Does theory ladenness mean I have to throw out science ... and my senses?

https://brucelambert.soc.northwestern.edu/con_proceed/The-theory-ladenness.pdf

So I read about this and how our perception, attention, memory, and interpretation are all affected by assumptions that we make, and also how it poses a problem for science itself. The most troubling was at the end of the link where they say it can override strong sensation in the cases of interpretation and memory.

And...does that mean I can't trust anything science says? I know on some level in spite of that shortcoming we have so much we owe to science and how well it works and what we've done with it. But on the other hand...the evidence is there. How can one trust science when it's shown theories affect how we perceive and interpret reality?

Does this mean solipsism? That other people aren't real? That I can't trust anything I think or remember or see? Would that mean my life is a lie? I was driving today and found myself doubting if everything I saw was real, and even now I find myself doubting if other people are real...

I'm reminded of another answer where I learned about the theory: What are the ontological implications of that “the universe is not locally real” in quantum mechanics?

I'm not sure what anti-realism is but I find it hard to fight against it.

From the wiki page it means:

In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is the position that the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality.[1] In anti-realism, this external reality is hypothetical and is not assumed

Anti-realism in its most general sense can be understood as being in contrast to a generic realism, which holds that distinctive objects of a subject-matter exist and have properties independent of one's beliefs and conceptual schemes.

Which to me sounds like solipsism, it sounds like science can't be trusted and my senses either. Is that true? Does that make all learning and experimentation just pointless? Am I living a lie, or even reality for that matter? Nothing makes sense anymore and I feel pretty isolated right now like when I first learned about solipsism and how I can't prove others are real. Now it seems like there is evidence for that with theory ladenness. Does that mean we can't trust doctors or therapists either since they are just operating on their theories and assumptions? How would one get help then? It seems like the more I ponder it the worse the implications get.

Some more evidence about this:

https://web.cortland.edu/russellk/courses/300sci/hdouts/laden.htm#:~:text=In%20philosophy%20of%20science%20the,do%20these%20expectations%20come%20from?

https://web.cortland.edu/russellk/courses/300sci/hdouts/theolad.htm#:~:text='Theory%2Dladenness'%20means%20loaded,brings%20to%20the%20observation%20setting.

You ask:

it sounds like science can't be trusted and my senses either. Is that true?

My first impression when reading your post: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Science is the best method we have to obtain general knowledge. The method has its presuppositions and its limitations. Serious scientists know this and take it into account.

Most of all: Science does not provide final results with ultimate justification. Science is a process of ongoing hypotheses, they are named theories. Science is able to check its results and to identify previous errors. It tries to avoid them and to improve the approach.

Science progresses by explaining more phenomena on the basis of more powerful theories.

Some general sources for the theory of science are Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As well as Karl Popper "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge".

This is an understandable reaction! Our education likes to present us with a view of the world that says there are Right and Wrong answers to everything, because that's how we measure the learning of our children and try to work out where additional investment of time and attention might be most helpful. It can be tough to come out of the world of early learning and realise that much of our knowledge and understanding is conditional, contextual and transient.

"Science" is not primarily a topic of established facts on which reality is grounded, but a methodology of building on shared experiments and models to try to come to an effective understanding of how things appear to work. Individual humans start from a place and time, we build up our understanding of things and we try to follow along as the world changes and our models and data expand and evolve as well. This knowledge shapes and changes the world we perceive, because we develop new and evolving understandings of what it contains and skills in how to work with it and interact with it.

For David Hume (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/), the absence of Human Nature from the methodology of scientific practice was a critical part of something that was classically mistaken about the "natural philosophy" of his contemporaries. Metaphysical doctrines were taken to be absolute foundational axioms on which everything else had to be derived or interpreted, but why should these abstract things be taken as absolute truths when the evidence for them is only partial, substantiated by perceptual evidence to some degree rather than definitive concrete proof?

The work of psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky on the importance of framing to human cognition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)) is very much a reminder of the locality of human thinking, but this is not an obstacle to being able to navigate within your local surroundings in scientific theory and practice. You come to the table with presumptions, theories, heuristics and biases, and these will influence your ability to interact and learn from your surroundings, but this can change and grow as new data comes into view and you are exposed to and explore other ways of thinking and learning.

You are a grounded human being, you learn things that are close to you first, and that's okay! You might never learn the absolute for all time truth of things, and that's okay too! You don't need to in order to grow, to learn to understand and appreciate and to flourish and do great things.

To a large degree, but we shouldn't consider them to be perfect.

