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Getting Science Wrong: Why The Philosophy of Science Matters
When Galileo dropped cannon-balls from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he did more than overturn centuries of scientific orthodoxy. At a stroke, he established a new conception of the scientific method based upon careful experimentation and rigorous observation - and also laid the groundwork for an ongoing conflict between the critical open-mindedness of science and the recalcitrant dogmatism of religion that would continue to the modern day.
The problem is that Galileo never performed his most celebrated experiment in Pisa. In fact, he rarely conducted any experiments at all. The Church publicly celebrated his work, and Galileo enjoyed patronage from the great and the powerful; his ecclesiastical difficulties only began when disgruntled colleagues launched a campaign to discredit their academic rival. But what does this tell us about modern science if its own foundation myth turns out to be nothing more than political propaganda?
Getting Science Wrong discusses some of the most popular misconceptions about science, and their continuing role in the public imagination. Drawing upon the history and philosophy of science it challenges wide-spread assumptions and misunderstandings, from creationism and climate change to the use of statistics and computer modelling. The result is an engaging introduction to contentious issues in the philosophy of science and a new way of looking at the role of science in society.
The problem is that Galileo never performed his most celebrated experiment in Pisa. In fact, he rarely conducted any experiments at all. The Church publicly celebrated his work, and Galileo enjoyed patronage from the great and the powerful; his ecclesiastical difficulties only began when disgruntled colleagues launched a campaign to discredit their academic rival. But what does this tell us about modern science if its own foundation myth turns out to be nothing more than political propaganda?
Getting Science Wrong discusses some of the most popular misconceptions about science, and their continuing role in the public imagination. Drawing upon the history and philosophy of science it challenges wide-spread assumptions and misunderstandings, from creationism and climate change to the use of statistics and computer modelling. The result is an engaging introduction to contentious issues in the philosophy of science and a new way of looking at the role of science in society.
- GenresPhilosophyScienceHistory
202 pages, Paperback
Published January 11, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 21, 2020
A somewhat peculiar book, good in spots, that savages some cherry-picked environmental "doomsayers" as being "utterly wrong" when in fact they might just have gotten the schedule wrong. Let's wait and see how the ongoing environmental collapse plays out - and does Dicken think humans can burn fossil fuels on Earth forever, or continue to squeeze ever-higher crop yields from an ever-decreasing area of arable land while eroding the soils off them, using ever more unsustainable inputs of fertilizers and pesticides while wiping out bees in the process, and investing the yields in creating ever more mouths to feed? Just because the world did not end in the 1980s or 1990s does not mean we're safe yet. Dicken mocks the premature predictions of mass starvation in India (which by the way remain completely possible as ever-worsening man-made global warming, characterized by Dicken as 'slight", threatens to cause simultaneous global breadbasket crop failures in the future), while maintaining silence on the Farmers' suicides in India. Granted, I wouldn't say the mere 200,000+ Indian farmer suicides that Dicken ignores constitute a tragedy as large as mass starvation in India would be, but the point remains that driving up crop yields in India with the application of capital-hungry and unsustainable inputs has already been far from cost-free. If nothing else, Dicken illustrates the peril that awaits a philosopher who doesn't read much about environmental science and policy beyond, if I had to guess from his work here, press releases from the Cato Institute or something, before arguing like a creationist who just learned about Nebraska Man. That is, avoid the temptation to straw-man or invoke false dichotomies with full-blown human extinction on the bad side. That's what Cato fellows get paid lavishly to do. (Perhaps a career option if the philosophy gig gets boring.)
