More on "Here Comes Science"

[mmcirvin]

There was some minor and relatively uninteresting controversy over the album's forthright discussion of evolution, and, to a greater degree, over "Science Is Real"'s lumping-together of "angels, unicorns and elves" as unscientific and implicitly unreal notions.


What I find more interesting is that "Science Is Real" seems to give the philosophically trained fits for espousing what they consider a naive scientific realism right in the title. It inspired a couple of interesting discussions on Crooked Timber and Matthew Yglesias's blog, the first of which is partly in song. They seem particularly peeved that John Linnell quotes Rudolf Carnap in the introduction, though the actual song's take on science as a privileged probe of objective reality is probably not a sentiment Carnap would endorse without qualification (and Yglesias argues that the Carnap quote is an inadequate description of science as well).

I point to this not to mock philosophers of science. It actually gives me pause, too, since I spent years studying a field where there are radically different competing ontologies describing the same set of results, and nobody can quite agree on what reality is even in broad outline, so about the best you can do is fall back on an operational description of what you're doing: if you do X you have probability P of getting Y, and what that means is left as an exercise for the reader. Also, I guess I've seen scientists beaten up so long with accusations of scientism that anything that looks like an opening, even coming from a rock band of nonscientists, puts me on guard (even though I am not even an aspiring scientist any more!)

And yet, and yet. It seems to me that a description suitable for a three- or four-year-old that, say, captures the essential difference between dinosaurs and dragons (a point on which Jorie is not entirely clear) is going to lean heavily on the naive realism, and science has something to do with that. Also, the mere fact that there are about three songs on this album that even deal with science as a process, rather than science as repository of received wisdom or enabler of technology, is pretty remarkable. "The truth is with science" is a bit too strong a statement, but "A scientific theory isn't just a hunch or guess/It's more like a question that's been put through a lot of tests" is pretty good as a first approximation.


Apparently John Flansburgh cold-emailed PZ Myers to offer him a free copy, which may possibly give additional insight into Flans's position on the angels/unicorns/elves question.



In other news, I vote "Why Does The Sun Really Shine? (The Sun Is A Miasma Of Incandescent Plasma)" as Most Fun To Noodle Along Stupidly With On Your Guitar.

Comments

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

They do look like eels, don't they? There are so many similar characteristics between snakes, lizards, and dinosaurs that it's easy to see where dragons come from in a vague sense. In Asian culture the stylized animals are all so similar to me that I often can't tell them apart, but it appears early dragons in China at least could have variations on been any number of animals.