Theory

Let me get one thing out of the way before anything else. I would be the first to claim that human thought has biasses which prevent us from being neutral or objective, and that the specifics of how natural science is practiced create other biasses within it. Robert A Heinlein once said “man (sic) is not a rational animal but a rationalizing animal,” and I agree passionately with and have tried to live my life in accordance with that. I would also say that there’s a difference between scientific and non-scientific usages of the word “theory”, and the second tends to be unfairly deprecated, but confusion between these two often leads to misconceptions. This doesn’t mean that the scientific, more rigorous, use of the word is more valid, but the distinction is there and it should be known.

Looking at some other uses of the word, there are:

• The colloquial, conversational use.
• The scientific use.
• Music theory.
• Colour theory.
• Political theory.
• Driving theory.
• Cultural theory.
• Gender theory.
• Literary theory.
• Mathematical and logical theory.

I actually make some effort not to use the word “theory” when that isn’t what I mean, and to replace it with “hypothesis”. A hypothesis is a conjecture which has not been tested, and doesn’t become a theory until it gets through a test which could prove it wrong, and perhaps have got through that test several times carried out by several people. In order for it to reach even that stage, it needs to be definite enough for one to be able to articulate clearly beforehand what it would take to refute it. It’s particularly bad to modify an hypothesis to explain away apparent refutations, although that does allow one to come up with better hypotheses if one gets lucky. It has to be specific, and it has independent and dependent variables. The independent variable is the part of an experiment which can be changed and tested, so for example you might have a hypothesis that water boils at a lower temperature under lower pressure and use a vacuum pump to pump some of the air out of a sealed chamber, then use a barometer and a thermometer to measure the heated vessel of water and its surroundings. The dependent variable is the boiling point of water under lower pressure, and the independent variable is the pressure inside the chamber. This is what it takes to qualify something as an hypothesis.

A theory, in scientific terms, is what, if anything, comes out of the other end of this process, which must be practiced more than once by different people in different places while attempting to duplicate the conditions as closely as possible. For this to happen, experiments need to be written up carefully and in detail. Ideally, they should also be carried out by people who are dissimilar to the people who originally did the experiments and are still competent. Without taking up a position on the efficacy or otherwise of homœopathy, for example, many studies lack ecological validity because they don’t involve the kind of consultation homœopaths undertake before they prescribe remedies, if that’s what they are, and consequently the .fact that there is absolutely no trace of the substance left in the preparation must continue to be taken as irrelevant until there can be proper dialogue between homœopaths and skeptics. For the record, I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that homœopathy can work, but I cannot definitively say that it doesn’t unless a well-designed scientific procedure has been reproduced which is also ecologically valid which refutes it, and it is not a scientific position to assert that it doesn’t or does work until that’s been done, and as far as I know it never has. Hence my suspicion that it doesn’t work, like that of other people, including medical scientists, is not scientific and not based on a specific theory. However, in case you’re interested, that’s why I’m not a homœopath, among other reasons (e.g. that it isn’t vegan), so I just avoid it and withhold judgement.

A scientific theory is an explanation for a phenomenon which has been tested repeatedly in the manner described above and has not been refuted. There has been some controversy in the history of science regarding exactly what the process is, partly resulting from the problem that inductive inference is not strictly logical. Just because something has always happened doesn’t mean it always will, and actual logic is structured such that it’s impossible to draw false conclusions from true premises, which means that there is no logical link between cause and effect, which appears to destroy the scientific endeavour entirely. Of course, few people actually follow this through in their everyday lives because of the high degree of uncertainty it would bring. One of the breakthroughs Karl Popper made was to come up with an account of the scientific method which didn’t use inductive inference.

