Justin Vlasits

Illustrated by Ashley Lee

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cience attempts to explain how the world works in a systematic way. In order to do this, scientists focus on foundational moments, such as when the universe began, when life began and when humans began to use language. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Thales made the first documented attempt at a scientific explanation when he claimed that the world was made of water in various mutations. In the intervening two and a half millennia, scientists have come to disagree over the nature of the essential substances that make up our world. Some now argue that its fundamental unit is something like a string, vibrating in different ways to make up the properties of different elementary particles. Despite the differences between theories, they all share the aim of discovering what lies at the foundation of our universe.

How do scientists begin to ask questions regarding the origins of our universe in a way that distinguishes them from theologians and philosophers? Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued that in order for scientists even to begin asking these sorts of questions in a scientific way, they need a certain number of methodological and theoretical assumptions to ground their work. He calls this a paradigm.

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aradigms organize the world so that it can begin to be studied by scientists. They determine the relevant questions they can ask and the ways they can go about discovering the answers. A paradigm acts as a sort of map that guides scientists along in their research. The scientist’s job is to fill in the blank areas and clarify details. The usefulness of a map derives from its ability to exclude irrelevant information and pinpoint the most important features. A road map, for A Case for Skeptical Science Justin Vlasits Illustrated by Ashley Lee features 7 example, does not need to include the same detail on elevation as a topographical map because its function is only geared towards providing a clear outline of various routes by which a driver could navigate a given area. A paradigm, similarly, provides a guide with which one can study, for example, the motion of a ball through space by excluding irrelevant information (e.g. the color of the ball) and including relevant information (e.g. the mass, volume, potential and kinetic energy).

Like any map, the paradigm has its own logic, which includes criteria by which to judge a statement true or false. But there is a certain priority to these kinds of assumptions— they must exist strictly before any other assumptions in order to have the power to verify other statements in the theory. That is to say, every theory points to its own validity and in one way or another excludes every other theory that it cannot incorporate into its logic. There are no criteria of truth external to the theories themselves that have the ability to judge between one theory and another. This is because a theory defines a way of seeing the world that is not inherently more or less true than another.

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f this is so, how do we know that our current scientific assumptions are better than, say, Aristotle’s? It is exactly this kind of question that drove ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics, especially Sextus Empiricus, to suspend judgment “on all matters of belief.” Sextus argued that every account can be opposed, in one’s mind, with an opposite account, and that both accounts can be equally believable. If this is true, the scientific paradigm becomes highly problematic for two important reasons. First, if any of a paradigm’s assumptions can be replaced by a contradictory assumption, then no paradigm can have truly unassailable assumptions. Second, if these opposite accounts are really equally believable, then there is no reason that someone should accept one paradigm over another. It seems as if Aristotle’s physics are equally ‘plausible’ as the most recent formulations of Quantum Mechanics because neither can be completely justified without appeal to the criteria of truth that come from the theory itself.

Kuhn argues along these 8 THE GADFLY FALL 2009 lines when he says that paradigms are incommensurable, but he allows for the possibility of scientific progress. After all, paradigms get better and better at “solving puzzles.” Namely, they get better at asking the kinds of questions that they can answer and providing reasonable and meaningful answers to those questions. But this only happens as long as scientists strictly adhere to their paradigm as the model for reality—otherwise they would engage in characteristically “unscientific” discussions of ontology and methodology and never get around to doing actual investigation. Kuhn argues that while it may be impossible for science to get us to absolute truth, its usefulness is dependent on scientists accepting paradigms.

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extus, however, doesn’t seem to think that we need to depend on a paradigm in order to investigate. In fact, he sees suspension of judgment as the first step to real investigation. On Sextus’ view, when someone is investigating based on paradigms, they are not really investigating at all since they think they already know how the world works. The skeptic, however, suspends judgment, and thus his investigation does not have any predetermined conclusion. Just because the skeptic suspends judgment, however, does not mean that he is unable to use some of the assumptions and techniques employed by paradigmatic science. He simply has to re-appropriate them to nondogmatic purposes. Instead of aiming for a definite answer, such as: “Atoms each have a nucleus made of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons,” he might come out with some sort of conditional such as: IF “Protons, neutrons and electrons have masses x, y, z and charges a, b, c” AND IF “Our theory of electromagnetic interaction is true” THEN “Atoms each have a nucleus made of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons.” It is important to see that atomic theory no longer has the same kind of ontological value—it is simply a defined placeholder that aids our understanding of certain events in the world.

Unlike paradigmatic science, which makes statements about the world that at some point cannot be justified, skeptical science leads to a network of belief commitments that all take the form of similar conditionals. The potential power of such a methodology is that it does not require the same belief commitments that paradigmatic science does. Instead, it allows for multiple networks of your beliefs to exist independently of each other such that the skeptic never has to decide on the rightness of a single paradigm. This means that they would never have to make the choice between the Aristotelian and the Quantum Mechanical worldview because any such choice seems to be unjustifiable in the eyes of the skeptic. This does not prevent the skeptical scientist from working within the framework of modern physics by sidetracking him in ancient methods; it only allows him to avoid commitments to a theory that he cannot justify to be true. This eschews the problem of criteria to decide true and false statements precisely because it does not purport to make those kinds of statements.

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he skeptic is thus immune to the paradoxes that plague normal scientists, yet is still able to carry out minute observations, such as Sextus did in comparative anatomy (one of the most active scientific fields in the Hellenistic world). If one is inclined to think that what Sextus did was real investigation, then the potential of skeptical science is obvious. He is also in a much more flexible position than a normal scientist: he is willing to allow for several meaningful interpretations of a single experiment. So while he is perfectly able to “solve puzzles,” he aims for something higher: understanding. Even though all of his efforts are unable to lead him to the positive statements, “This is true” or, “This is false,” he has a number of different perspectives on how the world works. He sees connections between different beliefs and has grappled with interpreting experimental data. What in this is not scientific?

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fter all, the word skeptic comes from the Greek verb skeptein, “to search,” and whether it is for an explanation of the origins of the universe or the set theoretic foundations of mathematics, skeptical scientists can look for models and heuristics that can aid our understanding of certain aspects of the world. Yet they also understand the problems inherent in the models and heuristics themselves. Their task is never complete, but on its way, their search accumulates knowledge about the way the world works. Such a mission for science neither compromises its integrity, nor diminishes its importance.