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Philosophy Of Science

pood said:
Philosophy of engineering. East to find.

In fact, there is quite a bit on the internet about the relationship between philosophy and engineering.
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Probably written by 'philosophers'.

There is quite a bit of information on the net about how god created the Earth.

If you can not define what you mean by philosophy or science the to say philosophy guides science has no meaning, and I wonder where you got the idea.





10 Rules for Engineers

www.kevinwanke.com www.kevinwanke.com

While leading Engineering Teams I have been lucky enough to work with some amazingly talented people. Through their wisdom and mentorship I have collected a set of principles that help to focus both my efforts and the messaging and expectations that I share with my teammates. One of the primary goals of this blog is to not only create personal validation around these principles, but to attempt to explain the depth and logic behind each one and to grow this list as I grow and move forward in my career. Here they are in no particular order:

Rule#1 – Communicate. Over-communicate. Then go back and Communicate some more.

Rule#2 – Trust – but also verify

Rule#3 – Plan for disaster instead of perfection. The best plans cover worst-case scenarios, not best-cast.

Rule#4 – Under promise and over deliver. Or just promise and over deliver. Just don’t over promise. And no matter what, over deliver.

Rule #5 – It may not be our fault, but it is always our responsibility

Rule#6 – Engineers are born optimists. Engineers are also the last ones to know they are in trouble. Be mindful of this so as to not let things get out of control

Rule#7 – Initial planning is the most vital part of a project

Rule#8 – All problems are solvable in time – just make sure to schedule enough time to create the right solution

Rule#9 – Never present a problem without presenting at least one possible solution

Rule#10 – Engineers – we get the job done
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I cod not have said it better. Successful engineers are usually part psychologist and part philosopher. And part politician.


When I was working I was member of the IEEE Institute Of Electrical And Electronic Engineers.


IEEE codes of ethics and behavior. For engineers ethics is not abstract academic c debate. you are fro time to tie faced with eethicall issues.

The IEEE code evolved over many decades. Written by engineers not philosophers.


7.8 IEEE Code of Ethics

We, the members of the IEEE, in recognition of the importance of our technologies in affecting the quality of life throughout the world, and in accepting a personal obligation to our profession, its members and the communities we serve, do hereby commit ourselves to the highest ethical and professional conduct and agree:

I. To uphold the highest standards of integrity, responsible behavior, and ethical conduct in professional activities.

1. to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, to protect the privacy of others, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment;

2. to improve the understanding by individuals and society of the capabilities and societal implications of conventional and emerging technologies, including intelligent systems;

3. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;

4. to avoid unlawful conduct in professional activities, and to reject bribery in all its forms;

5. to seek, accept, and offer honest criticism of technical work, to acknowledge and correct errors, to be honest and realistic in stating claims or estimates based on available data, and to credit properly the contributions of others;

6. to maintain and improve our technical competence and to undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training or experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations;

II. To treat all persons fairly and with respect, to not engage in harassment or discrimination, and to avoid injuring others.

7. to treat all persons fairly and with respect, and to not engage in discrimination based on characteristics such as race, religion, gender, disability, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression;

8. to not engage in harassment of any kind, including sexual harassment or bullying behavior;

9. to avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious actions, rumors or any other verbal or physical abuses;

III. To strive to ensure this code is upheld by colleagues and co-workers.

10. to support colleagues and co-workers in following this code of ethics, to strive to ensure the code is upheld, and to not retaliate against individuals reporting a violation.
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An oldie but a goodie. The Unwritten Laws Of Engineering from the 1940s. Used to have a hard copy. Accumulated wisdom of engineers, not philosophers.




TIMELESS ADVICE FOR ENGINEERS


The Unwritten Laws of Engineering by W. J. King was first published in 1944 as three articles in Mechanical Engineering magazine. It has been in print as a book ever since, becoming a classic of engineering literature. Recent editions, including a trade version, The Unwritten Laws of Business, have revisions and additions by James G. Skakoon. Mechanical Engineering magazine is excerpting laws from the book, presented in three articles just

as in 1944, with comments from contemporary authorities.


