Is Science a belief system?

This is a great quote Louis. Amartya Sen calls Polanyi's work "deeply philosophical", and I certainly have found it to be very persuasive. What Polanyi has written harmonizes with Kant's notion of autonomy. His claim is that the rational will is autonomous or free, and out of that freedom it decides which laws will bind it. This rational agency which Kant most especially associated with ethical norms seems to be quite applicable to epistemology as well.

What we frequently lose sight of in science is that we are not, as is usually assumed, dealing with an incontrovertible facticity in this realm. We, as rational agents, are deciding that we believe these "facts" (a classification we have invented) to be so. Based on what Polanyi says here If we are going to have epistemological integrity then, it would seem that the thing of importance is to come to the place where you are persuaded that you have proper warrant for declaring "because I believe so."

I think we as humans are not capable of having any objective perspective. Neither in our personal life's, nor when we are 'doing science'. It already begins with the choice of our measurement devices, which narrows the scope of possible outcomes before we actually measure anything. The process of choosing a 'proper' measurement-instrument presupposes a great variety of existing believes the researcher holds. I think the pursuit of objectivity which might be the main dogma in modern science should be replaced by the pursuit of transparency, since, we are not able to be 'objective'. Acknowledging that our perception and interpretation of reality is subjective would be a good first step. The next step would be to honestly reflect ourselves to get knowledge about our personal values, believes, biases etc. Then, when writing papers, we should honestly give information on our individual subjectivity. I think we should say goodbye to our belief that our research results are by any means objective. Instead we should examine our specific subjectivity, which would make it more easy for the recipient to understand in which ways scientific claims are subjective. Hopefully, these consideration will be part of a next paradigm shift in science.

Bill,

Did you notice that Polanyi qualified as ignoble the belief in a model of science as set of rules. Why does he think that?

Jonte,

Most good journalists do not claim to be perfectly objective or neutral these days. They acknowledge the impossibility of stepping outside the intrinsic biais of their education and culture but still trying to do a honest as much as they can towards understanding the issues from different viewpoints. Do you think scientists can learn from them?

Good question Louis. I'm not sure that he is saying that the model of science as a set of rules is ignoble so much as he is saying it is inadequate:

"That is what no set of rules, or any model of science based on a system of rules, can do; it cannot say “because I believe so.” Only a person can believe something, and only I myself can hold my own beliefs." The rational agent is the locus of belief rather than a set of rules. Rules are part and parcel of science from its early days in the Royal Society and its beginnings to the present. Here are the words of mathematician, scientist, philosopher and historian, Sir Alfred North Whitehead:

"Men became scientific because they believed, because they expected law in nature… and they expected law in nature because they believed in a Law-Giver.”

When science as we know it was just getting going, when Newton and Boyle were making their pronouncements about the laws they had observed, they were both excited and encouraged because they understood that the God Who had given them divine law and rules had also given physical (or scientific) laws and rules. The business of identifying those laws or rules filled the early scientists with wonder and awe. Like Johannes Keppler, they believed that they were "thinking God's thoughts after Him."

Dear Louis,

I cannot understand what is your interest in perverting the concept of science, reviving this question widely treated in other thread.

Science is the negation of any belief. Science is built with hypotheses instead.

The necessity of believing is a lack in intellectual evolution. I do not believe in anything. Every doctrine is provisional to me and rejectable, whenever the experience so requires.

However, a lot of people can transform scientific hypotheses into beliefs. This is a lack of these people, not of science.

Likewise, some people confuses probability estimation, with believe.

You can either believe that a drug will cure your illness or estimate that the probability of curing your illness is great. The first attitude is a belief, the second one is a probability estimation based upon experience or experimentation.

Science is not a doctrine, but a method. For instance, if you consider that evolution theory can explain some observable phenomena, then you are not believing because I have said "observable"; therefore testable. However, if you consider that any of the evolution theories is a universal truth, then you are believing, but you have transformed a tested scientific hypothesis into a believe. In other words, you have gone outside scientific method, therefore your belief cannot be science.

Sometimes, those people claiming that science is a belief system intend support its claim by showing that some people believe in some scientific hypotheses. This is a wrong decision. When some people believe in some scientific hypotheses, the consequence is that these people do not work as scientists; by no means the consequence can be that this belief is science.

Indeed, you only can introduce this question and this thread if you confuse science with those doctrines that some scientist believe. This is a way of perverting the word "science".

Science is not what some scientist believe, by contrast, science is what somebody can prove, it does not matter whether he is or not a scientist.

Sometimes, in some scientific groups, some doctrines are rejected. This attitude can seem consequence of some belief. It is possible, but if these doctrines are introduced with conclusive proofs, no true scientist can reject them. There is no risk when rejecting doctrines that are not supported by conclusive proofs. Nevertheless, see what the father of quantum mechanics said.

"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning."

Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Indeed, Planck's claim is due to the opposition against the principles of quantum mechanics introduced by him. However, his work was published and nowadays quantum mechanics is tested every day. This is an instance of when a theory is supported by solid proofs and can be tested, cannot be ever rejected.

Dear Juan-Esteban

‘’I cannot understand what is your interest in perverting the concept of science, reviving this question widely treated in other thread.’’

I don’t either and it is why I want to engage in this dialogue and maybe I will understand a bit more why this question is of great interest to me. Don’t you think that investigating the scientific process itself can shed some lights on how to possibly improve it or to avoid some scientific mistake? Applying critical thinking to this process should not undermine it but reveal some of its more obscure aspects and reveal some of its limits.

‘’Science is the negation of any belief. Science is built with hypotheses instead.’’

Hypothesis = working belief

‘’The necessity of believing is a lack in intellectual evolution.’’

