Logic and Science

I’d like to start by stating something that I find rather obvious but which seems not to be anymore. Logic, which is to say a person’s ability to use their knowledge and experience to form reasoned chains of expressions about something, and Science, the study of something using the scientific method, are not the same thing. I think part of the issue that has arisen whereby people equate the two of them stems from Logic becoming a branch of study in major universities. Instead of just using logic, we now study the process of logical argument and reasoning, and this study is often refereed to as a science. Hence many people assume that Logic and Science are the same thing, or even worse that Logic is merely a small branch of science and somehow developed after science.

This is of course not the case at all. Science is a rather new invention and springs from the development of the scientific method. But more than the use of that method science involves the testing and retesting of hypothesis, by the proponent of the hypothesis, and more importantly to the modern-day, by the scientific community at large. The scientific method is of course when studied just a complicated form of guess and check, but Science is the collection of the guess and checks of scientists in order that each man and woman no longer has to guess and check about the same things. It is an attempt to expand human knowledge in such a way that we no longer have to individually guess and check at things. It is a tool we use to examine the universe around us and then test that universe and then to retest it and then to provide those results so that everyone may look at them. Science is about determining how things happen, and as a tool it is good at doing that insofar as we can supply it with the right technology to do that. But science isn’t so good at answering all the questions we encounter in our lives.

For instance, there are those questions for which we do not poses the technology to explore. Like “How did the dinosaurs die?” Taken at face value the only way this question is answerable via science is to re-create the dinosaurs and then attempt several ways of wiping them out and then finding the closest match to what we have. That, or going back in time and watching. The first one still is not entirely scientifically accurate and the second involves time travel. But any other method would not be entirely scientific, it will in fact have to rely on logic to fill in the gaps. Any hypothesis we develop, no matter how well we test it, will require reasoned steps in its explanation of how X or Y killed the dinosaurs. You just can’t get there without Logic.

And in the modern world that is much of what Logic is used for. Because we have Science in the modern world, Logic is what we use to fill in the gaps left by those questions that science can’t answer, or can’t answer fully. The more I learn about the world the more I realize that Science answers very few questions about the world completely. Evolution for instance is only supported scientifically in the natural selection arena, whereby some species thrive in some environments and other species don’t. To date we haven’t seen the rest of the theory played out though the scientific method. The rest of the theory is held up by logic, and I didn’t necessarily say it was correct logic, but just that it was logic and in fact not science. To do the whole theory of Evolution through science you would have to create your own ecosystem on the scale of the Earth and watch it evolve over several millions, if not billions, of years. These problems of scale and technology would of course disappear when you had the right technology, that is true, but that doesn’t mean people won’t want to think about them in the time being.

Then there are those problems that science either cannot answer or has little to say about. Economics and psychology are two areas where science often finds itself floundering and experts are constantly baffled. How things happen in an economy are not always straightforward or easy to document. The same is even more true for how people make decisions. Oh for sure those two fields generate fistfuls of statistical evidence, but this as we know is again not science, it is merely distilled observation. With a statistic we can only say what was true, percentage wise, in the past, but we cannot use it to make scientifically accurate predictions about the future. I think I will have to leave that bit here now and bring it up later, for science and statistics get confused for one another quiet a bit these days as well.

Then there are of course the why questions, on which science is silent, simply because the why questions aren’t what science is for. Science is for the how. And what I mean by why questions is something like this “Why is the sky blue?”. Taken by science you get an explanation about the atmosphere’s refraction of certain colors of light and blue being the leftover one that makes it through to our eyes. But that’s not why is it, that’s how? Why the sky is blue depends on why the visible spectrum is the way it is, and that depends on both why our eyes are the way they are and why light behaves the way it does, and back and back the whys stack up until you hit more universal questions like “Why does the universe exist?” or “Why does the universe exist the way it does?”. Science doesn’t have an answer to those questions. For those questions it’s just us and logic out in the cold. And it’s not so bad, since logic has been with us a lot longer than science. But many people decide not to ask those questions anymore simply because they don’t have the warm blanket of science to get them through those questions. They say things like “Those questions don’t matter and aren’t worth bothering about.” They think that logic and science are equal and because science has nothing to say to answer those questions that logic will be equally quiet about the matter. I disagree. I think logic has quite a bit to say about those kinds of questions. Logic has indeed quite a bit to say about a lot of things, but as long as you think logic is science then logic will be more silent than it ought to be.