Peter Kosso - Intro thru Chapter 3

Peter Kosso - Intro thru Chapter 3

It is extremely difficult to summarize and comment on Kosso's reading without making this blog entry long. I apologize for the long entry, but there is so much I want to say that I possibly could not say less. I must say, as a fair introduction to my discussion, that I really appreciate reading this book. For a long time I have pondered on the philosophy of science. However being that I am not a person who is particularly engaged in and with the scientific community on a regular basis -- I was very doubtful of my conclusions. I was only able to make "outsider" inferences of my notions about the composition and elements of the scientific philosophy. Hence, one can only imagine how ecstatic I was about reading this book. It's been a joy and as time and lack of stress allows, I'm pretty sure I will continue to enjoy it.


So I will begin with the introduction of Peter Kosso's book, Reading The Book Of Nature: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science.
I could write pages and pages on some of the sentences I have encountered in reading the introduction, but I will use only a few quotes from throughout the introduction. The idea I would like to expose my thinking on is the suggestion that we have two reasons to be skeptical of success as justification of science's authority. The first being that, "The criteria and measure of success [ within the domain of nonspecialist not being able to check scientific findings/claims themselves ] are the business of experts [the scientists]...in this sense science is a largely self-regulating business whose success in crucial areas is self-proclaimed." And the second being that "scientific description of the world changes over time." The only thing I have to say about what Kosso says here is "Amen." Because, as I stated earlier in my blog "Fact is Fact. Fiction is Fiction," at one point scientists believed that physical attributes of a person were indicative of academic/working capacity and status. This has changed over time as we now notice that the access to opportunity and individual merit are often indicative of academic/working capacity and status. I misquoted myself when saying "intelligence" because I don't even think that word exists -- it's way too relative. With respect to the first point made about why to be skeptical of success as justification -- this reminds me of the journey of the dissenter we are experiencing in Latour's book. Once we continue upstream into the business of "Fact-making" those who are not specialists/interested in all the work that comes along with fact making (Those who are not trained to do so, and are not in the business of doing so) drop out and/or are unable to understand what is really going on. So it is entirely true that looking at success as justification for science is unfair (in scientific standards) because the business IS self-regulating and the success "Self-proclaimed" -- i.e. proclaimed by those who do the very same things as the ones who came up with the idea(s).


Now when it comes to Kosso's discussion about Theories, I have to say that I was absolutely glued to the book. If I understood Kosso correctly, he was attempting to alter a current perception of theories as being notions/ideas about the world that can not be true because theory is associated with the words "made-up" and can never be proven absolutely true. He goes on to say that Theories, instead, are statements that scientists are going into the business of discussing, testing, and supporting/disproving thus making them measurable within a spectrum of "well-supported" and "not-very-well-supported." While I agree that PERHAPS Kosso is clarifying a seemingly misunderstood term, he didn't really change the current perception for me. As a matter of fact, he solidified it. Because as he comes to the conclusion of chapter 1 (or maybe it was chapter 2) the conclusions that scientists discover/seek to justify are never really made into being completely solidified but are rewarded on their level of falsifiability. This supports the statement "well that's just a theory." Because theory is never completely settled as "Truth", it is instead settled as, "What we have come to understand based on our experiments, hypotheses (tested or waiting to be tested), relations/correspondence and coherence with other theories and/or laws. With all that said, the claim we are trying to make still has the potential/room to be falsified and proven wrong." This kind of makes reference to what I said about the implications of elective modernism -- living in a world where the standard is not truth but expertise and fallibility is the name of our foundational teachings and ways of life. It would be VERY difficult for the non-expert person to believe anything that is being said or claimed because they'd be encouraged/reminded of the idea of fallibility. I can only imagine a world with no certainty. I hope we continue to only imagine a world like that. Yikes!


Internal and External virtues are also very intriguing to me as we continue to move through the introduction to the third chapter of Kosso's book. Before I begin the explanation of my thinking with respect to these topics I must say this in response to this quote:

" There are only features that indicate truth. You never get to go home and see unambiguously that atomic theory, for example, is true. But you can do the best you can."

My uncomfortability with this statement is this: Why can't science just make a claim, test it, and then if tested correctly and "proven" to be true, say "this is truth"? If they are "proven" wrong at some point the only thing they have to say at that point is "Whoops. I was wrong. The truth wasn't my previous conclusion." I do not believe that it is inherently wrong for someone to say, "This is truth and there's no way of proving it false." If they are proven false it just means that they were wrong and now they have to fix how they think and admit to their statement being wrong. It happens.
With respect to things that can not be "proven" or aren't "testable" it's just a matter of trust. I think it stupid to disregard something that isn't "testable" i.e. not available. What's wrong with trusting what somebody says? In a sense, that's the foundation of science anyway. At one point, someone made a claim that had no references or theories to compare with. Someone just had to make up in their mind about something and go with it. That's trust. In my culture we call that Faith. The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Moving on to Internal and External values. This was an eye-opener for me, and a completely new concept to digest. The internal virtue of entrenchment was an interesting virtue that reminded me a lot of Latour's discussion about moving upstream into the world of black boxes. ust as as Latour constantly explains about the web-worky connections from theories that are connected to other theories that are connected to other theories. I almost came to the solid conclusion that Kosso was against any new information based on what he says on page 37, "...A theory should be plausible, given what we already know (or better phrased: what we think we may know; our "room-for-fallibility" theories)," until he finally explained how adhering strictly to the virtue of entrenchment is a bad thing.

