Blog #2: Building knowledge and its limits

What is the fountainhead of knowledge? That human reason (deduction) and human experience (induction) can both serve as bases for the production of knowledge has been well-established. The question is whether both are reliable.

Through sheer logic, one can arrive at the truth. Through reasoning and argumentation, one can convince others of the validity of a position. With these tools, philosophy occupied pride of place as a discipline for ages.

View of Pluto from one of the ex-planet's moons.
from http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/display.cfm?Category=Planets&IM_ID=16383

Today, it would be hard to accept that reason alone suffices. Much more is demanded. This is where human experiences and the senses come in. Where conjecture falls short, scientists and academics demand proof, and by proof, they mean empirical data. The injunction is for school instruction to be “evidence-based.” The same is true for the findings of researchers to become official policy of the state.

Much of what we know today is the result of this empiricist movement. An example is medicine, wherein diagnosis and treatment are based on numerous studies that must first go through the wringer of rigorous blind review by peers as part of the journal publication process.

New drugs and new uses of existing drugs have to undergo extensive clinical trials, and then be approved by big government agencies such as the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Even those in the hard sciences, however, agree that their quantitative methods have inherent limitations. Going back to the example of the drug approval process, the FDA has its “hall of shame” of medicines recalled from the market due to different safety issues.

If such is the case in the physical and biological sciences, then practitioners of the social sciences cannot ask their intended audiences to rely entirely on the findings of quantitative approaches.

For one, quantitative methodologies themselves rely on a specific, even rigid, set of assumptions. Violate one of these and the results will be useless. One finds out later that much of the assumptions do not hold true in reality. Another limitation can be the error of measurement. Variables or concepts might not have been well-defined conceptually and operationally.

Econometrics, the bread and butter of economics, uses statistical methods with the aid of economic theory in quantifying the relationships between dependent and explanatory variables. Autocorrelation between independent variables and other similar problems will, however, render the results of multiple regression analysis invalid. The bigger problem is when no data is at all available.

Opinion polls are all the more in vogue as the populists’ tool of choice. But surveys are only as good as the kind of questions asked by the enumerator’s instrument. Moreover, human experiences and the way humans perceive them are complex.

Where empiricism falls short in explaining its results, the social scientist can turn to qualitative approaches. To insist solely on the use quantitative approaches would be to limit the frontiers of knowledge.

The more controversial question for me is the still unresolved opposition between absolutism and relativism. Bernstein’s words are striking: Neither absolutism nor subjectivism is a “live option.” The author notes that “there are no non-trivial claims that are immune from criticism,” while relativism has become a “roaring torrent.” 

Social scientists will have to work harder to convince people amid the plurality of viewpoints.

Will humans be ever capable of knowing the truth? What’s clear is that despite the progress of the myriad branches of science, we still don’t have all the answers. The more we know about the world, it seems the less we are certain.