New answers tagged philosophy-of-science
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Quantum mechanics has many different interpretations. One, which is commonly accepted, is called Copenhagen interpretation. This idea says that an electron is everywhere at the same time but the probability to find it at some point in space by a measurement is its wavefunction modulus squared. Note that the electron is everywhere at the same time. In other ...
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The argument against a materialist cause and a metaphysical cause is a very old one that is much older than Aquinas. The Brahma Sutras addresses the regressus in infinitum against the Vaisesika philosophy (Indian materialist, atomists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaisheshika). In Brahma Sutra 2.1.12 - 2.1.14, (Chapter 2, Section 2 Adhikarana 3, here - ...
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This system claims that by following certain procedures faithfully,
the knowledge resident in nature can be brought forth and 'captured'
without any human intervention. How is this even remotely possible? It
sounds like a form of superstition, like belief in an anthropomorphic
god.
You are sort of right. This view of science is, as one great ...
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Haldane pointed out that when a corpse is buried, most of its cells are still alive. The corpse is not.
Living as a multicellular being involves a delicate between different cell lines, regulated by mechanisms including programmed cell death for defective cells. When these mechanisms fail, this is cancer. Individual cells become "immortal", but the organism ...
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How? For starters, the characterization of the sciences you offer sounds like those of a true believer instead of a scientist or scientifically inclined theologian, say the Pope, who embraces science and evolution. But, I can offer a rational response, which you are welcome to decline and downvote in your efforts to proselytize. Given your references to your ...
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In regards to HeLa cells, they are already termed immortal by biologists. According to the article:
HeLa (/ˈheɪlɑː/; also Hela or hela) is an immortal cell line used in scientific research.
So, by biological definition, they are immortal, though what that means to biologists philosophically isn't clear by the article. To restructure your assertion and ...
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HeLa cells are "immortal" because their genetic machinery is damaged, causing them to reproduce all the time, and they cannot repair that damage. They are cancer cells and although you can consider them to be "alive" in the sense that they grow and divide, they are not alive in the same sense that noncancerous cells or humans for that matter are.
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In your first point where you say "everything came from nothing", we should be clear that what you're describing isn't really nothing. From the rest of your post, I think you understand this and meant something more like "nothing physical" but I just wanted to emphasize this. From nothing comes nothing. You talk about a "property of nothingness", but nothing ...
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Personally speaking, I would probably use nomological, since at least the word isn't a neologism (it's got a history, and is enough in the ballpark that people will understand what you mean). There isn't a particular word for what you're talking about. In the philosophy of science, people generally generally analyze theoretical structures in terms of the '...
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One word answer, like metatheory? It might just be science. From Blackwell's Companion on the Philosophy of Science:
Some decades ago, Fred Suppe...remarked that "it is only a slight exaggeration to claim that a philosophy of science is little more than analysis of theories and their roles in the scientific enterprise" (p. 515)
If there's a single ...
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Interpreted narrowly, your question seems related to the problem of (data) fishing, where someone investigates hypothesis after hypothesis on the data until getting statistical significance on one (without correcting for the number of hypotheses considered), so that in all likelihood it was just a fluke. This is a well understood problem.
Interpreted more ...
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It is not possible to falsify economics or science. You are conflating theories, methods, and disciplines. Good theories are falsifiable, disciplines are not. Like most disciplines, some aspects are falsifiable and others are not, and that a discipline has some aspects that are not falsifiable doesn't eliminate it as a science. A perfect example is astronomy ...
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Mechanist (or mechanical) philosophy, in the original sense, meant the rejection of "substantial forms", i.e. forms with causal powers, such as souls, postulated by scholastics (who drew on some vague passages from Aristotle's De Anima). For a detailed discussion of substantial forms see How can the soul be a form in Aristotle's metaphysics? From the modern ...
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First of all, you can't fix time travel by getting the philosophy right - that's a wrong understanding of the nature of both physics and philosophy.
Neither do I think there is only 'the solution': I think you'll find another solutions include simply the impossibility of time-travel, the Novikov self-consistency principle, or the many-world theory.
But, to ...
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That thought experiment can be explained by Hinduism/Shaivism as taught by the vedas see Shvetashvatara Upanishad:
God, who is one only, is hidden in all beings. He is all-pervading,
and is the inner self of all creatures. He presides over all actions,
and all beings reside in Him. He is the witness, and He is the Pure
Consciousness
According to ...
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You wrote,
... I made the argument that economics is not science, because it cannot undertake repeatable experiments.
I'd like to take issue with the view that the ability to undertake repeatable experiments is either necessary or sufficient (or both?) for a discipline to qualify as a science.
First off, if your view were tenable, then astronomy could ...
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To me, the lack of being able to predict (at least on a national level) tells me that economics cannot be a science (at least at that level). It might suggest things about consumer behavior but it can't predict basic things that most people things that economists should know.
Ask an economist to predict ANYTHING that will happen 1 year out on a national ...
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Humanities is art not science, but based on science.
In humanities, which economics is the study of humans trading, there are many theories and no facts.
