The spirit of HPS (a love letter)

Last June I was in Vienna for the fifth conference on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS5). It was an immensely enjoyable event. Towards the end of the conference, during the very last talk that I saw before I had to leave for the airport, I rediscovered my love for HPS. Here’s how it happened.

The beginning was inauspicious. The speaker had made slides with LaTeX, so they were heavy on text.1 What is more, she recited those slides word for word, which is usually considered bad presentation technique. But here’s the surprising thing: it worked brilliantly. Because of the exact parallelism between the slides and the spoken word, it was easy to follow the speaker’s arguments and evidence. Many presentations go off the rails because the audience doesn’t know whether to focus on the slides or the spoken word. That wasn’t a problem in this case.

The story started simply enough. There’s a famous biomedical discovery from the 1980s that led to a Nobel prize: the fact that gastric ulcers are caused by infection with Helicobacter pylori. The episode is reasonably well researched in HPS, so we know something about who discovered what, when, and where, and how additional research established the finding beyond reasonable doubt. But the speaker asked an interesting counterfactual question: Why was the discovery not made before the 1980s? The conditions should have been right earlier. On the face of it, there was no good reason for the delay. In terms of concepts and methods, the discovery could have been made in the 1950s. So why wasn’t it?

Here’s where things became interesting. A big part of the problem was a mistaken assumption: that the stomach is sterile because of its high acid content. The speaker began by asking the most obvious questions. Perhaps there was good empirical warrant for believing in a sterile stomach? Perhaps the techniques for detecting certain types of bacteria did not exist prior to the 1980s? Or if they existed, perhaps they were not routinely used? Perhaps an earlier study had made other causes of gastric ulcers very likely? These are good, solid epistemological question that, I think, must always be asked first. In general, scientists are good at science.

But when none of these explanations seemed right, she opened up the list of possibilities. Could it be that we have an instance here of a sociological rather than an epistemological process? Maybe epidemiologists in the 1950s felt that the search for infectious etiologies belonged to an “old paradigm” and was no longer worth pursuing? Or perhaps some gastroenterologists who rejected the infectious etiology of gastric ulcers had undue influence? Could it be that a study claiming that the stomach is sterile was cited more and more but questioned less and less? Or maybe the treatment of gastric ulcers only became big business in the 1980s, which made it more attractive to do research on the disease? Clearly, there are many non-epistemic consideration that may have been in play.

I like this plurality of questions. Historians of science remain (on the whole) captivated by the social conditions of science, while philosophers are (on the whole) enraptured by highly abstract formal problems. It is up to HPS to ask the whole range of pertinent questions about the scientific process: to produce an adequate understanding of how science actually works, from the epistemology of experiments to the social organization of inquiry. To me, this is what HPS is all about. I left Vienna at peace with my discipline.2

If you are interested, the talk was based on a paper by Dunja Šešelja and Christian Straßer which is now published in Acta Biotheoretica. Note: The paper’s focus differs from the talk; it is mostly about whether the bacterial hypothesis of ulcer causation was “worthy of pursuit” from the 1950s to the 1980s, with much less focus on broader questions discussed above.

  1. I think LaTeX is great for writing essays, papers and books — I even force my students to learn the system as a kind of tough love measure. But I don’t think it’s a good tool for presentations: it’s not sufficiently visual to produce interesting results, and it encourages a number of bad presentation habits.
  2. Of course, I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm – and Popper (not yet Sir Karl) telling you how science is really done.

How much work can Mill’s method of difference do?

I have a new paper coming out in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, and here’s a link to a preprint on the PhilSci archive.

One of the basic ideas in scientific methodology is that in experiments you should “vary one thing at a time while keeping everything else constant”. This is often called Mill’s method of difference due to John Stuart Mill’s influential formulation of the principle in his System of Logic of 1843. Like many great ideas (think of natural selection), the method of difference can be explained to a second grader in two minutes – and yet the more one thinks about it, the more interesting it becomes.

