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The language used in sociology does deny the existence of objective knowledge, for excellent reasons that sociologists are happy to explain. It's a way to mana

by thisrod 10y ago

The language used in sociology does deny the existence of objective knowledge, for excellent reasons that sociologists are happy to explain. It's a way to manage a massive problem. https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/sociology-of-science.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardif... We might know objectively that matter is made of atoms, and sociologists know that too; but Dalton, Boyle and Lavoisier didn't know it. It's easy to tell a story about what they did and why they did it, and the story will end with everyone finding out that matter is made of atoms. But, in order for the beginning of that story to be an objective explanation of what people did, it has to make sense whether or not matter turns out to be made of atoms. Causality runs forwards in time. Therefore, atoms were discovered as a result of the actions of people who didn't know about atoms, and atoms did not directly affect the actions that led to their discovery. If atoms caused the discovery of atoms, it would have happened ten billion years ago, not two hundred.

schoen 10y ago
Thanks for the link to the Collins article; I found it very interesting. I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their discovery, but I don't think I have time to formulate them clearly right now, so I'll just stop with thanking you for the link. :-)
- trentmb 10y ago
  > I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their discovery Like what is the person that discovered them made up of, if not atoms?
  - thisrod 10y ago
    That can't be the cause: all of the people who didn't discover atoms were made up of atoms too.
- thisrod 10y ago
  Here is an exercise: draft your account of how atoms caused the discovery of atoms, then imagine how I would rewrite it as an account of how the luminiferous aether caused the Michelson-Morley experiment. My account is obviously bullshit, because the luminiferous aether doesn't exist. So, if your story is not bullshit, there must be a specific causal link in my story that doesn't have an analog in yours. Find it.
  - warrenpj 10y ago
    This seems suspicious to me, like you're playing a game with words that I'm not able to precisely identify. Isn't this conflating objective reality (which we can only theorize about) with objective knowledge about reality (which can improve over time but never be perfect)? The theory of the luminiferous aether "caused" the Michelson-Morley experiment, the outcome of which was inconsistent with the luminiferous aether actually existing. The theory of atoms "caused" many experiments, the outcome of which was consistent with atoms actually existing. What causes theories to exist? Conjecture and criticism motivated by logical and empirical problems. The problems are "caused" by objective reality, of which atoms are one part (at a certain level of explanation, anyway). An account of the development of scientific knowledge should explain the development of these problems, the conjectured solutions, and criticism made to them, and why the current explanations are the best available in light of this history. At no point do we need to claim that the current explanations are the best possible, but they are still objective knowledge.
    - thisrod 10y ago
      > The theory of ... This is starting to sound like history or sociology. The next step comes when you notice that the "the theory of" keys on your typewriter are getting excessively worn, and adopt a convention that any reference to "atoms" actually means "the atomic theory of matter". There's a convention in scientific reasoning, that I'm not allowed to say, "Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", although in fact he did. This is a safety measure: if we forbid people from saying that, we don't lose much, but we avoid some common ways of fooling ourselves. Sociologists are coming from the other side. They are allowed to say, "because Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", but they can't say "... because spacetime is curved." The readers know that spacetime is curved, and it's tempting for them to forget they are not the people whose actions they want to explain, and those people acted as if spacetime were flat. Perhaps they noticed things that were inconsistent with spacetime being flat. They never directly noticed that spacetime was curved: if it were possible to notice that directly, no one would ever have believed otherwise.
CamperBob2 10y ago
But, in order for the beginning of that story to be an objective explanation of what people did, it has to make sense whether or not matter turns out to be made of atoms. I'm afraid I don't follow. If the basic laws of chemistry and molecular composition were different, we wouldn't have heard of Dalton, Boyle, and Lavoisier. Instead, we'd refer to people who happened to choose fruitful lines of inquiry in that universe.
Natsu 10y ago
> If atoms caused the discovery of atoms, it would have happened ten billion years ago, not two hundred. What were those scientists made of, exactly?
enugu 10y ago
What is actually found to be true can play an important role in understand past attempts. Imagine one sends a group of ships on exploration with each ship given a partial and inaccurate map. One can use an accurate map (along with the ship maps) to understand how the various ships meet difficulties and have to change course(not finding expected land in the inaccurate map). Sociology of the decisions in the ships would be incomplete without an accurate map as success/failure affects the social process in the ship and this success depends on accuracy of ship map as well as the social forces (like two conflicting groups in the ship, some who want to get gold, some who are more inclined towards safety). See an old article posted here on discovery of an explanation for scurvy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912. Note that a correct explanation can help us to understand the partial success of past theories and also why they dont work fully. It is also important to understand the dynamics of the social groups and who is more likely to succeed. Your link is a good post, but "does deny" is too strong, a better expression of the attitude is "bracketing/setting-aside the issue itself and studying the social processes involved in both sides of the argument, how it influences which arguments are accepted". Note that scientists and programmers often make these types of arguments as well. For instance, a scientist can say that funding committees are biased as they represent the old guard. "Worse is Better" is an argument which uses sociology kind of arguments to explain popularity of programming languages, though a sociologist probably wouldn't get into objective assessments like the popular languages are worse. BTW, I dont agree with the main post that philosophy is bunk. Also, I think that there is construction in science, but one has to be clear at what level the construction happens. There are strong internal constraints which dont allow one to arbitarily use a different Periodic Table for instance.
hcs 10y ago
I think I understand what you and the Collins article are saying, but I don't agree that this denies the existence of objective knowledge. Rather, it is unconcerned with objective knowledge beyond its purview of understanding social pressures, even as it deals with scientists seeking objective knowledge. Maybe I just don't properly understand the whole science wars thing. It seems so obvious as to be uncontroversial that science is a thing people do and can be studied as such, but this is probably an unhelpful strawman (steelman?) I've substituted for what's really being argued. Or maybe this all died out in the 00s.

