15.11: Exercises

1. Suppose that for the last month and a half you’ve been slightly nauseous. You’ve had a mild headache almost every day. This illness is something new in your life. Aspirin helps with the headache but not with your stomach. Switching to other pain killers doesn't seem to make a difference. The world and your friends have lately been especially boring, and you don't want to do much of anything except watch TV. Usually you like to munch while watching the tube, but for the last few weeks you’ve lost your appetite. Your grades are suffering. Create several possible explanations for your illness. How would you go about testing your explanations to see whether any one is correct? [In this scenario, don't merely be passive and call the doctor; you are your own doctor.]

2. Professor William Whewell thought that the aim of science is to discover the works of God. Dr. G. Bell believed that the aim is to acquire specific facts. These days, a more generally acceptable answer than either of these two is that the aim of science is to

1. build technologically useful products.
2. improve our power to predict and explain phenomena.
3. delineate all the known facts of the world.
4. establish the scientific method.

■ 3. Which groups below should you examine before which others if you are trying to confirm or refute the claim that all emeralds are green? Rank them, beginning with the most important. Do not suppose that emeralds are defined to be green.

a. emeralds
b. green things
c. non-green things
d. non-emeralds

4. If there has been a 10 percent drop in the lung cancer rate for black females who smoke cigarettes over the last two years, but not for white females who smoke cigarettes, why should you not yet conclude that cigarettes are now safer for you to smoke if you are a black female? Be specific; don't merely say there could be reasons.

5. Referring back to the Concept Check about Brother Bartholomew's being a successful prophet, say which answers are better than which others and why.

6. Evaluate the quality of the following reasoning and defend your evaluation. Can you suggest any improvements? (100 words)

Inge has been a regular sun worshipper ever since she was a little girl in Denmark—summer in the pool or on a towel under the sun, spring and fall on the patio with solar reflectors focused on her exposed skin. She was a bronzed beauty, but now, after twenty-five years, two malignant skin cancers have started growing. She says it's the luck of the draw, but I say it's another case of the harmful effects of sunlight. The sun is just like an infrared lamp; if you put something under it long enough, it will fry. She has her explanation and I have mine, so mine is at least 50% correct.

■ 7. Discuss (under 50 words) the following scientific test in regard to the three conditions for a good scientific test, the deduction condition, the improbability condition, and the verifiability condition. You need not define or explain the three conditions.

Our hypothesis is that all people have telepathic abilities that occasionally show up during their lives, even though most people don't realize it. If the hypothesis is correct, then occasionally people will be stunned by instances in which they and other persons have the same thought at the same time even though they aren't having a conversation and aren't in any other ordinary contact with each other. Our testing has documented many such instances. Some of them are truly remarkable. We have testimony from a wide variety of citizens who have no reason to lie and who in fact have passed lie detector tests. Therefore, our hypothesis is correct.

■ 8. Which of the following is not a useful principle for making scientific progress?

a. Similar effects are likely to have similar causes.
b. Look for confirming instances of the hypothesis, never disconfirming instances.
c. To find the cause, look for the key, relevant difference between situations where the effect occurs and situations where it does not.
d. Divide the problem into manageable components.

■ 9. Suppose your copy of yesterday's newspaper says, "The Detroit Pistons will win their basketball game tomorrow night," and you know that this prediction came true this evening. Prophecy by the sports writer? No, your hypothesis is that the writer is not psychic, and you do not feel obliged to design some experiment to test this. If so, why does good scientific methodology require you to treat the Brother Bartholomew situation mentioned in an earlier section of this chapter any differently? ^[401]

10. Write an essay in which you critically analyze the following claims.

I am reincarnated. I once was a male slave who worked as a personal assistant to King Tut of ancient Egypt. I can prove it. I happen to know something that only a reincarnated person could know. I know that one of the members of Tut's harem was a dancer who wore special pearl bracelets on each wrist. I documented this fact six months ago by publishing drawings of the bracelets, yet it was only last week that archaeologists dug up the woman's tomb and found the pair of bracelets. Nowhere in Egyptian literature are the bracelets ever mentioned.

