ewilliamnelson-blog

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Check this out!

Carly Tribull, a Museum graduate student, wasp enthusiast, and artist has a new comic up on Scientific American’s blog Symbiartic, which celebrates the intersection of art and science.

Read the entirety of Carly’s comic about how she balances work, life, and research.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Hello, new followers!

This blog is generally more productive when classes are not in session. So in lieu of more substantive post, I want to recommend a book to y'all. Vine Deloria Jr.'s The World We Used to Live In is a fantastic book. Deloria does a lot of work on science. This does incorporate science, but only obliquely. It's a theological work mainly on the practices and powers of medicine men. If you are science shy, I wouldn't let that stop you.

It's a super important book. I think anyone interested in the dismantlement of colonial structures should have an interest in this book. Deloria was as much an activist as he was an academic. Anyone interested in radical indigenism should also find Deloria helpful.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Gordon sides with those-- like Einstein and a number of modern sociologists and philosophers-- who doubt that universal and context-independent criteria can be found reliably to distinguish the scientific from the pseudoscientific. But here is a suggestion about how one might do something, however imperfectly, however vulnerable to counter-instances and however apparently paradoxical, to get a practical grip on the difference between the genuine article and the fake. Whenever the accusation of pseudoscience is made, or wherever it is anticipated, its targets commonly respond by making elaborate displays of how scientific they really are. Pushing the weird and the implausible, they bang on about scientific method, about intellectual openness and egalitarianism, about the vital importance of seriously inspecting all counter-instances and anomalies, about the value of continual scepticism, about the necessity of replicating absolutely every claim, about the lurking subjectivity of everybody else. Call this hyperscience, a claim to scientific status that conflates the PR of science with its rather more messy, complicated and less than ideal everyday realities and that takes the PR far more seriously that do its stuck-in-the-mud orthodox opponents. Beware of hyperscience. It can be a sign that something isn't kosher. A rule of thumb for sound inference has always been that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But there's a corollary: if it struts duckness, that it's more authentically a duck than all those other orange-biled, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you've got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack.

Steven Shapin, "Catastrophism," Review of The Pseudoscience Wars by Michael Gordon, London Review of Books, pg. 10.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

If pseudosciences are not scientific, neither are they anti-scientific. They flatter science by elaborate rituals of imitation, rejecting many of the facts, theories and presumptions of orthodoxy while embracing what are celebrated as the essential characteristics of science. That is at once a basis for the wide cultural appeal of pseudoscience and an extreme difficulty for those wanting to show what's wrong with it.

Steven Shapin, "Catastrophism," Review of the Pseudoscience Wars by Michael Gordon, London Review of Books, pg. 9.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Einstein spoke with his usual wisdom when asked how scientists might tell by inspection whether unorthodox ideas were brilliant or barmy. He replied, with Velikovsky clearly in mind: 'There is no objective test.' The term 'pseudoscientist' is a bit like 'heretic'. To be a pseudoscientist is to be accused; you don't describe yourself as a pseudoscientist.

Steven Shapin, "Catastrophism," Review of The Pseudoscience Wars by Michael Gordon, London Review of Books, pg. 9.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Then there was the tactic of labeling Velikovskianism 'pseudoscience.' One of the strengths of Gordon's book is its careful historical unpicking of what scientists had in mind, and what they were doing, when they called something pseudoscientific. Pseudoscience isn't bad science-- incompetent, shallow, containing egregious errors of fact or reasoning. (In those senses, there's a lot of bad science around which is almost never identified as pseudoscience.) Rather, what postwar scientists meant when they called Velikovskianism pseudoscience (along with contemporary parapschology, resurgent eugenics, Wilhelm Reich's orgone energy theory, creationism and the fantastical world ice theory) was that these were bodies of thought that pretended to be scientific, dressing themselves up in the costumes of science, but which were not the thing they pretended to be. Pseudoscientific thought might indeed contain errors of fact and theory, but the orthodox regarded it as fundamentally misconceived.

Steven Shapin, "Catastrophism," Review of The Pseudoscience Wars by Michael Gordon, London Review of Books, pg. 9.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Interviewed just before his death by the Harvard historian of science I.B. Cohen, Einstein said that Worlds in Collision 'really isn't a bad book. The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.' Yet he thought, as Cohen put it, that 'bringing pressure to bear on a publisher to suppress a book was an evil thing to do.'

Steven Shapin, "Catastrophism," Review of The Psuedoscience Wars by Michael Gordon, London Review of Books, pg. 7.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Analogies were drawn from the history of science seen as the history of martyrs to dogma. Velikovsky figured himself as Galileo and his opponents as Galileo's critics, who wouldn't even look through the telescope to see teh moons of Jupiter with their own eyes. 'Perhaps in the entire history of science,' Velikovsky said, 'there was not a case of a similar violent reaction on the part of the scientific world towards a published work.'

