Miller’s Skepticism

Posted by jns on September 15, 2005

But science is more than the sum of its hypotheses, its observations, and its experiments. From the point of view of rationality, science is above all its method–essentially the critical method of searching for errors. It is the staunch devotion of science to this method that makes the difference.
[...^*]
It took Popper’s genius to realize that what is central to rationality is criticism, not justification or proof; and to scientific rationality, empirical criticism. To rescue science as a rational enterprise, perhaps the rational enterprise par excellence, there is accordingly no need to attribute to well-tested scientific hypotheses a security or reliability that they do not possess. Scientific hypotheses are not trustworthy or reliable, except in the sense of being, in some instances, true; and they are not in any interesting respect based on experience.

[David Miller, "Being an Absolute Skeptic", Science, 4 June 1999.]
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^*The bit that I excised between the parts I quoted was not uninteresting, it just didn’t seem to carry the flow of the idea that I wanted to note by quoting Miller. Here are the words represented by the elipsis belonging, in the original, to the first paragraph:

What is wrong with pseudoscience is the manner in which it handles its hypotheses, not normally the hypotheses themselves (though if they are designed to be unassailable and unfalsifiable, then unassailed and unfalsified they doubtless remain). But although a hypothesis that survives all criticism thrown at it is preferable to a hypothesis that dies, it does not become a better hypothesis through being tested. It may have been a better hypothesis from the outset, of course; it may be true. True hypotheses are what we seek.