One that makes accurate predictions about what will happen in the real world. One that lets you predict that if I kill these little buggers in the microscope people won't get sick.
It's common to assume that the model that makes accurate predictions actually corresponds to reality.
Its more than common for a reason: its usually right. Its not an assumption its a conclusion. Making no distinction at all between the two is why philosophy completely fails to understand why science works.
It's also common to discover with more research that it doesn't. That, for example, the model only works at a particular scale and is really only a special case of a more inclusive model.
Just because a description isn't perfect doesn't mean that it isn't real, or vastly better than anything else. f=ma has limits, but its still better than poltergeists did it.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hi, my name is Kirth. I'm a scientist.
For me, "makes useful predictions" and "withstands testing" (generally, in my work, two ways of saying the same thing) are the gold standard. I don't deal with questions of ultimate reality or Truth or any of that -- I deal with what works.
For me to make claims that any predictions I make correspond to some ultimate reality would be itself philosophical, not practical.
The only failure of understanding here is yours regarding philosophy.
Show. Don't tell.
I don't know if a philosopher ran over your dogg as a child or what, but your distane for it and the rest of the humanities long ago passed into irrational territory.
I dislike the amount of time that gets wasted on them in education.
I do like history. I think its because something actually happened that you can talk about.
For me to make claims that any predictions I make correspond to some ultimate reality would be itself philosophical, not practical.
You do it all the time, whether you realize it or not.
All I have left are some Devonian crinoid stems I found in some exposed limestone at a roadcut in the Catskills in New York; they're about 400 million years old. (Everything else I've found got donated to Clemson University.)
You're saying they are roughly that old , not that they fit a model of being roughly that old.
There's a continuous exchange of gases between the atmosphere and the ocean, with the concentration of dissolved CO2 in the latter inversely proportional to temperature (warmer planet -> less CO2 in the ocean -> more CO2 in atmosphere -> warmer planet.
You don't say that you have a model of CO2 (something you can't even see), or that you detected the Co2, you say you have CO2 because the evidence for it is THAT good.
scientific papers are the same way: if its something speculative the label it as such. For stuff we know ? Its written as a known.
You have yet to use the phrase "epistemic nihilism" correctly.
Show. Don't tell. Your say so that I used it wrong is completely meaningless.
Considering the level of discourse that dominates modern society, we don't teach enough of them.
They do not help people correspond to reality they just gussy up peoples opinions.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
All I have left are some Devonian crinoid stems I found in some exposed limestone at a roadcut in the Catskills in New York; they're about 400 million years old. (Everything else I've found got donated to Clemson University.)You're saying they are roughly that old , not that they fit a model of being roughly that old.
You're getting hung up on an artifact of communication, and mistaking it for a mental attitude that isn't correct. When I say, "they're about 400 million years old," I mean, "Based on my observations, they seem to assess in the range expected for other reference 400 Ma stuff." It would be ridiculously laborious to spell that out in every sentence, but the thought is always there. For all I know, Last Thursdayism is in fact correct.
When I say, "I had chicken for lunch," I mean that I remember ordering chicken and recall eating something that seemed to pass casual cues as fitting the model of what I consider 'chicken'. I do NOT mean that I have some magical ability to perceive some hypothetical Ultimate Chickenhood and compared what I ate with that divine form and found it identical.
Hell, when I bring home dinner and Mrs Gersen says, "Where did that come from?" I don't say, "Well, I suspect the rice was grown 215.4 miles magnetic west of Brenham, but the seeds were probably derived from blah blah blah, etc.; whereas the styrofoam in the carton originated..." and go off on a six-hour discussion of the antecedents of every ingredient of every element. Instead, I just say, "From the Belizean place across the street." My saying that does not in any way deny any of that other stuff, it's just a concession to the fact that that there's no point in my spelling any of the other stuff out.
You're getting hung up on an artifact of communication, and mistaking it for a mental attitude that isn't correct. When I say, "they're about 400 million years old," I mean, "Based on the test methods available to me, they assess in the range expected for other reference 400 Ma stuff." It would be ridiculously laborious to spell that out in every sentence, but the thought is always there. For all I know, Last Thursdayism is in fact correct.
