Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
I don't hate philosophy. The thing I dislike is people who claim intellectual superiority because they've read a lot about it.
Dave
The study of atoms in the brain doesn't explain the redness of red;Materialism = FAKE
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I don't hate philosophy. The thing I dislike is people who claim intellectual superiority because they've read a lot about it.
Dave
This sounds like the sort of folk experimentation that proved homeopathy and blood letting. Very easy to be fooled by placebo and wishful thinking. Whether that counts as science or not is down to what definition you happen to decide to use for science.
David Mo
Philosopher
You can call things whatever you want as long as you make the distinctions that are given in reality.
It's one thing for you to just observe and record. For example, in group studies it is common to place an observer who stands outside the group and records the relational behaviors of the members.
Another thing is if you introduce successive modifications of the variables to see the effects. For example, you may introduce an aggressive provocateur that increases tension between group members. Or a born peacemaker.
Another thing is that you establish a series of computable variables that include working hypotheses and by successively altering the conditions of the initial situation you can adequately measure the effects and demonstrate their relationship to laws expressed in the form of universal statements.
The first thing is called observation in epistemology. The second is called experimentation. The third is the controlled experimentation proper to experimental science.
If you want to call it in other ways it is your right, but it is not correct to erase the differences between these three processes of knowledge.
Otherwise, you are right that there are processes of non-scientific knowledge that are informal forms similar to scientific ones, but they are not the same.
Sideroxylon
Featherless biped
Same for people who read a lot about history and claim intellectual superiority?
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
Any subject, really. Philosophy happens to be the subject of the thread at the moment, and the combative nature of the OP started the whole thing off on the wrong foot so tempers started off high and stayed there. We got way past the understanding that the OP was a non sequitur long ago; ideally the thread should have died then. As I'm partly to blame, I think it's time to stop feeding the flames.
Dave
Wudang
BOFH
Why not just stick with "trial and error". If we make the word "science" apply to anything it loses meaning. We have enough trouble with the word "theory" as it is.
As it happens I read an article about some scientists testing a chinese plant used in TCM and claimed to help condition X (can't recall). The first task was to identify which exact species of the approximately 100 plants known by that name was supposed to be the right one. A confounding factor was that person A tries a plant called say redleaf and an hour later his headache is gone. (post hoc fallacy). He tells person B redleaf helped. B tries the plant known as redleaf in his village which is a different plant but maybe has some other metabolic effect or maybe it just makes a nice tea and he feels a little better.
None of that is science and calling it science is, again, to so stretch the term as to make it meaningless. Science is sytematic.
Because else we fall into the Philosopher trap of it not being science unless its beakers and labcoats, promoting the idea that science is some dry and sterile process that doesn't apply to the real world.
This thread is already, as was the design and was the intent, so far in the weeds of labeling the parts semantics it had no chance of ever going back, again as it the point with philosophy.
That being said you are correct to a large degree. What we call things is of secondary importance.
At the core what we have it two broad mentalities, a desire to have epistemologies that have standards and a mentality to have eptistimilogies that have no standards.
Science (or broader related epistemologies like logic, reason, empiricism, falsefiability, etc) provide a framework where it is possible to be wrong. This is unacceptable to many people.
"Ideas are tested by experiment. That is the core of science. Everything else is just book keeping."
Stripped down to the absolute most basic conceptual framework if you have an idea, perform an action based on the idea, and then observe the universe to see what happens, you're doing science.
I'll stand by main point. If a claim/idea/musing/pondering it's not falsifiable it's little better then a mental creative writing.
This seemed like a good statement on the topic:
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25322
"Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best. String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity involve phenomena that are likely to manifest themselves only at energies enormously higher than anything we have access to here on Earth. The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms that are impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on Popper, have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they are not falsifiable.
The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a priori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets."
The issue with most of the pseudoscience back in the Million Dollar Challenge days of this forum wasn't that it wasn't falsifiable, it was that it had been falsified and people went on believing/selling it anyway.
