What is Science?

Ossorio: This next one isn't [a nice, neat one], but it's interesting. It's one that one encounters fairly often. "How would you characterize what science is? What does it entail? What does it encompass?"

The short answer is "You can't." [laughter] The background paradigm is that things in the real world essentially you can never define. You can never give the necessary and sufficient conditions. That's neither unfortunate nor is it an accident. The reason you can't is that you don't learn it that way. You don't learn what a cup is by first having a definition of a cup and then learning to recognize instances. You don't learn what a mountain is by first having a definition or theory about mountains and then learning to apply it.

Instead you learn all these things by encountering them, by encountering instances, by having people say what this one is, by asking questions and getting answers. None of those amount to a definition. But you wind up knowing what a cup is. You wind up knowing what a mountain is. That's how you know about these things.

The same holds for science. Science is part of the real world. It's an institution. It's something that people do. And there are various way of consummating that sort of activity. But there's no way to say "Here's the definition. Here's what science is."

Just to turn the screw another notch, insofar as you can say what science is, I think that if you look at the history of science, you wind up with the conclusion that science isn't what it used to be. It's not a constant. It has changed.

(?) Peter, is that like airplanes have changed? Is that the way you're using it?

Ossorio: Yeah. Before airplanes used to be made of wood and wire and propellers, and now they're not made of any of those things. Airplanes have changed. The changes are not quite so dramatic in science, but let me tell you a story there.

In its original versions, scientists were people who looked at some aspect of the real world around them and said in effect, "I want to find out more about this." Then they applied certain canons about what it takes to find out more about this, and they came up with laws, with regularities. They came up with more or less explanatory laws which codified regularities.

At any given point, you could say "This is what this science is about. This is what it tells me about." Because it started as an inquiry about something. Psychology started as an inquiry about people. Not about cups. Not about mountains. About people. And likewise with every single other science. It started out with a subject matter that preceded the scientific study, that raised our curiosity and we wanted to find out more about it.

What evolved as a way of finding out more about it is what we came to call science. It involved making observations, collecting systematic data, introducing taxonomies, coming up with hypotheses or generalizations that you could then go out and collect more data and see if your data still fit. One of the rules of the game is that foresight is a lot better than hindsight, so that correct predictions count for a lot more than being able to explain after-the-fact things that you already know happened.

Part of the background of curiosity and inquiry was that old urge to increase our behavior potential. We want to be able to do things that we couldn't do before. And that's why you have not only prediction but control as criteria. That's the connection between science and technology. Things that you can control are technology. Things that you can build and make are technology. That was built into what science was, but science included also the explanations, the thinking, the experimentation, etc.

(?) I'm wondering if you could work out an answer to the question of "How does one person who identifies himself as a scientist recognize another person as a scientist?"

Ossorio: The answer will be the same.

(?) But you have to make use of the notions of potential, Paradigm Cases, and family resemblances?

Ossorio: You can, but it won't get you all of the way. That's like in the spiritual domain, you can have better and worse theories, but they won't do for the competence to understand the questions.

(?) But I think what it points out is that different disciplines have different standards about what identifies one as being a scientist.

Ossorio: There is not unanimity about a lot of these things. In fact there's not unanimity about anything. You are going to get different people giving different answers. So if you want to make general statements, you don't come down to that level, because you just get disagreements.

(?) In something you wrote a long time ago, you characterize scientific accounts as precise, systematic, comprehensive...

Ossorio: That's not definitional.

(?) Is that a characterization of a scientific account?

Ossorio: That's just a generalization. It's like saying "Businessmen are neat." It's not a definition of a businessman. It's an empirical generalization. And likewise, scientific accounts are generally precise, systematic, comprehensive. Those kinds of things also serve as informal criteria. For scientists, these are the kinds of things that you very likely try to accomplish. But again not necessarily.

That's the difference between knowing in the ways that we do and understanding how it works, versus being able to define the necessary and sufficient conditions.

(?) Couldn't you take social practices, and define what science is in terms of social practices...

Ossorio: Scientific ocial practices have changed. That's why I say that science has changed, including the social practices. They've changed.

(?) You say that we learn what things are by encountering instances of them. How does that jive with the fact that science predicts the existence of things like atoms, and we've haven't actually encountered instances of them.

Ossorio: In non-scientific behavior, things in the real world we encounter them. Let me get to that a little later.

The kind of change that has taken place - remember I said that it started out this way - what I'm describing is how science started out, what the classic picture of science is. That there is a real world. We're studying that real world. We're doing that by finding out more about it, by being systematic about this, and by testing our understanding by making predictions.

This is the basis for a lot of my prior critiques of psychology. If you have people as your subject matter, why in the hell would you go about it this way if that's what you wanted to find out about? Times have changed.