Some beliefs are of these nature but not all of them;

‘’ I do not believe in anything.’’

So you think that you are a Belief Tabula Rasa. I rather think that by that statement you mean that you are ready to give up any of your current convictions that would be proven wrong. I am also ready.

‘Every doctrine is provisional to me and rejectable, whenever the experience so requires.’

I had guessed right.

‘’However, a lot of people can transform scientific hypotheses into beliefs. This is a lack of these people, not of science.’’

I agree. The greatest scientific discoverers are those that have managed to transform their personal subjective beliefs into scientific statements which have be tested and thus adopted by others. They were the great creators and the space were this creation began was a subjective and personal place.

‘’ ’Likewise, some people confuses probability estimation, with believe. You can either believe that a drug will cure your illness or estimate that the probability of curing your illness is great. The first attitude is a belief, the second one is a probability estimation based upon experience or experimentation. ‘’

The second attitude is more realistic belief I agree; the belief in statistic estimation of the risk using specific methods, I share to a certain extend this belief.

‘’Science is not a doctrine, but a method. For instance, if you consider that evolution theory can explain some observable phenomena, then you are not believing because I have said "observable"; therefore testable. However, if you consider that any of the evolution theories is a universal truth, then you are believing, but you have transformed a tested scientific hypothesis into a believe. In other words, you have gone outside scientific method, therefore your belief cannot be science.’’

All scientists that want to make significant advance in science have to speculate outside the established science, their new ideas cannot at first be expressed precisely enough to be tested and so be scientific. They have to spend years of efforts in order to clarify these vague beliefs and to transform them into scientific belief and the last stage will require empirical validation. It is the commitment in their beliefs that carry them through. They are not dogmatic fouls that adopt dogmas and stop searching being convinced of their truth. They have to trust their intuition in order to make this intuition works towards the clarification of the intuition and its translation in terms of scientific statements that can be tested.

Most large scale scientific theory such a the modern biological theory of evolution, Bing Bang cosmology theory, quantum physics have a huge reservoir of epicycles. These theory do not break based on a few experiments which seemed to contradict them. Not at all. These theoretical framework are easily adaptable to new empirical facts. Fifteen years ago, standard BB theory was predicting a slowing down expansion of the universe. Then we developed a new astronomical distance measurement technique based on class B supernova and by believing the accuracy of that technique, we estimated that the expansion was currently accelerating. No problem, Einstein constant is not zero anymore, most of the energy in the universe is the energy of empty space. Bring other surprising empirical fact not predict by the theory now and new epicycle can be added. Another example is the speed of rotation of Galaxies and the mutual attraction of galaxies clusters. Based on the belief of mass estimation technique General Relativity produce a gravitational forces that is much too week to explain these phenomena. No problem, these mass estimation techniques did not take into accound dark matter. Most of the matter inergy in the universe is now assumed to be in dark matter. What is dark matter? We do not know but based on the belief that GR is true we can calculated exactly its distribution around galaxies and based on this belief we can determine some of the quantum characteristic of these dark particles and we are presently building numerous multi million dollars instruments to detect these particle we belief exists. I am not criticising the scientists for holding on their belief and bringforth epicycles because it is a conservative attitude that for a while we have to take instead of throwing away all our theories because of a few glitches here and there. Recently for over a year, there seemed to be an empirical case of supraluminal speeds for neutrinos contradicting one of the fundamental belief of modern physic. It did not shake the confidence of most theoretical physicists on limit c; most of them assumed with confidence that there was a glitch with the experiment in Geneva and they were proven right later. In the case of the modern biological theory of evolution, the high complexity of the biological phenomena make the falsification of the theory almost impossible. So science building is not a straightforward question of making hypothesis and testing them.

Polanyi and all those that tries to investigate about the scientific process as process that involve a subjective component do not try to undermine the value of science. Polanyi before doing his work in philosophy of science was a first rank physical chemist working in the 1920`s in Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin with people such as Einstein and his best friend protégé: Wigner. He opposed the type of philosophy of science you have, that Popper and Husserl have developed, a full fledge objectivation program. He did not want to undermind science, only to assert that science like all other human endeavor involve a human component that cannot intrinsicly be removed and that belief in objectivisation is even amoral in its social consequences. Both Popper and Polanyi were motivated in their views by avoiding a new civilisation catastrophy that both of them had withness with Nazism and the second world war. Both of them (and many other philosophers) saw in this catastrophic events not the results of the killing by guns but the results of men being leaded by wrong ideas, the Nitchean type of subjectivity that had developed in Germany and both saw that a proper philosophy of science was necessary for avoiding these kind of wrong ideas to develop again. Popper’s remedy: purging science from subjectivity using its falsifiability critera. Polanyi thought that the wild Nietzschean subjectivity was the result of a moral inversion caused by the project of eliminating the subjective or the personal from the scientific project Popper conception of science is dominating the mind of most scientist with a touch of social influence that they got from Kuhn notion of paradigm which is in my not so modest opinion a diluted and weak version of Polanyi’s philosophy of science.

‘’Sometimes, those people claiming that science is a belief system intend support its claim by showing that some people believe in some scientific hypotheses. This is a wrong decision. When some people believe in some scientific hypotheses, the consequence is that these people do not work as scientists; by no means the consequence can be that this belief is science.’’

Our disagreement seems to be located that I use the word belief not in an absolute sense of believing without reserve without any empirical consideration. You use the word belief to mean uncritical belief. The difference in the meaning we attribute to this word is not the realm cause of the disagreement, the real cause is our disagreement about our philosophy of science. Your are close to Popper and I am close to Polanyi.

‘’Indeed, you only can introduce this question and this thread if you confuse science with those doctrines that some scientist believe. This is a way of perverting the word "science".

