Philosophy Of Science

[Politesse]

If science comes from philosophy, from what does philosophy come from? What guides philosophy?.

Dharma, obviously. Either that or The Chicken that laid The Egg.

 

[pood]

If science comes from philosophy, from what does philosophy come from? What guides philosophy?

If science is philosophy then philosophers should get themselves a lab coat, a pocket protector,a slide rule, and most importantly safety goggles. You never know when something will blow up in your face.

Philosophical thought experints can be dangerous.

You mean like Einstein’s Gedankens, influenced by Hume, that inspired relativity? Newton’s insight, never before achieved by anyone and not involving lab coats or safety goggles, that the earth is also falling toward a falling body?

 

[pood]

Two of the most remarkable insights in scientific history were from philosophical thought experiments. I guess engineer Steve finds them … dopey,

 

[pood]

Another philosophical thought experiment was Hugh Everett’s 1957 paper on the relative state formulation. I guess Steve would find that dopey, too. Myself, I wonder what Einstein, who died two years earlier, would have thought of it.

 

[pood]

John Dalton, who introduced atomic theory to chemistry, specifically acknowledged his debt to the blind philosopher John Gough. There are so many examples of this.

However, I expect shortly we shall again hear the bromidic mantra, “Philosophy bakes no bread.” Though maybe it bakes Twinkies.

 

[Jarhyn]

From reading the OP on Popper: he is correct insofar as that his philosophy of science as narrowing down the bounds on a real phenomena.

This ends up producing an abstract, if inversely derived view of the universe: it shows us something of the "shape" of the thing in some abstract but solidly real way. Our uncertainty has error bars, but these bars bound a real structure. To m it happens in the same way as that we don't know the true upper and lower bounds of the number of primes for regions we have not fully calculated of the number line, but we can and have narrowed our estimates in proven and real ways, and can confidently hold on that understanding.

Popper's is the view of science any engineer with any shred of hubris must inevitably have, that our ability to falsify that which is false, and prove that which is true within the remainder, and to test that in turn, that's what is needed to build new things from the understanding we have.

 

[bilby]

I have posted several times I worked with creationists who were very good engineers. They compartmentalize science and engineering.

Engineering in no way contradicts creationism. Indeed, many of the most intelligent creationists become engineers, because that discipline doesn't conflict with their beliefs. No compartmentalisation is necessary.

 

[Elixir]

Engineering in no way contradicts creationism. Indeed, many of the most intelligent creationists become engineers, because that discipline doesn't conflict with their beliefs. No compartmentalisation is necessary.

Lots of engineers are creationists, and the fact that they exist is oft cited by creationists as authoritative evidence that creationism is scientifically fine and dandy. Dembski, Behe et al get a devoted following for their nonsense, and even morons like "Hello my name is Kent Hovind"* get groupies. But "the guy I know who is an engineer" has even more credibility for the average YEC, than do people handing them complicated shit like "irreducible complexity".

(Let alone volcanoes blasting koalas from Mesopotamia to Australia)
* The opening line of Hovind's "dissertation"

 

[Politesse]

That the branch of the "sciences" most disconnected from active scientific research sometimes doesn't fire some people for hawking pseudoscience is not the boast some engineers think it is.

My husband is a functional safety engineer, and a good one. He attended the University of Michigan, and today earns a considerable sum of money, making sure the products of a certain notoriously successful graphics card company don't accidentally kill us all. In his college days, he was a Creationist as well. Unsurprising, because he grew up in a deeply conservative state, and his only education in the life sciences was an AP Biology class that taught "both sides of the debate. As such college did not directly, disabuse him of the dogmas his conservative childhood church had raised him with.

He did, however, pick up the basics of the scientific method, and more importantly, wound up in a branch of engineering that involves routine hypothesis testing on critical issues. It was inevitable, even though it was not immediate, that he would eventually realize the fact that his parents had obliged him to commit his life to a hypothesis that would not pass the most rudimentary barrage of fault testing. Thus, the work world did a better job of whittling away at his theological confidence than the university had. By twenty-five, he was a "spiritual Creationist" who no longer denied evolution and imagined Adam and Eve as Hominins. By thirty, he had abandoned Creationism altogether. A few years later, he left the church. It had no use for a scientifically trained mind, and he had no use for an institution that held his career back more than it helped.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Two of the most remarkable insights in scientific history were from philosophical thought experiments. I guess engineer Steve finds them … dopey,

Would you consider Kepler's thinking that orbits may be elliptical instead of circular to be a philosophical thought experiment? Just wondering so I can contextualize your comments a bit better within the history of science and compare to Einstein's thought experiments.

