Philosophy and science

(Continuation of existing discussion that developed in another thread)
OK first I absolutely accept that many scientists are far from enamoured with philosophy. In fact at first I thought you might be one of the science forums regulars because this debate is very reminiscent of many similar ones we have had.

quote:

---

Why do you think that's a problem with empiricism and not with logic? Maybe it's the notion of axiomatic derivation that has the fundamental flaw, not the notion of empiric gathering of knowledge.

---

It certainly isn't a problem with empiricism, simply a suggested change of focus. Better to try to gather the one piece of data that disproves the hypothesis than gather a million supporting examples...therefore design the tests to falsify the hypothesis not simply to confirm it (choose boundary cases or make bold predictions at the limit of the hypothesis).

quote:

---

Much valid science predates Popper. We even continue to use Mendel's genetics from over 100 years from before "The Logic of Scientific Discovery." Bayes has done far more to prevent fundamental errors in the practice of science than anything Popper has done.

---

I agree that much valid science predates Popper but there has been an paradigm shift because of his work.
Falsifiability is now generally understood as a key element in scientific demarcation and scientific method. The notion that an hypothesis should be testable and potentially falsified to be considered scientific is pretty universal now. Also the notion that the power of an hypothesis is a function of how easy it is to refute flows directly from this. Until Popper science was infested with pseudo-science like Freudianism simply because there was no agreed way of saying what was and was not science. There were vague notions of empiricism, but no clear line in the sand. Popper provides that and in doing so frees science from many of parasites that used to cling to its coat-tails with impugnity.

quote:

---

Every scientist I've ever met has heard of Bayes; I can think of only one who had heard of Karl Popper before I brought it up. (Largely their response to my description of his philosophy is something akin to "...and what's the punchline?")

---

That surprises me. I would have thought that most undergrad science courses would have had at least a module on scientific method and demarcation/philosophy. I suspect that the 'what is the punchline' comment means 'it is obvious' - but it wasn't. Yes, it should be obvious to anyone studying science now because it has been absorbed so that it is no longer even notable. Go back to pre 1930 and there is no clear scientific demarcation, and a scientific method which Aristotle would have recognised and which was unclear and over-reliant on inductive method. Popper et al clarify, simplify and set the basis for modern scientific method, peer-review and demarcation. You don't need telling that one reading/observation can refute a hypothesis and require it to be modified or ditched. Scientists of the 18th and 19th century DID need telling so because they generally did not look to falsify but to confirm. That is a much weaker method and leaves too much chaff surviving. Attack the theory head on, and determined to falsify it (just as most juries on the professional journals do) and you quickly cut through the bull.

quote:

---

If there's a way to resolve these questions, they'll be resolved by scientists doing science, not philosophers doing philosophy. In the meantime philosophers will borrow the language of biology and physics to produce stuff indistinguishable from Sokal's classic hoax.

---

No, scientists will do what they get grants to do. Meanwhile their grant awarding bodies will be influenced by philosophy, economics and a range of other considerations. Yes, I agree that philosophy can be a refuge for pedants, sophists and those with nothing to say but an overwhelming urge to say it. I don't think it is either fair or accurate to characterise the whole discipline, or even the majority, in that way.

quote:

---

And yet I can't find any philosophers in any science labs. I can't find Kant next to the lab manuals in any science course. My wife's new Nanodrop spectrophotometer didn't come with a manual on the philosophical implications of Beer's law. I can't find a single scientist who turns to Popper when he has a question about experimental design.

---

Again I am surprised. Do the designers not seek to push the boundaries and go for cases where the hypothesis should be stretched, rather than the safe middle ground? Actually I know they do because I speak regularly to physicists, biologists and chemists in the science forums. If they don't then they are not designing their experiments as well as they could or should.

quote:

---

But I can find legions of philosophers like Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini who evince less than a freshman understanding of the science of evolution, yet pen a ridiculous strawman attack against it:

---

Yes but come on - I can find large numbers of computer 'scientists' and engineers who are avid creationists (I don't know what it is about computer science or engineering, but it is certainly the case). It means nothing. We don't damn engineering because a proportion of engineers have loony-tunes views, nor should we do so for philosophy.

