Science Is an Abstract World
"All the matters about which science speaks, whatever the science be, are abstract, and abstract things are always clear. So that the clarity of science is not so much in the heads of scientists as in the matters of which they speak. What is really confused, intricate, is the concrete vital reality, always a unique thing." -- Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, p. 156
"Nothing carries so much authority today as science, but there is actually no such thing as 'the scientific world-view'. Science is a method of inquiry, not a view of the world. Knowledge is growing at accelerating speed; but no advance in science will tell us whether materialism is true or false, or whether humans possess free will. The belief that the world is composed of matter is metaphysical speculation, not a testable theory." -- John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette, p. 151
Gray is, by the way, an atheist, and a materialist of some sort or another, so this is certainly not a case of religious nostalgia resisting scientific advances, but simply a philosopher who correctly understands what science can and can't tell us about.
Some people contend that successful prediction of the hallmark of science. "If economics is a science, why is it so bad at prediction?" they ask.
But they fail to notice how little of the real world physics can predict. I was sitting in my diner this morning as I was composing this, with the jukebox playing and people talking. I thought of what parts of the world around me a physicist could predict with any decent degree of accuracy:
On the stove, one of the chefs was boiling some water. About the only thing of interest going on around me that a physicist could have predicted was how long it would take the water to boil. And that is because the water has deliberately been put in a constrained, artificial set up, in the limited space of a uniformly conductive pot and over the steady heat of a carefully designed flame, precisely to make its time to boiling predictable... much like the way physicists set up an experimental environment.
Scientific prediction is not about the real world as a whole: it is about a world of pure quantity abstracted from the real world.
The world of science is an abstraction. It discovers that electrons stand in certain quantitative relationships to protons, and so forth. Whitehead suggests that this is because they "prehend" the proton and react to it in a certain way. This is a philosophical position, and science can have nothing significant to say about it, other than, "Whether or not electrons prehend protons, that is no part of the abstractions with which we deal."
Similarly, science says nothing at all about what migraine headaches "really are." It traces out certain quantitative relationships in human physiology that occur before or along with a migraine. If someone suggests that these changes are the result of a demon entering the sufferer's body, all science can say is, "Well, the demon doesn't appear in our equations."
But, of course, neither do the sights, sounds and smells of the real world. So not showing up in a scientific equation is no sign of irreality.
The late Sudha Shenoy once said to me, "They are approaching this theoretically, but the real world is historical, not theoretical."
I've thought about that remark a lot since then, and I think I have an idea what Sudha was saying. All of special sciences abstract as part of their essential nature: they are constituted by the style of abstraction in which they engage. If physics stopped looking at the world only in terms of forces and motions, and began, say, taking emotions and plans into account, it would cease being physics.
But history is only abstract accidentally: the historian and her readers are human beings, and no one has time to read or write everything that happened. Nevertheless, as details are added and abstractness reduced, the work becomes more, not less, historical. So history comes closer to the real world than any theoretical science can.
An interesting corollary here is that, far from history being a sad stepchild of the "real," experimental sciences, that would adopt their methods if only it could, in fact, the experimental sciences are utterly dependent upon history. (This was noted by Collingwood decades ago.)
The idea of an experiment itself is an historical achievement on the part of a historical group of people. There is no general experiment to see if something counts as a genuine experiment, for how would we know if that "experiment-testing" experiment was itself a genuine experiment? No, it is through an exercise in historical understanding that scientists determine if something counts as an experiment, as they consult the history of successful and of failed experiments in their discipline, and see how the one in question appears in light of that record. And it is through their historical understanding of a series of such experiments done in the past that scientists judge that a theory is discredited, or worth testing further, or so well-confirmed that there is no sense bothering to check it further (at present).
The experimental sciences are dependent on history.
Not experimental tests for what counts as an experiment.
... and damned right it should!
Have you ever heard of Orffyreus's Wheel? In the 1700s, a rather eccentric personage named Johann Bessler was exhibiting a perpetual motion machine in Europe. Several prominent scientists examined it and were unable to determine how it worked. There were allegations of fraud, but the method of fraud supposedly employed would not have been possible if first hand accounts of the wheel's operation were accurate. (Note: it is an historical problem to determine what actually was occurring! Science depends upon history.)
In any case, scientists simply ignored this unsolved problem, and went on as if the belief in the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine had never been challenged. And good for them that they did! For science to proceed forward, contrary observations must often be disregarded. Michael Polanyi notes that a very similar thing happened in the 1920s, when a (this time) serious scientist presented multiple observations confirming the existence of the ether. But, by this time, scientists were fully convinced there was no need for this hypothesized entity, and simply ignored the observations. Again, history has proven that to have been a sound judgment.
How does one know when to pay attention to contrary observations and when to ignore them? Well, making that judgment well is why it takes years of training to become a good scientist. There is no rule or algorithm that can be learned from a high school textbook that can make the judgment for you.
If you search the net a bit you can find many claims for the "irrationality" of relativity and quantum mechanics. I've just picked two at random here, but there are thousands like this:
"Near the origin of relativity is the claim that the velocity of light is determined by the receiving point. Effect supposedly precedes cause. Everyone knows something cannot be caused after it occurs. That claim is not allowed anyplace." -- Here.
"The Natural Philosophy Alliance (NPA) is devoted mainly to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels , of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas developed with full respect for evidence, logic, and objectivity." -- (The group's site is down right now, so no link!)
Now, certain "Austrians" have, quite detrimentally to the greater acceptance of Austrian economics, linked such crank physics to the Austrian programme in economics. This rejection of mathematical or physical findings due to their "irrationality" is a phenomenon which has arisen again and again in the history of science and mathematics. In every single case given to us by history, it later became clear that the "irrationality" was entirely that of the "rationalist" critics, who were unable to extend their own thought processes to embrace the rationality of the new mathematical or physical findings.
Here are just a few cases which some advance in physics or mathematics was deemed "irrational" by numerous "rationalists" at the time it occurred:
Irrational numbers: It is said that the Pythagorean who first discovered that the square root of two is irrational drowned himself.
Negative numbers: How can there be less than zero of something?
Imaginary numbers: Hey, they're imaginary, aren't they?
Heliocentrism: Critics of Copernicus said his model was crazy -- which, from the point of view of Aristotelean physics, it was.
Action at a distance: Huyghens and Leibniz, amongst others, chided Newton for re-introducing "occult" forces into science.
What is quite striking is the each new wave of critics of the advance of science and mathematics holds as 'a priori' conditions of 'rationality' precisely those physical and mathematical findings of earlier generations that were previously held to be the height of 'irrationality'! Surveying this process, we can easily discern what is occurring: for many people, intellectual growth has ceased by, say, 20 or 25. Whatever concepts they have absorbed by that point in their lives are deemed 'rational'. Any new concepts they encounter after that point are 'irrational'.
Relativity and quantum mechanics, as shown by the great Ernst Cassirer in what is, perhaps, the best book on the philosophy of science I have read, entitled Determinancy and Indeterminancy in Physics, are as fully rational as -- and, in some ways more rational than -- ealier paradigms of physical investigation. What's irrational is to reject the findings of modern science because they strain your brain.