Guest essay by Steven Burnett
This is an essay regarding the fundamental differences between the hard and soft sciences. While I don’t emphasize climatology much in the essay, I believe this may provide some insight into the chasm of evidence and approach between the two.
Recently, more climate consenters have been starting to grapple with the uncomfortable fact that the discrepancies between models and reality are, in fact, significant. While there are still some holdouts there have been more than a few mainstream discussions about some of the “softness” in climate science.
In a way it’s an olive branch to the climate skeptics. While there are crazies on both sides of the climate debate, I find that the core of climate skepticism stems from articulating the differences between the hard and soft sciences. I have studied and been degreed in both, and would like to offer up some explanations and examples of the differences between them.
I have been a scientist since before I had proper memory formation. My father, an engineer, and I used to go for walks and he explained the physical world the way an engineer sees it. So, as the story goes, by the time I was 13 months I pointed to a condensation trail by an airplane and explained to my mother what it was and how it was formed.
My first childhood Hero was Egon Spengler, a ghostbuster, and I pulled out my encyclopedias and looked for definitions of all the terms used in the movies and cartoons. I was then introduced to Back to the Future and my interests moved from nuclear particles to space time. Naturally my hero moved to Einstein. But it wasn’t just movies that influenced my development as a scientist. I had children’s books on Louis Pasteur, Dr. Ballard, Edison and Galileo. Each of these scientists drastically moved humanity’s understanding forward, despite enormous criticism of their theories and hypothesis. Needless to say my scientific heroes weren’t particularly popular in their day and age.
As a child I was listed as gifted learning disabled. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s, dysgraphia, and ADD while I was young. I thus had poor social skills, a short attention span, and couldn’t write legibly. As an extrovert, having trouble with nonverbal communication was a massive struggle. I turned to my books, encyclopedias, and the library to attempt to understand and solve the problem. There is an incredible amount of information and not being able to focus appreciably on a single source led to research threads through multiple disciplines. At the end of the day my choice was simple, experiment with social techniques or give up. I chose the former.
I still perform regular experiments and log the data. All results are mentally catalogued, anomalies flagged and reviewed until I thoroughly understand what nuances I missed. The system isn’t perfect, I can intone or inflect improperly, I can also mistakenly use accurate but socially improper lexicon as my vocabulary is immense. Failures can lead to hostility, repudiation or ostracization. Society is more unforgiving than many realize, but my experiments have been fruitful. The application of successful techniques has helped me mitigate eccentric behaviors and evolve or cultivate strategies which help me appear normal. The proper application of the scientific method in my daily life is the difference between being functional and not.
Being able to screen good hypothesis formulation, experimental technique and results was an integral part of my development. Determining logical fallacies and errors, standards of proof and reproducibility was the difference between keeping friends and losing them. It is also how I fundamentally distinguish behind the hard and soft sciences.
The whole reason for this essay came from me stumbling upon the Wikipedia article attempting to distinguish between the two and being frankly dumbfounded. I have to reproduce the second paragraph in full so that everyone truly understands my issue.
“Philosophers and sociologists of science have not been able to confirm the relationship between these characteristics and perceived hardness or softness in empirical studies. Supposedly more “developed” hard sciences do not in fact have a greater degree of consensus or selectivity in accepting new results. Commonly cited methodological differences are also not a reliable indicator. Psychologists use controlled experiments andeconomists use mathematical modelling, but as social sciences both are usually considered soft sciences, while natural sciences such as biology do not always aim to generate testable predictions. There are some measurable differences between hard and soft sciences. For example, hard sciences make more extensive use of graphs,[4][11]and soft sciences are more prone to a rapid turnover of buzzwords.”
In short philosophers, and sociologists of science, both soft science fields, haven’t been able to confirm the differences. They point to a lack of consensus in the hard sciences, controlled experiments and mathematical models. The analysis is about as meaningful as finding no difference between a peewee and professional basketball game because they both shoot rubberized orange balls at hoops. That is exactly the problem with the soft sciences, they can get the results they want by only evaluating the characteristics they choose.
