Philosophy Of Science

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

At what point do you say that philosophy comes into the picture?

Observation does not appear to be a matter of philosophy.

Gathering information does not appear to be philosophy.

Experimentation and testing of information does look like philosophical inquiry.

Forming hypothesis or theory? It also looks doubtful because that is just a matter of tying the evidence together.

So at what point does science become a matter of philosophy?

You can't see the wood for the trees.

How do you determine that these are the steps you should follow?

How, for example, did you decide that "Experimentation and testing" was a better option than "Prayer and quiet contemplation"?

What made you think that "Gathering information" was preferable to "taking psychoactive drugs"?

The answer begins with a 'P'.

Psychology?

 

[No Robots]

Verification (eg. by predictibility) is what validates a theory. The theory is prior.

There is something that comes prior to theory.

Yes. It is thought.

 

[steve_bank]

My point.

One does not have to know anything about empiricism from philosophy to be empirical.

I was babysitting a rug rat for a couple and had her out in the yard. She crawled towrds a rock periodicity stopping to put her hand out feeling for the image until she got to it.

She was empirically testing and gauging reality. Always red it.

Philosophy does not invent, it speculates, comments, and categorizes on what is.

Which came first, empirical testing of reality and ideas or empiricism?

Romans were great engineers without our math and science. They developed empirical data on strewth of materials. They figured out beams were stronger than flat wood. They developed the arch.

You might say philosophy formalizes what people do.

 

[Politesse]

You might say philosophy formalizes what people do.

Yes.

Which begs the question of why any sensible person would disapprove of philosophy. You can't really want to underperform a two year old on rational inquiry?

 

[pood]

As @bilby noted, the intellectual infrastructure for the broad enterprise we call science was laid by philosophy.

Now you might say that science has become completely separate from philosophy, but that is not true. As the aforementioned Norman Swartz (and more notably Einstein) said, bare data is not enough. You have to THINK ABOUT that data, and CONCEPTUALIZE and CONTEXTUALIZE it. Doing that, and how to do it, is philosophy,

Uranus isn’t fitting Newton’s paradigm. Shall we really ditch such a successful theory?

No. We find Neptune.

Mercury isn’t fitting Newton’s paradigm. Shall we really ditch such a successful theory?

Yes, we don’t find Vulcan. We find gravitational lensing.

But we don’t WHOLLY ditch Newton. We realize it works to a limit. It’s still great for getting us to Mars.

And so on.

Duhem-Quine. If Newton had known about this PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT, he might have questioned his assumptions about absolute space separate from absolute time and his assumption about Euclidean geometry. Recall, Newton PHILOSOPHIZED about gravity in a letter, wondering what such a “force” could be. He already had the PHILOSOPHICAL intimation that maybe it was not strictly a force at all.

Philosophy and science are always having metaphorical and metaphysical intercourse. I suppose physical intercourse would be more fun.

And none of this has anything to do with religion.

 

[steve_bank]

Out of high school I went into the Navy and went to electronics schools.

Before I read or had classes in philosophy and science I learned to empirically trouble shoot electronic systems. It was a natural process. Trouble shooting is a skill learned by experience.

The practice of science is a skill learned by experience. It is not learned from a philosophy. When lerng a new skill you go through a 'learning curve'.

In engineering an empirical solution can mean ‘trial and error’.

The generalized Scientific Method is trial and error. Hypothesis, trial, accept, fail and reformulate, try again.

We all do it maturely. Modern formal science involves mathematical models.

You can’t fit reality into a philosophy, at best a philosophy of science is a subjective generalization of a process that originates in the way our brains work.

 

[pood]

Out of high school I went into the Navy and went to electronics schools.

Before I read or had classes in philosophy and science I learned to empirically trouble shoot electronic systems. It was a natural process. Trouble shooting is a skill learned by experience.

The practice of science is a skill learned by experience. It is not learned from a philosophy. When lerng a new skill you go through a 'learning curve'.

In engineering an empirical solution can mean ‘trial and error’.

The generalized Scientific Method is trial and error. Hypothesis, trial, accept, fail and reformulate, try again.