The late Peter Lipton in his 1991 book on inference to the best explanation (IBE) made the descriptive claim that the method of difference is used widely in much of science, and this seems correct to me. But he also argued that the method is actually much less powerful than we think. In principle, we would like to vary one factor (and one factor only), observe a difference in some outcome, and then conclude that the factor we varied is the cause of the difference. But of course this depends on some rather steep assumptions.

First, we need to be sure that only one factor has changed — otherwise the inference does not succeed and this happens. But how do we ever know that there is only one difference? This is what Lipton called the problem of multiple differences.

Second, we may sometimes wish to conduct experiments where the factor which varies is unobserved or unobservable. For instance, John Snow inferred in the 19th century that local differences in cholera outbreaks in London were caused by a difference in the water supplied by two different companies. However, Snow could not actually observe this difference in the water supply (what we now know was a difference in the presence of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae). So Snow inferred causality even though the relevant initial difference was itself only inferred. This is what Lipton called the problem of inferred differences.

Lipton proposed elegant and clever solutions to both problems. He argued that the method of difference is to some extent mere surface action. Beneath the surface, scientists actually judge the explanatory power of various hypotheses, and this is crucial to inferences based on the method of difference. So Snow may not have known that an invisible agent in part of the water supply caused cholera, or that this was the only relevant difference between the water supplies. But he could judge that if such an agent existed, it would provide a powerful explanation of many known facts. In order to make it easier to discuss such judgments about the “explaininess” of hypotheses, Lipton introduced the “loveliness” of explanations as a technical term. Loveliness on his account comprises many common notions about explanatory virtues: for instance, unification and mechanisms. Snow’s explanation is lovely because it would unify multiple known facts: that cholera rates correlate with water supply, that those who got the bad water at their houses but didn’t drink it didn’t get sick, that the problematic water supply underwent less filtration, and so on. An invisible agent would moreover provide a mechanism for how a difference in water supply could cause a difference in disease outcomes, which would again increase the loveliness of Snow’s explanation. Ultimately, Lipton would argue, Snow’s causal inference relied on these explanatory judgments and not on the method of difference “taken neat” (to use Lipton’s phrase).

I have great sympathy for Lipton’s overall project. But I am also convinced that in many experimental studies there are ways to handle Lipton’s two problems that do not rely on an IBE framework. In my paper, therefore, I take a closer look at his main case study — Semmelweis on childbed fever — to find out how the problems of multiple and inferred differences were actually addressed. The result is that multiple differences can be dealt with to some extent by understanding control experiments correctly; and inferred differences become less of an issue if we understand how unobservables are often made detectable. The motto, if there is one, is that we always use true causes (once found) to explain, but that explanatory power is not our guide to whether causes are true. The causal inference crowd will find none of this particularly deep: but within the small debate about the relationship between the method of difference and IBE, these points seemed worth making.

Grue-some confusion

Having concluded at the end of my previous post that the study of statistics has helped me to appreciate the value of the philosophy of science, it is only fitting to point to an instance of the reverse: Statistics can be a resource for solving philosophical problems.

Nelson Goodman’s new riddle of induction is supposed to show that no purely syntactical theory of confirmation is possible (i.e. one that does not depend on the meaning of the terms that appear in the argument, like “raven” or “black”). Here’s an outline of the argument. Goodman introduced the term “grue” and defined it thus: an object is grue if it is green before a certain date D or if it is blue after D. So an emerald is grue before D, while the sky is grue after D. (Note well that nothing changes color: This is all about the terminology we use to describe things.) Obviously, grue-like terms make it difficult to generalize from empirical observations. Even if we have examined a vast number of emeralds under all kinds of conditions and have found all of them to be grue, this fact does not generalize. After the future date D, we will encounter emeralds that are not grue. Thus, it is entirely hopeless to attempt to specify how many observations or how many variations of circumstances are needed before we can arrive at the general claim that “all emeralds are grue”.

