A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting exchange in The Guardian between George Monbiot and Nicholas Maxwell, a philosopher of science from University College London. In his piece, Monbiot presents an excellent, if overly pessimistic, analysis of the psychology behind climate change denial. In his response, Maxwell draws on some interesting results from the philosophy of science to make some outlandish and possibly dangerous conclusions about climate science. He argues that climate science, and science more generally, doesn’t seek truth and nobody will believe what scientists say until they own up to this fact.
(Update: In the comments on this post, Maxwell claims that his views are misrepresented here. Scroll down to see the debate.)
Monbiot’s analysis of the psychology of climate change denial
Monbiot points to a problem with the climate change debate that I have been interested in for some time. He explains that the actual science is too complex for the public, in general, to make an informed judgement about so we must take what the experts say on trust. But taking things on trust seems to be counter to the lessons we have learnt from science.
The detail of modern science is incomprehensible to almost everyone, which means that we have to take what scientists say on trust. Yet science tells us to trust nothing, to believe only what can be demonstrated. This contradiction is fatal to public confidence.
Monbiot’s column finishes on a very pessimistic note. After discussing some very interesting research about the psychology of evidence and belief, he suggests that maybe there is nothing we can do to convince people of the real dangers of climate change. “There goes my life’s work,” he concludes.
I think that Monbiot is unnecessarily pessimistic and i think the deep tension he points to regarding trust in science can be resolved — but I’ll return to that issue in another post. In this post, I want to have a look at the bizarre claims made by Maxwell in his response.
Maxwell’s misuse of philosophy of science
Maxwell’s response is that scientists are giving people less reason to believe what they say since they are lying about their whole enterprise anyway! If they want people to believe what they say, according to Maxwell, they should stop lying.
The odd thing is, that according to Maxwell, the lie that scientists are going around telling us is that their research aims at truth. They should own-up, he says, and admit that they don’t seek truth at all.
The obvious problem with this advice is that if it turns out that science doesn’t aim at truth, then why should anyone believe it? Most people want their beliefs to be true and if they think that science doesn’t aim at truth, they won’t want to believe science.
So it’s clearly not good advice for scientists who want the public to believe what they say. But is Maxwell right about science? What reason does Maxwell give for thinking that science doesn’t aim at truth?
My first thought was that Maxwell would appeal to the kind of antirealism defended by philosopher Nancy Cartwright. In the introduction to her book How the Laws of Physics Lie, Cartwright says,
In modern physics, and I think in other exact sciences as well, phenomenological laws are meant to describe, and they often succeed reasonably well. But fundamental equations are meant to explain, and paradoxically enough the cost of explanatory power is descriptive adequacy. Really powerful explanatory laws of the sort found in theoretical physics do not state the truth.
I don’t agree with Cartwright but her work is important and very interesting. Maxwell’s claims do sound a bit like Cartwright’s but, at least in the Guardian piece, seem far less challenging. He says,
Physics only ever accepts theories that are unified – that attribute the same laws to all the phenomena to which the theory in question applies – even though many empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted… The aim of science is not truth per se, but rather truth presupposed to be unified, or explanatory.
Proper definitions of measures of unification are quite complicated. For present purposes, it is useful to think that for one theory to be more unified than another, it must either explain more phenomena or make fewer fundamental assumptions, or both.
Maxwell’s article concludes,
In short, in holding that the intellectual aim of science is truth alone, scientists seriously misrepresent its real, problematic aims, and thus prevent urgently needed critical assessment by scientists and non-scientists alike. More honesty about the nature of science might improve science, and public attitudes towards it – and might even encourage scientists to produce less gobbledegook.
Maxwell’s point seems quite different to Cartwright’s. Cartwright’s (questionable) point is that no real-world situations actually obey the laws of physics: the laws of physics apply only to imaginary situations like frictionless planes. The generality or unification of physics comes at the price of truthfulness, she argues. The generality gained by the unification of the laws of physics comes at the price that they only accurately apply to imaginary circumstances.