Ironically I have been degreed in both the hard and soft sciences. I possess a bachelors in chemical engineering and psychology. Asking someone what they want to do for the rest of their life at 18 is a bit tough to answer especially when your knowledgebase and interests were as tremendously varied as were mine.
I started as a biological engineer, thought it was a ridiculous amount of work compared with the political science and business majors I roomed with and switched to psychology. I wasn’t too far into the psychology program before I realized I despised psychology and by extension the other soft sciences. I only graduated with the degree to spite the psychology program, I’m not joking.
The soft sciences spend the first two weeks of a course talking about how they are a science, and the next 13 weeks destroying every pillar of the scientific method. When my research methods professor used Carl Sagan’s essay a dragon in my garage as a means of saying that nothing can be proven or disproved, I dropped my textbook on the floor, so it would make a rather loud sound, stopping the lecture. I then dropped it again, and remarked that maybe next time it will stay up because we totally can’t prove the existence of gravity. Looking back it wasn’t very nice, but there is only so much rage I can contain.
That isn’t the only instance of things that resulted in a massive mental face palm in that program. In the soft sciences it’s accepted that the phenomena are inherently complex, thus it is acceptable to formulate a study that does not eliminate variables beyond the one being studied. Statistics is used to sort for the significance of a result.
For instance in a survey there is no regard given to the difference between people who choose to respond vs simply throwing it out, and all responses are considered correct regardless of the topic’s nature. Imagine performing a survey on human sexuality that asked about frequency, number of partners and propensity for cheating. Accepting any of the responses as representative of the population as a whole is not only unverifiable, it’s also very likely to be wrong.
Personal bias enters any discussion of results frequently. There is very strong evidence from monozygotic twin studies and others that IQ is strongly correlated with genetics. Because of the implications regarding racial IQ discrepancies, we received rather lengthy lectures about any variables, missed test parameters and the like, every time these studies entered the curriculum. Even though IQ heritability has generally been confirmed as 85%[1], regardless of the test used, the idea of nature vs. nurture is still considered a legitimate debate topic in this “scientific” field. More importantly the variables we were warned about are accounted for in the original studies.
Of course it’s perfectly acceptable to present an ad hoc change of the definition of intelligence without a preceding lecture and caveats about possible problems or complications. If it tickles the political fancy it’s taught, even if there are no empirical studies to support the hypothesis. Gardner’s hypothesis was only one politically correct theory taught with no evidence.
Carol Gilligan is a published feminist who wrote about male bias and suppression in adolescent development. Neither she nor her disciples have ever been able to validate her claims. In the textbook Adolesence and Emerging Adulthood, her theories would receive a dedicated page or more, and were filled with notations about how “her writings have received a wide audience”, or, that a school was “so impressed with Gilligans findings that school authorities revised the entire school curriculum”. By comparison the fact that both girls and boys self esteem declines in adolescence, that she only uses excerpts of interviews in her research, or that no corroboration of her results can be found, were minimized. The section concluded with the paragraph,
“although Gilligan’s research methods can be criticized for certain flaws, other researchers have begun to explore the issues she has raised, using more rigorous methods. In one study Susan Harter and her colleagues examined Gilligan’s idea of losing one’s “voice” in adolescence…. ….However Harter’s research does not support Gilligan’s claim that girls’ voice declines as they enter adolescence.” [3]
In the hard sciences, a lack of evidence and poor methodology usually excludes theories and researchers who promote them from the textbooks and the classroom, but in psychology, I was still tested on them.
Unfortunately soft science is spreading into the other domains. In my capstone course we had to watch the thoroughly debunked Gasland documentary. We heard about fracking fluids, well contamination and maybe just possibly earthquakes caused by the process. When I presented three studies that thoroughly destroyed the claims the professor dismissed them with a wave of his hand. We were required to take a course called energy and the environment, which is best described as green masturbation. When you present solar roads, indoor farming, renewables, and local agriculture, as a required engineering course without any sort of cost benefit analysis or numerical pretense what else can you call it?
