Anomalous Presumptions

My recent metaphysics post touches on a question I’ve been thinking about for some time: How can we judge whether a given domain of inquiry or a theoretical proposal is credible or not? Of course this is a very hard question, but I think we should pay more attention to an aspect of it that can give us at least retrospective insight.

Some domains were once very important, but have completely lost any credibility — for example astrology. Some domains have been losing credibility for a long time but haven’t been completely written off — for example Freudian psychological theory. Some domains seem quite credible but are being vigorously attacked by investigators who are themselves credible — for example string theory. Also, in some cases, proposals that were broadly rejected were later largely adopted, sometimes after many decades — for example continental drift, reborn as plate tectonics.

Philosophers of science, and many epistemologists, mine these historical trajectories for insight into the broader question. There are diverse approaches to explaining the success or failure of various theories and research programs. However I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of these attempts are “internalist”, in the sense that they focus on the internal state of a research program over time. Different approaches focus on formal characteristics of a sequence of theories, social and historical factors, methodological factors, etc. but almost all accounts assume that the answer is to be found within the research program itself.

I’d like to propose a different perspective: We can judge the health of a research program by its interactions with other research programs. As long as a research program is actively using and responding to results from other domains, and as long as other domains are using its results, or working on problems it proposes, it is healthy and will remain credible. If it proves to be incapable of producing results that other domains can use, or even worse, if it stops responding to new ideas and challenges from external research, it is on its way to becoming moribund.

Looking back at the historical trajectories of many research programs, this criterion works quite well. It is not very hard to see why this could be the case. Investigators in any given domain are constantly making practical judgments about where to spend their effort, what ideas proposed by others they should trust, etc. (Kitcher discusses this point in detail in The Advancement of Science.) Investigators who might take advantage of results from a given external domain have a strong incentive to make accurate assessments of whether those results can actually contribute to their work. Furthermore, they have a lot of information about how reliable, relevant, and easy to use a given result is likely to be (compared, for example, with an historian or philosopher). So if a research program isn’t generating useful results, its neighbors will sense that, and will have strong incentives to accurately reflect their judgment in their research practices.

However I think the implications are actually much deeper than these obvious (and probably valid) factors. For example, the trajectories of research programs are often dramatically shifted by new techniques that depend on external results. Plate tectonics became became dominant through a dramatic shift in opinion in 1966 largely as a result of improved measurements of magnetic orientation in sea floor rocks. Paleontology and archeology have been dramatically affected multiple times by improvements in dating based on physics. Evolutionary biology has been hugely reshaped by tools for analyzing genetic similarity between species. Etc.

Such shifts open up major new interesting questions and opportunities for progress. But they are much less likely to occur in domains that, for whatever reason, are cut off from active interchange with other research programs. Also, some reasons why a domain may be cut off — the desire to protect some theoretical positions, for example — will also tend to cause internal degeneration and ultimately loss of credibility.

More generally, my criterion reflects the fact that all research programs exist within a network of related activities — technical, intellectual, educational, etc. — without which they would wither and die. In essence, I’m advocating taking this network, and its changes over time, more seriously.

This criterion doesn’t engage in any obvious way with the usual question “Are these theories true?” (or at least, becoming more true, if we can figure out what that means). I’m not even sure that I can show that there is a strong connection.

Possibly this indicates that my criterion is fatally flawed. Or possibly it means I should look harder for a connection. But I suspect that this actually means that the idea of “truth” does not work very well at the scale of research programs. If a scientist is reporting experimental results, “truth” may be a very appropriate criterion, especially if we are concerned about fraud or sloppiness. But in these larger issues we should probably try to sharpen our criteria for pragmatic usefulness, and not waste time arguing about truth.

Filed by Jed at 1:21 am under Philosophy, Social order
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