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

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.

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.

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.

Fine - if you are satisfied with that level of abstraction then no problem. It will serve you at a pragmatic and limited level. Your glass will be ok and you have somewhere to put your feet.You could then say 'what more is needed'? Well for the scientist there is a deeper understanding of what the table can do, what it implies, what it could lead to. By examining the table can we make general statements of a wider nature about our surroundings?
From studying your table and going down into the structure we get transistors, atom bombs and a heap of other stuff that requires some knowledge of 'under the surface'.Will a quantum field view lead to new applications/materials? Dunno..but I think our experience says that understanding something at a deeper level than present is generally a worthwhile enterprise and will generally spawn things which could not be predicted at the time...just my take on it.

Never said brains needed minds. The point is that the 'animal reality' of things is useful yes, but unless we want to go back a few centuries it isn't nearly enough. That isn't a philosophical issue, it is a scientific issue. Modern science is not something you can treat in this pragmatic common-sense way because the universe doesn't obey common-sense laws. The very limited part of it that we perceive appears to, that's all.

quote:

---

Don't confuse philosophy with reality or understanding.

---

You don't think that might be the slightest bit patronising?

Of course, but those perceptions colour the way we interpret the data.
It is very easy to demontrate how flawed we are at both perceiving and then understanding that perception. Nearly everyone has fundamental and very basic misconceptions which lead to similarly basic errors in decision/logic which we aren't even aware of most of the time. Whether that perception is through an electron microscope or our eyes doesn't make much difference.Who could possibly work in particle physics and retain the notion that reality is what we perceive? Shift a few things around and that perception is completely different. Hell, we don't even need to invoke quantum physics to see that - relativity on its own is enough to show us that what we think is real is far from it.PS - I recommend having a bash at the following to test your own perceptions, sense of consistency and reality...http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/
Philosophy Experiments Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

But you are doing it again - appealing to the example of a charlatan to say something about philosophers. Deepak Chopra is a woo-woo merchant with no more knowledge of quantum physics than my 10 yr old Nephew. Actually strike that - my 10 yr old nephew knows more, because what little he DOES know is correct. Nobody educated beyond the level of a common newt thinks that Chopra has anything truthful, let alone meaningful to say about anything.
If I said that physics was baloney because Erik Von Daniken uses it to show how alien spaceships work...well that has about the same validity of quoting Chopra to say anything about anything....

Yes I see that but I think that is to overstretch what Popper actually said about Falsification. He didn't rule out inductive reasoning completely. His main point was one of demarcation - if an hypothesis makes testable (falsifiable) predictions or it doesn't. That, to my mind, is still the best way of dividing science from pseudo and non science.
The fact that an hypothesis is falsifiable says nothing about it's veracity - and Popper was in error with his later work on this - but I still maintain it is the best test for making sure that such an hypothesis qualifies as scientific, even if wrong.Edited by Bikerman, : sp

Chopra? well-regarded? Hell no. Are you making this up as you go along?
He is a medical doctor, not a philosopher and he is widely despised amongst both scientists and real philosophers.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

OK now I have some sympathy for this yes. In fact I struggle to think of a philosopher of real note and import since Wittgenstein.
That may be simply because, like most of the rest of the arts and social sciences, post-modernism infected the subject and people started worrying way too much about relativism and whether anything was more true than anything else. Or it may be that we are just in a lean period for philosophy, or it may be saying that philosophy is indeed dying. Personally I doubt the latter and think it is a combination of the first two...

We will simply have to disagree about that...

Are we reading the same wiki?
I see a lot of old nonsense prizes that any celebrity 'academic' has got. Hell, Jeremy Clarkson has two PhDs in Engineering. Nothing of substance and certainly no endorsement from anyone I recognise as even vaguely philosophic, let alone a professional philosopher.
Then we have the criticicism section and suddenly there he shines forth.As for what philosophers think of him - he says it himself in an interview

quote:

---

Yeah. I think to some extent I am. But, again, you know I'm not an academic. So mainstream philosophers always have a problem with what I write, as do mainstream scientists. Everybody has a problem with what I write.

---

Whenever anyone says mainstream in an interview, 99 gets you 100 that some wack-job is about to pontificate. He is a joke and always has been and no serious philosopher would poke him with a long stick.