The death of philosophy?

by Joanne Benhamu

(This essay was published as a Letter to the Editor of The Skeptic magazine, March 2019, Vol 39 No 1)

The philosophy versus science debate has filled the pages of this magazine for some time now, with Gary Bakker^1,2 and Ian Bryce³ heaping scorn and derision on the discipline of philosophy. Both claim that philosophy has given humanity nothing of value since it has been unable to answer a single “Big Question”^1,3. Tim Harding, James Fodor and Dr Patrick Stokes have already addressed much of Bakker’s arguments in detail, so I will not go over this well-worn ground again. I will address the following: Ian Bryce’s most recent contribution to this discussion and specific claims made by both Bakker and Bryce regarding the role of philosophy and science in morality.

In the most recent edition of this magazine, Ian Bryce writes that he was “puzzled” by Tim Harding’s wish to “exclude science from philosophy”. Ian goes on to describe a face-to-face interaction with Tim Harding in which he asked him directly whether “philosophy should use observations from the real world”³. I asked Tim directly whether Ian’s characterisation accurately represented his position. Tim stated that his argument is that philosophy and science are different but equally valuable disciplines that can work together. Tim’s argument is not that philosophy and science are incompatible, but that they perform different roles, with science using observation, experimentation and the resulting data to discover facts about the world, and philosophy often using these facts, applying reason and drawing conclusions.

In his letter, Ian expands on his account of the discussion with Tim, claiming that those on the philosophy side of the argument were unable to present an example of a “meaningful finding in philosophy which did not use observations of the real world”. Ian goes on to state that he lectures extensively on how “science, not philosophy, has illuminated where the universe came from, how it works, and where it is going”. Ian then states that an unnamed philosopher claimed that 3000 years of debate has not established the origin of human ethics and argues not only that science, but Darwin have answered this question. Ian cites human behaviour systems, genetics and memes as evidence for this claim. This is a curious assertion, as philosophy does not seek to determine the origin of human ethics but to address the ethical questions which humans face as we interact with the world. Here, I note Bakker’s statement¹ that “any meaningful question can best, or only, be answered by observation and experimentation, ie (sic) by the scientific method”.

I challenge Bakker and Bryce’s assertion that philosophy has had no real-world impact on human affairs. I refer to Bakker’s statement that the “is/ought” debate in ethics is an empirical not a philosophical question. I will address two of Bakker and Bryce’s claims, firstly that the study of morality is an empirical one rather than a philosophical one; and secondly, Bakker’s statements regarding informed consent.

Bakker essentially argues that experimental evidence on moral reasoning undermines the plausibility of moral rationalism. Bakker is correct that until recently the ideas put forward by moral philosophers regarding moral reasoning were non-empirical. Recent experimental evidence has challenged the rationalist views of Kant, Plato, and Kohlberg that moral judgements are caused by moral reasoning. Our developing understanding of neuroscience, genetics and neurobiology and the application of experimental psychology has allowed us to empirically test claims around moral cognition. Jonathan Haidt presents compelling evidence that cool-headed reason leading to moral judgement formation is an illusion, and posits that reason occurs post-hoc to rapid intuition⁴. Experimental psychologist Joshua Greene hypothesises a dual-process model of moral intuitions and argues that we should privilege consequentialist intuitions⁵. Philosophers Richmond Campbell and Victor Kumar draw on the dual-process model with their model of moral consistency reasoning which suggests that reason and emotion closely interact, driving moral change at the societal level⁶. While they do not have experimental evidence to support their model, they put forward plausible suggestions for hypothesis testing.

Neuroethics

It is true that some moral philosophers have been hostile towards the growing field of neuroethics⁷. These critics mischaracterise neuroethics by claiming that it seeks to tell us what is right or good. The aim of neuroethics is to understand how our brains come to have values, or, as philosopher Patricia Churchland puts it: “…how can neurons value something?”⁷. Readers of this magazine would know that understanding our biases is a matter of interest to Skeptics. The work being done in neuroethics could help us to overcome those biases that influence moral cognition, and potentially provide us with the tools to achieve better outcomes for society^7,8.

So, as you can see, I do not disagree with Bakker and Bryce that an empirical approach to ethics is both necessary and useful. However, the field is not without its critics and for good reason. As an example, Berker points out that the hypothetical scenarios that Greene tests in his laboratory using fMRI may not represent how we make moral judgements in real-life⁹. Of course, one of the major limitations of neuroethics is that it would be unethical to test how we would really respond if asked to push the fat man off the bridge to stop the trolley.