Maxwell, on the other hand, is not arguing that our current laws of physics are wrong because they do not accurately describe the real world, but rather that they only describe the world as accurately as infinitely other, less unified theories. He says that scientists thus don’t seek truth, but rather “truth presupposed to be unified, or explanatory”.
As a matter of fact, he is right. There are infinitely many equally empirically adequate theories. And one of the main reasons for accepting one theory over another is unification — we choose theories that carry the least number of assumtions while explaining the most phenomena.
Why unification is a good guide to truth when choosing theories is an interesting question and its not clear what the answer is. One is tempted to simply say that unification has been a good guide in the past, so we should expect it to be in the future. But its not clear that this defense really works. (For one thing, the defense seems to assume some kind of unification between the past and the future which might introduce some circularity.)
Another line of defense is that when a theory is better unified – when it explains more phenomena – it is also better confirmed. A theory is thought to be confirmed by the number of phenomena that it explains and so the more unified a theory, the better confirmed it is.
Or perhaps the right answer is that given by some pragmatists: what we mean by truth, is that which is, in some way or other, useful. Theories completely lacking in unification do not explain much at all and as a result are of very little use. If that’s right, then it’s almost a matter of definition that the more unified theories are more likely to be true.
Let’s forget about truth. What matters is usefulness.
But the important thing to point out is that the way Maxwell presents the issue of unification is somewhat misleading. It is not that scientists aim at unification instead of truth but rather that they think that unified theories are more likely to be true. Given the choice of two theories, the more unified one is thought a better contender at truth. As I’ve pointed out, why that has been the case in the past and why we think it will be the case in the future is an interesting question and one worth investigating.
At the heart of Maxwell’s view is the claim that usefulness and truthfulness come apart — that true theories might not be the most useful (for things like predicting the future). We know that theories that are more unified are more useful, but Maxwell claims that they are not more likely to be true. If that’s the case, then when it comes to matters of practical significance such as climate change, it’s not at all clear why we should care about what Maxwell is calling truth. What matters is that the theories are useful: that they provide the right predictions. Thus, even if Maxwell is right about scientists not aiming at the real truth, he doesn’t give us any reason to think that they should.
It seems to me unlikely that truth and usefulness come apart as Maxwell thinks they do. But if they do, he needs to tell us why a “truth” that doesn’t explain much — and therefore doesn’t predict much — is worth pursuing. What we need is a theory that makes the correct predictions, not one that conforms to Maxwell’s peculiar definition of truth.
Cartwright, Nancy (2004). Do the laws of physics state the facts? Readings on the Laws of Nature
Kitcher, P. (1981). Explanatory Unification Philosophy of Science, 48 (4) DOI: 10.1086/289019
I missed the Monbiot – Maxwell debate (went off Monbiot a bit when he called for Phil Jones to resign). But Maxwell sounds like a total idiot. “Truth” and “unified theory” are in opposition? Crap. It seems to me, apart from the common sense rejection of this apparently sophisticated but obviously nonsensical claim, that 2500 years of science doesn’t simply rely on unification but demonstrates its reality. We don’t live in a world/universe in which every single phenomenon needs to be separately explained. Clearly we don’t, and the advances in science have come about by discovering the unifying principles – evolution, the periodic table, the big bang, DNA, quantum physics, greenhouse gases. The alternative view, that, say, every star or every species was a unique individual for which a unique explanation had to be found was the pre-science view of the world. But in addition, it isn’t true at a practical level – an observation that is found to not fit within a unified system becomes the subject of special investigation, and the reason for its features use as the basis for a new unified theory.
All that counts in science is that a theory makes more accurate, comprehensive, and testable quantitative predictions of experimental outcomes than the alternative theories.
All other features of scientific methodology are secondary.