We all do it maturely. Modern formal science involves mathematical models.

You can’t fit reality into a philosophy, at best a philosophy of science is a subjective generalization of a process that originates in the way our brains work.

That’s nice, Steve.

Except life and science and PHILOSOPHY are not all about electrical engineering. Not even close.

Maybe you somehow missed that.

But you are welcome to your impoverished world view. I know at your age it’s hard to learn new stuff.

 

[DBT]

Verification (eg. by predictibility) is what validates a theory. The theory is prior.

There is something that comes prior to theory.

Yes. It is thought.

No, there is the physical world with its objects and events.

 

[No Robots]

Verification (eg. by predictibility) is what validates a theory. The theory is prior.

There is something that comes prior to theory.

Yes. It is thought.

No, there is the physical world with its objects and events.

As we perceive them in thought.

 

[DBT]

Verification (eg. by predictibility) is what validates a theory. The theory is prior.

There is something that comes prior to theory.

Yes. It is thought.

No, there is the physical world with its objects and events.

As we perceive them in thought.

No, as the brain acquires information and forms a mental representation of the external world....which happens prior to thought. A mental representation that is constantly being tested against an objective world that cares nothing about our thoughts, beliefs or interpretations.

Where if you get it wrong, you time on earth may be very short. Where the brain, in order to survive and interact with an objective world, must practice science rather than philosophy.

 

[steve_bank]

Verification (eg. by predictibility) is what validates a theory. The theory is prior.

There is something that comes prior to theory.

Yes. It is thought.

No, there is the physical world with its objects and events.

As we perceive them in thought.

No, as the brain acquires information and forms a mental representation of the external world....which happens prior to thought. A mental representation that is constantly being tested against an objective world that cares nothing about our thoughts, beliefs or interpretations.

Where if you get it wrong, you time on earth may be very short. Where the brain, in order to survive and interact with an objective world, must practice science rather than philosophy.

Nicely put.

 

[steve_bank]

Out of high school I went into the Navy and went to electronics schools.

Before I read or had classes in philosophy and science I learned to empirically trouble shoot electronic systems. It was a natural process. Trouble shooting is a skill learned by experience.

The practice of science is a skill learned by experience. It is not learned from a philosophy. When lerng a new skill you go through a 'learning curve'.

In engineering an empirical solution can mean ‘trial and error’.

The generalized Scientific Method is trial and error. Hypothesis, trial, accept, fail and reformulate, try again.

We all do it maturely. Modern formal science involves mathematical models.

You can’t fit reality into a philosophy, at best a philosophy of science is a subjective generalization of a process that originates in the way our brains work.

That’s nice, Steve.

Except life and science and PHILOSOPHY are not all about electrical engineering. Not even close.

Maybe you somehow missed that.

But you are welcome to your impoverished world view. I know at your age it’s hard to learn new stuff.

HeeHeeeHeee

Look arnd around you. It is all engineered. Paint on walls, computer, car[et, buildings, sewers, water system, cars. CAT scans, MRI, clothes, shoes, TV, radio.

Electricity.

We all do 'science' in one form or another. Observe reality, hypothesize, test. Humans didit from the start without any philosophy as we call it.

Science is not just theoretical cosmology and quantum mechanics.

Figuring out how to sense the daily position of the sun related to seasons knowing when to plant seed in the spring. Structures that will shine the sun on a spot at a specific time of the year.

Such ancient structures remain in the Americas and Europe without any connection between the continents.

Non human species observe and test hysteresis. Pattern recognition. Genetically built into the brain by evolution.

Your argument on sience is philosophy reduces to:

There are cases where people labeled philosopher have influenced science, therefore philosophy guides siecnce.

The argument ignores all the science throughout history that was not influenced by a 'philosopher' or philosophy which is a vague ill defined category.

Pole just did as anatiral humn cp[acity.

The categories of science and philosophy reduce to human thought. Intermbased on how the brin is wired.

All is thought which exist without philosophy. Symbolic language evolved.

