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What's the way to go truth
Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 3:23 pm
by mita2002
I am working about higher Mathematics at a univ. , and I wonder that : how to obtain scientific truth ? although I think so much but I haven't ever found out this . Ex: How to creat a theory ? as Landau or Einstein was doing ...
Re: What's the way to go truth
Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 7:03 pm
by Richard Baron
Hello Mita
My first reaction is to ask what question, or questions, you are asking. There could be several. Here are the ones that come to my mind.
1. How does one have ideas that are worth having? (It is easy to say something that no-one has ever said before, but hard to say new things that are worth saying.) I think this is more a question for psychology than for philosophy, but one consistent theme in the history of science is that good ideas are had by people who have done lots of work to master existing knowledge. "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration", as it has been put.
2. How does one come up with theories that have a decent chance of being correct? Same answer as for 1, but with emphasis on being ready to submit your ideas to criticism, both by yourself and by other people.
3. How do we know when our theories are correct? Well, we cannot get any absolute guarantees (although Feynman liked to claim that we knew that quantum electrodynamics was correct, because it had been tested to an accuracy of one part in ten billion, or something like that). But lots of testing according to recognised standards by people who did not themselves come up with the theories helps.
You mention mathematics. That is different from the empirical sciences, because you might get enough people to study a proof hard enough to know for certain that it was sound, then you would know for certain that the conclusions followed from the premises. The conclusions might fall into disuse if someone came up with something else that was more useful, but they would not be refuted. Having said that, new mathematical results tend to be sufficiently complicated that they need to be submitted to detailed testing by other people that is just as arduous as the testing one expects in the empirical sciences.