by thisrod 10y ago

schoen 10y ago

Thanks for the link to the Collins article; I found it very interesting. I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their discovery, but I don't think I have time to formulate them clearly right now, so I'll just stop with thanking you for the link. :-)

trentmb 10y ago
> I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their discovery Like what is the person that discovered them made up of, if not atoms?
- thisrod 10y ago
  That can't be the cause: all of the people who didn't discover atoms were made up of atoms too.
thisrod 10y ago
Here is an exercise: draft your account of how atoms caused the discovery of atoms, then imagine how I would rewrite it as an account of how the luminiferous aether caused the Michelson-Morley experiment. My account is obviously bullshit, because the luminiferous aether doesn't exist. So, if your story is not bullshit, there must be a specific causal link in my story that doesn't have an analog in yours. Find it.
- warrenpj 10y ago
  This seems suspicious to me, like you're playing a game with words that I'm not able to precisely identify. Isn't this conflating objective reality (which we can only theorize about) with objective knowledge about reality (which can improve over time but never be perfect)? The theory of the luminiferous aether "caused" the Michelson-Morley experiment, the outcome of which was inconsistent with the luminiferous aether actually existing. The theory of atoms "caused" many experiments, the outcome of which was consistent with atoms actually existing. What causes theories to exist? Conjecture and criticism motivated by logical and empirical problems. The problems are "caused" by objective reality, of which atoms are one part (at a certain level of explanation, anyway). An account of the development of scientific knowledge should explain the development of these problems, the conjectured solutions, and criticism made to them, and why the current explanations are the best available in light of this history. At no point do we need to claim that the current explanations are the best possible, but they are still objective knowledge.
  - thisrod 10y ago
    > The theory of ... This is starting to sound like history or sociology. The next step comes when you notice that the "the theory of" keys on your typewriter are getting excessively worn, and adopt a convention that any reference to "atoms" actually means "the atomic theory of matter". There's a convention in scientific reasoning, that I'm not allowed to say, "Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", although in fact he did. This is a safety measure: if we forbid people from saying that, we don't lose much, but we avoid some common ways of fooling ourselves. Sociologists are coming from the other side. They are allowed to say, "because Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", but they can't say "... because spacetime is curved." The readers know that spacetime is curved, and it's tempting for them to forget they are not the people whose actions they want to explain, and those people acted as if spacetime were flat. Perhaps they noticed things that were inconsistent with spacetime being flat. They never directly noticed that spacetime was curved: if it were possible to notice that directly, no one would ever have believed otherwise.

CamperBob2 10y ago

But, in order for the beginning of that story to be an objective explanation of what people did, it has to make sense whether or not matter turns out to be made of atoms. I'm afraid I don't follow. If the basic laws of chemistry and molecular composition were different, we wouldn't have heard of Dalton, Boyle, and Lavoisier. Instead, we'd refer to people who happened to choose fruitful lines of inquiry in that universe.

Natsu 10y ago

> If atoms caused the discovery of atoms, it would have happened ten billion years ago, not two hundred. What were those scientists made of, exactly?

enugu 10y ago

What is actually found to be true can play an important role in understand past attempts. Imagine one sends a group of ships on exploration with each ship given a partial and inaccurate map. One can use an accurate map (along with the ship maps) to understand how the various ships meet difficulties and have to change course(not finding expected land in the inaccurate map). Sociology of the decisions in the ships would be incomplete without an accurate map as success/failure affects the social process in the ship and this success depends on accuracy of ship map as well as the social forces (like two conflicting groups in the ship, some who want to get gold, some who are more inclined towards safety). See an old article posted here on discovery of an explanation for scurvy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912. Note that a correct explanation can help us to understand the partial success of past theories and also why they dont work fully. It is also important to understand the dynamics of the social groups and who is more likely to succeed. Your link is a good post, but "does deny" is too strong, a better expression of the attitude is "bracketing/setting-aside the issue itself and studying the social processes involved in both sides of the argument, how it influences which arguments are accepted". Note that scientists and programmers often make these types of arguments as well. For instance, a scientist can say that funding committees are biased as they represent the old guard. "Worse is Better" is an argument which uses sociology kind of arguments to explain popularity of programming languages, though a sociologist probably wouldn't get into objective assessments like the popular languages are worse. BTW, I dont agree with the main post that philosophy is bunk. Also, I think that there is construction in science, but one has to be clear at what level the construction happens. There are strong internal constraints which dont allow one to arbitarily use a different Periodic Table for instance.

hcs 10y ago

I think I understand what you and the Collins article are saying, but I don't agree that this denies the existence of objective knowledge. Rather, it is unconcerned with objective knowledge beyond its purview of understanding social pressures, even as it deals with scientists seeking objective knowledge. Maybe I just don't properly understand the whole science wars thing. It seems so obvious as to be uncontroversial that science is a thing people do and can be studied as such, but this is probably an unhelpful strawman (steelman?) I've substituted for what's really being argued. Or maybe this all died out in the 00s.