I don’t use “stats” to get rid of.

That you don’t know the difference between statistics and statements of probability is why you can never do competent history.

It’s just all the worse that you don’t know that you yourself are always using statements of probability. Just because you hide what you mean behind fuzzy words (like probable or very improbable or somewhat likely or more likely) does not mean you are not referring to numbers. You always are. The difference between me and you is that I admit this, and make clear what I mean when I say such things—and why.

Because then I can do another thing you can’t: I can vet the logic of my own inferences (and thus demonstrate whether my conclusions actually do follow from my premises), because I am actually stating checkable premises, and correctly deriving the conclusions from them (which can only be done with probabilistic logic, because history is not subject to deductive logic).

I do not get the impression you actually care about being logical or admitting the mathematical content of your sentences or anything else, so I hardly see a point in speaking further on this, but in the extremely unlikely chance you actually do care (or someone else reading this does), see:

Bayesian Statistics vs. Bayesian Epistemology

We Are All Bayesians Now: Some Bayes for Beginners

Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning

These are very good questions.

First, the annoying answer is: you just have to read continuously and diversely in science for many years, and “dive” every term or concept you don’t understand until you at least have the gist down.

Example:

I did have an actual science education. All my electives in high school were science, and broadly: not just physics and biology, but I also took courses in, e.g., ecology and human physiology; and my B.A. required breadth-courses in science, so I took geology and psychology and statistics and both cultural and physical anthropology, and those are just the ones I remember off-hand; and my military schooling included 12 units of electronics engineering, including practical electromechanics and the physics of sound.

But…from the time I was a freshman in high school, which was the mid-80s, until about 2000 or so (so, for at least a decade and a half) I subscribed to the weekly magazine Science News (which is staffed only by writers with actual science degrees so it contains vastly more reliable science-reporting than mainstream media) and I read every issue cover to cover, and when I ran into words or concepts I didn’t understand, I looked them up, and then made sure I understood what each article was saying (even if I did not get all the particulars behind the story).

The last twenty years I have moved on to reading actual science papers themselves (I no longer bother with Science News, though largely because the internet keeps me apprised now), and doing the same thing (if I need to grasp something and I don’t, I research it until I do). It helps to have had college statistics. Because a lot of science is based on that, and most bogus or bad science can be caught by understanding that.

This doesn’t require running formulae. You just need to understand what a confidence level and interval are, what their relationship is, and why every study entirely hinges on that, and thus what various numbers assigned these really mean. But more important is breadth: to do competent physicalist philosophy, you need a decent lay grounding in physics down to the subatomic level, as well as a decent lay grounding in cell biology and human physiology, and in cultural anthropology and sociology. Etc. So you should read basics in every science field. Then you can make cross-comparisons and avoid errors interpreting one field without a grounding in the others.

The key to the latter is “chase your interests,” because passion will maintain your doggedness, interest, and attention (you will learn more, faster, and better if you are really interested). It’s a drunkard’s walk through everything. That way you stay interested and engaged, and learn random stuff, until you’ve sampled so much of the information space, that your random learning ends up being a pretty broad understanding of science.

So, if you see an article about black hole cosmology that interests you, read it, and then read the study it is reporting on, and then look for any response or rebuttal papers or contrary theories and compare; that will bump you against other things, so maybe you end up on a rabbit hole about attempts to explain the alpha constant; and maybe that then bumps you against discussions of Kühnian paradigm theory and Popperian falsificationism and what actual scientists now think about those things, when you then get the idea to check those things against real examples in science, which ends you up reading up on a multi-paper debate in physical anthropology, which you decide to perform your own eristic analysis on as an outside observer, and this ends up cluing you into Pearl’s seminal treatise in causation theory, and you end up studying his finding that the number of possible causal relations is logically finite and determinable, which you try out on a political science paper, which gets you into checking the literature on the replicability crisis, which lands you eventually reading a peer-reviewed science paper developing an objective instrument-based measure of potato chip crispiness.

(This is an actual sequence of events; I did this on a binge several years ago.)

That’s basically how you do it.

Second, a perhaps less annoying answer is:

Write down ten sciences (there are hundreds, but pick ten, and make sure they are broad, and not “all physics,” in fact try to get ten that are as different from each other as possible); concertedly collect a decade-old college intro textbook in each one (those sell used for dirt cheap due to the corporate economics of textbook editioning and its effect on demand, yet the actual changes in the field in ten years are unlikely to matter for your mission); and read them all. If you run into things you don’t understand, do the thing (look those basics up until you have a gist). By the end of that project, you’ll know what you need to do next.

Third, perhaps an even less annoying answer is:

Pick three different hyper-specific topics in philosophy that you are well versed in (like, your top three specialties, questions you’ve solved or can speak authoritatively on the debate of), and research what science has already said about each one. The effort to even figure out where to look (which sciences? which things? how do you find them?) will already be getting you there. And then rabbit-hole / breadcrumb the science on every one until you have as good a grasp of the science pertaining as you did the philosophy.

That said, one thing must hold true across all three methods:

Read critically.

Learn to find out when a claim is speculative or provisional, and when it really is “established science.”

For example, there are a million black hole theories; realizing that will tell you the state of black hole science is more philosophy than science, albeit still toed well in as a science. But that is different from a claim in psychology that has a hundred corroborating studies and multiple confirming meta-studies and is thus as well known as a thing can be in that field; and there are states-of-affairs at every point in between.

There is a lot of bad science (replicability rate is between 1 in 3 and 2 in 3, which is alarmingly bad). So you have to be on guard against that.

I have advice in these articles:

A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research
The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking

And all the math you will ever need to know is in Math Doesn’t Suck and The Mathematical Palette (both written for humanities majors).

I don’t know if this adequately answered your question or was a bunch of tl;dn. So do please ask more questions if this didn’t get at what you needed.

A completely irrelevant point.

This is getting tedious.

Emotional attachment to a theory is folly.

Disregard of the logic of probability is fatal.

You are committed to both. Which means you can never really do history.

I’d really like to follow your advice on developing scientific-based reasoning. However, I struggle with understanding what counts as a genuine scientific advancement and what does it means for philosophy, how science can inform philosophy, how to interpret scientific papers, and how to even begin meaningful research. I’ve tried tools like Google Scholar, but it feels like just scratching the surface.

Could you recommend books or resources for someone in my position—books that:

Introduce the foundations of science for those coming from a non-scientific background, Help improve scientific literacy (perhaps aligned with the kind of poll you once shared on your site), Teach how to read and understand scientific literature, And offer a deeper exploration of logic, building from the basic symbolic logic I already know?

Thanks very much for any guidance you can offer.

Consider the late Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, a very accomplished historian. He was not close to JFK, but he worked in the latter’s White House. After the assassination he wrote the best seller “A Thousand Days”; his account of the President’s three years from both the inside and the outside. It remains a good read. But it is from beginning to end “historical fiction”. The author’s agenda was to turn the man he had served and adored into a superhero, a contemporary Lincoln, and an idealistic progressive. This embarrassing hagiography does not make it worthless, though it is far from accurate – let alone definitive.

Yet Schlesinger’s essential portrait, that of Kennedy as a Cold War sceptic and cautious centrist, remains both valid and validated by the release of subsequent sources and memoirs.

Schweitzer’s tragic/heroic Jesus who yet remains a moral inspiration, can be revived in Jesus Ben Ananias. That’s a perfectly reasonable theory, not an empty supposition or anything to do with apologetics. It even has the backing of you-know-who’s razor, if you care about that dodgy, cliched measurement.

Good points.