Wudang
BOFH
I think we have to distinguish between unfalsifiable in practice and unfalisifiable in principle. For example, phenomena that only manifest at energy levels we don't have access to. Maybe there are future circumstances that will allow that - fusion power, whatever. And scientific hypotheses may also have predictive power, so perhaps some variant of string theory predicts certain behaviour in the vicinity of black holes say. If we observe that the hypothesis gains weight.
xjx388
Penultimate Amazing
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What distinctions are given in reality? None whatsoever. The only distinctions are the ones humans create. The monkey that learns to crack open a nut with a rock isn’t worrying about “this is a non-science activity,” it’s just getting a nut out of the shell.
That’s what we do: we want to know about something. We can think about it all we want to, but at some point, to really know about it, we have to actually experiment, like that monkey banging away at nuts.
With homeopathy, someone thought, “Hey, maybe like cures like,” or whatever, dreamt up all these axioms and put it into practice without doing any verification . They substituted hubris for diligence and declared that it was true. They mistook placebo effect for actual effect and called it confirmation. Others who asked, “but does it really work?” did the experiments and showed that it doesn’t work.
Science, is whenever someone dreams up an idea, accepts that the idea could be wrong and diligently tests the idea. Hard science is the best tool we have for arriving at the truth. Philosophy can only help us come up with the ideas in the first place.
This seems a little uncharitable to the early days of homeopathy. At that time at least it did less harm than conventional alternatives and may have appeared, by comparison, to be pretty good. If as you say they mistook placebo for effect, then they weren't simply relying on their hubris. They just lacked a sufficiently rigorous methodology. It's not as if modern scientists don't fool themselves in this way sometimes.
David Mo
Philosopher
I don't quite understand. What do you mean, "create" a difference?
There's a real difference between painting my room red or white.
There is a real difference between putting an observer in the background of the room and introducing a provocateur into the discussion group.
Don't you think these differences are real?
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David Mo
Philosopher
'Hard' science? Is there a 'soft' science? Where's the difference?
I don't know why you exclude philosophy from science. The philosopher says, "Man is a wolf to man." And then he looks around and "proves" his idea.
Magic is also science. The medicine man has his recipes for curing diseases. They usually work and if this doesn't happen it's because someone has cast an evil eye. That is proven by his experience as a healer. He can cite a lot of cases he has treated before.
And homeopathy. Because there are a lot of people saying that they have been cured by drinking homeopathic water. Then it's proven.
And the housewife who tries adding a little saffron to the broth to see if it tastes better. She tries it and says "it tastes better". Then she's doing science.
Everything is science!
Either you make a distinction between the scientific way of testing ideas and what isn't. Then you're in the problem of the demarcation of science. And not everything is science! And the problem is not so simple that you can solve it with blunt, vague phrases.
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arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
The difference is that philosophy is in some aspects about intellectuality itself. So when someone studies it, it pretty much defines them as an intellectual, especially in their own eyes. Historians get snooty about history, but philosophers get snooty about everything, because philosophy touches on pretty much everything. That's one reason why I have little patience with it. There are others.
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Sideroxylon
Featherless biped
Tone over substance. Yeah see that complaint in politics discussion too.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
One of the other reasons is that as far as I can see there's very little substance either.
Sideroxylon
Featherless biped
Posters shooting the breeze here? In Plato, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Frege et al. In contemporary academic? In Chopra and William Lane Craig? All of the above?
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
All and more. Seems to me there's a lot of words, but they rarely make a difference to my life, you know? I'd rather those words be expended on something that's going to make my life better. Like science.
And yeah, I know that science wouldn't be where it is without philosophy. But this is why so many people say that philosophy is a waste of time. Because they can't see any practical outcome.
SusanB-M1
Incurable Optimist
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Isn't 'knowledge' the original definition of the word 'science'?
Sideroxylon
Featherless biped
We would not think the way we do about ourselves or the world. Some of it for the worse. For example we might blame Descartes/Avicenna for this thread. I can entertain the idea that philosophy is dead but the indispensable contributions are clear in any reading of the history of ideas.