Science is not what some scientist believe, by contrast, science is what somebody can prove, it does not matter whether he is or not a scientist.’’

For you science is black and white. Something is scientific if it can be proven empirically and it is not it it cannot. I can agree with you to a certain point but as I said previously, I see science as a process of creation which does not begin in the scientific sphere but in the speculative artistic and philosophical sphere. Removing the creative and speculative part of science is equivalent of treating cancer with chemotherapy the elimination of all cell reproduction in the body. It works fine for a while but too much of it kill the body.

Sometimes, in some scientific groups, some doctrines are rejected. This attitude can seem consequence of some belief. It is possible, but if these doctrines are introduced with conclusive proofs, no true scientist can reject them. There is no risk when rejecting doctrines that are not supported by conclusive proofs. Nevertheless, see what the father of quantum mechanics said.’’

So there is a little place for creation in your framework. Maybe we can agree on more than that.

"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning."

Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

I agree with Planck on that.

Regards

Dear Louis,

Your claims are of semantic nature. If you term "working hypotheses" as beliefs, then science is based on beliefs. However, If a working hypothesis is a belief, need not be tested and is taken as a truth, instead of as a hypothesis. The need of testing hypotheses arises from doubt, and doubting occurs when you do not believe.

Nevertheless, some scientist can believe in some hypotheses, and some cops can thieve, but in this cases neither scientists are acting as scientists, nor cops are acting as cops.

In any case, everything depends on what you call science. For the great philosopher Kant, only maths can be science. Manipulating the meaning of the key-words, you can extend this thread "ad nauseam". I have no interest in this kind of game. I have always defined each key-word accurately to avoid manipulations. If you are interpreting any of my messages, you must interpret each key-word as I have defined previously; otherwise, you are misinterpreting me and arguing about what I have no said. If you assign a different meaning to the word "science", you have a poor concept of science.

Once again I repeat that science is a method, not a doctrine.

For instance, if I state that the number 4 is even, because I have heard this truth by a man wearing a large white beard, this truth is not a scientifc one, in spite of being a true doctrine. By contrast, if I state that 4 is even, because his remainder by 2 is 0, then the doctrine is the same, but the method makes it a scientific truth.

To Juan-Esteban and Louis, two members of my network and whose comments I read always with a great pleasure. I hope that my post will make both of you smile.

The root of science and belief.

I have a headache; eat this root.

That root is heathen; say this prayer.

That prayer is superstition; drink this potion.

That potion is snake oil; swallow this pill.

That pill is ineffective; take this antibiotic.

That antibiotic is artificial; eat this root.

(Slightly modified from "A brief history of Medicine" written by an anonymous author.)

Dear Lehtihet,

The following two anecdotes are real.

1)

Some Jehovah's Witnesses try to convert an old catholic. He answers: I do not believe in my religión, which is the only true, how can I believe in yours?

2)

In Belfast, when the confict between catholics and protestants was in algid stage, a well-known writter entered from the Ireland Republic. A cop asked him:

-- Are you catholic or protestant?

-- Not at all; I am atheistic.

--Well, well, but are you atheistic catholic or atheistic protestant?

Thank you dear Juan-Esteban. The first one is new to me -)

If you read my previous post between the lines, you will see that my purpose was actually to attempt to ease a little the tone in this thread. Indeed, although this thread has included very instructive comments from you, Louis, and other knowledgeable contributors, my feeling was that the latest exchanges between you and Louis had been a bit too harsh. I just did not want to see this interesting thread ending in this manner between two members I greatly appreciate; which explains why I wanted to make both of you smile -).

Dear Juan-Esteban,

I am not sure that you can accomplish what you think you do as regards science. In terms of epistemology all knowing begins with believing. You have to take many things on faith because they are simply unable to be proven. Some of those things are the existence of other minds, the existence of the external world, the trustworthiness of your faculties, the law of non-contradiction (whether you hold it in a simple or in a sophisticated manner), and the list goes on. When you set out to "do science" you are taking all these things by faith. You are assuming them to be right. In fact, the scientific method cannot tell you that science is as trustworthy and purely factual as you hold it to be, nor can it tell you that all religious faith is as contemptible as you hold it to be. From the way you write here I believe that I have warrant to conclude that science has become your religion. Many scientists (a number of whom are atheists) have recognized that Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, et. al. have tried to take in far too much territory with their claims. I do not think you can successfully defend these claims in terms of philosophy and logic.

Max Planck, whom you cite above, said this: "Both Religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations… To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view". Did Planck, inasmuch as he made this claim, demonstrate a "lack of intellectual evolution"?

Dear Johnson,

You have said,

"In terms of epistemology all knowing begins with believing. You have to take many things on faith because they are simply unable to be proven. "

I agree with you. Knowing begins with believing and ignoring everything. Since children have no capability of analyzing, then need believe in what their parents and teachers say. However, becoming adult consists of being able to discern and analyze. It is a matter of updating the version of brain. Of course, there are a lot of things that " we are simply unable to be proven." But there are also a small set of things that we can test. If you assume untestable things you are believing. If neither you accept nor reject any untestable thing, then you are not a believer.

In any case, the question depends on semantic. If you call science those things that some scientists believe, then science is a matter of beliefs. By contrast, if you call only science those doctrines that can be tested, then science is not a belief system. I have defined several times the key-words in this thread and I do not deserve to be misinterpreted.

Let me show some definitions of the key-words by some noticeable thinkers.

a) The great philosopher E. Kant, negates that philosophy can be science. For him only maths are science, and maths are not built from beliefs.

b) An important spanish writer, Eslava Galan, defines faith as follows: "Faith consists of believing what we know that is false.

