Philosophy Of Science

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

At what point do you say that philosophy comes into the picture?

Observation does not appear to be a matter of philosophy.

Gathering information does not appear to be philosophy.

Experimentation and testing of information does look like philosophical inquiry.

Forming hypothesis or theory? It also looks doubtful because that is just a matter of tying the evidence together.

So at what point does science become a matter of philosophy?

You can't see the wood for the trees.

How do you determine that these are the steps you should follow?

How, for example, did you decide that "Experimentation and testing" was a better option than "Prayer and quiet contemplation"?

What made you think that "Gathering information" was preferable to "taking psychoactive drugs"?

The answer begins with a 'P'.

Psychology?

 

[No Robots]

Verification (eg. by predictibility) is what validates a theory. The theory is prior.

There is something that comes prior to theory.

Yes. It is thought.

 

[steve_bank]

My point.

One does not have to know anything about empiricism from philosophy to be empirical.

I was babysitting a rug rat for a couple and had her out in the yard. She crawled towrds a rock periodicity stopping to put her hand out feeling for the image until she got to it.

She was empirically testing and gauging reality. Always red it.

Philosophy does not invent, it speculates, comments, and categorizes on what is.

Which came first, empirical testing of reality and ideas or empiricism?

Romans were great engineers without our math and science. They developed empirical data on strewth of materials. They figured out beams were stronger than flat wood. They developed the arch.

You might say philosophy formalizes what people do.

 

[Politesse]

You might say philosophy formalizes what people do.

Yes.

Which begs the question of why any sensible person would disapprove of philosophy. You can't really want to underperform a two year old on rational inquiry?

 

[pood]

As @bilby noted, the intellectual infrastructure for the broad enterprise we call science was laid by philosophy.

Now you might say that science has become completely separate from philosophy, but that is not true. As the aforementioned Norman Swartz (and more notably Einstein) said, bare data is not enough. You have to THINK ABOUT that data, and CONCEPTUALIZE and CONTEXTUALIZE it. Doing that, and how to do it, is philosophy,

Uranus isn’t fitting Newton’s paradigm. Shall we really ditch such a successful theory?

No. We find Neptune.

Mercury isn’t fitting Newton’s paradigm. Shall we really ditch such a successful theory?

Yes, we don’t find Vulcan. We find gravitational lensing.

But we don’t WHOLLY ditch Newton. We realize it works to a limit. It’s still great for getting us to Mars.

And so on.

Duhem-Quine. If Newton had known about this PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT, he might have questioned his assumptions about absolute space separate from absolute time and his assumption about Euclidean geometry. Recall, Newton PHILOSOPHIZED about gravity in a letter, wondering what such a “force” could be. He already had the PHILOSOPHICAL intimation that maybe it was not strictly a force at all.

Philosophy and science are always having metaphorical and metaphysical intercourse. I suppose physical intercourse would be more fun.

And none of this has anything to do with religion.

 

[steve_bank]

Out of high school I went into the Navy and went to electronics schools.

Before I read or had classes in philosophy and science I learned to empirically trouble shoot electronic systems. It was a natural process. Trouble shooting is a skill learned by experience.

The practice of science is a skill learned by experience. It is not learned from a philosophy. When lerng a new skill you go through a 'learning curve'.

In engineering an empirical solution can mean ‘trial and error’.

The generalized Scientific Method is trial and error. Hypothesis, trial, accept, fail and reformulate, try again.

We all do it maturely. Modern formal science involves mathematical models.

You can’t fit reality into a philosophy, at best a philosophy of science is a subjective generalization of a process that originates in the way our brains work.