Overall though, in chemical engineering we have very exact equations that give us very exact answers. These equations are derived from hundreds of experiments, outlining the variables for each substance used. Fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, physics, chemistry and other hard science disciplines have had to prove themselves correct by testing for the opposite conclusion. My thermodynamics textbook didn’t begin with a lecture about how scientific it is, it opened with the statement that the study of thermodynamics exists only because we haven’t found any instances where a system operates differently.
When neutrinos were detected moving faster than the speed of light it was a big deal. The result would have overwritten over 100 years of experiments saying it couldn’t be broken, it still hasn’t just FYI. When cold fusion experiments couldn’t be validated their proponents were laughed out of any major publication. In the hard sciences when the results of a hypothesis diverged from reality they were discarded and checked for errors, but it would still only take a single reproducible experiment to validate or invalidate the concept.
The same problems that plague psychology are rampant in climatology. Tribalism is strong enough that most are willing to break out into red or blue war paint. When faced with an incredibly complex problem they only design their experiments (climate models) to handle the variable they are interested in. Confounding variables, be it ENSO, the AMO, cosmic rays, TSI, ocean heating, surface albedo, UHI, and other impacts are ignored even though they have demonstrably significant impacts on their measurement parameter. When faced with falsifying data, the data is ignored or marginalized. There is no significant internal forensic review of the experimental construct once it can be declared dead, and they essentially keep cashing the checks and publishing as if the hypothesis are valid.
Please understand it’s not that soft sciences are pointless, they’re simply worthless. Examining what makes humans, society or even the climate tick are noble endeavors. The failure to demand reproducible or falsifiable results, reject failed hypothesis, or allow for and defend work that is riddled with personal or political bias is what undermines these fields, it’s what makes them “soft”. More succinctly the problem with these fields isn’t entirely methodological, it’s cultural and it exists at every stage of training.
Inevitably, the ignorance of logical fallacies and degradation of the sciences begs the question why. Perhaps its tied to the ever increasing percentage of American’s who are going to college. After all, more students means more professors. Perhaps it’s a hiring bias[2], and subsequent group think, or maybe hiring more professors simply means they have to lower standards. By the same token, making more money available for grants may allow for more shoddy research. My hard science background was rooted in survival, perhaps not needing to worry about your next meal is bad for scientists. Like Kohlbergs sixth stage of moral development, maybe it’s simply too difficult to uphold the standard. It’s Ironic that after all my research, and all my studies, that the most compelling insight likely comes from the ghostbusters.
If I may wax poetic for a moment, the hard sciences are like a rock while the soft sciences are like sand. They are fundamentally composed of the same stuff, but it’s the structure that makes them different. You must find a comfortable spot to rest on the rock but sand conforms around you. An uncomfortable rock must be dealt with, sand can simply be brushed away. Rock climbing requires training and equipment, a walk on the beach does not. I have had the opportunity to do both, and from personal experience, rock climbing is both harder and more fulfilling.
References
1. Bouchard, Thomas J. “Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits. A Survey.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 13.4 (2004): 148-51. Print.
2. Inbar, Y., and J. Lammers. “Political Diversity in Social and Personality Psychology.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7.5 (2012): 496-503. Web.
3. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.
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@Jimmy Finley at 9:14 pm
RE: Geology, “The Present is Key to the Past”
One of my teachers, Dr. Paul Weimer, Sr. hit us upside the head with that chestnut.
“Don’t you believe it!
Two billion years ago there was no free oxygen on this planet.”
The oceans were acidic. The continents barren. What oxygen that was generated was consumed in the precipitation of the Banded Iron Formations. His lesson was that the Present only HINTS at the Past. Never forget the Past might be far different than what exists today.
That is why one of my hobby horses is the question “What was the atmospheric pressure in the middle to late Paleozoic to Cretaceous?” to understand the fossilized evidence of large fauna. There is an awful lot of carbon buried in the geologic records. Once upon a time a lot of it was in the atmosphere.
“There are three broad ways of thinking about truth in mathematics: Platonism (basically claiming it as a religious fact), Nominalism (which fails horribly beyond the simplest mathematics) or Instrumentalism (which basically says that the only sense in which math can be considered true is in that it is useful, the only position with solid support beyond wishful thinking).”