According to Popper, theories are simply held until they’re refuted. I’ve possibly gone a bit too far in accepting a kind of caricature of his beliefs in this area because I hold that all scientific theories are wrong. He did once make an off-the-cuff remark about the probability of arriving at a correct scientific theory being zero, but I think this was probably meant to be a joke. The basic idea is that scientific theories are simply used as practical ways of engaging with the world, such as building TV sets and internal combustion engines to mention two technological applications of theories, until something else comes along and proves them false. That doesn’t actually mean anything will ever do that, but then the question arises of whether the reason it doesn’t is because it’s literally impossible or is just because nobody happens to have come across a way of refuting it. To me, Popper is a somewhat questionable person because he threw his lot in with the likes of Hayek, although he didn’t seem to be as right wing, and although I don’t mean to be ad hominem about it, if his thought forms a consistent whole, this would for me cast doubt upon his views on the scientific method. His actually articulated political philosophy is akin to that of many right wing thinkers, that the existence of ideology is inherently oppressive, and I think this leads to being in denial about implicit ideologies and is a factor in the persistence of mature capitalism. Relating this back to the idea of theory, it seems mainly to amount to the idea that there can be rigorous scientific theories but no social or political theories of the same kind, and therefore that attempting to apply a political “theory” will always lead to oppression because it will be seriously wrong and not even a practical means of running a society. This is of course mainly aimed at Marxism.

Speaking of Marxism, another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, has always struck me as a closet Marxist. Incidentally, I’m apparently two degrees of separation from him – we have (I presume he’s dead) a mutual acquaintance. This might mean that I’ve been subject to some kind of groupthink with respect to his beliefs. I vaguely recollect that I’ve already talked about him on this blog, so I won’t go into too much detail again, but his basic view is that science normally proceeds with entrenched theories held by people with experience and reputation which are only replaced when they are. When this replacement happens, it’s called a scientific revolution and science does then operate according to Popper’s view, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Hence belief in the luminiferous æther persisted with more and more absurd properties being assigned to it until its existence was disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment. This reminds me of when I used to use a twin tub to do the washing and various things went wrong with it until I was having to unscrew the central column of the washing machine bit, wheel it out to the back yard, upend it to drain out the water and put the column back in. It used to take me four hours of constant attention. Eventually a housemate pointed out that it would be easier to take it to the laundrette, so that’s what I did, but the point is that the difficulties had steadily accumulated without me really thinking of what the alternative might be until I reached a stage of considerable silliness. This happens in science as well. My personal view is that non-baryonic dark matter is an example of this.

On a somewhat related matter, science can sometimes get itself into a position where it becomes difficult to test its propositions using current technology. This happens with particle physics and accelerators, for example, in that it seems to have become impossible to build a sufficiently powerful particle accelerator to test certain hypotheses about the nature of matter. Another example is string theory, which seems to be untestable. However, in such circumstances ways are sometimes eventually found to test these theories, either through ingenuity or better devices for doing so. I’ve mentioned this before as well.

The colloquial looseness of the word “theory” is particularly prone to being misunderstood in the area of biology, where evolutionary theory is often described as “just a theory” and sometimes accused of being untestable. I want to address this by using the idea of “cell theory”. Cell theory is a genuine theory which is much less questioned by anyone than the theory of evolution, and is really just the idea that all living things are composed of cells, which are the basic units of life. As stated, this is actually wrong, and there are other ways in which it could be questioned, but it is basically true. Specifically, viruses, if they’re considered to be alive, are not made up of cells, there are syncytia, which are continuous bodies of cytoplasm with multiple nuclei and other organelles through them, fungi being an example, and what we think of as single-celled organisms could alternatively be thought of as organisms whose bodies are not divided up into cells and it’s a kind of useful fiction to consider an amœba and a white blood cell to be the same kind of thing because the former is a whole organism whereas the latter is a small part of a much larger one. It’s also not known if any shadow biosphere which might exist on or in Earth is made up of cells, and then of course there’s the possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe, if it exists, being very differently constituted. However, all of these things are details and they don’t really contradict the general truth of the theory. They don’t mean that if you come across a tree, say, or a jellyfish they won’t turn out to be made of cells. What happens is that theories become refined with scientific change. Cell theory is a theory which is also an approximate fact. The fact that most large plants and animals are made up of cells has been established and remains the case.

