Science and philosophy: falsification

I'm simply going to state Karl Popper's claim and explain what it means. In further posts, I'll talk about the justification for his claim, and why we should care about the claim and its justification. If I feel like it, I'll talk about some weaknesses in Popper's case, and how they can be strengthened. However, that will require additional research that I would have to do in my copious free time. We'll see.

Popper's central claim is that a statement is scientific only if it is falsifiable. Note that this condition is necessary but not sufficient: a statement can, for example, be falsifiable and actually false, in which case it is not scientific. (Some might argue that Popper never says this, but it seems so trivial that if he really doesn't say so explicitly, it is uncharitable to believe he doesn't take it for granted.)

A statement is falsifiable if and only if there is an empirical observation that could in principle actually be observed that would render the statement false. If we do in fact observe a falsifying observation, then the statement is definitely false. However, if we bend over backwards to attempt to observe something that would falsify the statement, and we are unable to do so, we gain confidence in the truth of the statement; we can use probability theory (Bayesian or frequentist) to quantify our confidence. We can be certain that some statements are false, because we make a falsifying observation, but we can never be certain that any statement is actually true.

For example, take the statement, "Objects always fall when we drop them." This statement is falsifiable: if I drop something, and I observe it not falling, then the statement is definitely false. However, no matter how many times I drop something and observe it actually falling, I cannot be certain that things always fall when I drop them, everywhere on Earth for all time. The best I can do is say having observed things falling when I drop them many times, I have confidence in the statement, but if I were to ever actually observe a counterexample, then I would have to revise my theory.

In contrast, consider the statement, "God created the universe." The syllogism

1. If God had not created it, the universe would not exist
2. The universe exists
3. Therefore, God created the universe

is certainly valid, and (2) is confirmed by observation. But the syllogism is not falsifiable: if no universe exists, we could not observe that fact. (We are part of the universe; if the universe did not exist, neither would we.) Therefore, the syllogism is not scientific: we could not in principle observe its falsity.

In principle, Popper's claim is very straightforward; in practice it's a lot more complicated. Most importantly, we cannot evaluate statements independently: all statements depend on a theoretical context, the larger structure of a scientific theory, the construction of our measurement devices, and the nature of language itself. Hence, we cannot isolate single statements for falsification; instead we can only falsify larger theoretical constructs. The best we can say if we observe something that falsifies a statement within a theoretical context, then something in the context (including the statement) is false, but we can't be sure precisely what part of the context (or the entire context) is incorrect.

For example, I'm watching the Feynman lectures. Feynman talks about observations of the moons of Jupiter that falsified Newton's theory of gravity. Instead of modifying the theory of gravity itself, scientists changed the theoretical context by adding the premise that the speed of light is finite, with a definite value.

But this ambiguity does not damage Popper's central point. Popper does not give us any guidance on how to fix problems, he merely claims that if it is impossible in principle to have this particular problem, i.e. impossible to observe something contrary to the theoretical context, then whatever it is you're doing, you're not doing science.

Science and philosophy: Introduction

What is "science"? What makes one endeavor scientific and another endeavor non-scientific?

It's tempting to say that science is what scientists do. It's a tempting answer, because different kinds of scientists do a lot of different things. The way biologists do biology is very different from the way physicists do physics; if they are very different, why is it legitimate to label both as "science" but label mathematics or philosophy as "not-science" just because mathematics and philosophy are very different from physics and biology. It's also tempting because we can say that science is just another social category; to talk about science abstractly risks the fallacy of reification. In much the same sense being "American" is just what people in the United States happen to do; to talk abstractly about some essential "Americanism" that would be true regardless of what any Americans actually did would be nonsensical reification.

A lot of people, myself included, think that, unlike Americanism, there really is something essential about science, something essential that would be true even if everyone who called themselves "scientists" didn't do it. Moreover, it's important to think and talk about the essential nature of science because science, done "correctly," has immense social value; done incorrectly, science is useless or harmful. Furthermore, what actual professional scientists actually do is a vastly more rigorous version of a general mode of thought, a mode that everyone should employ, at least about some of their ideas and behaviors.

Of course, there are no other modes of thought, modes that are not science, that also have value; I do not advocate "scientism" in the sense that science is the only valuable mode of thought.

If there really is something essential about science, then philosophers are better-situated than scientists to talk about it. Paradoxically, if there is something essential about science, then it is possible that scientists do things scientifically out of habit or tradition, without reflection or specific intention. They could be doing things scientifically, but doing those things not because they know those things are scientific, but just out of habit. It might also be true that because science, as actually practiced, is socially situated, scientists do specific things that might be irrelevant or contrary to what is essentially scientific because of their social situation. It could take an outsider to discern which of those things really comprise the essence of science, and which are just arbitrary habits or extraneous social behavior. For example, I've worked with a lot of scientists. Many of them have no idea what statistical tests do or how statisticians actually interpret them; they just click a button in Stata or Excel, and if the p value is less than 0.05, they publish. The statistics are essentially scientific; the choice of 0.05 (or any other specific number) as the threshold of significance is not essential to science.

Again, I don't wish to deprecate the social aspects of science: scientists are part of society, and they have to fit their practices to the larger social context. Still, if there is such a thing as what is essentially science, it is still important to discern what is scientific and what is social.

Philosophers are also well-situated to talk about the essential nature of science because when doing actual philosophy (rather than "philosopholgy," the study of the somewhat arbitrarily constructed canon of philosophy) are the least susceptible to authority and privilege. A philosophical work stands or falls on its argument, not on the reputation or privilege of its author. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, for example, is "authoritative" on a version of Libertarianism not because he holds any particular power to define it, but because he makes good arguments (well, as good as can be expected) and has persuaded a lot of people that his version of Libertarianism makes sense.

In this series, I will be talking about the philosophy of science as a philosopher. I claim no special privilege to define the essential nature of science, or even to establish that there is such a thing as an essential nature of science: my work, like all philosophy, stands or falls on the persuasiveness of my arguments.

Hayek's theological epistemology

Had Friedrich Hayek simply stated that economics and the social sciences in general have the most complicated subject matter so far known, i.e. human society, and that we should formulate social policy with extreme caution because the scientific knowledge we can gain about our society is limited, he would have been correct. And he might also have been profound: it is perhaps the case that economists are too confident about their scientific knowledge. But in his Nobel Prize speech, The Pretence of Knowledge, Hayek makes a much stronger claim. Economists, Hayek argues, have made serious policy errors because they have aped the forms of science in a field where science itself does not and cannot apply. Hayek first establishes that there is a problem, the "serious threat of accelerating inflation." Hayek attributes this problem proximately to "scientism," the idea of a "simple positive correlation" between employment and aggregate demand; Hayek asserts that economists accept this idea because they employ a "mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed."* Hayek does not believe that this correlation between employment and aggregate demand is unscientific; he admits that it that is is the only theory for which "strong quantitative evidence can be adduced." However, Hayek believes it is "fundamentally false" and "harmful" to use to guide public policy.

*Hayek quotes himself here, from "Scientism and the Study of Society, " reprinted in The Counter-Revolution of Science.

According to Hayek, economics (and presumably all social sciences) cannot productively use the scientific method. The data necessary to construct good scientific theories are "necessarily limited" and important information may not be available. In contrast, Hayek asserts that in the physical sciences, all important information is "directly observable and measurable." Because of the limitations on the availability of data, instead of observing what is important, social scientists declare that only what is observable is important. This tendency "quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. . . . We know . . . a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information." Because these facts cannot be confirmed by quantitative measurement, they are excluded from consideration in mainstream economics. Thus, Hayek asserts, scientism causes economists to accept false theories with good scientific support, such as the causal connection between employment and aggregate demand, and reject true theories without scientific support, such as Hayek's alternative explanation of structural unemployment. Although Hayek is correct in identifying the society as the most complex object of study, his analysis is otherwise completely incorrect, and his alternative is utterly without any intellectual support.

