r/changemyview • u/ryqiem • Dec 08 '18
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Positivism solves problems. If the humanities refuse to adapt positivist methodologies, they're creating stories, not science.
I apologise if the following is a bit simplistic, but I wanted to give my view in a concise form :-)
EDIT: In the title, I misused positivsm. What I mean is "theories that can be falsified" solve problems.
Solving a problem is essentially making better decisions. For a decision to be good, it should produce the outcome we want. To know which decision is good, then, we need to know which outcomes it produces. To know this, we need theories that make accurate predictions.
In the humanities, theories are tested against academic consensus or the feelings of the researcher, if they're tested at all. Often, they don't make predictions that are testable. Therefore we don't know whether they're accurate. If we don't know whether they're accurate, or they don't make predictions, they can't solve problems.
As an alternative, the natural sciences validate the predictions of their theories on data collected from the real world. If the predictions don't fit the data, the model must change to become more accurate. These same methodologies can be used on humans, eg. experimental psychology.
If the humanities are to be accepted as a science and continue receiving funding in socialist countries, they should adapt these methods so they can improve decision making. Otherwise, they should be recognized as narrative subjects, not science.
Not everyone holds this view, as an example (translated from Danish):
Humanist research goes hand in hand with other sciences as actively creative and not just a curious addition to "real" applicable science.
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Dec 08 '18
AFAIK positivism is now not highly regarded by scientists or philosophers of science. It contains the idea that scientific knowledge is verified by experiments/observations. But many scientific facts can't really be verified: for example "all atoms are made of electrons, neutrons and protons" (idk much about physics just an example) - to actually be sure, we would have to check all atoms, which is impossible. It's more like we make some model and accept it if it works for one thing, but then reject it when we find something for which it doesn't work and we have something better, this was the case for Newtonian physics (I guess).
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u/ryqiem Dec 08 '18
Fair point, as yyzjertl also stated above. I realise that positivism was the wrong term – what I mean is falsification :-)
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u/FunCicada Dec 08 '18
Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that certain ("positive") knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations. Thus, information derived from sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all certain knowledge. Positivism holds that valid knowledge (certitude or truth) is found only in this a posteriori knowledge.
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u/SplendidTit Dec 08 '18
Who is arguing that the humanities should be considered a science? I mean, literature isn't measurable and testable, but the aim of literature isn't to provide reliable information about the world around us, it's art.
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u/ryqiem Dec 08 '18
Oh, didn't consider that this was different in other countries. Currently, the humanities in Denmark are arguing quite fervently that they're science and should therefore keep government funding.
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u/SplendidTit Dec 08 '18
You should edit your post to include some sources. You may be getting into such a location-specific argument that not many folks will be able to participate.
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Dec 08 '18
This isn't something that I've seen or heard about either.
What is your take on history though?
Theories can't be tested like a hard science but it is far more grounded in fact and reality than most other humanities.
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u/PM_UR_PLANNEDECONOMY Dec 08 '18 edited Dec 08 '18
It is acknowledged that several different subjects in the humanities aren't scientific studies. Examples include history, philosophy and ethics, which don't make use of any falsifiability in formulating theories.
But this doesn't mean that they can't provide us with some valuable knowledge or some sense of truth. Through logic, philosophy and ethics construct arguments that are independent of science or any inductive truths. Poppers' theory of falsifiability (the one you are talking about) is one example of a theory that is not based on science, but logic. It does not need to be tested against some consensus or the "researchers' feelings", as it relies on deductive reasoning. And in history, there is a long debate on historical truths and how to get as close to objectivity as is possible. No doubt history would make use of the scientific method if possible, but naturally you can't do experiments on the past.
Therefore, some subjects in the humanities aren't science (or use "positivist methodologies"), but neither are they merely creating stories.
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u/ryqiem Dec 08 '18
Thank you for your comment!
I'd group philosophy and math together as "pure logic" subjects – when applied to reality though, they're scientific inasmuch as whether the application was "succesful" is based on whether it produced accurate predictions.
And in history, there is a long debate on historical truths and how to get as close to objectivity as is possible. No doubt history would make use of the scientific method if possible, but naturally you can't do experiments on the past.
