In conversation with Maarten Boudry

 

Average-sized, middle-income, and in a mundane corner of the world, the fictional country of Turania is unremarkable in nearly every way. The dominant ethnic group – the Turans – have a familiar story that they like to tell about themselves, as well as about their neighbours, the Urartians. It goes like this: from their lowliest citizen all the way up to their king, the Turans are a noble and generous people; kind, but not to a fault. They are also proud. Which is where Urartia comes into the picture… because, as the story goes, they are none of these things.

Instead the Urartians are a treacherous bunch, invading, enslaving and massacring the Turans at every opportunity. It’s in their nature, somewhere deep in their bones. Wars have been fought between the two countries, and at different moments both sides have occupied the territory of the other. Of course, the fighting is always instigated by the Urartians, with the Turanians only ever killing out of self-defence, and struggling at every turn to halt the Urartian natural instinct to commit war crimes.

Inside Turanian territory live a small community of ethnic Urartians. Not too far away, but just across the border is a similar situation: a small minority of ethnic Turans living within Urartia and calling it home. The Turans are tolerant and welcoming of this group, but it’s not easy. Their guests behave poorly, leeching off the benefits of society while refusing to assimilate. Instead they try to undermine the Turanian state, conspiring with their distant government, trying to topple Turania from within. On the other side of the border things are different. The Turan minority live in constant fear, attacked each day simply for who they are; besieged by a state that is trying to ethnically cleanse them.

This story is told and told again. It is taught in Turanian schools, through patriotic events and holidays, and through popular culture. Even the historians are on board, just in slightly different tones. They tend to steer away from certain aspects of the story, largely ignoring the quasi-religious elements and the origin myths of the Turanian kings. Nor do they spend any time speaking about the more outlandish and conspiratorial aspects of the story. They are professionals after all, and so they talk about actual history: the dates of the many wars, the nature of the fighting, and the people involved. They also do something else…

Held tight within the broader culture, the Turanian university system similarly promotes Turanian nationalism. Government and private funding relies upon this being done, and so do academic careers. Anyone showing insufficient zeal is quickly overlooked for promotions and grants. So as these historians write about their country’s history, they do so with an emphasis towards that national story. All the dates are real and all the events actually happened, but it is shaded in one direction. They still talk about the benevolence of the Turanian kings compared to their Urartian counterparts, and the suffering of Turanians at the hands of their neighbours; all the time downplaying the crimes of their side while emphasising those of the other.

It doesn’t take long for life and routine to take over, and soon these historians don’t even realise that they are twisting evidence in this way – the whole country bound together by the embellishment, some people simply entertaining more sophisticated versions of it. Soon everyone considers the story to be not only true, but also completely uncontroversial. So whenever foreign media or foreign diplomats offer a different understanding, it is reflexively dismissed as malicious propaganda, likely funded by the Urartian government. And of course, any Turanian who might dare to express public doubt pays a fast and painful price; not necessarily in violence, but always in ostracism and social outrage.

Then comes along a young Turanian citizen, someone brought-up on a diet of non-fanatical nationalism; but a nationalist nonetheless. She is taught the story by her parents and family and friends, at each level of her schooling her teachers have reinforced it, and every time she turns on the TV or reads a book or opens a newspaper, it’s there. In short, she holds several key beliefs about history which are glaringly false. 

Then one day, in a less-policed part of town, she stumbles into a dissident book store. On the shelves she finds a translated book by a foreign – and internationally reputable – historian. As she reads through the pages she discovers an incredibly convincing counter-narrative to everything that she has been taught. At this point, Maarten Boudry has an important question: what does she do next? What is the rational next step for her? Does she do the Popperian thing and consider her beliefs to be falsified, and so abandon them? Or, perhaps, “Still, is it possible for her to rationally affirm the Standard Story?”