 

[steve_bank]

P1 Philosophers philosophize
P2 I philosophize
P3 Science is philosophy
C I am a scientist

Attributed to Hocus Pocus Of Alexandria:

I philosophize, therefore I am philosophy.

 

[steve_bank]

Pood said
The issue at hand, and which should be in the Philosophy of Science thread, is the apparent allegation that philosophy is worthless. If it were, you’d be dead. You do philosophy all the waking time even if you don’t know it.

I never said philosophy is worthless. I said philosophy is a general category that has a number of subcategories. Philosophy meaning the general love of or search for knowledge and wisdom.

Wasn't there a an ancient Greek who said about hierarchical categories? Structured hierarchical categories are essential in all human areas.

Aristotle did create hierarchical categories
, which served as a foundational basis for classifying everything from living organisms to philosophical concepts. His method of categorizing the world based on observations influenced Western thought for centuries. He developed several classification systems, including the famous "ladder of life" and the ten categories of being.

I read Aristotle and others as a background in how science and engineering evolved. How did they do it. How Romans build aqueducts.

Starting the 1600s philosophy lost a lot of its content. Science. linguists, psychology and other areas became independent dispenses.

The word science is a broad category with many distinct independent subcategories and functions. A broad distinction is categorical vs applied science, but the boundary is fluid.

Theoretical science is not just cosmology and QM and particle physics..

If you are looking for meaning and value in philosophy, philosophy of science e is a very small part of it.

I have heard it said philosophy is the history of thought, in the west we start with Greece. China and India have different histories. The comparisons are a study in themselves. Eastern versus western thought and philosophy.

Our foreign policy with China and the Mid East is based on an assumption all cultures have the same philosophical basis as we do, everybody thinks like we do. Which is false.

Philosophy does matter, but maybe not as you imagine it.

 

[BSilvEsq]

As I understand it, Science is a tool that many people utilize in an attempt to form a cohesive view of the world in which they live and how it operates.

The philosophical and/or metaphysical foundation of Science is a belief (faith?) that (i) there is an objective reality that exists independent of the observer (although some, but not all, quantum physicists might disagree), and (ii) the objective reality is capable of being discerned / observed, measured, tested and verified in some manner or another. I call this a philosophical or metaphysical foundation because it is, at rock bottom, an assumption about the nature of reality. More precisely, it is an assumption that there is a reality. Without this philosophical or metaphysical foundation, Science does not exist, as the absence of this philosophical or metaphysical foundation precludes the possibility of anything being capable of being proved (even temporarily or situationally) or falsified — as those terms are used within Science. One of the best discussions of this subject that I have read is included in a paper titled “Exploring the Philosophical Underpinnings of Research: Relating Ontology and Epistemology to the Methodology and Methods of the Scientific, Interpretive, and Critical Research Paradigms,” which can be viewed at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f24f/1d16645e. For anyone who has the time and inclination to read the paper, I highly commend it.

The foregoing is not a criticism of Science. It may well be the case that there is a discernable objective reality that is capable of being mapped by Science. It also may be the case that Science is simply modern mythology.

In the grand scheme of things, physics (and quantum physics, in particular) is accepted by many as the latest and greatest paradigm for explaining the universe. It is a modern mythology that tells a story that aligns with what we believe to understand about the universe – as discovered through application of math and science. But, no paradigm is right or wrong. By definition, a paradigm is a metaphor, which most closely aligns with our understanding of reality (if such a thing exists). When someone says that a paradigm has been proven wrong, they simply mean that the acquisition of greater knowledge (or what appears to be knowledge) has caused the paradigm to be expanded or abandoned in favor of a new paradigm.

As I see things, there are no true “laws” of physics. There are simply principles that the authors of the story of physics find sufficiently robust to be compelling based on the current state of knowledge. New knowledge that is consistent with the paradigm, but somewhat different from some aspect of the paradigm, causes the paradigm to be revised to accommodate the new knowledge. Other new knowledge is so inconsistent with an existing paradigm so as to require its abandonment in favor of a new paradigm that accounts for all that is known.

