Statements about the future

Let us take two statements from your last two posts :

1. 'God will show up in X years'
2. 'Ted Williams will be up and running in 20 years'

They are exactly of the same form, right ? So which one belongs to science and which one does not ? Now conduct a poll asking this question. More than 99% of respondents will answer (correctly, in my opinion) : (2) belongs to science and (1) does not. So we are all agreed on this. But if we are, it cannot be on the basis of form, since the form of the two sentences is the same. So on what basis do we all make this judgement on which we are so well agreed ?

I think this is not a simple problem and we should approach it with great care. Indeed, this is probably one of the most difficult problems of modern philosophy. One that people like Carnap, Ayer, Quine and Wittgenstein have been struggling with for the best part of their lives. In that debate, I have chosen my camp. It is that of the later Wittgenstein (after 1930, not to be confused with the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, which was written just after WWI).

Its answer to this particular problem would probably be to say that you cannot use form to distinguish between the two statements because form has no direct relationship with reality. It is just a set of rules, a 'grammar', that only apply within language itself, to govern how we use it, but cannot say anything to us about the objects to which we apply it. In fact, the later W is in full agreement with you, Doc, when you say that language is nothing more than a protocol. But this has a consquence I am not sure you see as clearly. If you look at it, Logic, in its modern, mathematical sense, is nothing more than form. It is made of syntactical rules. So it can only be used as a set of rules, a programming language to transform statements into other statements. You cannot use it to say things about the things the statements talk about; or even about the statements themselves. Logic is not a language in the sense that it does not say anything about anything. It is just a mechanical device to transform bits of language into other bits of language. This is the idea behind the equation of Logic with Grammar (one of W's famous stunts). No one would be tempted to call grammar a language. Would you ?

So what is language ? W claims that we cannot answer this question precisely because the word applies to a variety of human activities that only share a 'family ressemblance' between them and no hard and fast property. Instead, what there is is a variety of 'language games', with overlapping domains. None of the domains constitutes the whole of language. Everyday language within a given family is one such game. Everyday language within a given company is another one; very similiar but different. This is why we have company-specific jargon. Science is yet another language game or, rather, a cluster of related language games.

Confused ? Well yes, it is difficult. Because it is not the way we are used to think about science and language. Another way to put it (my own, this time) is to say that language is something that happens between people and not between people and objects. We definitely are not 'mapping symbols to empirical measurements'. We are making noises or putting together strings of graphical marks that others may use as clues to imagine what kind of empirical experience we might have had. If I say 'I am seeig a blue object' you are almost certainly going to imagine a different color than the one I am currently seeing. And the point here is not whether I am being precise or not. It is the process you use to decode my message : you imagine a color at random and picture it in your mind because it is not incompatible with the word 'blue'. So there is no direct 'mapping' between the sign and the empirical experience. What there is is a set of reflexes, acquired through training, which make us accept or reject a certain group of empirical experiences or imagined empirical experiences, in the presence of a given sign.

The consequence is that science cannot be defined on the basis of the statements it uses. 'Ted Williams will be up and running in 20 years' is a scientific statement if it is uttered by someone who has the relevant credentials to be considered a scientist. If it is uttered by a snake-oil peddler, it is not a scientific statement even though it is exacly the same statement in both cases. Science will always elude you if you try to define it as a 'body of knowledge' or a set of statements of a certain kind. You can only catch it if you accept to consider it as human activity (a language game) practiced by a recognizable group of human beings with definite boundaries in the social space. In a word, it is a human institution, a tribe. The only way to get a grasp on what science is is sociology (Kuhn), not Logic.

Once again, we cannot have knowledge because we have no access to things in themselves (Kant). But, hopefully, we have institutions whose activity tend to accumulate justifications for certain beliefs. Science, or rather, the scientific establishment, has used a certain method over the past few centuries that has proved extremely efficient at justifying a certain cluster of beliefs. This method might have been also efficent at justifying other beliefs, like those we use as a basis for ethics. The history of the XXth century is mainly the result of a number of experiments at doing just that. I think everyone agrees that these experiments (Nazism, Communism, Logical Positivism, the Murray and CIA mind-control attempts) are failures. The result is that scientists are no longer credible outside science itself, that is outside the domain of expertise within the bounds of which our culture considers them to be reliable.