Doug, while I can agree with much of what you write, this is misleading and unphilosophical. Modern Platonism versus whatever else in mathematical philosophy, e.g., formalism, constructivism, logicism, none of which are nominalism, differ over the ontological/metaphysical status of mathematical truths or entities, that is, whether they are ‘real’ in their realm, and in what way. Quine was only a nominal nominalist, 😉 and contra Theo, Quine was never really anti-Carnap, since Quine was hoping for veridical sensory nerve stimuli to be the experiential data that Carnap wanted for a long time.
Mathematics in practice is conducted *as though* the entities in question are real and subject to discovery. But there are metaphysical problems with those assumptions.
Instrumentalism was a philosophy of science concept and has its own problems. Epistemologically and metaphysically. I’m actually interested in whether mathematicians or philosophers of mathematics are doing anything with instrumentalism nowadays.
Also, you are not quite fair to people who recognize that logic has to be prior to experience in order for experience to be possible.
And when you opine that “Physics underpins everything in the end.” Do you really mean everything? And do you really mean physics?
And while greens so often adopt whacked out concepts such as bio fuels that are causing starvation around the world, you would think they be pushing LENR (aka: Cold Fusion).
Cold fusion and the heat effect been re-produced over 1800 times now around the world. So no science explain how this works (hard science) but LENR does produce HEAT and lots of it.
Just because the hard science does not yet have a handle on LENR is not reason to ignore the heat and potential of this new energy source.
The only real question left is how + when this new energy source without pollution can be commercialized.
Video here:
Philemon says:
May 21, 2014 at 5:53 pm
I am not going to pretend to be an expert on the philosophy of mathematics, I’m not, and I certainly won’t claim that I can settle the issues and put everything in neat boxes in the space of a forum post. I therefore trust you will forgive any mischaracterisations.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the names.
The question of whether something is true or not becomes the same as the question of whether it is real or not once you accept that for something to be true it must be true of something.
A ^ A is true for every A, but 1+1=2 is not true of everything (one puddle of water plus another makes a one puddle of water) and it is difficult to know just what i is supposed to be true of, or even the full expansion of Pi for that matter.
Roughly, to be Platonistic is to postulate a heavenly object of which “1” in the mathematical sense is true. To be nominalistic is to hold on to the belief that there is some real system which corresponds to mathematics, perhaps just difficult to find, but real nonetheless. Logicism is basically the (vain) belief that mathematics can somehow be reduced to logic and have the universal sort of truth applied to it, in the face of mountains of contradicting evidence. Fictionalism is what I prefer to call instrumentalism, although strictly strictly speaking you can be instrumentalist without believing that mathematics is false, I guess. Constructivism is more a question of what sort of proofs are valid in mathematics, rather than being about the truth of mathematics broadly. Formalism entails instrumentalism or fictionalism if you accept the idea truth having to be about something unless you are happy to accept that the process is a thing itself, in which case it starts to resemble Platonism or nominalism, so again, it is not really functionally distinct at that level.
I’m not sure I agree with your reading of Quine though, he was very anti logicial-positivism (and therefore Carnap), and he pretty much blows whatever was left of it out of the water. The nature of logical-positivism is that almost anything can be read as support for it, but the key is really Quine’s devastating attack on reductionism, which is central to the thesis.
Well, Doug, not to nitpick too much, but…
You still seem to be assuming that, in mathematical philosophy, “Platonism” relies on some sort of religious belief, or heavenly objects, or maybe what Plato said, when the modern day usage is more akin to Realism about truths wherein mathematical objects are, well, objective, even if the objects are conceptual. Conjectures for mathematicians are akin to empirical questions, especially given that there is no mechanical way to come up with proofs to decide them one way or another. The problems with mathematical realism for philosophers are the ontological and metaphysical ramifications.
“Constructivism is more a question of what sort of proofs are valid in mathematics, rather than being about the truth of mathematics broadly.” Actually, it is about the truth of mathematics broadly as well. There are epistemological issues.