Hayek first mischaracterizes the scientific method. Although he mentions Popper approvingly, he deprecates the notion of falsifiability and instead imputes to science a requirement of behaviorism, also known as positivism. Taken from psychology, behaviorism specifically asserts that because we cannot directly observe what is in a person's mind, the mind has no physical; at best we can merely talk about correlations between observable inputs and observable behavior. More generally, as proposed in philosophy by the Vienna Circle, positivism asserts that only that which is directly measurable has any physical meaning. The Vienna Circle, including Carnap, Popper's primary intellectual opponent, quickly realized positivism's untenability and abandoned the concept. So far as I know, no philosopher today holds that positivism is a foundational concept in the philosophy of science. Had Hayek criticized economists and social scientists for positivism, his critique would have been correct and perspicacious.

But Hayek believes that science itself requires positivism. Positivism, according to Hayek, is a routine, unobjectionable element of the physical sciences: "[I]n the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable." This is simply not true of any science, not even physics. In 1946, Albert Einstein criticized Ernst Mach's positivism, saying,

[Mach] did not place in the correct light the essentially constructive and speculative nature of all thinking and more especially of scientific thinking; in consequence, he condemned theory precisely at those points where its constructive-speculative character comes to light unmistakably, such as in the kinetic theory of atoms.*

Hayek's attribution of naive positivism to science is simply mistaken.

*Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science, by Don A. Howard.

Curiously, Hayek opens his speech with a purely scientific critique of a simplistic correlation between employment and aggregate demand. Assuming such this simplistic correlation really is fundamental to economic theory at the time, it is falsified by the directly observable experience of inflation: a simplistic correlation would predict that increasing the money supply when there is above-normal unemployment will not cause inflation. Under Popperian falsification, Hayek's criticism is dispositive: we have directly observed events which contradict predictions of the theory, therefore, there is something incorrect or missing from the theory. However, the phenomenon of observations contradicting theory is routine in science; that a theory has been contradicted by observation does not in any sense invalidate a discipline as unscientific or "scientistic."

Hayek, however, does not conclude that the simplistic correlation between employment and aggregate demand is incomplete; he makes the much stronger assertion that it is "fundamentally false [emphasis added]." He must mean that there is no actual causal relationship whatsoever between aggregate demand; that all the observed correlations, which he admits, are either spurious or indicative of parallel or indirect causation. Hayek, however, concludes that any correlation between employment and aggregate demand is incorrect because it is measurable, and because it admits of only what proponents "regard as scientific evidence."

Hayek's alternative is that all unemployment (other than routine frictional unemployment) is fundamentally structural. Without apparent qualification, Hayek asserts that "the chief actual cause of extensive unemployment . . . [is] the existence of discrepancies between the distribution of demand among the different goods and services and the allocation of labour and other resources among the production of those outputs." Hayek, however, cannot actually prove this theory. Hayek admits he cannot offer quantitative evidence in support of his theory: "[W]hen we are asked for quantitative evidence for the particular structure of prices and wages that would be required in order to assure a smooth continuous sale of the products and services offered, we must admit that we have no such information." Hayek continues, "[W]e can never produce statistical information which would show how much the prevailing prices and wages deviate from those which would secure a continuous sale of the current supply of labour [emphasis original]." His single attempt is to declare the theory would be proven false "if, with a constant money supply, a general increase of wages did not lead to unemployment." This account, however, is obviously inadequate either to support his own theory or to challenge an account linking aggregate demand to employment, because by a "constant money supply," Hayek is holding demand constant a priori. Where Hayek does not misunderstand science, he directly rejects it.

Hayek's only "intellectual" support for both his criticism of the scientific method as used by economics and the social sciences is not just an assertion of "a mistaken conception of the proper scientific procedure"; it is essentially "theological," in that it relies explicitly on revealed truths that cannot be contradicted by experience. Hayek asserts, "We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information." This assertion makes no sense: if have only "imprecise and general information," then we can know these supposed facts only by revelation, not by any sort of scientific inquiry. Indeed, Hayek admits that "the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence." These supposed facts cannot be observed directly, their effects cannot be observed directly, and yet they are still, according to Hayek, actual facts. Hayek's justification of his own theory is thin to the point of nonexistence: "few . . . will question the validity of the factual assumptions [!], or the logical correctness of the conclusions drawn from them." Hayek engages here in a wholesale repudiation not just of positivism, but of scientific knowledge in general.

Everything about Hayek's reasoning directly mimics the arguments of creationists and pseudoscientists. Who are you going to trust, Hayek asks, your preconceptions and prejudices, or your lying eyes? That Hayek received a Nobel Prize in cconomics is as absurd as it would be to award the Nobel Prize in physics to Deepak Chopra; that Hayek is even mentioned in a university curriculum about economics is a disgrace to the discipline, not because of his ideology (everything is ideological) but because of his contempt and dismissal of the scientific method.

Strong atheism

Strong atheism is the belief that no deity actually exists. To support this position, we have to consider several substantively different definitions, or classes of definitions, of "deity".

The first class, deity₁, is the class of contradictory or meaningless definitions of "deity". We can safely affirm that no being exists with contradictory or meaningless properties. For example, the omnimax deity is either contradictory or meaningless because of the problem of evil. It is a contradiction that an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity would permit evil in the world. Alternatively, we don't know what evil is (we are mistaken in some mysterious way) or there is no such conceptual category as "evil"; in this case, "omnibenevolent" is meaningless. The omnimax deity is offered as an example; finding that some particular definition of deity is not in the class of deity₁ does not rebut the idea that we can safely deny the existence of any deity₁.

The second class, deity₂, is the class of undetectable (i.e. "supernatural") deities. Again, we can safely deny the existence of any deity that is, by definition, completely undetectable. To affirm or deny the existence of such a deity is to say exactly the same thing about the world of experience. An undetectable deity entails its own subtle contradiction: it is exactly the same to say, "Deity₂ exists," and to say "Deity₂ does not exist."

The third class, deity₃, is the class of presently undetected deities. These deities are only detectable under some special circumstances that do not (presently) obtain on Earth. These deities are detectable only after death, or are hiding behind the couch, or on Achernar III, or somewhere else presently inaccessible. The problem is that there are an infinite number of definitions in this class; the probability that any one definition is true, especially a definition that names a finite number of deities, is infinitesimal and warrants disbelief until evidence becomes accessible.

The fourth class, deity₄, is, by definition, presently detectable, but strongly paranormal (contradicts our ideas about physics). The evidence presently available, by the definition of paranormality, argues against such a deity. Deities which are detectable only privately fit this definition, because private knowledge (about anything but the content of one's own mind) is itself paranormal. (Note too that having an unusual sensory modality is not private knowledge, since someone who has even a unique sensory modality can prove its existence to someone without it, rendering that modality public.) Of course, the evidence might be sufficient for us to revise our concept of normality, but so far all attempts have fallen flat. Given that human beings have been looking for such a deity for many thousands of years, the failure to find one is itself sufficient evidence to warrant belief that no such deity₄ exists.

The fifth class, deity₅, is, by definition, presently detectable and not strongly paranormal. This definition includes "God is everything that exists", or "God is the [human emotion of] love." In the atheists' view, a deity₅ is no deity at all; the speaker is using metaphorical or figurative language, and we are not literary critics.

All classes of definitions have sufficient warrant for either disbelief, disinterest, or exclusion from consideration. We cannot, of course, be certain that none of these deities (except perhaps deity₁), but the preponderance of direct and indirect evidence warrants strong atheism.