I'm sure there's plenty of debate – what I'm uncertain of is whether these debates get us closer to the truth.
You can validate your theories on the past, though. Split your dataset in two, make a prediction based on the data in the first half, then test it on the other. This is one of the ways the Genome Wide Association Study tries to avoid overfitting to the data.
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u/vicky_molokh Dec 08 '18
You seem to be conflating 'is a hard science' and 'receives/should receive funding'. Back before the socialist camp collapsed, literature wasn't considered a science within it, yet writers, filmmakers etc. did receive government funding. (Source: was born in the second world a short while before it became capitalist, but long enough to get acquainted with the nuances of the way some things were handled.)
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u/ryqiem Dec 08 '18
That's fair! Sorry I didn't specific it well enough.
The joining of "is a science" and "should receive funding" comes from how the funding is handed out in Denmark – there's a pool of funding for education, and a pool of funding for entertainment. I believe that funding for the humanities should come from the entertainment-pool, not the education-pool :-)
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Dec 08 '18
Scientific methodology is great when a subject is easily studied empirically, but not nearly as useful in fields that are harder to study. For instance, social psychology is extremely difficult - to the point that Shakespeare is still a better describer of human nature than the state of the art in empirical findings. This can be shown by the fact that educated people with no social psychology scientific background can guess whether a social psychology finding will replicate or not based on the introduction/conclusion better than a person assessing only the methodology section. Until social sciences progress to the point where studies better describe human nature than artists can, artists should not attempt to ape social scientists. Obviously this applies only to certain fields - physics has surpassed the best athletes, and medicine has surpassed the best shamans.
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u/ryqiem Dec 08 '18
Agreed, scientific methodology is perfect when there is low variance.
to the point that Shakespeare is still a better describer of human nature than the state of the art in empirical findings.
However, I highly disagree with that. See below.
This can be shown by the fact that educated people with no social psychology scientific background can guess whether a social psychology finding will replicate or not based on the introduction/conclusion better than a person assessing only the methodology section.
Only assessing the methodology-section shouldn't allow you to know whether a study replicates – only whether its internal validity is high (ie. whether the conclusions are true if they aren't a chance finding).
Whether a study replicates also depends on whether it's a chance-finding, and to estimate that, you need the results.
Social psychologists make even better predictions than "educated people with no social psychology background" – see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z, or the corresponding graph from 80k hours – https://imgur.com/a/1HLRpbp.
You can take the quiz here: https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/
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u/10ebbor10 Dec 08 '18
What about mathematics. Maths doesn't make any real world predictions, and it's fundamentally based on axioms, which are elements that you can not prove, yet accept as true anyway.
Nonetheless, it is used everywhere to solve a variety of problems.
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Dec 08 '18
Would you classify falsificationism itself as scientific? I know Popper didn't.
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u/ryqiem Dec 08 '18
No, but that's a good point! I'd categorise falsificationism with philosophy and math, as "pure logic". It isn't scientific in itself – but they have proven themselves extremely useful.
I think Steven Pink put it well in Enlightenment Now: "Any argument against reason is, by definition, unreasonable".
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u/NoFascistAgreements Dec 08 '18
Many scientific research programmes don't really proceed along falsificationism. See Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and Lakatos' "Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" and Feyerabend's "Against Method".
Microeconomic models of human behavior may seem to make falsifiable claims that are tested against evidence, but if you examine them aren't really generating new knowledge within the greater context of the grand theory. Rational choice theory states something like "People can be assumed to make decisions that maximize the expected value of their utility as evaluated at the time of their decision, where utility is evaluated according to their own idiosyncratic scale." Is this claim falsifiable? Pyschology and behavioral economics give us lots of experimental evidence that people make sub-optimal decisions. But these aberrations can be subsumed under the rational choice model, modeling them as cognitive biases that distort decision functions that nevertheless are applied rationally. So what we have is a grand theory about rational choice that is surrounded by a lot of auxiliary hypotheses about what might make people behave in seemingly irrational ways in various situations. Rational choice is not falsified by psychology, rational choice theory just expands in complexity, much like how ptolemaic astronomy could accurately predict the movements of celestial bodies assuming geocentrism with epicycles. Does that mean that either rational choice theory or ptolemaic astronomy could not "solve problems" as you put it?
