Farewell to Reality Read Online Free

things-in-themselves. We may nevertheless choose to assume that they exist. I can find no better argument for such ‘entity realism’ than a famous quote from philosopher Ian Hacking’s book Representing and Intervening. In an early passage in this book, Hacking explains the details of a series of experiments designed to discover if it is possible to reveal the fractional electric charges characteristic of ‘free’ quarks. * The experiments involved studying the flow of electric charge across the surface of balls of superconducting niobium:
    Now how does one alter the charge on the niobium ball? ‘Well, at that stage,’ said my friend, ‘we spray it with positrons to increase the charge or with electrons to decrease the charge.’ From that day forth I’ve been a scientific realist. So far as I ’ m concerned, if you can spray them then they are real. 7
    This brings us to our first principle.
    The Reality Principle. Reality is a metaphysical concept, and as such it is beyond the reach of science. Reality consists of things-in-themselves of which we can never hope to gain knowledge. Instead, we have to content ourselves with knowledge of empirical reality, of things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-measured. Nevertheless, scientific realists assume that reality (and its entities) exists objectively and independently of perception or measurement. They believe that reality is rational, predictable and accessible to human reason.
    Having established what we can and can’t know about reality, it’s time to turn our attention properly to science.
    The scientific method
    In 2009, Britain’s Science Council announced that after a year of deliberations, it had come up with a definition of science, perhaps the first such definition ever published: ‘Science is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.’ 8
    Given that any simple definition of science is likely to leave much more unsaid than it actually says, I don’t think this is a bad attempt. It all seems perfectly reasonable. There’s just the small matter of the ‘systematic methodology’, the cold, hard, inhuman, unemotional logic engine that is supposed to lie at the very heart of science. A logic that we might associate with Star Trek’s Spock.
    The ‘scientific method’ has at least three components. The first concerns the processes or methodologies that scientists use to establish the hard facts about empirical reality. The second concerns methods that scientists use to create abstract theories to accommodate and explain these facts and make testable predictions. The third concerns the methods by which those theories are tested and accepted as true or rejected as false. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.
    Getting at the facts
    The first component seems reasonably straightforward and should not detain us unduly. Scientists pride themselves on their detachment and rigour. They are constantly on the lookout for false positives, systematic errors, sample contamination, anything that might mislead them into reporting empirical facts about the world that are later shown to be wrong.
    But scientists are human. They are often selective with their data, choosing to ignore inconvenient facts that don’t fit, through the application of a range of approaches that, depending on the circumstances, we might forgive as good judgement or condemn as downright fraud. They make mistakes. Sometimes, driven by greed or venal ambition, they might cheat or lie.
    There is no equivalent of a Hippocratic oath for scientists, no verbal or written covenant to commit them to a system of ethics and work solely for the benefit of humankind. Nevertheless, ethical behaviour isdeeply woven into the fabric of the scientist’s culture. And the emphasis on repetition, verification and critical analysis of