Physics, itself, was born out of an informational revolution that caused many people to abandon prior mythology. In relatively recent past, physicists have taken a quantum leap in their beliefs, causing the physics paradigm to be reshaped. Some physicists, however, are unpersuaded by the new story and remain attached to Newtonian physics.

As we continue to evolve, we develop new and greater information (or, possibly, build on our grand illusion). If the evolution of new information is sufficiently great it leads to revolution in which the most robust current paradigm is abandoned and relegated to the history books. In that regard, it seems more likely than not that there will come a time when today's modern physics will be viewed as a step between ancient mythology and some yet-to-be written story of the universe, which will, in turn, yield to yet a new and broader story.

 

[BSilvEsq]

Science = Modern Mythology​

While there are suggestions of this concept in the writings of many respected philosophers, one of the most direct discussions appears in the work of Paul Feyerabend. As explained in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (the “SEP”) (at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/):​

Feyerabend saw himself as having undermined the arguments for science’s privileged position within culture, and much of his later work was a critique of the position of science within Western societies. Because there is no scientific method, we can’t justify science as the best way of acquiring knowledge. And the results of science don’t prove its excellence, since these results have often depended on the presence of non-scientific elements, science prevails only because “the show has been rigged in its favour” (SFS, p. 102), and other traditions, despite their achievements, have never been given a chance. The truth, he suggests, is that science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits (AM, p. 295).​

A discussion of Feyerabend on Wikipedea (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science) similarly explains:

Feyerabend said that science started as a liberating movement, but that over time it had become increasingly dogmatic and rigid and had some oppressive features, and thus had become increasingly an ideology. Because of this, he said it was impossible to come up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from religion, magic, or mythology. He saw the exclusive dominance of science as a means of directing society as authoritarian and ungrounded. Promulgation of this epistemological anarchism earned Feyerabend the title of “the worst enemy of science” from his detractors.

Another entry to the SEP adds the following:

An even more fundamental kind of criticism was offered by several sociologists of science from the 1970s onwards who dismissed what they saw as a false distinction between philosophical accounts of the rational development of science and sociological accounts of the irrational mistakes. Instead, they adhered to a symmetry thesis on which any causal explanation of how scientific knowledge is established needs to be symmetrical in explaining truth and falsity, rationality and irrationality, success and mistakes by the same causal factors (see, e.g., Barnes and Bloor 1982, Bloor 1991). Movements in the Sociology of Science, like the Strong Programme, or in the social dimensions and causes of knowledge more generally led to extended and close examination of detailed case studies in contemporary science and its history. (See the entries on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge and social epistemology.) Well-known examinations by Latour and Woolgar (1979/1986), Knorr-Cetina (1981), Pickering (1984), Shapin and Schaffer (1985) seemed to bear out that it was social ideologies (on a macro-scale) or individual interactions and circumstances (on a micro-scale) which were the primary causal factors in determining which beliefs gained the status of scientific knowledge. As they saw it, in other words, explanatory appeals to scientific method were not empirically well grounded.

A good article about Feyerabend appears at https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...paul-feyerabend-really-science-s-worst-enemy/.

The following is also interesting: (i) “Scientific Proof Is A Myth” (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/11/22/scientific-proof-is-a-myth/#35fa34282fb1; (ii) “What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought About Scientific ‘Truth’” (at https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...s-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/; “The Mythology of Science” (at https://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2007/08/the-mythology-o.html);

And, as I previously have posted, there is a great article titled “Exploring the Philosophical Underpinnings of Research: Relating Ontology and Epistemology to the Methodology and Methods of the Scientific, Interpretive, and Critical Research Paradigms” (at https://www.researchgate.net/public...4Ufy5Xi5NFg54tEH81eTwIeN3aQjgqaEWadPq4CE-hvps). There also is an excellent a book titled “Myths, Models and Paradigms” by Ian Barbour – which I was given to read in a Theology course in college. Both of these sources present a scholarly analysis of the mythological nature of science.​

 

[DBT]

It would seem that if determinism is true, the physical principles of the world must be sufficiently robust to reliably inform our past, present and future states of knowledge.