Perhaps, you consider this definition to be a provocation, but it describes accurately some usual attitudes. Consider that modern science begins when Lavoiser proclaims his law: The law implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed.

Foundations of modern physics are also conservative laws. Mass-energy cannot created nor destroyed, can only be changed.

General relativity consists of Einstein's field equation, that is also a conservative law.

Do you think that conservative laws negating the possibility of creating or destroying mass-energy are well tested? If so, you can also assume the existence of a creator of this law, but you cannot assume a creator for mass-energy that must be eternal. Of course, there are a lot of people who believe that mass-energy needs to be created. This is an example that fits into the former definition of faith.

As you can see, by defining the used key-words in different ways anybody can extend this thread "ad-nauseam". If you are analyzing any of my posts, please, interpret each key-word as I have defined before. I am always aware of defining the key-words I use.

Kindly regards,

Juan-Esteban

Dear Juan-Esteban,

You say regarding Kant that he "negates that philosophy can be science. For him only maths are science, and maths are not built from beliefs."

I don't know which of his writings you are referring to, but Kant divided things which we can know using our own senses into two categories: Analytic statements are true by definition, whereas synthetic statements convey information in their predicate which is not already present in their subject. An example of an analytic statement would be: “All dogs are canines.” A synthetic statement would be: “This dog is friendly.” Analytic statements give no new information besides that which is already in their terms. They may break that information into constituent parts, but it is not new or additional information. Synthetic statements bring together two concepts which are not synonymous or interchangeable, usually employing the use of a predicate descriptor. (Kant, CPR, A736/B764)

Matters of mathematics are analytical, but most matters of science are synthetic. I am unaware of any place where Kant says that only analytical claims are scientific. That would seem contradictory of much that he has written.

Eslava Galan's statement is borrowed from Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who puts those words on the lips of "Pudd'nHead Wilson". It is simply a humorous way for Clemens to express his own skepticism. The original statement is: "There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the schoolboy who said, ;Faith is believing what you know ain't so.' " (from Following the Equator, 1897)

Whether you acknowledge it or not, like the child, you and I still use belief all the time. Much of life and of cognition depends upon certain axiomatic understandings which we simply cannot prove. You cannot prove the law of non-contradiction. You simply must assume it in order to believe that speech is coherent. You cannot prove the existence of other minds. You must assume it in order to have this discussion with me and others here. You cannot prove the existence of the external world. You take it as a "brute fact". You assume the reliability of your own brain, as do I, but we hold it to be an evolved organism. Why ought we to trust the reasoning and perceiving of such an organism? Can we prove the trustworthiness of the senses and the human thought processes? Even if you think you have matured to the point where you do not need to "believe" certain things, you have not. You cannot. It simply is not able to be done. A basic study of epistemology and belief-forming mechanisms will make this clear.

You speak of testing things in order to move past the realm of belief, but you neglect the fact that your confidence in your own brain and the reliability of the testing process assumes a tremendous number of things as axiomatic.

I was under the impression that modern chemistry, not science itself, began with Lavoisier. I would date the development of modern science to the British Royal Society and its founders (as regards anything organizational) and prior to that at the individual level. If mass-energy is eternal in the way you speak of it being, where was it before the singularity? I think the singularity closes all of our mouths as regards science. We must admit that everything burst into existence out of what appears to have been nothing, in a moment at which (according to all the physicists that I have read) the laws of physics were somehow "suspended" or not operating as they usually do.

P.C.W. Davies put it this way:

If we extrapolate [back into the past], we reach a point where all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe… For this reason most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself.

I wonder who has more faith, the person who thinks this happened by natural processes or the one who thinks there might have been a Maker?

Dear, Johnson,

On the one hand, I have mentioned Kant only as an instance of different concepts of science or different meaning for the word "science". By no means, I have defended his doctrines; therefore, any analysis of Kant's philosophy does not fit into an answer to my post.

On the other hand, all singularities I know are virtual. In any case, you are confusing me. For instance, you have said:

"I think the singularity closes all of our mouths as regards science."

I absolutely agree with you. However, if my mouth keeps closed, then I am not a believer. By contrast, believers open their mouths face singularities. When you have your mouth closed in what you cannot know, then you are not believing. You are believing when you open your mouth in those scopes in which you cannot know anything.

Since I was young, I use multivalued logic in the most natural way. I do not assign either the truth-value 1 or 0 to any statement, because I am not sure of anything.

I only assign a truth-value near 1 to those statements widely tested, and 0 to those statements leading to contradictions. To be fair, you cannot assume that I believe anything with a truth-value 1.

Multivalued logic has grown in my mind in a natural way as my beard and simultaneously.

Best regards.

Juan-Esteban

Dear Juan-Esteban,

Are you sure that your mouth remaining closed necessarily means you are not a believer? It sounds as if you hold that that which you cannot explain is a stopping place, a sort of an epistemological "Ne Plus Ultra". Silence is merely refusing to speculate, and as you know, many non-theistic scientists have not refused to speculate, but rather, they have gone "beyond" in their speculations. Are they then as child-like in their doing so as those who leave the possibility for faith of some sort open in their minds?

Do you simply refuse to speculate about where mass-energy came from, and take its existence as a brute, inexplicable reality? If so, how many of those brute, unexplained facts can one hold in one's mind before becoming somewhat frustrated with the limits of such a thought process?

What is the basis upon which you have confidence in multivalued logic? What is the basis for your reluctance about assigning truth values to statements. I would respectfully submit that if you think about it, you will find some strongly held beliefs at the bottom of your thought processes. I am sure that they are rational and reasonable beliefs, but I would then further suggest that you cannot demonstrate the reliability of those beliefs by the usage of the scientific method.

