Fake explanations (and the case of Phlogiston)

[Singu]

What is fire, and why does it burn? The 18th century chemistry's answer to this was, "Phlogiston":


phlogiston [floh-jis-ton, -tuh n]
1. a substance supposed by 18th-century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies, and to be released in combustion.

Developed by the German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl early in the 18th century, phlogiston was a dominant chemical concept of the time because it seemed to explain so much in a simple fashion. Stahl believed that every combustible substance contained a universal component of fire, which he named phlogiston, from the Greek word for inflammable. Because a combustible substance such as charcoal lost weight when it burned, Stahl reasoned that this change was due to the loss of its phlogiston component to the air.

Phlogiston escaped from burning substances as visible fire. As the phlogiston escaped, the burning substances lost phlogiston and so became ash, the "true material". Flames in enclosed containers went out because the air became saturated with phlogiston, and so could not hold any more. Charcoal left little residue upon burning because it was nearly pure phlogiston.

Of course, one didn't use phlogiston theory to predict the outcome of a chemical transformation. You looked at the result first, then you used phlogiston theory to explain it. It's not that phlogiston theorists predicted a flame would extinguish in a closed container; rather they lit a flame in a container, watched it go out, and then said, "The air must have become saturated with phlogiston." You couldn't even use phlogiston theory to say what you ought not to see; it could explain everything.

The Rise and Fall of the Phlogiston Theory of Fire
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/e...lavoisier.html

If this sounds familiar, it's because this is how Socionics works and "explains" things. You look at the result first and then explain things in hindsight ("Why, this person's behavior is explained by Fi, and the reason why he is having problems is due to his PoLR" - but that's not actually explaining anything). It's fake causality, it's a fake explanation. You could call it pre-science, but it's pre- in a way that it's fake and bogus.

You may laugh at the result now, because you now know that the real explanation is not "phlogiston", but it had something to do with air, or "oxygen" and a form of chemical reaction called oxidation and combustion, which was correctly explained by late-18th century chemistry when the theory of phlogiston was refuted.

Fuels "burned" when fuel + oxygen was oxidized in the form of combustion (Fuel + O2 -> CO2 + H2O) and this chemical reaction generates light energy and kinetic energy, and it emits light and heat and this is what we see and feel as "fire". If you want to know what fire "is", then you'd have to look into physics and not chemistry.

Sure enough, this was the correct explanation, and it correctly predicted things every single time. Fantastic!

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But we have been trapped in this "fake" explanation for thousands of years until we have developed modern science with better tools to understand things, because this is how our brains worked due to our history of evolution. Our brains are inundated with biases and errors and quick conclusions; it only produced what is "good enough" with the amount of energy required to process things.

Modern research suggests that humans think about cause and effect using something like the directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of Bayes nets. Because it rained, the sidewalk is wet; because the sidewalk is wet, it is slippery:

[Rain] -> [Sidewalk wet] -> [Sidewalk slippery]

From this we can infer—or, in a Bayes net, rigorously calculate in probabilities—that when the sidewalk is slippery, it probably rained; but if we already know that the sidewalk is wet, learning that the sidewalk is slippery tells us nothing more about whether it rained.

Why is fire hot and bright when it burns?

["Phlogiston"] -> [Fire hot and bright]

It feels like an explanation. It's represented using the same cognitive data format. But the human mind does not automatically detect when a cause has an unconstraining arrow to its effect. Worse, thanks to hindsight bias, it may feel like the cause constrains the effect, when it was merely fitted to the effect.


A good way to distinguish between a fake explanation and a real explanation, is that it can correctly predict things in the future. Even better if it can actually explain the phenomenon. Then it can predict things with even greater precision and accuracy.