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, lordly, and pious 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. Nirvana? Utopia? Eudaimonia? Game over? Have we clocked the machine and have to start again? Apocalypse? — but let us say that the mysteries of the universe will have been solved, and whatever terrifying joy it presented hitherto will feel a bit entropic, warm and brown.

But notice, too, how the idea of the “ultimate solution” — I know, right? — cleaves to rather monomythical ideas about the nature of life: that there are rules, it is bounded, has a running time, a definitive up and down, left and right, start and finish. There is a quest to be resolved. We are players inside a finite game.

If this is right — only if this is right — then epistemic priority is important. Not just for its efficiency, but for the second order connections it vouches safe. For all theories must interconnect, match, share the same logic, assumptions and ontology. Every point on every branch of the logic must be correct, lest we throw out the whole machine.

Rather like a proposed crossword solution that for one clue looks right, but later turns out to have been mistaken, 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. But the mechanics of the cosmos is no ordinary 15 by 15 grid. Not even a bank holiday jumbo grid.

“you might think it's a long way to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space”

Engineering must be perfect. There is no tolerance in the system no room for ambiguity or alternative hypothesis stop if you have to commit to reductionism everything has to be right.

An hour experience in the history of science comma, is anything but. The progress of technique from the the discovery of fire to the proof of the big's hose on is no no orchestra rated parade to enlightenment. Every theory has succeeded every previous one by conquest.

So to reductionists, epistemic priority is important. Critical to the mission. The slightest internal inconsistency is a killer.

But, problem: on what grounds can we award such priority? Until we find that broken second order link, then the competing models have the same explanatory power. Even if we do find broken link, who is to say whether the present theory or some other one is at fault?

Or there might be no such thing

I suppose it would be cheeky to invoke occam's razor against the the extraordinary conjectures of ISM. Without any reason beyond a parrot logical consistency what grounds are there for believing it. Question is is similar to the one Richard Dawkins asks of intelligent design. Just because something seems to be designed intelligently comic that doesn't mean it is. Likewise just because the universe seems to behave with regularities and according to consistent principles, that doesn't mean necessarily it's does.

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