Every now and then someone picks a fight with me about the epistemology of science. As a former physicist and current economist, I might be particularly touchy on this topic. But I’ve found myself comfortable with a simple position that efficiently resolves most debate.<\/p>\n
Often at issue is that many scientists demand that we are searching for capital-T-Truth. Logic and mathematics are indeed about truth– or at least conditional truth– in the sense that very specific rules tell us what conclusions can be drawn from what premises. To the extent theorists (in physics or economics, say) just do math, that research is also about Truth. However, if the premises– the assumptions of the model– are wrong, that Truth may have no bearing on reality.<\/p>\n
For all applied work– work that uses real-world data, sometimes to test various theories– my satisfying criterion is whether we’ve come up with a way to make reliable predictions<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 Mixing hydrogen and oxygen gives you water and a bundle of energy:\u00a0 that’s a reliable prediction.\u00a0 The next solar eclipse will occur on August 1, 2008.\u00a0 If a central bank prints a huge amount of money and pours it into an economy, inflation will result. Every now and then someone picks a fight with me about the epistemology of science. As a former physicist and current economist, I might be particularly touchy on this topic. But I’ve found myself comfortable with a simple position that efficiently resolves most debate. Often at issue is that many scientists demand that we are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":283,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[608,434,291],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-rhetoric","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI care little about whether these are everlasting Truths.\u00a0 (Sometimes predictions are possible because we’ve observed the same phenomenon repeatedly and reliably: under ordinary circumstances, putting a pot of water on a hot enough fire will cause the water to boil.\u00a0 Sometimes predictions are possible because we have an encompassing underlying theory:\u00a0 gravity assists can be used to send probes like Cassini to their destinations.\u00a0 I guess I would say that to me those underlying theories represent something like Truth.)\u00a0 Mostly, I just appreciate that science and scientists have learned enough to make these and other predictions about the world with very high levels of confidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"