What is Science?
What is science? I do not mean just the dictionary definition, though perhaps we need to start with something commonly accepted like that in order to understand more fully what science is.
(This came up in the discussion of "Ego Depletion." My comments here were too long and involved for that. So, I offer this as a new topic.)
A few years ago, before going under the knife at a university research and teaching hospital, I signed an agreement that I understood that medicine is an art, not a science, and that outcomes are not predictable. Maybe that is why the German word for medical doctor is "der Arzt." But medical practice certainly depends on science, does it not? And they do have medical research, which we hope is practiced as a science, rather than an art like ballet or ceramics.
(Granted that art has a lot of science in it: chemistry of pigments, physics of firing, anatomy, botany... it is all there if you care to know. Does "the science of painting" make sense?)
In this discussion, blarman, WilliamShipley, and lucky differentiated engineering from science. We commonly accept the generalization that scientists discover basic laws; and engineers apply those to the creation of new products; and technicians maintain those creations. That is how things are today. History provides a different model.
The steam engine came before thermodynamics. The telegraph and telephone antedated Maxwell's Equations. Luther Burbank died 20 years before DNA was announced. Similarly, William Smith, who predicted and found the presence of coal by the fossil record of England, died 20 years before The Origin of Species (-- http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20....
Inventions are largely the improvements of technicians, not the direct applications of theories to new practices.
Computer science may not yet be a science, but the summary work we are doing now will be generalized into new theoretical models.
In William Gibson's "Bridge Trilogy" set in the immediate future, some of the viewpoint characters are artists in a beach house, majoring in Media Science at UC Berkeley. It is not a science yet...
But, what, then is a science?
I look at the practice. If a pursuit consciously chooses the scientific method, then it is a science.
We all know the basic Scientific Method:
1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.
http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics...
Norman Edmund (1916-2012), founder of Edmund Scientific - and who has not been a customer? - taught a 14-step process.
http://www.scientificmethod.com/index...
Steps or Stages of the Scientific Method
1. Curious Observation
2. Is There a Problem?
3. Goals & Planning
4. Search, Explore, & Gather the Evidence
5. Generate Creative & Logical Alternative Solutions
6. Evaluate the Evidence
7. Make the Educated Guess (Hypothesis)
8. Challenge the Hypothesis
9. Reach a Conclusion
10. Suspend Judgment
11.Take Action
Supporting Ingredients
12. Creative, Non-Logical, Logical & Technical Methods
13. Procedural Principals & Theories
14. Attributes & Thinking Skills
http://www.scientificmethod.com/index...
The way I learned it - five steps, seven, or more - publishing your findings is always the last step. That can mean just recording this in your notebook, if the results are intermediary. But in any case, you must finalize the process by making it possible for others to replicate the work.
That was perhaps the essential truth that separated chemistry from alchemy in Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist (1661). Boyle argued for open disclosure of means and methods. That openness - your own open mind open to the minds of others - may be the sine qua non of science. It also speaks to the tension of science in the context of national security. That is nothing new. Projective geometry was held as a French military secret. Can anything secret be a science?
(This came up in the discussion of "Ego Depletion." My comments here were too long and involved for that. So, I offer this as a new topic.)
A few years ago, before going under the knife at a university research and teaching hospital, I signed an agreement that I understood that medicine is an art, not a science, and that outcomes are not predictable. Maybe that is why the German word for medical doctor is "der Arzt." But medical practice certainly depends on science, does it not? And they do have medical research, which we hope is practiced as a science, rather than an art like ballet or ceramics.
(Granted that art has a lot of science in it: chemistry of pigments, physics of firing, anatomy, botany... it is all there if you care to know. Does "the science of painting" make sense?)
In this discussion, blarman, WilliamShipley, and lucky differentiated engineering from science. We commonly accept the generalization that scientists discover basic laws; and engineers apply those to the creation of new products; and technicians maintain those creations. That is how things are today. History provides a different model.
The steam engine came before thermodynamics. The telegraph and telephone antedated Maxwell's Equations. Luther Burbank died 20 years before DNA was announced. Similarly, William Smith, who predicted and found the presence of coal by the fossil record of England, died 20 years before The Origin of Species (-- http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20....
Inventions are largely the improvements of technicians, not the direct applications of theories to new practices.
Computer science may not yet be a science, but the summary work we are doing now will be generalized into new theoretical models.
In William Gibson's "Bridge Trilogy" set in the immediate future, some of the viewpoint characters are artists in a beach house, majoring in Media Science at UC Berkeley. It is not a science yet...
But, what, then is a science?
I look at the practice. If a pursuit consciously chooses the scientific method, then it is a science.
We all know the basic Scientific Method:
1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.
http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics...
Norman Edmund (1916-2012), founder of Edmund Scientific - and who has not been a customer? - taught a 14-step process.
http://www.scientificmethod.com/index...
Steps or Stages of the Scientific Method
1. Curious Observation
2. Is There a Problem?
3. Goals & Planning
4. Search, Explore, & Gather the Evidence
5. Generate Creative & Logical Alternative Solutions
6. Evaluate the Evidence
7. Make the Educated Guess (Hypothesis)
8. Challenge the Hypothesis
9. Reach a Conclusion
10. Suspend Judgment
11.Take Action
Supporting Ingredients
12. Creative, Non-Logical, Logical & Technical Methods
13. Procedural Principals & Theories
14. Attributes & Thinking Skills
http://www.scientificmethod.com/index...
The way I learned it - five steps, seven, or more - publishing your findings is always the last step. That can mean just recording this in your notebook, if the results are intermediary. But in any case, you must finalize the process by making it possible for others to replicate the work.
That was perhaps the essential truth that separated chemistry from alchemy in Robert Boyle's Sceptical Chymist (1661). Boyle argued for open disclosure of means and methods. That openness - your own open mind open to the minds of others - may be the sine qua non of science. It also speaks to the tension of science in the context of national security. That is nothing new. Projective geometry was held as a French military secret. Can anything secret be a science?
