is philosophy a science
Posted: Fri Oct 21, 2016 3:24 am
or can i put on a white robe sit on a rock, or on marble steps and do philosophy and call myself a philosopher? Socrates didnt go to school for it! He invented it .
For the discussion of all things philosophical.
https://canzookia.com/
Funny, I was just saying the same thing about Leo.Skip wrote:Where philosophy got bogged down, tracking the elusive Heffelump, science kept slogging on and came up with weird shit like GPS and post-it notes.
Some of it is actually pretty good.
Geez, I miss Leo!
Once I’d arrived at the conclusion that physics made no sense I quickly came to another one which was predicated on my growing love for philosophy. It seemed impossible to me that our cosmos could be the complex mathematical entity which our physicists were claiming it to be. If philosophy were to have any validity at all it was simply inconceivable that the comprehension of our cosmos would not be the birthright of Everyman.
Whatever our universe might be, she could not be any of the host of impossible entities speculated about in the popular science literature, because these absurd universes are only comprehensible to a handful of super-geeks who speak in tongues, the fascinating but inscrutable language of mathematics. I felt that the comprehension of our universe should be intuitively obvious to anybody, and I decided that this assumption would form the central plank of my entire philosophy, and thus of my life’s quest. The philosophy of the bloody obvious was born and named and I could clearly define its objectives. Either I would find the problem with physics and make our cosmos comprehensible or I would die in the attempt.
... One might well wonder why I never took up physics as a career but I somehow knew that joining this priesthood would be a mistake. Although mathematically competent I was never an adept and I didn’t kid myself that I could ever be one. Furthermore, my arrogance notwithstanding, I was never self-delusional and I knew damn well that these physicist blokes were in all likelihood a hell of a lot smarter than me. If the problem of physics were actually a problem of physics then they would have found it long ago, and for almost a century after realising that they had such a problem they hadn’t even managed to lay a glove on it.
I didn’t for a moment entertain the possibility that I could do what they had been unable to do with their magnificent mathematical toys. As I saw it, this had to be a problem of a different nature which required a radically different approach. The problem of physics had to be a conceptual problem, and conceptual problems are accessible to reason. This was a task for a Natural Philosopher, for whom conceptual problems accessible to reason are all in a day’s work.
For a Natural Philosopher the problem with physics took only about a nanosecond to discover, because 20th century physics is riddled with metaphysical absurdities. It is inconsistent with the teachings of all of the major philosophical schools of both east and west, dating back to the pre-Socratics and beyond. Its models make several basic metaphysical blunders by conflating the physical with the non-physical, and also by conflating a physical model with its mathematical representation.
These blunders went largely unpunished by the philosophical community when they were first presented to a bewildered public. The history of 20th century physics will be much written about from many different angles, but the question which puzzles me the most is this: Where were the philosophers while all this was going on? The navel-gazers were safely locked away in their ivory towers writing learned dissertations, which nobody ever took the trouble to read, about the meaning of other people’s words, which nobody ever took the trouble to try and understand for themselves. So intimidated were they by the mathematical virtuosity of the geeks that barely a one of them had the courage to poke his head above the parapet to voice a word of protest.
Meanwhile the physicists, purporting to be on the same mission as the philosophers to discover the nature of physical reality, were parading around a cock-and-bull story about the nature of space and time which back in Plato’s day would have had the whole fucking lot of them sold into slavery. Hardly a squeak of outrage was heard from the hallowed halls of philosophical academia about this gratuitous insult to millennia of diligent scholarship.
Well, if considering hypotheses which cannot be tested is science, when it is done by scientists, what is it that makes them scientists in the first place? If non-scientists are party to the same knowledge, are their hypotheses any the less scientific?surreptitious57 wrote:Science is the study of observable phenomena but that is not everything scientists do for sometimes they consider hypotheses which
cannot be tested but could still be true. As they have to use existing knowledge to make logical assumptions about what is unknown
This was the reasoning behind Einsteins statement that imagination is more important than knowledge and it explains how he came
to develop the Theory Of Special Relativity. Through use of gedanken or thought experiments rather than actual experiments per se
Science is essentially a hypothesis generating discipline as that is the basis upon which it functions. One cannot determine truth about observable phenomena by reason alone. So while some hypotheses might be untestable not all will. And also not all untestable ones will always be untestableuwot wrote:Well if considering hypotheses which cannot be tested is science when it is done by scientists what is it that makes themsurreptitious57 wrote:
Science is the study of observable phenomena but that is not everything scientists do for sometimes they consider hypotheses which
cannot be tested but could still be true. As they have to use existing knowledge to make logical assumptions about what is unknown
This was the reasoning behind Einsteins statement that imagination is more important than knowledge and it explains how he came
to develop the Theory Of Special Relativity. Through use of gedanken or thought experiments rather than actual experiments per se
scientists in the first place? If non scientists are party to the same knowledge are their hypotheses any the less scientific?
Depends what you mean by functions, and, again, science. It is demonstrably the case that vast majority of people employed as 'scientists' spend most of their career working with models that are known to work. So, for instance, rocket scientists will use Newton's equations to send people to the Moon, or Einstein's to place a GPS satellite in orbit. There is a very strong instrumentalist ethos, which is the backbone of everyday, making things work, science. Of course, there are others who take it upon themselves to devise more accurate, or simpler models, so that science is more effective or efficient. In practise, this means mathematical models, and whether they bear any relationship to reality is irrelevant to their function. Then there is the tiny percentage of people who try to understand the cause of observable phenomena. Some will join research teams working on a particular hypothesis, and the really smart, or persuasive ones will develop research teams that work on their personal ideas. Some are driven by curiosity, some by faith in their own intuitions, some by dreams of glory or riches and some for reasons known only to themselves; scientists are only human, after all. All of which comes under the umbrella of science, but these days, an hypothesis will only be accepted as 'fact' by the general scientific community if it produces results.surreptitious57 wrote:Science is essentially a hypothesis generating discipline as that is the basis upon which it functions. One cannot determine truth about observable phenomena by reason alone. So while some hypotheses might be untestable not all will. And also not all untestable ones will always be untestable