Friends and foes

Julian Baggini says that atheists and believers can get along:

Dividing the world up into believers and non-believers, while accurate in many ways, doesn’t draw the distinction between friends and foes. I see my allies as being the community of the reasonable, and my enemies as the community of blind faith and dogmatism. Any religion that is not unreasonable and not dogmatic should likewise recognise that it has a kinship with atheists who hold those same values. And it should realise that it has more to fear from other people of faith who deny those values than it does from reasonable atheists like myself.

Sounds reasonable, n'est pas? But let's unpack it a little bit.

First, what might Baggini mean by "friends" and "foes"? Why are "reasonable" atheists the friends of the religious who are "not unreasonable" and "not dogmatic"? Observe especially the distinction between reasonable and not unreasonable: is this just a rhetorical device to avoid repetition — i.e. is reasonable the same as not unreasonable — or is there a subtle difference between the two? If there is a difference, then we should examine more closely whether the difference really does allow us to be friends. It is not always the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

To examine the consequences of this difference, let's look at our (more or less) agreed upon common enemy, "the community of blind faith and dogmatism." Why is this particular community an enemy? Note that Baggini does not (as I do not) predicate enmity on the content of the dogma, but on dogmatism itself. But even here we must ask: why do we consider someone who dogmatically holds to the exact same values that I as a humanist rationally (or so I think) hold? Why should I consider how we hold the values to be more important than the the values themselves? Why not consider someone who rationally and flexibly holds contrary values to be more of an enemy than someone who dogmatically holds compatible values?

There are two possible answers. The first might be that rational, flexible people can hold only one sort of values just by virtue of being rational and flexible. In just the same sense, rational, flexible people can hold only one notion of science. (There may be some disagreement in the details, but we've found that rational, flexible people have always converged on one notion of scientific truth, regardless of their initial biases.*) Alternatively, rationality and flexibility are themselves core values; irrationality and dogmatism are inherently contrary, in just the same sense that indifference to or approval of the suffering of others is inherently contrary to concern for and disapproval of the suffering of others.

This statement is definitely controversial; many postmodernists have in fact strenuously and fundamentally disagreed. But that's a debate for another day.

I think I'm entitled to use a philosophically stricter reading of "not unreasonable": Baggini is a professional philosopher, he is speaking in public and on the record. Regardless of of Baggini's specific intentions, however, the characterization of the "moderate" religious as "not unreasonable" in a different sense than "reasonable" is the core of the Gnu Atheist critique of the "moderate" religious. I think the distinction is substantive and accurate: there really is a difference between "not unreasonable" and "reasonable", and one essential difference between atheism and the moderate religion really is that the former is reasonable and the latter not unreasonable.

Ethical philosophy often tends to three-valued logic: required, prohibited, and optional; or in psychological terms: approval, disapproval and indifference. Furthermore, our basic beliefs (beliefs about actions or outcomes) do not always match our ethical meta-beliefs (beliefs about others' beliefs). For example, one might positively approve of eating healthy food, but one might be indifferent to others' beliefs about eating healthy food. On the other hand, one might disapprove of others' suffering and disapprove of another's belief that he approves of or is even indifferent to others' suffering. So a rigorous ethical analysis of Baggini's position will be complicated.

One can be rational, irrational or not irrational*. Therefore there must be three corresponding classes of ideas: ideas that are rationally compelled (in the descriptive sense), ideas that are rationally prohibited, and ideas that are neither rationally compelled nor prohibited. We can define a rational person, therefore, as someone who believes (holds as true) every rational idea**, disbelieves (holds as false) every irrational idea, and most importantly has no belief about ideas that are neither rational nor irrational***. The "rational" person thus considers ideas that are neither rationally compelled nor prohibited to be noncognitive. An irrational person believes some rationally prohibited ideas and/or disbelieves some rationally compelled ideas. The "not irrational" person, therefore, believes all compelled ideas, disbelieves all prohibited ideas; he however believes as true (or disbelieves as false) some ideas neither rationally compelled nor prohibited.

*"Rational" is more easily adapted grammatically than "reasonable" to different word forms.
**More precisely: those ideas that she knows about and knows are rational.
***She is also agnostic about those ideas — and only those ideas — that appear susceptible to rational analysis but for which insufficient information is presently available to perform the analysis.


These "middle ground" ideas, these "not irrational" ideas, still have propositional character: they contradict other "not irrational" ideas. One cannot, for example, believe (hold as true) that God loves us and wants us to be happy and simultaneously believe that God hates us and wants us to be miserable. So one cannot simply believe or disbelieve all "not irrational" ideas*. Therefore, the "not irrational" person must have some methodology for choosing between not irrational ideas, and that methodology ex hypothesi cannot be rationality.

*We can also see by this analysis that rationality consists of more than just logical consistency. A person can be logically consistent and "not irrational"; it might even be possible to be both logically consistent and irrational.

I'll arbitrarily label this alternative methodology "not-irrational epistemic methodology" or NIREM. It is either the case that NIREM by definition cannot apply to or by definition can apply to ideas susceptible to rational analysis. If it can apply to rational ideas, either it always gives the same answer to those rationally-analytical ideas that NIREM also applies to, or it gives different answers to some of them. If it gives different answers, then the answers that conflict with rational analysis must be "specially" excluded.

To make a long story short (too late!), an important Gnu Atheist "confrontationalist" position is that all known forms of NIREM do apply to some rationally-analytical ideas, and they all give different answers to some of those ideas. The difference between the moderate "not unreasonable" religious and the unreasonable "dogmatic" religious is that the former specially exclude rationally-analytical ideas from consideration by their alternative methodology. Indeed it is our position that the "not unreasonable" religious are sometimes actually unreasonable (especially about women, homosexuals and sexuality in general); they're just not as outrageously or egregiously unreasonable as fundamentalists.

It would of course be an adequate rebuttal of this position to construct some NIREM that by definition could not apply to rational-analytical ideas, a NIREM without a "special" exception for the domain of rationality. In my investigations, however, I have not yet seen any such construction.

The most obvious problem is that everyone agrees (or at least Baggini appears to and I definitely take for granted that we all agree*) on what rationality is, and therefore on what ideas ideas are true and false according to rationality. But there is no agreement on what constitutes the "correct" NIREM, and many millennia of history have shown no progress whatsoever on developing a consistent NIREM. Furthermore, if it is the case that every NIREM applies to and gives different answers to rationally-analytical statements, there cannot be a feature within any NIREM that justifies the exclusion of those statements; the exclusion has to be external and special. Thus the insistence of the moderate religious that the fundamentalists should adopt this special exclusion has no influence. Similarly without influence is the Islamic insistence that I should adopt Islam because without it, I would have no reason to not eat pork. The rational atheist position has at least some influence: the fundamentalists' NIREM should be abandoned because it conflicts with rationality.

*Suitably constructed, even the fundamentalists agree on what constitutes rationality. They just think rationality so constructed is irrelevant or wrong.

Another problem is that almost any idea can be moved to the domain of "not irrational" by adding a qualifier. The idea that God created the entire physical universe ~6,000 years ago is definitely irrational: we know rationally that the physical universe is ~14 billion years old and the Earth ~4+ billion years old. The idea, however, can be "moved" to the domain of "not irrational" by qualifying it, for example, with the omphalos hypothesis.

Let me hammer the point home. It is rational to believe, "The universe is ~14 billion years old." It is irrational to believe, "The universe is ~6,000 years old." It is not irrational to believe, "The universe is ~6,000 years old and it was created to appear ~14 billion years old." Rational analysis is not capable of distinguishing one way or the other between a universe that actually is old, and a young universe created to appear old.