I generally agree with ProfChuck, but I will disagree on some of his corner cases in this instance: Newton's Laws of Motion are valid within the parameter of 'what is observable by human senses' but they do not apply cosmologically nor at atomic scale. Nonetheless, they are valid - within the stated constraints. A scientific principle does not have to apply everywhere in the universe (ie in a black hole) in order for it to be valid.
It is not necessary that science be useful or published or peer-reviewed; these are procedural aspects of science, not 'the discovery of reality' per se. (It is, however, necessary that a postulate be disprovable, per SBilko.) It is also not necessary for science to precede technology/engineering. It was the development of glass lenses that allowed both Astronomy and Microbiology to exist - the technology preceded the science.
Jan
The nature and methods of any science depend on the subject matter. The methods and procedure of the sciences of mathematics, epistemology, ethics, grammar, geology, evolution, astronomy, psychology, etc. are not the same as those of physics, and no one science should be copied for the others.
(1) you still have to record what you are doing and have done.
and
(2) even if the work is rejected, the submission itself is according to the necessary process.
"Publication" can be limited to your own notebook. If you do not keep one, you are not doing science. You are just living a rational life of interested curiosity about the world.
The informal life of interested curiosity also does not require any kind of an experiment. You could just look around you and ask questions and seek consistent answers without ever testing one, not even with an independent observation. In Anthem Equality 7-2521 could recreate the electrical lightbulb from the existing materials, but he says at the end that he does not know what the stars are. He may never know. He still led a life of rational-empirical (objective) enquiry, even though no science of astronomy existed at that moment.
Newton's Laws of Motion fail within our own solar system: the three body problem cannot be solved with Newtonian Mechanics. The Earth-Moon-Sun, the many moons of Jupiter, the Rings of Saturn (Jupiter, Uranus), cannot be understood with Newton's Laws alone. (Moreover, there is no one "Three Body Problem" but several restricted cases, like the Sun-Earth-Moon where two bodies are much larger than the third. And in addition, there is no "Four Body Problem." We have no way to apply Newtonian mechanics to the Rings of Saturn. It needs a different theory.
But the problem is not Newton. Take Darwinian evolution. I question whether it meets the definition of science. No experiments were proposed or are carried out. Scientists have bombarded all manner of species with radiation and not produced a new one. Yet, the "species" of bears of North America -- brown bear, Kodiak, and Polar Bear- and inter-breedable.
I am not asking about this "science" or that, but asking you what you mean by "an attempt to discover an aspect of reality." Not just any "attempt" can be a science, can it?
It seems to me that, reading the responses on this thread, people are going far into the topic 'how you do good science' and not 'what is science'. A good example of this is 'publication': Publication has nothing to do with whether or not you have rigorously examined the nature of reality and discovered a new facet of it - it just determines if you communicate this. (Of course, no one else can test your discovery or build on it if you do not communicate it, but that is part of the process of science not the discovery itself.) I agree with most of what is said about how to do good science, btw, but do not want to drop the concept of discovery per se.
My mind also boggles at an attempt to figure out how a Tarot Deck could be used to discover reality (except perhaps as a generator of statistics) but, again, I am trying to distinguish between the process of doing good science (how) and the essence of science (what). If someone brighter than I can figure out how to use a Tarot Deck to do science, I will be willing to include that as a valid tool...but it makes my brain leak out of my ears to think of how to accomplish that.
Jan
All it showed was the initial assumption of Darwin - which no one ever denied - that living things adapt to their environments (or not) and those that do reproduce more of their kind. So, Eskimos are short and round and Watusi are tall and thin and Finns are very lightly pigmented. As far as we know, people from pole to pole interbreed all very well.
Darwin's consequent assumption - which has never been shown - is that successive generations of adaptation by members of one species creates new species.
The easy inference - denied as "ignorance" - is that once there was only some generic mammal (CLASS), and by selective adaptation ORDERS were created. And the Orders adapted to their changing environments and their descendants were the FAMILIES. Success generations of families adapted to their many different environments and became GENUSSES (genii). And now, we have species.
But that is not how it works at all. Dinosaurs had genii and species. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Other great apes have 24 pairs. How did that come about? What were our common ancestors and how did we get 23 pairs of chromosomes? It is truly a chicken-and-egg problem.
And the genus homo gave rise to homo erectus and homo habilis and homo neanderthalis and homo sapiens. However, we know that homo neanderthal was really just a breed or strain of homo sapiens because their DNA is found among modern humans, showing that fertile offspring were possible.
How do you know which attempt is "really" science?
I assume that you at least saw the movie version of Atlas Shrugged. Have you read the book?
Because your statement above was open and honest, I will not give it a Thumbs Down. It at least engenders discussion.
In fact, an objective political science suggests solutions. As you can see here, though, many deny the validity of political science, which makes it hard to achieve progress in that area. My favorite example was Commander Denniston of Bletchley Park who believed the German ciphers to be unbreakable. Hard to achieve success with that assumption…
However, there are areas where her views and mine diverge. As I understand the interpretation of her philosophy an objectivist society will be dominated by "heroes". Typically, heroes are type A personalities and it is not clear that such a society can be dynamically stable. A successful society will include people from all walks of life and with a broad range of capabilities and talents. We need trash collectors at least as much as we need scientists. If you consider the spectrum of individual types in Huxley's "Brave New World" we see everything from Alpha double pluses to the Epsilon minus. Each with a vital roll in society. In BNW this structure was created and enforced by the state but in the real world this structure exists naturally and again each strata forms an important and essential part of the social body. We probably need plumbers and machinists at least as much as we need politicians and philosophers.
I have probably missed it but I fail to see how Objectivism as a political philosophy accommodates this reality.
However, my greatest concern is that Objectivism could easily become a kind of secular religion. A religion complete with sinners and saints, heretics and blasphemers, true believers and skeptics. All led by the prophet Ayn Rand. A position that Rand would probably find disgusting.
Like any religion there are those that "believe" in Objectivism. However, belief flies in the face of objectivity. When you believe something you have shut the door to further enlightenment. "Belief" in Objectivism is a contradiction.
I would like your thoughts on that.
