[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Re: The real method of scientific discovery: [...]

[Terry W. Colvin]

Terry W. Colvin forwarded:
>TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
>
>< http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2843/1_28/111897967/print.jhtml >
>
>The Scientific Method: The idea that there is a single Scientific Method and
>that induction is a key part of it is one of the most unfortunate fables
>foisted off on innocent students[...] Retroduction, or abduction,
>is the real method of scientific work

Also from the article:

"Peirce translated this third method as abduction or retroduction; it 
follows this pattern:

    Some surprising phenomenon P is observed.
    P would be explicable as a matter of course if H were true.
    Hence there is reason to think that His true.

A scientist does not make a lot of particular observations and then try to 
generalize from them to some hypothesis H. Instead, a scientist confronts 
puzzles that arise naturally in the course of her work. She ponders them in 
the light of the intimate knowledge of the system she has developed, and 
based on that knowledge, she makes a creative leap of the imagination to 
say, "This would all make sense if H were true!" I particularly want to 
emphasize that creative, imaginative leap, because this is the critical 
ingredient that makes scientific work different from following a cookbook 
(or a logic book), which makes it the exciting, challenging, creative human 
work that it is. This is the element that puts science on a par with the 
arts and other creative activities as an enterprise worthy of humans."

I think this misses a few things.

First of all, why is P surprising? The only reason the scientist is 
surprised by the white crow is because she induced something from having 
observed those 1000 black crows that came before. Without induction, there 
would be no surprise.

Secondly, abduction is not a "creative, imaginative leap". In a nutshell, 
we can abduce A from B if we can deduce B from A, but that doesn't tell us 
how to come up with A in the first place. Abduction does not tell us how to 
generate A.

And while it is true (in some sense) that this creative step makes science 
more than following a cookbook recipe, that's also true for painting, 
acting, and most human activities.

What distinguishes science is not that it's creative, but that it's 
inductive. Deductions are common: if water gets things wet and if something 
fell in water, we all deduce that thing is wet without being scientific 
about it. Same for abductions: if our friend missed his meeting with us, we 
can all think of abductive explanations for this suprising fact, including 
abduction in the other sense.

But if we see one hundred black crows and we present the hypothesis that 
all crows are black and predict the next crow will be black too, that 
begins to look like science.

So while science, like most human activities, uses deduction, abduction, 
and making things up on the spot, it's mostly identifiable by using 
induction too to create and test generalizations.

Finally, the formalism of logic rules is a powerful way of describing 
things but only an approximate model of how we think. Our brains don't work 
with rules, but with neural impulses and networks. When a scientist looks 
at a set of data and comes up with an explanation that's probably not 
deduction, nor abduction, nor induction, but something more fuzzy like 
statistical pattern matching.

Best,
Ludi

Ludwig Krippahl


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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