What Is Philosophy?

[bilby]

High tech, space exploration, etc, is the result of scientific research.

It can be. But need not be. The reason it is in our culture is because of our philosophy.

Scientific research can be done without leading to any technology at all; And technologies can (to some extent) arise without what we today would think of as scientific research.

The Anglo-Saxons produced some of the finest steel made prior to the Industrial Revolution - it wouldn't be bettered until the twentieth century - but their metallurgy was founded as much in superstition as in science. There were many parts of the process they used that could have been omitted, or simplified, without lowering the quality of the end product; And their way of doing things worked, but their smiths didn't know why.

They had high tech. But not scientific research. Their approach was evolutionary and intuitive, not scientific nor empirical. When a particularly good batch of steel came from the forge, they tried to reproduce every part of the process, saying the same prayers, working in the same weather, season, and phase of the Moon, with the same boy working the bellows, the same dog lying near the hearth, etc., etc.

The ancient world had some incredible engineering. It even had some amazing tecnologies. But to get to the moon requires not only technology, and not only technology backed by empirical science, but also philosophy - you need the philosophical understanding of why empiricism is superior to faith or superstition; You need an economy with large surpluses, which comes from employing a range of philosophical ideas from capitalism through to constitutional law; And you need to want to go to the Moon, not as a poetic metaphor, but as an actual desire and strong cultural drive - in the case of the Moon landings, that drive came from the philosophical conflict between capitalism and communism.

"Why didn't the Romans develop to the point of having a spave program?" is a philosophical, as well as an historical question; And the answer lies in their philosophy, rather than in their ability to employ science and technology. They did do science, and a lot of spectacular engineering; But they lacked the philosopy that resulted in the enlightenment, and later in the Industrial and Technological Revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

[bilby]

From this it follows that at least in part, the idea that science consists of objectively reproducible data is a fallacy. The data must be interpreted. And science is full of controversy over how to interpret data.

Reproducible observations are required to aggregate data to interpret. Scientific “interpretation” of data is ideally composed of defining support for, or falsification of “interpretations” (hypotheses) that explain the data. Certainty is never absolute, but falsification is.
Controversy is an indispensable feature of humans’ application of scientific methodology, it’s not a bug.

We have a cultural philosophy that says that science is a way to increase the number of possibilities - to make new things possible that were previously impossible. We couldn't go to the Moon; Now we can.

Clearly that philosophy has some grounding in reality. But it is completely opposite to the philosophy of science as driven by falsification. Science doesn't actually make new things possible - if they are possible today, they always were. The Romans could have built steam engines and railroads; None of the science behind that technology was unknown to them, nor has any fundamental part of reality changed since their time to make it more possible today than it was in 200CE.

Science proceeds, not by creating new possibilities, but by destroying old impossibilities (falsification). Just as a sculptor can reveal the statue that was always present in a block of marble, so science strips away the things we believe, that ain't actually so.

Every scientific advance consists of reducing the number of possible ways to do things. When we reduce them far enough, we can see the wood for the trees, and actually achieve things that were previously only potential. It's not until you understand why you could never get to the Moon in a hot air balloon, that you will bother to look into rocketry.

Science has made far fewer things possible. That's why we can now do more stuff. But if our cultural philosophy didn't include the false belief that science makes new things possible, we would likely still be building roads for our horsemen to ride messages across long distances, just the way the Romans did.