Do you think many philosophers of science are out of touch with experimental reality? Do you think that they need to go back "to the experimentalists themselves" ? Sometimes I wonder if they are theorizing about what goes on in the experimentalists' minds and what goes on in laboratories from a position of excess distance.
Fra
Sep27-08, 04:49 AM
Do you have an example of what philosophers of science you have in mind?
I think the philosophy of science tries to elaborate and reflect over the interaction between experiment, predictions and theories. I don't know what philosophers of science that doesn't acknowledge feedback from reality, the differences seems more to be what abstractions to use to increase our understanding of this process itself. The utility of this is in my opinion a sort of evolving higher "intelligence" of the scientific process. Take the brain for example, not only do we seem to learn more and more as per a fixed scheme, we also learn howto learn more efficiently and evovle the learning schemes.'
IMO, this is the task to philosophers of science. Closely overlapping the theoretical models of learning, or theories of theories.