- #36
humanino
- 2,527
- 8
That is not what I saidCivilized said:Anyone who thinks they can make progress in a 2000 year old subject without building on the great thinkers who came before them, is arrogant and destind to fail inevitably.
That is not what I saidCivilized said:Anyone who thinks they can make progress in a 2000 year old subject without building on the great thinkers who came before them, is arrogant and destind to fail inevitably.
humanino said:That is not what I said
0xDEADBEEF said:Didn't Weinberg say he tried that and that it didn't help.
No, because that would be completely misrepresenting the situation.octelcogopod said:Can't we say that philosophy deals with things that can't be directly observed or calculated, while science does?
octelcogopod said:Okay, so philosophy is about knowledge, and science is a way to acquire knowledge.
octelcogopod said:Therefore science is part of philosophy.
octelcogopod said:Science is a universal thing, to me it is based on the most fundamental thing we have - observation and that there exists an empirical world.
octelcogopod said:Once you break out of the observation part you can still acquire knowledge, but it is not science, it will then become philosophy.
octelcogopod said:My earlier post posited that maybe one day we will have an empirical, measured and observered form of every phenomena and event in the universe, in which case there would be no philosophy left.
apeiron said:So philosophy = generalisation of our ideas. Science = making specific measurements. Then move the debate on to how the two aspects of knowing can be effectively put into action in modern academia.
JoeDawg said:One of the big problems in the philosophy of science is called the 'demarcation' problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
If philosophy is about generalizations and science is about specific measurments, then categorizing species in biology, categorizing stars in astronomy, quite a lot of archeology, paleontology, and geology; are philosophy.
Add to that, measuring the positions of stars, in order to create a horoscope, is science.
I don't think most scientists would agree with that.
I agree, but it is quite a common thing to do.apeiron said:Demarcation problem is really about finding reasons to put science on a pedestal which is quite the wrong kind of defence I believe.
I don't think this is always the case. The emergence of the 'most effective' seems very haphazard, and historically, unusual. The last 300 years has been very 'unusual'. I do like your use of 'democratic', although many defenders of science would cringe at such a description. It's objective, don't you know, not something you vote on. I, however, think democratic and scientific ideas are integrally linked, for good and bad.The better approach (and here I adhere most closely to Rosen's Modelling Relations epistemology) is to see modelling as a democratic exercise. Sit back, let the models compete, and the most effective (for their purposes) will emerge from the fray.
Predicting the weather could be said to suffer from the same problematic complexity, however. I think we give it more cache because it fits better into our modern mechanistic view of the universe, I'm not sure that's anything more than prejudice though.As a field, it is not systematic in closing the measurement loop so that the model - the generalisation - is subject to learning.
I think we do this sometimes, but I think we are also very prone to erroneous feedback loops, our minds are suckers for superstition, instinct, habit, tradition; patterning errors.Of course, this is not just how good modelling works, it is how brains work. Our minds anticipate the next moment's sensory input and then responds to the errors in prediction, paying attention to what was not expected, what was surprising, and then updating a running model of the world. When everything is being smoothly predicted, they call it the flow experience.
Reductionism - not seeing the forest for all the trees.For some reason, philosophy and science have become disjointed activities in the sociology of human knowing. I am explaining why a division would emerge, but then also why the two have to work together.
Many people who specialize, anyone with a serious career, can get caught up in their own version of reality, and literally can't understand the language of others. Our brains can only handle so many models, and usually not at the same time. The paradigm shift idea.So forget the current disfunctional academic scene.
octelcogopod said:Even with the subjective, we still must base science on the premise that there is an external empirical world. Science is all about exploring that world.