Rand sought to develop an integrated philosophical system. And she explained much in addition through essays, lectures, and Q&As. For her, the only basis for capitalism was the right of the individual to live their own life by their own standards. But those standards could not be arbitrary. You do have the political right to be an idiot. Objectivism is more than that. The question of standards is highly important. It was addressed in "The Objectivist Ethics" as well as in essays such as "Isn't Everyone Selfish?" and "How do you live a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?" and "Counterfeit Individualism."
Pragmatism has no place in Objectivism, either as epistemology or politics. It is demanded by logic and known to history that if you begin with epistemological pragmatism - range of the moment, context-free thinking - then you end up with political pragmatism - people in concentration camps. I am not kidding or exaggerating. Ask any American who is ethnically Japanese about the "pragmatic" solution to the "problem" of immigrants here from a country with which the USA is suddenly at war. Then, think about Donald Trump and Muslims.
This has a direct bearing on science and how it is practiced. To ewv and other Objectivists, a pragmatic approach to science leads directly to pseudo-science, research fraud, and scientific misconduct because they perform "experiments" and gather "data" that have no conceptual basis in reality.
I am sure that you are a nice guy and all, and you seem to have enjoyed a long and productive career in science. But in this case, you are kind of like those people who do not know the difference between speed and velocity.
And, largely, allowing for technical errors like that, I am pretty much in accord with what you have written. Just saying'…
I understand and accept her explanation.
That said, we have many examples of scientists working with entities and their processes long before anyone knew what they "were." Luther Burbank died 20 years before Crick and Watson published. I mentioned William Smith who read the fossil record of England before 1800. While more always remains to be discovered, relative to them, we know what inheritance "is" and we know what evolution "is". I grant that reputable physicists such as Richard P. Feynman suggested that we do not know what an electron "is" yet.
I do not know what the essential demarcation is, where the bright line is drawn, but as we gather more information, test more hypotheses, invent more objects and processes, we gain a fundamental understanding of what we are studying. We know what the Moon "is"; cancer, not so much…
Meanwhile, we want to convert the whole world by getting them to watch a movie.
As for your personal suspects about me: no.
(I do not know why, but our society has a folkway or maybe a taboo against speaking about someone in the third person while they are present. Because I do not know why, I tend to do it more often than most other people around me.)
(And I really do believe that Dr. Peikoff has better things to do with his time. It was a quip, actually a doff of the hat.)
(Have you read David Harriman's The Logical Leap? It is a basic book for Objectivists who are interested in the philosophy of science.)
Astronomer William Keel explains:
The cosmological principle is usually stated formally as 'Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers.' This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.
The implications of this are significant and illustrate the roll objectivity and reason play in understanding the universe.
Without a basic epistemology and metaphysics recognizing the basic nature of reality, observation and conceptual thinking would not be possible at all, let alone advanced science. It is up to us to discover and conceptualize what we need from what we are aware of, recognizing that things do change in accordance with their nature, in order to logically formulate and validate scientific, contextual principles in accordance with non-contradiction. It isn't a game with tentative metaphysical "assumptions".
"The universe playing fair" makes no sense no matter how you try to stretch it.
Principles that apply to different entities in different places when they are the same kind of entity. If some planet somewhere else behaved differently it would be because it is a different kind of entity. That is no great mystery and does not require an "assumption" of a "cosmological principle".
Concepts do not bear an only "useful" and "so far" "consistent relationship to reality". Valid concepts are based on reality and are our way of grasping it through our hierarchy of knowledge.
Myself, I believe that you cannot rationally argue someone out of an opinion that they were not rationally argued into in the first place. (I think that Heinlein said that.) I believe in "sense of life Objectivism." In other words, the works of Ayn Rand "resonate" with some people - 24 million or more, apparently - and many of them pursue philosophy deeper and more formally. Most people, especially adults, only accept what they agree with already and fail to integrate the rest.
My perception is that those with the best understanding came to the philosophy of Objectivism as teens or young adults.
As for the others, I try to look for agreements. I understand "the universe playing fair" as a sense of life statement. You certainly would have a lot more to say (or maybe nothing at all) to someone who claimed that science is hard work because the universe perniciously hides the truth from us and it is just our rotten luck that most of it is unknowable "dark matter."
Ethics as invention versus discovery is a false alternative. The science of ethics isn't an arbitrary invention, it is based on the nature of man and his requirements to live. Those requirements must be discovered, but ethical principles as such are not discovered as intrinsic to reality. Ethics is the objective formulation of principles required to live based on the facts of our nature. As always, the objective is distinguished from both the intrinsic and the subjective. Principles are identifications of facts of reality as formulated in our specific form of conceptual consciousness.
I also believe that you will get farther if you separate ethics from morality. Morality is fundamental to ethics. Robinson Crusoe needed morality. He did not need ethics until Friday came along. Ethics cannot contradict morality, but ethics is only social. Different rational species may have different ethics fully consistent with the same (objectively required) morality as ours.
I many not understand the "implicit" but if the law of gravity is implicit to reality, then, so, too, does morality implicitly apply to every rational creature, each volitional entity, regardless of its physical construction, no less than an electron has charge.
Myself, I differentiate ethics from morality. (Having gone around on that with my Objectivist comrades has been fruitless.) Morality is for the individual. On his island, Robinson Crusoe needed morality the same as he needed language: for his survival. Ethics are social. On a crowded city bus, should you give your seat to a pregnant woman? Morality exists like the laws of chemistry. Ethics depend on the specific, contextual nature of the beings and the natures of their societies. However, ethics cannot contradict morality because morality is (however you want to think of it) "higher" or "more basic." Morality is the foundation for ethics. Morality supersedes ethics.
By "morality of volition" I mean the fact that the presence of volition necessitates morality.
That attitude was a change, a cultural shift, attributable to the Greeks of archaic times transitioning into the Classical age. They no longer feared the gods.
I agree with you that in what is intended as a formal discussion here, personifying the universe as an entity that "plays fair" is a nice artistic device, but does not make a clear statement connecting metaphysics and epistemology
Interestingly there is a ethics to science.