At times he writes like the man falling off the skyscraper who shouts "All right so far!" past each floor, while ignoring the many historical examples of civilizations that actually did collapse while confident of their invincibility. Read the Jared Diamond book and get back to us. For every "doomsayer" who failed to grasp the extent to which humans would substitute another unsustainable input for the one they saw running out (thus kicking the can down the road to make the future reckoning all the more "interesting"), there are others who actually got their predictions right in some detail. For example, the failure of the New Orleans levees in Hurricane Katrina was predicted shortly before the actual event, and ignored. After the unnecessary deaths and destruction, then the $15 billion in funding suddenly became available to fix the problem - temporarily though. As climate change ramps up, New Orleans will inevitably be abandoned unless humans can grow gills. Dicken gets exercised over Malthus and Jevons, but elsewhere cites Alvin Plantinga's recycled argument from design as if to take him seriously, only to later present Hume's pre-Darwinian destruction of the design argument while not appearing to recognize Plantinga's God of the Gaps refinement for what it is. But hey, at least Dicken likes Hume. And he does at least admit that some past "failures" (which may actually be about the schedule rather than the equifinal outcome) by some individual environmentalists in no way prove the current consensus of climate scientists to be wrong, but he never quite gets to grip with the differences between some predictions by individual scientists vs. the outlook of an entire scientific community. We're likely to see a bit more diversity with the former, and perhaps a bit more reliability with the latter.
There was much to like in the discussion about the success of science, although Dicken seemed to keep selectively forgetting it when it suited his purpose. The success of science could not form a greater contrast with the endless history of religious failure - which errors dwarf anything from an environmentalist to insignificance. At least when scientists get something wrong, they learn from their mistakes and do better on the next go, whereas religions just keep making the very same mistakes over and over and over. How many times has the second coming of Jesus been predicted?
The potshots at usually unnamed popular atheist and skeptical writers made no sense. Instead of just pronouncing Hume superior to them all, how about providing some examples? Are we to take Dicken's view on faith? It would be hard to out-do Hume after all so backing up the potshots should have been easy enough. And trying to downplay the anti-science history of the Catholic Church is comical. Granted, Catholics aren't attacking evolution in exactly the same way as America's Evangelicals recently, but the Vatican hardly leads the charge in promoting science-based progressive policy. A church whose "pro-life" policy rests on the divine creation of souls in a petri dish, and which promotes AIDS in Africa by opposing condom use, and which finds more in common with Trump than any competitor, is a long way from being a friend of science or human values. Dicken must do more than ignore reality and trust the reader to be ignorant here. The kind of person who might read a book about the philosophy of science is probably not so easily fooled.
And why the frequent hyperbole, such as blaming the repeated efforts of creationists to get their lies taught in science classes at taxpayer expense on their opponents' inside-baseball-type errors in the philosophy of science? And why condemn the participants in a political decision (that's what courts and public schools and taxes are about) for being "political"? What is the alternative, surrender? If "Getting (the philosophy of) Science Wrong" by the side of science had any tactical significance for creationists, beyond riling up a handful of obscure philosophers in the field, why didn't creationists sieze on that? Instead they just did a copy and paste of "intelligent design" for the earlier "creation" in their fraudulent textbook, tried again, and failed again. Kitzmiller v. Dover seems to have worked out pretty well despite Dicken's hysterical denunciation of it.
For a vastly superior factual and philosophical treatment of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, read Massimo Pigliucci's Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk which presents the central substance rather than the peripheral style issue we get here. I'm not knocking the style - it's interesting to see how the trickiness of the demarcation problem bubbles and boils beneath the surface. But from a practical perspective, it's like fretting over the shape of the buttons on a German soldier's uniform in World War II - that's not going to decide the outcome.
I wasn't bothered as much as some reviewers about the inexplicable mentions of Jean-Claude Van Damme. They didn't seem relevant to any point Dicken wants to make but hey, it's his book and I guess Van Damme is important to him. I was more offended by Dicken's repeated boasts about his drinking and flying habits - two behaviors that do real and quantifiable harm. 75,000 Americans are killed by the booze industry each year. I guess they mean as little to Dicken as all the Indian farmers committing suicide so Dicken can say Paul Ehrlich was wrong. And then Dicken had the cheek to present the Tu Quoque fallacy as if in defense of his flying habit. What a missed opportunity do some real practical philosophy! Just because someone who flies on jets tells us the harm that flying on jets does, doesn't make the harm vanish.
Another style gripe is Dicken's habit of presenting a case in character, as if he actually means it, before walking it back with a refutation. I don't see how that sort of bait-and-switch approach is serious.