For the first in the series, we start with “What the Beginner Needs to Learn at Once.” Future installments will be “Relating Chiefly to Engineering Managers” and “Professional and Personal Considerations.
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steve_bank said:
pood said:
Philosophy of engineering. East to find.

In fact, there is quite a bit on the internet about the relationship between philosophy and engineering.
Click to expand...
Probably written by 'philosophers'.

There is quite a bit of information on the net about how god created the Earth.

If you can not define what you mean by philosophy or science the to say philosophy guides science has no meaning, and I wonder where you got the idea.
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Most of life is not engineering, in which things are extremely well defined. Definitions of science and philosophy are slippery — which is why it appears I had to introduce you to the Demarcation Problem.

I have no idea why you started this thread if you have no intention of engaging with its subject matter. I have already given you plenty of stuff to think about, including a link to a very good book on the subject. I suggest you spend some time thinking about these things rather than falling back on bromides like, “Philosophy bakes no bread.”

Engineers must employ logic and critical thinking skills. They must know how to assess a problem using premises and conclusions. They must think about the ethics of what they are doing. All of that is philosophy.
 
steve_bank said:
Philosophy still bakes no bread.

An airplane flies and a computer works regardless of how you philosophize about it. Or believe a god is involved.
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Okay, but do you want to have a life of nothing but bread-making and bread-eating, without so much as an interesting co-worker to converse about the nature of reality with? If there's nothing more to your life than pragmatic survival, it's a dismal excuse for a life compared to what you could be doing. What a waste of a beautifully complex brain! To be sure, from a capitalistic perspective, most of Picasso's output was "useless" and certainly less money than he could have been making churning out period-appropriate ad copy. But what sort of a humanity is that?
 
Politesse said:
do you want to have a life of nothing but bread-making and bread-eating, without so much as an interesting co-worker to converse about the nature of reality with?
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How do bread-making and bread-eating preclude discussion of the nature of reality?
Politesse said:
If there's nothing more to your life than pragmatic survival, it's a dismal excuse for a life
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If you ignore the pragmatic requirements for survival, you won’t have a life to describe as a dismal excuse.
Obviously, focus on pragmatism is required, just not exclusive focus.
But speaking of CWOTs, lamenting the opportunity cost of other people’s choices ranks right up there IMHO.
 
Politesse said:
steve_bank said:
Philosophy still bakes no bread.

An airplane flies and a computer works regardless of how you philosophize about it. Or believe a god is involved.
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Okay, but do you want to have a life of nothing but bread-making and bread-eating, without so much as an interesting co-worker to converse about the nature of reality with? If there's nothing more to your life than pragmatic survival, it's a dismal excuse for a life compared to what you could be doing. What a waste of a beautifully complex brain! To be sure, from a capitalistic perspective, most of Picasso's output was "useless" and certainly less money than he could have been making churning out period-appropriate ad copy. But what sort of a humanity is that?
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While I agree with the substance of your post, Picasso left behind an estate worth $1.3 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. I’m sure he made lots more than he would have had he churned out ad copy. :)
 
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But, speaking of art, we can ask, “Does art bake any bread?”

A good example is Van Gogh. He died penniless, but today his art is worth an inestimable fortune.

Years ago, Sean Hannity, that filth rag on Faux News, had his own radio show, and the subject of Van Gogh somehow came up. He sneered at the artist, saying something to the effect of, “If he wanted to make money, he should have made art that people wanted to buy.”

That right there is the mentality of, “Only stuff that bakes bread is worth anything.”
 
pood said:
Politesse said:
steve_bank said:
Philosophy still bakes no bread.