A different empirical approach to morality has been taken by Paul Zac, who has been lauded in the media for his work on oxytocin or, as he calls it, “the moral molecule”. I highly recommend that interested readers explore science journalist Ed Yong, and economist John Conlisk’s excellent critiques of Zac’s research. Yong¹⁰ expresses concern that Zac’s promotion of the molecule as being the driver of morality is not just stretching the science, but stretching the truth, and wildly oversimplifying a complex issue. Conlisk¹¹ directs his criticism towards Zac’s claims regarding the effect of oxytocin on market behaviour, citing, among other things, concerns regarding methodology, data quality and reliability. There is certainly growing evidence of biological drivers of moral behaviour, however, we must exercise scepticism as the experimental evidence is in its infancy and in some cases unreliable. I find it concerning to see some moral philosophers – Peter Singer as an example – jumping on board the neuroethics train when a particular body of empirical work appears to suggest that our brain may preference their particular moral view.

This leads me to Bakker’s claim that the is/ought question is empirical not philosophical, leading me to conclude that Bakker does not understand the question in the first place, nor the types of questions moral philosophers engage with. What, if anything, does experimental evidence say about the purpose moral judgements serve within a society, and does this mean anything for a normative ethical theory? Understanding how the human brain processes information relating to moral decisions, or that we are prone to treat a particular moral decision in a particular way, tells us nothing about the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of any moral judgement. Neuroscience can tell us what ‘is’ about our moral judgements, but not what is good – the very question that moral philosophy wrestles with. It is fair to ask whether rational theories can provide guiding principles by which to live a good life if they do not incorporate the neurobiology underpinning how humans make moral judgements. I think it is a mistake, especially with the science being in its infancy, to place too much weight on the findings within neuroethics or to disregard the role of moral philosophy in guiding moral decision-making and developing moral frameworks.

Both Bakker and Bryce argue that observational evidence is sufficient to answer these moral questions, however they fail to recognise that scientific and moral observation are different. G. E. Moore argued against ethical naturalism that what we call “goodness” or “the good” is not a natural property¹². I refer readers to the entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy¹² for a more detailed explanation of Moore’s argument. Gilbert Harman draws from Moore’s work, giving the example of a proton going through a cloud chamber resulting in a vapour trail which can be observed. He notes that the scientific observation is itself evidence for the physical theory – the physical theory explains the proton, which explains the trail which explains your observation¹³. Harman gives an example of a moral observation, in this case seeing a group of children setting a cat on fire and observing that the act of setting a cat on fire is wrong¹³. Seeing the cat set on fire and making the moral observation “that’s wrong” does not explain the “wrongness” of the observed act. He explains how making the moral observation does not appear to be evidence for the moral principle because the principle does not help explain the moral observation¹³, demonstrating that science and philosophy are not guided by the same principles.

Bakker states that “Rationalists and humanists decide on what laws and social mores to advance and adopt according to what history and thought experiments tell us will best achieve society’s goals. And those goals … are determined not by theology … or philosophy … but by systematic observation of what human beings are actually found to value…The goals of a person, of society, or of humanity are to be discovered, not imposed. They are an ‘is’ not an ‘ought’.”¹. Bakker would have you believe that science can answer the is/ought question by telling us what works. This fundamentally misses the point of the is/ought argument. The type of empirical findings Bakker refers to may tell us that ‘x’ will work, but this does not tell us that ‘x’ is good, nor does it tell us whether a particular societal goal is good.

Informed consent

Moving to Bakker’s comments on Harding’s example of informed consent in clinical trials. Bakker argues that consent is sought “not because of some absolute moral law, either conferred by a deity or deduced by a philosopher; but because of the consequences for science, medicine and society of not having such a consensual system”. Bakker’s point here suggests a lack of both knowledge and understanding of the intense and lengthy debates in the bioethics literature regarding the nature of informed consent. Indeed, the field of bioethics is an example of applied philosophy, thus calling into question both Bakker and Bryce’s claims that philosophy is of no value in the real world.