The flattering mention of Friedrich Hayek in passing was also a bit jarring - as if Dicken is unaware of the tremendous right-wing baggage that drags in, with the think tanks like Cato and Mercator, and the dark-money-funded anti-science and the Kochtopus and all of it culminating in Trump's outright war on science including, incredibly, medical science. As an aside, I'd bet physicians never thought they'd get the same treatment as climate scientists have been getting from Hayek's ideological heirs for decades - go back and re-read First they came .... Trump demonstrates how an attack on one field of science (say, evolution) eventually puts any field of science at risk.That's what was at stake in Kitzmiller vs. Dover, although that was but one skirmish in the ongoing war against science. Again, why does Dicken assume his reader doesn't read? But it does suggest a possible explanation for Dicken's selective reporting of environmental "doomsayers" and the casual use of other Cato-style code words like referring to our "slight" climate change. For a writer who mentions his love for theology he seems quick to forget what Jesus allegedly said about the mote and the beam in one's eye.
At times he writes like the man falling off the skyscraper who shouts "All right so far!" past each floor, while ignoring the many historical examples of civilizations that actually did collapse while confident of their invincibility. Read the Jared Diamond book and get back to us. For every "doomsayer" who failed to grasp the extent to which humans would substitute another unsustainable input for the one they saw running out (thus kicking the can down the road to make the future reckoning all the more "interesting"), there are others who actually got their predictions right in some detail. For example, the failure of the New Orleans levees in Hurricane Katrina was predicted shortly before the actual event, and ignored. After the unnecessary deaths and destruction, then the $15 billion in funding suddenly became available to fix the problem - temporarily though. As climate change ramps up, New Orleans will inevitably be abandoned unless humans can grow gills. Dicken gets exercised over Malthus and Jevons, but elsewhere cites Alvin Plantinga's recycled argument from design as if to take him seriously, only to later present Hume's pre-Darwinian destruction of the design argument while not appearing to recognize Plantinga's God of the Gaps refinement for what it is. But hey, at least Dicken likes Hume. And he does at least admit that some past "failures" (which may actually be about the schedule rather than the equifinal outcome) by some individual environmentalists in no way prove the current consensus of climate scientists to be wrong, but he never quite gets to grip with the differences between some predictions by individual scientists vs. the outlook of an entire scientific community. We're likely to see a bit more diversity with the former, and perhaps a bit more reliability with the latter.
There was much to like in the discussion about the success of science, although Dicken seemed to keep selectively forgetting it when it suited his purpose. The success of science could not form a greater contrast with the endless history of religious failure - which errors dwarf anything from an environmentalist to insignificance. At least when scientists get something wrong, they learn from their mistakes and do better on the next go, whereas religions just keep making the very same mistakes over and over and over. How many times has the second coming of Jesus been predicted?
The potshots at usually unnamed popular atheist and skeptical writers made no sense. Instead of just pronouncing Hume superior to them all, how about providing some examples? Are we to take Dicken's view on faith? It would be hard to out-do Hume after all so backing up the potshots should have been easy enough. And trying to downplay the anti-science history of the Catholic Church is comical. Granted, Catholics aren't attacking evolution in exactly the same way as America's Evangelicals recently, but the Vatican hardly leads the charge in promoting science-based progressive policy. A church whose "pro-life" policy rests on the divine creation of souls in a petri dish, and which promotes AIDS in Africa by opposing condom use, and which finds more in common with Trump than any competitor, is a long way from being a friend of science or human values. Dicken must do more than ignore reality and trust the reader to be ignorant here. The kind of person who might read a book about the philosophy of science is probably not so easily fooled.
And why the frequent hyperbole, such as blaming the repeated efforts of creationists to get their lies taught in science classes at taxpayer expense on their opponents' inside-baseball-type errors in the philosophy of science? And why condemn the participants in a political decision (that's what courts and public schools and taxes are about) for being "political"? What is the alternative, surrender? If "Getting (the philosophy of) Science Wrong" by the side of science had any tactical significance for creationists, beyond riling up a handful of obscure philosophers in the field, why didn't creationists sieze on that? Instead they just did a copy and paste of "intelligent design" for the earlier "creation" in their fraudulent textbook, tried again, and failed again. Kitzmiller v. Dover seems to have worked out pretty well despite Dicken's hysterical denunciation of it.