An airplane flies and a computer works regardless of how you philosophize about it. Or believe a god is involved.
Click to expand...
Okay, but do you want to have a life of nothing but bread-making and bread-eating, without so much as an interesting co-worker to converse about the nature of reality with? If there's nothing more to your life than pragmatic survival, it's a dismal excuse for a life compared to what you could be doing. What a waste of a beautifully complex brain! To be sure, from a capitalistic perspective, most of Picasso's output was "useless" and certainly less money than he could have been making churning out period-appropriate ad copy. But what sort of a humanity is that?
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While I agree with the substance of your post, Picasso left behind an estate worth $1.3 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. I’m sure he made lots more than he would have had he churned out ad copy. :)
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Hence why I said most of his output. The majority of his career was spent churning out art that sold for relatively little, more controversial than lucrative.

Even where his famous pile of dough was concerned, I note that without philosophers and aesthetes, much of that wealth also would not have existed. Most of the value of his estate was in his own paintings, which by then were valued at absurd prices, because people who do enjoy thinking found his work challenging and interesting. Sure, he was king of the table by the time he died, but only because he had managed to attract the love and attention of the idle. Guernica is one of the finest paintings ever produced, but it baked no bread. It was proof against psychological angst about the war, not an effective shield against a falling artillery. It was painted on a wall, yes, but not a particularly strong wall, and the paint adds little to its stability. If you tried to use Guernica as any sort ot practical barrier or platform, you'd be toast.

And what wealth wasn't in painting was leavened mostly with some timely investments in real estate, which kind of goes to show...

EDIT TO CONCEDE: But I agree that Van Gogh would have been a more apt example. Or my favorite sculptor, Camille Claudel. Poor woman. Not even an art collection to her name by the end, she destroyed most of it in a depressive episode.
 
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I think Guernica is perhaps THE finest painting ever produced, but it baked no bread in solving engineering problems.
 
A shame this thread (and others in science and philosophy) aren’t gaining traction: Possible life on ancient Mars, possible solution to the origin of life, the current conundrums in quantum mechanics … instead it’s Kirk, Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, and other revolting people.

We could distinguish between falsification as a criterion for a proper scientific theory, and falsifiability as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for distinguishing between science and non-science or nonsense.

If we adopt the latter criterion, it removes the problem that the aforementioned Norton pointed out of adopting flat eartherism, dowsing and ID creationism as proper sciences. (But should we even dismiss those trio as proper sciences?)

Falsificationism has the problems already discussed. But if we adopt falsifiability as a necessary but not sufficient condition for science, we rule out unfalsifiable notions such as Many Worlds in QM and string theory and superdeterminism, since none are falsifiable. Is this wise?

The physicist Sean Carroll argues that Many Worlds inevitably falls out of QM, even though it can’t be falsified.

As to falsifiability, there are two schools of thought. One holds that you should hang on to a good theory even if it is falsified. This is exemplified by Einstein’s response to the question of what he would say if his relativity theory were falsified: “Then I should be sorry for the dear lord, because the theory is correct,”

Another is the advice to dump a theory when it has been “falsified.”

In the 19th century, Newtonian mechanics was allegedly “falsified” by perturbations in the orbit of Uranus that his theory could not explain. Yet, properly so, almost no one believed that such a successful theory spanning centuries had really been ruled out by one data point. This goes to the first school of thought,

Sure enough, a mathematician used Newton’s own mechanics to predict that another planet beyond Uranus must exist to explain the otherwise unexplained perturbations of Uranus. He predicted exactly where it would be found, and found it was: Neptune.

Far from being falsified, Newton’s mechanics were gloriously vindicated.

Recall Duhem-Quine: an ancillary assumption held that there was no planet beyond Uranus. That was wrong. This is why theories cannot be falsified by data alone but must take into account all factors, including one’s assumptions.

But then later the SAME MATHEMATICIAN held that there must be another planet, dubbed Vulcan, orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury, because Mercury also had anomalies that Newtonian mechanics could not explain. It seemed obvious, after the success of the Neptune prediction, that this planet would be found, and Newton again resoundingly vindicated.

It was not found.

General relativity explained the anomalies, and strictly “falsified” Newtonian mechanics. Einstein’s model not just explained everything Newton could but made a novel prediction that was verified: gravitational lensing.