If it really is the case that all (or even many) rational ideas can be qualified into the "not irrational" category, then those who admit some NIREM have a severe epistemic problem: how do you determine when a rational idea should or should be qualified to move it into the domain of NIREM? More importantly, how do we differentiate between competing methodologies for qualifying these ideas? Different NIREMs thus introduce confusion not just in how to evaluate individual ideas that outside the domain of rationality, but collections of ideas with components that fall inside the domain of rationality. In short, just admitting any sort of NIREM potentially introduces confusion about all ideas, not just those outside the domain of rationality.

In conclusion, the Gnu Atheist position against moderate religion is that even though the moderate religious are the enemy of our enemy (the fundamentalists), they are still not our friends. Rational atheists criticize both the moderates and the fundamentalists for being religious, for adopting a NIREM in the first place; we are not particularly impressed that the moderates (sometimes) specially exclude rational ideas from consideration. The moderates criticize the fundamentalists for doing religion wrong, but there's no consistent account — and I fail to see how there can be any consistent account — of how we determine the "right" and "wrong" way to do religion. Better to just dismiss the middle ground as being noncognitive: either meaningless or (suitably constructed) a matter of pure preference.

Global and local burdens of proof

DagoodS's comment in Atheism and the burden of proof illustrates an important distinction between the related but different concepts that I'll label as the more-or-less static "global" burden of proof and the ever-shifting "local" burden of proof.

In a legal case, the prosecution and the defense have substantively different tasks: the prosecution (or plaintiff in a civil case) has to prove the specific charge. The defense, however, never has to prove the opposite of the specific charge; the defense (absent an affirmative defense) must merely undermine the prosecution's case. This is, as best I understand it, the point DagoodS is making about the technical legal definition of the "burden of proof"; we can see this as the global burden of proof.

There is also, even in a legal case with a static global burden of proof, a de facto shifting local burden of proof. Once the prosecution introduces some evidence supporting the specific charge, if the defense does nothing, the jury might conclude that because the defense has not raised any doubt at trial no doubt actually exists. The defense — if they wish to prevail — now has the burden of raising doubt. This burden is for all practical purposes, a burden of proof, since the defense must give a reason to raise doubt. It's in some sense a "lesser" burden, since the defense does not need to prove the opposite of the overall charge; they need only prove the lesser point that the prosecution's evidence is not as probative as the prosecution would have the jury believe.

The prosecution might have to prove, for example, that the defendant was near the scene of the crime. Because they have a global burden of proof, they cannot merely allege that the defendant might have been near the scene of the crime, they have to introduce actual evidence proving that the defendant actually was at the scene. The defense never has to prove that the defendant was not at the scene of the crime, they merely have to cast doubt on the prosecution's case: they can in effect prove only that the defendant might have been elsewhere. The prosecution has the global burden of proof.

But the prosecution might bring in an eyewitness who will testify that he saw the defendant near the scene of the crime. At this point, the defense has a local burden of proof. They cannot merely allege that the witness might have been mistaken; they must introduce actual evidence to prove that the witness was mistaken (or at least unreliable enough to raise a reasonable doubt). The defense has a local burden of proof.

The point of global and local burdens of proof is that the burden is on one party to perform a specific kind of task, not on each party to perform the same kind of task more effectively than the other.

Agnoticism

Gary Gutting responds to shaunphilly's query, saying,

Of course, you can use the terms the way you think best. But your way of putting things ignores two importantly different ways of not believing that God exists. You might not believe in the sense that you withhold judgment as to whether God exists OR in the sense that you believe that God does not exist. In ordinary usage, the first sense of not believing in God is called “agnosticism” and the second is called “atheism”. It seems to me that this is a useful distinction, and I don’t see what you gain by eliminating it.

But I think Gutting himself is erasing a distinction between two or three different kinds of agnosticism.

Atheism is primarily a social and political term. Millions of people who are not professional philosophers or theologians, who don't care what distinctions philosophers and theologians care to make, self-identify as atheists primarily because they're convinced that all these priests, bishops, popes, rabbis, imams, gurus, and other assorted spokesmodels for God are completely full of shit, and they aren't afraid of saying so. But that's beside the point.

The point is that philosophically aware atheists, do not, as Gutting asserts, want to erase the distinction between atheism and agnosticism. Rather, they want to draw the distinction between not knowing because we haven't yet looked and "not knowing" because the proposition is not knowable.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins distinguishes between Temporary Agnosticism in Practice (TAP) and Permanent Agnosticism in Principle (PAP). Under TAP, the speaker believes that the information to answer the question is available; she just doesn't actually have it. For example, there might or might not be life on Europa or Titan. I believe that it's a question we could answer, the information is "out there", but we don't yet actually have the information to draw a firm conclusion. Under PAP, the information to decide one way or another is just not logically possible to have. There is no way of knowing one way or another, for example, whether or not there's a ninja hiding in my bedroom. (This principle is purely epistemic. The ontological status of the assertion is not really relevant: there's nothing ontologically exceptional about a ninja hiding in my bedroom.)

(There's also the sense of "agnosticism" as not making specifically a priori assumptions about some proposition, either because one checks a posteriori or because the proposition is irrelevant. Notepad (the simple text editor that comes with Windows) is agnostic about ASCII and Unicode: it will check and try to determine the encoding of a file. A program that does a binary comparison of two files is also agnostic about ASCII and Unicode; in this case, the encoding is irrelevant.)

There's asymmetric agnosticism: where we could in principle know only the truth of some proposition, but we cannot in principle know its falsity (or it would be many orders of magnitude more difficult to know the falsity or the truth). If a ninja stepped out of the closet and said, "Hello!" I could easily know it's true that there's a ninja in my bedroom, but I cannot ever know it's false; the ninja might be hiding.

It's important to draw this distinction between kinds of agnosticism because it's a routine apologetic strategy to draw the distinction between atheism and (some form of) agnosticism and then equivocate between the different forms of agnosticism: since you're an agnostic, maybe you should actually look before you draw a conclusion. Anyone who's following my The Stupid! It Burns! series will see examples of this kind of thinking. Indeed, by chance the most recent example shows this thinking: "Absolute knowlege [sic] is required to make such a claim that 'God does not exist'."

It is, I think, subtly but deeply misleading to say that one does not know the truth of a proposition that one cannot know. To say that one does not know implies to the ordinary human mind that one might know. At a more philosophical level, it's been asserted by actual canonical philosophers (e.g. William James' "Leap of Faith") that one is actually in a sense justified in having any position on a proposition one cannot know.

But this attitude leads to a severe problem when the proposition in question is about the real world. We intuitively believe that propositions about the world are inherently truth-apt: all (definite and fully-qualified) statements about the world are either true or false. If one is actually justified in believing both the truth and falsity of a truth-apt proposition, then we have a logical contradiction. If I'm justified in believing that "God exists" (for an unknowable God), a statement about the real world, then in a sense "God exists" is true; if I'm equally justified in believing "God does not exist", then "God exists" is false. The only way out is to hold that both statements are actually meaningless, albeit "meaningless" in a more abstract sense than "goo goo ga ga". And why should we require atheists to have any position on a meaningless proposition? When the theist defines God as unknowable, he has not challenged the atheist's position, he has merely lapsed into incoherent babble.

Why should a professional philosopher — in a profession that claims to be about clarity and precision of thought — endorse incoherent babble?

More on knowability

In my previous essay on knowability, I concluded that to be truth-apt, it's not enough that a statement about the world to be semantically meaningful and prosaic. Everyone knows what I mean by "There is a ninja hiding in my bedroom," and the meaning of this assertion does not assume that ninjas have any paranormal or extraordinary powers: they can't turn invisible, they can't control my mind, they can't manipulate the collapse of the wavefunction; they're just more clever at hiding in prosaic, ordinary ways than I am at discovering them.