---

There are 10 types of people. Those who understand binary, and those who don\'t.
Chris

Thread copied here from the Philosophy and science thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

I don't see any evidence of such a paradigm shift.Scientists always understood that science is empirical, that it is about observations and what one can conclude from observations. Falsificationism was Popper's attempt to account for this within philosophy. Some philosophers agree and some disagree.There is actually better empirical support for the Duhem-Quine thesis than there is for falsificationism. Perhaps amongst philosophers. In their ordinary scientific work, scientists don't give it a second thought. Even within philosophy, there are critics.Quoting from the Wikipedia article on falsifiability: It has been that way at least since the time of Galileo. However, philosophy greatly overestimates the importance of testable hypotheses, and greatly underestimates the importance of measurement. I would have to guess that even before Popper, many scientists criticized Freud, and were skeptical of his work. And since Popper, we have had Cold Fusion and Intelligent Design. Popper's falsificationism does not seem to have eliminated the pseudo-science. I am not aware of such a module.From the perspective of scientists, the scientific method is based on "follow your curiosity, wherever it leads you" and "measurement, measurement, measurement." That might have been true of philosophical accounts of science. I doubt that it was true of science as it was actually practiced. Compare that with the quote above from Sokal and Bricmont. It seems to me that you are doing an effective job of demonstrating that philosophy still doesn't understand how science works. Most of what goes on in the science lab is very different from the kind of hypothesis testing that Popper discusses. Computer Science has more in common with engineering and mathematics than with traditional sciences. And engineers are themselves intelligent designers, so it is not too surprising that they have some sympathy for the idea of intelligent design.The strongest and most consistent opposition to intelligent design and creationism comes from biologists and geologists, mostly because they see the evidence first hand in their every day work.

quote:

---

There is actually better empirical support for the Duhem-Quine thesis than there is for falsificationism.

---

But that never was a theory - just a cobbling together of two views which appear the same from a distance but incompatible close up.
Duhem was convinced that Physics was a unique exception in science and that only Physics couldn't be falsified hypothesis by hypothesis. He accepted falsification for the other sciences. Quine was a weirdo, like many brilliant men. He was at a far reach from Duhem - he believed that the sum total of knowledge was the unit to be falsified - everything had to be included, and that by doing this, individual statements that were false in one 'mix' could be made true by changing one of more of the linked statements in the whole 'mish mash' of statements that comprised the complete knowledge 'unit'.You can obviously see where he is coming from and going with this - it is a frontal assault on the logical positivists. He wants to assert that individual 'chunks' of truth gained by reductionist analysis are not discreet and cannot be treated as such - contra the LP position. That's actually a pretty good point of attack, but then he gets ambitious and brings first formal logic and then mathematics into this holistic mix. He is then essentialy saying that both formal logic and mathematics are contingent on the rest of the holistic mix - the - the entire formalism in logic is thus reduced to a set of propositions which can be changed in light of later empirical evidence.I think he has lost it at this point, and I think he knows it. he scrabbles around for support and used quantum events and their apparent paradoxical nature to argue that the formal/mathematical notion of distributivity is a limiting case, and he tries to replace it with quantum logic. Here he is cribbing Von Neumann's work on binary quantum propositions that can be combined but do not possess the propery of distributivity. He quickly realised this wouldn't work and dropped it like a hot brick.And you think other philosophers were guilty of going around the houses? Compared to Quine Popper is a model of simplicity and clarity. Quine is, essentially definiting a problem that does not exist and killing the patient who is not sick (laws of logic), then replacing the whole notion of separate sciences, laws and statements with a holistic supraentity which is the only thing which can be falsified. This is a nightmare. There is no justification for this switch at all, since the formal laws of logic were not found wanting.
From this point it gets into really deep and headache-causing waters when he starts getting into indeterminate translation etc.I'm astonished that scientists are into this and reject Popper as too centred on one notion and too removed from empirical concerns...I still remember struggling through Quine 20 years ago and thinking I'd give anything to get back to nice, simple, Popperian philosophy which was in comparison a model of clarity....

quote:

---

Perhaps amongst philosophers. In their ordinary scientific work, scientists don't give it a second thought. Even within philosophy, there are critics.

---

But Sokal and Bricmont are not within philosophy - they are physicists having a laugh. Their paper was a wind-up - having a dig at the post-modernists. The swipe at Popper is just that - a swipe in passing rather than a serious criticism. They were after the French postmodernists, not KP.*In fact it is pretty ironic that KP comes in for stick from scientists for being too philosophical and not concerned enough with emirical measurement. He was generally denigrated and belittled by philosophers of science during his lifetime for just the opposite.
In fact the astronomy/astrology reference is a useful reminder of the following summary:

quote:

---

Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.
W. W. Bartley, Philosophia (September—December 1976)

---

quote:

---

I would have to guess that even before Popper, many scientists criticized Freud, and were skeptical of his work. And since Popper, we have had Cold Fusion and Intelligent Design. Popper's falsificationism does not seem to have eliminated the pseudo-science.