Steven Shapin, "Catastrophism," Review of the Pseudoscience Wars by Michael Gordon, London Review of Books, pg. 7

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Velikovsky offered both diagnosis and treatment. And if his theories were not, in themselves, religious, they so clearly pointed to political and moral consequences that one disciple cited his Velikovskianism to the draft board as a way of getting out of the Vietnam War: pacifism flowed from planetary astronomy. (The reluctant soldier happily failed his physical, not his metaphysical).

Steven Shapin, "Catastrophism," Reviews of The Psuedoscience Wars by Michael Gordon, London Review of Books, pg. 6

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

This book gives a great account of Velikovsky and the aftermath of his book. It sheds some light on psuedoscience as a category, as well.

Please excuse the amazon link. There was not google books entry, and I haven't been able to get my hands on a physical copy yet. The next few posts will be quotes from Steven Shapin's review of this book.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Velikovsky! I actually knew next to nothing about him before I talked to Steven Shapin (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/shapin.html) about wanting to write my term paper on fringe science (which he ultimately said might be better termed as psuedoscience, but I'm not totally committed on that yet.) I just found this archive. It looks like a great resource!

Velikovsky is probably one of the best known catastrophists-- people who argue that the current state of affairs can't be assumed going backward in time, or that we got here not through gradual change but through either one or a number of major changes (catastrophes). He published Worlds in Collision in 1950 with a science publishing house. In it he argued that the Earth is the way it is as a result of a collision with Jupiter, which triggered several changes on Earth and a near miss with Mars. It's fascinating stuff, and I suggest you read the book.

What is most interesting from my perspective as someone who studies the creation of authority in science and other systems of knowledge is that scientists were not pleased with this book. Most of the vocal opponents were at Harvard actually. They even got the publishing house to drop his book. Velikovsky triggered a public discussion of the definition of science and the nature of its creation and verification at point in time when many sciences (though physics most keenly) were still in uncharted territory after WWII.

I'll post more about the context and reception of his book, but I thought I would provide an introduction first.

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

All cryptids are folkloric. That is an uncomfortable statement for many enthusiasts. The difficulty comes from a misunderstanding of what folklore entails, and how it is manifest. Folklore is not a term of denigration-- it is the cultural expression of customs, traditions, and beliefs. Not all folklore reflect objective truth, but neither does all folklore dilute objective truth. The idea that folklore must be false, or at best is a foggy notion of reality, misses the point altogether. Cryptids are folkloric because they are ethnoknown-- they occupy a place in an ethnozoological scheme even though they are still unverified by science.

Chad Arment, Cryptozoology: Science and Speculation, pg. 56

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

The biggest problem with simplicity is that it is not always easy to determine the simpler hypothesis. Which is simpler, an unknown primate in north America, or centuries of hoaxes and misidentifications which posit technical savvy and ingenuity far beyond what was then known for some pieces of evidence. To put it another way, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is it really simpler to hypothesize a parrot in a duck costume?

Chad Arment, Cryptozoology: Science and Speculation, pg. 33

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Given the illogical and inadequate justification for many skeptical approaches, I cannot refer to the belief-state of 'I believe [p] has not been proven' as skepticism. I prefer to call it the 'Investigative' strategy, and note that this is much closer to the practical methods of inquiry and debate found among serious investigators. This strategy relies upon both critical rationalism and a stimulus to investigate.

Chad Arment, Cryptozoology: Science and Speculation, pg. 32

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

Hello again, folks! I try to keep the housekeeping posts brief and infrequent, but given that I've been away for a couple weeks, I thought I would say hi and frame the upcoming posts for you.

I have some more quotes from Chad Arment's book queued. I want to remind everyone that I am not advocating his opinions. Ultimately, I'm a lot more of a relativist than he is, which is not to say that he is an absolutist.

After that I have a new project I've been working on that will probably take more of a central role on here. I'm working on a short paper (25 pgs) on psuedosciences, how we came to know them as such (as it is a fairly recent phenomena), how the history of science has dealt with them, how sciences have dealt with them, and ultimately what they have to say about ways of knowing. My hope is that this project will move from a theoretical exploration to an historical case study. Right now I'm in the process of finding a case to study. Those posts should probably be more academic in nature, though hopefully not too boring. There's some neat stuff out there!

All the best, and thanks for following!

-E

[ewilliamnelson-blog]

How do we balance the suspension of both belief and disbelief? Investigation within Polyani's agnostic state of 'I believe [p] has not been proven" is the best path. It allows for possibilities on either side, while recognizing that there is still work to be done. Those who hold to a philosophy of disbelief, for example, which impeded scientific progress. Error may occur within an investigation, but activity breeds potential, and the possibility of error is preferable to stagnation. We can search for and eliminate error. Stagnation is fruitless.

Chad Arment, Cryptozoology: Science and Speculation, pg. 31