In order for a statement about the world to be "philosophically" meaningful, it must also be epistemically available: it must not only describe the world in a semantically meaningful way, I have to be able, at least in principle, to know whether it's true or false. A statement that's unknowable in principle is a statement I don't care about, it's a statement I can't care about; it's a statement that's irrational to care about. "Apathetic" is just too weak a word to capture the radical and absolute character of my not caring.

Like our ninja hiding in the bedroom, many people define "God" as epistemically unavailable, at least to a naturalistic empirical epistemology. Note that any extraordinary, paranormal, non-material characteristics of "God" are not immediately relevant: even an entirely prosaic statement can be epistemically unavailable. The naturalist's rejection of such conceptions of God is based not on the extraordinary characteristics of God, but rather on the concepts' epistemic unavailability: we reject the idea on other grounds before we even get to the extraordinary parts.

A commenter alludes to such a conception of God:

A point that most atheists miss is the self-insufficiency of human reason to attain to a true knowledge of God. Scripture puts it this way, "Who has believed our report, to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?". Self-sufficiency engenders pride -- the primary sin of man. God reveals himself to those whose hearts seek him in sincerity and self-insufficiency. The truth that really counts is not just rawly empirical and accessible to a self-sufficient human intellect -- it is fundamentally personal, and attained by humility.

I'm not precisely sure what this comment means*, but it's clear that the comment references some conception of God that is empirically unknowable.

*I don't expect comments to be rigorously precise.

As we have seen earlier, just that we can construct meaningful unknowable statements is not by itself an objection to an epistemic system. So long as one can plausibly invoke radical apathy, so long as the limits of an epistemic system are exactly equivalent to the limits of our concern, our epistemic system by definition fails to deliver only the knowledge we do not want.

I am not so philosophically naive or foolish as to assert that I am certain that empirical epistemology is the only way of knowing. I can be best characterized as a weak metaphysical naturalist: empirical scientific epistemology is the only way of knowing that I presently understand; it is the only method that does the job I expect of an epistemic method. Therefore, one can draw the accurate conclusion that I hold a more abstract metaphysical principle: an epistemic method has to do a particular job.

There are many different aspects of the job I want an epistemology to do, but an important component is to deliver surprising consistency. I want to be surprised by my knowledge, and I want my surprising knowledge to be consistent with the knowledge I conclude that other people have. I don't want my "knowledge" to be by definition just an expansion or elaboration of ideas I already have, and I don't want my knowledge to be fundamentally idiosyncratic, indistinguishable from personal preference.

It's one thing to say, "I prefer to believe a God exists." That seems like an odd sort of thing to have a preference about, and seems to do some violence to our notions of what a clause such as "a God exists" means and how we should evaluate it, but a preference is a preference: It's a fact about one's mind, and stating the preference is (usually) sufficient evidence that the preference actually exists: it is a real property of a real mind.

But stating a preference as a preference by definition excludes the argument that people with differing preferences are mistaken: preferences can be good, bad or neutral, but they cannot be correct or incorrect. And the comment suggests that people who do not believe a God exists are indeed mistaken: according to the comment, most atheists miss the point, which suggests a mistake (at least somewhere), not a differing preference.

The comment clearly does not assert that atheists are empirically mistaken: whatever point we are missing, we are not missing any empirical evidence, nor are we drawing unreasonable conclusions from the evidence. The comment suggests, rather, that we are missing an alternative epistemology, having something to do with sincerity, humility and the assumption of self-insufficiency.

I cannot draw any strong conclusions about any details of an alternative epistemic system the commenter himself would specify, but I've investigated revelation as an epistemology pretty thoroughly, and I've come to the conclusion that it does not do the job I expect of an epistemic system.

First, revelation shows precisely the inconsistency we would expect of natural ethical intuition being prosaically transmitted and adapted to the individual and cultural requirements of specific times, places and people. Revelation does not show the surprising consistency of scientific statements, which appear much more resistant to cultural and idiosyncratic differences. You might not like nuclear weapons, but few will deny that if you slap enough plutonium together hard enough, you get a hell of a bang; and fewer will say that we can eliminate nuclear weapons by believing they don't physically work.

We have Mohammed's revelation, Paul's revelation, Moses' revelation, Buddha's, Confucius', Joseph Smith's, L. Ron Hubbard's, Mary Baker Eddy's, etc.: all are different, and the differences all correspond closely to the cultural and individual context of the different revelations. Revelation does not appear to establish the sort of consistency I demand of an epistemic system.

And, of course, I myself definitely believe no God exists: why isn't my "revelation" as authoritative as another's?

The commenter mentions sincerity, humility and "self-insufficiency". I don't really know what he means by "self-insufficiency", but I think I'm as sincere and humble as the next guy. But I am missing the point in some sense: presumably because I have concluded that no God exists, I am insufficiently sincere or humble, or I'm doing something else wrong. But if we can tell whether some epistemic system is being "properly" used by evaluating its conclusions according to a priori standards, then by definition it is not delivering surprising knowledge: it can by definition deliver only what is already believed a priori.

Contrast this with scientific epistemology. If someone concludes that the empirical evidence supports Intelligent Design, that's a pretty blatant clue that they're not using scientific epistemology correctly. However, that's just a clue: I can actually show that they're not using scientific epistemology correctly by examining their methodology directly, without using the content of their conclusion as evidence.

The theist has two barriers to overcome, an epistemological barrier and a meta-epistemological barrier. He cannot simply define God to be unknowable: An unknowable God is precisely the sort of God it's positively irrational to care about. I no more care whether or not there's an unknowable God than I care whether the world is run by selfish, greedy, shortsighted and incompetent politicians and selfish, greedy, shortsighted and clever capitalists, or whether it's run by a massive and preternaturally clever conspiracy perfectly simulating a world run by idiots and assholes.

To bring questions about God back into the domain of of concern, the theist must either make an empirical case (which fails dramatically given the actual empirical evidence) or privilege an alternative epistemic system. But an alternative epistemic system must do the job of an epistemic system, by delivering surprising consistency. (The theist could, of course, deny this meta-epistemology and say that an epistemic system need not deliver surprising consistency, but at this point we're getting so deeply enmeshed in layers of abstraction that I'm back to radical apathy.)

On knowability

Suppose we consider the assertion "There is a ninja hiding in my bedroom." Ninjas are of course human beings who are experts at hiding; they are better at hiding than any finite person is at discovering them. This assertion is, at a purely semantic level, completely material: ninjas are physical human beings of meat and bone; they don't have any spooky or paranormal powers, they just have a particular material skill.

There is absolutely no logically possible empirical observation I could make from which I would conclude the falsity of this statement. We won't play any semantic games: even if I were to actually see a ninja in my bedroom, there could be another ninja who is successfully hiding. For the same reason, there is no empirical observation that could falsify the converse, that there are no ninjas hiding in my bedroom.

Our intuition about the world positively screams, however, that both statements really are truth-apt: It really is true, or it really is false that there's a person in black pajamas hiding under my bed right now, even if I'm completely incapable of ever knowing one way or the other. (If I were to actually look under the bed, the ninja is skillful enough to move somewhere where I'm not looking, and sneak back under the bed when I stand up.)

In philosobabble, we would say that the assertion that there's a ninja hiding in my bedroom is ontologically meaningful — it is a statement about the world that all competent English speakers would understand and consistently describe — but it is, on empiricism, epistemically unavailable: we cannot know the truth or falsity of this meaningful assertion.

This assertion captures the essential "limits" of scientific naturalism, such as it is. The ninja who is hiding and doing nothing more has removed herself from my experience.

(Note that a ninja could, if she chose, convince me that she was hiding without being discovered. She could, for example, leave a note on my desk: "Hey doofus! I'm a ninja, and I'm hiding in your bedroom! Mwahahahahaha!" Under obvious circumstances I could very easily be persuaded by this evidence that there really was a ninja hiding in my bedroom, without actually discovering her. But for me to have positive evidence of her existence, she has to at least in some way re-enter my experience.)

