The Scientific Method
Does anyone still believe a method of science really exists, and that it essentially defines and differentiates science as a sui generis human endeavor?
Shouldnt we abandon this idea? Is it not both old and obsolete?
Shouldnt we abandon this idea? Is it not both old and obsolete?
Comments (101)
[quote= Edward Dougherty; https://strangenotions.com/the-real-war-on-science/] Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The truth (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.
Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.[/quote]
Who argues that science is a "Sui generis human endeavour"? What does that even mean?
Quoting Mikie
Why? You're providing no argument or even some basic angle on discussing the topic.
In my view, it'd be hard to sincerely act as if anything goes. Maybe Popper (for instance) isn't the final word, but he can be taken as one of many thinkers using critical rationality to further clarify that very same critical rationality.
That seems like a good (necessarily blurry) picture of it.
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I suspect that such clarification is interminable. I'm on a Husserl kick at the moment, and he and the other phenomenologists seem to understand that phenomenology's most burning issue is the clarification of its own founding intention -- which is deeply if controversially scientific in as radical and pure a sense as possible --but one wrestles endlessly with the meaning of radically and purity.
Another great read along these lines was Jim Baggotts Farewell to Reality, also scathingly critical of string [s]fantasy[/s] theory.
Yes, of course. I do think there is a scientific method, although it certainly isn't the simplistic one people often identify - hypothesis, experiment, results, theory, repeat as needed. It's not a specific method, it's an epistemological process that can lead to many different approaches.
The scientific method is really the only thing that makes science science. No scientific method, no science. It always seems to me people who want to claim there isn't one are just trying to be all iconoclastic and post-modern and stuff.
Sorry, I have to go to bed now.
I agree. I suspect that it's (ideally) a sublime style of sociality, a way of seeing others and of seeing one's own claims from the outside. One tries to see around limiting idiosyncrasies or (equivalently) see as an ideally universal subject. It's as if the object in its truth exists for just this perfected subject. I don't pretend that this is typically explicit.
I should give that a read sounds interesting.
Quoting Quixodian
I agree with you. But I think a similar attitude can exist in philosophy, and that what we call science is an offshoot of this. The difference being that scientists ontology is naturalism.
Others seem to be understanding the OP just fine, so Im not sure what more youre looking for. Either science is unique in some way as many claim, and which I myself believe or it isnt. If it is, what makes it unique? The scientific method? Thats also been claimed, and I dont agree with it.
Quoting Janus
But it does presuppose naturalism, does it not?
I dont know if its humanly possible, as you mentioned. It does seem like the best we have, but even the best makes some very basic assumptions.
Quoting plaque flag
I dont mean to say that anything goes. I dont believe that. Im saying the idea of the scientific method is mostly wrong-headed. Unless of course we want to define it as something different from what is usually meant.
Quoting Pantagruel
A very important point, yes.
This is interesting because in the same paragraph you are unsure about the limits of science, while also worrying about pseudo-science. But does your worry of pseudo-science not suggest that you have some criteria to demarcate science and pseudo-science, at least roughly and intuitively if not concretely?
This may serve as a good starting point to understand the demarcation of science - what makes one theory science and another pseudo-science? Is it in the method used?
I dont think sweeping, abstract claims can be made. You have to look at specific, real world examples. So, are horoscopes pseudoscience? Yes. Is chiropractic a pseudoscience? It depends - but mostly, yes. Is creation Science pseudoscience? Yes. And so on. You can demonstrate each fairly easily.
More generally, lets consider quantum physics. Essentially, Einstein's General and Special Relativity remains the best version of an empirically validated theory. While string theory has been highly productive, all of that productivity has been in the domain of the construction of theoretical models. There is no empirical evidence for string theory. This unverified-but-not-unverifiable direction of research begs for abuse by pseudo-scientific interests.
Exactly, which is why theres so much woo-woo that uses quantum mechanics as an example to justify it. Another one: energy. More New Age-y stuff. They really have no understanding of any of it, they simply use it to create fictions like science fiction writers. Crichton did something similar with Jurassic Park a lot of fun, but complete nonsense.
I guess my question is why are horoscopes pseudoscience? Is it because of the method they use to come up with theories? Is it because of something else?
And the same question for the other things you called pseudoscience. There is some reason you call these pseudoscience, something that distinguishes them as not science. What is it? The answer to that question will provide a perspective on the line dividing science from not science.
Am I correct in saying you are:
1) Unsure about the limits of science
2) Sure that there is pseudo-science
3) Pseudo science is not science
It seems that if 2) and 3) are true, then you are sure of at least some of the limits of science.
If I say theory X is pseudo-science because of a and b, then I am saying a and b are indicators that something is not science.