Applying this to evolution, yes evolution is a theory, but it’s a theory which is also a fact. There are refinements and controversies within it. For instance, Richard Dawkins and others are very keen on individual gene selection, where they see genes as the basic unit competing for survival, and tend to reject group selection, where the survival of individual genes is influenced by the evolution of groups of organisms. Another example is punctuated equilibrium, which is similar in a way to Kuhn’s idea, that a species stays stable and similar to its ancestors for a while, then suddenly undergoes rapid evolution in response to changing circumstances. There are also the details of how genes are represented, in the form of nucleic acids, and how they’re switched on or off, epigenetics, none of which was known in the early decades of evolutionary theory, and there are clearly exceptions to evolution in the form of planned breeding, genetic modification and the horizontal transmission of genes via viruses between unrelated organisms, but again, none of that contradicts the general theory of evolution by natural selection.

The refinement of theories can also be seen in the progress from Kepler through Newton to Einstein. Kepler was able to work out that the planets in this Solar System obeyed certain physical laws in that they moved in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus, faster when they were closer to the Sun and slower when they were further away, and that the time taken to orbit the Sun is proportionate to the square root of the cube of the mean distance from it. From this, Newton was able to generalise the laws of motion and gravity, which are considerably counterintuitive because we’re so used to air resistance and friction and don’t realise that the way things move on a planet with a substantial atmosphere is a special case. For instance, it may not be obvious that a moving object will travel in a straight line without changing its velocity unless other forces are acting upon it because they nearly always are in our experience. The preceding view is Aristotelian, and effectively applies to driving theory because of braking distances, for example. However, Newtonian physics also applies to driving theory because of the difficulty of using non-anti-lock brakes on ice or a wet road, at which point Aristotelian physics ceases to be applicable. A motorist trying to brake on ice has entered a Newtonian paradigm, and road traffic collisions and other mishaps illustrate very clearly that Newton’s theory is also a fact.

Moving beyond Newton to Einstein, it became clear that in some circumstances the laws of motion didn’t work. In particular, Mercury’s orbit precesses in such a way that it appears to imply that there’s another planet further in whose gravity pulls it about, and the Michelson-Morley Experiment shows that light travels at the same speed when it’s moving with the orbital motion of Earth, against that motion or at right angles to it. Hence further refinement was needed, and it came in the form of the general and special theories of relativity. There are various ways to demonstrate that relativity is true, some more arcane than others. For instance, subatomic particles are often unstable and have a half-life in the same way as radioisotopes. In a particle accelerator, these lives are longer according to how fast they’re moving. One of the starkest examples of why relativity is true is found in satellite navigation systems, which again apply to driving in the form of GPS and satnav, although interestingly they’ve been used by the military since the early 1960s CE. GPS satellites orbit at 14 000 kph and are in orbits where Earth’s gravity is weaker than on the surface. Both of these influence how fast the atomic clocks on board work, to the extent that they run around 38 microseconds faster per day than a clock stationary relative to Earth’s surface at sea level. Light travels more than eleven kilometres in that time. Therefore, the clocks in the satellites have to be adjusted to take this into consideration, or the error in locating a GPS receiver would accumulate by several miles every day. This also helps planes land safely in bad weather as it enables them to locate the runway in fog. Hence again it’s theory which is also factual. Some of us live in hope that a loophole will one day be found in the details of special relativity which will enable spaceships to reach the stars within a reasonable amount of time. If that happens, the fact will remain that most of the time relativity works fine. An exception needs to be found, and this may be present, for instance, in the space between two cosmic strings, which is however fine for moving between cosmic strings but not much else. If relativity was wrong, light would move more slowly if an observer was moving, and a moving torch would add its speed to the speed of its light, but this doesn’t happen. Also, Mercury’s orbit would either be different or there would be another planet orbiting closer to the Sun.