Questions of this kind are old in the history of philosophy, and only slightly less old in the history of the philosophy of science. They burn down into those seemingly perpetual problems of knowledge, truth, and deception. And once started in this way, it is natural to soon rephrase things, and to ask: What is science? How do we distinguish between science and non-science? Otherwise known as the Demarcation Problem. Popper’s famous answer goes like this:

He was not interested, as some people were (such as the logical positivists) in drawing a line between what is meaningful and not meaningful, but only in diagnosing that which makes science special. And what matters is falsifiability! If for example you have a theory in front of you, and you want to know on which side of the demarcation it falls, you should think not about the evidence that supports it, but rather how it might be proven wrong. You need to create a category of refutation: some kind of possible observation that, if witnessed, would cause you to abandon the theory in an instant. If you cannot do this, then what you have is not a science.

Consider two great minds of the era, two men who both emerged at around the same time, and who dominated academic fascination during Popper’s earlier life: Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s work focused on the individual and the psyche – Einstein’s on his general theory of relativity. And both made clear predictions, the former that childhood experiences have a huge and continuing impact on our adult selves; the latter about how light travels through space. And while most people were caught-up in adulation for both of these promising new sciences, Karl Popper noticed something unsettling about Freudian psychoanalysis, something that his colleagues strangely saw as a positive aspect of the theory:

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest.

Imagine it like this: a young, angry man walks into Freud’s clinic, and explains the personal issues he is having with rage and aggression. Freud naturally explains to the man that all his negative emotions are due to the behaviour of his parents while he was still a child. This might seem reasonable at first, but it is a theory that bends to the facts. If his parents regularly beat him, then he is living out that violence today. The same could be said if they were kind to him but fought with each other. Or if they were distant and unloving – this causing anger within their son due to the lack of attention and affection. If they never fought, always denounced violence, and smothered their son with love, then this too produced feelings of anger because he was never allowed to express violence as a child, and so is now rebelling against his parents’ kindness. Once the psychological theory is there, any and all types of childhood experience will confirm it; or as Popper explains things, psychoanalysis “resembled astrology rather than astronomy.”

Einstein was doing something very different. His general theory of relativity made the clear prediction that light would be gravitationally attracted by large cosmic bodies – such as stars and planets – just as material bodies are. This was hard to test though, because it needed to be done under the perfect alignment of a solar eclipse. But Einstein made the prediction nonetheless. He wasn’t looking backwards for confirming data, but looking forward and predicting his own refutation. Something that most people believed would happen, even Popper himself: “few of us at the time would have said that we believed in the truth of Einstein’s theory of gravitation.”

Einstein was happily exposing himself to risk and failure, because under such an eclipse if light didn’t bend the way his theory predicted, then the theory would be disproven in that moment. He would be wrong, the world would know it, and general relativity would be false. Everybody waited. Until, in 1919, when the conditions were finally appropriate, a solar eclipse occurred, and Einstein’s prediction was witnessed. Rather than walking away from general relativity, as the scientific community (or those who hadn’t already done so) were largely expected to do, they were forced to embrace it, and instead the community walked away from the previous theory, Newtonian gravity; debunked in an instant by a single observation.

The difference in the behaviour was, for Popper, the difference between a pseudoscience (Freud) and a real science (Einstein). If you look hard enough, “it is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory”, but if these confirmations are not “risky predictions” then they aren’t worth very much. Here are some of Popper’s core conclusions from these two historical episodes:

* Every ‘good’ scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is. 

* A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

* Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

* One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

And for some decades this is where the battle rested. Popper had drawn the demarcation in a way that seemed to make sense, and though the debates still hummed-along, and new solutions would come and go, no one dared to think that perhaps the distinction just wasn’t important: that the Demarcation Problem was either “misguided” or “intractable”. Then slowly they did!

First it was Pierre Duhem and W.V.O. Quine, who pushed back at Popper’s premature declaration of victory. Science as they saw it was much too elastic to sit neatly on one side of the falsifiability line, with all else falling to the other. It just wasn’t as unified of an enterprise as all of that, it was instead a broader and ever-changing landscape of activities, and one that regularly connected with the non-scientific world. Most prominent though, was Larry Laudan, who, in 1983, declared the issue dead on arrival, nothing more than “hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us”: a pseudo-problem! Every attempt to draw a line between science and non-science had, according to Lauden, failed, and so the whole game should be abandoned, with no hope of ever finding a solution.

