The term Science has been wrong before is a fallacious argument in a number of ways. While it is of course important to take into consideration it is misguided to use this as a trope for defending positions which have been shown to have a severe lack of evidence such as alternative medicine, perpetual motion machines and other pseudoscientific positions To begin with it is a non-sequitur fallacy as the conclusion is not necessarily a logical consequence of the premise. For example, just because scientists were once incorrect about phlogiston, in no way invalidates the theory of evolution. The usual examples of science being wrong such as Galileo (even though he was condemned by the church and not scientists...) were theories that were in no way disprovable at the time, much in the way that certain theories in quantum physics such as string theory cannot be readily disproved in contemporary science. An important factor that is often left out of this equation is the WEIGHT of evidence there was to support such theories. Theories such as evolution, global warming, gravity and the like are well supported because after decades of scrutiny they have stood the test of time and more and more evidence has come in favour of these theories... so much so that a general pattern starts to emerge that is going disproportionately in one direction that creates predictable models of feedback -- this is when a consensus emerges. Many alternative medical practices on the other hand have been carefully shown to be incorrect in one study after another - no additional information will suddenly invalidate these conclusions. When used like this, the science was wrong before trope is akin to suggesting that our observations that gravity is an attractive force are wrong, because one day in the future we might just see something go floating up instead of falling down. So while it is true that several believed-to-be-true theories turned out to be wrong, that doesnt mean that theories that have already been proven wrong might suddenly turn out to be correct. Remember, the problem of inductive reasoning is that we can never really fully know what is TRUE, but can we can know what is FALSE through falsifying claims and disproving them -- its only from disproving claims that we can arrive at a better understanding of what is correct. The fact that science can be wrong in this way is a feature, not a bug, as one of the differences between science and pseudoscience is that science is self-correcting whereas pseudoscience continues to put forth the same debunked points over and over again. Unfortunately, this is the case with most positions that bring out the science was wrong before trope.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 09:58:54 +0000