Informed consent, as it is currently conceived, stems from those historical atrocities carried out in Nazi Germany; at the hands of researchers in Tuskegee, and other notorious examples of how human beings have been sacrificed in the pursuit of empirical facts – the irony should not be lost on the reader. When Bakker states that consent is not sought because of “some absolute moral law” but because of “the consequences for society” he seems oblivious to the fact that once again he is taking a philosophical position. What are the consequences of not obtaining consent from patients? We can see from historical examples that a deficit in trust towards the medical and research community can result, as we see among African Americans who suffered gross injustices at the hands of doctors and scientists. Once again, the irony should not be lost when we consider how the scientific community and society at large have benefited from the use of Henrietta Lacks’ tumour tissue to develop the first immortal cell line¹⁴. It is the world of philosophy – specifically the bioethics community – which has truly engaged with the ethical implications of how HeLa cells were obtained. It is the bioethics community which seeks to engage with the implications of dual-use research while many scientists protest that we are an impediment to progress.

But returning to the is/ought question, the focus of the moral philosopher turns to whether, for example, trust itself is good. Assuming that the answer to this and similar questions are implicit is a mistake. In order to promote what is good, we need to demonstrate its goodness and wrestle with what makes it so.

As Bakker suggests, we can operationalise everything, but too often researchers are unaware of how they can impact patients and participants, how they may undermine justice. Bakker overlooks the fact that the discussion of evidence is itself a subset of philosophy, that the factual knowledge that empiricism has given us is diminished without the philosophical study of the nature of knowledge itself. That being said, part of the ethical justification for offering any intervention to a patient is the prior plausibility and empirical evidence substantiating that intervention. Philosophical debate about informed consent has centred on various notions of autonomy; the principles of respect for autonomous choice, beneficence and justice; the role of trust; the fiduciary duty doctors have to patients, and further, how we conceive of and relate to our bodies; the role of power in the investigator participant relationship; the notion of the self in the present state and over time; the role of values and preferences and consideration thereof; our duties to ourselves and to others; the goals of research itself. My recently completed Masters thesis took a hard philosophical approach to informed consent to clinical trials drawing from epistemology and philosophy of language but providing real-world solutions for how we can best protect research participants.

In both Bakker and Bryce’s arguments there is a hubris that I find concerning. Too often science is called into question by those who are disgruntled when the facts challenge their worldview. We in the skeptic community challenge these individuals by highlighting that while the scientific method is imperfect it is the best tool we have for understanding the natural world. Those who would argue, as Bakker and Bryce do, that philosophy is unimportant and irrelevant in this scientific of all ages fail to see that so much of what we do in science is imperfect. It is because of our very humanity that we frequently fail in our scientific endeavours. The replicability problem in psychology stands as a stark example, as does the recent use of CRISPR in China and the ethical problems with this research.

By misconstruing the goals, methods and intent of philosophy, Bakker and Bryce fail to recognise its value in the same way that proponents of pseudoscience who question climate change, vaccination and GMOs dismiss the scientific method. Bakker’s assertion that his undergraduate degree confers on him an expertise in assessing the value of this vast and complex discipline demonstrates a lack of humility; and humility, I would argue, is critical to both good philosophy and good science.

References

1. Bakker, G., “Science & the Real World”, in The Skeptic, December 2017, Australian Skeptics Inc: Sydney, Australia.
2. Bakker, G., “More philosophising”, in The Skeptic, June 2018, Australian Skeptics Inc: Sydney, Australia.
3. Bryce, I., “No contest”, in The Skeptic, December 2018, Australian Skeptics Inc: Sydney, Australia.
4. Haidt, J., “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment”, Psychological Review, 2001. 108(4): p. 814-834.
5. Greene, J., The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul, in Moral Psychology, Vol. 3, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Editor. 2008, MIT Press.
6. Campbell, R. and V. Kumar, “Moral Reasoning on the Ground”. Ethics, 2012. 122(2): p. 273-312.
7. Churchland, P.S., Braintrust What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality, 2011, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
8. Christensen, J.F. and A. Gomila, “Moral dilemmas in cognitive neuroscience of moral decision-making: A principled review”, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2012. 36(4): p. 1249-1264.
9. Berker, S., “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience”, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2009. 37(4): p. 293-329.
10. Yong, E. “The Weak Science Behind the Wrongly Named Moral Molecule”, The Atlantic, 2015.
11. Conlisk, J., “Professor Zak’s empirical studies on trust and oxytocin”, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2011. 78(1–2): p. 160-166.
12. Baldwin, Tom, “George Edward Moore”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/moore/.
13. Harman, G., The Nature of Morality – An Introduction to Ethics, 1977, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
14. Skloot, R., The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. 2011, New York, USA: Broadway Books.

