scientific limitations

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.    Albert Einstein, 1938.

Like a computer, science can only engage with the inputs it is given. The less clear the questions it processes the less clear the answers it gives, and the more its processes resembles GIGO.

Mathematics is able to deal successfully only with the simplest of situations, more precisely, with a complex situation only to the extent that rare good fortune makes this complex situation hinge upon a few dominant simple factors. Beyond the well-traversed path, mathematics loses its bearings in a jungle of unnamed special functions and impenetrable combinatorial particularities. Thus, the mathematical technique can only reach far if it starts from a point close to the simple essentials of a problem which has simple essentials. That form of wisdom which is the opposite of single-mindedness, the ability to keep many threads in hand, to draw for an argument from many disparate sources, is quite foreign to mathematics.    Jacob Schwartz, 1992.

When the intrinsic limitations of science are not recognized a reliance is fostered on the assumption that machines of loving grace guide the "united cabals of ambitious citizens" who govern us.

It may seem natural to think that, to understand a complex system, one must construct a model incorporating everything that one knows about the system. However sensible this procedure may seem, in biology it has repeatedly turned out to be a sterile exercise. There are two snags with it. The first is that one finishes up with a model so complicated that one cannot understand it - the point of a model is to simplify, not to confuse. The second is that if one constructs a sufficiently complex model one can make it do anything one likes by fiddling with the parameters - a model that can predict anything predicts nothing.    John Maynard Smith, 1999.

It is generally assumed that scientific inquiry is transparent; however, "a man may not have two masters", and as well as targeting it the interpretation and application of scientific research is directed by the cupidity of its funding, not by social need. Yet the assumption continues to drive perception, and conceptual confusions are dismissed. Divorced from elementary reasoning however, science is nonsensical, and easily misrepresented then to justify zenophobia, for instance, or the denial of climate-change.

Science, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends.    Albert Einstein, 1949.

The frame of reference in which words are understood determines their meaning. Divorcing content from context is impossible, and trying to do so then only leads to 'contested jurisdictions', the intransigence of which frustrates the application of knowledge in every field from theoretical physics to psychology, climate-change, and wellbeing.

The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a "young science"; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. (Rather with that of certain branches of mathematics. Set theory.) For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. (As in the other case conceptual confusion and methods of proof.) The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.    Wittgenstein, 1945.

Well-being (eudaemonia) is a subjective and abstract state of being. It is a composite of similar complex qualities, such as contentment and success, none of which can be isolated from individual experience, and is then unavailable for any objective scientific observation. While each of us, personally, entirely and unavoidably, engages with it, and despite its being self-evident, substantive and priceless, science can actually then say very little about it.

..I hope even readers sceptical of this particular conclusion might be persuadable of the general point that the deadlock in discussions of interpretation can be broken — or at least, our understanding of the problem can be deepened — by focussing less on specifics of the particular interpretative strategies, and more on what we should reasonably require of a solution.    David Wallace, 2017.