---

Many scientists did indeed, but they had no handle to grab him by. He was doing measurements, he was making predictions, he was hypothesising. What could one say was not science? Only the falsifiability criterion hits that spot. Freudianism is not falsifiable. Most of the analysis consists of postdictions rather than predictions and Popper threw this into sharp focus.Cold fusion was caught exactly by Popperian thinking, but not specifically falsifiability. It was repeatability that did for that theory - nobody could reproduce the results.
ID doesn't count since it was never seriously proposed as science.If you want to know just how not seriously proposed it was then try reading the Dover trial summary. The judge used Falsifiability to deliver the killer punch:

quote:

---

The court concluded that creation science "is simply not science" because it depends upon "supernatural intervention," which cannot be explained by natural causes, or be proven through empirical investigation, and is therefore neither testable nor falsifiable. Id. at 1267.

---

* In case the astrology/astronomy thing is still niggling - falsifiability does separate the two very nicely - the debunkers were having a little laugh methinks. I'll let Popper say it in his own words:

quote:

---

These considerations led me in the winter of 1919—20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theoryif we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theoryan event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability; some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirersfor example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by re-interpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.")

​

I may perhaps exemplify this with the help of the various theories so far mentioned. Einstein’s theory of gravitation clearly satisfied the criterion of falsifiability. Even if our measuring instruments at the time did not allow us to pronounce on the results of the tests with complete assurance, there was clearly a possibility of refuting the theory.

​

Astrology did not pass the test. Astrologers were greatly impressed, and misled, by what they believed to be confirming evidenceso much so that they were quite unimpressed by any unfavourable evidence. Moreover, by making their interpretations and prophesies sufficiently vague they were able to explain away anything that might have been a refutation of the theory had the theory and the prophesies been more precise. In order to escape falsification they destroyed the testability of their theory. It is a typical soothsayer’s trick to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable.

---

Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

I am not sure that is really correct. Quine's book "From Stimulus to Science" is very much consistent with positivism.Personally I find Quine hard to read, so I don't claim any expertise in understanding him. But I also find him a bit of an enigma. I have serious disagreements with Quine's views on mathematics. I'll agree that Popper is clear - he is far easier to read than Quine. But "clear" can be consistent with "clearly wrong."Here's the problem with philosophy of science. It looks at accepted science. Then it looks at the data that is used by accepted science. And it tries to build a story as to how the data justifies the science.But that's often backward. Philosophy needs to look at what the data was before the development of the particular science, and see how the science actually changed the data. Often it is the science that justifies the data, rather than the data that justifies the science.Scientific epistemology tries to describe science as belief formation, with the data justifying the beliefs. But most scientific advance importantly involves concept formation or concept change, and it often involves collecting new kinds of data that were never available before. This is mostly missed by the philosophers. That is probably a misreading of Quine. Again, I admit to not being an expert on Quine, and to finding him hard to read. But I think his target was not the laws of logic, but rather was the way that logic was being used within philosophy. And, personally, I do think there is a lot of misuse of logic within philosophy. I suspect that very few scientists read Quine. And most of those who try would probably soon give up because of his opaque writing style.I happen to have been reading some philosophy, but that is unusual for scientists. I became interested in the science of human cognition, and it turns out that the philosophers control much of that field. So one is forced to study some philosophy in order to be able to read the literature. Granted. Nevertheless, what they write is suggestive of how unimportant Popper is to physicists. However, Freud was reaching conclusions that went far beyond what could reasonably be concluded from his measurements. Recognition of the importance of repeatability is far older than Popper's philosophy.

quote:

---

I am not sure that is really correct. Quine's book "From Stimulus to Science" is very much consistent with positivism.

---

No, I promise you - that is absolutely classic attack on the two pillars of LP - reductionism and the separation/distinction between analytic and synthetic truth. There is no doubt that this is his intent there, non at all. Don't forget I am talking about his seminal work - Two Dogmas of Emirical Science (or something like that - I could go and dig it out but I'm rather hoping it has permenantly buried itself somewhere inaccessible - it caused me much physical pain to read it last time).Quine is worse than hard to read. I thought Wittgenstein was the hardest philosophy I had read - that is tough. Quine beats it.

quote:

---

Scientific epistemology tries to describe science as belief formation, with the data justifying the beliefs. But most scientific advance importantly involves concept formation or concept change, and it often involves collecting new kinds of data that were never available before. This is mostly missed by the philosophers.

---

I'll come back to this later when I have mulled it over a bit more

quote:

---

That is probably a misreading of Quine. Again, I admit to not being an expert on Quine, and to finding him hard to read. But I think his target was not the laws of logic, but rather was the way that logic was being used within philosophy. And, personally, I do think there is a lot of misuse of logic within philosophy.