I am not trying to be combative by saying these things Juan-Esteban, they are simply realizations I made a number of years ago which brought me to the end of my confidence in my own ability to be purely rational and to "do life" without recourse to any sort of faith or belief.

Sincerely,

Bill

H.E. Lehtihet,

Thank you for your comments. I began this thread because of a disagrement with Juan-Esteban on the question of the compatibility of science and religion we had on the thread: Is 20th century science atheistic? (I do not recall the exact title). I then realized that our disagrement was not so much based on our religious belief or non-belief but on our conception of what a belief is. I think that we have managed the clarified a little bit our disagrement but there is still a lot of confusion. Although I am passionate about such question, I do not think that I have experience any anger , only frustrations about the confusion which prevent us to get at the real disagrement.

Bill,

This discussion requires much more energy than most other discussions I am participating. I was wondering how to reply to Juan-Esteban about its claim that our disagrement stem from semantic and the meaning attribute to the word ''belief''. Your contributions did part of the job. Thanks.

Juan-Esteban,

I think it would be usefull for the clarification of our disagrement that you read

Michael Polanyi, Scientific Beliefs, Ethics, 61 (1)Oct. 1950, 27-37.

http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Polanyi%20Scientific%20Beliefs%20Ethics%201950.htm

My objective in this discussion is to reach a point where we disagree but that we are both clear on what we disagree.

Regards

Dear Louis,

Sincerely, I appreciate your words. If I seem angered, it is only a delusion. I know that, sometimes, it seems that I am writing with a hammer instead of a keyboard. This is only a consequence of misinterpreting my words. I am always aware of defining the key-words I use. Accordingly, when in some answer to any of my messages, the key-words are misinterpreted assigning a different meaning to any of them, I tend to interpret that somebody is manipulating my claims. This fact is hard to digest to me.

Mainly, when I repeat again and again that our disagreement is purely semantic.

Notice, that when I have stated that science is not what any scientist believes, but what somebody can prove, then I am ruling out from science every belief, including any belief about the origin of Universe.

I do not know which the origen of Universe could be. Some primitive people believed that the Earth was lying in the back of a turtle. I suppose, that they were happy because they had an explanation for a cosmological question. If I would accept any untestable explanation, I will feel myself as ridiculous as those primitive people. It is a matter or personal preferences. I am happier being ignorant than ridiculous. Nevertheless, I respect every belief, provided that they are not camouflaged as knowledge. If you prefer a cocktail of beliefs and knowledge, it is a matter of flavors. I prefer pure spanish wine.

Kind regards,

Juan-Esteban

P.S.

Once again, I must repeat that I appreciate your words. At least, you have interpreted my thought properly.

Dear Bill,

I Agree with you in basic terms. However it seems to me that your going too far in simplicity: If Kant say's that maths are "All dogs are canines", then Kant is lacking profundity. It is clear that a vast part of maths are constituted by "All dogs are canines" like statement, however math is like English or Spanish a set of rules.

This rules are tools based on which mathematical thinking is build upon.

Math is broader, yet always have the keypoint of being precautions of certainly knowing that all dogs are... friendly?.

Dear Louis and Juan-Esteban,

I totally agree with Juan-Esteban that science is a method, not a doctrine.

Louis, in the thread "Is mathematics a human contrivance or is it innate to nature?" you wrote: "I partially agree with the Popperian philosophy of science of your last paragraph but I also disagree with it because I opposed Popper on many counts a lot along the lines drawn by Polanyi".

I read some Polanyi's papers but found these far too much metaphysical.

Anyway, what do you reply to the following assertion: the scientific methodology is not to demonstrate that a given hypothesis is true per se but just that it has not been falsified by as many experiments and/or observations as possible? (e.g., quantum mechanics theory)

Marc,

Science is a method, not a doctrine:

The scientific community decide what is interesting, and what is methodologically acceptable at the moment. The scientific knowledge is set of doctrines that has evolved in different phenomenal domains (each special science) according to agreed upon standards of the scientific community.

Falsifability as a criterion for what is scientific or not:

Popper's falsifiability criteron has some merit; it is a sufficient critera but not a necessary critera. For example string theory cannot be tested presently, and most of the multiverse theory cannot be tested presently. A Popperian would say that they are not scientific theories until we can find a way to test them. I disagree. Popper took a long time to accept as scientific the modern synthesis biological evolutionary theory because he was right, it is very hard to falsify this theory. Most complex theories have important reserve of epicycles. New facts that do not agree with them can be incorporated with minor modification of the parameters of the theory. String theory can accomodate almost anything. When a theory become a rubber band then it is difficult to falsify it and falsibiability loose meaning.

Polanyi:

Like most scientists you probably agree with most of Popper philosophy of science and with most of Kuhn philosophy of science. This is strange that most scientists do not realized that Kuhn's philosophy is a copy of a subset of Polanyi's philosophy of science which was constructed as an opposition to Popper's philosophy of science.

Popper beleive in objective science. Polanyi believe that science is not totally objective ; it standard are social standard of the scientific community (the paradigm of Kuhn). Poincarre had a very similar position about physics. In the preface of his book (Science and Hypothese) he explain that physical theories are conventions (they have some formal arbitrary elements, the choice of the geometrical framework) but are not arbitrary conventions; they have to be productive, general, and conform to facts. It is a Kantian position, some apriori concepts are necessary. Polanyi before becoming a philosopher of science was a first rank physical chemist; he was not interested in meta-physics. You might appreciate his paper: Life's irreductible structure. But I think that the main reason why Polanyi opposed to Popper is the place he thought subjectivity play in the scientific creation process. He developed fully this idea in Personal Knowledge. Polanyi show how most of the objective theoretical scientific knowledge is discovered by the scientist by self-expression of implicit intuitive knowledge the scientist has developed though its theoretical and empirical observations. The classical example of an implicit knowledge is learning to use a bike. If I ask you how do you ride your bike, you will not be able to say much about the actual procedure you are using because your learning is not explicit (objective) but implicit (subjective). In order to be scientifically creative we thus first to commit ourself along unproven theoretical avenues that our intuition (implicit knowledge) is guiding us and then gradually flush out in term of objective/explicit knowlege what this intuition is.