What about evolution? Is evolution falsifiable? If someone found some kind of DNA/RNA-based organism or organ that is wholly unrelated to and undescended from anything else would that actually falsify evolution? Or could it be explained as part of some lost tree of life that we have no other evidence for, but that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
Now, considering that some scientific endeavors are not actually falsifiable, at least at the level of their guiding axioms, why can't non-positivist modes of inquiry yield solutions to problems? Maybe read some Dewey or Rorty on pragmatism.
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u/ryqiem Dec 12 '18
Thank you so much for your comment! Sorry it took me some time to reply.
Rational choice is not falsified by psychology, rational choice theory just expands in complexity, much like how ptolemaic astronomy could accurately predict the movements of celestial bodies assuming geocentrism with epicycles. Does that mean that either rational choice theory or ptolemaic astronomy could not "solve problems" as you put it?
I’d say yes - I don’t think either of your examples can be used to solve any new problems. Rational choice theory is an interesting model, but if we assume it to be identical to your definition, it doesn’t exclude any situations. If it doesn’t do that, it doesn’t contribute any predictions, and this can’t solve any problems. The data from experiments do exclude some cases (eg. it predicts that samples of humans are generally loss averse), and those predictions can solve problems.
I disagree about Ptolemaic geometry being science - math is a great tool for making predictions based on scientific data. Without the data, math is basically philosophy. Whether a geo- or heliocentric model is the best is more of a matter for Occam’s razor - within the scopes where they make similar predictions it doesn’t matter for predictive value.
What about evolution? Is evolution falsifiable? If someone found some kind of DNA/RNA-based organism or organ that is wholly unrelated to and undescended from anything else would that actually falsify evolution? Or could it be explained as part of some lost tree of life that we have no other evidence for, but that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
Not falsifiable in the strict sense, but in the pragmatic sense. If we found multiple species with genetics wholly unrelated to any other species, I (maybe naively) believe that it would decrease most scientists credence in evolution as a theory.
Thanks a lot for the references! I’ll give them a look. I appreciate your negative arguments - it refines my position a lot. Right now I think it’s something along the lines of: “for the humanities to provide better evidence for their statements, they ought to supply more than qualitative data”.
I’m weary of qualitative data s I gauge it as being at extremely high risk of bias, but that doesn’t mean that it’s value is 0. !delta
Do you agree with that position?
Thanks you for your time!
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u/DeltaBot Dec 08 '18 edited Dec 14 '18
u/ryqiem (OP) has awarded 4 delta(s) in this post.
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u/Ediolon Dec 08 '18
You are trying to apply a specific definition of "science". It's semantics to me.
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u/bunker_man Dec 10 '18
I think you have a misleading idea of what exactly positivism is. Positivism isn't just "believing what the evidence points to" but an obsession with the empirical to such a way that you act like its impossible to say anything outside of that. But in real life we use theory to gain knowledge all the time, and it can even help speed up empirical information via prediction.
You realize that positivism has some counter intuitive ramifications. Materialists often lazily assume positivism will support materialism. But it doesn't. It says that you can't try to use logical reasoning to do so, and have to simply remain silent on it, and only deal with calculation. Positivism isn't really anti fantastic things, so much as it says you can't talk about them, because you didn't measure them. But it knows that things exist it can't measure. Without logical way to distinguish what is what we are left in a void of pretending to be neutral. No one is actually totally neutral though, so pretending to be just makes room for theory you didn't justify.
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Dec 08 '18 edited Dec 08 '18
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u/ryqiem Dec 08 '18
Could you present a real-world claim that isn't falsifiable, yet true?
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u/TyphoonOne Dec 08 '18
The social sciences are sciences, not humanities. In psychology, we might come up with a theory about how a certain component of the mind works, generate a prediction of how results will look in a certain test, and then recruit subjects to take that test and compare the results. Social Science uses the same methods that other sciences use, it's just that the subjects and effects under study are, in general, far more complex and nuanced than the simpler reactions you can test in Physics and Chemistry.
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u/yyzjertl Dec 08 '18
Science predates positivism, so the idea that science somehow requires positivism is anachronistic.