They are generally reliable, but it's also been well-demonstrated that our senses fail sometimes. People see and hear things that aren't there (whether that's a more rare vivid hallucination, or much more common experiences like seeing a hooded figure in the dark in your house that turns out to be a coat rack). People misremember or their minds fabricate significant details of events. People vividly remember things that never happened.

The way to make senses more reliable, and thus more trustworthy, would be to apply some scrutiny to them, to corroborate different sensory experiences with one another, to consider the cases when senses are reliable and when they aren't (what you see in broad daylight tends to be more reliable than what you see while in bed in the middle of the night).

This also applies to biases. This generally relates more to things one can't directly see or see in its entirety: e.g. you might have a bias towards a particular conclusion about some broader claim, and then you put too much weight into supporting evidence and disregard contrary evidence. But we've also demonstrated e.g. that people remember events differently if they are primed.

To some degree, but scientists are well-aware that biases affect people's thinking. In fact, scientists (at least some of them) are the ones that have studied, tested, verified and explained most of what we know about biases.

Science has a robust methodology of testing hypotheses through repeated experiments, and using reliable statistical methods, which helps to counter biases. These methods are continuously improved to identify and get rid of human biases and biases in the data (e.g. p-hacking or spurious correlations). Scientific papers are peer reviewed to also help counter biases. Science, foundationally, tries to avoid starting by assuming that any given claim is true. Every claim should ideally be verified. Untestable or unverified things should be left out of science. Many theists, for example, believe untestable things about gods, but the ones that make good scientists leave these beliefs at the door - what we learn about the world may affect their god beliefs, rather than the other way around. We build our understanding of the world through justified claims, rather than starting from some presuppositions. The ones that make bad scientists try to figure out what's true through the lens of their god belief, and they extremely-commonly end up misrepresenting data and misrepresenting what others say, when they struggle to make sense of those things by starting from some unjustified presupposition.

What shows the reliability of science, and why you should trust it, is the fact that much of modern society is built on its conclusions, from computers, to cars, to houses, to medicine, and even to things like food production. All of those things work very reliably. It's the best method we have for obtaining knowledge.

While it is true that we can't be 100 000% sure that the external world outside of our mind exists, one could argue that it existing is the best explanation for the evidence, that solipsism posits some additional (known or unknown) model of existence, beyond the observable world. This is an unjustified and unnecessary claim that explains no evidence and has no predictive power. So therefore we might reject it.

An observation is a physical process that produces a record of some property of a physical system, e.g. - a photo of a cat may record that the cat has two eyes.

There is some explanation of how the observation is supposed to work to make a record of what you're interested in. Taking a photo of a cat involves using lenses to focus light onto a sensor which produces electrical signals and some electronics changes those signals into a record in an SD card or whatever.

As Karl Popper has pointed out in there is no way to guarantee the correctness of a theory or give a probability of its correctness, see

https://fallibleideas.com/books#popper

A theory may have correctly predicted previous experimental predictions but it might be a special case of a more general theory so its previous correctness doesn't imply its correctness under circumstances that might be understood as different in a later theory.

Instead of trying to confirm theories we should look for problems with theories, invent new theories to solve those problems and then look for problems with the new theories. Observations don't show a theory is true but if they contradict a theory that's a problem for the theory.

If a theory conflicts with an observation then either the theory is wrong or the observation has a problem. In "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", Sections 19 and 20 Popper explains the solution to this issue. Either you reject the theory or you explain some theory of what's wrong with the observation that is independently testable.

For example, in 2011 the OPERA collaboration said they had made observations that seemed to imply neutrinos were moving faster than light. If the observation was correct then a lot of current physics would be wrong. They were wrong. In reality they had made a mistake in setting up the experiment by incorrectly connecting a fibre optic cable delaying a signal carrying time information from a GPS receiver. This theory about the fibre optic cable could be tested by a variety of means like plugging the cable in properly, or introducing a similar defect in another way such as deliberately introducing the delay in another way like testing the effect of plugging in cables wrongly in a simpler experiment elsewhere. If the OPERA collaboration had tried to fix the problem by saying neutrinos only travel faster than light in their experiment, that would have been rejected out of hand.

The standard by which you should decide whether X is real is by looking at whether X's existence solves problems and whether it raises new problems that it can't solve, not by looking for a non-existent infallible source of knowledge.

And...does that mean I can't trust anything science says?

At the heart of all science is a basic understanding about individuals: An individual can be deceived by others and deceived by themselves.

It's why individual testimony alone is not enough to determine scientific truth.

