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Review of "Just a theory" (exploring the nature of science)
by Moti Ben-Ari

This is a very basic introduction to the philosophy of science which I picked up in the St Martin's homeless centre. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it has the virtue of being very clear: I like the way he makes the case for evolution, for example. On the other hand, even to me, and my knowledge of the philosophy of science is not extensive, it seems very partisan and niave, relative to the book which both he and I would recommend: "What is this thing called science". I've so far only read a few scattered chapters, but his knowledge, or at any rate his detailed analysis of philosophers of science seems to end with Thomas Kuhn - Popper is the only other central figure to be dealt with in depth - Paul Feyerabend is mentioned (out of context) twice, Imre Lakatos or any of the more recent philosophers not at all.

I read with interest, for example, the chapter on Post-Modernism, which Ben-Ami regards as the enemy, and I got the impression that Ben-Ami was taking the worst examples he could find and misrepresenting arguments - I'm not at all sure he had actually read any PoMo stuff - the only "Post Modernist" (if indeed he fits that description) that he actually mentions in the whole chapter was John Bloor. I think the source for the chapter is the attacks made on PoMo by others; Gross and Levitt and Alan Sokal, the author of the highly amusing spoof and a well written critique of PoMo's critique of science. Apart from these there are no sources given for any of his assertions, which include the serious charge that PoMo philosophers deny that the HIV virus is a primary cause of AIDS. I know little about PoMo, but (from that little and the excellent essays in reply to Alan Sokal by mathematician Gabriel Stolzenburg) I doubt whether many PoMo philosophers say that the truth is wholey subjective.

What, perhaps, they would argue is that all truth is subjective (as well as) objective - an intersection of the two; there are many different possible constructions of the world "brought forth" (in the language of the Santiago theory of cognition) through our interaction with our surrounding environment including our culture. But I don't think Ben Ari has ever heard of the Santiago theory of cognition or its authors, Humberto Maturana and Fransisco Varela. I don't think he would read much which challenged his views.

But I've only started to read/write about this book - stuff I will cover include his chapter on reductionism/chaos, which I don' think much of, and which also seems to be badly researched.

Chapter 9 is entitled "Reductionism: the whole is the sum of its parts". By entitling it in this way, the author positions himself as someone on the reductionist side in the reductionism versus holism controversy, as holists say that a whole is more than the sum of its parts. To be honest neither sentence has a fairly tight meaning which you can easily pin down. Anyway, I am definetly in the holist/system theory camp, and I should be able to knock what he says down, but in practice I don't feel have the necessary analysis to hand - I seem to need to re-read Fritjof Capra's "The Web of Life", Arthur Koestler's "The Ghost in the Machine" and Steven Rose's "Lifelines" (the last is very rigorous and pretty formidable) - even though I've been grappling with them for years. Nevertheless, I will see what I can do now. I want to give first a fairly lengthy quote of the author's position: I would make it even longer if I could, but I'd end up quoting the whole chapter.

"Reductionism and mechanism
Science attempts to explain a natural phenomenon in terms of a mechanism. The nautre of an explanation or a mechanism is such that it necessarily involves lower-level entities and concepts than the phenomenon under discussion. We say that the phenomenon is reduced to lower-level entities and concepts. This is so trivial that it would not be worth belabouring, except for the misunderstanding it engenders concerning the process of science. For example, if you ask me to explain why my spaghetti sauce tastes so good, I would offer an explanation by reducing the question of taste to a list of ingredients; for example, I would tell you that I use lots of garlic and thyme. Any time you ask for a recipe, you are engaged in reductionism; that is, you have abandoned the holistic experience of tangy taste, pungent smell, and velvety texture for the dry list of cloves of garlic and sprigs of thyme.

Similarly, a scientist searching for explanations is necessarily going to reduce a phenomenon to lower-level concepts and entities. Of course these lower-level entities will themselves become objects of curiosity and demand explanation in terms of a still lower level. If you are curious to know why sheep chew cud, you have no choice but to reduce the problem from a study of sheep as individual animals to a study of the anatomy and physiology of the internal organs of sheep. In turn, the anatomy and physiology can be explained by reducing them to the muscular structure of the complex ruminant stomach and the biochemistry of the digestive secretions. Reductionism runs rampant and stops only at the level of the elementary particles of physics."

OK. Let's start with this business of the recipe. Yes, one reason why your spaghetti sauce tastes so good is because of the garlic and thyme - these are what Aristotle calls "material causes". However although a material cause may be a necessary cause (but not always - there might be several alternatives which could be substituted to give the property of "tasty" - note to self - give examples of biological alternatives, phenotype repair etc) it is not a sufficient cause: even if you specified all the ingredients and their amounts, all of the human actions and their sequence, all of which involve feedback loops, have to be specified, you have to say what length of time you have in on the cooker, how long with the heat turned up, how long with the heat turned down etc etc - otherwise you could get many different alternatives including a charred mess.

To extend the analogy, consider where a list of atomic ingredients for particular organisms can be a sufficent cause of those organisms. If you shuggle the atoms about are you going to get 100 human beings or giraffes, a whale, 50 billion bacteria, a large indescrible mess, or what? Now in a certain sense you could argue that evolution and the sophisiticated theories of emergence outlined by people like Stuart Kauffman involve precisely that kind of shuggling, and I have no problem with it. To be continued