Thread 3—KR's "Scientific method"
Thread 3—KR’s “scientific method” |
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D |
Two omissions in KR’s “scientific method.” |
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JM |
No evidence yet for conspiracy. |
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D |
Didn’t address my points. |
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JM |
Second try. LG still best explanation. |
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KR |
Be more specific! |
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KR |
Longer response to two points. |
The third thread contains six messages. D began it by claiming that the “scientific method” in my essay is invalid because the government that pushed the “lone nut” hypothesis also collected the evidence, evaluated it, and continues to keep “lone nutters” and conspiracy theorists from examining it. When he saw that I was using the scientific method, he realized why I had to ignore these two requirements (because I am part of the controlling group?). The hidden evidence makes genuine scientific analysis impossible.
Your essay on the scientific method omits two essential characteristics. First no group of investigators should have a special relationship to the evidence and second the evidence should be available to everyone.
I was surprised by this omission. When I found this so-called scientific method being applied to the JFK assassination then I knew why you ignored essential characteristics of the method.
The lone-nut hypothesis was an explanation of the JFK assassination advocated by the same group that collected, validated, and discredited the evidence. This was a violation of the principle of no special relationship between a group of investigators and the evidence.
Champions of the conspiracy interpretation and lone-nut explanation of the JFK assassination do not have access to all the evidence. So much for the possibility of a scientific examination of the assassination.
This argument was based on a major misunderstanding of how the scientific
method works. D maintains incorrectly that the scientific method (a)
prohibits any subset of investigators from having a “special relationship to
the evidence,” and (b) must make the evidence available to everyone. By a
“special relationship to the evidence,” D evidently means the same
people finding the evidence and interpreting it. But this goes on in science all
the time. Raw data is virtually never published anymore. Broad summaries, often
graphical, are. The scientist need only describe the work in sufficient detail
to convince readers that the work was done properly and show them how to repeat
the experiment if they choose to.
D also makes a big issue of not
finding these two items mentioned in my essay. The logical flaw here is that the
essay described only one aspect of the scientific method, exploring the built-in
predictions of its hypotheses and theories. The essay’s first sentence, “One
of the classical ways of evaluating a scientific theory is to see whether it
correctly predicts other things that are true or eventually discovered to be
true,” should have made this obvious. No significance can be attached to the
absence of discussion of other parts. A second logical flaw is that you can’t
know how much evidence is hidden if it is truly hidden, or even whether any is
hidden or how important any of the allegedly hidden evidence is. The third
logical flaw is that you need not give up trying to understand the assassination
even if evidence is hidden. You can examine the available evidence for
consistency and redundancy, as I have done in another essay. Thus D’s
picture is pessimistic at best and seriously flawed at worst. His conclusion
that the assassination cannot be examined scientifically does not follow from
his premises.
The second message was from JM, who described my course on the assassination and noted how CTers have been complaining from time immemorial that various groups have been hiding evidence of conspiracy from them. She concluded by recommending Dwight Macdonald’s critique of the Warren Commission to D.
To this, D replied haughtily:
Why are you replying to my post? You have said nothing in response to my remarks.
JM then tried again, in the fourth message, admitting that she could have focused her remarks more. She challenged D’s idea that two essential ingredients of the scientific method were missing:
See, I do not think these two characteristics mentioned has anything to do with scientific investigation. Now, I think you may be trying to degrade the WC and its methods used in its investigation. That has nothing to do with the article.
Let me repeat the first sentence...............”One of the classical ways of evaluating a scientific theory is to see whether it correctly predicts other things that are true or eventually discovered to be true.........”
So the article was actually about one aspect of evaluating a scientific theory.
In response to D’s third paragraph, about the violation of the principle of no special relationship between the evidence and a subset of investigators, JM wrote:
Again you are criticising the method of the WC, or at least I think that is what you are saying which has nothing to do with the article. But let me ask you how you think most criminal cases are looked at: A crime is committed, the scene is investigated by lawmen, evidence is collected by lawmen, if there is “hard” evidence collected, it probably points to a suspect. The lawmen then will attempt to arrest the suspect. Once the suspect is arrested, the legal eagles become involved.