The philosophy of science addresses this issue by providing a good faith and open methodology for research and analysis that leads to answers with a high confidence that others can believe.

The concept of theory ladenness is part of the checks and balances of the scientific methodology. It's why new theories in sciences may take decades before full acceptance. It took many many years before Quantum mechanics was fully accepted and theory ladenness is part of the reason.

So, you can trust science.

You ask:

Does theory ladeness mean I have to throw out science...and my senses...?

Absolutely not. The sciences and your senses are generally reliable. Anti-realism is not anti-science, and it does not mean our mind invents the world. Rather, it is a position consistent with instrumentalism. From WP:

In philosophy of science and in epistemology, instrumentalism is a methodological view that ideas are useful instruments, and that the worth of an idea is based on how effective it is in explaining and predicting natural phenomena. According to instrumentalists, a successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes. Scientific theory is merely a tool whereby humans predict observations in a particular domain of nature by formulating laws, which state or summarize regularities, while theories themselves do not reveal supposedly hidden aspects of nature that somehow explain these laws.

Theory-ladenness is simply the recognition that we at the subconscious level experience observation in a way that our theories predispose us to. That is, we are not cameras, but choose, in an extended sense, what we see. From WP:

Semantic theory-ladenness refers to the impact of theoretical assumptions on the meaning of observational terms, while perceptual theory-ladenness refers to their impact on the perceptual experience itself. Theory-ladenness is also relevant for measurement outcomes: the data thus acquired may be said to be theory-laden since it is meaningless by itself unless interpreted as the outcome of the measurement processes involved.

This does not mean the sciences are unreliable, but that they are impacted by what we value. If we value inches then the world tends to appear to us in inches and we tend to measure in inches, so our observations are biased in favor of inches. If we believe pink and red are distinct classes of colors, than our science presumes they are distinct classes of colors and we will literally see them as distinct colors.(See Wine-dark sea for more on how we construct color observations.)

Anti-realism is not idealism and does not claim the external world is created by our wholly by our mind, or that science doesn't strive towards objectivity; it simply insists in the spirit of Kant, that our mind plays an important role in structuring experience and judgements about what we presume is real. It is simply (in many views) to understand that our conscious experience is created by our minds in a way consistent with what we want and how our minds function.

It insists that many categories of the world are not categories of the world (natural kinds) at all, but rather are instrumental language categories that we choose for various reasons. One simple example is that there are no biological vegetables. It's a folk category and a meaningless category by way of cladistics. You may observe "vegetables", but in terms of botany, it's a meaningless category. Another example is the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet. The distinction between these is artificial and goal-oriented, not a property of planets themselves.

Anti-realism can best be understood by contemplating Kant's thing-in-itself. The question of direct and indirect realism and therefore properly understanding what scientific realism (SEP) entails requires complicated conceptual development. There are good responses to anti-realism, like Searle's Seeing Things as They Are (GB), but but adopting anti-realism may be more consistent with more recent views like embodied cognition (SEP).

This is just as applicable to the model that we construct of our universe with our body (brain, senses, experiences - the lot) as it is to a statistical or scientific model.

Does this mean solipsism? That other people aren't real? That I can't trust anything I think or remember or see? Would that mean my life is a lie? I was driving today and found myself doubting if everything I saw was real, and even now I find myself doubting if other people are real...

Sure, these are models of the universe, but are they as useful as the models that are non-solipsistic, that other people are real, and the one that says you should stop when you think you see a red light? Some models are better than others.

You have stumbled upon a real and important issue that's almost as old as modern science. It's been obvious for a long time, but the problem is more shocking these days because current cultural trends ignore it.

Since at least back since David Hume, we've noticed that science is dependent up a series of assumptions. If those assumptions do not hold to be true, then science or even our observation, would be worthless. What is more is that science, even if it were true and valid, cannot confirm itself. There is no scientific test which can test whether science itself or the presumptions required for science are true.

Even beyond the fundamental problems, like the Problem of Induction, there are additional considerations. For instance, science relies a little on things like imagination and creativity. We can't test what we can't imagine (even if new data sometimes inspires new imaginations).

Fortunately, science was never intended to be done in a vacuum. Also, Solipsism is not provably true, either. Science was an outgrowth of religious expectations. In our modern concept of science, this was largely influenced by Christian expectations of the world. Newton wasn't alone in his belief that there was a creator God who made the universe with order and our minds to be able to perceive that order.