---

Well, this is one of the passages I was referring to

quote:

---

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system [of our beliefs]. The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.

---

He goes on further from there to develop this into the holistic model of falsifiable 'knowledge' and from thence to specific state that since the laws of logic cannot deal with quantum phenomena then they clearly are also empirical and can change - he suggests adopting the Von Neumann quantum logic which has no distributability a=b but b<>aI'll have to dig it out, I knew it would come to this...20 years I'd managed to forget him for :-)Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

This is a reply to your last post to me in the previous thread:
Message 160No, I don't. No, this step is completely irrelevant. I am not talking about what the table "is" and "is not". Such things are irrelevant. We were discussing whether or not the table exists at all. Not what that existance depends on. What that existance depends on is irrelevant to the table existing. Do you understand this idea? I will try to explain further: Again, all irrelevant.
Again, you're talking about "whether or not it IS a table"... which is irrelevant on coming to a consensus that it does exist.
Some can call it a workbench, and others a sculpture... others can call it God's Personal Alter of Wickedness. How we identify the object is irrelevant in determining whether or not the object exists independant of the observer.
All people, even those who call it a workbench, sculpture or God's PAW will all agree that they can see it and bump their hips into it. They all agree that it exists independantly of the observer. No philosophy required. Yes, atoms are real.
Electrons are real.
Not all observations come directly from light being reflected into human retinas.
However, while you are still unsure that a table is real, perhaps we should deal with the simple examples before moving on? No. I believe that what can be confirmed to be observed independant of the observer is real. C'mon Bikerman, I know you're a smart person, are you telling me that you completely ignored the last part of the table example that clearly states that the observation is repeatable and verifiable? How many of the millions that think God is absolutely real can see Him and bump their hips into Him? Obviously your comment here doesn't make any sense with regards to the example provided. As I mentioned with respect to the atom, not all observations are as direct and simple as others. Especially where the extremely small, extermely large, or extremely fast are concerned.
However, before we move onto the more complicated questions, perhaps we should first agree that tables do, in fact, exist. No?You still haven't shown any reason why I require philosophy of any sort to come to the conclusion that a table objectively exists.

Interesting. I may have to take another look at "Stimulus". Not that it matters much, since I disagree with positivism and I disagree with a lot of what Quine writes. Yes, I agree that Quine is harder than Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein is not an easy read. As it happens, I mostly agree with Quine there.

This Quine chap sounds like an interesting fellow.Asking as one who is pretty familiar with Popper but not with Quine can you give me an indication of where the key differences in aproach might lie?At this point I ask not to challenge but purely because you seem more knowledgeable of Quine and his approach than I.

In practice I've never seen science prosecuted this way. A theory is more likely to be accepted because it appears to be right, not because it is not wrong yet. And the notion of falsification really doesn't provide a lot of practical support to a theory. The ability to be falsified is certainly an important quality in a theory, because its the principle that it matters if your theory is right or wrong. Finding falsification is a mug's game - how could you tell if you failed to find falsification because your theory isn't false, or because your search was incomplete? How can we expect scientists to accept theory on the basis of unfound evidence? That's a fallacious argument from ignorance. Scientists still look not to falsify but to confirm. (I guess that's why none of them have heard of Popper.) A theory gains support as a result of the evidence for it, not because of the lack of evidence against it. After all, every new hypothesis comes out of the gate with a lack of evidence against it, simply because it's so new nobody's gone looking for the evidence yet. The standard of "not-been-falsified-yet" means immediate acceptance of theory, and nobody in the sciences thinks that way. Scientific theories are accepted on the basis of the evidence for them. Personally I think that flows more directly and naturally from Bayes, but that's fine. No. None of them do. Again I think you're not yet understanding the degree to which philosophical concerns are ancillary to the work of scientists. For instance, I'm sitting here in my living room, where my science textbooks form kind of a crenelated fortress around me - textbooks in organic chemistry, physics, biology, biochemistry, and some of my wife's older invertebrate physiology books - and none of them are about philosophy, falsification, the meaning of scientific knowledge, or anything like that. The last module that was inserted in any class was the bioinformatics module somewhat discontinuously plopped into the middle of my advanced genetics course (not saying it didn't belong there, it was just a bit of an afterthought.)When undergraduate science courses depart from the general basic-fact-lecture format, in my experience it's been to introduce practical tools, not to ruminate on philosophical notions. Well, as you say - scientists do what they get grants to do, and it's been my experience that for the vast bulk of non-rockstar scientists, what they're basically doing is taking an experiment they read about in a journal as applied to one species, and applying it to another. (I'm kind of bio-centric in my experience with working scientists.) It's a conservative way to stake out a new area for investigation but assure a grant committee that your research is likely to produce results (and publications.) Maybe that's the problem - maybe you want to talk to the scientists who don't talk on forums. A lot of scientists, and science students, are people who want to put their heads down and generate pubs, not push any boundaries. I think boundary-pushing is something most of the scientific community is content to relegate to a small number of rockstars, but as sexy as it is I don't think it should be understood to be representative of the work of the scientific community.Most scientific work is about filling in holes in our knowledge with proven techniques, not necessarily inventing the new techniques that allow us to explore vistas previously inaccessible. Fair enough, I guess.