And there really are some headaches here for Popper. What he is describing involves more than just a particular theory, but rather a relationship: the connection between a theory and its predictions (observation statements). Something that is never straightforward, and always carries the taste of ambiguity. On one hand (and less importantly) it assaults the sensibilities of most scientists, because it implies that any claim – no matter how detached and ridiculous it seems – can be called scientific if it only proposes an observation that would unequivocally prove it false.

On the other hand scientific theories generally are not so friendly to us. They don’t neatly connect with reality in the way that the famous all swans are white example does. In this case the falsifiable observation pretty much writes itself: unless you find a non-white swan, such as the black swans that exist in Australia. Instead most scientific theories have degrees-upon-degrees of complexity to them, connected to reality only through long chains of background theory, boundary conditions, and subordinate assumptions. A scientific theory is always several steps removed from its observations. Or as Imre Lakatos put it: “It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.”

Imagine you have a theory and then you want to do the Popperian thing – you want to ensure that it is scientific – so you create predictions that would falsify it if they happen. And you then watch those predictions transpire before your eyes. What do you do next? Yes, you might scrap the theory, or you might just as reasonably blame one of the countless other conditions, theories and assumptions that led to you making the prediction. You can never know for certain just what is being falsified, only that something is, and so you can always rescue your theory to fight another day. For many people, Popper’s falsifiability criterion is at one-time much too lenient, while conversely being much too strict.

Maarten Boudry agrees that Popper’s demarcation isn’t drawn in the appropriate place, but he also thinks that Lauden is badly mistaken about the impossibility of correcting the error, and of re-drawing it somewhere better. It starts from an observation about us: Despite many modern-day philosophers following Lauden’s thinking, and avoiding the Demarcation Problem altogether as an endless sinkhole of intellectual activity, something odd has also happened… “the rest of society somehow failed to take notice.”

Without understanding all the reference points nor the history behind it, everywhere you turn people are losing sleep and energy trying to revive Popper’s game. Our judicial systems refuse arguments and evidence of certain kinds, our school curricula reject the encroachment of theories such as creationism, public health officials run campaigns warning against alternative therapies… the list goes on. Indeed many countries have made-for-purpose, and government-funded, professional organisations whose job it is to fight these battles wherever they appear. And what they are fighting is pseudoscience!

Step back to look at this phenomena for a moment, and it soon hits you just what is going on. Sure, there is something about pseudoscience most people quickly recognise as harmful, but more importantly there is something about pseudoscience that most people simply recognise. They may not have explicitly solved the Demarcation Problem, but they do seem to intuitively know what a pretender-science is when they see it, what it looks like, what it sounds like, and how it behaves.

Here Boudry plants his flag, and begins disentangling the problem in reverse: “Rather than demarcating science and non-science on first principles, we should start from the common usage of the term ‘pseudoscience’, in particular the real-life doctrines and activities that are most often designated as such.” Starting with a comprehensive explanation of what science is, might just be too much of a leap and too tricky a definition. So instead we begin with all those things that science excludes – phrenology, graphology, creationism, homeopathy, astrology… – and the interesting thought that if most people are recognising these things as non-scientific, then perhaps everyone is, tacitly, also sharing the same demarcation values; it’s just that they haven’t been spoken aloud yet.

And when you deconstruct pseudosciences a few things become clear and common: 1. They recognise, and agree with, the authority that real science holds within society, 2. So they try to mimic science in convincing ways, 3. They build evidence and seek broad support, 4. They avoid counter-evidence and build immunisation mechanisms for this into the details of their theories, 5. There is an asymmetry between how they deal with evidence and counter-evidence, 6. They often appeal to antiquity, and claim that the longevity of their theory implies that it must be true, 7. Their experiments are often unrepeatable, 8. They use hyper-technical and obscurant language, 9. They avoid peer review…

This is not so much a checklist, but an accumulation of evidence. If what you have before you fits a number of these categories, then what you likely have is a pseudoscience. Perhaps we don’t need a clear cut line to still have a line! Popper would have hated all of this, and dismissed it as psychologism (the belief that problems in epistemology can be solved through psychological study). It’s a charge that Boudry welcomes: “psychologism is exactly what allows us to escape from Popper’s logicist straitjacket.”