In answering, assume that the last two statements have been verified as correct.

11. What is the best example below of the fallacy of ad hoc rescue?

a. Newton deduced Galileo's law of falling terrestrial bodies from his own laws of motion, thereby rescuing Galileo's law from refutation.
b. Newton adopted the particle theory of light even though Huygens's optical experiments showed definitively that light is a wave and not a group of particles.
c. Scientists struggling to explain the odd shape of Uranus's orbit using Newton's law of gravitation suggested that God wanted the orbit to be perturbed in just the ways astronomers observed it to be.
d. The dinosaur extinction hypothesis can be rescued by finding data that would be implied by the hypothesis.

12. Uranium becomes lead in 4.5 billion years, say the scientists. OK, but how do the scientists know this if they have never sat and watched a piece of uranium for that long?

13. What is wrong with the following reasoning?

According to the dictionary definition of science, a science is a body of knowledge amassed in a systematic way. Therefore, because a telephone book and a repair manual both are systematized bodies of knowledge, it follows that they, too, are sciences. Thus, the following is a correct listing of some of the sciences: physics, botany, repair manual, chemistry, geology, telephone book, astronomy, and anthropology.

14. What is wrong with this as a scientific explanation?

Rafael dropped the ball because of his carelessness.

15. The passage below was accepted by the Catholic Church as a refutation of the astrological hypothesis that the stars determine every person's destiny. It is from the Confessions of St. Augustine, a Catholic saint who wrote in about 400 C.E. (a) Briefly explain why the refutation is a successful refutation, and then (b) alter the astrological hypothesis so that St. Augustine's remarks no longer refute the essential claims of astrology.

Firminus had heard from his father that, when his mother had been pregnant with him, a slave belonging to a friend of his father's was also about to bear.... It happened that since the two women had their babies at the same instant, the men were forced to cast exactly the same horoscope for each newborn child down to the last detail, one for his [father's] son, the other for the little slave.... Yet Firminus, born to wealth in his parents' house, had one of the more illustrious careers in life... whereas the slave had no alleviation of his life's burden.

■ 16. Consider the following test:

I predicted that if mice have been stealing the strawberries during the night from my terraced garden, then they ought to show up on the infrared videotape that I had left running all night. I didn’t really expect to get such a good video, but look at this clip. There they are! Look at that one snatching my berries. Will you loan me your hungry cat?

What is the conclusion of the argument that shows the test satisfies the deducibility condition?

a. If mice have been stealing strawberries during the night from my terraced garden, then strawberries should be missing the next day.
b. The videotape will contain parts showing mice taking strawberries from my terraced garden.
c. Mice stole strawberries during the night from my terraced garden.
d. If mice stole strawberries during the night from my terraced garden, then clearly they are the culprits

17. A science's paradigm is

a. that part of the science's methodology that has not changed throughout the history of science.
b. the normal way to solve problems in the science.
c. a nonstandard way of constructing explanations within the science.
d. the accepted way of revolutionizing the science.

■ 18. Occasionally in disputes about creationism and evolution, someone will say that the theory of evolution is both a theory and a fact, and the opponent will say that evolution is a theory and so should not also be called a fact. Explain this disagreement.

■ 19. The International Testing Service, which tests third- and sixth-grade students throughout the world, recently reported that students at the Shalom Day School, a private school, have been doing significantly better each year for the last five years. Knowing that the tests do give an accurate report of the students' basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, Dr. Julius Moravcsik of the Nashville School System commented that the report evidently shows that teachers at Shalom Day School are doing a better job each year. Justify why this comment could be an example of committing the post hoc fallacy. Do so by giving a specific alternative explanation of the improved scores, not by merely stating the definition of the fallacy.

20. Sarah Manring says that her psychic friend has extraordinary mental power. When asked why she believes this about him, Sarah said, "Because once he offered to tell me what I was thinking. He said I had been thinking about having sex with my boyfriend but had decided not to, and he was right." Explain why Sarah is jumping to conclusions about her psychic friend. More specifically, what condition for a good test most obviously fails to hold and thus makes Sarah's test not a good test of the psychic's power?

a. Deducibility,
b. Improbability,
c. Verifiability.

