What is this thing called science?
'Introductory textbook on the philosophy of science'
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- I don't think it's accurate to compare it a theocratic phenomenon. Ask any physicist, they will say that science requires checking our theories against the evidence and changing our theories as new evidence comes to light. It's not like they issue scriptures to all grad students about what you must believe.
In practice, science requires balancing multiple criteria. Does a model have the right level of simplicity and complexity? Can I convince my peers that it's correct? Should I trust the results of a crank over the results of someone who has a long history of excellent work, and how much onus is there on my me and my research group to reproduce every single published result?
Keep in mind, no one expects to be responsible for a revolution, so you get an effect similar to "poll herding" -- it is desirable to have a consensus, and as consensus emerges around a theory for how to describe some new observations, you get people going along with it even if they maintain personal reservations. In fact, it has been clear to many physicists that dark energy is just an ad hoc explanation, and there has been serious contention about what better model could exist, and there have been several competing models. But every model had its flaws. It's possible that the timescape model will also have flaws that cause it to be re-evaluated.
I recommend a book called "What is this thing called science?" by Chalmers [1]. When I was an undergrad it gave me a more nuanced understanding of the Philosophy of Science.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_This_Thing_Called_Scie...
- >music yoga
I would wager that most people who enjoy listening to music at some point have hummed some tune, sung in the shower, or something like this. If your point is that merely the act of listening itself is enjoyable, then that seems to apply to reading philosophy as well---there's enjoyment to be found in the mere pleasure of reading a philosophical work, and it's not like having a philosophical discussion is what "actualizes" this enjoyment or something strange like that.
(Though in any case I don't think this is the relevant criteria for whether an academic institution should be abolished or not, but.)
>I'm not saying this project is complete, I'm predicting that science will continue to make progress monotonically until all that is left for philosophers is the Philosophy of the ever-shrinking Gaps.
Suppose we accept the view that consciousness can be fully explained by science. Suddenly this means that actually all of philosophy will fall to science? And we should pre-emptively abolish the institution because of this prediction?
>That is flat-earth kind of wrong. There is at least one obvious universal methodological rule for scientific inquiry, and that is the one voiced by Feynman: any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong.
Usually when people express this kind of, "X idea is wrong, and anyone who argues for it is intellectually bankrupt" will refuse to take seriously any discussion on the matter, so I won't say too much on this topic. But if you're interested, you can read Feyerabend's arguments, including case studies in the history of science where traditionally well-respected scientists have violated, e.g., principles of falsifiability. Chalmers has a nice book, What is This Thing Called Science?, that includes this view, though the book is far more nuanced than Feyerabend. "Any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong" sounds plausible, but there are several issues, such as the theory-ladenness of observations and the inability to test any specific hypothesis in isolation, meaning it's difficult to know what particular theory or part of a theory an observation falsifies (Duhem-Quine).
>It would have absolutely no impact on the manifest fact that science is effective.
But nobody has suggested that the dichotomy is either a) Popper's falsificationism is correct or b) science isn't effective. None of Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, or really, any philosopher of science disagreeing with Popper is saying science isn't effective.
>That fact alone casts some pretty serious doubt on DQ being a problem for Popper because the only way it could possibly be an actual problem for Popper is if Popper is correct :-)
But it's hardly a unique view to Popperian falsificationism that things can shown to be wrong, the view that things can be shown to be wrong is something all the thinkers mentioned and any sane person agrees on.
- The history of science generally doesn't seem to be characterized by shifts in theory due to empirical disproofs. Usually, when theories are "disproved", we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but rather, we want to stick to the theory and try to patch it up. When Uranus didn't seem to be moving according to the predictions of Newtonian mechanics (a disproof!), physicists didn't throw out Newton, they posited the existence of another planet. And they turned out to be right, Neptune existed.
See Chalmers' What is This Thing Called Science? for an introduction to these kinds of topics, or Kuhn and Feyerabend's work for historical responses. (And the Duhem-Quine thesis for the "auxiliary hypothesis" response to falsifiability I hinted at with my example.)
- Broadly speaking, philosophers of science don't think there's a generic answer to what differentiates scientific inquiry from not-scientific (or pseudoscientific) inquiry. Popper put forward the criterion of falsifiability (if it's falsifiable, it's science, otherwise, it's not science), but after Kuhn and Feyerabend's arguments, philosophers generally drifted away from thinking there's some hard-and-fast rule to differentiate science and pseudoscience.
If you're interested in these issues, you might enjoy Chalmers' What is this Thing Called Science?, an introduction to the philosophy of science that addresses issues like these. Or a primary source like Feyerabend's Against Method, quite a fun read, though maybe not one that many philosophers of science today would give their full-throated endorsement of.
- For me, probably What Is This Thing Called Science?. It was the first time I really thought about some basic questions in epistemology.
- Douglas Hofstadter's work provides several examples.
* Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB)
* Metamagical Themas
* I Am A Strange Loop (IAASL)
GEB and IAASL are thematically similar, and both are worth a read if you're interested in both Gödel's theorems (plus related work eg Church-Turing) and Hofstadter's philosophy of mind. GEB is a lot more creative and fun; IAASL does a better job of communicating the key technical ideas like incompleteness.
Metamagical Themas is a collection of shorter work, generally technical and fun.
Although Hofstadter was the first to come to my mind, these other authors/works also provide fun and/or excellent examples of technical writing:
* Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line"
* Velleman's "How To Prove It" and "Philosophies of Mathematics"
* Mittelbach & Goosens "The LaTeX Companion"
* Waldrop's "The Dream Machine"
* Nielsen & Chuang's "Quantum Computation & Quantum Information"
* Lakatos's "Proof & Refutations"
* Chambers "What is this thing called science?"
* Doxiadis & Papadimitriou's "Logicomix".