Well, we can start with the fact that theres no credible evidence whatsoever for their claims or their beliefs. Theres very little evidence that manipulating vertebrae has any significant health benefits (beyond placebo), for instance. Theres no evidence that the positions of the planets have any demonstrable effect on human beings. And so forth.
But there are psychological reasons too. Its usually easy to identify when a person wants to believe something for understandable reasons. Whether because its comforting or theres financial incentive or whatever. So motivation is a factor. Motivated reasoning.
But theres also all kinds of biases and pitfalls that lead people astray and you dont even have to examine the evidence to know its complete nonsense. Claims about 9/11 and the moon landing are some obvious ones. Take a lot of people in, because theyre presented very smartly, by design. But upon inspection assuming we need to bother to get that far they reveal themselves as the half-truths and cherry-picked conglomerate of bullshit that they are.
I think that pseudo-science is perpetrated intentionally by people for material ends. Most of that stuff educated people can ignore, but if I cared to pay attention to some of the absolute twaddle that some people pay attention to I'm sure I could draw a line pretty easily.
We can be unsure about whats true and not true, yes? It doesnt mean theres no such thing as truth.
Ok, so just starting with your first paragraph, it seems a dividing line for science:
- Science requires evidence (material evidence? naturalistic assumptions? etc)
Does that not start to answer your OP? The scientific method requires evidence.
To answer the question in the OP "Does anyone still believe a method of science really exists?" - I would say you do believe such a method exists, and you use such a method to demarcate science from pseudo-science, including in many posts in this forum. In particular you think that materialistic evidence is an important part of the scientific method, and if there is a theory where the evidence does not support it, you are inclined to dismiss that theory as not scientific. Am I somewhat close?
I am not trying to be facetious or antagonistic, I'm sorry if it comes out that way. I think this is a great idea for a topic.
In order for a person to call something pseudo-science, they must first know the limit of science, to know that the pseudo-scientific theory lies outside the limit of science.
I think there's something there. Much of scientific practice is analytic, in the sense that the aim is to find a way to isolate one factor from among the great many that go into producing any phenomenon we might be interested in. This is very difficult. I was surprised to find, when watching an episode of Nova, that once you've carefully gathered your samples it can be like another year before you get the results of carbon-dating. Every step is work.
So that's one thing. The enormous time and energy put into getting answers to questions made as specific as they can be, or as they need to be, whichever is achievable.
I think the main features of science as an enterprise are that it is communal and self-correcting. I don't know if that fits exactly in the traditional "method" box, but it's the crucial add-on to the carefulness above: for all the work dozens of people put in, they might miss something, so no one believes that there is any process available that marks your results as The Truth. They're just results, and the better the process the more weight they'll carry, but mistakes at either the level of practice or of theory are just expected.
Quoting Mikie
Or, to quote @Pantagruel, its quaint.
If an idea is too complicated, or has too many variables, the less subject it will be to be considered "scientific". Of course, simplicity has to be used only in so far as it helps explain more complex phenomena, but if one forces this idea to the extreme, you won't get anything out of it.
There's also the curious aspect of "elegance" that arises in some of the sciences, which I know is somewhat controversial, but, for whatever reason, theories pertaining to physics say, and sometimes some aspects of linguistics, have this property to it.
What is it you think makes science special, that is not the method? Could you elaborate? It seems to be from other posts that you have criteria that you use to evaluate whether a theory is science (the word evidence pops up a lot), what is this other than part of a method?
And an emphasis on quantification, objectivity, and replicability. Naturalism is a theoretical posit intended to differentiate science from traditional metaphysics which is associated with religion. An barrier that remains in place, if only implicitly, in this day.
Quoting Pantagruel
Producing what, exactly? Other than research grants and tenures for academics, I mean.
Interesting bit of terminology - advocates for string theory and related multi-verse conjectures are often scornful of the insistence that speculative science ought to be subject in principle to validation or falsification by observation or experiment. They devised a slang word for those insisting on such criteria - the popperazi :grin:
I think science deals with things as they appear to us, so we are always there in science, and it cannot tell us about any imagined "absolute" nature of anything. We are obviously capable of thinking that things have absolute existences and natures, completely independent of us, what those existences and natures might be is something completely inaccessible to us. We might even question whether the idea is even coherent.
Phenomenology does not investigate the nature of the things themselves as they appear to us, but rather attempts to investigate the nature of the appearing itself. I think it follows that there cannot be the kind of strict intersubjective corroboration, which is possible in science, but there can be intersubjective assent to, or dissent from, its findings in the form of 'yes, that's how it seems to me" or 'no, that is not how it seems to me'.
Science is naturalistic in that it brackets the question of the supernatural for methodological reasons, and that works...spectacularly well. So, it is not that science has a blind spot regarding the metaphysical or the role of the subject, but that those questions are irrelevant to its most effective methodologies.
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FWIW, I defer to current usage, so that my suggestion that Husserl is a scientist is a metaphor.
