulty, for I cannot think of something which is more clearly non-science than is “intelligent design”.
At this point, I run up against a difficulty, for I cannot think of something which is more clearly non-science than is “intelligent design”. Then I would say that you clearly have a very limited imagination.
Please have pity on this person of limited imagination, and give an example of an alternative that fits better. Or is this another example of how ID lives on “don’t tell”?
Some of the arguments about the nature of complex entities such as religion or science may involve extremely difficult issues of logic or even metaphysics, but the practical problem is not so complicated. For purposes of ideological debate, anything that doesn’t have a simple definition doesn’t have a definition at all. It’s as if people had noticed that the continent of Europe has an arbitrary eastern border and isn’t a square, a circle, or a triangle and then concluded from these facts that it doesn’t have a shape at all. The demarcation dilemma is a variant of one of the ten known undergraduate ideas—it’s hard to say if a euglena is an animal or a plant, therefore we can’t tell oak trees from house cats. In the context of a serious study of the sociology and history of science, it may be possible to elucidate how its practioners distinguish science from non-science; but the kind of answers you get from this process are too fractal and multi-dimensional to satisfy anybody, even the scientists themselves. Out of sheer rhetorical necessity, the scientists will go on talking about science as if it had a simple, easily comprehended essence. That essence, however, is part of the PR apparatus of science; and the whole it defines is merely another one of the parts of an infernally complicated system.
Thom you claimed that you couldn’t imagine anything less scientific than ‘intelligent design’, a claim for which I accused you of lacking imagination. You immediately responded with a very strange question; “or is this another example of how ID lives on “don’t tell”?, which I’m quite happy to admit I don’t understand. Maybe you could be so kind as to elucidate? Coming back to your original claim it appears to be based on the belief that ‘intelligent design’ has no scientific merits what so ever and therefore nothing could be less scientific. I would at least tentatively offer ‘turtles all the way down’ as considerably less scientific than ‘intelligent design’. I say tentatively because as far as I know ‘turtles all the way down’ has never produced any scientific explanations of any note, but I could be wrong. The hypothesis of intelligent design has however in the course of the history of science produced highly significant scientific explanations and that more than once. To give just two famous examples from the 17th century, at least two scientists working under the assumption of the intelligent design hypothesis and, even in their case, assuming the intelligent designer to be the biblical christian god, and not as the modern intelligent design advocates do claiming that their hypothesis does not imply any specific deity, laid the foundations of modern science. They were of course Johannes Kepler at the beginning of the century and Isaac Newton at its end. Ironically the foundations that they laid under the assumption of this hypothesis enabled later generations of scientists to develop explanations in which the intelligent design hypothesis became superfluous. Science is not a static process in which there are eternal fundamental truths but a dynamic process of placing questions about the natural world under the assumption of plausible hypotheses in order to produce fruitful explanation of that natural world. Over the millennia those hypotheses have constantly changed but for a substantial part of that time the intelligent design hypothesis was assumed to be a valid scientific hypothesis and this assumption generated a significant amount of important scientific progress.
I’m referring to the ID policy of not making any statement of substance – no answers to Who, What, Where, When, Why, or How. And, of course, I am referring to the recent phenomenon of ID. Your references are to people who believed in God as the Creator. ID does not acknowledge God as the designer – as has been pointed out, ” Possible candidates for the role of designer include: the God of Christianity; an angel–fallen or not; Plato’s demi-urge; some mystical new age force; space aliens from Alpha Centauri; time travelers; or some utterly unknown intelligent being.”
Defining science is easy: it is the process of applying the scientific method. 🙂 Seriously, science is a process: Question, test, evaluate, repeat. No question too stupid. (Want to question Newton’s laws of thermodynamics? No problem, design your experiments and go for it.) Religion forbids certain questions, and the only process is to follow. (Why do you get to speak for the invisible sky wizard? How can I be sure this isn’t a scam? Why are you reaching for my wallet, is that where my soul is?)
On Burke I will just ask; but when does dark become light? At dawn. This currently has some vogue in the logical literature as the question of vague predicates, or “vagueness”. It seems to me that most of the predicates we use in real world situations are vaguely delimited. Vague predicates have no clear demarcation, but have clear modes or central points. I would suggest that we do best by starting at the centre of our natural classes and working out, rather than starting at the edges and including in.
“I would suggest that we do best by starting at the centre of our natural classes and working out, rather than starting at the edges and including in.” Is fortifying our “clearest” definitions a closer route to truth, .. or some kind of pragmatism? (not judging, just asking – what is the goal?) Also, how to address conflict resolution? (different sources have different standards for dawn). Or the big one: subjectivity? (my friend thinks it’s dawn, but I think it’s night)
IMO all classification, and indeed all science, is pragmatist, or possibly instrumentalist. There is no “truth” to be had other than this in a fallibilist epistemology like those of science. We classify our natural kinds in order to make generalisations form which to proceed in our investigations. A “natural” kind is one that doesn’t depend solely upon the predilections of a single observer or the convenience of many observers, but upon properties that can be ascertained to be those of the things being investigated. We do this in order to learn about the natural world.
I understand, and it makes perfect sense under the umbrella of a pragmatism that maximizes objectivity for the hard sciences. I assume there must be a strict, rigorous methodology for this type of classification. But it seems to me, that it would be ill-equipped to handle vague things like night/day, especially if the classification system imposed artificially objective (and possibly essential?) properties where none may clearly exist. Not sure about the history of science or religion.
To answer Tom S’s question (playfully), there are clearly many things which are less like science than is ID. Take a blancmange for example. That is so unlike science that no one could possibly mistake it for science. ID, on the other hand, has sufficient similarity to science that many people do mistake it for science. More seriously, I would say there are three questions that a complete definition of science needs to address: 1. What general kind of thing is science? Answer: it is a process of making rational inferences about reality. 2. What types of rational inference are considered science? The word “science” tends to be limited to fields of study which are more strictly methodical, and perhaps those which involve (but aren’t limited to) discovering general theories. For example, historians make rational inferences about historical events, but we don’t usually consider those to be science. A mechanic makes rational inferences about what is wrong with engines, but we don’t usually consider those to be science. 3. How do we distinguish between a rational inference and an irrational (or invalid) one? (We might also ask just how bad does an inference need to be before we consider it to be non-science or pseudoscience rather than just poor science.)