Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!gilbert From: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng Subject: Non-science not non-sense? Message-ID: <1578@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Date: 22 Aug 88 16:41:28 GMT References: <536@buengc.BU.EDU> <3940@pdn.UUCP> <3958@pdn.UUCP> <250@quintus.UUCP> <1562@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <468@ztivax.UUCP> Reply-To: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Distribution: all Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland Lines: 129 In article <468@ztivax.UUCP> ref@ztivax.UUCP (Dr Robert Frederking) writes: >>which is of no benefit to anyone, the use of the word "science" must >>be due to the belief that it will bring benefits. > >Or the belief that it's an accurate name, whether that belief is >well-founded or not. Why implicitly attribute ulterior motives to them? Debunking. >It is odd that you display this confusion between science=good, >not science=bad Not odd at all. How many times have you seen the comment "X is not scientific enough" or "In order to place X on a more scientific footing" or "we need a more scientific approach". I presume all of the politics and ideology of science are passing you by. In the 1960s and 1970s it was certainly not "trendy" to be a non-science (cf non-sense). Each era has its own canons of certainty. In ours, it has been the methods of empirical science, which as we all know, any philosophy undergraduate and most arts undergraduates can shoot through in seconds when it comes to the claims made for the certainty of scientific experiment. I presume you think AI will be better once it's scientific (not yet => needs to be in the future)? Of course, we are told, "real" science doesn't follow these methods at all. Text book accounts of scientific method do not capture what "real" scientists are doing at all. If so, enlighten me. What ARE they doing and why can't we see it in black and white like the crude positivism which all scientists, so the story goes, have abandoned, nay, never really endorsed? To summarise, in sociological terms there is an ideological battle between science, intuition, custom, religion (in many guises: biblical, mystical, occult), and the "argument" of the humanities as to the proper basis of certainty. Science has the upper hand at the moment, largely because of its value to material production. Despite hi-tech, as we move towards a knowledge-based and personal skill based service dominated economy, it is arguable (and thus I argue) that the hegemony of scientific method as the ONLY proper source of truth will be unsustainable. It just doesn't work for human related activities (see Dilthey and the Hermeneutic tradition, ... for starters :-)). >More paradoxical confusion. Or is this intended ironically? Some irony, but I don't see the immanent paradox (sarcasm this time :-]) >build nuclear weapons and rockets to the moon are, of course, engineers. Not in Los Alamos they weren't. Cultural histortians attribute much influence to the atom bomb in establishing the power of the boffins' 1st XI. Only a decade before, Fleming was working with two assistants and a sink and Chain was making penicillin in milk bottles. Science did not have the hold in the 1930s which it has by the 1960s. Something changed, and WW2 and the products of science (radar, missiles, jet engines, synthetic penicillin, ergonomics, etc) seem to have played a major role in easing out the likes of Gestalt psychology for the rat and pidgeon circuses of failed chemists. >From what I have seen, people in cognitive science perform experiments on >physical entities. They are therefore entitled to use the term science, as >long as their experiments conform to some reasonable version of the >scientific method Let's hear it for the good version then! RA RA RA, reasonable scientific method, HOORA HOORA, YOWSA, YOWSA, YOWSA Tell us why it works. My first degree was in education. In 1981, there was little from cognitive psychology which could be applied directly to the education of 11-18 year olds (but much from social and affective psychology, e.g. motivation, a jolly good physical entity, what what?). What's changed? Where's the science got us? Why will it get us anywhere? How do you get a class of low achievers with "reading" ages under 11 through an exam for the average 15 year old? What is science going to do here? >Engineering is so certain as to be almost boring Science is so isolated as to almost irrelevant ... :-) >If they called themselves a science while only engaging in rhetorical > battles without any experiments, one could complain. I complain when they DO use experiments too. Ever heard of experimental DESIGN as opposed to experimental method. It is not method which makes the best experiments in psychology. It is the raw insight and imagination behind the design of the experiment. Method can be written down for the terminally unimaginative. Design cannot. Look at the debate between psychologists and you will see as much debate about the design of an experiment as about the method of its conduct. >I think what Richard O'Keefe may have meant is that the funding agencies >certainly aren't fooled. At least for very long. How long is very long? 5, 10, 20 years? Look back to 1960s funding and see who's still around from the "systems" and "science" schools of that decade, still plodding on with their naive empiricism and continued lack of inspiration in experi-mental design. Even 5 years of funding is enough to leave a slowly decaying ideology around. It will take decades to de-odourise the humanities after the hot positivist party of the 1960s. Your assertion is a historical one, and the evidence is easy to check. Look at the net. Someone in comp.ai.edu is still looking for measures of readability like "weight" or "length". Will the funding bodies not be fooled again after the plus-science non-sense of the 50s and 60s on this issue? Will my posting choke the style checker? Anyway, where do I stand? I stand with both feet in the dualist camp that holds that the evidence given to sense data is adequate for a fairly mechanical modelling of natural processes, but is hopelessy inadequate for the study of autonomous, conative agents embedded in a language and culture. I despise Method in human studies as the refuge of the insensitive or incompetent. I use methods of course, but would never appeal to the magic of a technique in order to try to convince. The aim of study, whether of cognition or anything related to human action, is to improve our understanding of ourselves. Reductionist scientific method brings anything but understanding. There are more imaginative approaches to experiment which deliver NO LESS certainty than classical scientific method. They are all known to any well educated person under 40, and to many over that age. All of them recognise that subjectivity and the biasing of language are unavoidable in the study of human action. Unlike science, which represses subjectivity under a myth of objectivity, most post-modern approaches to knowledge confront subjectivity with a head-on honesty. It is this candour that makes work so more convincing and authentic than the ritualised masques of positivist science. And what of Cognitive Science? I prefer Edinburgh's old "epistemics", which is far less committed to any one paradigm, but couldn't get block ESRC funding like a proper science can :-) -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert