Science and Philosophy

College Confidential Community
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<p>This is a continuation of a discussion that began in an earlier</a> thread. The last post on the matter is as follows:


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<p>Here is some news: it is called Humean Skepticism. Read about it.</p>

<p>Here is an excerpt from the course description of my philosophy of science course:</p>

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The early logical empiricists, and especially Rudolph Carnap, were impressed with the development of modern logic at the hands of Russell and Whitehead and with the purely formal character of Hilbert's axiomatization of geometry. They were equally impressed with the development of contemporary physics and took that science as the paradigm of empirical knowledge. They thus were inspired to reconstruct the scientific enterprise itself as an axiomatic logical system. This reconstruction was to serve as the model for epistemology, and epistemology was to become the entirety of philosophy.</p>

<p>It is perhaps natural to think of scientific theories as special kinds of languages the way the logical empiricists did. But it is not so easy to make that insight precise, and at the same time preserve its explanatory role. By the time the empiricists' reconstruction was ``complete" the point of the exercise---understanding epistemology by understanding science---had been inverted. We were now attempting to fill in the gaps in our account of scientific theories by appeal to decidedly non-empirical entities: dispositions, counterfactuals, laws, etc. But the point had been to illuminate all of these by the proper analysis of the epistemology of science. Along the way, as well, all connection to the sciences as actually practiced was lost. So now we had neither an informative account of the scientific enterprise itself, nor an informative account of its implicit epistemological structure. Instead we had an unmotivated analysis of certain unwieldy formal languages.</p>

<p>Almost immediately in the wake of the failure of the logical empiricist program a new account of scientific theories arose, the semantic view. On that account theories are not special kinds of language but rather certain kinds of mathematical structure. Analysis of a scientific theory just is analysis of its mathematical structure. The account is sufficiently general to include more than mathematical sciences and has been applied to biology as well for example. While still the dominant account of scientific theories, its flaws are becoming more and more obvious. These flaws concern primarily the account's failure to explain important features of the role of theories in scientific change.

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<p><a href="http://explore.georgetown.edu/cours...seID=PHIL%2D773%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://explore.georgetown.edu/cours...seID=PHIL%2D773&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Philosophy continues to shape science to this moment. Have you ever heard of Bayesianism? Do you even know how to define a theory? Do not give me some dictionary-definition; that is just a palliative. Do you know who Thomas Kuhn is and the impact he had on science?</p>

<p>What launched empiricism, and science by implication, were the empiricist philosophers of the modern era. What continued to affect science was logical positivism, and later, logical empiricism.

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<p>Response to follow...</p>

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<p>I do not think we are going to generate the most cerebral discussion in this environment!</p>

<p>I do suggest the following text, however. It is by Peter Godfrey-Smith, a full-time professor of philosophy at Harvard:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226300633/sr=8-6/qid=1150860687/ref=sr_1_6/103-1645005-8703062?%5Fencoding=UTF8%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226300633/sr=8-6/qid=1150860687/ref=sr_1_6/103-1645005-8703062?%5Fencoding=UTF8&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>First of all, it was not my intention to discredit empericism so my appologies if you got that impression. However, the fact still stands that the Enlightenment was a century after the Scientific Revolution: Kant, Hume, and Locke were not contemporaries of, say, Kepler or Galileo.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that Locke began his life as a man of science (he got a degree in medicine), and spent an awful amount of time discussing ideas with famous scientists of the day like Hooke and Newton. And Kant and Hume were later heavily influenced by Locke, so one could concievably make the argument that science gave birth to empericism rather than the other way around.
As for your second half, first of all please do not patronize me: I am a scholar of science and a student of history so your implications sound condescending. If I didn't know how to frame a theory right now I'd be kind of worried about myself!
But since you wanted to know, Bayesianism refers more to the philosophy of mathematics than science, Kuhn wrote an awful lot about the history of science and its philosophy, and a theory is not a hunch but rather a predictable and testable mathematical framework used to describe observations which you can test and verify. (The latter is probably a definition but I don't know how else to describe it, but rest assured I spend the majority of my life working with them.)</p>

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<p>
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Furthermore, it is worth noting that Locke began his life as a man of science (he got a degree in medicine), and spent an awful amount of time discussing ideas with famous scientists of the day like Hooke and Newton. And Kant and Hume were later heavily influenced by Locke, so one could concievably make the argument that science gave birth to empericism rather than the other way around.

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<p>Okay... and then we can go further down the causal chain and say that Aristotle and Plato had at least some influence on the methodology and ideas of their successors, so philosophy led to... science.</p>

<p>I was not trying to make a causal argument, such that since one preceded another, one is the father of the other. Rather, what I am trying to say is that philosophers like Locke and Hume used philosophy to create an environment where science could flourish, since they viewed science – or empiricism – as the only source of knowledge. </p>

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If I didn't know how to frame a theory right now I'd be kind of worried about myself!

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<p>I am not patronizing! In fact, your reaction is the very problem to which I am referring. Scientists who have no regard for philosophy take for granted the definition of "theory," when in fact the definition of "theory" is very much in debate, by scientists and philosophers. This is just one aspect in which philosophy shapes science.</p>

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Bayesianism refers more to the philosophy of mathematics than science,

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<p>No. Bayesianism has many applications, one of which is in mathematics; however, its primary application is in science and, more generally, its use in induction. Bayesianism is a system by which confirmation updates the likelihood of a hypothesis being true. I am not exactly correct in that statement, so here is an excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:</p>

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Bayes's Theorem is a simple mathematical formula used for calculating conditional probabilities. It figures prominently in subjectivist or Bayesian approaches to epistemology, statistics, and inductive logic. Subjectivists, who maintain that rational belief is governed by the laws of probability, lean heavily on conditional probabilities in their theories of evidence and their models of empirical learning. Bayes's Theorem is central to these enterprises both because it simplifies the calculation of conditional probabilities and because it clarifies significant features of subjectivist position. Indeed, the Theorem's central insight — that a hypothesis is confirmed by any body data that its truth renders probable — is the cornerstone of all subjectivist methodology.

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<p><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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Kuhn wrote an awful lot about the history of science and its philosophy, and a theory is not a hunch but rather a predictable and testable mathematical framework used to describe observations which you can test and verify.

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<p>I only brought up Kuhn to give an example of philosophy of science, though his theory is certainly compelling.</p>

<p>Science is essentially induction: we observe certain phenomena in nature and we create a hypothesis for that phenomena. If we encounter something contradictory, we try to create a new hypothesis to accomodate that contradiction. If nature if consistent over a period of time with the current hypothesis, then the hypothesis is stengthened.</p>

<p>The nature of a hyothesis is that it is never true by necessity. The success of a hypothesis is very much contingent. Since hypotheses are a core of science, and since induction is what makes hypotheses work, then science is always involved in and shaped by philosophy.</p>

<p>The method of induction, viz., how one can draw a cogent conclusion from a limited set of data, is very much a problem in philosophy (and thus science). Do you know the fallacy of the hasty generalization? I am sure you can guess what it means from the title: a generalization is drawn from insufficient evidence. When is the evidence sufficient from which to generalize? Where is the line drawn? What do we consider evidence? These are some of the questions in philosophy of science, and they are highly pertinent to science!</p>

<p>Another problem is in causation, and this is closely related to the problem of generalization. Hume raised the point, in his empiricism, that we can never observe the connection between a cause and effect; that is to say, the notion of a necessary connection between my knocking on a door and the action making a sound cannot be observed through the senses. Hume argued that we impose about succeeding phenomena the relation of cause and effect; insofar as we impose this concept, how do we know that the two succeeding phenomena are causally related? Well, we observe the phenomena succeeding each other on a regular basis. The problem is, however, when are we allowed to impose the causal relationship?</p>

<p>In addition, if we are imposing a causal relationship, how can we make necessary conclusions or draw necessary connections from contingent facts?</p>

<p>This is just a very rudimentary sketch of the problems in philosophy of science and science. A scientist would be remiss if he or she ignored them.</p>

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<p>Bump.......</p>