All I have left are some Devonian crinoid stems I found in some exposed limestone at a roadcut in the Catskills in New York; they're about 400 million years old. (Everything else I've found got donated to Clemson University.)You're saying they are roughly that old , not that they fit a model of being roughly that old.
You couldn't even get through the explanation of why you're not sure they were 400 million year old rocks without admitting to the existence of other 400 million year old rocks.
Even if you were the proper paragon of poppers paradigm and held that thought for everything... whats the point for a geologist? Yes, standing on the bleeding edge of physics dealing with weird forces you can't even see and have to observe indirectly at best that sort of paranoia makes sense. But when you can get a concussion from your subject matter? Hell to the no. Its nothing but a pointless mental backflip to avoid.. what exactly?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
You couldn't even get through the explanation of why you're not sure they were 400 million year old rocks without admitting to the existence of other 400 million year old rocks.
Again, limits of communication. I said "reference stuff," which might be all wrong. Hell, maybe the stuff isn't even 400 Ma rocks, but 6-year-old killer mimics shapeshifted into rocks. I act as if the former is correct because it's paralyzing to discuss every other possibility in the world, but some element of doubt is always there. That doesn't mean that all things are equally likely, but it does mean that we never actually know stuff -- we only make models and predictions that are more or less useful.
Its nothing but a pointless mental backflip to avoid.. what exactly?
To avoid the one pitfall that ruins science and turns it into religion.
Certainty is the bane of the scientific method. Belief in Truth (capital T) or ultimates of some kind -- that's faith-thinking, not science-thinking. Skepticism and doubt are the scientist's most important lenses. We can't give those up without ceasing to be scientists.
It's the ability to say, "you know what, let's throw out all that stuff we've been saying, and try this instead, and see if it works better" that allows progress.
Admittedly, most of time even scientists think of it that way, but in a rigorous sense, it's not true.
Rigorous in what sense? Hewing to an impossible standard?
I, for one, refuse to engage in discourse with an anti-intelectuall who has expressed nothing but distain and derision for art, literature, linguistics, anthropology, law, archeology, languages, and the rest of the humanities.
hey, I have nothing against diggers and a lot of art.
but it does mean that we never actually know stuff -- we only make models and predictions that are more or less useful.
If you don't know more than the guy holding the sign on the street corner that says "the end is near" then whats the point?
Certainty is the bane of the scientific method. Belief in Truth (capital T) or ultimates of some kind -- that's faith-thinking, not science-thinking. Skepticism and doubt are the scientist's most important lenses. We can't give those up without ceasing to be scientists.
What sounds more like a religion, "this is a 400 million year old rock" or "I can't tell if this is a 400 million year old rock or a 6 year old mimic put there by an intelligent field mouse" ?
It's the ability to say, "you know what, let's throw out all that stuff we've been saying, and try this instead, and see if it works better" that allows progress.
That's one ability. A huge, revolutionary ability that comes up once a generation in one field of science.
Another, equally important ability is the ability to say "Ok, we figured this part out, write it down, teach it, and lets move on". Someone figured out what limestone was made out of, you base new findings on that, you don't spend eternity re inventing the wheel and constantly doubting every single fact that you've ever gotten in the past.
What makes science different from religion isn't that religion never questions everything and that science always questions everything but that science can question anything that it needs to. You build build you build you go forward until you hit something that doesn't make any sense and THEN you backtrack. Yes, you sometimes have to question old conclusions but you don't need to do that until you have a reason to.
For practical purposes, we work as you suggest. When discussing the philosophy of it all, we put in all the disclaimers. It's good to keep them in the back of your mind anyway, to keep your mind open for the counter evidence when your preferred model actually does break. That's how we learn new things.
That doesn't really do much for the argument that the philosophy of it has any value.
Of course, scientists being human, it doesn't always work. Which brings us back to the "wait for the old scientists to die off" approach.