We can come up with infinitely many statements about the real world, about objects as prosaic and non-spooky as our stealthy ninja, none of which can even in principle be empirically known. It is indeed the case that our 21^st century Earth might be full of unicorns and leprechauns, all shy and easily able to hide from us clumsy and inattentive humans.

There's no choice for the scientific naturalist but to bite the philosophical bullet. Yes, indeed, there are infinitely many meaningful statements about the world we can't ever in principle know the truth or falsity of.

So what?

I can't even say I'm agnostic or apathetic. I'm both agnostic and apathetic about whether President Obama wears boxers or briefs. My attitude about a ninja in my bedroom is so qualitatively different from my attitude towards Obama's underwear that to use the same words to qualify both seems like a grievous offense against the English language. One might just as well call a big hole a mountain of nothing. It is at least conceivable that I could be persuaded to care about and discover the truth about Obama's underwear. It is, however, absolutely inconceivable and logically impossible for me not just know about but to care about a ninja hiding in my bedroom, at least until she somehow obtrudes on my experience.

So I'm complete unimpressed by theists talking about the "limits" of scientific naturalism. Yes, scientific naturalism has limits, and those limits precisely conform by definition to the limits about what I can possibly care about. Theism does in some sense "transcend" the limits of scientific naturalism, but only by suspending principles by which we can ever agree on any statements about reality.

I say, "There really is no God; if there were, She would love everyone regardless their sexual orientation and give them all eternal life in Heaven."

A theist might reply, "There really is a God, and He hates fags, and He'll punish fags for all eternity."

I can then say, "Excellent! We are in complete agreement!" Such a theist would fail not just to demonstrate he was correct and I was mistaken, he would fail to show that we actually disagree! Wait, what!?

If we transcend the limits of scientific naturalism, if we admit that one can actually have a relevant opinion about the truth of empirically unknowable statements, then we must conclude that both statements are known to be true. If they mean mutually inconsistent things, then we have a contradiction; to preserve logic we must therefore conclude that the statements both mean the same thing, and therefore we agree.

It doesn't matter how deep you go. At some point you'll assert the truth of a freely controvertible proposition. A theist might say, "The Bible says that God exists and He hates fags, every empirically unknowable statement in the Bible is true, therefore God hates fags."

Again, I would reply, "Excellent! We agree completely! The Bible says that God exists and hates fags, the Bible is false in these respects, therefore God does not exist and if she did, She would love all people, including homosexuals." Both statements are true, therefore they must be saying the same thing.

The fault lies in our ontological intuition. There are statements about the world we don't happen to know that we believe are true or false regardless of our knowledge or lack thereof. In general, our best scientific model to explain our experience is, in general, a real world where statements about that world are indeed true or false without regard to the knowledge we happen to have at the time. But it is an unwarranted generalization — despite our linguistic and cognitive habits — to actually believe there is truth or falsity to statements about the world that cannot be known, however prosaic such statements appear to be. Our belief that unknowable statements can be true or false is simply an artifact of the shortcuts we take to efficiently process language, not any truth about the real world.

Scientific naturalism

Tim Kowal responds to my criticism of his post chiding atheists' "intellectual procrastination":

We are certain some element or elements of a theory — a set of statements about the world — are false if the theory entails false statements about observation.

There cannot be any "true" statement about reality once one rejects the concept that truth can transcends the empirical world. You are correct that there are as many models of truth and reality as there are religions--more, even. This is a debate for the respective adherents to those models. But to reject any truth that is not empirically observable is to cut oneself off at the knees. At the very least, atheists must posit that objects in the world have causal relationships with one another, that the future will resemble the past, and so on. Religion is simply an organized, systematic way to organize these transcendental truths.

Atheists certainly don't reject causation and induction, but they don't give an account for how they can know it. They simply refuse to acknowledge the transcendental truths they rely upon. This is disingenuous.

I'm never encouraged when readers cannot read and understand simple declarative sentences in the English language. But after blogging for more than 30 months and discussing religion and philosophy on the internet for a decade, I'm rarely surprised. Much as I dislike repeating myself, I will do so. Even if it were true (which it's not) that "Atheists... don't give an account of how they can know" about causation an induction, it is necessary to acknowledge that we do not have such an account before we can begin to create one. Organizing wildly contradictory religious "models" — models that give no account of knowledge more sophisticated than an invisible sky-fairy magically putting ideas into our heads — in some systematic way and leaving the resolution of those contradictions to some vague debate on unspecified grounds just avoids beginning that search for truth. Even if atheism were to bring nothing at all to the philosophical table, it would be rational and sensible to reject religious thought and admit profound ignorance. If after millennia they are unable to give us anything at all better than magical sky-fairies and consensus by the sword, then we are rationally entitled to explicitly acknowledge we are starting from nothing at all.

But of course there is something. There were atheists before scientific naturalism, but it is no surprise that atheism has flourished under scientific naturalism, which does not just recognize the failures and vacuity of what passes for "epistemology" in religion but gives us a powerful way of explaining features of the world both gross and subtle in a more sophisticated way than invoking magic.

Even an inattentive reader should note the glaring contradiction in Kowal's comment: in almost the same breath he complains that atheists "don't give an account" of knowledge while also undermining the account we do give, i.e. empiricism. Just this discrepancy alone forces the reader to choose which of two uncomfortable interpretations is the most charitable: either Kowal is insane, he is simply too stupid to detect this rather obvious contradiction, or he is intentionally trying to deceive his readers. If he does not like the epistemic account that scientific naturalism does in fact give, let him say so: to critique an account he does not acknowledge the existence of too greatly shocks the mind of those unpracticed in religious doublethink and cognitive dissonance.

Worse yet, Kowal must reach decades back to the beginning of the 20th century (or perhaps to the middle of the 18th) to find a natural epistemology he can criticize with cognitive abilities deficient in competence or honesty.

It is simply false that modern scientific naturalism — the sort of naturalism practiced for centuries by actual scientists and explicitly described by at least some philosophers of science for decades — "reject[s] any truth that is not empirically observable." Even the most misguided of the logical positivists and naive empiricists would not have gone so far: even they admitted truths derived from an empirical foundation, even if those derived truths were themselves not empirically observable.

But of course problems with the naive empiricism of the 20th century were anticipated in the 18th by David Hume (objections that Kowal mentions without crediting Hume, an atheist). We cannot directly observe either causality or consistency over time, and much to the dismay of the naive empiricists, we cannot rigorously deduce these features of the world from the directly observable evidence. (There are a lot of other problems with logical positivism and naive empiricism, not the least of which is that the systems themselves are neither observable nor deducible from observation.)

Philosophers are little better than theologians, and it is unsurprising that anyone who reads only philosophy might think that this naive view constitutes the core of scientific thought. There are intelligent philosophers who have propounded more sophisticated concepts, but their work is buried in a mound of bullshit exceeded in scope and elaboration only by theology. The atheist criticism that finding the diamonds of theological sensibility is simply too difficult to be worth the trouble applies equally to philosophy*. Kowal's misunderstanding of scientific naturalism is excusable and correctable in a way that his "bad food and not enough of it" contradiction about the very existence of a natural epistemology is not.

*I have for various reasons decided to go to college in my old age. Despite my interest, I've rejected philosophy as a subject of academic study: the bullshit to sense ratio is too high for me to have any hope of making a meaningful contribution to anything but the edifice of bullshit itself. There is too little bullshit in science for a person to make a substantial contribution on the basis of only clarity and honesty: science demands competence, competence I lack both the time and alas! natural talent to develop. Economics and political science seem just about right: enough bullshit that an honest man of mediocre competence can make a contribution; enough sense (I hope) that the contribution can be meaningful.