Quoting Janus
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True, but as some kind of quasi-Hegelian direct realist, I claim that things just are the way they appear to us. To be sure, we can make mistakes, but this ability of ours to make mistakes need not lead to a dualism that puts the subject behind a veil of incorrigible sensation and conception. (I'm not saying that you are floating dualism, but just defending my direct pluralistic realism that features promises and puppies as equally real and meaningful in the semantic-inferential nexus of interdependent entities ---my warm holist ontological blanket, untorn and continuous. @180 Proof shared this link with me once, and it seems to get thing right : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_of_immanence .)
The part that resonates for me is:
Mind may no longer be conceived as a self-contained field, substantially differentiated from body (dualism), nor as the primary condition of unilateral subjective mediation of external objects or events (idealism). Thus, all real distinctions (mind and body, God and matter, interiority and exteriority, etc.) are collapsed or flattened into an even consistency or plane, namely immanence itself, that is, immanence without opposition.
I take this in terms of the structuralist insights that entities (including concepts) are semantically interdependent. For instance, watch old cartoons and see how dogs, cats, and mice are all related. I tell you what a cat is in terms of dogs (from which it flees) and mice (which it chases.) We have all the famous dyads too of course. Nothing can be plucked out and keep its meaning.
Excellent point. If you look at Popper on basic statements, you'll find people just agreeing to take certain statements as given. The rubber meets the road where embodied subjects to whom the world is given simply assent that this or that claim needs (for now) no further justification. So it's not just phenomenology. I think in general a rational community always argues from currently uncontroversial statements toward or against others that are controversial.
Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv
Related point : my suspicion is that science largely shines (for most) by the reflected light of technology that just works. A crude power-worshipping pragmatism is the working attitude of, well, all of us maybe in our typical sub-scientific mode. I'm not trying to pose as above it. I'm ambivalent. But this makes the uselessly pretentiously rational-critical philosopher a fool in the eyes of the world. Bacon said knowledge is power (so [only] power is knowledge.)
Those "things" of the senses are of a collaborative nature; they exist as affects between what appears to us as the body and what appears to us as its environment, replete with other bodies, animate and inanimate, photons and other phenomena.
Thanks for the link; I'll check it out.
Quoting plaque flag
I agree, our faith in science is based on its technological applications. But then there is a basic observational aspect of science which is just an amplification of our ordinary observations of the world. For example, "It is raining", "water flows downhill" and countless other everyday observations which can be definitively corroborated or falsified.
I'm ambivalent about science too, though, if it morphs into a scientism that claims that everything about animals and humans can be empirically determined. For me it's back to the noumenal, 'the ultimate nature of things cannot be determined"; metaphysics cannot be a science.
Nonetheless I think all these pursuits, science, phenomenology, metaphysics, have things to tell us about ourselves and the world around us.
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It sounds like I can ride into town for the gunfight with another direct realist, which is great.
I like to think that the transcendent subject is basically just the human species. No humans means no world in any way that we can talk about without confusion. But any particular human is dispensable. Like data moving from server to serve, timebinding flame from candle to candle. But we can't say that the species-subject simply creates the world, for this would not be a subject and (in my view) we wouldn't know what we were talking about. Hence an irreducible entanglement. The environment that. 'appears to us' is indeed an environment. What the species [ clearly ] is just reality itself. Which is not to say that we ever conquer the depths of reality or obtain perfect clarity. It's just that we always already have at least blurry access to the real.
Quoting plaque flag
I like this idea; I think it's right on the mark. A disembodied transcendental subject cannot evolve or be affected by anything. If we think about the in itself, the "precognitive influences" I mentioned, as utterly changeless, then we have a huge, insurmountable problem' how to understand how a world of unimaginable diversity and constant change could emerge from an utterly amorphous changelessness.
We can't know the in itself, even if only by stipulation, but I believe we can think more or less coherently and plausibly about it.
I see the naturalism of science as being methodologically necessary. I mean it just really cannot take metaphysics into account; it can only work with what can be observed, and the ways, mathematical and logical, we have of reasoning about what is observed as well as our capacity to create imaginative scenarios that can be worked up into testable hypotheses.
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Right, and Husserl would include our basic categorial intuition, extending the given beyond mere sensation (or something like that.) As Popper saw, all scientific theories include universals. They permeate our experience.
Just for clarity, I love science and am trying to carefully aim only at scientism. I'd call problematic conceptions of empiricism an aspect of scientism. In an important sense, Husserl is an exemplar of genuine empiricism. To be sure, the nature or essence of experience is contested. Which means that the essence of science (really identical, in my view, with rationality) is contested.
Perhaps I'm just trying to point out a complacency that accepts dazzling tech as a substitute for a coherent ontology. And I don't even want to judge it from a place of resentful self-righteousness. I want to sketch it as an important part of the situation.