Those aren't the only options, and what makes science different from other fields is that scientists can and will change their minds based on evidence (einstien comes to mind, hawking had a famous bet with another scientist that he lost, i don't recall anyone dumping rutherford off to alaska...)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If you don't know more than the guy holding the sign on the street corner that says "the end is near" then whats the point?
Your predictions are more useful than his. That's as far as it goes -- but that counts for an awful lot.
What sounds more like a religion, "this is a 400 million year old rock" or "I can't tell if this is a 400 million year old rock or a 6 year old mimic put there by an intelligent field mouse" ?
No religious person said "I can't tell" about anything within their personal 'revelation' ever.
It's the ability to say, "you know what, let's throw out all that stuff we've been saying, and try this instead, and see if it works better" that allows progress.
That's one ability. A huge, revolutionary ability that comes up once a generation in one field of science.
It's not usually that huge, and it's not at all infrequent. Hell, last month a colleague and I went back and scrapped a "settled" site conceptual model, just because we needed a model that would better fit one new observation. We do that all the time. We're ABLE to do that because we don't think of things as being "settled."
Another, equally important ability is the ability to say "Ok, we figured this part out, write it down, teach it, and lets move on". Someone figured out what limestone was made out of, you base new findings on that, you don't spend eternity re inventing the wheel and constantly doubting every single fact that you've ever gotten in the past.
If your predictions in one area are good enough for the time being, you focus on another. So, no, you're not re-inventing every wheel ever, always. That doesn't mean that everything but what you're currently working on is settled forever, however.
Yes, you sometimes have to question old conclusions but you don't need to do that until you have a reason to.
This statement is directly at odds with your assertion that some old conclusions are perfectly and permanently settled as being some kind of Absolute Reality (TM).
Just because you can work it out with mass doesn't mean you can work it out with every ability to determine reality.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So I'm a bit late to the party, but I want to inject in something that hasn't been part of the discussion before yet I find incredibly interesting.
Math. Math is an entirely human concept. On the abstract, it really doesn't have any connection to the real world. It's a bunch of assumptions and definitions plus the (tremendous) mental exercise of seeing what we can derive from those assumptions and definitions. The real working of math (not those pale shades we get to experience in high school) can often get really, really abstract. At a relatively early stage of academic math studies, one learns that just about all the concepts they were familiar with from high schools are just private cases that are relatively intuitive of much broader ideas and concepts.
And yet, somehow, math has been probably the most important tool available to humanity as we advance in our scientific knowledge and technological prowess. Despite the fact that principally we ourselves came up with how math works based on how our intrinsic way of thinking works, time after time it proved itself capable of describing vastly complex natural phenomena. It is possible to construct a mathematical formula for how something works, and if you just figure a way to plug in the correct numbers you get prediction power. This is actually the very definition of what physics is - there was a wonderful part of Walter Lewin's lectures from MIT where he talks about that, but sadly it is now unavailable.
How is this even possible, and why is it so? Why do arbitrary math rules that humans came up with complement science so well, when sometimes the math preceded the science by hundreds or even thousands of years?
The only connection I am able to identify is that the laws of math aren't completely arbitrary because we invented them, and our logic is meant to allow us to function in this universe with it's laws. That might suggest that somehow, by simply formalizing what our brains are coded to understand, we were able to begin the mighty project of formalizing the logic of the universe itself.
Which leads to yet another fascinating question. Is new mathematical knowledge "discovered" or "invented"? Was it always there, an intrinsic part of the universe that we just needed some time and smart people to figure out? Or is it new knowledge, created by humans the same we we bred new kinds of dogs into existence?
I remember my undergrad comprehensive thesis. Assessing the Presence of a Specific Paleo Rabbit at a Specific Locality. Looking through really dead rabbit bones for one specific bunny.
Hours of measuring rabbit teeth, staring down a scope, comparing various dental features to the stages of wear on the teeth all for one simple conclusion: I failed to find my rabbit.
Thing is, I couldn't say "No, this rabbit isn't at this site." I had to say "There is no evidence to support the assessment of the rabbit's presence at this site within this collection." I can't just say "no."