(?) I'd like to take a crack at backing you up on that... There's a recursion or iteration between the media and technology. These things increase the ability of scientists to invoke new types of measurement, new things to measure, new types of measurements to carry out. Recently the Ten String Theory by mathematicians had the effect of turning the tables on the physicists. Instead of the mathematicians having to explain the physicists' experiments, now the mathematicians were telling the physicists what to go experiment with because they were trying to predict what the outcome would be. It's kind of a game where the tables were turned. So consequently the things you used to think about measuring and the way you go about it have evolved.

Ossorio: Think of that as an intermediate case.

Now let me present you with a new paradigm. The paradigm goes back to Plato. It's called "The Allegory of the Cave." The story was that we're like people who live in a cave, and what we see out there are the shadows of real things that we don't see. We don't see them because we're surrounded by the cave. What we do see is merely the shadows of what is really out there.

That's the new paradigm of science. Science is no longer starting out with a subject matter and finding out more about it. Instead it starts out with some theory about what's really out there. Then see where you can apply it, see where you can get mileage out of it. It doesn't start out with a subject matter. It starts out with "I've got this kind of theory" or "I want this kind of theory". Let me see where I can use it to good advantage.

(?) You said the notion of "use it". Sometimes I wonder whether science has simply been co-opted by business and has become technology rather than science, because there's so much money, there's so much power in the business community, that they rule science and turn it into technology.

Ossorio: Well, yeah, except you might say that's the "Evil Empire" version. [laughter] If you think of science as an effort to increase our behavior potential, that's what technology is. And any increase in behavior potential, that's legitimate, independently of how you can misuse it and how you can subvert it. It's legitimate to try to increase our behavior potential. And that's still present in the present paradigm. You say, "Where can I apply it effectively?" "What mileage can I get out of it?" "Can I apply it here? Can I apply it there? Can I apply it there?"

The contrast is that you don't start with something you want to find out more about. You start with a theory and see what you can do with it.

(?) Pete, I don't know if the history of science bears out that trend. I think that may be your version of pessimism about science.

Ossorio: It's not pessimism. I'm just saying it's changed.

(?) Well, but it seems that there are two trends that certainly have occurred. One of them is that science has diversified, and it often includes the study of ever more complex systems and many different approaches, some of them reductionistic, some of them holistic, some of them more empirical, some of them more theoretical. It would seem that at the same time, because of our social interest in solving problems of concern to our society - environment, health, and so forth - and because of our increased computational power and increased observational power, we have studied ever more complex systems, which have demanded perhaps more interdisciplinary collaboration than ever before. So there are two trends. One toward greater diversification, the other towards greater unification, and the one thing you can say is that science has "complexified". Whether there is really a trend toward more theoretical work is an interesting issue.

Ossorio: I didn't say that there was a trend toward more theoretical work. I said that there is a change in the paradigm of how you use theories and what the theories are.

(?) But there are many paradigms.

Ossorio: I'm saying this is the kind of change that has occurred.

(?) It's one of the kinds that has occurred.

Ossorio: This is the kind of change that has occurred. I'm not saying that no other change has occurred.

(?) But it's biased to think that it's representative of the changes in science.

Ossorio: No. I'm saying that this is the important change that has occurred. [laughter]

(?) Well, for sure the Ten String Theory bears out that this has happened. Any time you event a mathematical theory, then you to the physicists... [inaudible]

Ossorio: This really has nothing to do with complexity. It would happen anyhow. It could apply anyhow.

(?) So you think science has become disembodied?

Ossorio: No. It's just different. It's just a natural sort of change.

(?) Do you think it's more hypothetical/deductive rather than inductive?

Ossorio: I'm not even sure of that, although I'd be inclined to agree.

(?) That's certainly been a trend as physics has become more mathematical.

Ossorio: I said that I'd be inclined to agree, although I don't have strong evidence one way or the other.

(?) But that hasn't been true in the biological sciences which have become ever more concrete.

Ossorio: I'm not sure of that either...

(?) Could I try to take a crack at this? We attempted in the Advanced Life Support Program to do a categorization of things for our Factor Space Indexing. I don't know how many of you folks know what that is... But you say "Let's think about what we're going to study here." We say we're studying ecology. We're studying evolution. We're studying the diversification of plants. We're studying biology. We're studying biochemistry. We're studying all these things. How can we create a hierarchy of things on behalf of our Factor Space study?

And you get into some crazy things when you start working with Process Descriptions. Is ecology a Process Description under evolution or the other way around? Is biology a Process Description under science? You can go on and on like this, and it really is interesting. The thing that I have to agree upon is maybe as Larry says, you've got an awful lot of different sciences all of a sudden having to work together to make sense out of something you might call evolution, as a Process Description, not as a belief system. In other words, can you write down a process that would show how evolution could occur. Or what do we mean by ecology? How does that occur. And so on. It was interesting. It showed the diversification that's existing more than unity.

Ossorio: One reason why I said that the change I noted was the important change - I think that if we were able to give a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the classic science, that all of these other changes would fit, and we would say that science has not essentially changed. Whereas what I've described, I would say "This is an essential change. This makes it something different from what it was."

