<p>This is a continuation of a discussion that began in an [earlier</a> thread](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=189987&page=4]earlier”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=189987&page=4). The last post on the matter is as follows:
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<p>Response to follow…</p>
<p>I do not think we are going to generate the most cerebral discussion in this environment!</p>
<p>I do suggest the following text, however. It is by Peter Godfrey-Smith, a full-time professor of philosophy at Harvard:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226300633/sr=8-6/qid=1150860687/ref=sr_1_6/103-1645005-8703062?_encoding=UTF8[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226300633/sr=8-6/qid=1150860687/ref=sr_1_6/103-1645005-8703062?_encoding=UTF8</a></p>
<p>First of all, it was not my intention to discredit empericism so my appologies if you got that impression. However, the fact still stands that the Enlightenment was a century after the Scientific Revolution: Kant, Hume, and Locke were not contemporaries of, say, Kepler or Galileo.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that Locke began his life as a man of science (he got a degree in medicine), and spent an awful amount of time discussing ideas with famous scientists of the day like Hooke and Newton. And Kant and Hume were later heavily influenced by Locke, so one could concievably make the argument that science gave birth to empericism rather than the other way around.
As for your second half, first of all please do not patronize me: I am a scholar of science and a student of history so your implications sound condescending. If I didn’t know how to frame a theory right now I’d be kind of worried about myself!
But since you wanted to know, Bayesianism refers more to the philosophy of mathematics than science, Kuhn wrote an awful lot about the history of science and its philosophy, and a theory is not a hunch but rather a predictable and testable mathematical framework used to describe observations which you can test and verify. (The latter is probably a definition but I don’t know how else to describe it, but rest assured I spend the majority of my life working with them.)</p>
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<p>Okay… and then we can go further down the causal chain and say that Aristotle and Plato had at least some influence on the methodology and ideas of their successors, so philosophy led to… science.</p>
<p>I was not trying to make a causal argument, such that since one preceded another, one is the father of the other. Rather, what I am trying to say is that philosophers like Locke and Hume used philosophy to create an environment where science could flourish, since they viewed science or empiricism as the only source of knowledge. </p>
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<p>I am not patronizing! In fact, your reaction is the very problem to which I am referring. Scientists who have no regard for philosophy take for granted the definition of “theory,” when in fact the definition of “theory” is very much in debate, by scientists and philosophers. This is just one aspect in which philosophy shapes science.</p>
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<p>No. Bayesianism has many applications, one of which is in mathematics; however, its primary application is in science and, more generally, its use in induction. Bayesianism is a system by which confirmation updates the likelihood of a hypothesis being true. I am not exactly correct in that statement, so here is an excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:</p>
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<p><a href=“http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem[/url]”>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem</a></p>
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<p>I only brought up Kuhn to give an example of philosophy of science, though his theory is certainly compelling.</p>
<p>Science is essentially induction: we observe certain phenomena in nature and we create a hypothesis for that phenomena. If we encounter something contradictory, we try to create a new hypothesis to accomodate that contradiction. If nature if consistent over a period of time with the current hypothesis, then the hypothesis is stengthened.</p>
<p>The nature of a hyothesis is that it is never true by necessity. The success of a hypothesis is very much contingent. Since hypotheses are a core of science, and since induction is what makes hypotheses work, then science is always involved in and shaped by philosophy.</p>
<p>The method of induction, viz., how one can draw a cogent conclusion from a limited set of data, is very much a problem in philosophy (and thus science). Do you know the fallacy of the hasty generalization? I am sure you can guess what it means from the title: a generalization is drawn from insufficient evidence. When is the evidence sufficient from which to generalize? Where is the line drawn? What do we consider evidence? These are some of the questions in philosophy of science, and they are highly pertinent to science!</p>
<p>Another problem is in causation, and this is closely related to the problem of generalization. Hume raised the point, in his empiricism, that we can never observe the connection between a cause and effect; that is to say, the notion of a necessary connection between my knocking on a door and the action making a sound cannot be observed through the senses. Hume argued that we impose about succeeding phenomena the relation of cause and effect; insofar as we impose this concept, how do we know that the two succeeding phenomena are causally related? Well, we observe the phenomena succeeding each other on a regular basis. The problem is, however, when are we allowed to impose the causal relationship?</p>
<p>In addition, if we are imposing a causal relationship, how can we make necessary conclusions or draw necessary connections from contingent facts?</p>
<p>This is just a very rudimentary sketch of the problems in philosophy of science and science. A scientist would be remiss if he or she ignored them.</p>
<p>Bump…</p>