I enjoyed and agree with the article. Real and honest science, even within the limits of the knowledge available at the time, has done more to improve the conditions of life for man than any other human activity.
(1) " Einstein’s relativity did disprove Newton, it just refined and expanded on them at speeds near the speed of light and in regions of very large gravity. "
You mean "did not disprove Newton…"
and
(2) GDP - gross domestic product for GPD.
At the very top: "Note for the present discussion we will assume that A is an inanimate object." (Why? Why are living things not subject to what you propose are physical laws? What you say about living entities, is true of all objects. My computer is aging. Last year, my wife put new, bigger, memory chips in it. It is still the "same" computer, as I am still the "same" person. Your claims are easily challenged by baking a cake. I understand objective metaphysics. Your treatment - like David Harriman's Logical Leap - conflates the vernacular with the technical. It is not fatal. I just point out that as an "apologia" it will not convince someone who does not already agree with you.
Your passing comment on pseudo-science and Keynesian counterfeiting is not quite clear. " In a pseudo science a new theory can come along and predict totally different results." Well, of course, that, too is science. New theories, if they are consistent with reality, will predict effects not yet anticipated by the old theories. Moreover, a Keynesian would point out the government money has the full faith of the government behind it, whereas counterfeit money, once detected loses its value. On the other hand, preach all you want about gold, people still take FRNs in preference to it. (Try it at any big box store.) I think that you have a fallacy of a stolen concept in there, "counterfeit." (I know the parable you refer to, from Milton Friedman: some counterfeiters come into town…" But, again, in particular, Friedman, as a monetist accepted that the value in government money is the full faith and credit of the issuing authority. Lacking that, even with gold and silver, we would be weighing every coin in every transaction.) I know what you meant to say. You just need a better example.
And more…
That is why I raised the issue here and offered the discussion. There's a lot to be said.
And it needs to be said because I distrust what I perceive as an "Orwellian sin" of trying to reduce complex realities into shoutable slogans.
1) Yes science does apply to A being a living organism, however it results in an extra layer of complication. Is a tadpole a frog for instance. I did not want to have to explain these cases because I think it would have side tracked the conversation.
2) Real sciences do not have new theories that completely overthrow (contradict) earlier theories, because real science is based on empirical evidence. A new theory cannot change the underlying empirical evidence.
A real science would not say that inflation is good for the economy and bad for the economy that is a straight forward contradiction and cannot occur in a science. This would require the underlying empirical data to change.
Elsewhere I have written on Hume and Carl Popper who are of historical significance to the philosophy of science, but the article was meant to layout the most important concepts not cover every aspect.
Yes people should not make complex subjects more simple than they are (Libertarians non-aggression principle), however they also should not make things more complex than they are. (The common refrain of the left is that things are complex and therefore we have no knowledge)
While we strive to recognize our ability and turn the thinking switch to the on position their goal is to padlock it shut with a welded key slot.
Over or under simplification and your mentioning the non-aggression principle which is another way of saying Give Peace A Chance I'm finding have one common false premise. They fail to take into account some important feature of human nature.
One can wish for 'peace' but then one can also wish for 'conflict' without the effort of stating how the balance is to be arrived at and maintained. Thus the delusion of inflation fails to recognize TANSTAAFL and turns a blind eye to those who must pay the bill.
A leftist will just accept the party mantra. An Islamic would say It's God's Will. No problem with the pesky need for explanation..no need for thinking.
And some will say I have to vote for evil ...I have not choice.
They are correct. They choose to have no choice.
Those who deny or seek to find away around that one Keynesian truth are not Keynesian.
Just as those who take an oath to the Constitution and immediately ask "Find me away around the Constitution" or 'the supreme court hasn't visited that particular portion yet.' are not Constitutional and their oath is a lie.
http://www.monorealism.com/science/sc...
And that is good. However, is it not true that truth can be verified with different equipment and skills? Being able to replicate an experiment is necessary, but not sufficient. It is not just following a recipe to get a cake. Observations with a spectroscope cannot contradict observations with a telescope or the naked eye. We explain the Doppler Effect of the Red Shift by analogies to fire engine sirens as they approach and leave. It has to be that way.
As for different skills, take pocket billiards, for example. Someone who is not "skilled" as a physicist certainly validates Newtonian mechanics by playing the game. It could not be true that this only works in my lab with my equipment. It has to work for shooting pool, playing baseball, hat tricks in hockey, horses in dressage, and breaking up pavement with a jackhammer. The skills are all different, but they all work to validate the same claims.
And the essence of Newton's theories is that the laws of the heavens are the same as the laws on Earth. That was the paradigm shift of Newtonian mechanics. Even though medieval astronomers could put the Sun at the center of the system, the assumption was still that life on Earth was different from the celestial spheres. And that speaks to the "mono realism" and the
Jan
science and its applications is the language used to
freeze the knowledge for future use. . if our attempts
to use language like math are to be successful, we
must present scientific statements in enough ways
to allow triangulation to a specific piece of understanding:::
this is the reason that Galt's speech is so long. . he made
enough statements about reality to allow the listener --
well, the reader -- to "home in" on his real meaning.
the "science" of knowing a person, for example, requires
that you have multiple interactions. . I didn't know
stress analysis in engineering before I had done a
whole bunch of triangulating calculations. . prediction
is difficult, but exciting and definitely possible! -- j
.
What do you mean by "triangulating" stress analysis calculations? You always have to identify and use essential features, determine sensitivity to relevant factors, and assess the accuracy of the results.
than just a few words from you. . after reading lots of
word-products from you, I have an idea about how to
understand what you mean. . words are not math,
and it takes a whole bunch to allow what I called
"triangulation" to get the real meaning. . stress
analysis can involve bending, shear, tension, compression
and many combinations of those. . by using more
than just one formula, the engineer can home in on the
very most likely failure zone, depending on the loads
impressed on a material, a structure. . a good example
is notch sensitivity. . the exact shape of a feature
shaped like a notch, or dimple, or scratch, or impressed
feature like a stamped ID number on a ford driveshaft,
can raise stresses in extreme ways. . it's empirical
knowledge which allows accuracy, and that requires
testing to failure. . most engineers cannot afford that,
so comparison of calculated results is required. . just like
I compare your current words with those which I have
seen in the past, to arrive at my best estimate of
your current meaning. -- j
.