We may differ a bit on this issue. To me the in-itself is something like the 'reflection' of a worldless-subject. It's a limiting concept like the worldless subject that, for my money, isn't worth the trouble.
But there is an encompassing world that is 'other' than us in an important if not absolute sense.
I prefer to think about the finitude of our knowledge in terms of the 'depth' of the lifeworld. Everything is 'horizonal.' (Horizon, background, the sense of more around the corner or over the hill.) Even the moment has retension and protension. Time itself is smeared. Even the everyday spatial object 'transcends' our always-finite viewing of it. We are never finished seeing it. There is always another perspective. Then physics can endlessly clarify the details of how a chair exists, etc. But all along the objects of the lifeworld are real. They are just not 'finally' given. It's a 'flat' or singlelayer ontology but it's foggy with depth. So we have the proper sense in it of our fallibility -of a world that is 'infinite' in relation to us as individuals.
In the sense that we cannot really do anything with the 'in-itself', I agree. I also agree that when we try to imagine the existence of the world prior to humans we project our (necessarily) anthropomorphic cognitions. On other hand I think it is implausible in the extreme to think that the prehuman world did not exist or that its existence was "human-shaped", even though we are unable to think its existence in prehuman terms (obviously).
For me the importance of the in-itself and the noumenal consists in its sustaining the realization that existence is, no matter how familiar it may seem, ultimately ineluctably mysterious. It is this that allows for, as Kant argued, faith, and I also think it allows for all kinds of wonderful metaphysical speculations, which seem to me just fine provided they are not taken too seriously. It seems to me there is also the humour of absurdity in this ineluctable mystery of existenceand to me that is enriching despite, or perhaps better, just because of, its indeterminability.
I wouldn't be too sure about the "abandonment" in actual practice . . . . down deep scientists have ideas they hope will be substantiated by experiment or shown to be wrong. Preferably the former. They are, by and large, human and hope to get there first. On the other hand pure curiosity can be a driving force.
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Quoting Janus
I can relate. It's like a glitch. I still think that as 'serious' ontologists whose discourse refuses to cut corners for practical or political reasons (dazzled by the glory of technology perhaps) --- and not as physicists or geologists who accept the fictional independence of their models from their modelling --- the best thing to do is confess that we can't say anything sensible here, that we can't give a meaning to our signs.
I admit though that the Meillassoux's 'ancestral realm' is tricky, and I can understand someone taking another side on this issue.
For others who didn't see this link yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux
We agree on the ineradicable mystery of the world. I love this quote:
[quote=The Visible and the Invisible]
The fact that the philosopher claims to speak in the very name of the naïve evidence of the world, that he refrains from adding any thing to it, that he limits himself to drawing out all its consequences, does not excuse him; on the contrary he dispossesses [humanity] only the more completely, inviting it to think of itself as an enigma.
This is the way things are and nobody can do anything about it. It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it first in the sense that we must match this vision with knowledge, take possession of it, say what we and what seeing are, act therefore as if we knew nothing about it, as if here we still had everything to learn. But philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with word-meanings, it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression. If the philosopher questions, and hence feigns ignorance of the world and of the vision of the world which are operative and take form continually within him, he does so precisely in order to make them speak, because he believes in them and expects from them all his future science. The questioning here is not a beginning of negation, a perhaps put in the place of being. It is for philosophy the only way to conform itself with the vision we have in fact, to correspond with what, in that vision, provides for thought, with the paradoxes of which that vision is made, the only way to adjust itself to those figured enigmas, the thing and the world, whose massive being and truth teem with incompossible details.
[/quote]
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Sure. We are ludic primates, and I love us for it. Schlegel's notion of irony is beautiful. Fits more in my Dramaturgical Ontology thread, but oh well.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/#RomTur
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I take the honor of subjecting oneself to peer review is not so unlike that of the brave soldier that shows up for battle. We don't like our pet theories busted to pieces, but we end up with better theories in the long run if we subject ourselves to criticism. We keep eachother a little less dishonest.
I like Pigliucci's description "mathematically informed metaphysics." Suggesting the intimate relationship between science and metaphysics, as I've considered elsewhere. I think the description is a propos.
It is not pure phenomenology - just because you experience something, that is unlikely to simply be accepted as science. However if many people experience the same thing, and it can be methodologically ordered into a theory that explains the shared experiences, we see the start of what we might call science. If we then use instruments to record whatever it is that we experience, it becomes even more likely to be accepted as science. If this theory can be used to accurately make predictions (eg in experiments), then it comes even closer to what is accepted as mainstream science.
We definitely value predictive power, but I'd say that semantic robustness (an intensely developed clarity) is another genuine value that can't be quantified.