Joanne Benhamu is a Senior Oncology Research Nurse with a Masters in Bioethics.  Her research thesis considers the ethics of informed consent in the light of new scientific developments in medicine.  Joanne is also Vice President of Australian Skeptics Inc.  Reblogged with permission of the author. 

Philosophy Denial: A Trap for the Unwary

by Dr. Patrick Stokes

“There is no new thing under the sun” complains ‘the Preacher,’ the great nihilist philosopher of ancient Israel. Certainly, philosophy-bashing is nothing new. The Athenians put Socrates to death, the Alexandrians murdered Hypatia, Jan Patočka died after a long interrogation by the Czech communist secret police. Thankfully in recent years philosophers have gotten off comparatively easily. The hemlock having been quietly shelved, these days we philosophers mostly just have to put up with rockstar astrophysicists (to date: Hawking, Krauss, deGrasse Tyson) and the odd thinkpiece declaring philosophy obsolete, unproductive, or simply ‘dead.’

What’s interesting about these critiques is that they all end up falling obliviously into exactly the same trap. All end up trying to philosophize their way out of doing philosophy, like a drowning person trying to drink his way out of the water. Gary Bakker’s recent article on these pages is a splendidly illustrative example of this genre.

A standard complaint in the anti-philosophy literature is that science progresses and philosophy does not. This complaint takes at least two different forms, both of which are present in Bakker’s piece. The first is that philosophy is simply made redundant by advances in other fields, principally the natural sciences. If physics can tell us why there’s something rather than nothing, so the thinking goes, who cares what Spinoza had to say on the same topic? Why should we care about philosophers’ definitions of ‘nothing,’ ‘cause’ or ‘substance’ when the definitions that scientists use get the job done perfectly well?

To call philosophy an ‘alternative methodology’ to science, as Bakker does, misses the point if it assumes they each apply to the same type of proposition, as if science and philosophy take themselves to be two different ways of testing claims like ‘water boils at 100 degrees celcius at sea level’ and ‘no two numerically distinct entities can share all their properties.’

Bakker’s in fairly esteemed company in buying into this confusion: Stephen Hawking’s claim that physics has superseded philosophy rests on the same mistaken assumption that physics and philosophy were simply alternative, competing methodologies for producing the same type of knowledge about the same thing, both chasing the same goal, and physics won.

You can’t test the boiling point of water philosophically, and you’d be a fool to try. But equally, Leibniz’ principle of the identity of indiscernibles is not an empirical proposition. You won’t determine whether it’s true or not by observation or experiment. Neither are the propositions of logic, or ethics, or aesthetics, or even epistemology. Yet that does not excuse us from having to answer logical, ethical, aesthetic, or epistemic questions.

The second complaint is the even more sweeping one that philosophy doesn’t answer any serious questions we might have. Of course philosophy offers answers to questions all the time; the complaint is, rather, that they don’t stay answered. Bakker argues that my erstwhile Stop the AVN comrade Peter Bowditch, in defending the value of philosophy, fails to provide a single “scrap of empirical evidence – just one example of a problem it had solved.”

But that’s already to invoke a standard of success (empirical evidence) and with it a criterion for measuring philosophy against that standard (the solving of problems) that are not only tendentious in themselves – why would we assume logical, metaphysical, epistemological or ethical problems are solvable in the same way as empirical questions? – they’re a standard and a criterion that could only be defended philosophically.

For a great many of philosophy’s critics, particularly those given to the more naïve forms of scientism, this is a curious and persistent blind spot. They quite rightly defend the scientific method as a knowledge-generating mechanism so unprecedentedly successful that it overrules any and all competing methods – and in a world full of pseudoscience and associated nonsense it’s a very good thing that they do!

But you cannot use the scientific method to investigate the efficacy of the scientific method itself without falling into obvious circularity. Bakker – like a great many philosophers of science before him – appeals here to the fact that science works as a justification for taking the deliverances of the scientific method as being true. I’ve certainly no objection to that. The problem is that ‘what is true is what works’ is not a scientific proposition. It’s a philosophical one, with roots going back to pragmatist philosophers like Charles Peirce and William James.

Like many philosophy denialists, Bakker simply fails to notice that his own position, in this case a position he calls ‘empiricism,’ is itself a philosophical position, and as such can only be evaluated and defended philosophically. In fact, Bakker’s view, as he acknowledges, is really a pragmatist rather than an empiricist one: his “what works, works” is a long way from the sort of scientific realism we usually associate with what he calls ‘Rationalism.’ (It’s also very odd he thinks ‘postmodernists’ – insofar as that’s a descriptively useful term, which it mostly isn’t – dislike pragmatism. Rorty would be spinning in his grave).

