Jonathan Lawhead

“ The world is messy, and science is hard. These two facts are, of course, related: science seeks to understand a messy world, and that’s a difficult task. Scientists have a variety of tools at their disposal to cope with this messiness: the creation of idealized models, the scientific division of labor, and the proliferation of increasingly elaborate pieces of technology all serve to help us predict and control a complex world. ”

“ Questions about how climate science makes its predictions, on what basis we ought to trust those predictions, how we might use the tools of climate science to make better predictions, how to interpret the climate data on record, and how to best make use of our limited computing resources are all methodological questions. "How should we decide which factors to include in our climate model?" ”

“ Philosophers of science do indeed need to do better with regard to climate science—it is a real, pressing issue: perhaps the most pressing contemporary scientific issue facing us. To a very great extent, this means doing something: the degree to which philosophers have engaged with climate science at all is minimal even compared to the general paucity of philosophical contact with applied contemporary social issues. ”

“ I intend to take up at least some of this research myself in the future (particularly work in the foundations of complexity theory and information theory as they relate to climate science and the scientific project as a whole) , but I am equipped with neither the time nor the ability to take all of it up; climate change is a pressing issue that demands our immediate attention, and we'll need to work together if we're to solve this problem. If nothing else, this dissertation is a sustained argument for precisely this point. ”

“ I suspect that individual readers will find my discussions of their particular areas of specialization somewhat unsatisfying: philosophers of science operating in the tradition of the profession—those who have inherited their methods and problems down from Hempel, Kuhn, Popper, van Fraassen, and so on—will likely find my discussion of the structure of the scientific project in Chapter One unsatisfying in virtue of the fact that it makes very little contact with the classic literature in the field. ”

“ With that account of science in hand, I argue that philosophy has a real contribution to make to the scientific project as a whole—I argue, that is, that there are issues with which the scientific project ought to be concerned that are not precisely scientific issues, and that philosophers are in a good position to tackle those issues. ”

“ Science often falls short of its ideals, and the climate debate has exposed some shortcomings. Science is done by people, who need grants, who have professional rivalries, limited time, and passionately held beliefs. ”

“ Butterworth’s call for philosophers of science to “do better” was inspired by another contribution to The Guardian from a few days earlier, this one written by Nicholas Maxwell, a philosopher at University College, London. Maxwell’s piece, “Scientists should stop deceiving us [2] ,” criticizes scientists generally (and climate scientists in particular) for producing what he calls “incomprehensible gobbledygook” that (he suggests) is to blame for the public’s rejection of scientific insights. ”

“ Going even further, Maxwell suggests that underlying this problem is an even deeper one—an insistence on the part of scientists (especially physicists) that scientific theories be “unified”—capable of applying to all parts of the world in their domain—and that more explanatorily satisfying theories are rejected on the basis of disunity, leading to a thicket of incomprehensible theories that make little contact with the values of contemporary society. ”

“ This is why the empiricism and pragmatism of science are vital, and why when scientific results affect us all, and speak against powerful political and financial interests, the openness and rigour of the process become ever more important. ”

“ Chapters Two and Three review some contemporary work being done in complexity theory, with a particular focus on attempts to define and quantify the notion of “complexity” itself, then sketch an account of complexity that builds on the work done in Chapter One.
Second, there are methodological questions. These questions are more specifically concerned with the structure and operation of a particular branch of science; the methodological questions that will concern (say) a fundamental physicist will be different from the methodological questions that will concern a climate scientist. ”

“ These questions concern the structure of science generally, the relationship between the various branches of science, climate science's continuity (or lack thereof) with the rest of science, and other issues that don’t seem to be investigated directly by any other branch of science. Foundational questions include those that are traditionally thought of as the purview of the philosopher: "how do we know that we can trust science?" ”

“ Not all tasks call for the application of the same tools, though, and so the scientific project takes all kinds: there’s room for a variety of contributions, and we must be willing to change tactics as new problems present themselves. ”