If we follow this alternative approach to the Demarcation Problem, then there is still a lingering issue that needs some sort of explanation. If Popper was wrong, then why has his falsificationism endured and remained popular amongst working scientists? Boudry puts it like this: despite Popper being wrong, his philosophy of science still got one very important thing correct; a matter of emphasis about how good scientists behave. They take risks! They “stick out their necks”! After all “they can afford to do so”, because they are seeking only truth, and not the validation of their theories. For them, mistakes and errors are things to be found and corrected, as quickly and loudly as possible…

So let’s go back to that mundane corner of the world, and our young Turanian citizen who has just wandered into a dissident book store. Leafing through a convincing and alternative version of her nation’s history, she is in the process of discovering that everything she believes to be true, is actually just a pseudoscience. And her years of uncritical behaviour towards it, making her a pseudoscientist, of a kind. She has that one pressing question before her: what to do next? At what cost?

It wouldn’t be an easy moment. First off, she doesn’t have the expertise to properly judge what she is reading, and acquiring this background knowledge would take an enormous amount of time and energy. But even if she somehow did – returning to the bookstore day after day, reading more and more conflicting accounts of her nation’s story – what then? In patriotic Turania disbelief has negative consequences. Her fellow citizens are hypervigilant, always on the lookout for waning loyalties and the subtle indications of dissent. So to avoid punishment this new found knowledge will have to be kept a secret. She will have to lie, she will have to deceive, and she will have to act, all the time carrying a different kind of burden; unbearably harmful in its own way.  

To lie convincingly is a difficult game. Our young Turanian will need to keep up appearances, simulating the genuine patriotism of those around her; matching their level of enthusiasm, while also being cautious to not overdue things and draw suspicions in that way. And she will need to keep this up forever, never letting her real feelings affect her behaviour. Living with constant fear, anxiety and paranoia, the psychological drain will be tremendous. And then there is the moral burden of what her dishonesty is perpetuating – all those possible friends, colleagues, and family members who might also be having doubts, but are silenced by her loud and proud nationalism. How long before that guilty conscience bubbles-up and exposes her in some way?

We all have these nice thoughts about ourselves as rational beings, seeking truth, trying to better align facts and theories, and valuing cognitive accuracy. What we don’t like to spend much time on, is just what happens when these nice thoughts separate from our real world interests. Maybe sometimes, maybe often, “people are better served by falsehood than by the truth”.

The same can be said for the Turanian state, and their national story. If what they value is loyalty and commitment, then truth just isn’t worth very much. If every citizen could check on the story they are being told, and easily find that it was both accurate and overwhelming, then it wouldn’t help to discriminate between loyal patriots and un-loyal dissidents. For the story to function as a sign of commitment (as opposed to a sign that it is true), the story needs to have falsehoods, it needs to stretch peoples’ credulity. It needs to be a pseudoscience…

She is still there in that bookshop, our young Turanian citizen. Scrolling through the pages of an uncomfortable truth. With terror, the full ramifications of what she is reading are dawning upon her. Until this moment she considered herself unwaveringly rational, always committed to truth. But until this moment rationality has, always, been to her advantage in life. This time however, there will be no praise and encouragement – this time it comes at a huge personal cost. That same question hangs painfully in the air: what does she do next?

 

*** The Popperian Podcast #5 – Maarten Boudry – ‘Diagnosing Pseudoscience - Why the Demarcation Problem Matters’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #5 – Maarten Boudry – ‘Diagnosing Pseudoscience - Why the Demarcation Problem Matters’ (libsyn.com)