The least of Formalism’s problems is that it entails some sort of “fictionalization”, which I don’t think it necessarily does. There are multiple types of Formalism, for one thing, but the idea in most of Formalism that mechanical proofs are something mathematics is made of is erroneous.
As far as Logicism goes, well Russell pretty much got told by Gödel. Yes, yes, there are modern variants, and I am not above going for the cheap score. I am a very poor role model.
“Instrumentalism” is something of a loaded term in philosophy of science. If you mean something else, you should call it something else, or, at least, be prepared to very carefully and precisely define it before using it.
Quine wasn’t anti-reductionist in that he was still pursuing various sorts of reductionism to the very end, but kept finding them wanting, even going so far as to joke that the only way he could think of to make his sensory nerve stimili truly veridical was by assuming “pre-established harmony” because he saw that evolution wouldn’t really guarantee it. He himself admitted to sympathizing with the Carnap’s hopes and sharing them even though he couldn’t help seeing and pointing out deficiencies in the various schemes, including, but not limited to, logical-positivism’s underlying assumptions. If you want to point out a philosopher who was truly anti-logical-positivism, Popper is a better candidate.
And your opinion on Darwinism is? Feel.free.to.add.eugenics. Or are you afraid of being “Expelled” as in the Ben Stein documentary?
Personally, I belie the math of the hard sciences precludes “evolution” as typically imagined. Either there is God, Magic, or some kind of smart ET and we are like Pentium chips.
It is actually the “hard” scientists who are naïve ,simplistic, and lacking both in common sense and scientific competence when they mistakenly believe that they can make useful predictions of future climate. Only small volumes of time and space and a carefully selected small number of variables are subject to useful analysis by the equations of classical physics. For example – Newtonian -Einsteinian gravity works with great utility at the scale of the solar system but fails hopelessly
at galactic levels. Like the climate scientists the cosmologists are so wedded to their mental constructs that the immediately invent epicycle like theories in their case dark matter and energy to preserve their equations.The GCMs are basically weather forecasts scaled up to global levels spatially and to time periods well beyond any possibility of accurate computation. Once again see
Climate science is in the first instance an historical science. Readers would do well to read Vol1
of The Geological Time Scale Gradstein et al Eds Elsevier to gain some understanding of the methods of this Historical Science. Do not doubt that this is a hard science in that billions of dollars are spent every year to test the accuracy of its predictions in the oil and mining industry.
For a forecast of the possible coming cooling based on the 60 and 1000 year quasi periodicity in the temperature data and using the Neutron count and 10Be record as a proxy for solar activity see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.
This type of prediction is in reality “harder” than anything produced by the IPCC modelers which depend on a myriad of subjective speculative assumptions concerning the variables involved.
Steven
I found your essay interesting, and while I agree with a lot of it some of it seemed steeped in irony.
You highlight the failings of psychology while trumpeting the relationship between IQ and genetics. IQ is itself a construct founded in the social sciences. You also ignore the link between IQ and diet which would highlight the importance of environment. One could accuse you of the same thing you accuse others of. I may be wrong, but I thought that they now realise that IQ tests are just an elaborate way of measuring how good someone’s short-term memory is; which is essential to most cognitive tasks.
On the general point of soft vs hard sciences, I’d agree that hard sciences are useful and have proven to be so while soft sciences tend not to be. I think the demarcation between hard/soft is linked more precisely to the aptness of “reductionism” as a method in each discipline. For example, physics and physical chemistry are purely reductionist in that most processes can be modelled using reliable mathematical models; while secondary sciences such as biology and geology have a spectrum of reductionism (ranging from pure to less pure – less pure being by semi-quantitative means). From these then testable, repeatable predictions can be made. The soft-sciences deal largely with people. People are primarily emotional rather than rational therefore it is very hard to repeat the same experiment, even with the same group of people and get the same result. Economics is different to most social sciences in that reductionism is apt in some areas such as relationships of supply and demand and profit; however most economic modelling is just complete nonsense.
As for softness slipping into all areas of science. Yes it is happening and via the growth of environmental components in nearly every science courses. Most worryingly in biology, geology and chemistry.