People can talk to one another and get a sense of others' development in this dimension on this or that topic, so it's not entirely subjective. It's just messier than physics. Like Husserl, I was a math guy before I got into phenomenology. We all learned the math without bothering to talk about what it all meant. Which statements were justified was clear enough, but what those statements really meant was hardly addressed. Ontology is so squishy and 'just opinion,' right ? [Ah but that's an ontological claim...]
In my view, Husserl was reacting to the groundlessness of science of his day. It was impressive and successful in some sense, but it was 'floating' semantically. What did it mean ? So he looked into the deepest and most foundational nature of logic and conceptuality. This project in itself is like the essence of philosophy as a kind of science of science. For Husserl, and for any genuine philosophy, conceptuality is not subjective. My act of thinking about numbers is mine, but the numbers have a sort of independence, if not perhaps from all human cognition of them, at least from any particular human's cognition of them. I note that Popper eventually postulated his World 2 and his World 3, which is not so far off.
edit: I did a little digging into quantum computer simulations of string theory and this popped out to me:
Here we comment on possible implications from this work, combined with quantum
Church-Turing Thesis. The quantum Church-Turing Thesis states that any physical
process that happens in the real world could be simulated in a quantum computer. We
could write it in a more formal way: Any calculation that cannot be done efficiently by
a quantum circuit cannot be done efficiently by any physical system consistent with the
laws of physics.
In other words, if a theoretical model can not be efficiently simulated via quantum computer then it cannot be efficiently realized in the real world. One hypothesis then could be that, the more efficiently a theoretical model can be quantum-computer simulated, the more likely that model is to be reflective of reality. If we are dealing with "large scale theories" whose points of correspondence are nothing less than the parameters of reality, establishing what counts as confirmatory evidence might be...complicated. Perhaps the model is its own best evidence, based on this hypothesis?
Simulating Superstring Theory on a Quantum Computer
Agreed, semantic robustness is valued in science.
Quoting plaque flag
Where I see a divide between phenomenology and science is in the method. Science (I would say all sciences) requires a level of methodological robustness that is not required by phenomenology.
You can talk to people in a mall about experience and write a book about it in free form, and this book may be well received in phenomenology circles. But you will find it harder to get that published in a scientific journal. However if you set up a questionnaire that you asked a selected representative sample in the mall, where in addition to verbose answers they also rated parts of their experience on a numerical scale, you are likely to find it easier to get that published in a scientific journal. It would also help if you performed a statistical analysis of the responses.
There is also a rationalist approach to science that in places contrasts with phenomenology. Take the Einstein quote:
I would say experientially there is truth to that. However if he had published that as part of a scientific theory on time, it would certainly not have been accepted as science.
So while I think there is a large phenomenological aspect to science, I think there are important differences too.
Phenomenology is obsessively methodical, though. I'm talking about Husserl and early Heidegger. Obsessively methodical.
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
I really don't personally mind if you are sold on the wonders of phenomenology, but such a statement suggests that you haven't much looked into it. Correct me if I am wrong, and I don't intend to be rude.
Sure. I happen to be trained in statistics. But you are arguing the trivial claim that Husserl, for instance, is not understood as a natural scientist. No one disputes that.
A phenomenologist, though, might ask what the hell a p-value actually means. I don't mean its fairly clear technical meaning, which I understand better than most, but its larger meaning in relation to the world as a whole ---its place in the lifeworld. As Russell put it, math is the game where we never know and don't even care what we are talking about. Except I'm not a logicist, or a formalist. Intuition plays an important role, even if 'diagrams' and numerals are necessary supplements.
Just to be clear, I'm not pissing on science. I love science.
But I've got some experience with math and physics (went to school for that kind of thing, also computer science), and to me it seemed that people all too readily settled for a very 'local' semantics. It's presumably because of the specialization of knowledge. Everyone is afraid perhaps to speak outside their little yard. The positivist boogey man will get them ?
Nicely put. I'd say the species itself is similarly entangled with the biosphere, etc. ie. That there is tiered entanglement from most to least animate (correlating with the conditions of being law-governed versus free).
Thanks ! All this entanglement is another way to say holism perhaps.
By 'free' do you mean normative reason-giving entities like us ? I'm a fan of Brandom. I tend to understand freedom in terms of timebinding responsibility for the coherence of deeds which include speech acts. The responsible subject ( the rational agent ) is very much temporally stretched. Did you ever look at Flatland ? The author used space, but it occurs to me now how eerily temporal humans are relative to other creatures we're aware of. We are spheres among circles if time is spatialized.
Yes, precisely that meaning of free. Regarding our 'eerie temporality', I have lately been speculating on the forum whether consciousness might not actually exist - ie. have a "size" - in the temporal dimension, versus just traversing time.