 

[pood]

Two of the most remarkable insights in scientific history were from philosophical thought experiments. I guess engineer Steve finds them … dopey,

Would you consider Kepler's thinking that orbits may be elliptical instead of circular to be a philosophical thought experiment? Just wondering so I can contextualize your comments a bit better within the history of science and compare to Einstein's thought experiments.

Kepler discovered ellipses empirically.

Hume supported radical empiricism — a philosophical stance.

The Copernican system had the same problem as the Ptolemaic system — the assumption that orbits ere perfectly circular. This was a mistaken philosophical assumption. I once read an account of the difference between Ptolemy and Copernicus was that the former fell afoul of the principal of parsimony, but in fact it seems that was not true vis a vis Copernicus, whose account actually required more epicycles than Ptolemy’s did.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Two of the most remarkable insights in scientific history were from philosophical thought experiments. I guess engineer Steve finds them … dopey,

Would you consider Kepler's thinking that orbits may be elliptical instead of circular to be a philosophical thought experiment? Just wondering so I can contextualize your comments a bit better within the history of science and compare to Einstein's thought experiments.

Kepler discovered ellipses empirically.

Hume supported radical empiricism — a philosophical stance.

The Copernican system had the same problem as the Ptolemaic system — the assumption that orbits ere perfectly circular. This was a mistaken philosophical assumption. I once read an account of the difference between Ptolemy and Copernicus was that the former fell afoul of the principal of parsimony, but in fact it seems that was not true vis a vis Copernicus, whose account actually required more epicycles than Ptolemy’s did.

Kepler was trying to fit data with circles, which you state was a "philosophical assumption". So, I want to know if you consider Kepler's thought that orbits could be ellipses to be a "philosophical thought experiment" along the lines of Einstein's. He considered something that wasn't the common paradigm at the time and then made quantitative predictions based on that thinking that ultimately fit the data better.

 

[Swammerdami]

Many of the great scientists drew inspiration from religion or mysticism. Kepler was deeply religious. Oppenheimer may have been atheist but was deeply influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. The chemist August Kekulé supposedly dreamed about a mystic symbol of ancient Egypt and Greece when he anticipated Pauling's concept of resonance:

... Kekulé spoke of the creation of [his model for the benzene molecule and in particular why certain diderivatives of benzene had only one isomeric form]. He said that he had discovered the [oscillating] ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros)

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I have posted several times I worked with creationists who were very good engineers. They compartmentalize science and engineering.

Engineering in no way contradicts creationism. Indeed, many of the most intelligent creationists become engineers, because that discipline doesn't conflict with their beliefs. No compartmentalisation is necessary.

Anecdotally, my experience in California's Silicon Valley was that electronics technicians frequently espoused right-wing political views. I can't comment on design engineers who seemed to focus 99% on their work.

 

[DBT]

Anybody can learn to measure shit. Thinking hard and well about life, science, sociology, politics, ethics, logic, existential meaning, and associated topics is the very stuff of life, and that is philosophy.

Scientific theory as an explanatory narrative for observations being made, or a body of evidence doesn't seem to be a matter of philosophy, more a case of tying things together, explaining whatever is observed or discovered, testing and modifying according to the results. Is an explanation a matter of philosophy? Is an observation a matter of philosophy? Testing? Experimenting?

As has been repeatedly explained, philosophy does not have the same goals as science, though science, as a form of epistemology, is a branch of philosophy.

It's the latter that's being disputed.

Observing the natural world is not philosophy.

Learning how the world works is not philosophy.

Any species of animal that has a sufficiently complex CNS, is able to observe and experience its environment and learn how to interact with it. That is not philosophy.

Science just does it systematically. Making observations, gathering and testing information, which is not philosophy, but science.

Philosophy has its place, but there is a distinction to be made between science and philosophy.

 

[steve_bank]

Again.

Science and engineering and math as well are broad categories.

Chemistry, and biology are under science in college.

Chemistry is a vast area. Chemists in industry function much like engineers.

Scientific research into particle physics and cosmology is a small part of what sscince as a category encompasses.

Research does not just apply to cosmology and the like.


There is the story of Fairchild investing in a small engineering group of engineers that developed the first mass producible transistor. A major development in the day. Followed by the path that led to the first integrated circuits and the modern processor. None of it existed.