For a vastly superior factual and philosophical treatment of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, read Massimo Pigliucci's Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk which presents the central substance rather than the peripheral style issue we get here. I'm not knocking the style - it's interesting to see how the trickiness of the demarcation problem bubbles and boils beneath the surface. But from a practical perspective, it's like fretting over the shape of the buttons on a German soldier's uniform in World War II - that's not going to decide the outcome.
I wasn't bothered as much as some reviewers about the inexplicable mentions of Jean-Claude Van Damme. They didn't seem relevant to any point Dicken wants to make but hey, it's his book and I guess Van Damme is important to him. I was more offended by Dicken's repeated boasts about his drinking and flying habits - two behaviors that do real and quantifiable harm. 75,000 Americans are killed by the booze industry each year. I guess they mean as little to Dicken as all the Indian farmers committing suicide so Dicken can say Paul Ehrlich was wrong. And then Dicken had the cheek to present the Tu Quoque fallacy as if in defense of his flying habit. What a missed opportunity do some real practical philosophy! Just because someone who flies on jets tells us the harm that flying on jets does, doesn't make the harm vanish.
Another style gripe is Dicken's habit of presenting a case in character, as if he actually means it, before walking it back with a refutation. I don't see how that sort of bait-and-switch approach is serious.
The flattering mention of Friedrich Hayek in passing was also a bit jarring - as if Dicken is unaware of the tremendous right-wing baggage that drags in, with the think tanks like Cato and Mercator, and the dark-money-funded anti-science and the Kochtopus and all of it culminating in Trump's outright war on science including, incredibly, medical science. As an aside, I'd bet physicians never thought they'd get the same treatment as climate scientists have been getting from Hayek's ideological heirs for decades - go back and re-read First they came .... Trump demonstrates how an attack on one field of science (say, evolution) eventually puts any field of science at risk.That's what was at stake in Kitzmiller vs. Dover, although that was but one skirmish in the ongoing war against science. Again, why does Dicken assume his reader doesn't read? But it does suggest a possible explanation for Dicken's selective reporting of environmental "doomsayers" and the casual use of other Cato-style code words like referring to our "slight" climate change. For a writer who mentions his love for theology he seems quick to forget what Jesus allegedly said about the mote and the beam in one's eye.
July 14, 2018
The author offers some interesting insights and new perspectives in various spurts throughout the book which covers the topics of 1. Objectivity of scientific practices 2. Distinction between genuine scientific research and pseudoscientific nonsense 3. What is meant by the scientific method.
I suggest that readers read the Epilogue first to get grounded at the start of their read as well as for the “relative” perspective on Kant that it affords.
I believe the book would have benefitted greatly by a much tighter editorial control as it does not flow despite distributed flurries of brilliance throughout. AND: Maybe there is a big overlap in the Venn diagram between readers interested in the philosophy of science and viewers of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies; but, if not, the multiple references to the latter are a distraction in what is otherwise a promising, if somewhat uneven, book.
I suggest that readers read the Epilogue first to get grounded at the start of their read as well as for the “relative” perspective on Kant that it affords.
I believe the book would have benefitted greatly by a much tighter editorial control as it does not flow despite distributed flurries of brilliance throughout. AND: Maybe there is a big overlap in the Venn diagram between readers interested in the philosophy of science and viewers of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies; but, if not, the multiple references to the latter are a distraction in what is otherwise a promising, if somewhat uneven, book.
July 29, 2020
An entertaining book on how scientific practice is often mischaracterised that suffers slightly in its structure. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2018...
December 31, 2018
Finally, I have finished this interesting book. Discussing the philosophy of science is an exciting subject. But discussing the philosophy of philosophy is a more exciting subject. This book is an enjoyable journey between the worlds of science and philosophy.
June 21, 2019
A book about the philosophy of science. Nice. Only it's not. Another failed novelist retelling fairy tales in a historical context. If Dicken represents "The Philosophy of Science", the World will be better off.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews