Discussie over het positivisme

Op 28 april 2006 heeft dr. Ewald Vervaet het bestuur van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen (KNAW) verzocht een discussie te openen over het positivisme in het algemeen en over de positivistische psychologie in het bijzonder. Dat verzoek wordt begeleid door het artikel ‘Het positivisme en zijn ongeldigheid’.

Vervaets verzoek wordt door zes hoogleraren aanbevolen en door 37 academici die geen hoogleraar zijn, ondersteund. Dat laatste geldt ook voor enkele belasting-betalende niet-academici.

In Trouw heeft een kort artikel gestaan, dat vooral gaat over enkele van de vele maatschappelijke consekwenties van het positivisme: ‘We slaan door in onze cijfergekte’.
Aan het slot van dat artikel kunt u doorklikken naar het Trouw-artikel ‘Cijfers maken het leven niet veiliger’ van de criminoloog drs. Frans Kets over het positivisme bij de politie.

Naar aanleiding van de studiemiddag Positivistische psychologie: geslaagd of mislukt? van 8 november 2006 heeft Vervaet een vervolg gegeven aan zijn brief van 28 april (en 11 mei).

meer …

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. more …

Throughout his writings, Hayek has emphasized that a
“scientistic prejudice” is working as a bad steering factor in
the research for sound theories in the general field of social
sciences, and especially in economics. Notwithstanding Hayek’s
criticism, most contemporary economists still think that they
must imitate methods of physical and biological sciences in order
to do good and valid science. While Hayek was first vehemently
reproving this methodological choice in his early writings (for
example, Hayek 1952), he was afterwards convinced by Popper, as
he himself acknowledges (see Hayek 1967) that the scientific
method social scientists sought to transpose into their own
research field was mere illusion. more …

Thanks to Tony Earls who mentioned this paper from Robert Nadeau at the Université du Québec à Montréal at Twitter.com.

Caveat: Edward de Bono, founder of lateral thinking, remarked that he never debates. He said that two parties cannot agree primarily because they have either different information, or different perception, or different values. I interpret Bono as meaning that recognizing our differences and trying to view from the other party’s perspective is better than debating. With regards to the views I express in my blogs, I take Bono’s advice to heart . more…

I share my love of science with many other people I love science. Science is a way of thinking and a way of manipulating certain aspects of the real world in order to gain knowledge about those aspects. Science has produced a body of knowledge about the empirical world. Science explains how aspects of the world work and predicts some future outcomes. The knowledge we acquire through science is codified in language. American scientists write their findings in English; Dutch scientist write in Dutch (and sometimes in English). Knowledge is communicated through sentences in one language or the other. So the sentence ‘the earth is spherical’ can be thought of as resulting from scientific investigation and not so the sentence ‘the earth is flat’.

Can we make deductions from a sentence that it is the result of scientific investigation? No we cannot.
So which sentences about the world should we believe as a truthful representation of it?
There is no straightforward answer to this question. But there are some clues we can find to determine which statements are the result of scientific inquiry. I will elaborate on this below, but let me make three preliminary remarks first.

[1] Science cannot explain why entities exist. It can only explain how entities are (causally) related to one another and can show how entities develop from other entities. Science can explain, for example, how a seed becomes a plant by describing the developmental stages from the beginning to the end. In this respect we may say that science is a very humble undertaking (but a difficult one).

[2] Science studies entities that are perceptible, observable. One of the most important concepts in science is the concept of causation: how some entities (events) cause some other entities to move or to change.
Causation itself is not an empirical entity, it is a concept that relates empirical entities in a temporal order to each other. A natural law of physics for example, is a statement about an empirical event that causes another event (every time).
The concept of ‘God’ is not a scientific concept because it does not conjugate two empirical states of affairs to each other. It is a concept that has no empirical foundation.