It would be easier to list the similarities, since there are so few of those.Most obviously, Popper is easy to read and Quine is hard to read.Popper is a philosopher of science. Quine is far broader in his philosophy. For example, he has written a lot on the philosophy of language.As far as I know, Popper is not controversial, though he has some critics. But he mostly goes along with the traditional view that knowledge is justified true belief. He does question traditional assumptions about the use of induction, but then so have many others.In the Quine quote where I indicated agreement with Quine, he uses the expression "so-called knowledge", so you can see that he is actually questioning some of the traditional assumptions of epistemology, including scientific epistemology. However, where other critics such as Kuhn and Feyerabend have tried a frontal attack, Quine is more like a mole gnawing away at the foundations.I have his book "From a Logical Point of View" which might be a place to start reading him if that is what you are looking for. His paper "Two dogmas of empiricism" is included in that collection. Somewhere, in a book on philosophy of mathematics, I have a copy of his paper "Truth by convention" which is, in some ways, a precursor to his "Two Dogma's argument" (or at least the part of that argument on the analytic/ synthetic distinction.Whether it is worth the effort of trying to read him, that's hard to say. Unless you are seriously into philosophy, I would be inclined to advise against it. However, you might find it useful to browse through the wikipedia entry.

I will look him up.I am familiar with Feyerabend and Kuhn to a limited extent (they were part of my philosophy of science course)Popper's anti-inductivist pure falsification arguments have, as I understand it, been logically refuted.

It turns out that falsificationism is unfalsifiable.In the US, we have a group called the NTSB - the National Transportation Safety Board. They investigate train crashes, airline crashes, bridge failures, etc. And they often come out with new ways of reducing the risks.So imagine the induction: All the many airline flights have arrived safely; therefore this airline flight will arrive safely.A crash can thus be seen as an inductive failure. And the NTSB can be seen as advancing knowledge not through induction, but through induction failures.

quote:

---

Popper's anti-inductivist pure falsification arguments have, as I understand it, been logically refuted.

---

Have you a reference for that? I wasn't aware it had been refuted.
I know his later work on verisimillitude/truth has been shown to be flawed in the basic assumptions - something Popper himself was quick to acknowledge when discovered

quote:

---

"my main mistake was my failure to see at once that if the content of a false statement a exceeds that of a statement b, then the truth-content of a exceeds the truth-content of b, and the same holds of their falsity-contents", Objective Knowledge, 371

---

quote:

---

You still haven't shown any reason why I require philosophy of any sort to come to the conclusion that a table objectively exists.

---

Well, if we keep using the word table then I think it is obvious that my previous objections still hold - 'table' means more than something solid which we can perceive. So let's ditch the label (or at least I'll pretend that when I say table it carries no extra meanings).
So does the table have physical existence which we can agree on?
One way to see the table is as disturbances in an underlying quantum field. The field curls and kinks and we see this disturbances as particles at the atomic scale and as solid matter at the macro scale. From the quantum field perspective there is no mass, no matter, no table. The various fermions we perceive as particles are peturbations in the quantum field rather than 'solid things' and the way they interact is by exchange of bosons which are themselves fields with excitations or peturbations which correspond to the 'particle' nature of the photon (or hypothetical graviton).
Sooo....at a very basic level there is no table. The table is percieved as such because the quantum field excitations which we think of as 'ourself' interacts with the quantum field excitations which we think of as 'the table' in a predictable manner to produce certain outcomes which we label a table. From the quantum viewpoint there is neither YOU nor TABLE, just ripples in fields....So yes we can agree, but that agreement is contingent on our own structure and makeup.
But it goes further - hence the photon question. If we are moving significantly quickly or observing from vastly different gravity potentials then no, we cannot agree on the table. We cannot even agree on the basic dimensions of the table. We also cannot even agree on how it relates causally to other spacetime events.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.