In response to D’s fourth paragraph, about the impossibility of a scientific examination of the assassination, JM made a number of salient points. The following are selected from her longer answer:
I seriously doubt that in any crime all of the evidence is ever recovered. In most murder cases finding the weapon is considered strong evidence.
The WC had much more evidence then most have in murder cases. Also, remember, the jury in a trial, is not allowed to know everything until after the verdict is in. So your characterization is not validated by how the system actually works.
Remember, except for the acoustics and some other ideas, most of the questioning of the findings of the WC are based on information found in the WC.
I referred you to a lengthy article written in 1965 that shows all of the criticism you have concerning the WC is old hat. People have been saying it for years.
I agree there are some problems with their methods. I agree the autopists did a lousy job. I agree there was some CYA activities by those involved. But none of this nor your attitude, changes the standing that as of now there has been no one conspiracy theory that meets the predictability that has been supported by strong evidence and accepted by a majority.
D chose not to respond further.
I then sent two replies to D, the fifth
and the sixth, that ended the thread because he did not respond. The first
of these was a short one that requested that he be more specific in his charges
against the scientific method:
You seem to be quick to dismiss scientific investigation of the assassination because evidence is missing, and yet your statements were very general. Could you be more specific, please, as to the important kinds of evidence you consider missing and why they could affect anyone's conclusions more than the currently available evidence can? Seems like a tall order to me.
The second message noted in more detail that neither of his objections were so different from actual science, i.e., groups of scientists often have special relationships to their evidence (they generate it, interpret it, and publish conclusions from it), and other scientists seldom get to see this raw data:
I want to expand a bit on my earlier remarks to your "no group of investigators should have a special relationship to the evidence." First, I am unaware of anywhere that this is stated as an explicit part of the scientific method. Please cite a reference and provide a quote if possible.
Second, I suspect that it is not in the scientific method because it isn't necessary or practiced. What is formally necessary is the ability to duplicate the results independently or, lacking that, the check them meaningfully from the reports. Let me give a couple of examples. If I run an experiment, I am under no obligation to share the raw data. I report how I did the work, sometimes samples of the raw data, the processed results, and the conclusions I reached. People with similar facilities can then check me. A good recent example of these safeguards in action was cold fusion from a few years ago. Nobody could reproduce it, and it eventually went away, along with its two proponents. Now if I use special experimental facilities that aren't generally available, such as a big particle accelerator, or if I report results from the field, such as air pollution over the Pacific, where others are not about to go solely to check me, they judge my results by how well they fit into the overall system that we both understand and have checked. In any event, my findings will remain tentative for a while, and sometimes a long while. I think that this situation is not so different from some of the results in the JFK case. One important feature of the strong evidence in the JFK case is that it so redundant that one or two pieces deemed uncertain can be eliminated without affecting the final conclusion (see http://karws.gso.uri.edu/PSC482G/Spring2000/Critical_thinking/Min_phys_ev_genuine.html).
Now, on your point about my "scientific" procedure not being genuine because of lack of access to all the evidence, I think that this situation is not so different from real science. As noted above, other researchers have access only to processed data or to reports in journals. The Warren Report and the HSCA Report are the analogs to processed data and journal reports. Now, if you think that someone is hiding data from all of us, this is also similar to real science in that we seldom have all that we want or need, and we can't do anything about it for the moment. It is NOT scientific to quit there, however. It is scientific to start with what you have and call the result provisional. Even if you don't explicitly label it provisional, all scientists understand this to be so, and JFK researchers should, too. The scientific method is essentially a series of successive approximations, with each step being governed by data and critical thinking. You do the best you can with what you have. Anyhow, if data are presumed hidden, you can never know how much, or even if there are any, so that is not an argument for stopping.
This ended the third thread.
I think it was telling that D
responded sharply to what he considered a fuzzy reply, but remained silent when
pressed for specifics and for genuine answers of his own. He thus illustrated
the common tendency of posters in newsgroups to prefer shallow back-and-forth
repartee to serious dialog.
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