''the scientific methodology is not to demonstrate that a given hypothesis is true per se but just that it has not been falsified ''

I agree with this statement.

Louis,

I find your answer a little bit long so It is not easy to comment it. Nevertheless I will try to do so and to be as short as possible.

Actually I read Polanyi’s paper “Life's irreductible structure”. I also read the comments by Jeffrey Goldstein on it in 2012 in his paper “Polanyi’s Anti-reductionist Philosophy of Biology Introduction”.

In particular I was quite interested in Rosen’s confession cited by Goldstein (E:CO Issue 2012;14(4):139-153) which can apply to Humberto Maturana's and Michael Polanyi's approach too:

“We have neglected developmental problems; and most particularly, we have neglected evolutionary problems, which are concerned with the way in which the class of organisms changes over long periods. Since a “structural” analysis pertains only to the class of biological systems at single instants of time (i.e. is a static description of the biological world, considered in evolutionary terms), there is an essential dynamical element missing from our discussion; in the terms used above, we have specified the instantaneous states of the biological world, but not the forces acting on them to produce changes of state, nor the equations of motion to which these forces give rise”.

You say “Popper's falsifiability criterion has some merit; it is a sufficient criterion but not a necessary criterion. For example string theory cannot be tested presently, and most of the multiverse theory cannot be tested presently.”

I agree with you that string theory and the multiverse hypothesis cannot be tested presently and thus are not scientific hypotheses until we can find a way to test them. I am surprised when you assert that the evolutionary theory was not testable at its beginning: on which references do you base your assertion?

You admit that “string theory can accommodate almost anything”. To me this is an additional proof that it is not a scientific theory, at least in its present state.

I don’t understand your sentence “Most complex theories have important reserve of epicycles”: could you clarify this point?

You say “Pointcarre explained that physical theories are conventions (they have some formal arbitrary elements, the choice of the geometrical framework) but are not arbitrary conventions; they have to be productive, general, and conform to facts. It is a Kantian position, some a priori concepts are necessary”.

Do you think quantum mechanics is a convention with a priori concepts? If yes, could you explicit the a priori concepts necessary to support the theory?

I am happy to see you agree that the scientific methodology is not to demonstrate that a given hypothesis is true per se but just that it has not been falsified until now. This means you agree that a scientific methodology exists and can be accurately defined.

Marc,

'I agree with you that string theory and the multiverse hypothesis cannot be tested presently and thus are not scientific hypotheses until we can find a way to test them.'

I agree we cannot test these theoretical construction presently. I think that if one day we can find ways to test some consequences of these theories, their scientific status will be tremendiously enhanced. But I accept them presently as scientific hypothesis because they are potentially falsifiable. They are many theories which are so vague that they are not potentially falsifiable. Those I agree are not scientific because of the vagueness ; they are not potentially falsifiable because we cannot even agree on what is precisely being said which is the bottom line requirement of the potential falsifiability. The rubber band effect or the epicycle store (see Polanyi paper stability of beliefs, it refer to the Ptolemy's model that was fine tuned using epicycles) are a problem for the falsifiability critera. Personally I have no problem with a theory that has a lot of free parameter that you can change. String theory has so many parameters that there are as many different valid string theory than atoms in the universe. A scientific theory is an condensed description of a lot of data. The more simple it is and the more data it compressed the more convincing it become. If it can predict unexpected results and these can be tested, it convincing power is increased. Remember that a theory that do not explain everything within its empirical domain is not strictly speaking falsified. It is in crisis. The crisis can be resolved by epicycles addition or slight modification, experimental error removal, or by simply ignoring these contracdicting data. This is the reality of scientific research as described by Polanyi and Kuhn. Paradigm shift need a lot of convincing and it does not occur unless a competing theory is available.

Quantum theory like any theory is based on basic assumptions (axioms) which define quantum theory. Yes we came to them by a interplay between modeling and experimentation. But a lot of different modeling options, some of them partially equivalent were set aside in the early years of the 20th century. The choice of the language has important consequences and it is still going on which is a clear indication that a lot of mathematical freedom exist for expressing the same empirical fact. The battle of interpretation and most appropriate formalist has never been settled and will never be before a new type of quantum gravity theory will subsume it and then will begin a new battle in quantum gravity among many different formalisms and interpretation. Science is not perfectly unambigius and so keep a philosophical aspect that can never be settled.

Louis,

You say "Quantum theory (QM) like any theory is based on basic assumptions (axioms) which define quantum theory".

Can you specify these basic assumption or axioms?

In the history of QM I don't see any a priori, quite the contrary most of its results are counter-intuitive. QM as Einstein's gravity are fully counter-intuitive theories.

By contrast false or ideological theories (e.g., Lyssenko' theory) please politicians or the social class in power. Nearly always new scientific ideas or theories challenge and question received ideas. This is of course also the famous case you and me support, the evolutionary theory initiated by Darwin.

It is true that a scientific theory has never explained everything until now. It applies only to a relatively specific domain and I suspect that it will be so for ever.

Again, either for QM or Einstein's gravity theory or evolutionary theory etc. which free parameters can be changed to fit the theory better with the outcomes of the experiments?

