Saturday, October 5, 2013
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In an e-mail to GWPF, Lennart Bengtsson has declared his resignation of the advisory board of GWPF. His letter reads : " I have bee...
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Lennart Bengtsson sent me this manuscript and asked for publication. Maybe a few words about who Lennart Bengtsson is are in order. He i... -
CLIMATE CHANGE ARBITRATION BIAS AT WIKIPEDIA by Alex HARVEY h/t GoRight Recent events in the labyrinthine world of the Wikipedia c...
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In a previous thread, we were discussing the claims of desmoblog.com, which presented leaked e-mails and documents supposedly originating ...
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The discussion on the thread " hottest year on record " has moved away from the original topic and has focussed on the merits, an...
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I have a short piece in Nature Geoscience with the title 'Climate change as a wicked social problem'. Here is the link http://rdcu....
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Das Umweltbundesamt hat eine Broschüre herausgebracht mit dem Titel: " Und sie erwärmt sich doch. Was steckt hinter der Debatte um den ...
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With the fifth assessment report soon to be released by the IPCC the pre-publication buzz is well underway. A while ago unauthorised dr...
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Some readers have expressed their interest in discussion about the recent paper on climate reconstructions methods A statistical analysis of...
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The Guardian has a short article on this issue. Damian Carrington reports that '2016 will very likely be the hottest year on reco...
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12 comments:
What it means is that science cannot do without methodology. When undeterminism was discovered and noted by Poincaré and Duhem during the late 19th century, they claimed that science was driven by concentional choices. Hence the name "conventionalism".
Logic alone is not sufficient: For any set of observations thre can in principle exist many different theoretical explanations. Karl Popper didn't like the conventionalistic view and suggests in his Logic Der Forschung (1934) a number of methodological rules aiming at eliminating at least some of these logically possible theories, typically theories which uses ad hoc and other conventionalistic stratagems to avoid falsification.
In the case of climate science it means that logic alone will never be sufficient for determining if, for example, the main AGW-theory is false. What one has to keep an eye on is if proponents of such a theory reformulates the theory in such a way that it becomes non-falsifiable using for example vague claims, ad hoc explanations when things do not fit, etc. Because that would be counter to good scientific methodology.
Ingemar Nordin
I found this:
http://www.pdcnet.org/gps/content/gps_1993_0044_0041_0057?file_type=pdf
"Quines These der Unterdeterminiertheit empirischer Theorien, der gemäß es in ihrem theoretischen Gehalt verschiedene, aber dennoch empirisch äquivalente Theorien geben kann, ist nach wie vor mit Unklarheiten behaftet. Eine genaue Analyse der entscheidenden Textstellen zeigt, daß die These offensichtiich nur auf nicht-kompakte Theorienformulierungen angewendet werden kann, daß aber das Kriterium der Kompaktheit recht schwer zu verstehen ist. Darüberhinaus erweist sich der Ausdruck „empirischer Gehalt" als ebenso klärungsbedürftig wie „theoretischer Gehalt". Beide Ausdrücke sind jedoch für das Verständnis der These von entscheidender Bedeutung. Es zeigt sich, daß so dem Versuch einer befriedigenden Interpretation trotz der Modifikationen, die Quine seit der Lancierung der These in On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World vorgenommmen hat, beträchtliche Schwierigkeiten im Wege stehen."
MfG
Yeph
If someone wants a copy of the Carrier-paper, please let me know - hvonstorch@web.de
One of the criticism of paleoclimate reconstructions based on proxy data is that researchers measure many records, for instance tree-ring chronologies. Among those many records only a few seem to be correlated with measured temperatures, which could be due to shear chance and not represent a true physical relationship.
In the realm of scientific theories - not only climate research - something similar could be happening. Many theories are tested, but only those that seem to fit the observations survive. Could this apparent success be due to shear luck ?
Eduardo
this is a good question and the answer is probably: we don't know.
The 'underdetermination' thesis (u-t) has different versions, some authors thought it applies only to physics, others thought it applies to all knowledge.
If we apply the thesis to itself, we would need to know what the data is upon which the u-t is founded (all fields of science?). According to the thesis, there should be another theory compatible with the available data. In this sense the u-t would require the emergence of at least one competitor theory or thesis.
It follows that we cannot overcome the circularity in the argument about the 'truth' of scientific theories.
Because of such considerations, some philosophers of science are convinced that epistemology needs to be 'anti-foundational': there are no firm fundamentals upon which to build scientific edifices. The metaphors used are of piles being driven into quicksand, or of a ship which is rebuilt in open sea without having the option of going back to the dock, as Otto Neurath famously put it in 1932.
I quoted from memory. Popper used the metaphor of driving piles into a swamp (not quicksand). Neurath coined the boat metaphor already in 1913. I have an unpublished manuscript which deals with these questions, just uploaded to my Academia pages.
Comments welcome!
A theory is always underdetermined. the point is to figure out which theory is less underdetermined.
At the moment it looks like the climate shifts hypothesis is less underdetermined than AGW.
To decide which one to believe in we need to understand both the logic of scientific discovery (usually ignored by constructivists) and its politics (usually ignored by positivists).
@Eduardo
Pure luck does not need a new thesis, like the Gödel's incompleteness theorems for instance. If it could tell us something new about the character of physical laws it would be helpful.
Pure luck can easily be excluded if you really want to.
Regards
Yeph
Eduardo said:
"Many theories are tested, but only those that seem to fit the observations survive."
I have got the impression that in scientific practice it is too often the other way round:
Many observations are made, but only those that seem to fit the theory survive.
It is perhaps even worse as : the Economist says
The missing link from the Economist
You may also be interested in this paper by Gregor Betz: http://philpapers.org/rec/BETUMA
'Underdetermination, model-ensembles and surprises: On the epistemology of scenario-analysis in climatology'
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