LaVar Hosting Jeopardy July 26-30 Stan Account 👁

6/Now, one can argue that these historical scientists were doing bad science. And skeptics of modern science will then say that you're committing the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. But in fact, it's no fallacy, because "science" has multiple meanings.

7/"Science" can refer to the body of ideas and knowledge that we call "scientific". It can refer to the people and institutions who do what we call "science". Or it can refer to a way of thinking and learning about the world.

8/Many of the people who fell in love with eugenics in the early 20th century were "scientists" in the second sense. And many people believed eugenics belonged in the body of "scientific" knowledge in the first sense.

9/But very little of eugenics was produced using the methods of thinking and experimentation that we think of as "science". There was a lot of mistaking correlation for causation, making empirically ungrounded assumptions, failing to test theories, etc.

10/Thus, while eugenics is a good cautionary tale about how the scientific *establishment* can go wrong, and about how bad ideas make their way into popular consciousness, it says little about whether the scientific method is a reliable way of investigating the world.

11/The accidental or intentional use of the failures of the scientific establishment shouldn't be used to discredit the idea of investigating the world through scientific means.

12/Thus, "No True Scotsman" thinking, in this case, doesn't change the definition of "science" as needed to prove a point - instead, it involves pointing out that people are improperly conflating different definitions of a word in order to make a bad point.

13/So I think we should be slower to accuse people of making "No True Scotsman" arguments, and more careful about conflating definitions. (end)