What is Philosophy of Science?

philosophy of science

Introduction

Humanity has always been searching for answers of how we came to be and about the world/universe we inhabit.

Over the many millennia, the process of collecting information and compiling knowledge (which is the essence of science) has changed many times. Many people think that science has always been this one special way of studying the world, but the truth is that it has changed & evolved many times over the course of human history as new ideas formulated in the field of philosophy.

Science itself was under the broad umbrella of philosophy until as far as the 17th century when the two separated into their own fields of study, each with their own many sub-fields.

Even then, I believe science is still closely linked with philosophy today when we consider the possibilities and the focus of both on thought processes. Both also rely on rationality and using logic to make deductions & arguments – the only difference I see is that one tends to uses experimentation while other sticks to theoretical arguments (theoretical physics and experimental philosophy blur the boundaries).

Classical Science

Classical science began in a world with two trains of thought in ancient Greece of studying the world – relativism and absolutism (both are no longer part of modern science).

Relativism (slightly different from cultural relativism) was the idea that everything one knows about the world is in their minds. The idea is concerned with the notion that things exist in the minds of people and that external world may or may not exist (as far as they know, existence of external world is irrelevant since even the idea of existence itself exists in the minds of people). To put it simply, if one person sees that a car is blue and another says the car is red. According to relativism, both people would be correct because each person’s reality is in their own minds.

virsitil_inyourhead_1024

Photo by themiracleisaroundthecorner

Absolutism said that all of reality exists absolutely in the world around us. Humans are simply there as part of this reality as nothing more than pawns. Every fact we collect about the world is also absolutely how the world is. Basically, people with this belief felt everything we see in nature is part of this absolute truth of the world.

Both are, of course, flawed. Relativism lacks consistency because everything exists only in our minds. That means reality is completely different from mind-to-mind. For one person, 1+1 might equal 2 but for somebody else it might equal to 4 (extreme example but you get my point). Absolutism is flawed because if somebody notices some phenomena in one place to be true then that phenomena is ALWAYS true everywhere in every part of the universe. That is, of course, not true as we see with strong evidence from Einstein’s theory of relativity & others.

As you may notice, both trains of thought were two extremes, but these extremes were followed until late Middle Ages (Bird, 1921, p24). Of course, the history of science is not anywhere close to being this simple, but I simply want to focus on the thinking involved over the last few thousand years without getting very specific.

Modern Science

Modern science has taken a different route that does not fall into either extremes.

There is no absolute truth because for every answer we find, there are ten more questions waiting to be asked concerning that one answer. Information is continuously collected and knowledge evolves from one junction in time to another. Absolute truth would mean that the first fact we find is how the world always works under every circumstance at all times no matter what.

As far as relativism is concerned, different aspects of the world are also not different from mind to mind as experiments can be duplicated and results can be duplicated by different people. Relativism truly does not hold any water logically because every person would be correct — ‘earth is flat’ and ‘earth is round’ would both be correct at same time.

The truth is all we can truly do is document effects of different observations & experiments. The job of science is not to explain why something happens but to show what happens and how. ‘Why does gravity exist? Why is there so much empty space in atoms? Why does energy equal matter (famous E=MC^2)?’ Science is not there to explain why these things happen. All we can truly do is describe these phenomenons (Bird, 1921, p34).

This leads to the basic question that most people learn in elementary school: What is science and the scientific method?

From Websters dictionary: “Systematized knowledge derived from observation, study, and experimentation carried out in order to determine the nature or principles of what is being studied.”

More basic than that, Science is a collection of ideas, concepts, knowledge and, at the foundation, different ways of thinking/doing research using the scientific method.

Scientific Method

The scientific method was first developed in the Islamic empires (in modern-day Iraq) in 10th century from basic ideas of ancient Greeks like Aristotle, Plato, etc. It then spread to the west through the Byzantine Empire & also spread to the East. Since then, it has been refined many times by people like Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Albert Einstein, etc (Shuttleworth, 2009). Remember, science has no borders, no boundaries, and is continuously refined.

scientific-method-model

 

This was the best graphic I could find in Google images and it defines the process very well.

It all begins with a question and/or observation. From that, you make an inference/hypothesis of what will happen under certain circumstances & devise an experiment to test that hypothesis.

If a hypothesis is not testable with an experiment then it stays as a hypothesis. It does not mean it is false but it also does not mean it is true either. Of course, there are some things that we cannot show evidence but we accept it as a society – things like morality, democracy, law, etc – but nobody expects those things to be experimented on for scientific validity because we accept it as a society.

Basic case: A scientist does not have to be smart/dumb or good/bad at what they do to be considered morally good/bad. Both things we consider separate as a society and so we accept it that way. For instance, we cannot prove that being friendly is scientifically good or bad but we believe as a society and humanity that being friendly is good. This topic will be discussed further in a future blog entry.

 

One of the biggest misconceptions that people have is that science’s job is to prove things. Science can never truly “prove” something is true, but merely show evidence for/against something.

A successful experiment would mean the scientific theory is true under the circumstances that it was tested in. In another part of the universe, the circumstances could very well be different and thus could lead to different results. This is why you can never “prove” something is true in science because if it is proven to be true then it has to work under every situation. That is, of course, humanly impossible to show as it would require infinite experimentation as the universe has infinite types of circumstances in infinitely-sized space (argh infinity haha). All it takes is for one result in some distant galaxy to be false that the theory comes crashing down (this is science’s quality of ‘falsifiability’).

One example for falsifiability that my professor used (I see it is an example used a lot). Lets say you see a group of swans and you see they are all white. You decide to search further and find only white swans. From that, you theorize “All swans are white.” Your observation might show strong evidence for that, but to prove that, you would have to search EVERY corner of Earth and every corner of the universe for every swam that might exist to see if they’re all white. It’s obviously impossible, and all it takes is one black/gray swan that your theory is proven false.

Every experiment has to be repeatable as it is possible that an error was reached for whatever reason. If it cannot be repeatable by anyone else then the experiment has failed and has to be redesigned since the result cannot be re-obtained (lots of pseudosciences fail here as the results may not be repeatable in a lab).

The results that you get from a successful experiment are, of course, analyzed & processed before they become a scientific theory (I will do a future blog entry on plain “theory” versus “scientific theory” as tons of non-scientific people confuse the two things as being the same, which they are not).

Philosophy of Science

The philosophy of science has developed over many generations as the way of thinking and compiling knowledge has continuously evolved. Humanity is learning more, doing more, thinking more from one generation to the next. Isaac Newton used to say “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” The only way we can learn more is by learning from our past and building upon that.

On the grand scale of things, the scientific method is essential and tightly linked with doing science; it is to science what the justice system is to law. It is also built on the notion of simplicity and being straight-forward to remove any sort of ambiguity and potential bias of any sort. This, of course, does not mean it is full-proof, but it is the best tool we have available for our never-ending search for answers. As Carl Sagan said, science is a way of thinking, and it is also a way of fulfilling our curiosity for answers from this strange universe we inhabit.

 

 

 Sources:

Bird, J., & Einstein, A. (1921). Einstein’s theories of relativity and gravitation: A selection of material from the essays submitted in the competition for the Eugene Higgins prize of $5,000. New York: Scientific American Pub.
 

(Apr 23, 2009). Who Invented the Scientific Method?. Retrieved Oct 01, 2014 from Explorable.com: https://explorable.com/who-invented-the-scientific-method

Harsh Shukla
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