All the words have meaning. Using a bunch of them talking around something doesn't say what it is.
What does systematically calculating and estimating potentially significant stresses to see what is important have to do with "triangulation", and what does that have to do with lots of words in Galt's speech to "home in" on a "real" meaning as if it were something else? Ayn Rand wrote what it really means.
actually mean is a process of looking from different
points-of-view in your conversations to learn more
precisely what you really mean. . further, reading
between the lines gives another context. . example:::
I have come to think of you as a mature male, someone
who has a dual background in philosophy and science,
someone who probably grew up in one of the northern
States and who has spent lots of time alone. . this
estimation lets me look at what you say from the point-
of-view which you might have when saying it. -- j
.
and even math is subject to conventional interpretation.
words are imprecise, and that's why I speak of
triangulation. -- j
.
of-view, or more than one perspective, to clarify meaning. -- j
.
in college, one of my German professors was a philologist. He ran down the list of theories for the origin of language, from onomatopoeia to "baby talk."
I also give great weight to analogy.
And then there is allusion. "Darmok at Tanagra, His arms open wide." I remember a political commentary titled, "Nixon Agonistes." Hollywood reporters called Hepburn "Katherine of Arrogant."
That Newton's law of gravitation could not account for 43 seconds of arc per century in the precession of the perihelion of the orbit of Mercury, after all the other perturbations were accounted for, does not mean that it is false. There is no such thing as infinite precision. Newton's principles of gravitation remain true and as accurate as they have always been, and is still used daily in science and engineering. Without them, Einstein's discovery of a more complex formulation accounting for more detail could not have been done.
Any conceptual, meaningful quantitative principle can in principle be measured and will or will not hold within some context of precision. Popper adds nothing to that. His philosophy offers no theory of the conceptual nature of science, replacing it as a-conceptual statements of "predictions" of measurements subject to an impossible standard of precision and omniscience in the name of "falsifiability". No wonder people who follow this anti-conceptual standard wind up as skeptics claiming that every theory is a disconnected falsehood waiting to be contradicted and replaced.
Meanwhile, Einstein's theory has had spectacular success -- to another finite degree of precision -- on a very limited number of cases, with little in the way of conceptual understanding or reason to distinguish it from competing theories. This lack of conceptual distinction is reason to regard it as tentative.
Does this mean that black holes were predicted by Newton? Probably not but his theory does allow for them.
Popper regarded astrology and Freudian psychology as pseudo-sciences because no test could disprove them.
That is where your claim fails, that "Science is ever expanding knowledge … Science advances when more scope and precision become possible, adding to our knowledge through contextual principles." I assure you, having socialized with them on several occasions that modern astrologers consider themselves far advanced over the star-readers of old, and, of course, distance themselves from the daily horoscope. Conspiracy theorists from the mundane to the extra-terrestrial always find new and better evidence to expand their understanding. Just consider the Millennarians within the political right, including many self-identified "Objectivists" who insist that the end of the world is at hand. Every day's news brings ever more evidence of what they expect to believe, always expanding their knowledge, and widening their scope.
What they all lack is admissions of the existence of facts that could disprove their theories.
On the other hand, Newton's Laws of Motion are testable. Within whatever convenient range of measurement, if force were not equal to the product of mass and acceleration, we would find that out. That is what an experiment is: a test of falsifiability. In that, you are right, when you noted that Newton's mechanics was not "falsified". Not only does it provide a consistent explanation, tests to disprove it have failed. Freudian psychology and astrology have been falsified.
Trying to equate science with "falsifiability" and "testable" does not explain conceptual knowledge and adds nothing. Conceptual knowledge already has principles of objectivity and of truth as correspondence with reality based on observation. But Popper is worse than that because it is itself anti-conceptual and a form of philosophical skepticism as a result.
Freudian psychology has the same power: Id-Ego-Super Ego… Oedipus Complex, Electra Complex… suppression, repression, neurosis,… avoidance complex… Lots of explanations…
Moreover, modern astrologers acknowledge astronomy as the science in support of their art. For good astrology, you need good measurements.
That speaks to the pragmatist fallacy of measuring without a conceptual basis.
At what step in the Scientific Method would you add
"Form a concept."
or
"Abstract a concept from the relevant percepts."
or
"Differentiate the essential distinguishing characteristic and integrate it to a relevant, established truth."
You might as well insist on subject-verb agreement, because like good grammar, thinking conceptually is fundamental to any rational and productive endeavor.
Formulation of new concepts in science goes hand in hand with the theory development, which like any problem with creativity can take a very long time through many attempted iterations, head scratching, and subconscious processing until the right thing occurs to you after many trips back to the drawing board and new empirical investigations. Proper concept formation is crucial, but one can't say that a new causal principle and its validation means 'just make a concept, problem solved'.
Nobel laureate Kary Mullis noted that many of his peers were born in months close to his own. He wondered if there was a correlation. You could do a statistical study to show that Geminis are two-faced and Tauruses are plodders, etc. Prove it all you want; it proves nothing. Falsification sorts the truths from the fictions.
Driven both by knowledge and instinct, various activities keep an individual and the species alive and may involve hunting, gathering, eating, shelter, reproduction, sleep.
Then there are social needs as (most) humans are social animals.
An important sub-class of both the above is trade. The word commerce is used to describe human activities which have some interaction at least at the selling end which have the objective of material gain.
Then there is the need for expression and creation by art, music and literature. This group may belong both to trade and social needs.
Then there is the human thirst for knowledge, for its own sake as well as for survival and commerce. There are various ways to attempt this. One such is called science or the scientific method. Science is the search for knowledge using approaches in MM's lists. This searching identifies and classifies knowledge rather than accumulating experience and data. Such classified knowledge leads rules, laws, to be drawn up using explanations from which predictions are made.