Explanatory cooperation (aka a subset of entrenchment) reminded me of Latour's expansion on positive and negative modalities with an emphasis on the positive, "...the explanatory link gives [coinciding/supportive theories] mutual support. (pg. 38)" The newly proclaimed theory, in the process of justification, is supposed to support the theories it is entrenched in, or making reference/fact-making support to. Supposedly this is "truth-conducive." That term is a WHOLE different area of debate that would require many more words that I will not say.

Testability: I made mention of my thoughts about that a little earlier in this entry, ...The concept of falsifiability or refutability. Thea idea that responsible justification is comprised of the requirement of falsifiability is, as I said earlier in this entry and in the Implications of Elective Modernism, troubling. There are too many things in this world that are not testable that are crucial to our existence. To say that these are not "Truth-conducive" is plain wrong. Put simply, I disagree with the notion that responsible theory justification requires that something has to be able to be testable to the possibility of being proven false. This notion seems quite irrational, proud, and immature. Basically it's a way of saying, "don't trust anything unless you can see it for yourself and find the same finding." It's not humble, it's timid.

With respect to the virtue of "Generality", I say what I said just above this paragraph. Supposedly generality enhances testability because there is more room for being tested and maybe proven false. This statement is true, but it doesn't make it valuable in my opinion. Generality being a feature is acceptable, but describing it as a valuable feature may go too far in its evaluation. Just because a description may make reference or explain many things all at once at all (or many) times doesn't make it more valuable. It just makes the theory more general.

Simplicity: i really like the fact that Kosso explains how the idea of simplicity and the determination of what is simple and what is not is dependent upon cultural/linguistic/social understandings. I believe that is entirely true and irrefutable. However, my question with response to the idea of simplicity being a "Valuable feature" is: would simplicity really be valuable if we just taught people that complication and thinking complexly is not a bad thing? Really the idea that theories are more valuable when they are simple because they are easier to work with is just a reflection of the current value and expectation we have with time. If it's easier to work with, it takes less time, if it takes less time, we can accomplish" more" within a given amount of time. This then suggests that it is better to do more in less time than it is to do less with more time. Perhaps we only need to shift this understanding and let complexity have it's rightful place in our world and stop avoiding it. We need to realign our thinking with respect to time and just learn to take more time to do more things. Fast pace isn't the best. Simplicity is not objective.

"External values...indicate...that [a] theory...is accountable to observations." Again, this is another suggestion that testability is what makes a theory valuable with implications of constant uncertainty -- something I am very uncomfortable with. The external virtue of explanation is that "a good theory should be able to explain some observed phenomena." (pg. 47) It was somewhat difficult to explain how this virtue is distinguished from the internal virtue of explanatory cooperation. The second external value of testing and confirmation was also difficult for me to distinguish between the internal virtue of testability being that it indubitably elaborates on the notion of "counting" toward falsifiability (pg. 49).


And finally, we come to chapter three which is an attempt at elaborating on the external virtue of explanation. I would like to focus on the amendments made to the covering-law model being that Kosso suggested that his entire explanation of the covering-law was incomplete and thus needed to be amended. Particularly what caught my attention the most was when Kosso says, "[The accomplishment of understanding is] finding the most basic patterns in the events and structure of the world." This is totally indicative of an appreciation for the concept of efficiency and then using it as a standard for judgment of what warrants a good theory and a bad theory in explanation. As stated earlier, how can we finalize this account? As Kosso stated earlier, the explanation of a theory in "basic" form is almost entirely based on the cultural appreciation/description and use of language and measurement. Nonetheless I appreciate that he goes on to explain that the external feature of explanation of causal theories (answers to the why questions) are influenced by the internal concerns of a theory. It helped to clarify the distinction between the internal virtue of internal explanation and external explanation.

To conclude, I want to point out that Kosso finally supports my claim that living in a "Fallible" world would be disastrous. Just as my head continues to spin in trying to understand and come to grips with the circular logic of science philosophy, so I'm sure the world outside of academia would as well. As a connection to my claim about a world of fallibility living in elective modernism, on page 65 Kosso writes, "Successful explanation certainly does not guarantee that the explaining theory is true." Just because a theory explains a phenomena does not mean the explanation is really what causes the phenomena. But the sad part about all of this, as I stated earlier is (pg. 68) "It is hard to tell when we've got a genuinely causal explanation...explanation construed as identification of the cause is indicative of truth, but is too difficult to evaluate." It's circular logic because part of the whole POINT of the philosophy of science and determining "responsible" and "good" justification is a claims ability to be tested, i.e. evaluated. This is disastrous if we decide to live in a world with this kind of logic. It would make people's heads go in circles until finally exploding!