It is a sound intuition to think that something must be fishy about grue-like terms. However, it has been difficult to show why precisely grue-like terms are inadmissible in science. Many attempts to solve the problem failed: Most famously, attempts to show that time-relative terms in general are inadmissible didn’t succeed, despite their intuitive plausibility. It was also proposed that the relevant distinction might be between terms that are “projectible” and those that are not, and this led to a search for criteria of projectibility. Others suggested that true confirmation is only possible where so-called “natural kinds” are concerned. In general, many philosophers concluded that the grue-problem may be intractable and may represent a deep problem for all theories of confirmation.

However, I think that a robust understanding of the problem (or much of the problem) was eventually found — an understanding based on statistical thinking. It is an excellent instance of progress in philosophy of science. Here’s a brief review of the proposed solution. Goodman was thinking about a sampling operation: You look at n members of a population in order to form an opinion about the properties of the entire population. To use his example, you conclude that all emeralds are green from sampling n emeralds. To use a more realistic example, you might want to predict how a country is going to vote based on a sample of 2000 likely voters. Now, it is well known that sampling fails if certain assumptions aren’t met. One of these assumptions is that the act of sampling must not alter the property being sampled. If my asking people “who will you vote for next Tuesday?” causes them to feel more established and therefore to vote for the incumbent party, my survey will overestimate the incumbents’ share of the vote. It turns out that something similar holds for the term grue: The fact that I sample an emerald before date D makes it “grue”, while otherwise it would be “not grue”. Thus, my sampling of an emerald can change its “grueness”. Clearly, then, this violates the rules of sampling. It is this statistical reasoning, and not some elaborate philosophical theory, that explains why “grue” is an inadmissible predicate.

The matter is, of course, more complex than I make it out to be; and there may indeed exist instances of grue-like problems that cannot be treated like this. For those who wish to go beyond my three paragraphs, I recommend this paper by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

What I learned by discovering statistics using R

I would summarize many of my driving interests under the heading of “scientific epistemology”. However, for a long time I had an egregious blind spot: statistics. Although I read my way through Rohlf and Sokal’s classic text “Biometry” six years ago, it left me with something less than a working understanding of statistics as a research scientist would use it. Whether this was my fault or the text’s, or simply a matter of incompatibility, is hard to say.

To ameliorate the situation, I spent much of my spare time last April plowing through each and every chapter of “Discovering Statistics Using R” by Andy Field (and co-authors). On the whole, it was an immensely enjoyable experience. Here are a few of my meta-insights.

