Timeline for Should viable philosophical theories not always be consistent with science?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 7, 2018 at 17:49 | comment | added | Yechiam Weiss | "You shun philosophy for failing to align with your preferred theory. Now take that for a moment, and see why you see such an estranged relationship between philosophy and science might come forth". I love this paragraph. I would also throw in pragmatism into the answer, I feel in behind your words and I think it might be worth bringing to the front. | |
| Mar 6, 2018 at 20:42 | comment | added | Conifold | It seems to me that there are two separate distinctions under an ambiguous label. First, "facts" are "small" while "theories" are "big", they are concatenations of "facts". So conservation law is a "fact" but relativity is a "theory". Second, the former distinction is ignored but the words are used to debate how well a theory is established, so classical mechanics is a fact (within its scope) but evolution is only a theory (to some). | |
| Mar 6, 2018 at 1:52 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | Such a disagreement gives creedence to my own pet definition of "fact," which is "any statement that is deemed so evidently true that the speaker is uninterested in discussing the possibility that it might be not-true." While somewhat snarky in nature, it actually captures all of the definitions of fact used here quite well, and I personally find the subjectivity of that definition useful. | |
| Mar 6, 2018 at 1:51 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | @Conifold That's interesting. It looks like there's disagreement on the term. Wikipedia uses "In science, a fact is a repeatable careful observation or measurement (by experimentation or other means), also called empirical evidence" and "In the most basic sense, a scientific fact is an objective and verifiable observation, in contrast with a hypothesis or theory, which is intended to explain or interpret facts" | |
| Mar 6, 2018 at 1:39 | comment | added | Conifold | Dictionary gives "any observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and accepted as true" for scientific fact with "the structure of a cell membrane is considered a scientific fact" as example. It does not seem that the "observation" needs (or even can) be individual or that it can not be theoretical (structure of a cell is certainly in part theoretical). So it is semantically acceptable to call established theories "scientific fact", and attempts to draw some principled theory/fact distinction repeatedly failed in the last century. | |
| Mar 5, 2018 at 21:03 | history | edited | Cort Ammon | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 728 characters in body
|
| Mar 5, 2018 at 20:41 | history | answered | Cort Ammon | CC BY-SA 3.0 |