Philosophers of science have never really grasped this.
I think that’s demonstratably false. There are many, many theories that could be devised that are more empirically adequate than our current ones, but are unacceptably disunified. Coming up with empirically adequate theories is easy – coming up with empirically adequate theories that are not ridiculously disunified is science.
Yup!
It seems to me that there are areas of science which get by just fine with mere instrumentally useful theories, and others which clearly should be taken as making truth claims about their contents. The history of the Copernican revolution shows that astronomy split into a cosmological worldview (the celestial spheres of Aristotle) and an instrumentally useful theory of positional astronomy (Ptolemy’s geocentric model, with its epicycles, deferents, eccentrics, and equants). The heliocentric model won not because it was instrumentally more useful–it wasn’t, at least until Kepler came up with elliptical orbits–but because it began to explain more qualitative phenomena in a way that became first plausible and mathematically elegant and then ultimately unavoidable given further discoveries. Cosmology and positional astronomy then re-unified, along with Newtonian mechanics, creating a “consilience” of evidence that argues for truth (or at least an approximation thereof, further complicated by relativity).
An instrumentally useful theory that doesn’t purport to be true (i.e., doesn’t purport that all of the entities within the theory are real) still requires true predictions, so you can’t completely get away from truth.
Seems to me science aims at both truth and usefulness, though the latter may sometimes be the best we can get within a particular domain.
This Blog completely misrepresents my Guardian article, and my views. I argued that science does not ONLY seek truth – it seeks truth PRESUPPOSED TO BE UNIFIED OR EXPLANATORY, and more generally truth THAT IS OF VALUE. Of coure science seeks truth. My argument is that it does not seek truth alone.
The Guardian foisted a misleading title onto my article, without consulting me, and this misled most of those who commented on my piece. They reacted to the title and, like the author of this piece, failed to note what I actually argued for in my article. I do not, in the article, say scientists are lying. I do say they are deceiving themselves about the nature of science. The real aims of science are profoundly problematic, and need to be made explicit within science, so that they can be criticized and improved, as science proceeds.
Some commentators even took me to be a climate warming denier. I have been warning about climate warming for decades. My whole argument is that we need a revolution in science, and in academia more generally, if we are to learn how to deal properly with global problems, such as those of climate change.
Look at my website, http://www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk. Read one or other of “essays”. Read my book “From Knowledge to Wisdom”, first published in 1984 (second extended edition 2007). When first published it received many glowing reviews, for example one in Nature which said, among other things:
“Maxwell is advocating nothing less than a revolution (based on reason, not on religious
or Marxist doctrine) in our intellectual goals and methods of inquiry … There are altogether too many symptoms of malaise in our science-based society for Nicholas Maxwell’s diagnosis to be ignored.”
Professor Christopher Longuet-Higgins, Nature
Nicholas Maxwell
From the Guardian article:
“The situation might be helped if scientists stopped deceiving us, and themselves, about the nature of science itself, and adopted a more truthful view.”
This is in the body of the piece. How do you expect to be read when you flat out state that scientists are deceiving us?
Nicholas, are you arguing that there are multiple truths? That there are “unified truths”, “valuable truths” and other truths — perhaps the truths you call “wisdom”? Are you a relativist?
Either way, from what you say, it’s not at all clear that I’ve misrepresented your view. Unless you’re a relativist, it seems the central tenet of your thesis is that unification is not a good guide to truth. Is that right?
What I said in my Guardian article was perfectly clear, and I am amazed at the hysterical reactions to the title, about which I was not consulted, and the failure to read my article. My article stated, quite clearly, that science does not seek truth alone, truth per se. It seeks truth presupposed to be unified (or explanatory). More generally, it seeks truth that it is of value to know, in one way or another. In other words, science seeks more than knowledge of irredeemably trivial, useless truth.