[3] The truthfulness of a scientific statement can be evaluated by the methods that were used to produce the statement (knowledge) in question. Methodology is the study of how science should be practiced. Methodology is a complex theory that prescribes how investigations should be performed on the basis of evaluation of practices. It is an activity (a method) we could compare with the buzz word “Best practice”: the most effective and efficient way to accomplish a task based on proven and repeatable procedures.

In their book “Wat een onzin!”, published in 2008 – I don’t think it has been translated in English (yet) so my translation of the title would be: “Sheer nonsense!”, Dutch scientists Herman de Regt and Hans Dooremalen discuss the rules a person can use to distinguish between sentences that are the product of scientific investigation (often called hypothesis or propositions) and sentences that are not (statements about ghosts, homeopathy, deities, etc.). I will discuss one rule De Regt and Dooremalen mention, the rule of falsification. This rule states that scientific statements should be falsifiable. The statement “all swans are white” is falsifiable and can be tested to be false by finding at least one black swan. The statement “God created the world” is not a falsifiable statement because we have no means to test it; the word “God” does not refer to an empirical entity.

Summarizing: scientific research produces falsifiable statements about the empirical world and these statements are subsequently subjected to refutability tests. Falsifiable statements about the empirical world are stated in terms of observable, interrelated entities.

I like thinking, so I like science. Because science is thinking, experimenting and making statements about us and about our world. I completely disagree with Descartes though who said: cogito ergo sum (I think so I am). I would rather say: I feel so I am (I’m sorry I can’t write this in Latin). But I only can make such a statement because I think and have a memory.

I don’t like religion. Because religion is believing in untested and untestable statements about us and our world.

Science is about making statements (refutable conjectures) about reality, about how it is and how it will be. Religion is about making statements (irrefutable truths) about how it is and how it should be. Religion tells people how to behave (especially how women should behave – is God a man?) but no religion will ever tell objects what to do. So some religions would say that God doesn’t want you to ride on a bicycle on Sundays but there is no religion that forbids stones to roll from the mountain on Sundays. Why is that?

When scientists talk or write about the word ‘truth’ they are talking of how well a statement, a model or a theory fits the real world. Most scientists agree that there are no age-long true theories or facts. Even so, science is capable of making predictions by – for example – discovering the laws that govern the physical world.
Science is the art of making a perfect representation of the world so it can predict some aspects of it.

Social sciences have the same aim as the physical sciences: the prediction of future outcomes. In social sciences the subject of study is the inner part of man, his behaviour and his artefacts. The difference with the physical sciences lies in the research methods used. Between brackets: some social scientists believe they should only use the same methods of that of the physical sciences. How erroneous!

If we take a close look at science then you may conclude that scientists start from the world as they encounter it and then they try to explain (and predict) how parts of it interact. There is no design in science, except the design of scientific models and theories.
A scientist is like a man entering a building and starting to investigate how the different parts of the building work (together).
A religious believer (yes a man too and not a woman) on the other hand enters the building, has a quick look around, leaves the building, examines it meticulously from the outside and wonders who the architect was. Of course there is nobody to tell him, so he starts speculating. Soon he discovers there is no information to speculate upon so the believer makes up a story, goes home and tells everybody the great news (his invented story). And because he did not have a good look at the inside of the building he invents how we should behave in there (and especially the women).

Catholics thought that the earth was flat. They did a lot of horrible things to Galileo because he told them the world was not like a pancake but like a soccer ball. Now they too the world is round. But how many people had to die before they accepted this ‘fact’?
Because religion has no way of testing its beliefs, religious statements can be held as absolute truths. This causes believers to think they are the best of breed and that their morals should therefore be imposed on others.

Is it possible to be religious and to be a scientist? Theoretically science and religion are not compatible. But there are scientist believers. In my view they have a big problem in explaining how they can live with conflicting statements and in explaining how they solve this incompatibility.

The status of social science has always been very questionable and from the beginning,  social scientists have tried to explain that their methods are just as good as those of any scientist who studies the natural world (the physical scientist). ‘Look at how many statistics, we use’ you hear them exclaim. So by applying the same research methods as the physical scientists, the social scientists consider themselves ‘respectable’ scientists.