This goes to the heart of Norton’s point that “falsifying” a theory is never enough: you must have a new and better theory that not only explains all the predictions of the prior theory, but makes novel predictions, too.

But — again — Newton’s mechanics are perfectly good for everyday use. It gets us to the planets, without any need for Einstein.

Norton complained that a strict falsificationist criterion would elevate flat eartherism, dowsing, and intelligent design creationism to the status of science. Should we really worry about that?

Here, the (atheist) philosopher of science Brad Monton critiques the Kitzmiller decision ruling intelligent design “not science.” He, correctly in my view, said that the judge had no business solving the demarcation problem by judicial fiat. His point was that you can’t say ID is not science. What you CAN say, for the time being, is that it is unevidenced science, but that is no reason to leave it out as a topic for discussion in a science class. As to the worry of TEACHING it as science, there is no worry, because, currently, there is nothing to teach. As Lakatos would have it, ID has no research program. Maybe that will change. In his paper, Monton also adduces ways supernaturalism could become part of a research program.

However, we also have crackpot ideas that can be a priori ruled out as science. Among them is a “theory” being peddled here that light from the sun is at the eye instantly, even though the same person peddling this idea admits that light from the sun takes 8.5 minutes to arrive at the earth, where the eyes are. This bizarre notion contradicts Aristotle’s Law of Noncontradiction, that a proposition and its direct negation cannot simultaneously be true.
 
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pood said:
Norton complained that a strict falsificationist criterion would elevate flat eartherism, dowsing, and intelligent design creationism to the status of science. Should we really worry about that?
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in the case of Flat Earth I would say no because from what I have seen (too much!) it hasn’t gotten past the hypothesis stage. There is no theory to be falsified.
 
pood said:
Here, the (atheist) philosopher of science Brad Monton critiques the Kitzmiller decision ruling intelligent design “not science.” He, correctly in my view, said that the judge had no business solving the demarcation problem by judicial fiat. His point was that you can’t say ID is not science. What you CAN say, for the time being, is that it is unevidenced science, but that is no reason to leave it out as a topic for discussion in a science class. As to the worry of TEACHING it as science, there is no worry, because, currently, there is nothing to teach. As Lakatos would have it, ID has no research program. Maybe that will change. In his paper, Monton also adduces ways supernaturalism could become part of a research program.
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To the bolded: Not so. Not at all.

There is an equivocation here between science the methodology that produces and tests theory; And science the body of work - the set of theories that that methodology has tested, and not yet demonstrated to be false.

Teaching of science, at least up to the high school level, is generally focussed on teaching the body of work. And it is taught (unsurprisingly, given that schooling started out as a religious activity) as something to be believed. A set of unquestionable facts about reality, which you must memorise and regurgitate if you wish to pass your examinations.

It is trivially easy to add to the syllabus a set of claims that have not withstood the methodological process of doing science. ID has no research program; But then, nobody is researching the charge on the electron, or the speed of light in a vacuum, or the electronegativity of Oxygen, either.

We are told that these things have been measured; And we are told what the results are. The difference between a well established fact that nobody is bothering to question as no new data has been seen that casts doubt on it, and an unsupported faith based claim, is very clear - to people who have a solid grounding in science as a methodology. That group does NOT include school students, nor does it include many of their teachers.

Most school science teachers, particularly at the primary school level, are teachers, rather than scientists. They are given a science syllabus and text books, and told to teach what is in those; They have far too much on their plate worrying about whether little Jenny is being abused by her new stepfather, and stopping little Johnny from pulling little Ralphie's ears off, and trying to get funding for a pencil each for every kid in the class, to actually check whether what the School Board puts in the syllabus is actual science or not.

There is PLENTY to worry about in the teaching of science, not least the fact that schoolchildren are taught by example that science is just a bunch of facts that need to be memorised - just like history, geography, or religion.

We see people here all the time claiming that science is just another religion. Those people are victims of this teaching system.
 