The objective for this activity we call science is the gaining of knowledge -is does not have to be useful.
The use, the application, of knowledge gain we call technology.
The application to trade and social needs occurs in such activities as engineering and medicine.
Rand- Nature, to be conquered must be understood.
Feynman- Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.
Apologies to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
I think what you've posed is some methodology of how to do science.
We also need to be more explicit in Step 1. Even observational sciences such as geology and astronomy are based carefully defined and validated explanations of what to observe and why. We do not just look around at random. I love going out with my telescope, but wondrous as it is, I am (I hope) more than a slack-jawed savage staring at the Great Unknown.
That speaks to what a "test" is.
"Since the Renaissance, the term experiment has been used in diverse ways to describe a variety of procedures such as a trial, a diagnosis, or a dissection …"
(On my blog here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20....
Your thumbnail definition begs a myriad of questions. You said that science is "the effort we put put forth to find and understand the causes of the actual effects we encounter in life as human men." But not human women? I am sure that you did not mean that. What is a human non-man or a non-human man? What are you trying to say?
It has to be more than effort. It must be productive effort. How do we know what will be productive? We are not working at random. Something must be informing our efforts. That "something" is science itself. it is important that the scientific method is self-validating. Modern philosophers claim that tautologies are uninformative. (That is the "analytical" side of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy.) Unmarried men are bachelors says nothing, they claim. In fact, it says a great deal and, being a statement of identity it is fundamental to understanding the very complicated social structure of marriage.
What do you mean by "actual" effects? You mean real, rather than supposed or wrongfully perceived? Well, yes, of course, so is "actual" a redundant term? Did you mean something else?
Is finding the causes without understanding them not also science? Even 300 years after Newton we do not "understand" gravity, but we certainly "found" it. The same is true of biological evolution. Darwin's theories cannot stand up to skeptical inquiry. And he was not the first to propose them. He also was preceded by others such as William Smith (1769-1839) who put the theory of evolution to practical use.
And yet…
"If gravity be an inherent quality, pent up and quiet in matter, how can it produce action at a distance? If it be an incessant emanation from matter in all directions, why does not matter become exhausted of it? If it emanates only towards attracting bodies, how can it know in what direction to travel? Thus it may be seen that the admission of attraction as an inherent quality precludes all rational inquiry. Yet so far as man has studied and comprehended nature, her ways are in accordance with reason and with the equivalent relation of cause and effect." — Memoir on the Constitution of Matter and Laws of Motion, by J. L. Riddell, New Orleans Medical Journal, March, 1846, volume II, page 602.
So, Einstein said that matter warps the space-time continuum. But you deny that space-time is curved. Do you have a better explanation?
We do know what gravity is. It is an attractive force between masses dependent on the amount of the masses and the distance between them, all in the usual form. And you all kinds of instances of it from the Cavendish experiment to apples falling from trees to what happens when you stand on your bathroom scale to the solar system. That we don't know how it works in more detail by what mechanism, or more about mass, does not mean that we don't know what gravity is. Knowing something is not and does not require omniscience. You know what you know. Not knowing more or knowing everything does not mean that you don't know anything.
Newton not liking 'action at a distance' means that he didn't like not knowing or being able to account for what happens throughout the distance or what may be happening at some other distance somewhere else where there is no mass. But that something happens and the force acts on each mass at the distance is a fact. It's not good to not like facts qua facts.
The mathematical gravitational field is a higher level abstraction in our hierarchy of knowledge. (Refer to Chapter 3 on "Abstractions from Abstractions" in IOE for an elementary explanation of levels of abstraction.) It isn't a floating abstraction, it's related to other concepts, integrated within a theory.
You know the relations between gravitational field, gravitational force, and gravitational acceleration, all of which require other concepts to relate them, such as mass, velocity, distance, time, derivatives and gradients. It requires both concepts of mathematical method and concepts of things. (Refer to Chapter 4 on "Concepts of Consciousness" in IOE.)
It isn't a physical entity, like a chicken that you can't see directly. And it isn't like a flow field in the Euler or Navier Stokes equations for a fluid that refers to velocities of regions of matter. As a higher level of abstraction it allows you to identify what the gravitational force would be anywhere on another mass if it were there.
Understanding it depends on a great deal of prior knowledge, ultimately based on perceptions at the base of all your knowledge, but not a perception of the gravitational field as such: It is a theoretical entity whose existence is inferred through conceptual knowledge of other observations. Objective abstractions must not be reified into 'things' intrinsic to existence, as if they were all some kinds of chickens, but neither are they subjective fantasies. They are our objective means of knowing reality through a complex abstract hierarchy of concepts, provided that the concepts and theories are objectively formulated in accordance with reality.
That is how you know what a gravitational field is. That you don't know more about it, and don't know of something like a hidden chicken to which it refers, or some kind of blob with no identity but characteristics and behaviors tied to it, does not mean that you don't anything about it or don't know what it is, i.e., what the concept means. We understand physics through abstract concepts mathematically formulated. Understanding of more complex phenomena is indirect, through higher levels of abstractions: Again, that is our means of objective conceptual awareness of the universe through abstraction when done by valid means.
The same goes for Einstein's theory of gravity except that it is far more complex than simple Newtonian physics. Space-time represented mathematically as 4 dimensions relates spacial dimensions with time in the form of the distance traveled by light in the time. The 4 dimensions are mathematically independent, not 4 directions in a reified 4D universe somehow extending 3D space.
Space is itself an abstraction as a relation between entities, not a 'thing' as Newton thought of it as big container. Time refers to a periodic measure of change, also an abstraction. If human beings disappeared -- if there were human no consciousnesses to think of space and time, the facts of entities and change (like the vibrations in an atomic clock) that give rise to our concepts would still exist, but not the concepts of space and time.
The concepts are our means of understanding the universe conceptually in a relation between existence and consciousness, not things intrinsic to existence (like Aristotle's version of Platonic forms), but also not subjective figments of imagination trapped in a consciousness unrelated to existence. Don't reify space-time.