Why? Because it *could* be there, because I can't prove it's not. Heck, given the geographical region and the time period, it was a distinct possibility it *is* there. Thing is, there might even be evidence to support it being there amongst another museum's collections. I can't be 100% positive that it isn't, just 100% sure I didn't find it. The most I could say is that I found no reason to say it was there.
And do you know WHY I got to work with these rabbits? Because someone said that they were there 50 years ago, and someone else thought "maybe they aren't" and passed that off to me.
Kirth Gersen is absolutely right: in science we are ALWAYS looking back at what we know and trying to figure out if maybe, just maybe, we should toss it and try again.
While Sir Karl Popper was an extremely influential philosopher of science, his ideas aren't without criticism. Usually from other philosophers of Science, whose existence seems to have been missed.
I'll suggest taking a read through Kuhn, Quine, Lakatos, maybe even Feyerabend, and then jumping back to this thread.
If you're eager to see problems, though, in Popper's ideas, watch the brilliant movie Einstein and Eddington. Notice that while using Newtownian physics for EVERYTHING, the scientists are aware that there is an issue with the orbit of Mercury. It doesn't work, there's a wobble and there shouldn't be.
A strict falsificationist would have said, that's it, we have no working understanding of motion. That didn't happen. Instead, it was just circled as a possible problem for later, because Newtonian physics works for everything else they had at the time.
----------
And by the way, geocentric beliefs still allow you to do accurate astronomy for anything visible from earth. The math is different, but it's quite possible. You could even have Ptolemaic ideas, like epicycles and equants, and it's STILL possible to make accurate predictions, though the math isn't exactly what I would call 'fun'.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
And here you go...
Kirth Gersen is absolutely right: in science we are ALWAYS looking back at what we know and trying to figure out if maybe, just maybe, we should toss it and try again.
During that work, how often did you check the "assumption" that the rocks you were working with came from extinct animals vs. whether they were a medusa's garbage pit or placed there by satan to fool you? Or that extinct animals were even a possibility?
Changing your mind about a very specific thing you looked at for a short period of time is vastly different than having to resort to last thursdayism or geocentrism. There are different levels of settled: the presence of the rabbit or what kind of rocks you have under your feet doesn't remotely qualify. Addressing one as if it was the other is more than a little straw-manning.
----------
And by the way, geocentric beliefs still allow you to do accurate astronomy for anything visible from earth. The math is different, but it's quite possible. You could even have Ptolemaic ideas, like epicycles and equants, and it's STILL possible to make accurate predictions, though the math isn't exactly what I would call 'fun'.
You would not have been able to find Uranus that way.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Kirth Gersen is absolutely right: in science we are ALWAYS looking back at what we know and trying to figure out if maybe, just maybe, we should toss it and try again.
During that work, how often did you check the "assumption" that the rocks you were working with came from extinct animals vs. whether they were a medusa's garbage pit or placed there by satan to fool you? Or that extinct animals were even a possibility?
Changing your mind about a very specific thing you looked at for a short period of time is vastly different than having to resort to last thursdayism or geocentrism. There are different levels of settled: the presence of the rabbit or what kind of rocks you have under your feet doesn't remotely qualify. Addressing one as if it was the other is more than a little straw-manning.
It's matter of scale. In the field of Paleontology, there have been several major paradigm shifts in our understanding of the evolutionary history of life, where scientists have had to go back and basically throw out everything we thought we knew about something. The origins of birds, whales, and turtles, dinosaur lifestyle, the Pleistocene extinctions, etc are all subjects where an established dogma was thrown out or had to be substantially rewritten.
No people are not questioning whether fossils are actually magical fairy rocks, but I don't think that analogy works at all with arguing against science revising itself.
So I'm a bit late to the party, but I want to inject in something that hasn't been part of the discussion before yet I find incredibly interesting.
