Sunday, September 22, 2013

The Erotetic Side of Science (Scientific R&D, Part 1.1)

In my previous post, I introduced a metaphor of science that divides the scientific enterprise into quality control and research-and-development (R&D) divisions.  Usually, scientists hold positions in both divisions (still speaking metaphorically), though some spend more time in one than in another (e.g., in physics, where experimental and theoretical physicists are often up to very different things).  I also argued that the quality-control division is what sets science apart from other efforts to produce knowledge, and I dedicated that post to a discussion of this central aspect of science.  Ironically, I find the need to split my discussion of science’s R&D up into four parts, this one and the next about the questions that animate R&D work, the third and fourth about the substance and organization of scientific theory and knowledge. 

What’s so questionable about science?

Recall, science is a process or a practice; it unfolds in real time.  It is something that we do.  We don’t always think of it that way, because when we read, hear, or watch science articles, we usually receive a story that collapses the process down into a “flat,” timeless presentation.  But this timelessness is artificial.  When we actually do science, it is an undertaking with a beginning, middle, and end.  More accurately, each individual science project has its own beginning and an end, though different projects may unfold out of phase with each other.

While science is a process, it is not the sort of process that just happens to scientists, as if we are “hapless victims” of science, who have stumbled into science already in progress.  In chemistry, there is a concept that says that many chemical reactions don’t just happen; two compounds sitting next to each other, even touching each other, may remain inert for a long time, even though they have the potential to react violently with each other.  What they need is a trigger, or a “catalyst” to use the term favored by chemists.  Well, metaphorically speaking, the scientific process needs a catalyst.  It needs something to trigger it, to ignite it, to innervate it.  It needs proactive researchers to actually take the initiative.  Most importantly, it needs researchers to ask a question, to identify a specific problem to pursue.  The question is the catalyst of the research cycle.

Specifically, the research cycle goes something like this: first, identify a problem – a deficiency in our understanding of the world – and ask a question about it:

  • Why is my throat soar?
  • Why did we get freezing rain this winter, serious snowstorms last winter, and hardly any precipitation at all the winter before that?
  • Why does this population of orangutans engage in frequent social interaction whereas that group does not?
  • Which is healthier, this organic apple, or this other one that isn’t advertised as such?

Then, brainstorm a possible explanation, or if you are really ambitious, a set of alternative answers to the question.  The conjectural answer(s) then become(s) the hypothesis/es that will anchor your research, the idea(s) that you plan to hold accountable to observational scrutiny.  Next, place the hypothesis in an “if, then” sentence having the form “if [hypothesis] is true, then [observational expectation] will also be true.”  In other words, if your hypothesis is actually true, what would you expect to observe?  Keep in mind, as I stated in my last post, the expectations you identify must be stated so that you are actually endangering your idea.  In other words, you have to pick expectations that could conceivably run counter to observation.  By extension, if you are working with multiple competing hypotheses, the task of holding them all accountable requires the identification of observational expectations that are consistent with one hypothesis but not the other and vice versa.  The final step is to actually observe the dangerous reality you have identified and to see if your observations are consistent with your expectations.  If so, yay for your hypothesis; we can add it to our collection of standing knowledge.  If not, boo for it; we need another idea, because we haven’t yet achieved the understanding that we were hoping for.

What’s so erotetic about science?



No, that's not a misspelling; you just read it wrong.  (But then again, it's hard to concentrate with Einstein giving you those smoldering bedroom eyes.)  ‘Erotetics’ is one of those obscure words that only philosophers know ... well, until I define it for you, and then the cat's out of the bag.  I would hazard a guess that scientists are as unfamiliar with it as anyone else.  So, what is it?  Erotetics is the area of logic that is concerned with questions and answers.  In some future post, I will have a lot more to say about logic in general, but for the moment I will simply say that not all logicians pay much attention to questions and answers; few are dedicated to questions and answers specifically, and the work of many logicians doesn’t concern them at all.  Logicians who study erotetics are thus a highly specialized community.  And yet, insofar as questions are the catalysts of science, we ought to be concerned with what eroteticians (? or eroteticists?) might have to say.

In a slightly bigger nutshell, erotetics is concerned with good questions and good answers, or with criteria to distinguish between good and bad ones.  What’s a good question?  To begin with, it is a question that assumes a reality that at least the inquirer believes.  In scientific context, it should also be a reality that the interrogator’s peers believe.  We have all experienced the confusion that follows when someone asks us questions based on wrong assumptions.  “Why were you awake and making so much noise all night?”  “Well, I wasn’t awake all night,” or “I was awake all night, and I heard the noise too, but it wasn’t me making it.”  The point is, the failure to agree on the reality that the question presupposes presents an insurmountable obstacle to sufficiently answering it.  In the preceding case and in cases like it, a “why…?” question begs a “because …” answer, and we quite simply cannot provide “because…” answers to “why…?” questions that assume untruths.  This is the fallacy of the loaded or complex question (see also here).  It is also a crucial topic in scientific questioning, and in the public relations of science, that I will revisit later in this post and more in my next post.

There are also some bad questions that we can’t even understand, usually involving a violation of the accepted definition of words that results in absurdity, for example, “how many meters long is the song of the morning birds?”  Of course it is possible to measure a birdsong in terms of frequency and volume, or changes therein, and of course a meter is a unit of measurement.  But sound wave frequency and volume measure sound (frequency being a measure in time), whereas the meter is a measurement of space.  The idea of measuring sound waves with a spatial unit of measurement presents a semantic mismatch that renders the question absurd.