21. I'm going to test my precognitive powers. I predict that my mother will be calling me the next time my phone rings. Oh, there goes the phone now. "Hello? Mom! Hey, I knew you were going to call!''

Discuss whether all three conditions for a good scientific test apply to this test. That is, is the predicted outcome of the test (a) deducible, (b) improbable, and (c) verifiable?

■ 22. Suppose competent archaeologists have extensively looked for, but not discovered, a trace of an ancient city on a particular island. Suppose Mr. Jones points out this failure to find the ancient city, then mentions the fact that other archaeologists don't dispute the results, and from this concludes that there was no ancient city there. Is Mr. Jones' conclusion probably correct? Why?

23. Write an essay about astrology. Describe astrology and explain how its practitioners believe it works and what evidence they might offer in defense of its success. Use footnotes to indicate the source of your information. By applying some of the five criteria or detecting pseudoscience mentioned in this chapter, create an argument for why astrology is a pseudoscience.

24. Write an essay that responds to the following remark. "Evolutionary theory is both a science and a religion and cannot be conclusively proved. Creation science is no different."

25. Why can't scientists give poorly supported hypotheses the benefit of the doubt, and just accept them? Why the obsessional preoccupation with matters of validation?

26. Francis Bacon said that the way to do science is to clear your mind of all the garbage you’ve previously been taught, then collect data with an open mind, and after the data is collected the correct interpretation of the data will come to you. Today's philosophers of science say science doesn't work that way. What do you suppose they say instead?

27. Create a four-page essay in which you explain to an eighth-grade school audience how science works. Use your own knowledge plus this textbook as your primary source of information about how science works; but express everything in your own words; do not quote from the textbook.

---

Solutions

3 Ranking of groups: (1) emeralds, (2) non-green things, (3) green things and nonemeralds. The most useful group to examine would be the emeralds. Check to see that they are all green. If you can't do that, then check the non-green things making sure you don't discover an emerald in there.

7 Doesn't satisfy the improbability condition for a good test. The test result would be likely to occur either way.

8 Answer (b).

9 The sports writer wasn't claiming prophetic powers, but only using the evidence at hand to guess what the future might bring. What the sports writer did is ordinary; the Bartholomew prediction is extraordinary, and extraordinary claims require extraordinarily good evidence. If the story about the Detroit Pistons is true, nothing much turns on that fact, compared with the story about Brother Bartholomew—at least nothing much as far as our worldview is concerned. If the prophecy part of the Bartholomew story is correct, then science's fundamental beliefs about precognition (seeing into the future) will need to be revolutionized.

16 Answer (b.)

18 The two are using the words theory and fact differently. The first person means by theory a general system of laws, and means by fact that these laws are true. The opponent could be doing one of two things: (i) he or she could mean by theory something that is general and mean by fact something that is not general; and in these senses a theory cannot be a fact, (ii) The opponent could mean by theory something that so far is poorly supported by the evidence and mean by fact something that is known to be well supported by the evidence; and in these senses a theory cannot be a fact. If the opponent is using the terms in sense (i), then the two people are merely having a semantic disagreement; each could easily agree with the other once they straightened out how they are using their terms. But if the opponent is using the terms in sense (ii), then not only are the two persons disagreeing about the meaning of the terms, they are also disagreeing about whether the theory of evolution is well supported by the evidence.

19 Maybe the teachers aren’t doing better but instead the admission standards at the school changed and now only more accomplished students are admitted. Moravcsik should rule out this alternative hypothesis before promoting his hypothesis about the teachers.

22 Yes, this is fine reasoning. The conditions of a good test were met. The scientists’ hypothesis is that there is no ancient city on this island. The deduction condition is satisfied because one can deduce from the hypothesis that, if there were no ancient city, then extensive looking for it should fail to find it. The probability condition is satisfied because it is improbable that they’d find no city if in fact the hypothesis were incorrect and there really was an ancient city there. The verifiability condition is satisfied because it is a straightforward matter to verify that the test came out as predicted, namely with finding no evidence of the ancient city.