Perhaps we have aspects of 'the law of reversed effort' happening in science... This is a term Alan W. Watts uses in his book 'The wisdom of Insecurity" 1951. In this model the more you try to fix something the worse it becomes - enforced religion, the war on cancer, drugs and terrorism comes to my mind. Alan refers to when you try to sink you end up floating and when you try to float you sink. The Chinese sage Lao-tzu declared that those who try to justify themselves do not convince. Most importantly though to know truth first one must rid themselves of knowledge and that there is nothing more powerful and creative than emptiness.

I often get my best insights from turning every thought upside down, so often it makes more sense rather than less. This then makes it easier to be intuitive and come from nothing. As humans we shrink from emptiness, uncertainty and insecurity and in doing so create beliefs and dogma that were often laughable in the past yet many can not see are verging on the ridiculous now..... Speed for children, mercury in fillings, dead teeth retained in jaws, endocrine disruptors on our foods and in our building supplies, toxins in our water supply, junk non-food, EMF radiation everywhere and on it goes...

Heather,

I like Alan Watts but I did not know about the law of reversed effort. I did not read any of his book but I have watched many of his videos on Utube. The emphasis on emptiness in Eastern philosophical traditions parallel the importance of the practice of meditations and yoga and other spiritual exercices in these traditions. Anyone having done these exercices can intuitively understand the emphasis on emptiness and also feel why language and rational thoughts have limits. The scientific creative process is not contrainted to be within language although the scientific discourse is one of the most constrainted form of language. The only antidote to dogmatism, is not to be a sceptic, not to be an adorator of existing knowledge, but someone focusing on creating new one. Creation is the antidote to dogmatism. Any slowing down in the creativity is a falling down into dogmatism, the adoration of false gods.

PERSONAL PARTICIPATION Michael Polanyi, Eric Voegelin,

and the Indispensability of Faith

Mark T. Mitchell

Modern philosophy is characterized by, among other things, a rejection

of tradition. The early moderns initiated their inquiries by explicitly

and categorically rejecting the authority of the Aristotelian and religious

traditions. Those traditions were seen as oppressive and a hindrance to

the pursuit of truth. Any reliance on belief or tradition as a starting

point for investigation was rejected. This ideal has continued to our day.

Polanyi writes:

To assert any belief uncritically has come to be regarded as an offence

against reason. We feel in it the danger of obscurantism and the menace of

an arbitrary restriction of free thought. Against these evils of dogmatism

we protect ourselves by upholding the principle of doubt which rejects any

open affirmation of faith [1952, 217].2

The twin streams of early modern philosophy, rationalism, and empiricism,

both rejected any dependence on tradition and authority.As Polanyi

puts it, “Cartesian doubt and Locke’s empiricism . . . had the purpose of

demonstrating that truth could be established and a rich and satisfying

doctrine of man and the universe built up on the foundations of critical

reason alone” (1964, 75).3

Polanyi argued that the modern-day descendants

of Descartes and Locke were still pursuing their ideals in the

twentieth-century, and that they manifested themselves in the form of

both logical positivism and skepticism. These modern empiricists and

skeptics “are all convinced that our main troubles still come from our

having not altogether rid ourselves of all traditional beliefs and continue

to set their hopes on further applications of the method of radical scepticism

and empiricism” (Polanyi 1964, 75).

The attempt to reject all dependence on tradition and authority (which

implies belief) gave rise to the ideal of explicit, objective knowledge. Tradition and authority are mediating elements that inevitably influence

the mind subjected to them. A mind subjected to such influences cannot

obtain the necessary distance to attain a purely objective and explicit

grasp of the facts. Thus, the war on tradition is the attempt to rid the

mind of epistemological mediaries that cloud and influence the mind

and prevent the knower from accessing unmediated truth. According to

Polanyi, “objectivism has totally falsified our conception of truth, by exalting

what we can know and prove, while covering up with ambiguous

utterances all we can know and cannot prove, even though the latter

knowledge underlies, and must ultimately set its seal to, all that we can

prove” (1958a, 286).

We must ask, then, whether or not such things as

tradition and authority are epistemologically necessary. If so, then the

ideal embraced by modern philosophy is self-contradictory, and it would

follow that those who embrace this ideal inevitably produce incoherence

within their systems of thought. Polanyi recognizes the epistemic role

played by faith; thus, for him the rejection of faith must be overcome if

modern man is to recover the proper epistemological balance. In Polanyi’s

phrase, a “post-critical philosophy” must be developed.

Sorry Louis, but it is difficult for me to follow you on this path: "Polanyi recognizes the epistemic role played by faith" and so? Personally I don't.

I don't understand how you demonstrate that Polanyl is right?

Can you develop your point?

Marc,

I will try to clarify the best I can now although I am not satisfy with my current understanding:

Enlightenment movement began and continued as a CRITICAL TRADITION where any realiance on belief/tradition as starting point of investigation is rejected. It is a hard drug against dogmatism but it has side effects.

A second ideal of the enlightenment movement is the ideal of EXPLICIT UNAMBIGUOUS OBJECTIVE knowledge.

This ideal is concomitant with a third ideal of the EMPIRICAL VALIDATION of knowledge where Nature and not humans become the ultimate arbitrator and validator of knowledge.

The unambiguity of knowledge is a necessary condition for permitting the empirical validation. This ideal of empirical validation is where a philosophical knowledge is distinguished from a philosophical knowledge.

The ideal empirical validation ideal leads to the fourth ideals of QUANTITATIVE OBSERVATION which is unambiguous and allow by the development of accurate measuring apparatus to precision in observation and thus to accuracy and increase in unambiguity of the models.