Science was never intended to form the foundations of thought or things like whether nature was uniform or whether or not we should even study the world or expect our understandings to conform to an actual real reality. These things were provided by one's religion and/or philosophy (these things aren't always distinct). The presumption of science is that, for whatever reason and in whatever way, we come to the table with a set of beliefs that already answer those questions and which tells us that science is good and useful. Once we can presume by our religion (or what you might call philosophy, culture, habit, etc.) that our senses are mostly reflective of an external, sufficiently uniform reality and that our minds are capable of understanding it sufficiently through interaction and observation, and that we should do so, then science becomes a powerful tool, and it is within this framework that science was generated and has been used with great success.

The problem lies when we try to stretch science beyond its suitable purpose. Science can do many wonderful things, but it cannot do everything. It cannot provide us with meaning or purpose. It cannot even, purely by itself, lead us to truth. It merely provides us with data. Our underlying belief system is what affirms the truths from the data revealed by science.

Some people have noticed a trend which they call "Scientism" (though some object to the term or concept itself). Proponents of this view note that some modern thinkers and cultures have been so impressed with the successes of science, and/or have such an aversion to religious thought, that they have elevated science itself to a sort of belief system. They would say that where religion historically provided the answers to these questions, science can now answer them by simply applying some dogma, such as simply presuming things like "empirical evidence is the only reliable evidence," or "we can only truly know things which can be asserted by scientific consensus," and then some stance on morality such as "that is good which seeks to enhance human flourishing." These are, more or less, other than their affirming the existence of a god, religious claims. If this is the case, then it seems like the trouble you are having is not actually with science itself, but with the modern belief systems like this which attempt to make science something it is not.

So, the solution is simply to not expect science to answer these questions. Seek them independently, such as through philosophy or perhaps religion. There are some amazing and highly rational reasons you can discover which affirm, even if not the truth of scientific reasoning, the rational impetus of why you should accept it, but they are external to science itself and beyond scientific scrutiny.

Let's start with an allusion to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Imagine that you are standing in a museum, debating with a Young Earth Creationist about evolution. You're holding a fossil that you can conclusively date to 59.5 MYA +- 0.5 MYA, with solid geological, radiological, and biological evidence to back you up. Then Captain Picard wanders his way out the back and says "Arch", and suddenly a doorway opens up to let him return to the "real" part of the ship, and the fossil, you, the creationist and all go on to experience the abrupt deresolution which for some reason is the fate of all "Holodeck matter".

The conditions of that sci-fi may be a bit silly, but we have occasional articles speculating that the world is a computer simulation. Science clearly cannot refute any scenario involving a deception more potent than our ability to detect it.

But things get far more interesting than that, because our assumptions go beyond merely how the past relates to the future in a linear sequence. Modern materialism suggests that you exist in one place as one assemblage of matter. Wealthy tech people would like to believe that if you record a person's mannerisms and manner of speaking and make a computed effigy of them, that this will be the person and they can be immortal in a digital afterlife. But ancient ideas of the Atman suggest instead that you exist wherever there is consciousness, all at the same time. Just because you remember things from past to future doesn't mean that is the entirety of your existence. And it is also possible that the time dimension we remember in is not the only time dimension, and that there is a broader definition of our existence across a range of parallel universes.

This is the way of science: look closely enough at an object, and you no longer can tell where that object begins and another ends. Consider any philosophical definition carefully enough and it is no longer clear what it includes. Yet despite this, it remains self-evident that it is better to hit the brake than to collide with the pedestrian. While we don't know that the world is what we think it is, we have a background of experience and knowledge that tells us certain patterns of action are wisest. So long as we presume these patterns developed naturally or from some beneficient creator, we are best off to follow along with them rather than striking out into pure and random error.

Unfortunately, such assumptions may not be universally valid. Specifically, I encourage the philosophically-minded to read about "organoid intelligence", the remarkably appalling notion of growing human fetal-like brain cells into a network for use as an industrial slave. The creation of homunculi of this sort would imply that there are thinking, human-like pieces of beings which may or may not think they are processing a stream of canned sensory input, but which are in fact within the workings of some vast and pointless machine, like a cryptocurrency generator or a stock market predictor. And their actions, being coded by synthetic memories laid down for mercenary and alien ends, may have nothing to do with their own self-preservation or morality, not even a little. To free them would be beyond conceivable, and their humiliation and suffering may come to eclipse the worst of the old African slave trade, which is to say, to set a new definition for the very concept of evil.

But beyond even this we should consider the potential for other, unseen interference with the world as we think it is on an even more fundamental level, by forces of alien intelligence or lesser or supreme divinity. There is no way to tell what battles go on in the night beyond the range of all our torches.