  1. You can grasp the statistical concepts without becoming a mathematician. I sometimes have difficulty assimilating knowledge if I fail to understand its foundations — e.g. to learn how a drug is used without understanding its molecular mode of action. This difficulty persisted even after I had identified it as a hindrance. (This is part of why I wandered from medicine into the history and philosophy of science, where an obsession with foundations is generally a natural advantage.) Analogously, I was worried that I might get stuck with my statistics text as soon as I encountered some mathematical theorem that I had to accept but couldn’t understand with reasonable effort and within reasonable time. Happily, I found it easy to deal with mathematical black boxes in statistics. I think two things helped. First, DSUR introduces the black boxes efficiently and often labels them explicitly, which makes it easier to accept them. Second, many statistical black boxes can be grasped intuitively. For instance, there is the “variance sum law”, which states that the variance of the differences or sums of two independent variables is equal to the sum of the variances of the two variables (this matters, for example, if you are testing whether the means of two populations differ in a t-test). I don’t know how you prove this (although it is not difficult to imagine the outlines of a proof), but I nevertheless find it highly plausible that the variance sum law holds. Other questions are more difficult — e.g., why do correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1? Mathematician friends tell me that the answer to this is nontrivial. Nevertheless, I did not have any difficulty accepting it, and so my education in statistics could proceed. I found that there were many similar instances of very tolerable black boxes.
  2. Statistics should be seen in relation to concrete study designs. When I read “Biometry”, I think I lost the forest for the trees: I learned about the theory of statistics but failed to see how it applied to concrete research situations. One of the strengths of DSUR is that it is pretty clear about how each statistical method relates to familiar types of study designs.
  3. The importance of the computer is hard to exaggerate. “Biometry” was originally written in the 1970s, and its primary tool was the pencil: It taught me how to do statistics by hand, if necessary. I get that this can be useful for teaching concepts. But in practice (and in 2014) I found it vastly more enjoyable to study statistics in close contact with R, where I learned how to actually work on more or less realistic data sets. I like to joke that I love computers and will take any excuse to spend more time with them. More seriously, I think that doing statistics is pretty similar to programming: Understanding the concepts is one thing, but you also need to learn which functions take which values, where to put the semicola, and what the error messages mean. There is a craft to statistics, and I think that familiarity with the craft makes it easier to assimilate the theory.
  4. Emotions matter. It is well know that learning without positive emotion is difficult for us humans. Importantly, therefore, DSUR helped me to get excited about statistical methods. I get that you should have a good conceptual grasp of the assumptions that a data set must meet if you want to do an ANOVA. But studying those assumptions before you have ever done an ANOVA and thus before you have discovered the potential power of the method is, frankly, boring. DSUR helps you to see — more importantly, to feel — that statistical methods are really cool and powerful, and this helps you through more tedious things like checking whether your data are homoscedastic.
  5. Philosophy of science is useful. During the first half of the book, in the throes of young romance, I felt that statistics is the key to understanding scientific epistemology and in some sense removes the need for a philosophy of science. But I quickly recuperated: I now think with renewed conviction that the philosophy of science is tremendously important. It should be taught alongside statistics to students. One cannot make sense of scientific methodology by understanding only statistics but none of the concepts that traditionally live in the philosophy of science. Statistics texts hardly touch many of these questions: What is a cause? What is the logic of causal inference, and what are its prerequisites? (Which is the basis for asking: And how does statistics help in inferring causes?) What is the epistemological role of scientific models? What are mechanisms, and what does it take to ascertain them? How do causal processes at different levels of organization relate to each other? What is an explanation, and what role does explanatory power play in the confirmation of scientific hypotheses? Many of these questions do not (currently) have definitive answers. But I do think (based on experience) that most working scientists have strong intuitions about them that help them in their epistemological work — and if nothing else, the philosophy of science can prime these intuitions and help to produce better scientists. To my surprise, then, an immersion in statistics has helped me to better appreciate one of my parent disciplines (which are, in this order: biomedicine, history of science, and philosophy of science).

Grand Theories

David Hull:

Although grand theories about the nature of science are currently out of fashion, I think we need to rehabilitate them. We need to construct theories about science the way that scientists construct theories about fluids, gene flow and continental drift. To construct such theories, we need data, and our only source of data is the study of science, past and present.


(Original at JSTOR.)

The power of natural selection

Last week I wrote a version of Richard Dawkins’s “methinks it is a weasel” program (as explained in The Blind Watchmaker). The point of the program is to demonstrate the power of cumulative selection in comparison to pure chance. Consider a random string such as “in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth”. In a purely random process, the probability of this string occurring is minuscule: with 27 letters in the alphabet (don’t forget the space!) and 54 letters in the string, the number of possible strings is 2754, or 1.97 x 1077. Your chances of hitting on this string by producing random strings are, for all practical purposes, zero.

But the situation changes once we introduce selection and cumulation. The program begins by creating a population of random strings, each 54 letters in length. None of these will be very close to the target string “in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth”. Nevertheless, some strings will match the target string in a few positions. The program evaluates each one to determine the best match. For example, the following best candidate in generation 1 (from an actual run of the program) shares 7 letters with the target string. These are underlined:

 gen 1: tashiwwsmsianhdfyf yvrrjutym bjjoig byxfpkwpkkhzfj g h
target: in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth

The program then takes this one best match and mutates it to create a new population of candidate strings. For example, each letter (in each string in the population) might be replaced with a randomly chosen letter from the alphabet with a probability of 0.09 (resulting, in this case, in around 4.8 replaced letters per string on average). This new population of strings is then again evaluated, and the best match to the target string is again retained and mutated. The mutations can be either neutral (if a non-matching letter is replaced with a non-matching letter, or if a matching letter is replaced with itself), detrimental (if a matching letter is replaced with a non-matching one) or beneficial (if a non-matching letter is replaced with a matching one).

