#normal science

Not long after MCR announced a reunion tour, I happened across a paper about forests that referenced an entirely unrelated 'MCR'. A great deal of fun was had imagining it was talking about the band anyway.

The Nonessential Tension: How Dogmatism Complicates Normal Science

In one of his most evocative essays, Sir Karl [Popper] traces the origin of 'the tradition of critical discussion [which] represents the only practicable way of expanding our knowledge' to the Greek philosophers between Thales and Plato, the men who, as he sees it, encouraged critical discussion both between schools and within individual schools. The accompanying description of Presocratic discourse is most apt, but what is described does not at all resemble science. Rather it is the tradition of claims, counterclaims, and debates over fundamentals which, except perhaps during the Middle Ages, have characterized philosophy and much of social science ever since. Already by the Hellenistic period mathematics, astronomy, statics and the geometric parts of optics had abandoned this mode of discourse in favour of puzzle solving. Other sciences, in increasing numbers, have undergone the same transition since. In a sense, to turn Sir Karl's view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition to a science. Once a field has made that transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.

The history of astrology during the centuries when it was intellectually reputable records many predictions that categorically failed. Not even astrology's most convinced and vehement exponents doubted the recurrence of such failures. Astrology cannot be barred from the sciences because of the form in which its predictions were cast. Nor can it be barred because of the way its practitioners explained failure. Astrologers pointed out, for example, that, unlike general predictions about, say, an individual's propensities or a natural calamity, the forecast of an individual's future was an immensely complex task, demanding the utmost skill, and extremely sensitive to minor errors in relevant data. The configuration of the stars and eight planets was constantly changing; the astronomical tables used to compute the configuration at an individual's birth were notoriously imperfect; few men knew the instant of their birth with the requisite precision. No wonder, then, that forecasts often failed. Only after astrology itself became implausible did these arguments come to seem question-begging. Similar arguments are regularly used today when explaining, for example, failures in medicine or meteorology. In times of trouble they are also deployed in the exact sciences, fields like physics, chemistry, and astronomy. There was nothing unscientific about the astrologer's explanation of failure. Nevertheless, astrology was not a science. Instead it was a craft, one of the practical arts, with close resemblances to engineering, meteorology, and medicine as these fields were practised until little more than a century ago. ... In each of these fields shared theory was adequate only to establish the plausibility of the discipline and to provide a rationale for the various craft-rules which governed practice. These rules had proved their use in the past, but no practitioner supposed they were sufficient to prevent recurrent failure. ... In their absence, however, neither the astrologer nor the doctor could do research. Though they had rules to apply, they had no puzzles to solve and therefore no science to practise.

Neutronics And Chi Development In Tai Chi Chuan