Читать книгу Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science: A History (Third Edition) - Thomas J. Hickey - Страница 102

Given the fact of scientific pluralism – of having several alternative explanations that are tested and not falsified due to empirical underdetermination in the test-design language – philosophers have proposed various nonempirical criteria they believe have been operative historically in explanation choice. And a plurality of untested and therefore unfalsified theories may also exist before any testing, so that scientists may have preferences for testing one theory over another based on nonempirical criteria. But no nonempirical criterion enables a scientist to predict reliably which alternative nonfalsified explanation will survive empirical testing, when in due course the degree of empirical underdetermination is reduced by a new or improved test design that enables decidable testing. To make such an anticipatory choice is like betting on a horse before it runs the race.

Test designs are improved by developing more accurate measurement procedures and/or by adding new descriptive information that reduces the vagueness in the characterization of the subject for testing. Such test-design improvements refine the characterization of the problem addressed by the theories, and thus reduce empirical underdetermination to make testing decisive.

When empirical underdetermination makes testing undecidable among alternative theories, different scientists may have personal reasons for preferring one alternative as an explanation. In such circumstances selection may be an investment decision for the career scientist rather than an investigative decision. The choice may be influenced by such circumstances as the cynical realpolitik of peer-reviewed journals. Knowing what editors and their favorite referees currently want in submissions greatly helps an author getting his paper published. Publication is an academic status symbol with the more prestigious journals yielding more brownie points for accumulating academic tenure, status and salary.

In the January 1978 issue of the Journal of the American Society of Information Science (JASIS) the editor wrote that referees sometimes use the peer review process as a means to attack a point of view and to suppress the content of a submitted paper, i.e., they attempt censorship. Furthermore editors are not typically entrepreneurial; they are the risk-avoiding rearguard rather than the risk-taking avant-garde. They select the established “authorities” with reputation-based vested interests in the prevailing traditional views, and these “authorities” suborn the peer-review process by using their preferred views as criteria for criticism and thus acceptance for publication.

External sociocultural factors have also influenced theory choice. In his Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957) Kuhn wrote that the astronomer in the time of Copernicus could not upset the two-sphere universe without overturning physics and religion as well. Fundamental concepts in the pre-Copernican astronomy had become strands for a much larger fabric of thought, and the nonastronomical strands in turn bound the thinking of the astronomers. The Copernican revolution occurred because Copernicus was a dedicated specialist, who valued mathematical and celestial detail more than the values reinforced by the nonastronomical views that were dependent on the prevailing two-sphere theory. This purely technical focus of Copernicus enabled him to ignore the nonastronomical consequences of his innovation, consequences that would lead his contemporaries of less restricted vision to reject his innovation as absurd.

Later in discussing modern science in his famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn does not make the consequences to the nonspecialist an aspect of his general theory of scientific revolutions. Instead he maintains, as part of his thesis of “normal” science, that a scientist may willfully choose to ignore a falsifying outcome of a decisive test execution. This choice is not due to the scientist’s specific criticism of either the test design or the test execution, but rather is due to the expectation that the falsified theory will later be improved and corrected. However any such “correcting” alteration made to a falsified theory amounts to theory elaboration, which produces a new and different theory.

Similarly sociology and politics operate as criteria today in the social sciences, where defenders and attackers of different economic views are in fact defending and attacking certain social/political philosophies, ideologies, interests and policies. For example in the United States Republican politicians attack Keynesian economics, while Democrat politicians defend it. But pragmatism has prevailed over ideology, when expediency dictates, as during the 2007-2009 Great Recession crisis. Thus in his After the Music Stopped (2013) Alan S. Blinder, Princeton University economist and former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, reports that ultraconservative Republican President Bush “let pragmatism trump ideology” (P. 213), when he signed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, a distinctively Keynesian fiscal policy, which added $150 billions to the U.S. Federal debt.

In contrast Democrat President Obama without reluctance and with a Democrat-controlled Congress signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in 2009, a stimulus package that added $787 billions to the Federal debt. Blinder reports that simulations with the Moody Analytics large macroeconometric model showed that the effect of the stimulus in contrast to a no-stimulus simulation scenario was a GDP that was 6 per cent higher with the stimulus than without it, an unemployment rate 3 percentage points lower, and 4.8 million additional Americans employed (P. 209). In an article published in Foreign Policy in 2000 recent Federal Reserve Board Chairman from 2006 to 2014, Ben Bernanke wrote that the repercussions of the 1929 stock market crash resulted less from the severity of the crash than from the response of policyholders. In his memoir The Courage to Act (2015), he wrote that the 2008 stimulus was small in comparison with its objective of helping to arrest the deepest recession in seventy years in a $15 trillion national economy (P. 388). Thus Bernanke, a conservative Republican, did not reject Keynesianism, but concluded that the recovery was needlessly slow and protracted, because the stimulus program was too small.

Citing Kuhn some sociologists of knowledge including those advocating the “strong program” maintain that the social and political forces that influence society at large also influence scientific beliefs. This is truer in the social sciences, but sociologists who believe that this means that empiricism does not control acceptance of scientific beliefs in the long term are mistaken, because it is pragmatic empiricism that enables wartime victories, peacetime prosperity – and in all times business profits, as reactionary policies, delusional ideologies and utopian fantasies cannot.