There are, however, wider usages of the word “theory” than just in science, as listed above. In this broader sense, a theory is a rationally-held abstract model of a phenomenon. It’s probably this usage which leads to confusion. In mathematics and logic, theory has to have a different meaning than in the other sciences because it can’t really depend on observation and testing in the same way. There are conjectures in mathematics, for example, that every even number is the sum of two primes, which has turned out to be the case for every example known but may at some point turn out not to be, and Fermat’s Last Theorem, mentioned here, that aⁿ+bⁿ=cⁿ is false for integer n>2. Entertaining 2109 as a real thing momentarily, and who knows, it may be, revealing the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to the psychical researchers in Cheshire would’ve disrupted our timeline, where Andrew Wiles proved it in 1994. The difference between mathematical theories and those of empirical science is that the former can be completely proved whereas the latter can only continue to be corroborated until proof of the contrary. Having said that, geometry in particular has turned out to be empirical rather than mathematical because of the claim in Euclidean geometry that parallel lines stay the same distance apart. They don’t. If they did, one consequence would be that GPS systems wouldn’t be prone to the same kind of error. Hence geometry does depend on observation and testing even though it went on for thousands of years before anyone realised it. This could also be true of logic. For instance, logic has the Law Of Excluded Middle and Non-Contradiction, which assert respectively that either-or always applies, such as something either being true or false, and that something cannot simultaneously both be and not be so. Quantum physics and some eastern philosophies suggest otherwise, and there are other kinds of logic which allow more than two truth-values, which may be in different orders incidentally, suggesting that there is more like a figurative hyperspace for truth, falsehood and others than a simple line along which truth and falsehood vary. Again, this has partly been refuted by observation. Hence mathematics and logic may not be as safe from refutation as they seem.

“Gender theory” is a polemical term rather than one actually applied by those who are said to practice it. Although there are such things as queer theory and feminist theory, this term actually refers to a purported conspiracy, sometimes seen as part of cultural Marxism when that is used as a label for a conspiracy theory. Phrases translatable as “gender theory” arose outside the Anglosphere and purports to refer to the idea that gender can be chosen at will and is being forced on children and society in general, and also aims to erode the idea of gender. This is a use of the word “theory” in a colloquial sense, because of course political and religious conservatives would assert that the reality is the biologically-based gender binary, so gender “theory” is not intended to refer to a set of beliefs which have been arrived at scientifically, unless the person involved distrusts science more generally. In fact any theories associated with gender with scientific support contradict the straw man created by this conspiracy theory.

And that’s another thing. In order to be scientific, and maybe they needn’t be, conspiracy theories would have to be able to make predictions and be open to falisification. There would need to be a test which would, if failed, demonstrate them to be false. Since there are so many of them, it’s hard to know where to start and also unfair to generalise. Moreover, this is a colloquial use of the word and it may be unfair to hold them to scientific standards. Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. For instance, there really was a consortium of filament light bulb manufacturers which deliberately made them less durable than they were originally, and some of the longest lasting bulbs date from before this time, such as the Centennial Light, which has been on continuously since the first year of the twentieth Christian century. Although investigation has revealed that this really did happen, there is a bit of a problem relying on the existence of really old working light bulbs to attempt to confirm this, as there’s a built-in bias towards older light bulbs from the fact that if they’d lasted a long time they’d be more likely to be older. For all we know there are filament bulbs manufactured in 2011, the last year they were produced, sitting in new old stock and likely to last another century. Except that we basically do know there aren’t because the conspiracy was real.

Something like colour or music theory is different again. They seem to refer to a structure of concepts placed on top of something we are unable to perceive in particular ways, so they’re anchored in an unchangeable realm and represent various networks of ideas on top of them. For instance, complementary colours and the colour wheel make sense to us because of the nature of our sense of vision. Most humans have three types of cone cells and one type of rod cell, each with peak sensitivity to a different hue. Although they’re thought of as red, green, blue and monochrome, the peak sensitivity of the first is actually in the yellow range. Red cone cells are less common than the others among mammals. To most mammals, red berries such as tomatoes and holly are black, so their complementary “colour” would be white, but not for us. Likewise, if an animal can see ultraviolet as an additive primary colour, i.e. they have an ultraviolet cone cell but no red, the complementary colour to ultraviolet would be aqua, which would be equivalent to white. It isn’t clear to me how a colour wheel would work in these circumstances because for us, violet and purple are similar but in fact violet is almost a primary colour but purple is secondary. I suspect that this is because violet wavelengths are half that of red, so our red cone cells are triggered by alternate wavefronts of violet light, raising the question of whether ultraviolet would look yellowish or greenish to us, and on top of that whether we could see yellow-blue, which to us is impossible but is possibly what ultraviolet “ought” to look like. Hence colour theory depends on our physicality and can be thought of scientifically but something else has been built on top of our nature which is not, strictly speaking, universal.

