Re: Philosophy of Science / Epistemology -- Larry Laudan

At 12:21 PM 6/10/2006, David Opderbeck wrote:

>... Just curious if anyone here has read Laudan
>or has a sense of how his philosophy of science
>/ epistemology might play into the faith/science relation.

@ These excerpts from the item blow indicate how it plays into it:

"After Judge Overton used a demarcationist
argument to strike down the Arkansas creationism
law, both Philip Quinn and Larry Laudan, neither
of them defenders of creationism by any stretch
of the imagination, argued that the judge had
accepted bad arguments from expert witnesses in
support of their conclusions. ..

I was even told that when Judge Overton ruled
there were Big Bang cosmologists who pleaded with
the judge not to use the criteria he did to
define science because it would not only rule out
creationism, but modern cosmology as well."

~ Janice

Attacking ID with the wrong
stick?
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_dangerousidea_archive.html

In an oped piece in the Christian Science
Monitor, Alexander George says that the
enterprise of demarcating science from
pseudoscience is a historically a failure. So
while he opposed ID and the attempt to bring it
into the school classrooms, he is critical of the
attempt to use a distinction between science and
pseudoscience to argue against its inclusion.

My own study in the philosophy of science reached
much the same conclusion where Creationism was concerned.

After Judge Overton used a demarcationist
argument to strike down the Arkansas creationism
law, both Philip Quinn and Larry Laudan, neither
of them defenders of creationism by any stretch
of the imagination, argued that the judge had
accepted bad arguments from expert witnesses in support of their conclusions.

Larry Laudan, "Commentary: Science at the Bar -
Causes for Concern," _Science, Technology and
Human Values_ v7 n41 (Fall 1982) 16-19.

Philip L. Quinn, "The Philosopher of Science as
Expert Witness," in C. F. Delaney, J. T. Cushing,
G. Gutting, eds., _Science and Reality_
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) 32-53

and more generally:

Larry Laudan, "The Demise of the Demarcation
Problem," repr. in M. Ruse, ed., _But Is It
Science?_ (Prometheus Books, 1988) 337-350

*
 From the December 22, 2005 edition - Christian
Science Monitor - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1222/p09s02-coop.html

What's wrong with intelligent design, and with
its critics By Alexander George

AMHERST, MASS. – This week, a federal judge ruled
that intelligent design may not be taught in the
science classrooms of Pennsylvania's public
schools. I agree with the verdict, but we need to
be careful about our reasons for supporting it.
Most critics of intelligent design seek to
undermine it by arguing that the doctrine is not
science. It's actually religion passing itself
off as science. Hence, its teaching constitutes
religious instruction. The Constitution disallows
the state's establishment of religion. Therefore,
intelligent design cannot be taught in the classroom.

The problem with this argument is that it
requires making the case that intelligent design
is not science. And the intelligibility of that
task depends on the possibility of drawing a line
between science and non-science. The prospects
for this are dim. Twentieth-century philosophy of
science is littered with the smoldering remains of attempts to do just that.

Science employs the scientific method. No,
there's no such method: Doing science is not like
baking a cake. Science can be proved on the basis
of observable data. No, general theories about
the natural world can't be proved at all. Our
theories make claims that go beyond the finite
amount of data that we've collected. There's no
way such extrapolations from the evidence can be
proved to be correct. Science can be disproved,
or falsified, on the basis of observable data.
No, for it's always possible to protect a theory
from an apparently confuting observation.
Theories are never tested in isolation but only
in conjunction with many other extra-theoretical
assumptions (about the equipment being used,
about ambient conditions, about experimenter
error, etc.). It's always possible to lay the
blame for the confutation at the door of one of
these assumptions, thereby leaving one's theory in the clear. And so forth.

Let's abandon this struggle to demarcate and
instead let's liberally apply the label "science"
to any collection of assertions about the
workings of the natural world. Fine, intelligent
design is a science then - as is astrology, as is
parapsychology. But what has a claim to being
taught in the science classroom isn't all
science, but rather the best science, the claims
about reality that we have strongest reason to
believe are true. Intelligent design shouldn't be
taught in the science classroom any more than
Ptolemaic astronomy and for exactly the same
reason: They are both poor accounts of the
phenomena they seek to explain and both much
improved upon by other available theories.

The suspicion that religion is lurking somewhere
in intelligent design theory is correct, but its
locus is often misidentified. The religion isn't
in the claims of intelligent design themselves.
Rather, the religion is in the motivation for
pushing a poor account of the natural world into the science curriculum.

I think there are two reasons why people shy away
from this way of viewing the matter. First, if
you call intelligent design "poor science," then
it seems you've allowed intelligent design a foot
in the door by accepting that it's science.
Science versus non-science seems like a much
sharper dichotomy than better versus worse
science. The first holds out the prospect of an
"objective" test, while the second calls for
"subjective" judgment. But there is no such test,
and our reliance on judgment is inescapable. We
should be less proprietorial about the unhelpful
moniker "science" but insist that only the best
science be taught in our schools.

The second reason has to do with politics. The
courts have had something to say about the
constitutional guarantees of the separation of
church and state. They've had nothing to say
about the unconstitutionality of teaching bad
science. Hence, if you wish to use the courts to
stop school boards from introducing intelligent
design into the curriculum, it seems you've got
to argue that intelligent design isn't a science
but a religious doctrine. If we're to be honest,
either we should find alternatives to the courts
to protect our curricula from bad science, or we
should start arguing in court that the separation
of church and state would be violated by
intelligent design's injection into the science
curriculum on account of its predominantly religious motivation.

• Alexander George is a professor of philosophy at Amherst College.
Received on Sat Jun 10 13:58:53 2006