Escalators Redux - The Philosophy of Science

So i was going to post this as a reply to Glabe's escalator musing, but as it began to expand into the philosophy of science i figured it needed a post of its own..

You want an economic explanation? i'll give you one in the form of a Kipling-esque just-so story popularized by everyone from Landsburg to Dawkins to the religious right Landsburg and Dawkins despise so thoroughly..

As i use the term, the essence of a just-so story is that the existence of any phenomenon makes sense tautologically. If your paradigm accounts for things existing because they are economically efficient or evolutionarily adaptive or because God created them, then you seek to recreate a chain of causality consistent with your paradigm that accounts for the existence of the phenomenon in question..

Of course i don't mean to disparage the concept of just-so stories; in the end, isn't that what science itself is built on? We create often paradigmatic hypotheses to explain the world around us, then we observe phenomena and recreate chains of causality that either confirm the hypothesis or force it to be refined. As these hypotheses are better refined, we get a better understanding of how the world works. Every so often a paradigm shift is necessary, like when we had to throw out the Ptolemaic cosmology or Newtonian physics because increasingly more detailed observations caused the models to become intractably complex..

Which brings up the question of what counts as science? Newtonian physics was a science. It could be, and was, proven inadequate observationally as a means for describing natural phenomena. Things exist because God created them? Because they are economically efficient? Because they are evolutionarily adaptive? These paradigms admit to no testing, and i would submit that, as such, they are more philosophical than scientific. You cannot disprove a paradigm that says economic phenomena occur because they are efficient. Rather, you use the paradigm to explore causes and to dig around until you find what makes something efficient. Once you've found it, it serves only to reinforce and even to entrench the paradigm. That's why people get so attached to their philosophical paradigms of choice, whether they be religious or naturalistic..

Does that render the sciences of economics and evolution so much rubble? No, but it does destroy religious-based "sciences". If i adopt a philosophy of evolutionary adaptivity, i can then use this philosophy as a backdrop to the science i conduct. i can perform experiments and investigations into the process by which evolution is carried out. i can discover the scientific rules governing nature that enable my philosophy. Thus the philosophy, while not science itself, encourages science by engendering a branch of science devoted to exploring the processes and implications of that philosophy..

Evolutionary science is so well-established and respected precisely because adoption of the evolutionary philosophy has given rise to scientific discovery that has taught us a lot about how the world works. Religious-based "sciences", on the other hand, do not exhibit this characteristic. Rather than encouraging scientific investigation, they often stifle it. Have you ever heard a creationist propose to explain the process whereby God created humans? Of course not. You may however have heard creationists purport to conduct scientific experiments to verify that the earth is only 6,000 years old. i applaud this attempt at scientific inquiry. However, most of the results of such experiments are inconclusive, contrary to the hypothesis, or just plain examples of poorly-done science..

Could creationism become a true science? Yes it could, and so could astrology. But the practitioners of both philosophies decline to do so; i suppose it's because they realize that the application of true scientific methods to their disciplines would be fruitless at best and more likely counterproductive to their claims. That said, i would welcome creationism alongside evolution in biology textbooks, if and only if the creationists are willing to engage in the kind of rigorous science that publication in a reputable textbook requires..

Where was i going with this? Oh yeah, economic efficiency as an example of a paradigmatic philosophy to which scientific principles can be applied in order to trace a chain of causality that can be turned into a just-so story. i have to use this process to explain away Glabe's escalator. Okay, here's what Landsburg would say: The handrail moves at a different speed from the steps because it is economically efficient for it to do so. If this were not the case, the problem would be fixed. If economic efficiency required the handrail to move at the same speed as the steps, it would. But how many people are going to stop using the Metro or switch to a competing Metro because the escalators are not in synch? If the Metro isn't going to lose money because of the way things are, there is no incentive to expend money to alter the status quo..

Of course, we must assume that the handrail and steps are natually out of synch. If they were naturally perfectly timed, they would not have been altered unless economic efficiency demanded it. And of course it is even more absurd to envision people taking their business elsewhere because the handrail and steps are NOT out of synch..

Thus we come to the just-so story. We conclude, based on Glabe's observation, that the handrail and steps are naturally out of synch and that there is no economic incentive to fix the discrepancy. That works fine for this example, but it brings up an even more puzzling issue: i have seen escalators before that were in synch, and now i wonder why they were. Is there something about their construction that makes them naturally in synch that is not present in the Metro escalators? Is there some economic efficiency to be had in synchronizing those escalators that is not present for the Metro escalators? It is very easy to explain away an escalator that is out of synch; but given its existence, it makes it much harder to explain away an escalator that is in synch..