In worked at Intel in the 80s.

R&d aka research and development. A lot of research went into the machines and methods of manufacturing integrated circuits.

A lot of R&D on what we call control systems or feedback control came out of Bell Labs during WWII. Itv was all invented from nothing.

Bode a mathematician working as an enginner at Bell Labs in the war dleveled a lot of the basic theory. Control theory is everywhere in technology, unknown to the masses.

I had a hard copy of his book, shoud be trivial reading for the philosopher or the armchair scientist.

https://jontalle.web.engr.illinois.edu/Public/BOOK

S/Bode-NetworkAnalysisFeedbackAmplifierDesign.pdf

The initial problem that led to feedback control was long distance telephone. Tube audio amplifiers drifted wit tine and temperature and a way was needed to stabilize amplifier gain.
Not cosmology, but the creation of theory where here was none tested by experiment.

A lot of research wet into developing resistors and capacitors.

Pood’s view is very narrow, pood has never been exposed to the greater reality. Pood needs to use different wording instead of using philosophy and sconce without qualification..



Creative people working in groups. Sometimes it is called reaching critical mass. Get the right people together at the right time and ideas start popping. For me there was nothing like it.

No philosophy involved. People motivating and inspiring each other.

 

[steve_bank]

If theree is no difference between philosophy and sconce, can you elaborate on what you mean by science and philosophy?

Do I use philosophy or science to build a bridge or a particle accelerator?

To me philosophy is easy. Anyone can create a philosophy. There is no right or wrong to a specific philosophy. Multiple philosophies of science, and ethics if you go outside of western philosophy. Which one is correct?

The Stoics believed suicide was a way out of an untenable situation.

There is no general consequences to a philosophy.

There are consequences to a physical theory being wrong. It has to be proven right.

 

[pood]

Two of the most remarkable insights in scientific history were from philosophical thought experiments. I guess engineer Steve finds them … dopey,

Would you consider Kepler's thinking that orbits may be elliptical instead of circular to be a philosophical thought experiment? Just wondering so I can contextualize your comments a bit better within the history of science and compare to Einstein's thought experiments.

Kepler discovered ellipses empirically.

Hume supported radical empiricism — a philosophical stance.

The Copernican system had the same problem as the Ptolemaic system — the assumption that orbits ere perfectly circular. This was a mistaken philosophical assumption. I once read an account of the difference between Ptolemy and Copernicus was that the former fell afoul of the principal of parsimony, but in fact it seems that was not true vis a vis Copernicus, whose account actually required more epicycles than Ptolemy’s did.

Kepler was trying to fit data with circles, which you state was a "philosophical assumption". So, I want to know if you consider Kepler's thought that orbits could be ellipses to be a "philosophical thought experiment" along the lines of Einstein's. He considered something that wasn't the common paradigm at the time and then made quantitative predictions based on that thinking that ultimately fit the data better.

Kepler derived ellipses empirically from carefully studying the orbit of Mars in particular. He was trying to fit the orbit into a circular paradigm but found that he could not, so ellipses were not a philosophical assumption on his part.

 

[pood]

Anybody can learn to measure shit. Thinking hard and well about life, science, sociology, politics, ethics, logic, existential meaning, and associated topics is the very stuff of life, and that is philosophy.

Scientific theory as an explanatory narrative for observations being made, or a body of evidence doesn't seem to be a matter of philosophy, more a case of tying things together, explaining whatever is observed or discovered, testing and modifying according to the results. Is an explanation a matter of philosophy? Is an observation a matter of philosophy? Testing? Experimenting?

As has been repeatedly explained, philosophy does not have the same goals as science, though science, as a form of epistemology, is a branch of philosophy.

It's the latter that's being disputed.

Observing the natural world is not philosophy.

Learning how the world works is not philosophy.

Any species of animal that has a sufficiently complex CNS, is able to observe and experience its environment and learn how to interact with it. That is not philosophy.

Science just does it systematically. Making observations, gathering and testing information, which is not philosophy, but science.

Philosophy has its place, but there is a distinction to be made between science and philosophy.

Bare data about the world requires interpretation. Interpretation necessarily involves philosophy.

 

[pood]

The circular orbit paradigm was itself no doubt inspired by a theological world view, in which it was thought God would use circles for orbits because circles were somehow “perfect.”

 

[pood]

Empiricism in science is of course a philosophical stance deriving largely from Hume.