jerromyjon said:
Right! Science is about proving how things work, and predicting it precisely. Philosophy deals with how hard or easy it is to oneself, and has no value to science.
I have serious reservations about both those points!
I am no admirer of Popper's superficialities, and he failed miserably in his misdirected attempts to abolish induction, but he was halfway right in his falsificationism.
More precisely, science is about the selection of the strongest of the available alternative hypotheses at any given point in its history, assembling scaffolding while one builds up stronger hypotheses. It is not about empirical/computational proof, though it might have seemed to be so for a couple of centuries after Newton.
As for philosophy being of no value to science, that is about as valid as arguing that formal maths is of no value to science, which proved to be a major pratfall for Hardy, remember? The philosophy of science is an applied branch of formal disciplines, and as such not only is of value, but also is the basis of the selection, evaluation and planning of scientific assumptions, hypotheses, theories, and claims of validity. A lot of the lousy experimental design that passes peer review is founded upon faulty appreciation of the significance of the underlying philosophy, by plodders who think that if you can sneak in numerical representations of something or other, you have achieved incontrovertibility, so never mind basic good sense.
But this way moderation and thread closure lie. Where those guys think one is to present or develop concepts, I have failed to grasp, along with many other abstrusities. If you have any interest in following up these questions, let me know where the right forum would be.