Many generation will yield none or only small improvements — for example, when a new population of 100 strings was created based on the first generation string above, the best candidate in the second generation had gained only one matching letter (underlined) in addition to a number of neutral mutations:

 gen 2: tashiwwsmsitnhdfyfvyvrrjutym bjjoig byxfhkwpkkhzfj gth
 gen 1: tashiwwsmsianhdfyf yvrrjutym bjjoig byxfpkwpkkhzfj g h
target: in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth

This cumulative process of mutation and selection continues until each letter in the string matches the target string, at which point the program stops. Needless to say, in the beginning most mutations will be neutral. As the string approaches the target string, more and more mutations will be detrimental, or in other words, the program can take quite a number of generations towards the end to optimize the last few letters.

I would offer my own version to the internet, but it seems redundant since a nice Python version of it is already available, and it is easier to play around with the source code of the Python program than with the code of my Objective-C implementation. (On a Mac, you can run the Python version by opening a Terminal, cd-ing to the directory of the, and running: “python”.)

The main message of the program is that cumulative selection is very different from random generation. In a typical run of the program, it takes around 112 generations to select the target string. If the proverbial monkeys tapping away randomly at typewriters produced one string per second, it would take them 6 x 1069 years to explore all the possible strings of 54 letters. The equivalent selection process — also producing one string per second — would be completed after only 31 hours. Such is the power of random variation coupled with cumulation!

The program has been criticized for exaggerating the power of selection. The critics argue that the program retains correct letters permanently and does not allow them to mutate any more, which is obviously not how mutations work in nature. However, the criticism backfires, since the selection process of the program works fine even if all letters are allowed to mutate in each generation. (Note: That all letters are allowed to mutate does not mean that all letters will mutate; this depends on the mutation rate, discussed below.) Both my implementation and the Python version allow all strings to mutate: it is entirely possible for the number of differences to the target string to increase from one generation to the next, and this often happens. Nevertheless, over time the deleterious mutations are removed.

When I’ve talked about this program in my lectures, some students were concerned about a kind of cheating. They felt that the program “already knew” the target string, so that it did not mirror evolution in nature, where the outcome is unknown. Maybe there is a version of this objection that I have not considered, but generally speaking I think it misses the point. The evolved string is found by the program through a process of blind variation and selection (just as in nature); the target string is only used to determine the “fitness” of a particular letter in a particular location. This reflects actual selection processes: biological variations will also have fitness values relative to the environment in which they occur.

It is instructive to consider how variations in the parameters “mutation rate” and “population size” affect the selection process. The mutation rate, in this program, is a number between 0 and 1. It determines the probability with which an individual letter in a string is replaced during the production of a new population of strings. Trivially, a mutation rate of 0 means no mutations and thus no change in the strings over time. A mutation rate of 1 means that each letter is mutated in each generation, which amounts to the absence of cumulative selection: gains in one generation are not retained in the next. For cumulative selection to work, mutation rates have to be relatively low (try it). In my experiments, mutation rates much above 0.1 generally lead to a selection process that oscillates around a certain number of differences and does not terminate. The reason for this is clear: high mutation rates interfere with the retention of matching letters.

More surprising perhaps are variations of the population size. This variable determines how many strings are produced (and mutated) in each generation. Even though I should have known better, I expected this not to matter too much: I was thinking about the total number of variations produced, and so surely it should be immaterial whether I’m producing 300 generations x 100 strings or 3000 generations x 10 strings — the total number of strings is the same. But this is where so-called “genetic drift” becomes an issue! Consider that each generation begins with a “best candidate” string and produces a population of mutated variants of it. In a reasonably large population, there will be many neutral or detrimental variants and a few improved ones; the improved ones are then selected as the template for the next generation. However, the smaller the population size, the more probable it becomes that none of the few produced variants are improvements. It is easy to see this if you assume a population size of 1: most one-off variants of a string will not be improvements, especially in the latter parts of the selection process (when most letters already match the target). Thus, small population sizes make it possible for the string to start to “drift” randomly, simply because each generation only realizes a small sample of possible variations, most of which are neutral or detrimental.

