Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences,University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
If you're Sandy Koufax or Nolan Ryan, the strike zone is a pretty fair-sized target. There are a lot of ways to hit it, and wide scope for alternative approaches, all of which are valid. If you're a Little Leaguer, the strike zone is a pretty tiny target. There are a lot of ways to miss it, and very few ways to hit it.
Now imagine a stadium full of people who haven't got a clue what baseball is all about. Some think the object of the game is to hit the batter or throw the ball as far as possible. They have no idea where the players stand or how many are on the field at a time. In this setting, it's clear that there is one - and only one - correct way to throw a baseball.
A gathering of working scientists is roughly equivalent to a gathering of professional baseball pitchers (in experience, not in salary!) They are aware of all the variations possible in their trade. Listening to them talk, it's easy to get the impression that all things are relative
To a student preparing for finals, it's a different story. The ways to get it wrong far outnumber the ways to get it right.
Consider a simple scientific question: what is the shape of the Earth? It's a sphere. Well, not exactly. It's an oblate spheroid, flattened by about 1/300, or 1/298 to be more precise, or 1/298.257222 to be more precise yet. Actually, it's not a perfect oblate spheroid; it has bumps and hollows, and local topography superimposed on top of those. If we look at all the possible concepts about the shape of the Earth, we see:
Working scientists, for the most part, are too busy trying to narrow the range of scientifically valid ideas to worry about the ideas that are known not to be valid. Still less do they worry about the ideas that are trivially false. They communicate their ideas to other scientists, and are keenly aware of the role of consensus and the social dimensions of science. Until recently, very few philosophers of science have paid much attention to ideas far outside the scientific pale. In this milieu, it's easy to start describing science in terms of social construct or shared myth.
When we turn to pseudoscience, however, we quickly find that most of the descriptions of science in terms of consensus, social construct or myth collapse into useless mush. Scientific creationism, after all, is a shared myth among its believers, and should be as valid in its own way as conventional science. The problem of telling valid science from pseudoscience has begun to interest philosophers of science, who term it the "demarcation problem."
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Created 5 February 1998, Last Update 8 July 1998
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