Modern scientific naturalism shares two features of theology. First, both systems make guesses about how the world might be. We do not directly know the world is causal, and we cannot (as we have discovered) deduce the world is causal from what we do directly know. In order to talk about causality, we have to introduce the concept without knowledge or even any real confidence as whether it's actually true. Second, despite their protestations of universal truth, scientific naturalism and theology are dynamic: one way or another, when these systems fail to correspond to the world of experience, both actually change.

But — and this is a very substantial but indeed — from these similarities scientific naturalism departs radically from religious faith. In religious faith, our core guesses about God (and thus God's world) are upheld "come what may". Our articles of faith are utterly immune from change (until an authority changes them). Anything and everything else might change — we might even deny experience itself (who are you going to believe? the Pope God, or your lying eyes?) — but our articles of faith are immune from public criticism.

Under scientific naturalism, however, none of our guesses are immune from criticism. Everything is, at least formally, subject to change. Similarly, no authority can declare any guess as immune from change; no one requires the permission of any authority to change any part of any theory.

More importantly, a theory that predicts more (in a specific sense) is, under scientific naturalism, considered worse than a theory that predicts less. A theory that predicts that we will see an object move is worse than a theory that predicts that we will see an object move in a particular direction at a particular velocity. The first theory predicts more: our theory is consistent with observation if we see the object move up or down, left or right, fast or slow; the second theory predicts less: movement in one direction only and at one velocity only.

In contrast, it is no fault under theology if our core faith predicts more or less. God's love is equally compatible with slavery or abolition; His hatred of homosexuality equally compatible with loving gay marriage as with discord; His contempt of women equally compatible with women's demonstrable competence as with their failure; His divine creation equally compatible with life-friendly physical law as with constant miraculous intervention; His intention to create a race of beings to worship and adore Him equally compatible with a 6,000 year-old universe with the Earth at its center as with a universe of such cosmic scale and scope that all of human history is no more significant than the mold in my shower is to all of terrestrial civilization.

Our scientific naturalistic theories about the world are true because they explain and predict this world; they are valuable because they predict only this world. Theology is compatible with any old world we might find ourselves in: change the laws of physics, remove them altogether, transform billions of light years of galaxies, clusters and superclusters to a uniform distribution of a hundred stars or even lanterns in a quintessential firmament, chop scores of elements from the periodic table and rearrange them with a throw of the dice, and not one word of the vast edifice of theological bullshit created over the last ten thousand years would have to change.

Kowal admits that theology and religion lack any epistemic system. In his own words, all we can do is organize and systematize all the contradictory models and theories about the world: we can do nothing to choose between these theories other than a handwaving mention of some vague debate (a "debate" that throughout history has all too often been conducted through the media of murder, rape, slavery, torture, conquest, oppression and genocide). Indeed scientific naturalism has developed a way to choose between these models and — while Kowal complains in that we have no way to choose — he complains in the same breath that our epistemic system is fatally flawed because it does choose, and it chooses against the arrant superstitions and vacuous bullshit of theology.

When Glendower famously boasted, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," Hotspur astutely retorted, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?" Answers are easy: I can answer any question, or so can any man; but are they true? Theologians can indeed answer any question, but we suffer not from a lack of answers but from a surfeit. We know that scientific materialism can not just answer some questions, but we can know that those answers and only those answers are true. If, by applying some distinction we are left with some questions entirely unanswered, with every candidate so far rejection, that is but a small price to pay for knowing that other answers really are true. Answers are easy: we can always think up more answers and test them out.

It would of course be disingenuous or at least incomplete to extol the virtues of scientific naturalism without mentioning legitimate philosophical objections.

Science is, of course, a human endeavor, and its pursuit susceptible to the ordinary intellectual and moral vices typical of human beings. Our scientific knowledge is dependent on what we choose to study, the kinds of knowledge we choose to pursue, and our answers are dependent on the questions we choose to ask. Science is no universal panacea, a machine we can put questions into and be confident of always or even often get true answers. The best we can say about science is that sometimes it makes some distinctions. But just sometimes is incomparably better than never, and that sometimes is on the basis of ordinary logical thought and the evidence of our senses, not the pronouncements of ridiculous men in silly hats or the elimination of dissent by the sword and the prison cell.

Strictly speaking, scientific naturalism does not separate theories into true and false, it separates theories into definitely false, not definitely false and bullshit: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." We cannot know the theory of universal gravitation with the certainty we know that "there are infinitely many prime numbers" is a theorem of the axioms of arithmetic. If for this reason you don't want to label scientific naturalism as knowledge, so much worse for your view of knowledge. When you can demonstrate the truth of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics with deductive certainty, let me know. Until then, I'll happily trade certainty of nothing for confidence in not just something but quite a lot while you play solipsistic games you could pursue without distraction if you put out your eyes and stopped up your ears.

We cannot apply scientific naturalism to scientific naturalism without circularity. But scientific naturalism as a method is not itself a theory about the world; it is simply a language game we play, a game we play not because we can somehow prove it itself is "true" but because we find it useful, a utility that — because we are uninterested in the what appears to be its the sole utility for justifying abominable behavior — that religion has never and apparently cannot provide.

Indeed it is the theologians whom we must accuse of intellectual procrastination. They have, to be sure, been diligent about providing answers, but after ten thousand years we are still waiting for them to give us a way — any way, however imperfect, that appeals not to our prejudice but our reason — to separate the the meaningful answers from the bullshit and the true answers from the false.

Skepticism

What is the skeptic’s option? The author asserts,

Skepticism is looking something directly in the eye and stating for everyone to hear that you don’t believe it.

No.

The author has an excellent point: The internet is indeed set up to make skepticism vastly more difficult, more difficult than it already is. But skepticism is not just open disbelief. Were that so, then we should consider evolution and global warming deniers skeptics in good standing.

Skepticism is believing or disbelieving on the basis of evidence and evidence alone. When a skeptic says that she's skeptical about this or that, she is not saying she doesn't believe it, she's saying, "Show me the evidence." I will abandon my most cherished belief if the evidence is against it, but more importantly I will adopt the most bizarre believe if the evidence supports it: if I'll believe quantum mechanics, I'll believe anything.

(Skepticism is not a belief formation mechanism; it is a filter, and an expensive filter at that. It is impractical to hold only those beliefs that have survived a rigorous skeptical filter; even the best skeptic holds a huge number of beliefs just because everyone else believes them. But when a belief becomes controversial or untenable, a skeptic is someone who exercises the discipline and will to look to the evidence and adopt, reject or suspend belief on the basis of the evidence and only the evidence.)

I was talking to an atheist the other day about economics (my favorite hobbyhorse). He's trying to be skeptical about economics: he says (paraphrasing from memory) that he looks at what both sides have to say, and believes the side that's more plausible. At least he's looking, and good for him, but that still isn't skepticism. The whole point of skepticism is believing ideas that sound intuitively implausible because the evidence supports them.

The idea that fundamental particles are in a near-infinitely dimensional superposition of states and in a sense aren't even there when no one is looking ought to boggle the mind. That the complexity of organisms and ecosystems evolved over hundreds of millions of years by mechanisms no more complicated than random variation and natural selection is ridiculous. That the "rock solid" Earth is whizzing and whirling around space at unimaginable speeds is ludicrous.

Without the massive amounts of evidence and enough methodological knowledge to evaluate that evidence, all of modern science is completely unbelievable. I personally know that quantum mechanics, evolution and heliocentricity are true because I do have enough methodological knowledge and I can evaluate the evidence more or less directly. I know that much of modern economic theory is complete bullshit because I've studied the subject directly and I can look at the evidence.