In connection with the first point, I argue that persistent acceptance of unified theories, when empirically more successful disunified rivals are available, means science persistently accepts, as a part of theoretical scientific knowledge, that there is an underlying dynamic unity in nature, to the extent that the true theory of everything is unified. Unity is good guide to truth in theoretical physics, along with empirical success. But my argument goes much further than that. Have a look at “Do We Need a Scientific Revolution?”, Essays, at http://www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk
Just a couple of points: I don’t think the reaction on this blog has been hysterical, nor has it been simply in response to the title.
If you contribute to a public debate in a popular publication, you have to accept that people will respond to the argument as they are presented in your article and not necessarily go back and read everything you’ve written on the topic. It seems you should be particularly aware of this fact since the piece that your article was a response to was precisely about the way that public debate cannot be expected to be as informed as specialist debate is.
Curiouser and curiouser. Mr Maxwell’s web site he links to above is just an extended promotion (with many reviews) of his book. The blurb he publishes includes the following disturbing sentences “All our modern global crises are the outcome of science without wisdom. If we are to avoid in this century the horrors of the last one – wars, death camps, dictatorships, poverty, environmental damage”. Really, Mr Maxwell? All down to science? Or down to ideology and political action and irresponsible media behaviour, all ignoring science and scientists?
I haven’t read Maxwell’s book but it does seem rather implausible. I don’t think science is the cause or the solution to the horrors of modern (or not so modern) history. Even more implausible is the claim that the problem with science — which has caused all these horrors — is its liking for unification!
Modern science and technology made possible modern industry, agriculture, medicine and hygiene which in turn made possible the rapid growth in population, global warming, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, the lethal character of modern war, and even the aids epidemic (aids being spread by modern travel). None of these things would have been possible without modern science and technology.
Have a look at:-
Can The World Learn Wisdom?
(Solidarity, Sustainability, and Non-Violence, vol. 3, no. 4, April 2007)
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv03n04maxwell.html
There’s no doubt that science made the scale of these things possible. But that isn’t enough to hold it responsible. Identifying a contributing cause is not the same as identifying responsibility.
And science’s predilection for unification seems utterly irrelevant. (Unless the idea is that it shouldn’t aim for unification so that it fails to progress.)
It seems that everyone who has a pet hate blames the ills of the 20th century on the object of their hate. Just this morning the Archbishop of Sydney blamed atheism for the same things Maxwell blames science for.
In my work I always stress that science is not to blame. In so far as academics – primarily from social science and the humanities – do have some responsibility, it comes from their failure to put what I call “wisdom-inquiry” into practice. I do not hate science. I have myself contributed to science in a number of ways – for example, I have developed a testable version of quantum theory that claims to solve the wave/particle problem. I have argued for the need for scientists to develop a more rigorous kind of science which acknowledges the real, problematic aims of science, and puts what I call “aim-oriented empiricism” into scientific practice, a meta-ethodlogical view which provides a framework for the progressive improvement of the aims and methods of science as science proceeds, in the light of improving knowlege. The points about unity in physics is a part of that arguemnt. I put forward a proposal as to how science can be improved, backed up with serious argument, and I am greeted with idiotic hysteria. If you bothered to spend ten minutes reading one or other of the papers of mine I have indicated, you would realize how gross your misrepresentations of my views are.
Four rather more intelligent comments about my work (from many more, as you can see if you consult my website):-
“Because Maxwell so obviously understands and loves science as practiced, say, by an Einstein, his criticisms of current science seem to arise out of a sadness at missed opportunities rather than hostility … I found Maxwell’s exposition and critique of the current state of establishment science to be clear and convincing … Maxwell is right to remind us that in an age of Star Wars and impending ecological disaster, talk of the positive potential of means-oriented science can easily become an escapist fantasy.”
Professor Noretta Koertge, Isis
Maxwell is advocating nothing less than a revolution (based on reason, not on religious or Marxist doctrine) in our intellectual goals and methods of inquiry … There are altogether too many symptoms of malaise in our science-based society for Nicholas Maxwell’s diagnosis to be ignored.”