Einstein's equations of general relativity are the form of the mathematics relating space, time, and mass through the mathematical concept of curvature -- "curvature" in the form of a higher level of abstraction generalized to 4 independent mathematical dimensions, not a simple attribute of an object having a curved surface.
The mathematics is similar to the differential geometry used to describe a curved surface like the earth or the Navier equations for an elastic shell, but the mathematical generalization does not refer to a simple object or a Newtonian 4D container reifying the abstractions. It refers through the chain of abstractions built on abstractions in the conceptual hierarchy to something about the universe, but it does not mean that space and time are an object, let alone a 4 dimensional object, that is physically curved like a chicken. Mathematics is a science of method. The mathematics of differential geometry is used because it allows for relating measurements in space and time in a certain mathematical form providing conceptual economy of thought. Don't reify abstractions.
You can say that "space-time has curvature" (if Einstein's theory is correct), but you have to know what that means at the appropriate level of abstraction and not reify it into giant 4 dimensional warped chicken.
What we can, and cannot "reify" is an interesting question. I believe that mathematics describes physical reality because the analytic and synthetic are unified as the objective. Beyond that, I have no consistent answer. I would need a week to write anything equivalent to yours.
Mathematics by itself doesn't describe reality. It is the means by which you relate in terms of concepts what can be measured. Mathematics is a science of method, not about things like physics does.
Some effort is productive, some is not, yet honest effort directed at actual vs imagined effects, productive or not, will provide information and knowledge. Many 'discoveries' are unforeseen or previously unseen effects, observed while examining another.
.
We see and measure the effects we call Gravity, We don't yet understand the cause nor have we "found it".--Darwin's observations and theories, within the knowledge available to him at the time, has led us to most of our current,understanding of natural evolution vs creationism.
Jaded engineers say non-engineers see it this way: Every success is a scientific achievement. When something goes wrong, however, it can be traced to an engineering failure.
I think that's old-school, and may be changing.
This seems to be an engineering feat, not a scientific one.
Yes. The same with Marconi. Physics said EM waves propagted line-of-sight. No one knew about ground wave or skip. He just kept cranking up the power, hoping that somehow the signals would get through and they did.
Now I would consider a degree in economics to be a science because of it's use of math.
Einstein and theoretical physics and biology always amazed me because much was imagined in mathematics first and later, much was found to be true in reality...like the atom, it's electrons, protons, neutrons of a cell.
Chemistry is another fascinating field. Astrophysics seems to use all of the aspects of science; observation, mathematics, physics, quantum physics and chemistry.
Quantum physics is my favorite...it also demonstrates my main pet peeve with many of the failures in the sciences...The problem with being able to look at whats there and not what one might expect to find there. That's why I was so taken with Mark Hamilton's concept of "Wide Scope Accountability" Below is this excerpt from my book:
Wide- Infinity in all directions
Scope- To extend our mental range and sight to include all vantage points
Accountability- To honestly consider all possibilities and accept responsibility for
all outcomes.
Ok… Now let us define it
To See and Think without Limits, Utilizing all Knowledge; Past, Present and most Probable Future, with Profound Honesty, to consider and Analyze all Possible; Explanations, Outcomes or Solutions, without any preconceived expectations.
A shorter version might be easier to remember, now that you have been exposed to the full meaning: Diligently considering all Possibilities, with Profound Honesty and Objectivity in Dealing with Reality, to solve any Problem or to create any Value.
Without any preconceived expectation is a very important point we will explore further:
""Another factor comes into play often and we do not even realize it. Preconceived expectations. What many scientist, researchers or value creators, have trouble with, when creating something new, solving a problem or compiling statistics, even trying to see through the illusions of what is really going on, is having a preconceived notion of what it is you are looking for. Many times, if you expect to find a thing, you will find that thing. It is just the way the universe works. This is why it is important to remain objective and approach reality with profound honesty. In other words. Remain open to whatever you find.""
Let us examine two concepts presented in the definition.
Accountability: We are all accountable no matter what actions we may choose to take
or not. It is Inherent. LIKE IT OR NOT.
Responsibility: Acceptance of the possibility that you might have to respond
Differently given an Unfavorable or otherwise not as expected
Outcome. You must respond differently given new knowledge
In order to stay in alignment with your intentions.
To effectively use this tool we need:
Dedication to Honesty and Reality: You MUST be honest with yourself therefore you
WILL be Honest with others and deal with Reality,
. Not some Illusion, falsehood or deception .
(To fully understand, being profoundly honest with yourself: read; “As a Man Thinketh” by James Allen and “Suppose We Let Civilization Begin” by Richard W. Wetherill)
Integrated thought: Using both the right mind and the left mind at the same time.
You know… When the light bulb over your head comes on.
The right Photographic creative mind is that voice in your head,
It speaks for the Subconscious that records everything.
The left logical mind brings order and logic to our thoughts,
Through Speech, our actions and Pen to paper.
Now, maybe some of you here can now understand my penchant for honesty and responsibility in science and technology.
our nuclear deterrent work, so the answer to your last
question is yes. -- j
.
The above is an interesting aside to this thread.
It says- government money destroys science.
Consider: " three kinds of researchers, one driven by curiosity for the truth,
another on a mission to solve a problem, and
a third with an “induced” curiosity created by demand from elsewhere — boss or government.
He predicted that the system would fail if those who were induced outnumbered the truly curious, as the “induced” curiosity was not well connected to reality, whereas the other two types were. The primary aim of the induced researcher was not to solve a problem or uncover an answer but just to keep their jobs, and there were many ways to “keep their jobs” that did not involve actual discovery.
....
The government is strangling science. The more money it spends the more real scientists are forced out.
.. .. Instead of questioning the orthodoxy, the neo-”scientist” is there to maintain it. "
An example-
'Glaciers are under-studied from a feminist viewpoint ”that focuses on gender (understood here not as a male/female binary, but as a range of personal and social possibilities) and also on power, justice, inequality, and knowledge production in the context of ice, glacier change, and glaciology.”"
Part of the output from a $413,000 government grant which included -glaciers from a feminist perspective.
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/...
File under- feminist glaciology, ..
