Scientific Method And Its Limits

“Science is everything.” More and more this meme is inserting itself into the dogmatic cannon of the 21st century; but it didn’t start here. The idea that science is ‘all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’ dates back at least as far as the mid-18th century. 

Determinism (Laplace), utilitarianism (Mill), liberalism (Smith), materialism (Marx), behaviorism (Skinner) and positivism (James) trace a fairly smooth 200 year trajectory, culminating in various schools of Logical Positivism (LP), ranging from A(yer) to W(ittgenstein). 

LP finally stated what everyone had been hinting at for 200 years: Propositions can only be True if they are meaningful, and they can only be meaningful if they are subject to falsification via the process known as Scientific Method. 

Is that true? Is science everything? Yes, but with limitations…and no, but with exceptions.

Science has given us an incredibly powerful tool, enabling us to identify and explain regularities in our environment. The principle might be summarized as ‘same input → same output’. Whenever outputs don’t agree, we immediately check the inputs: Did we really duplicate the prior experiment? Or was there something different about our set-up or our procedure?

Flashback: In high school chemistry, my lab partner and I frequently reported unique outputs. Question: Were these disparate outputs discoveries? (If so, where are the Nobels?) Or were they the products of human error?

When it comes to understanding the regularities of our world, Scientific Method is the undisputed heavy weight champion. It outperforms superstition, magic, and even child sacrifice. Horry for science! 

Alcoholics Anonymous is known for its memes; for example, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over (e.g. drinking) and expecting a different outcome.”  

But not everything in our experience is repeatable. Some things are ‘one-offs’. In so far as an event is unrepeatable, Scientific Method is of no use. And so Western Civilization classifies events (Science vs. Art) according to the ‘relative repeatability’ of each event.

Relative repeatability? No two events can ever be the same…or they would be one event, not two. They must differ in some respect, if only place and/or time. On the other hand, no two events in the same Universe can ever be entirely unrelated. Therefore, every event intersects with the realm of Science and with the realm of Art. We turn to Science when we wish to study what we share; we turn to Art when we don’t. 

The existence of technology per se testifies to the fact that conditions can often be reproduced to an acceptable tolerance. Of course, ‘acceptable tolerance’ is different in every case. 

Example: I wish to confirm the boiling point of water. For that I need a heat source, a beaker of H₂O, and a thermometer. Bingo! 100°C…or not! Not? What went wrong? Before we throw out centuries of science, let’s take a moment to confirm that all relevant conditions were ‘adequately approximated’ for our experiment. 

A few things we might check: the purity of the water, the pressure of the air, extraneous forces impinging on our experimental apparatus. I’m enough of a believer in science to assume that we will be able to trace our discrepant output back to some discrepant input.

Of course, there are times when no such discrepancy can be found. That’s called ‘discovery’. Eureka! The Cosmic Microwave Background, for example.

We may justifiably hope that Science will ultimately reveal to us ‘everything’ there is to know about ‘everything’…but only to the extent that everything is repeatable. But we must not expect Science to shed any light whatsoever on anything to the extent that it is unique. We have Art for that! Science is the Queen of its castle…but only its castle!

Alfred North Whitehead was fond of quoting the Anglican hymn, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.” For contemporary process philosophers, as for the pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Parmenides, etc.) before them, the task of philosophy is to account for continuity amid novelty and flux amid solidarity.

Every event is threefold unique. First, it arises out of a unique multiplicity, its own past, its own ‘light cone’; second, every event organizes that multiplicity into its own, unique World, i.e. its ‘personal history’; and finally, every event comes to be via the injection of a creative spark into that World.

On the other hand, multiplicities massively overlap, actual worlds can be maddeningly similar, and the creative impulse may be muted. One ball bearing can look and function very much like another; often they can be swapped with no discernable effect. Yet they are not absolutely identical, but  “Close enough for government work,” as we used to say.

So science is fiction, all science; it relies on the false premise of absolute repeatability. Yet science has conferred unimaginable adaptive advantage on the one species that has mastered it (homo sapiens). Therefore, despite its limitations, it satisfies William James’ (Pragmatism’s) Truth Test (“does it work?”).

We need science, more and more, but we must remember that it is a tool, not reality itself. A Roman Catholic may venerate a statue of a saint; but if that worshipper comes to believe that the statue is the saint, that’s idolatry. 

We must squeeze every practical advantage we can out of science, but we must not mistake it for reality. Science is a map, not the territory;  we must not turn it into a ‘golden calf’. Einstein said it best (he usually does): “…As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” 

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