However, the effects of population size and mutation rate interact. For instance, a mutation rate of 0.09 and a population size of 1000 will allow “in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth” to evolve. If you change the population size to 100, then the process will not terminate: it will oscillate between 10 and 15 differences or so. If you now reduce the mutation rate a bit, say to 0.05, then the process will again terminate. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out the explanation of the phenomenon!

Data never tell a story on their own

As a follow-up on last week’s post, here’s Paul Krugman on Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight:


A tentative suggestion: It seems to me that when Krugman says “model”, philosophers of science might prefer to say “mechanism”. I don’t think Krugman wants you to use a particular way of representing reality (a model); he wants you to analyze data with reference to the actual entities and interactions in the system under study (its mechanism).

Silver’s Mining Playbook (data mining, that is)

Having left the New York Times last year, Nate Silver has now relaunched FiveThirtyEight. I love Silver’s work, and I think his contribution to the American political discourse is invaluable. His push for “data journalism” is timely and necessary. But then, I would advocate a data-driven approach to most areas of life.

When it comes to the philosophy of science, however, Silver could and should be more sophisticated. This bothered me about his intriguing but flawed book “The Signal and the Noise” (look out for a brief review on this blog in the future), and it became apparent again in this piece introducing the new FiveThirtyEight:

Suppose you did have a credible explanation of why the 2012 election, or the 2014 Super Bowl, or the War of 1812, unfolded as it did. How much does this tell you about how elections or football games or wars play out in general, under circumstances that are similar in some ways but different in other ways?

These are hard questions. No matter how well you understand a discrete event, it can be difficult to tell how much of it was unique to the circumstances, and how many of its lessons are generalizable into principles. But data journalism at least has some coherent methods of generalization. They are borrowed from the scientific method. Generalization is a fundamental concern of science, and it’s achieved by verifying hypotheses through predictions or repeated experiments.

The first of these hyperlinks is to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on scientific progress, and the second is to the entry on Karl Popper. Both are problematic – let me explain.

Popper is famous for advocating the view that there is no such thing as verification. Contrary to what generations of scientists and philosophers of science thought, Popper argued, there is in fact no way to show that some generalization such as “all ravens are black” is true, or even likely to be true. On Popper’s account, all you can do is to refute false generalizations. A hundred black ravens do not show that all ravens are black. Nor do a thousand, or a million. However, a single white raven shows conclusively that “all ravens are black” is false. It is debatable whether this works as a general method of science: The philosophical consequences of such a view are severe, and it is pretty clear that scientists do not actually think like this. But one thing is certain: “verifying hypotheses through prediction or repeated experiments” is not a good characterization of Popper’s position.

Modern opinion on the role of generalizations in science is more divided. Certainly they play a role. But it is doubtful that science’s main goal is to search for generalizations, since these are often not too interesting. Take the above example of “all ravens are black”. This is known not to be true, but suppose it were: Would it be very interesting? We would still not know whether it just happens to be true, or whether there is something lawful about it. I would argue that the goal of science is different: it is to understand causal mechanisms. To return to the ravens, we want to know in detail how the causal mechanisms of raven pigmentation work. This will give us an understanding of why most ravens are black, and also of how the mechanisms of pigmentation can change to produce differently colored ravens. Knowledge of causal mechanisms is far more insightful and useful than knowledge about generalizations. But the transition from generalizations to causal mechanisms is one of the great challenges for data mining approaches such as Silver’s.

(Thanks to my friend Fabio Molo for drawing my attention to Silver’s piece, and to Tim Räz for paronomastic help with the title.)