Rauch on Peirce (Wrong 3)
a priori vs. scientific methods in Fallibilism
In my first post about Fallibilism I mentioned that Charles Sanders Peirce didn’t provide a lot of detail about the Method of Scientific Investigation, which is the fourth and best method of fixing belief. In my second post I devoted a bit of space to discussing what Peirce called the A Priori Method, which is the third method on his list. As Peirce makes very plain, it’s also the most slippery and deceptive, in that it seems reasonable on its face but can spackle over a lot of faulty logic and questionable assumptions.
Jonathan Rauch, who first made me aware of Peirce’s philosophy in his book The Constitution of Knowledge, has read more deeply into this topic than I have. He dropped me a line the other day to provide some clarification of how the A Priori Method differs from the Method of Scientific Investigation. As a reminder, these two methods are superficially the same in that both of them eschew the methods of Tenacity and Authority, which are obviously irrational. Both A Priori and Scientific Investigation purport to base beliefs upon rational analysis of observable facts. What then is the difference between them?
Here’s a quote from Jonathan Rauch:
I thought I'd address a question you allude to re the difference between the "a priori" method of settling opinion vs science. Here's how I understand it...
A priori methods are superficially similar to science, in that they posit hypotheses and use evidence and rational argument. But they're still fundamentally individualistic. Individuals, or factions, form conclusions and argue with each other, but even if they're brilliant, they have no systematic way to bring their views toward consilience (a collective, multi-perspective resolution). Whereas science is inherently a collective endeavor in which, as Peirce says, only "we" matter, not you or I. Knowledge arises as an emergent phenomenon from the comparing and collating of multiple points of view. Though he didn't have the term, Peirce invented network epistemology. Reality lives on the network, a property of the hive mind.
My favorite example: if you see a disheveled man scribbling equations in a garret apartment in Bern, you have no way to know, even in principle, whether he's Einstein or a madman. Science only begins when his claims enter the network and undergo collective evaluation.
It's a sophisticated concept...and a human breakthrough.
Since this helped clarify the distinction for me, I thought I’d turn it into a quick post for anyone who has been following my occasional notes about Fallibilism.
This feels a LOT like “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
It was fashionable for a bit (and may still be) to dismiss teaching the scientific method in academia. I think that’s because people were teaching just the steps and not diving into it. In other words, they were failing in a way that I believe much of academia is currently failing by not being extremely explicit about why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Being a sort of reactionary, I decided I would delve MORE into it and it seems like that works (though I don’t have anything but anecdotal evidence thus far).
I have taken to talking a lot MORE about the research step - letting students know that when I was their age I confused that step with the experimental step. But spending real time on that step - which is really just a form of trying to find out if the group as a whole has already figured out the answer to the question the observer currently has about the universe - allows me to very clearly tie back the final step, publication, in a way I never could do justice to before.
It allows me to tell the student that now THEY are participatory in this group sport we call “science.” And it is normally at this step that I reiterate how important it is to thoroughly describe and publish FAILED hypotheses because someone else may later have the same hypothesis and be saved enormous amounts of work by not having to go down the same blind alley.
Science is us telling stories about how the universe works but it contains a built in set of rules that allows us to slowly find out whether those stories are likely right or likely wrong. WITHOUT all the wrong stories we can’t make progress toward discovering the ones which are right.
Last point: one of the failures of teaching science in the U.S. today, in my mind, is that by and large we ONLY teach things we have already found to be true. What we really mostly teach is a sort of “history of science” rather than “how to DO science” at the primary, secondary, and even undergraduate levels. You don’t really start to DO science in school until you’re a grad student.
Even labs are what I call “cookbook labs” or exercises in going through the steps of finding something out that is already known. And that’s a shame. It really misses out on the deepest POINT of science which is ultimately epistemological. Science is the most practical form of showing “this is how I know that I know what I know.”
I really think if we approached teaching science in school STARTING from the direction of philosophy that we might get a lot more students interested in it.
I think we are likely to eventually conclude that intelligence is inherently recursive, which makes the distinction between individuals and collectives somewhat vacuous. Individual minds ARE networks.
It’s still possible to have conscilience in an individual mind - you can run the Hegelian dialectic on your own if you want. Conversely, it’s possible for a hive mind to ape at “debate” while rejecting evidence that doesn’t fit its conclusion.
So rather than ignoring individual human beings and saying only the network matters, I think the true distinction that matters is:
- the evidence available on the network
- the processing power of the network
- the reward function allocating resources on the network
The last one is critical. Large groups often get things wrong that individuals can see correctly, because the groups are driven by reward functions that prioritize status within the group now, over advancing the group’s long term survival.