Book Review: “String Theory and the Scientific Method” by Richard Dawid

String Theory and the Scientific Method
By Richard Dawid
Cambridge University Press (2013)

“String Theory and the Scientific Method” is a very interesting and timely book by a philosopher trying to make sense out of trends in contemporary theoretical physics. Dawid has collected arguments that physicists have raised to demonstrate the promise of their theories, arguments that however are not supported by the scientific method as it is currently understood. He focuses on string theory, but some of his observations are more general than this.

There is for example that physicists rely on mathematical consistency as a guide, even though this is clearly not an experimental assessment. A theory that isn’t mathematically consistent in some regime where we do not have observations yet isn’t considered fundamentally valid. I have to admit it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to call this a “non-empirical assessment,” because our use of mathematics is clearly based on the observation that it works very well to describe nature.

The three arguments that Dawid has collected which are commonly raised by string theorists to support their belief that string theory is a promising theory of everything are:

1. Meta-inductive inference: The trust in a theory is higher if its development is based on extending existing successful research programs.
2. No-alternatives argument: The more time passes in which we fail to find a theory as successful as string theory in combining quantum field theory with general relativity the more likely it is that the one theory we have found is unique and correct.
3. Argument of unexpected explanatory coherence: A finding is perceived more important if it wasn’t expected.

Dawid then argues basically that since a lot of physicists are de facto not relying on the scientific method any more maybe philosophers should face reality and come up with a better explanation that would alter the scientific method so that according to the new method the above arguments were scientific.

In the introduction Dawid writes explicitly that he only studies the philosophical aspects of the development and not the sociological ones. My main problem with the book is that I don’t think one can separate these two aspects clearly. Look at the arguments that he raises: The No Alternatives Argument and the Unexpected Explanatory Coherence are explicitly sociological. They are 1.) based on the observation that there exists a large research area which attracts much funding and many young people and 2.) that physicists trust their colleagues’ conclusions better if it wasn’t the conclusion they were looking for. How can you analyze the relevance of these arguments without taking into account sociological (and economic) considerations?

The other problem with Dawid’s argument is that he confuses the Scientific Method with the rest of the scientific process that happens in the communities. Science basically operates as a self-organized adaptive system, that is in the same class of systems as natural selection. For such systems to be able to self-optimize something – in the case of science the use of theories for the descriptions of nature – they must have a mechanism of variation and a mechanism for assessment of the variation followed by a feedback. In the case of natural selection the variation is genetic mixing and mutation, the assessment is whether the result survives, the feedback is another reproduction. In science the variation is a new theory and the assessment is whether it agrees with experimental test. The feedback is the revision or trashcanning of the theory. This assessment whether a theory describes observation is the defining part of science – you can’t change this assessment without changing what science does because it determines what we optimize for.

The assessments that Dawid, correctly, observes are a pre-selection that is meant to assure we spend time only on those theories (gene combinations) that are promising. To make a crude analogy, we clearly do some pre-selection in our choice of partners that determines which genetic combinations are ever put to test. These might be good choices or they might be bad choices and as long as their success hasn’t also been put to test, we have to be very careful whether we rely on them. It’s the same with the assessments that Dawid observes. Absent experimental test, we don’t know if using these arguments does us any good. In fact I would argue that if one takes into account sociological dynamics one presently has a lot of reasons to not trust researchers to be objective and unbiased which sheds much doubt on the use of these arguments.

Be that as it may, Dawid’s book has been very useful for me to clarify my thoughts about exactly what is going on in the community. I think his observations are largely correct, just that he draws the wrong conclusion. We clearly don’t need to update the scientific method, we need to apply it better, and we need to apply it in particular to better understand the process of knowledge discovery.

I might never again agree with David Gross on anything, but I do agree on his “pre-publication praise” on the cover. The book is very recommendable reading both for physicists and philosophers.

I wasn’t able to summarize the arguments in the book without drawing a lot of sketches, so I made a 15 mins slideshow with my summary and comments on the book. If you have the patience, enjoy :)