Professor Christopher Longuet-Higgins, Nature.
“The essential idea is really so simple, so transparently right … It is a profound book, refreshingly unpretentious, and deserves to be read, refined and implemented.”
Dr. Stewart Richards, Annals of Science.
“… a strong effort is needed if one is to stand back and clearly state the objections to the whole enormous tangle of misconceptions which surround the notion of science to-day. Maxwell has made that effort in this powerful, profound and important book.”
Dr. Mary Midgley, University Quarterly.
You say “If you contribute to a public debate in a popular publication, you have to accept that people will respond to the argument as they are presented in your article and not necessarily go back and read everything you’ve written on the topic. It seems you should be particularly aware of this fact since the piece that your article was a response to was precisely about the way that public debate cannot be expected to be as informed as specialist debate is.”
But my Guardian article argued that science does not seek truth alone; it seeks truth presupposed to be unified or explanatory, and more generally, it seeks valuable truth, and seeks valuable truth to be used, ideally to help enhance the quality of human life. All these aims are problematic, and need sustained critical discussion, by scientists and non-scientists alike. This blog, the mass of comments to my Guardian piece, and the two articles on the Guarian Commentisfree website, grossly misrepresented what I said. If you read my Guardian article again, and ignore the title, you will see that what I actually say is what I have just indicated above. It is said lucidly. And yet the mass of so-called scientists didn’t bother to attend to what I actually said. There was, instead, a gut reaction to the title, as two subsequent commentators on my article pointed out on the Guardian website.
For those interested, here’s the two replies that Maxwell is referring to. One is on the Guardian’s science blog, and the other is on the Comment is free website. They’re worth a look.
Can The World Learn Wisdom?
(Solidarity, Sustainability, and Non-Violence, vol. 3, no. 4, April 2007)
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv03n04maxwell.html
Nicholas Maxwell
(Emeritus Reader In philosophy of science at University College London)
http://www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk
The crisis of our times is that we have science without wisdom. This is the crisis behind all the others. Population growth, the terrifyingly lethal character of modern war and terrorism, immense differences of wealth across the globe, annihilation of indigenous people, cultures and languages, impending depletion of natural resources, destruction of tropical rain forests and other natural habitats, rapid mass extinction of species, pollution of sea, earth and air, thinning of the ozone layer, above all global warming – even the aids epidemic: all these relatively recent crises have been made possible by modern science and technology. Indeed, in a perfectly reasonable sense of “cause”, they have been caused by modern science and technology.
It may be objected that it is not science that is the cause of these global problems but rather the things that we do, made possible by science and technology. This is obviously correct. But it is also correct to say that scientific and technological progress is the cause. The meaning of “cause” is ambiguous. By “the cause” of event E we may mean something like “the most obvious observable events preceding E that figure in the common sense explanation for the occurrence of E”. In this sense, human actions (made possible by science) are the cause of such things as people being killed in war, destruction of tropical rain forests. On the other hand, by the “cause” of E we may mean “that prior change in the environment of E which led to the occurrence of E, and without which E would not have occurred”. If we put the 20th century into the context of human history, then it is entirely correct to say that, in this sense, scientific-and-technological progress is the cause of our distinctive current global disasters: what has changed, what is new, is scientific knowledge, not human nature. (Give a group of chimpanzees rifles and teach them how to use them and in one sense, of course, the cause of the subsequent demise of the group would be the actions of the chimpanzees. But in another obvious sense, the cause would be the sudden availability and use of rifles – the new, lethal technology.) Yet again, from the standpoint of theoretical physics, “the cause” of E might be interpreted to mean something like “the physical state of affairs prior to E, throughout a sufficiently large spatial region surrounding the place where E occurs”. In this third sense, the sun continuing to shine is as much a part of the cause of war and pollution as human action or human science and technology.