Math. Math is an entirely human concept. On the abstract, it really doesn't have any connection to the real world. It's a bunch of assumptions and definitions plus the (tremendous) mental exercise of seeing what we can derive from those assumptions and definitions. The real working of math (not those pale shades we get to experience in high school) can often get really, really abstract. At a relatively early stage of academic math studies, one learns that just about all the concepts they were familiar with from high schools are just private cases that are relatively intuitive of much broader ideas and concepts.
And yet, somehow, math has been probably the most important tool available to humanity as we advance in our scientific knowledge and technological prowess. Despite the fact that principally we ourselves came up with how math works based on how our intrinsic way of thinking works, time after time it proved itself capable of describing vastly complex natural phenomena. It is possible to construct a mathematical formula for how something works, and if you just figure a way to plug in the correct numbers you get prediction power. This is actually the very definition of what physics is - there was a wonderful part of Walter Lewin's lectures from MIT where he talks about that, but sadly it is now unavailable.
How is this even possible, and why is it so? Why do arbitrary math rules that humans came up with complement science so well, when sometimes the math preceded the science by hundreds or even thousands of years?
The only connection I am able to identify is that the laws of math aren't completely arbitrary because we invented them, and our logic is meant to allow us to function in this universe with it's laws. That might suggest that somehow, by simply formalizing what our brains are coded to understand, we were able to begin the mighty...
This is why there is a fairly vigorous debate (for mathematicians) in the field about whether math is "invented" or "discovered."
Yes, I mean 'with the naked eye', so pre-Galileo, but early astronomy did what it set out to do.
Copernicus theory had holes when introduced as well, such as the lack of observable stellar parallax. Yes, we can detect it NOW, but it's not 1543.
For mathematics, look at Euclid's tenth postulate, and the variations that are possible while still being internally consistent. Fun stuff. Then try to decide which tenth postulate matches 'reality'.
No people are not questioning whether fossils are actually magical fairy rocks, but I don't think that analogy works at all with arguing against science revising itself.
Because I'm not arguing against science revising itself. I'm arguing that at some point you consider a fact settled and move on. You have to.
What you've just done is identify one of those points: we KNOW what fossils are.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm arguing that at some point you consider a fact settled and move on. You have to.
I'd still quibble with that. At some point you consider a tentative fact good enough for your current purposes and move on.
We should be careful discussing truth in a philosophy thread, there's an entire class there, maybe two.
Philosophers disagree about whether absolute truth exists. If it does exist, philosophers disagree about whether or not you could get there. Assuming you could get there, philosophers disagree about whether or not you would know you were there.
So, without getting too deep in that rabbit hole, I'll recommend Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening. He was one of Karl Poppers students, btw, so had a chance to participate in top tier debate on the subject.
He'd agree with Kirth, btw, that once you have useable results, most go on their merry way, and don't spent time thinking about whether they really know, or only think they know.
I'm arguing that at some point you consider a fact settled and move on. You have to.I'd still quibble with that. At some point you consider a tentative fact good enough for your current purposes and move on.
Do we have anything better than good enough for our current purposes? A higher standard that makes sense?
Do we have anything better than good enough for our current purposes? A higher standard that makes sense?
I don't -- but then again, I'm a scientist, not a philosopher!
Do we have anything better than good enough for our current purposes? A higher standard that makes sense?I don't -- but then again, I'm a scientist, not a philosopher!
Philosophy thus not necessary to do science :)
They're the same thing, BNW, it's just that philosophy has Greek language roots, whereas science is Latin.
They're the same thing, BNW, it's just that philosophy has Greek language roots, whereas science is Latin.
They're the opposite. In many ways science is the rejection of philosophy.
Philosophy is investigation of the world through primarily speculative means.
Science is the investigation of the world primarily through observational and experimental means.
In philosophy you try to take your knowns and advance them them rationally as far as you can. If your knowns are true and your reasoning is sound you arrive at a correct conclussion.
In science the universe is so complicated that advancing from your knowns to your unknowns through a completely reasonable and rational manner... can still give you the wrong answer. It doesn't trust philosophy to get you the right answer. Thats why you check it. Again and again and again. And when the universe says you forgot to carry a 2 somewhere, you listen.