Experience, exposure, practise, and training allows you to choose the most useful theory to the specific circumstances. That is the art.
The goal is to integrate theory and self because as a human you ...
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There are multiple approaches to emergence, and I consider this to be the most valid, also agrees with my personal research regarding systems and interaction: emergence is just a subjective appreciation granted by reason.
To start, systems (the formal approach to things and objects) are just mental concepts. A constellation does not exist, the sky has only ...
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There seems to be 2 parts to your claim:
that a final state of human discovery in science is axiomatic and
that the goal of science is describing what we perceive with our senses.
It is fair to say that a goal of science is to describe our environment though it's not the case that that's limited to what we directly perceive with our senses. But there are ...
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Welcome, Aleesha
If economics is a science, we have I think to concede that it is does nor have the explanatory scope or depth of (say) particle physics. But this sort of damaging comparison, though common, is not what is needed. Biology is also a science which lacks the explanatory scope or depth of particle physics yet its status as science is secure.
...
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I fear, there is a misunderstanding about the meaning of "scientific". An experiment is one method in a lot different methods as a scientific approach. (And there are a lot experiments in economics like in game theory.) Even a repeatable experiment is no guaranteed proof, that a theory is true. There might be edge cases in an experimental setting, which ...
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Wikipedia says
Natural science is concerned with the description, prediction, and understanding of natural phenomena based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. It can be divided into two main branches: life science (or biological science) and physical science.
Social science is concerned with society and the relationships among ...
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What is Science?
The Popperian view of science is that a claim is "scientific" if it can be falsified. Science cannot prove that a hypothesis is true, only that it is manifestly false. If economics can make falsifiable claims, then I think it is justified to say such claims are "scientific", at least on some level (the degree of repeatability is certainly ...
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Certainly some economics qualifies as science. Here is an example of "hard science" as used in economics.
The Black-Scholes options pricing model is used by exchanges and traders to compute fair prices for options contracts traded on derivative instruments.
The model combines statistical methods (used to compute a measure of underlying volatility) with ...
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Economics is closely allied with political science, which is actually one part science and one part philosophy. Or, to be more precise, economics and political science can both be divided into science, philosophy and ideology, or propaganda.
Of course, you can always make a distinction between "economic science" and "economic theory," but if you took a ...
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Welcome to the demarcation problem of science. What is this thing called science? In lower levels of education, one is often given the impression that 'science', whatever that may be, exists as a monolithic entity. There is no sufficiency and necessity definition of what science is. It's better to say 'sciences' or 'scientific' when speculating as to this ...
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Wittgenstein is getting at the idea that any formal system rests on certain arbitrarily-chosen conventions, and by choosing different arbitrary conventions we can create different formal systems that represent exactly the same physical reality.
For instance, because of early history we habitually do plane geometry on a flat plane with orthogonal axes. Thus, ...
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The laws of nature do not describe the phenomenon of nature, they only present the foundation required to understand phenomena of nature, as Wittgenstein mentions later that in the past, people gave God and fate the same inviolable status as they give to the scientific laws now.Mechanics revolves around simple axioms that are treated as inviolable and the ...
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In short, Consciousness is our collective experience of sensing time & space. This is my personal definition. It may appear elusive until we understand it properly. Now, I will elaborate on the definition. The mechanism of an 'experience' is processing of the information in the brain. By 'sensing time & space', I meant sensing passage of time with ...
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You mention Peter Singer, who approaches the topic from a utilitarian rather than a right-based standpoint. Besides Animal Liberation (2nd ed., 1995), you might try:
P. Singer, The Animal Liberation Movement: its Philosophy, its Achievements and its Future. ISBN 10: 1909798622 / ISBN 13: 9781909798625
Published by Active Distribution, London, 2019.
P. ...
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In essence, your question is like this SE post which asks "how science is related to philosophy". Other closely related question are "is science just a more refined and effective method of philosophy?", "how does one know whether a discipline is a science of philosophy?", and "How should we characterize the relationship between mathematics and philosophy of ...
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Let's separate out two aspects of philosophy. First, there is a broad sense in which philosophy is the study of the application of higher reasoning. This goes straight back to the ancient Greek philosophers in the West (and to other ancient thinkers in other regions of the world): to the Socratic method, or Aristotles system of categorization. Note that for ...
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Both discipline use low level logic. But they have a different goal :
Science answer the question : How the world ?
Philosophy answer the question : Why the world ?
So, based on these statements, I think we can't say that maths or physics are a branch of philosophy.
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Do some philosophers believe there is no present, past, and future — and if so how on earth do they?
Cosmic Time is defined in more realistic models. As the big bang created space itself, there is an absolute reference frame and anything can be dated at "some time after the Big Bang". The non-existence of time became popular with special relativity but the general theory which considers non-stationary cases uses a parameter equivalent to a time coordinate: ...
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This is a knotty problem and there are many different perspectives on it but I would recommend looking at the details.
You might need a mind to discover the laws of physics and program a computer to simulate them. But when it's running it just carries on by itself and does not require any mental intervention. So there's nothing here to imply that the ...
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