I grant that we have many good examples of that. I just ask about the other examples, again, say, of 3M, a corporation which famously funds open research.
On the other hand, one of the ironies of government research is that their greatest (popular) claims to success about computers and the Internet are just the opposite. Ray Tomlinson recently passed away. He invented email. But he warned his colleagues not to mention it because it was not what they were supposed to be working on. In Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution are similar stories of people doing what interested them, not what they were being paid to do.
To the Editor:
In “Research Scrutiny” (The Chronicle Trends Report, February 29), you present a dangerously misleading characterization of industry-sponsored research and zero evidence industry funding is more likely to increase research misconduct.
[…]
More importantly, you ignore an obvious truth: Nobody gains more from accurate, verifiable science than industry. The market is an unforgiving arbiter of both performance and value and companies will derive no benefit by fudging research in order to produce defective products for customers to purchase. Instead, you exploit America’s most popular binge: company bashing.
(Full letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education here: http://chronicle.com/blogs/letters/no...
Uncomfortable Science and the Embargoed WADA Doping Study
Back in 2011 WADA - the World Anti-Doping Agency - provided research funding to a group of researchers to conduct a study on the prevalence of doping in elite track and field. The researchers conducted their research and then prepared a paper for publication.
[…]
. . . more than one year after completion of the study, did it become clear to the authors that WADA could not act independently from IAAF [International Association of Athletic Federations -MM], because WADA had made an agreement with IAAF which was not disclosed to the research group. According to this agreement, WADA would need permission from IAAF in order for us to submit the paper . . .
Full article on Roger Pielke's blog here: http://leastthing.blogspot.com/2016/0...
An 'Objectivist theory' of research, a good topic for another thread.
There's really more than one "publishing" step in the process. Before you conduct your major experiment (at least if it's in an area that involves observing natural phenomena, such as astronomy) you're supposed to share your intentions with your peers, so they can try it themselves, as Einstein did with the solar eclipse that validated Special Relativity. On the other hand, you're not supposed to present your conclusions to the lay public (who will take them as facts) until enough peer review has already happened that they're pretty reliable. If you publish early (effectively skipping the peer review process) you become known as a crank. There are a lot more cranks around than real scientists.
Of course, science can only apply to phenomena that are falsifiable (that is, testable), and this is where all attempts to "prove" moral theories fail. With enough observation, you may be able to say that following behavioral rule X produces measurable result Y, but any judgment of that result as good or bad is nothing but an expression of the speaker's preference for an outcome.
I do not have a lot of moral problems with logical positivists or pragmatists. If you know what positivism is, then you must appreciate that logical positivism was an attempt to bring together again the rational and the empirical. Logical positivism is just a faulty kind of objectivism. Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal has been doing yeoman's service in asserting science over post-modernist "fashionable nonsense." Sokal calls himself a political leftist; he does not like being called a Marxist. You can disparage his politics. You and I would agree that if he believes what he writes about science, then he is harboring severe contradictions relative to this political philosophy. But that's his problem. His defenses of science are still cogent.
(I don't know who you pissed off with that ideological summary, but I put your Zero back to One.)
Logical Positivism was a result of Hume's anti-conceptual Empiricism and has a lot in common with Pragmatism. It's not a faulty kind of Objectivism. It isn't anything like Objectivism, which has radically different basic positions on the basic questions of philosophy. Perhaps your sympathy with Logical Positivism and the idea of science as "method" stem from being influenced by the Positivists more than you think. See Leonard Peikoffs lectures on the British empiricists, Kant, Pragmatism and Logical Positivism the second part of his history of philosophy series.
We haven't been discussing the ethics of the Pragmatists and Analysts in this thread, it's about the epistemological nature of science. But the anti-conceptual nature of Pragmatism, Positivism and the varieties and emphasis in Operationism and Popper in the philosophy of science and in the name of science are very destructive of the ability to have knowledge of the world and provide a very bad philosophy of science.
The implicit philosophy of the Enlightenment was objectivism (small-o). Based on Newtonian philosophy, the Enlightenment was possible when people realized, however implicitly, that the evidentiary world is logically consistent, i.e., mathematically predictable; and conversely, that reason can provide answers not only about how to construct a steam engine, but also a government. The Constitution of the United States is a primary document in political science.
Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism (capital-o) is a 20th century formalization of much that was implicit in the Enlightenment. In addition, Rand considered and solved problems not perceived by the earlier philosophers. Most important were her theories of epistemology and ethics.
Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is in direct opposition to most previous schools of thought, at least in academic philosophy, as since the 17th century, most philosophers argued from a false dichotomy of rationalism versus empiricism. As rational-empiricism small-o objectivism denies the dichotomy. Capital-O Objectivism specifically does so in a famous essay by Dr. Leonard Peikoff, included in later editions of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
I judge science fairs. In the other discussion on "Ego Depletion" it came up that we reward "originality" very heavily and we do not reward replication. And no one mentions falsifiability. In other words, as in the case of Ego Depletion, instead of repeating the original experiment in new ways, one of those 30 or 50 subsequent researchers should have sought to disprove it.
We do that in social science. In sociology, ideologues from different schools attack each other's research with studies of their own casting doubt (if not disdain) on those other theories. Just as post modernists denigrate physical science as "not proving anything" because new truths are discovered, physical scientists disparage social science for this process. In fact, though, social science is more true to the standard of truth.
This sounds like a very poor choice of words on their part. So many things in science are modeled with a probability distribution function (PDF). The one I work with is signal strength in a multipath environment. Reflections from a pattern of nodes and antinodes as waves interfere constructively and destructively. You see that in physics class. Radio waves bounce off hundreds of objects, creating a jumble of nodes/antinodes, so we use models to estimate a PDF of signal strength.
So if I know the specs of a phone and base station I can calculate PDF of the signal being over some threshold, say some threshold where the packet error rate is low enough to make a clear phone call. If I had to figure out where a phone would work in a certain location where there's a significant probably of signal strength < the threshold of acceptable packet error rate, maybe I could say “I don't know. This is an art not a science,” but that would just be sloppiness to avoid explaining the science.