(edit, just reading this: This monadic being is therefore not contained in the simple present....but rather encompasses the totality of all aspects of life, the present, past, and future... Cassirer, Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms)
I haven't heard of Brandom. I have a rather love-hate relationship with linguistics. I think it has its place, but more as a supporting player, something which can be usefully invoked to clarify particular issues with particular inquiries. But I find it becomes unwieldy as a primary theme. Probably just a matter of personal taste.
Have you looked into Husserl's notion of the smeared moment ? Like T. S. Eliot, he thinks about what it means to listen to music. In short, there's no 'pure' (punctual, pointish) now but always anticipation and drag. So even the now is smeared, if we ignore the useful calculus fiction and just direct our attention to how life is given to us.
Quoting Pantagruel
Some of his work gets too deep in the linguistic weeds for my taste. But his creative reinterpretation of Kant's unity of apperception is great.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/From_German_Idealism_to_American_Pragmat.pdf
The discursive self is then essentially normative and (Brandom doesn't stress this in this passage) deeply temporal. For I am bound to previous commitments as I contemplate new ones, though I can of course rebuild myself slowly like Neurath's boat.
More generally, Brandom at his best makes the essence of rationality dazzlingly explicit to itself. His website is full of great free texts if you happen to want more.
You could say that when we act, we realize the law or principle which guides our actions. Indeed, the scientific method is essentially that, the instantiation (formal codification and social adoption) of some law that coincides with a certain type of human action (experimentalism). If scientific laws can be socially instantiated with tangible physical elements that are enhancements of fundamental human abilities (instruments, tools, symbols), why should not other types of laws (logical, moral) be similarly encapsulable?
I'm not exactly sure what you are asking. I'd just say that rationality is a kind of virtuous responsibleness. It's like paying one's debts, keeping one's promises. Notice that these are also essentially temporal. A self is a self-referential pattern in the dimension of time. A rational person keeps their story straight.
Are you looking to reduce normativity into something simpler ? If so, it seems to me that one has to argue for such a reduction, a performative contradiction. As far as I can tell, human existence [ I excluse the comatose, infants, etc.] is fundamentally and irreducibly normative.
Ok. The focus on the instruments threw me off. There are norms governing the driving of cars on public roads. Is that significantly different ? I like Popper on this. Science is a secondorder mythmaking tradition. One ought to modify claims in response to effective criticism, the results of experiments, etc. We let our theories do our dying for us, identified more with the critical-synthetic process than with our current pet thesis.
I guess those can be in some sense be formulated in terms of heuristic rules governing systems flow. So while it seems arbitrary and artificial that traffic flow is conventionalized, it can have symbolic meaning relative to something that is actually happening, some kind of functioning circulatory feature. I think that the scientific method only makes sense in terms of experimentalism. I think the most accurate general description of existence is that it is experimental in nature.
I certainly wouldn't classify myself as an expert on phenomenology, I have a shallower understanding than that. Quite possibly you have a better understanding than I do, so I welcome your views.
Phenomenology is methodological, but from my shallower understanding the method is different to that of science.
Take my quote from Einstein in my earlier post. Using a phenomenological method, having interviewed many people who have that same experience, one may come to the conclusion that time is indeed slower when you put your hand on a hot stove and quicker when you are spending time talking to someone you find attractive. This is saying something about time.
While a scientist would reject that notion and conclude that it says nothing about time. Instead you should put a clock in both scenarios and measure time that way, regardless of the experience.
Now a phenomenologist may ask "what is it the clock is doing?" and that is a valid question where the phenomenologist and scientist may share a good discussion.
So science and phenomenology share much (the last paragraph above), while also having methodological differences (the previous two paragraphs).
Am I along the correct track?
Absolutely, I'm not suggesting you are pissing on science.
As a first point of call, what I hope to get to myself, is a place where an understanding of science is self consistent.
Imagine a guy called Luke. It is fair enough if Luke takes after Feyeraband and it is fair enough if he takes after Popper. However I hope that whichever he takes after, he stays true to the assumptions underlying it. If Luke adopts Feyeraband but also believes strongly that many theories are pseudo-science, then I find that self contradictory. The same is true if Luke adopts Popper and believes there is no such thing as pseudo-science. And so on.
So I actually have less qualms if someone is scared of the positivist boogeyman, as long as they are consistent with such a position. I also have less qualms if someone isn't, as long as they don't invoke the positivist boogeyman when it suits them.
None of this is towards you or any particular poster here, but rather an overall theme I have seen as someone with a science background who is interested in philosophy.
But the point of the critiques of speculative physics and cosmology is that they might never be testable at all. As Ellis and Silk put it:
[quote=Scientific Method - Defend the Integrity of Physics; https://www.nature.com/articles/516321a]Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue explicitly that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.
Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts.
These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.[/quote]
I've often noticed how easily multi-verse and many-worlds speculations (granted that these are different but often conflated) provide metaphorical elbow-room for speculative rationalisation of scientific-sounding claims.