So, what is a good enough answer?  Once again, a good answer will be one that assumes realities that we are willing to accept; there is no sense in conjuring principles, phenomena, or entities that don’t have at least some believers.  But there is also an opportunity for conflict here, because not everyone believes the same thing, so the ability to answer such a question is relative to the community of belief; some answers will not sit well with some individuals because the questions they answer are themselves unhappily loaded.  Again, this is a crucial topic that I will revisit.

A good answer should also imply no contradictions, and as with good questions, it should not put ideas together that do not go together, lest the answer assert the absurd.  If I consult a doctor about why my throat is soar, I would have some serious doubts about them if they told me “because 5 times 5 is heavier than the odor of water” ... amusing, to be sure, but I probably wouldn't go back to them for a follow-up.

Then too, there are some answers that are bad not because they assume questionable realities or imply absurd or self-contradicting realities, but because they answer the wrong interpretation of an ambiguous question: “Did it rain on Monday because of a weather system moving in from the East?”  “well, do you mean, did it rain on Monday, or did it rain because of a weather system moving in from the East?”  In cases such as this, the meaning of the question and thus the range of acceptable answers is often conveyed either by tone of voice or by the well-understood details of the context in which it is asked.  For example, if we have already been discussing the weather system from the East, the question is probably a timing question: "did we see its effects on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday?"  On the other hand, if we are talking about the various weather systems that were lurking about the area on Monday, the question is probably about which one: "was it the one from the East, or from the South?"  Such questions usually only become problematic when they are asked out of context, though occasionally even contextual cues don’t clarify, often leading to uneasy conversations spent moving in the wrong direction.

Finally, there are some answers that make sense and refer to realities that everyone accepts as true, but are still failed answers because they don’t answer the question asked.  “Why is the unemployment rate up this week?”  “Well, let me start to answer your question with an anecdote about when my daughter was a little girl.  You see, she used to play piano and take lessons every Wednesday afternoon after school.  Eventually, though, she got bored with it.  She never really cared for it, I think, but we made her.  So, after a while she quit practicing.  Then there were the horse lessons … blah blah blah.”  This miscarriage of question-and-answer logic is an all too common strategy in political debate, but it can also be an honest mistake made by undisciplined minds, a failure to keep on point in answering the question, particularly in cases where the process of asking and of brainstorming an answer unfolds slowly.

Given the critical role that questions play in the scientific enterprise, we have a lot to gain by getting erotetic about science, in other words by asking what achievements and pitfalls we can make in science that stem specifically from the quality of the questions we ask or the goodness of fit between our answers and our questions.  Granted, all of the erotetic miscarriages described above present some risk for scientific questioning and answering just as much as they do in any other enterprise, and the best guard against them is critical thought.  But some are perhaps more relevant for our understanding of scientific success and failure than others.  Probably the most visible source of difficulty is the scientist’s ability to ask questions or to provide answers that refer to realities that their peers or the general public – or various subsets of the general public – accept as true.

Evolutionary biologists, for example, devote their labor to explaining why life on earth has evolved in the way that it has, in other words why we have the species that we have now, why these seem to be different from sepcies of the past, and why past and present species sometimes go extinct.  Why, for example, have so many species in the insect order Hymenoptera evolved such elaborate social interdependence (e.g., ant colonies, bee hives), but not all of them, and not all the same sort of social interdependence?  Are these differences the outcome of isolation between descendant subpopulations of an ancestral population, followed by the slow accumulation of random genetic mutations and/or random sampling errors in the transmission of different gene variants (‘alleles’) from generation to generation (a process that evolutionary biologists call ‘genetic drift’)?  Or are they instead the outcome of isolation between different subpopulations, followed by environmental selection for certain gene variants and against others?  What evolutionary biologists don’t ask is, “is evolution a real process?”  Nor should ‘evolutionary theory’ be mistaken to mean “the idea that evolution is real.”  Evolutionary biologists start with the basic assumption that evolution does happen (otherwise, they would not be evolutionary biologists), and evolutionary theory is instead dedicated to ideas about why it happens, both in general and in specific cases.  Darwin’s theory, for example, is a theory of evolution through natural selection, which accentuates a particular set of factors in attempting to account for particular species’ traits or variability between different species' traits.  Alternative theories of evolution instead accentuate other factors than those Darwin focused on.  For example, whereas Darwin's theory focuses on the differential reproductive benefits conferred by different biological traits (anatomical, physiological, behavioral) in light of the challenges posed by particular environments, the theory of evolution through genetic drift instead emphasizes the influence of randomness in the transmission of genes from generation to generation.  Increases or decreases in gene and biological trait frequencies can result from either process (or both in conjunction), though usually with different long-term outcomes.

The community of evolutionary biologists understands these concepts and accepts their truth, allowing them to proceed with their work, but there are also communities of belief within our (United States) population for whom such ideas are either controversial or vaguely understood, or both.  In erotetic perspective, there is thus a risk for dispute that we can all recognize, regardless of which side of the debate you might stand on.  More on this in future posts.

On the flip side, getting erotetic about scientific questions also means being prepared to extend a certain amount of charity or leeway to experts in fields that we do not fully understand.  As an anthropologist and a demographer, I know far more about evolution than I do about quantum physics, for example.  The realities that contemporary quantum physicists accept as true are largely unknown to me, but when I catch faint whispers from them, I am puzzled to say the least.  If an astrophysicist were to ask me one of the sorts of questions that animate their research, I would have little choice but to either consider it absurd (they might as well be asking how long birdsongs are in centimeters) or to concede that my puzzlement is a consequence of my own physics illiteracy.  I would tend to err in favor of the latter, but I suppose that my trust could be easily betrayed were an astrophysicist to have some fun at my expense.  That's not an invitation, by the way.

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