There is a problem though: in using the methods of the physical sciences while studying  humans (including their artefacts and their interactions), social scientist forget the most important aspect of what makes a being human: that he lives in a constructed semantic habitat. Meaning, knowledge and language being the main aspects defining this semantic habitat.

So the difference between physical science and socials science lies in my view in the difference between the nature of the subject at hand. Stones and atoms (‘things’ we can see through instruments) are quite different from humans. On the physical level, objects can be seen, they can be displaced and they can be felt (heavy and cold for example). But as the materialists have pointed out: humans are made of materials too. So humans can be heavy (most of them in the West are) and can feel warm. They move and they displace things. They also make things (artefacts) and interestingly enough, they exchange sounds (communicate) with each other.

Understanding (causal) relationships between entities (the realm of theory and model building) and predicting the time-space positions of entities (the realm of the testing of conjectures) is the main aim of all sciences. Can we predict the time-space position of humans and the consequences of their movements, and do we want to? Yes, we want to and yes, we can. But these predictions are not formulated by theories built with instruments borrowed from the physical sciences but built by analysing language and understanding its semantics. With the analysis of language, knowledge and communication we can understand the meaning of movements (we call them actions) and by consequence we can establish causal relationships between movements and through the theories we can predict these movements.

If we look at our world, we can divide it into 5 levels:
I: the subatomic,
II: the physical,
III: the biological,
IV: the mental (including the sensations) and
V: the social (defined as human interactions).

Research on biological entities and biological functions is conducted with the same type of methods as in the physical sciences. The study of the mental state is the most difficult to do, in my opinion. This is the study of fantasies, of thoughts and of (physical) feelings. The underlying entities of these phenomena being the brain and the neural network of a body.
Pain, for example is a sensation that belongs to world IV. It is indefinable and cannot be ‘explained’ by material entities (world I, II and III). Pain can be related to the presence of activity in some neuron circuits, but as everyone knows, a correlation does not necessarily imply a causal relation. We are dealing here with the age-old mind-body problem.

Let’s round off with some additional thoughts on social science; the science of world V.
1) Exerting a physical force on a human will never supply the desired effect because humans will always try to counteract physical forces that impinge upon them and they will always try to reinstall their previous physical and semantic state.
2) By analysing communication and its semantics we can make predictions. In fact we do it all day long. For example, if you hear a man making an appointment for 7 p.m. this evening with his girlfriend for the opera, you can predict that they will be there at 7 p.m. this evening. By no means can you predict this with the use of methods borrowed from the physical sciences.

Conclusion: social science is a science because we can make predictions based on theories. The methods used are different from those of the physical sciences.
In 1958 Peter Winch (14 January 1926 – 27 April 1997) already wrote a very interesting little book: The idea of a social science. But Peter is a philosopher and elucidating concepts is his profession. Social scientists on the other hand try to predict the way humans will interact with each other.

In 1982 I worked at the faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Amsterdam (in the Netherlands) as a methodologist. My work consisted of reviewing statistical software packages that were used at the university to analyse data. After a year I left the university because working as a methodologist/statistician wasn’t fulfilling for me. I was more a man of ideas and concepts than a technician. My interest in the sciences never flawed though and I kept reading about research, developments and new concepts in science. But of course, having studied psychology, I had  more interest in the social sciences than in the other sciences.

April this year (2009) I decided to start working on my PhD dissertation.  After more then 26 years, I  am back at science again. I know it will not be easy as I have a fulltime job at the Academic Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam  as organizational advisor and project manager. So my time is limited. The subject of my dissertation will probably be on change within organizations. I haven’t decided yet.

I started this web log because I like to write about science and I am very interested in what other people think about different subjects like knowledge, the foundations of science, mathematical concepts, language, mankind and human interaction.