(?) I'm not sure I'm following you with "The Allegory of the Cave". It struck me that psychology has been that way for a long time, imposing theories about the concept of a person. Is that an example of the change in science?

Ossorio: That has aspects of both. Remember that psychology, although it's been around a long time, there have only been a lot of psychologists for a short time. So that most of the action in psychology is recent, even though it has a long history as a science. The familiar psychological theories have the aspect of the new paradigm, namely that they're talking about something else other than what a person visibly is. On the other hand, they have aspects of the old paradigm in that there is a subject matter, namely persons, they're about. There's no two questions about it. They were interested in persons. So like I say, they have important aspects of both. (?) Can I ask another question about that? Are we running out of time? It's 10:30 p.m.

Ossorio: Let's take a few more.

(?) I was wondering if you'd address the causal model in psychology. I keep reading over and over in various areas of cognitive psychology talking about nailing down the causes of human behavior and human thought. It seems to come from a long trend of wanting to see human beings as part of the natural world subject to all the laws and canons and all other things. I was wondering if you could address that, if you felt like it.

Ossorio: Can you say it again quickly?

(?) Just the idea of believing that as a science, we've got to find out the causes of human behavior - that whole approach of looking for causes instead of understanding the person.

Ossorio: Okay. Let me triangulate on that. Number one, psychologists have almost never been what you might call original scientists. To put it very polemically, they've been flunkies [laughter], following the prescriptions of the philosophers of science about what science has to be like. I think that's unquestionable. It's public knowledge. This is what modern psychology was about. They were following the prescriptions about what you had to do to be a science.

The paradigm used by the philosophers of science was physics. If there ever were a science, there it is. From that, you get the clockwork model, the Newtonian model. Everything is clockwork. The whole universe is a big clock. Every piece of it is a smaller clock. People are little such clocks. This is the controlling model.

In that model, you have a different notion of behavior, namely that behavior is movement. There's hardly any psychological theory which doesn't equate behavior with movement.

(?) Ticks, not tocks. [chuckles]

Ossorio: It makes sense to ask "What's the cause of a movement?" It doesn't make the same sense to ask "What's the cause of a deliberate action?" So part of assimilating to the model is that you tailor your notion of behavior itself to the model. In that model, it does make sense to say "What are the causes?" But you are no longer studying behavior. Small price. But you're being very "scientific".

One of my polemic, hip pocket arguments with former colleagues who say "We need a really scientific approach to persons and behavior." I used to say "Look. Think about baseball. Think of taking a really scientific approach to baseball. What could that science tell us about baseball that's more important that what we already know about it?" And you know what the answer is.

If you think of people as generally in this ballpark like baseball, and not in this ballpark like clockwork, then number one, you have to be skeptical about what classic science could tell us about it. Mainly what it could tell us is how to beat the game. It can tell us a lot of empirical things that will help us technically accomplish things. But it doesn't substitute for the rules of the game themselves.

If you took a scientific approach to chess, you could figure out how to psych out your opponent, what sort of learning, etc., but none of that substitutes for the fundamental knowledge of what chess is and what the rules are. And it won't necessarily make you a better chess player.

So that's one of the - it's not a paradox, it's not a puzzle, it's just a difficulty - with the notion of having a science of behavior, a science of persons. You can do it using either model of science, and the difficulty is "What could you possibly expect? What could you hope for?" Clearly you could expect something and you could hope for something, and it's worth putting effort into. But it's also worth putting effort into learning how to play the game. And that's what we're up to when we socialize our kids. That's what makes them persons. And that's not part of psychology. So psychologists are in a peculiar position. I don't envy them. [laughter]

(?) [inaudible] as the model for psychology sounds like you sold your soul to the devil so you can in good conscience buy groceries.

Ossorio: Indeed. A Faustian bargain.

(?) So how can psychology become more scientific?

Ossorio: I think the answer is "That's the wrong question." How can we learn more about people? How can we learn what we really want to know about people? How can we be the way we really want people to be?

(?) You weren't quite audible there.

Ossorio: I said instead of saying "How can we have a science of persons?", the important questions about persons are not that. It's "How do we want to move? How do we want to become? How do want to be as people?" Not "How can we further our purposes more efficiently?" It always helps to be able to further your purposes, but those aren't fundamental questions.

(?) The usual attack on that is "Oh, that's just arm chair philosophizing. People disagree about those things. That's not being a good psychologist."

Ossorio: I would hope so.

(?) That's not going to satisfy them.

Ossorio: There are counter-polemics for every polemic. And the counter-polemic for that is "So is physics."

(?) What? Say more about that.

Ossorio: You can say exactly the same thing about physics. A bunch of guys writing down equations and doing this and that. Occasionally they go out and make an observation. Same with psychologists. Occasionally they go out and do an experiment. [laughter] Every piece of data is replicated a thousand times and spread around. You could say, "Well, what good have they done us? What have they done for us lately?" [laughter] Polemics are polemics.

Okay, I think it's time to close it. [applause]

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© 1997 Peter G. Ossorio