The False Intuitions of Science

A purely pragmatic view of science is that it is not concerned with whether it imparts understanding of the universe but instead is entirely concerned with delivering models that may be used to predict the results of experiments. In fact, if we limit science exclusively to the formulation of models, it can convey no meaningful explanation of observed phenomena. The reason is that the answer to "why" something exists the way it does is immediately circular because models are constructed empirically. That is, if Newton saw an apple fall from the tree and jotted down a description of what he saw, it doesn't very well help to say the apple falls "because" the model predicts it. The model is just a correlation with no explanatory power in itself.

Now, no practicing scientist or student actually takes the above view of science, even if it is a safe fall-back position to give when asked to provide a philosophical interpretation of a theory (most notably, quantum theory). We must believe that theories impart some real insight or knowledge into the nature of the universe.

We need philosophy to move from theory to understanding, or alternatively one might posit that a theory is part model and part philosophy. The trouble is that we rarely consciously develop or explicate this philosophical component. The philosophy instead grows organically as we "do science" and develop intuitions based on how we practice and study, and in my experience this led to several intuitions about the world that were assumed but never fully analyzed. While not every student will develop the exact same set of intuitions, my interactions with scientifically-minded people and reading of various literature leads me to believe that the modern scientific mindset is largely defined by these intuitions:

* As its domain is all observable phenomena, science provides the only valuable explanations of the natural world, and any non-scientific pursuit must be grounded on non-observability and supernaturalism
* The history of scientific theories is to march incrementally toward a complete and truthful account of the universe
* Universal laws (the discovery of which is the task of science) dictate the behavior of all things
* Physics serves as the ultimate science that all phenomena (including consciousness) can ultimately be explained in terms of and that all other sciences are reducible to

These intuitions correspond to a mechanistic view of the universe; one composed of stuff blindly bouncing about according to fixed rules.

In future posts I will explain why each of these intuitions is wrong.

UPDATE: I've linked the bullet points above to their respective posts.