In short, if by the cause of an event we mean that prior change which led to that event occurring, then it is the advent of modern science and technology that has caused all our current global crises. It is not that people became greedier or more wicked in the 19th and 20th centuries; nor is it that the new economic system of capitalism is responsible, as some historians and economists would have us believe. The crucial factor is the creation and immense success of modern science and technology. This has led to modern medicine and hygiene, to population growth, to modern agriculture and industry, to world wide travel (which spreads diseases such as aids), to global warming, and to the destructive might of the technology of modern war and terrorism, conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear.
All this is to be expected. Successful science produces knowledge, which facilitates the development of technology, both of which enormously increase our power to act. It is to be expected that this power will often be used beneficially (as it has been used), to cure disease, feed people, and in general enhance the quality of human life. But it is also to be expected, in the absence of wisdom, that such an abrupt, massive increase in power will be used to cause harm, whether unintentionally, as in the case (initially at least) of environmental damage, or intentionally, as in war and terror.
Before the advent of modern science, lack of wisdom did not matter too much; we lacked the means to do too much damage to ourselves and the planet. But now, in possession of unprecedented powers bequeathed to us by science, lack of wisdom has become a menace. The crucial question becomes: How can we learn to become wiser?
The answer is staring us in the face. And yet it is one that almost everyone overlooks. Modern science has met with astonishing success in improving our knowledge of the natural world. It is this very success that is the cause of our current problems. But instead of merely blaming science for our troubles, as some are inclined to do, we need, rather, to try to learn from the success of science. We need to learn from the manner in which science makes progress towards greater knowledge how we can make social progress towards greater wisdom.
This is not a new idea. It goes back to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, especially the French Enlightenment. Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the other philosophes of the Enlightenment had the profoundly important idea that it might be possible to learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened world. They did not just have the idea: they did everything they could to put the idea into practice in their lives. They fought dictatorial power, superstition, and injustice with weapons no more lethal than those of argument and wit. They gave their support to the virtues of tolerance, openness to doubt, readiness to learn from criticism and from experience. Courageously and energetically they laboured to promote reason and enlightenment in personal and social life. And in doing so they created, in a sense, the modern world, with all its glories and disasters.
The philosophes of the Enlightenment had their hearts in the right place. But in developing the basic Enlightenment idea intellectually the philosophes, unfortunately, blundered. They botched the job. And it is this that we are suffering from today
Michael,
Just curious as to why you think that
“Cartwright’s (questionable) point is that no real-world situations actually obey the laws of physics: the laws of physics apply only to imaginary situations like frictionless planes”
is questionable? Is it because you think the “power realism” of thinkers like (early) Roy Bhaksar, Brian Ellis, Stephen Mumford, Alan Chalmers, et.al., is basically the correct one?
Hi Edward,
I guess a better word there would have been “controversial” rather than “questionable”. I’m not sure what I think about Cartwright’s view. To tell the truth, I am reluctant to accept her conclusions even though I can’t see any problems with her arguments. I know that’s not a very satisfactory response but it’s all I’ve got!
:-)
Usually I don’t post on blogs, but I need to say that this article very forced me to do so! Thanks, extremely nice article.
Criticizing Maxwell’s philosophy is a red herring. The goal is to raise the alarm against the failure (only to us of course) to effectively communicate facts. “Referential accuracy,” “universality” – who, in the target audience, cares? These concerns bypass anyone who is threatened by the implications of climate science. Including, businessman and industrialists effected by carbon regulation, or unattractive energy policy, and, well, its just a culture war against those lazy-good-for-nothings who are a part of the attack on the “job creators.”
Wonky epistemic judgments are hugely advantageous in forcing important political judgements. If their is no incentive to accept a claim, and great incentive to deny it, there is no mystery about it’s widespread rejection.
Wise up you “truth” seekers — nobody (especially in a economic world) cares.”