That doesn’t mean this ‘Rationalist’ position is wrong. But it’s not, as many philosophically naive commentators seem to assume, simply and obviously right either. Any half-decent epistemologist with an afternoon to kill could drive a truck through any single element of the truth-standard Bakker endorses: “reliable, reproducible, consensual, evidence-based, applicable knowledge.” Can such a standard be defended? Absolutely! How would you do so? There’s only one way, and it rhymes (sort of) with ‘apostrophe.’

Of course, uninterrogated standards, concepts, and assumptions aren’t always a problem. Most of the time scientists simply don’t need to worry about questions of epistemology or metaphysics. They can do science perfectly well without them, and get further that way than if they had to constantly re-litigate questions about the epistemic and ontological basis of what they do. But questions don’t cease to be questions – even important questions – just because we’ve decided to set them aside within a given domain and for a specific purpose. And even the question of which questions are worth pursuing, being a question about value, is ultimately a philosophical one.

Even Bakker’s claim that “all meaningful philosophical problems are actually scientific problems,” quite apart from being false, is itself a philosophical proposition. Perhaps Bakker might have known that had he looked beyond the dictionary definition of positivism to learn why positivism failed in the specific ways it did. If he knew that history, he might have recognized his claim that “we have misused words to ask and answer questions that weren’t there in the first place” comes straight from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.”

Wittgenstein thought the purpose of philosophy is to dissolve such pseudo-problems, to “show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Yet as philosophy denialists show time and time again, philosophy is a snare that only gets tighter the more you try to struggle out of it. In claiming science displaces philosophy, Bakker is in fact doing philosophy, not science. In appealing to standards of evidence against which we could judge philosophy, he’s still doing philosophy. In appealing to a (naturalistic?) standard of ‘what works’ in ethics and law he’s absolutely doing philosophy – and falling into a category mistake by trying to smuggle normativity back into a picture he insists is all ‘is’ and no ‘ought.’

That’s the really irritating thing about philosophy: not that the perplexity never ends, but that in the end philosophy itself is simply inescapable. It’s what Bakker’s doing, it’s what I’m doing right now, and it’s what you’re doing right now in assessing these competing arguments. You can do it well, or do it badly; that’s all. And in that sense, we’re indebted to Bakker for unwittingly demonstrating, yet again, the value of philosophy.

Patrick Stokes is senior lecturer in philosophy at Deakin University and a member of Stop the AVN. His most recent book is ‘The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity’ (Oxford, 2015). Reblogged with permission of the author. 

How we edit science part 5: so what is science?

The best scientists, such as Marie and Pierre Curie, are committed to the experimental method. Wikimedia

Tim Dean, The Conversation

We take science seriously at The Conversation and we work hard at reporting it accurately. This series of five posts is adapted from an internal presentation on how to understand and edit science by Australian Science & Technology Editor, Tim Dean. We thought you would also find it useful.

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The first four posts in this series covered the scientific method and practical tips on how to report it effectively. This post is more of a reflection on science and its origins. It’s not essential reading, but could be useful for those who want to situate their science reading or writing within a broader historical and conceptual context.

Fair warning: it’s going to get philosophical. That means you might find it frustratingly vague or complicated. If you find yourself getting infuriated at the inability to settle on clear definitions or provide clear answers to important questions, that’s a perfectly natural (and probably quite healthy) response.

These issues have been intensively debated for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, without resolution. We’d likely have given up on them by now, except that these concepts have an unfortunate tendency to influence the way we actually do things, and thus retain some importance.

The foundations of science

Explaining what science is, and entertaining all the debates about how it does or should work, would take up an entire book (such as this one, which I highly recommend). Rather than tackling such issues head-on, this section will give a broad overview of what science is.

While it doesn’t get mentioned often outside of scientific circles, the fact is there is no one simple definition of science, and no single definitive method for conducting it.

However, virtually all conceptions of science lean on a couple of underlying philosophical ideas.

Francis Bacon (not the artist) was one of the leading voices to reform ‘natural philosophy’ into an observation-led endeavour, which ultimately evolved into science.
richardhe51067/Flickr, CC BY

The first is a commitment to learning about the world through observation, or empiricism. This is in contrast to alternative approaches to knowledge, such as rationalism – the notion that we can derive knowledge about the world just by thinking about it hard enough – or revelation – that we can learn from intuition, insight, drug-induced hallucinations, or religious inspiration.

