Philosophy and science

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is because philosophy is religion.That is to say, philosophy is mostly about preserving ancient traditions, and it has no real subject matter.

This post (to which I am replying) illustrates why many people think of philosophy as arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's why they look at the name "philosophy" and think of it as "the love of sophistry".

Why do you see "arbitrary" as a problem here?It seems to me that what makes something a table is a matter of social convention, and social convention is somewhat arbitrary.

I don't see how that follows. After all, the term "objective" refers to a human concept too, so "objective" can only mean what we want it to mean.We had an earlier discussion related to this in thread Objective reality.

Except that I will disagree with both camps. No, this is not at all testable, so it is pseudo-science.

Earlier post: Current post: You are implying that the MRI output is the exact representational code. But in that case, you ought to be able to accurately read minds using MRI output. As far as I know, that is not possible. At best you can get broad imprecise correlations.

That seems to be a diversion.When a scientist provides a scientific theory, that theory defines how to determine the values of the various variables that are mentioned in the theory. Sometimes it might be impossible in practice, such as when we are talking about what happens in the core of a star. But the way of determining the values in principle is spelled out in the theory.If you want to have a theory where beliefs and representations are the main variables, then you need to give definitions of those variables that are sufficiently precise that you could in principle go and measure them. We are not even close to being able to meet that requirement.

That's along the lines of typical cognitivist thinking, and probably way off target.

The story about beliefs and codes has zero supporting evidence.

In physics, theory is very much a theory of future observations. Theoretical physics and experimental physics have a lot of cross communication.With philosophy, the theories are about as useful as theories of the IPU or theories of the flying spaghetti monster. They are disconnected from observation.In the case of epistemology (the alleged theory of knowledge), there has actually been some experimentation. For example, Jean Piaget did experimental work on learning, and Piaget's work was found useful by schools of education. But mainline philosophy did little more than pay lip service to Piaget's work. And now that Piaget is safely dead, what little influence he had on philosophy is disappearing.The methods of philosophy are far more like the methods of theology and religion than they are like the methods of science.