You don't need enough knowledge to do original work in a field: you just need enough knowledge to evaluate claims on their own merits. But even this limited knowledge takes discipline, hard work and most of all time to acquire. But the work is indispensable: without it, you cannot have an informed opinion.

I myself am suspicious of evolutionary psychology, but I cannot be skeptical of it: I haven't done the work to evaluate the claims directly. It sounds like bullshit (and I think I have a pretty good intuitive bullshit detector), but I don't know it's bullshit. All I can really say is that there are scientists I respect, scientists who could evaluate the evidence directly, who are indeed skeptical. Experts' controversy a little bit of evidence, albeit indirect, that I can evaluate myself, but it's just not enough: every new idea, good and bad, justly faces the skepticism of established experts: that's their job. The best I can do is acknowledge my suspicions and suspend judgment.

The author is correct: The internet — especially "social media" — is not conducive to skeptical examination: it is not conducive to the evaluation of beliefs on the basis of evidence and evidence alone. On the other hand, the internet makes the fundamental process of learning enough of the fundamentals of any science and discovering the evidence on which to base a skeptical decision easier than ever before. You can, if you are so inclined, learn enough about just about anything to make an informed judgment, and learn it for no more than the cost of a computer and broadband connection... plus your time.

Engineers and philosophy

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Click on the comic and mouse over the red dot at the end for the usual SMBC bonus.

The Labor Theory of Value

The Labor Theory of Value (LTV) holds that the price of a commodity is determined by the amount of actual labor required to produce that commodity.

There are a couple of quibbles that can easily be addressed.

The LTV talks explicitly about price, not use-value. A commodity that takes twice as much labor to produce as another is not necessarily twice as useful or inherently valuable the other commodity. The LTV says only that if some item is actually traded for some other item (i.e. presuming the use-value of the items justifies the trade, and therefore makes them commodities), the relative magnitude of the trade will be determined by the amount of labor necessary to produce the items. If it's worth trading hats for shoes, and it takes twice as long to make a pair of shoes as to make a hat, then one pair of shoes will be traded for two hats.

All the quantities in the LTV are not individual but statistical quantities, and they are all relative to the physical means of production actually in use. "The amount of labor necessary to produce a commodity" is a statistical property of how much labor is necessary to produce all the shoes in a particular economy. Hence Marx explicitly qualifies his version of the LTV by talking about the socially necessary labor time.

All labor is not the same, even restricting "labor" to time spent producing commodities of known price and use-value. Labor differs in intensity, desirability, training, education and marginal utility* (i.e. the time spent making the first widget creates more use-value than the time spent creating the last marginally useful widget). Again, Marx explicitly qualifies his version of the LTV by talking about the abstract labor time. If, for example, it were half as desirable to make hats as shoes (perhaps because of the obnoxious fumes), then the abstract labor time necessary to create a hat would be twice the actual labor time, and one hats would trade for one pair of shoes. Similarly, because it takes an additional seven to ten years (and a considerable amount of labor) to train a physician, the abstract labor time of an hour of a physician's actual labor is also magnified.

Also, the Marginal Utility Theory of Value (MUTV) does not contradict the LTV. The MUTV specifies which statistical properties of labor time constitute the price.

These quibbles notwithstanding, the LTV is, of course, not even close to being true, at least not by itself. For example, it's implausible to believe that in 2007 more than ten times more labor* was required to build a house in Sunnyvale, CA than in Youngstown, OH. It's implausible to believe that a Macintosh computer takes twice as much labor to build as a similarly configured Windows computer.

*National Association of Realtors

The best way, I think, to view the LTV is as a candidate "ideal" theory in the same sense as Newton's First Law of Motion. Neither bodies on Earth nor celestial bodies ever travel in straight lines at constant velocity. In a similar sense, the LTV can be recast with the proviso: In the absence of external economic forces, the price of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary abstract labor time necessary to produce that commodity.

Of course, simply saying that the LTV is an "ideal" theory does not make it true, any more than calling Newton's First Law of Motion an ideal theory makes it true. There are specific scientific techniques that we can bring to bear on ideal theories to gain confidence in their truth.

It's important to understand that Newton never observed an object traveling in a straight line at constant velocity. The "net force" Newton was most interested in, of course, was gravity. Newton never actually observed one body exerting a net force on another body. The First Law of Motion (inertia) is explicitly contradicted by observation, and its primary modifier (which turns inertia into an complete* theory) was also not observable. (Worse yet, Newton had no clue how one body could actually exert a gravitational force on another.)

*At least regarding celestial bodies, which aren't affected by air resistance and aerodynamics, and leaving aside General Relativity for the time being.

We cannot justify inertia on "philosophical" grounds. The elegance and aesthetic appeal of the logical derivation from first principles is irrelevant. The "obvious" or intuitive appeal of those first principles is irrelevant. How can we empirically justify the FLM and the theory of gravity?

If we simply "induce" laws of motion from celestial bodies and bodies on the Earth, we end up with one law of motion for Mercury, one for Venus, one for the Sun, one for the Moon, etc., etc. and yet another for bodies on the surface of the Earth. (Curiously, we have (not counting aerodynamics) only one law of motion for all objects on the Earth's surface.) But if we hypothesize "unobservable" inertia and gravity, we end up with one law of motion which takes two independently observable* parameters: mass and distance. We cannot simplify all the motions of the celestial bodies without assuming inertia and gravity.

*More-or-less observable (and more directly observable than inertia and gravity). Density does not vary that much, and we can get a reasonable estimate of mass and distance from apparent size.

(It is a separate philosophical issue whether this sort of substantial simplification is at all epistemically relevant.)

If we consider LTV as an "ideal" partial theory, can we do the same sort of thing? There are a number of scientific tools available to us for testing the LTV.

The first tool is a general correlation. Correlation is not causation, but lack of correlation falsifies hypothetical causation. And there is indeed an apparent general correlation between actual labor time and price: jet airliners require more labor time per unit than houses, which require more labor time than cars, which require than computers, which require more than hamburgers, which require more than jellybeans, and the money prices show the same inequalities.

We can eliminate or control for "external" forces: Houses might vary in price between Sunnyvale and Youngstown without regard to labor time, but the difference in price of two houses in Sunnyvale or two houses in Youngstown will correlate more strongly to the difference in the amount of labor actually required to build the houses. A computer shipped by Amazon.com (i.e. a non-location-dependent commodity) to Sunnyvale will have almost exactly the same price as one shipped to Youngstown. (In a similar sense, inertia is more directly observable for bodies moving in nearly frictionless environments at right angles to the force of gravity.) The difference in price of two Windows computers will be more correlated to the difference in actual labor time, as will the difference in price of two Mac computers.

Better yet, we can independently observe "external" economic forces — geographical location, network effects, monopolies and monopsonies, etc. — and we can observe that two commodities with similar independently observable externalities will have similar "distortions" to the LTV.

Therefore we can conclude that the LTV + externalities has a similar empirical justification to inertia + gravity, and similar confidence is scientifically warranted in both.

Cargo Cult Science

[This essay has been on the web for a long time, but the various incarnations I link to keep going away. So here's the essay in its entirety. I'll take it down if Dr. Feynman's heirs or estate ask me to.]

Cargo Cult Science
by Richard Feynman

Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"

"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.

I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it, "he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?"

I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"

They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!"

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to cheek on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will--including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes didn't land--but they don't land.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something

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that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.

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Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens.

Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous (?) field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen" he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the

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thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.

All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using--not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats

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in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.

Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms--and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments--they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that you can do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a million rats no, it's people this time they do a lot of things and get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is anirrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?

This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of the things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent--not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.

So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.


Feynman, Richard P., and Ralph Leighton. "Cargo Cult Science." Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. 338-46. Print.

Excerpts available at Google Books: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!