Another philosophical basis of science is a commitment to methodological naturalism, which is simply the idea that the best way to understand the natural world is to appeal to natural mechanisms, laws, causes or systems, rather than to supernatural forces, spirits, immaterial substances, invisible unicorns or other deities.

This is why scientists reject the claim that ideas like creationism or intelligent design fall within the purview of science. Because these ideas posit or imply supernatural forces, no matter how scientific they try to sound, they break methodological naturalism, so they aren’t science.

(As a side point, science doesn’t assume or imply the stronger claim of philosophical or ontological naturalism. This is the idea that only natural things exist – which usually means things that exist in spacetime – and that there are no supernatural entities at all.

This is a strictly philosophical rather than scientific claim, and one that is generally agreed to be beyond the ken of science to prove one way or the other. So, if cornered, most scientists would agree it’s possible that intangible unicorns might exist, but if they don’t exist in spacetime or causally interact with things that do, then they’re irrelevant to the practice of science and can be safely ignored. See Pierre Laplace’s apocryphal – but no less cheeky – response to Napoleon, who remarked that Laplace had produced a “huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe”, to which Laplace reputedly replied: “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.”)

This is where we come to the role of truth in science: there isn’t any. At least in the absolute sense.

Instead, science produces facts about the world that are only held to be true with a certainty proportional to the amount of evidence in support of them. And that evidence can never give 100% certainty.

There are logical reasons for this to be the case, namely that empiricism is necessarily based on inductive rather than deductive logic.

Another way to put it is that no matter how certain we are of a particular theory, and no matter how much evidence we’ve accrued to support it, we must leave open the possibility that tomorrow we will make an observation that contradicts it. And if the observation proves to be reliable (a high bar, perhaps, but never infinitely high), then it trumps the theory, no matter how dearly it’s held.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume couched the sceptical chink in empiricism’s armour of certainty like this: all we know about the world comes from observation, and all observation is of things that have happened in the past. But no observation of things in the past can guarantee that things in the future will operate in the same way.

This is the “problem of induction”, and to this day there is no decisive counter to its scepticism. It doesn’t entirely undermine science, though. But it does give us reason to stop short of saying we know things about the world with absolute certainty.

Scientific progress

The steady accumulation of evidence is one reason why many people believe that science is constantly and steadily progressing. However, in messy reality, science rarely progresses smoothly or steadily.

Rather, it often moves in fits and spurts. Sometimes a new discovery will not only change our best theories, it will change the way we ask questions about the world and formulate hypotheses to explain them.

Sometimes it means we can’t even integrate the old theories into the new ones. That’s what is often called a “paradigm shift” (another term to avoid when reporting science).

For instance, sometimes a new observation will come along that will cause us to throw out a lot of what we once thought we knew, like when the synthesis of urea, of all things, forced a rewrite of the contemporary understanding of what it means to be a living thing.

That’s progress of a sort, but it often involves throwing out a lot of old accepted facts, so it can also look regressive. In reality, it’s doing both. That’s just how science works.

Science also has its limits. For one, it can’t say much about inherently unobservable things, like some of the inner workings of our minds or invisible unicorns.

That doesn’t mean it can only talk about things we can directly observe at the macroscopic scale. Science can talk with authority about the microscopic, like the Higgs boson, and the distant, like the collision of two black holes, because it can scaffold those observations on other observations at our scale.

But science also has limits when it comes to discussing other kinds of things for which there is no fact of the matter, such as like questions of subjective preference. It’s not a scientific fact that Led Zeppelin is the greatest band ever, although I still think it’s a fact.

There are similar limits when it comes to moral values. Science can describe the world in detail, but it cannot by itself determine what is good or bad (someone please tell Sam Harris – oh, they have). To do that, it needs an injection of values, and they come from elsewhere. Some say they come from us, or from something we worship (which many people would argue means they still come from us) or from some other mysterious non-natural source. Arguments over which source is the right one are philosophical, not scientific (although they can be informed by science).

Science is also arguably not our only tool for producing knowledge. There are other approaches, as exemplified by the various non-scientific academic disciplines, like history, sociology and economics (the “dismal science”), as well as other domains like art, literature and religion.

That said, to the extent that anyone makes an empirical claim – whether that be about the movement of heavenly bodies, the age of Earth, or how species change over time – science has proven to be our best tool to scrutinise that claim.

Tim Dean, Editor, The Conversation

This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.