Concepts are also theory-laden, as the phrase has it, and this erodes the distinction between what we perceive as factual and what we theorise about. We bring assumptions with us because it’s impossible to function otherwise. In a professional capacity, a psychiatrist of the old school might have been trained in Freudian analysis and look at a client’s interactions in terms of, say, cigarette-smoking being a phallic symbol rather than a physical addiction, so the behaviour they see in front of them might be interpreted completely differently. It affects all of us though. There are two kinds of theory-ladenness: semantic and perceptual. For the former, the words we use are based on pre-existing assumptions, hypotheses and theories. For instance, Brownian motion is the tendency of small particles in fluids to be battered asymmetrically by molecules and atoms, making them jiggle. This was first observed in pollen grains and thought to be something to do with them being alive, so there could be a confirmation bias there that everything which shows this kind of motion is living. The way I’ve explained Brownian motion, however, depends on atomic theory in a similar way. A related problem is that the theory to be tested can be assumed beforehand. Semantically, there is another kind of issue. For instance, temperature and heat are sometimes seen as interchangeable, and in an experimental write-up, temperature might be misreported or even misread as a result. In fact, temperature is a measure of the mean kinetic energy in the molecules or atoms of a substance whereas heat is a measure of the total kinetic energy. This comes into play with the upper atmosphere, which reaches a temperature of 2 500°C but a thermometer of the kind we’re used to employing will measure that as well below freezing because of the sparseness of the ions in that region. In some senses it’s actually meaningless that the atmosphere has that high a temperature but in others it is important.

There’s a well-known psychological experiment where some psychologists had themselves admitted to a psychiatric hospital by faking symptoms which did not correspond to any particular diagnosis. Once there, it took a long time for the staff to recognise that they were not mentally ill, even though they ceased to exhibit these symptoms immediately after admission, and there was also a hierarchical order to the people who realised they weren’t “ill”, starting with the lowest-paid and least professional workers and ending with the consultants. I would call that a good example of theory-ladenness, and it’s also interesting that education in a particular speciality actually conceals the apparent reality from those who ought to be experts. However, there is another possible interpretation of this experiment that it actually means that some psychiatric patients are not as they seem. This doesn’t mean they don’t correspond to the definition of mental illness, but it’s possible that society forces them to act in a certain way consciously because they lack a coherent rôle in it. This tallies with the social model of disability, that society disables people rather than disability being an inherent organic property of the individual.

There’s a tendency to think of theory as in opposition to practice. This is indeed sometimes the case. However, it’s equally true that we can’t avoid forming pre-conceptions, which are theories in a looser, non-scientific, sense, before we do things. Another problem, though, is that although there are perfectly valid non-scientific uses of the word “theory”, these can lead to misunderstandings as with the idea that evolutionary theory is “just a theory”, when it’s actually a fact as well-established as cell theory. At the same time, I wish the other senses of the word were more respected, because they are not in some sloppy realm where things are not thought through much of the time but constitute a firm basis. If I want to create a harmonious arrangement of clothing by dressing in complementary colours, the fact that that depends on most of us having only three types of cone cell doesn’t help anyone. I could insist, for example, that I’m wearing ultraviolet tights which look black to humans and pair them with a “complementary” teal skirt, but that’s not the same as wearing purple tights and a green skirt. In a way, it’d be good if we had more than one word for theory, but on the whole it’s futile for a sole individual to attempt to change language. Therefore we should really just be careful to think through how we are using that word and take steps to signal the distinction in other ways.