Newton resorted to the god of the gaps. People like Newton were not imple black and white figures when it cones to religion and science, still true today.

The majority of major European science contributors were Christian. Galileo. As the Mid East declined economically science and math passed form Persia and the Arabs to Europe. Newton used Persian astronomical data.

From a documentary on the topic, 'science always follows the money'. There has to be enough excess wealth to sopport it.

No, Isaac Newton was not a creationist in the modern sense; instead, he was a devout, but non-Trinitarian, Christian who believed in a God that actively created and sustained the universe
. His theological views, including a rejection of the Trinity and an emphasis on studying nature as a path to understanding God, were considered heretical by many of his contemporaries and were often kept private.
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His main contribution was the notional system of calculus which he used to develop his mechanics. It set the stage for modern science and technology. Calculus as it evolved and Newtonian mechanics remain mainstays of science and engineering.

He is the granddaddy of modern physical science. Einstein was important but not nearly as important as Newton. Equal to Newton in importance was Maxwell and his synthesis of electromagnets.

History of calculus - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Calculus, originally called infinitesimal calculus, is a mathematical discipline focused on limits, continuity, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. Many elements of calculus appeared in ancient Greece, then in China and the Middle East, and still later again in medieval Europe and in India. Infinitesimal calculus was developed in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently of each other. An argument over priority led to the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy which continued until the death of Leibniz in 1716. The development of calculus and its uses within the sciences have continued to the present.
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In Newton's England, there was a massive theological dispute raging, not so much between Protestantism and Catholicism*, but within Protestantism itself - a dispute that had led to outright war, the execution of the King and establishment of a Quasi-parliamentary republic with strong elements of a military junta, and then the reestablishment of a monarchy with vastly reduced powers.

Literally any and every religious belief in the late C17th in England was heresy to a large fraction of the country. It was a very good time to keep ones beliefs to oneself, as far as that was possible (which wasn't far, given that church attendance on a Sunday was mandatory).




* One thing most people with any power agreed upon by this time in England was that the Catholics were beyond redemption and were enemies of the state. Long gone were the disputes between Catholic and Protestant that had been a feature of the C15th and 16th; By the C17th the mere suggestion of Catholicism was sufficient to provoke a coup d'êtat, and did for both Charles I and James II - the latter was actually a Catholic, but the former was only married to one. Which was enough.
 
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I disagree that relativity falsified Newtonian mechanics. Use of terms.

Newtonian mechanics is the main system used in science and engineering. Relativity has little practical value in comparison.

Is relativity the absolute truth, if so how would you know ... philosophically.
 
bilby said:
There is PLENTY to worry about in the teaching of science, not least the fact that schoolchildren are taught by example that science is just a bunch of facts that need to be memorised - just like history, geography, or religion.
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What always gets me is that they are, in fact, taught "the scientific method". But not.... as a method. Just as another memorized series of facts. They often forget what order the "steps" were supposed to go in, which makes not the least bit of sense if you're thinking of it as a logical procedure. They can't apply it to a novel situation, or any situation. It was just a list of words they were meant to memorize.
 
pood said:
I think Guernica is perhaps THE finest painting ever produced, but it baked no bread in solving engineering problems.
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There has to be enough excess bread produced to allow people to sit around paining.

Da Vinci in part made a living as an engineer. He designed fortifications and weapons.

Tribal society or Greek and Roman civilizations, art is a luxury fueled by wealth.

Bows, arrows, and spears mean more efficient hunting and the poosblity of prduicng excess food allowing a poplatiinthat can make art.

Ding snce die niot ken in modern matematcal snse.

Peope figured out how to control fire nd spin stabilize arrows with feathers withut or dern scnce and math.

The Metdod again, form an hyopohesis for the solution to a prblem. Test it and refrmulate if needed

Prolem, how can we contrl fre.
Proble, how do we increase accurcy of an arrow.

Neccessity is them mother of invention.

The method is a trial ad error process that zeros in on trurth.
 
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