Epistemic priority

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When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill with the ball. At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.

—Richard Dawkins

{{|Epistemic priority|ˈɛpɪˈstiːmɪk praɪˈɒrɪti|n}}When two competing models appear to explain, account for or manage some phenomenon equally well, a means of deciding, which is the “proper” one.

For example, the trajectory of a missile may be accounted equally well, in theory, for by special relativity, Newtonian mechanics, or the “gaze heuristic”.

Which, all other things being equal, should we prefer? Does one have, as a piece of credentialised technical knowledge about the world, “epistemic priority” over the others?

You may not be surprised to hear opinions tend to be divide, cleanly, along magisterial lines, with experts in competing programmes preferring their own. Few experts are agnostic. Epistemic scepticism is left to philosophers. The JC thinks this a pity.

Some domain masters — can we call them that? — will appeal to the related concept of Occam’s razor — a clever heuristic to determine the easiest explanation to go with — but it is just a rule of thumb and has no scientific rigour of its own. A lazy, if useful, fudge but it has no epistemic priority either.

Why does it even matter? If it works, it works, doesn’t it? Some — your correspondent included — would say quite so.

But there is a strand of scientism that sees science as an enterprise converging on “reality”, or “the truth”, and not just “a handy set of tools for the time being”. To their program, progress — betterment against an abstract gold ideal — is important. Our theories must ascend a grand epistemic staircase towards enlightenment. Those that do not are diverting but, well, literally, diverting. Diversion from the path to enlightenment is at best wasteful and at worst destructive.

How one knows one is on the path to enlightenment is just the question, of course, to which epistemic priority gives an answer. If only we could all agree about it.

On this reductionist theory there is, at the top of that grand staircase (often the metaphor is literally inverted, and the progress described as a descent into structural engineering of the basement, but a “stairway to heaven” seems to us a much better image) a grand unifying theory of everything. when we have that, then — well, supporters of the grand unifying theory haven't carried on that thought experiment. But notice how it cleaves to the idea the universe is a bounded, time-bound, finite system.

If this is right, then epistemic priority is important for the second order connections it vouches safe. Rather like a crossword solution that looks right, but isn't, and thereby buggers up the rest of the grid, a valuable but wrong theory will lead to trouble down the line if it isn’t rooted out pronto.

So to reductionists, epistemic priority is important. Critical to the mission.

But, problem: on what grounds can we award such priority? If we find that broken second order link, then the competing models no longer have the same explanatory power. This is how paradigms degenerate.

To pluralists, pragmatists answer is “no.” Horses for courses. If your models works, use it.

We know our view of the world does not accord to scientific “realities”. Granite blocks feel hard and impermeable, but chemists tell us they are mostly comprised of space: scaled up, an atom is a walnut on the centre spot orbited by electrons the size of peas around the outside of a football stadium. But that is no truer an image of an atom than a granite block. These are all just models to help us comprehend.

(It is no little irony that the “gaze heuristic” works worst in theory — I just “kind of keep my eye on the ball and keep running” might struggle to get past peer review — but best in practice: there’s a reason not many astrophysicists play cricket for England.)

See also

• Occam’s razor