For instance, In the Copenhagen interpretation of physics, the wave-function collapse is considered a fundamental and irreducible aspect of quantum reality, where the act of measurement causes the system to "choose" one of its possible states, leading to the observed outcome. The Everett interpretation of quantum physics offers an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics in which wave-function collapse doesn't occur. It dissolves this conundrum by saying that what appears as wave-function collapse in the Copenhagen interpretation is actually the result of the quantum system branching into multiple parallel universes, each corresponding to a different outcome. But then, the many-worlds interpretation itself may not be amenable to empirical falsification, and the requirement of multiple universes seems at the least highly unparsimonious. The idea may fairly be regarded as a metaphysical rather than a scientific theory (Philip Ball's critique is often cited.)
There are many of these interpretive problems thrown up by current science.
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Nice ! You are very close in this to my understanding of a minimal foundation for inquiry. Thou shalt not engage in performative contradiction. Also, Brandom writes about the discursive self as responsible for the coherence of its claims. A discursive self 'is' this time-smeared quest for coherence.
This is basically a genuine limit on skepticism and relativism. What can't be rationally doubted is the conditions for the possibility of rationality. Now people can be crazy, but that's a different issue.
In which case what are they? If they don't have any kind of practical application their value is purely aesthetic.
If you mean the theories function in some holistic sense by deepening the coherence of an overall theoretical framework then that would be an application, but it seems a stretch.
Then they are elements of whatever theories happen to have practical application. Life is on a voyage of discovery wherein it inter-evolves with an environment. At an abstract level, organisms adapt to different types of information in their environments, producing forms that are specialized in various ways to interact with that information. For me, this is what differentiates science from pseudo-science. Science is definitively involved in this process.
Given that all observation (perception) is theory-laden, in essence, learning new knowledge can be like opening a door that lets you peer into a completely new dimension of reality. Since organisms adapt to their environments, expanding its environment through the integration of new knowledge creates the possibility of entirely novel types of adaptations. And as the type of information to which we adapt grows more abstract, the brain becomes more and more the organ of adaption. This is the import I see in the scientific method, cum experimentalism.
Yeah but thats biology. The parameters of what were discussing are no longer determined by that, and I think rationalising science, or any other human activities, in those terms is inherently reductionist. And there are better things than simply being well-adapted.
That's a non sequitur. The human enterprise is and always will be a human enterprise. As I pointed out, the nature of the environment to which we are adapting evolves based on our understanding. The only thing reductionistic is your characterization. Evolution can be as open-ended as it apparently is.
Quoting Pantagruel
Whereas were discussing the metaphysical implications of science. Do you see any difference between the biological adaptations of animals and intellectual interpretation, or do you see the latter as on a continuum with the former? Are such conjectures a form of or in service of adaptation?
Am I biologizing intellect, or intellectualizing biology? Yes, absolutely I'd say we are on a continuum which stretches from the poles of pure objectivity (which is an abstraction) and pure subjectivity (which is also an abstraction). It is in the nature of these antinomies that they are dyadic. There is no subject without object, no object without subject. The Copenhagen interpretation supports this.
Are we pieces of matter that learned to think? Or has thought learned to cloak itself in matter? Is one of those options inherently less improbable than the other?
This is similar to what Susan Haack argues.
- Scientism and its Discontents Susan Haack
Nice way of summarising it. I vote (2).
That's not phenomenology. Not if we mean Husserl & company. I recommend Zahavi's Husserls Phenomenology (Cultural Memory in the Present) if you are interested. Obviously primary texts are great, but Zahavi's book is map through the maze of a long career. Heidegger's The Concept of Time is also great. I mean the 100 page first-draft of Being and Time (there are several texts with that name, confusingly.) It's packed with the hits and less overwhelming than the final published draft.
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Quoting Pantagruel
Another option, expressed in the work of New Materialists like Karen Barad, is that material does more work than the old notion of materiality assumes. Rather than passive, static substance, matter is creative, intra-active and agentive ( not in the sense of pan-psychism), and thus already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought.
Is it animism? Is it panpsychism? Something else? I know lots of people would draw the line of consciousness at homo sapiens. I prefer the bio-evolutionary perspective that can discern intelligent behaviours in coral colonies. That is more the type of awareness that interests me. People like to draw a certain line in different places.
Your expression gets at a split in my thinking on the subject that's not easy to negotiate -- there's the historically real science as actually practiced, and then there's the philosophically attractive abstraction of that process which tends to look a lot cleaner than the real deal.
The former is real, the latter is at least questionable to me. But in designating the historical as the real contrast to the ideal -- "Falsificationism" cannot count as a criterion that differentiates the scientific from the not-scientific anymore because it, as a description, fits in the latter -- it's a prescriptive theory of science addressing the problem of induction rather than a descriptive one addressing what scientists actually do.
