There are two series of Substack Posts: The first is The Myth of Scientific Uncertainty. It has 16 numbered posts as listed below. The second is titled, When Scientific Laws Don’t Work. Its posts have been combined into a single narrative. It discusses exceptions to laws from the scientist’s and philosopher’s perspectives. Exceptions are shown to be common among laws and that they provided boundaries on their useful application, but do not undermine our reason to trust them when used within their limits. It ends with a call for scientists and philosophers to unite in the development of new realistic-based view of scientific knowledge.
The Myth of Scientific Uncertainty points out the dissonance between the trust we put in technology and the idea that anything could someday be disproved. It identifies the three pillars of scientific uncertainty.
1 The Trace that Remains
The still-valid part of disproved theories.
2. The Two Parts of a Scientific Theory
The what and the why.
3. The Black Swan
Scientific laws have a limited range of verified applicability, and those limits define the conditions in which they are sure to work.
4. The Picture and the Thing
Explanations are analogies and metaphors, not the reality.
5. Two Stories of Problematic Data
Is it the data or our conception that’s wrong?
6. Exceptions to Laws Within Known Limits?
Short of cataclysm, explanations rule them out.
7. Are Instrumental Measurements Valid Observations?
How instruments are reliable extensions of our senses.
8. Can Explanations Become Settled Science?
How a concept, once an hypothesis, can become an irrefutable fact.
9. Is the Real World To “Messy” for Scientific Laws to Work?
When laws adequately predict outcomes in the real world.
10. Simulating Reality in Complex Situations
How we make predictions when multiple processes occur simultaneously.
11. Conventions in Expressing Science: Essential, but Constraining
Universally accepted concepts and units enable (and potentially hinder) progress in science.
12. Science: A Product of Human Creativity and Discovery
Scientific knowledge is a description of the real world we have created from observations and interpretations.
13. Bias in Science by Scientists
Favoring the accepted view over credible alternatives from “outside” sources.
14. Outside the Box Looking In
It is easier to think outside the box if you're not in it.
15. The Importance of Story
Stories are more effective than ‘facts’ in changing minds.
16. Summary and Conclusion
Wrapping up what is and isn’t scientific, what knowledge is certain, what we could hold more lightly, and how these concepts could be beneficial.

My publications on philosophy

The Alan Alda Center for the Communicating Science posts a series called The Link. My article, How the Black Swan Became a Red Herring is their Link publication for September, 2023.

Michael Mathews, a philosopher/educator at the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia publishes a Newsletter called HPS&ST Newsletter which stands for History and Philosophy of Science and Science Teaching. It carries news, book reviews, conference announcements and summaries and much else. He has been doing this for 40 years and has gathered an extensive world-wide distribution. It is free and very worthwhile. Alerted to my Substack posts, he invited me to contribute them, in total, as an Opinion Piece in his September, 2023 Newsletter.

The Story

I first became aware of the fact that there was a study of the nature of scientific information by reading Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I was familiar with Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolution, but it was Persig’s discussion of Poincaré’s argument that there could be more than one explanation for a given set of observations that caught my imagination. This launched an inquiry into the philosophy of science that included taking a course in the philosophy of science from Oxford, and much reading.

As the consequences of science skepticism and denial became an increasingly harmful social phenomenon, I looked for a philosophical confirmation of what science we know for sure. I found that the philosophers call the realists that if there were not some certainties, technology would not be reliable, but they had not yet identified what aspects of scientific knowledge that could not get ‘recalled.’

This set me on a quest of my own, beginning with the writings of the physicist/philosopher Henri Poincaré whose picture you see in the illustration for this category. It has been a decade’s log process from a glimmer to a logical exposition, the latter only coming in my retirement from active laboratory research.

You can follow it in the Substack posts I have linked to in the accompanying list.

Richard Feynman is often quoted as saying that scientists have about as much use for philosophy as birds have for ornithology, but that may have been because of the prevailing idea that there was nothing we were learning that could not someday be disproved. So those of us producing this knowledge had no alternative than to just get on with it.

From what I know now, I believe that understanding the nature of scientific knowledge and which parts are certain is of value to the researcher, the science teacher, journalists, and policy makers where science is involved.

I hope you agree, and I strongly welcome discussion on this topic.