Science and Truth
Evaluating Problems
Universidad de Macquarie
Curso 2 de 4 en Solving Complex Problems Programa Especializado
The second course of the specialization EVALUATING PROBLEMS will show you how humans think and how to utilize different disciplinary approaches to tackle problems more effectively. It advances your knowledge of your own field by teaching you to look at it in new ways. EVALUATING PROBLEMS is constructed in the following way: Week I. "Thinking about Thinking" – How problem solving evolved in nature, how the mechanics of our brains work, and the psychological biases that can emerge when we think. Week II. "Philosophy, Science, and Problem Solving" – How humans have historically approached problem solving, from ancient times to the present. Week III. "Approaching Problems in the Natural Sciences" – How people in the natural sciences deconstruct problems. Week IV. "Statistics and Problem Solving" – How statistics can be used to evaluate problems and think critically. Week V. "Approaching Problems in the Humanities" – How people in the social sciences and humanities deconstruct problems. Week VI. "Evaluating the Anthropocene" – How to evaluate the problems of the Anthropocene.
Philosophy, Science, and Problem Solving
In this module we shall explore how human cultures evaluate complex problems, taking in global perspectives from history, looking at modern science, and examining cases where contemplation of problems go beyond science into the field of ethics and society.
Science and Truth6:57
Associate Lecturer
David Christian
Shawn Ross
The big question for
this segment is why does science make such strong claims to be the truth?
Module two is about strategies for problem solving,
from ancient philosophy to science.
Is science a superior method of problem solving?
Now, imagine a universe in which there were no rules, nothing was predictable.
Solving problems would be purely a matter of guess work.
And pretty soon, you'd run out of luck.
Fortunately, our universe is not like that.
It has a sort of operating system with rules that appeared within a second of
the Big Bang, we call them the laws of physics.
They provide some guidelines that we can use to understand and solve problems.
Many ancient philosophers in many different cultures understood this
rational aspect of the universe.
If the universe is rational, then you need rationality, or reason, or
logic to figure it out.
Chinese philosophers often talked of the universe as harmonious.
If it really is harmonious, then you need to understand the harmonies.
And find ways of sussing out the balance points, the leverage points.
How do you do that?
How can we understand these underlying laws,
the underlying harmony of the universe?
Traditional philosophers used logic, but
they also relied heavily on the wisdom of the past.
They read ancient texts, but they also knew that that was not quite enough.
Because even if the universe was rational and
harmonious, it was not completely rational and harmonious.
It could always spring surprises.
How do you deal with the irrational aspects of our world?
One way of thinking about this was to imagine that the gods themselves
were sometimes irrational, selfish, mean, and arbitrary.
This was certainly true of the Greek gods, whose behavior was often so
childish that Greek philosophers reckoned they would have to
figure out the laws of the universe on their own.
Or perhaps, the problem was that we simply didn't have enough knowledge to
see the underlying rationality or harmony of the universe.
If so, do you improvise, or do you fall back on intuition, or guess work?
Or do you look for more information?
Looking for more information is one of the main strategies of modern science.
Modern science shifts the emphasis from reading revered texts, such
as the writings of Confucius or religious texts such as the Christian Bible,
to actual observations of the real world and strict logic.
And this method has proved extraordinarily powerful, giving us vast new insights into
the nature of our world, and many new ways of dealing with it and controlling it.
In practice, of course, all societies observed their surroundings and they do so
carefully.
They have to, to survive.
But science puts this approach at the very center of its attempts to understand
And by doing so, it has given humans new forms of knowledge that have increased our
collective power over the entire biosphere.
Science has clearly made us better at solving some kinds of problems.
Mostly, those concerning complex physical systems.
And these explain why today, we're so
good at manipulating the material world that's all around us.
So is science or the scientific method,
as it is often called, the method for problem solving?
It's proved surprisingly difficult to explain why science is so successful.
And what its limits are as a way of solving problems.
The philosopher of science, Karl Popper,
argued that scientific research can never actually prove that a claim is true.
What it can do is to disprove false claims.
Finding just one black swan is enough to refute the theory that
all swans are white.
But science can never prove that all swans are either white or
black because one day, a pink swan could turn up.
Another philosopher of science, Kuhn,
reminded us that the scientists matter too.
After all, they're human beings.
And they have their own biases and assumptions.
Many of their claims are based on underlying assumptions or
paradigms of how things work.
And occasionally, these big paradigm ideas prove to be not quite right.
Newton's laws of gravity, for example, works splendidly for
250 years, until Einstein showed that they were slightly off.
So, we can have great confidence in many of science's claims but we can never be
absolutely sure that a new discovery will not modify or append those claims.
All that scientists have not been blinded by their own fundamental assumptions.
Science is a very, very good way of solving problems, but
it's not a perfect problem solving algorithm.
And there's another danger.
What if science makes us so
good at solving problems that we outsmart ourselves?
What if it helps us build weapons with which we could blow ourselves up?
Well, it's already done that.
Or computers that could take control of the world and
turn us into the equivalent of domesticated animals or worse.
Should we be scared of advances in artificial intelligence?
One of the paradoxes of problem solving is that the more problems we solve,
the more problems we can see.
Solving a problem always seems to reveal new problems, we will never know it all.
And perhaps, that´s over ambitious, anyway.
Perhaps, problem solving is really a matter of satisficing as the Economist,
Herbert Simon, put it.
We don´t need to solve all problems or to solve them perfectly.
We just need to solve the problems that are important to us, and for
which we can find solutions that are not too costly or dangerous.
Even that, of course, is a pretty ambitious goal.