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.
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