New answers tagged philosophy-of-science
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To answer this question you first have to know what physicists mean when they refer to physical laws.
To a physicist, a physical law is a rule which appears to account for the behavior of a physical system in such a manner as to allow the physicist to apply that rule to predict the outcome of an unperformed experiment or to explain the outcome of a performed ...
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The thought experiment is known as Chrysippus’s Dog and goes back to the named ancient Stoic. It was discussed by many modern philosophers, including Dennett, see Chrysippus’s Dog as a Case Study in Non-Linguistic Cognition by Rescorla for a survey. Here is the description of Chrysippus's dog given by Sextus Empiricus:
"[Chrysippus] declares that the ...
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We recently discussed a kindred but different question: Is the idea of a causal chain physical (or even scientific)?
"The only thing that really matters in establishing a hypothesis is the track record of predictions." - OP
The Ptolemeic system of predicting planetary positions, with tables refined over generations, was initially better than the ...
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Science is what scientists do. At root.
It is weakly emergent, and subject to contention around edge cases. This could be compared to uses of the word game. That language is use does not mean there aren't very widely used heuristics about how to use it, but applies to edge cases, and to understanding how language derived progressively from non-language. ...
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Emit a hypothesis
Run some experiments
Accept or reject the hypothesis based on the results of the experiments
Improve or come up with a new hypothesis
Repeat the hypothesis-test cycle until the phenomenon in question has been properly understood.
I think the list above is missing a couple of important steps:
Why we do it. It's the very first step, before ...
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"To me the existence of God is metaphysical, ie it exists outside the realm of human measurement."
Not really. It is quite possible that scientists observe events that contradict know laws of physics. And if god exists and decides to provide such an event then scientists can’t force him to repeat it. “Observable” would be needed, not “repeatability”...
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Yes Academia.com allows you to submit what appears to be papers but they don't have to be published. You can submit published ones also. You make a profile for yourself.
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One argument might be that science doesn't have a "complete understanding of reality". And that is the case from psychology to physics.
The claim that science never will never be all there is to know, is not especially postmodern. Descartes was an early modern philosopher, who claimed
Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are
...
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The short answer is yes -- too many (most?) people are quite confused.
Specifically, they are confused about things that we don't experience on a day-to-day basis. Things that can only be understood through mental models and abstract reasoning.
Remarkably, one the first concepts they would struggle with, is also fundamental to our notion of truth, to our ...
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Probably an ill-formed question. Notice you are using the concepts "describe reality" and "understanding reality".
Expecting science to provide a complete description of reality is like expecting a map to be identical to the terrain in all possible senses.
Science is not intended to describe reality. Moreover, knowledge (science is just a ...
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Three words: cogito ego sum.
They refer to a proposal by Descartes and it says that strictly speaking, we cannot know anything beyond our own1 existence. Which leaves us free to do exactly nothing.
We solve it by assuming that this is not a dream, that the world is real and we can make sense out of it.2 It might feel like an obvious next step (so obvious, ...
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Premise 1: There might be some phenomena in Reality that cannot be grasped, studied, and experimented with science (e.g. the existence and nature of God(s))
Premise 2: Science cannot tell whether that is the case or not (e.g. science cannot disprove the existence of Allah or Krishna)
Conclusion: Since science cannot tell whether science has complete grasp of ...
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The main reason which justifies punishment of evolved behaviours, is to impose a fitness cost upon harmful behaviours.
It matters not whether the person is blameworthy for having been bestowed with such behaviour, or even whether they can change it under their own will. The behaviour will be under pressure to change and be weeded out simply by imposing the ...
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The terms "our reality," "complete understanding" and the "scientific approach," need more robust definition. As is, answers to you query will be hit and miss affairs that may fail to fully satisfy (cf the varieties of answers you’ve received already, including my own). Moreover, while all are anti-realists, and claim that ...
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While this may strike others as an opinion-based question, I am going to buck that trend and claim that science itself answers this question, and therefore, properly cited, is a question that is a good fit for our site. So, don't let anyone inside or outside the analytic science school of thinking dissuade you from asking about the relationship between ...
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When Auguste Comte and a host of followers delineated two categories of qualities, Primary and Secondary, he included in the first only those things which could be measured; solidity, extension, motion, rest and number. The secondary qualities were relegated to the subjective world of individual experience; color, taste, smell and sound. That's where the ...
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"Science is not enough for a complete understanding of our reality"
"Our reality" depends on an understanding of being. We have a handle on extant beings - the things we can observe, or for which we can infer various aspects of existence. We have much less of a handle on the living beings that do the observing (or creating). For ...
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Many genes need to meet with the correct environment. FoxP2, 'the language gene', is known to trigger babbling during development. In wild cockatiels individuals may be assigned names, and have emergency calls, and flock calls that build cohesion and call to roost. But raised by humans, they mimic human speech & music. Like this. Gene and behaviour, in ...
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Ethics are rules for societal conduct. Being a part of society is not “natural”.
You have to keep your primeval instincts of self preservation aside if you want to be a member of society. You have to be willing to think of the whole and therefore abide by the ethics.
On the contrary, you can choose to not abide by ethics if you are willing to give up the ...
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The big book of scientific knowledge is written in the language of mathematics. Four hundred years of work in this area as shown that regardless of what philosophers or physicists might think about this, it nonetheless is a fact that the use of mathematics to organize knowledge about the physical world is (to some) unreasonably effective.
As such, the ...
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It comes down to intelligible intelligence. Which I suggest is a specific case of mutual intelligibility. As an experiment, people tried reverse diagnosing the function of a microchip; it was basically impossibly difficult. You need insight into how something occured, and how it fits within systems, to make sense of it. Language is like this too. An machine ...
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The more inputs I test the more confidence I should have. But why?
In the general all question, given a black box with infinite possible inputs and some output, and with unknown complexity, it is unclear what amount of testing will give what amount of confidence when predicting the next behavior of the black box.
However when the complexity of the interior ...
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I agree with @HWalters -- what could have possibly motivated you to post this here???:) Nevertheless, I happen to have been a software developer all my professional life, and also have an ms in physics, so maybe I can see a tenuous connection, as follows. Firstly, let's define a program as corresponding to a computable function f:N-->N, since any text string ...
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A few thoughts:
-do all of these conceptual questions still cause difficulties if everything is expressed purely in mathematical terms and in full without abbreviations? I don't have the right typeset on my computer but, for example, I think that if you typed out the formula for mean velocity in full it would be quite clear what is meant by saying that it ...
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