And yet it's the prescriptions which seem to help a person try and "be objective" -- like it's more of a role rather than a fact. But if that were the case... well then there's no method at all, it's a social designation and function! And whatever those who have that designation or function do is what science is.
And that's the tension in my thinking between these two ways of looking at science.
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To answer your OP @Mikie -- What I think the take-away is is that "Anything goes" works when we're trying to universalize to a prescriptive theory of science which demarcates science from not-science for all cases of science, but almost always we're not thinking at that level of abstraction where we're comparing historical periods of scientific practice and describing their methods of thought and inference in an attempt to understand why this practice seems so fruitful, or in the case of Popper, how it gets over the problem of induction.
We're instead thinking "What makes it different from..." some other thing, in which case, it seems like we're able to point out methods that differ, or differences along the way. But it won't sound as impressive as a single, rational criterion that demarcates the scientific from the not-scientific. For that I'd just say Popper did a pretty good job, and Feyerabend shows the limitation of that approach. It gets at something, but it misses something too.
Quoting Pantagruel
Animism and panpsychism tend to begin from the Cartesian dualist split between inner subjectivity and outer materiality and simply inject the outer with the stuff of the inner. New Materialism doesnt do that. It rethinks the nature of human subjectivity and empirical objectivity along the same lines, so that relational process becomes more fundamental than the steric identities of intrinsic inner subjectivity and material substance.
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Interesting that my new read, Nicolai Hartmann, contests this fundamental dyad of object and subject, saying it is a hypostatization of the relational nature of consciousness (i.e. an unfounded metaphysical assumption) and that there is an avenue to pure being through some kind of pre-reflective 'natural attitude.' This smacks of Collingwood's 'absolute presuppositions.'
However Hartmann's method is also aporetic, embracing the antinomian nature of the development of philosophical thought and its key problems. So I can see this challenge to my fundamental intuitions about the inextricability of objectivity and subjectivity as part of an overall dialectical progress.
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Sounds interesting. I found this paraphrase:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicolai-Hartmann
One way to get at this is to consider that no epistemology can be installed without appeals to the nature of the subject. We might talk of the entanglement of epistemology and ontology, because the ontologist has to make a case for claims, and the form of such a case will presumably imply or manifest an epistemology.
Yes. Hartmann goes further and talks about something which encompasses both the object of ontology and the subject of epistemology. Now you could get sticky and say, well, that more comprehensive reality is itself what is ontologically primary. But Hartmann elects to maintain the posture of separation, which allows for further investigation into their unique natures. His dyad of Dasein (the ontological ) existence and Sosein (the epistemological) essence are linked together through a kind of pragmatics of primitive action. Sosein and Dasein are related in almost systems theoretical terms, where the Sosein of a specific individual tree (its unique essence) has its Dasein in its place in the forest.
This I firmly believe.
Barad's thesis, if I'm understanding it right, seems closer to pansemiosis? I
And Hoffman has a similar attempt to ground intentionally with his Conscious Realism. He posits agents as fundemental and has a toy universe model for how we might be able to build up physics and natural selection starting from agents with a menu of choices.
These are all necessary efforts since there are clear problems with the current dominant paradigms, but the variety of ways in which intentionality is "put back into the world," is a bit dizzying. I've read a lot of theses like these, and they often resort to creating their own new terms, e.g. Deacon's "ententional," etc., which makes them even harder to compare.
My guess is that these ideas will keep sloshing around until one can actually make unique predictions through its formalism that are then verified. New paradigms always start off in this sort of muddy, difficult, philosophical work. Whether they can replace existing structures seems to depend on if they can predict outcomes in novel ways.
While these authors are quite right that there is institutional bias against their ideas, I also think that one of the barriers to their acceptance is the surfeit of different theories bouncing around. What is to set one above the others?
It has occured to me that this might indicate another problem with trying to explain intentionality. It might not come from one sort of thing. Intentionality might be sort of like natural selection, where there are good arguments to be made for group, individual, gene, and functional selection. Are we best off looking only at genes, largely ignoring challenges to the Central Dogma, or should we look at evolution in terms of high level "core algorithms," like "lighter than air flight," and "shelter construction?"
Or, since all different levels of explanation have merit, should we be looking for something that occurs through a sort of fractal recurrence, where the same pattern is generated in ever larger, more complex ways through similar principles? E.g., selection occurs on multiple levels, intentionality emerges not only from from the relational nature of the most basic physical interactions, but also through a series of similar, larger scale recurrences of that same general pattern? This would explain why we can have many different theories that all seem to work to some degree, but which operate on many different levels. Such a view might also open up the path to explaining how and why consciousness develops the way it has historically.
But conceptualizing and formalizing such theories is a bear. I start to wonder if maybe we are running into a limit on our understanding set by our own cognitive capabilities, our inability to consider multi-level parallel processes acting as a set of blinders.