A knowledge is said to be objective is it is explicit and if it is about reality independent from the observer. The objectivity ideal is a claim that OBSERVATION AND MODELING can be decoupled and separated. This claim will abandoned by most quantum physicists in the early years of the 20th century.

Among the side effects of these enlightenment scientific ideals is a the casting of suspicion and unproductive doubts on traditional knowledges that is not expressed along these ideal forms. It even tends to undermine the process of discovery which cannot always begin is perfectly scientific territory. Doubt and uncommitted critical attitude hamper the act of faith necessary for discovery. The process of scientific discovery needs an act of faith in the reality of an unseen reality which the critical attitude undermined. It tend to devaluate all knowledge which has not reach the ideal expression form and so hamper the creation of new science. It tend to scientism a belief that all cultural knowledge that cannot be scientifically established and expressed cannot be trusted and this set the stage of a war on human cultural traditions.

Polanyi proposed a theory of explicit knowledge discovery based on a cycle of empirical discovery where empirical knowledge of a phenomenal domain explored by the scientist is gradually internalized in tacit knowledge which intuitively guided the investigation towards certain explicit hypothesis that can be tested which lead to further tacit knowledge which futher guide the process of discovery towards other forms of explicit knowledge/hypothesis. What is guiding this process is belief in tradition, reliance on intuition guided by tacit empirical knowledge and this process is ampered by an overemphasis of the critical attitude too early in the process of discovery. Notions of aesthetic judgement of the discoverer and aesthetic judgement of the scientific community are central .

Louis,

Thank you for this long response.

Well, I am not of course against intuition in the discovery process, in particular to generate hypotheses. On the contrary I fully agree that it would be stupid for a scientist to censor his intuition when looking for new hypotheses. However once a scientist has found a given hypothesis he must follow a rigorous approach to test it.

Regarding tradition do you have some examples for which it has been a good guide for generating fruitful hypotheses?

I don’t know what is ‘objective knowledge’. Personally I consider that a scientific approach is only able to demonstrate what is wrong. Thus, as long as a given hypothesis has not been falsified it can be considered as true. However IMO a given hypothesis is scientific only if it is falsifiable. But you already know very well my opinion about it.

I don’t understand your sentence: “This ideal of empirical validation is where a philosophical knowledge is distinguished from a philosophical knowledge”. There should be a mistake somewhere, shouldn’t there be?

Marc,

The interesting question is not what to do to test an hypothesis but how to discover an interesting hypothesis. To become a scientist , one need a scientific education and training. Once educated and trained one has been initiated into the scientific tradition and at that point one hope to make a discovery in order to contribute to this tradition.

“This ideal of empirical validation is where a philosophical knowledge is distinguished from a philosophical knowledge”. Scientific knowledge is a philosophical knowledge that is expressed in such inambiguous manner that it can be falsify. This is the main critera for being able to put the adjective ''scientific'' to a philsophical knowledge.

Heisenberg:

''The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.''

Marc,

Wikipedia: Attributed to Immanuel Kant, the critical philosophy movement sees the primary task of philosophy as criticism rather than justification of knowledge; criticism, for Kant, meant judging as to the possibilities of knowledge before advancing to knowledge itself (from the Greek kritike (techne), or "art of judgment"). The initial, and perhaps even sole task of philosophers, according to this view, is not to establish and demonstrate theories about reality, but rather to subject all theories—including those about philosophy itself—to critical review, and measure their validity by how well they withstand criticism.

Polanyi was anti-positivist and post-critical. Polanyi points out that thinkers of the critical period have pursued 'a mistaken ideal of objectivity'.

'Thus, when we claim greater objectivity for Copernican theory, we do imply that its excellence is, not a matter of personal taste on our part, but an inherent quality deserving universal acceptance by rational creatures. We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses, but only favor of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason (PK p. 4-5)''

''This logically three storied structure of my appreciation

of a living being naturally includes my appreciation of myself as a living and knowing being, and thus the perspective is thrown open of an evolutionary process, leading up from the amoeba to the highest animals and

including the animal holding this discourse. My skills and connoisseurship, my knowledge of speech and my understanding of science, like all of the rest of my intellectual proficiencies, are then seen as forming part of my life, and the enquiry into the nature of knowledge which I have so far pursued here appears as an extension of biology, while biology itself appears in its turn as a process of life reflecting on itself.'' http://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/polanyi/Persons.pdf

Louis,

I cannot agree with you when you assert that "the interesting question is not what to do to test an hypothesis but how to discover an interesting hypothesis".

How can you say that a given hypothesis is interesting if it is not testable by observations and/or experiments? I think you seriously underestimate the essential role of the experimenters.

According to your answer "Scientific knowledge is a philosophical knowledge that is expressed in such inambiguous manner that it can be falsified. This is the main critera for being able to put the adjective 'scientific' to a philsophical knowledge" I supposed that your sentence should have be written: "This ideal of empirical validation is where a scientific knowledge is distinguished from a philosophical knowledge” (?).

Moreover a philosophical hypothesis which has been tested is no more philosophical as it has become scientific!

Maybe Louis is talking about where do ideas initiate. There is a recent film about this named "the origin". From philosophical point of view it is quite interesting...

This question goes deep into antropological issues: when, how, does people came out with new thoeries, that are quite right!. Im thinking here in famous Newton's apple, because we can come out, by method like idea's rain, to solution to practical simple problems, but when it is about a break trough in science there is no recepy for comming up with new hypotesis.

Well, hard work, participation within a community, etc can be a draw to an answer of ¿How does scientific hypotesis are proposed?.

Going a step forward I would add that this is one of the reasons that science is a belief system: sience is obviously subjected to cultural aspects of people that makes science. I think this is clear only from historical perspective.

Michael Polanyi, Science and Reality

''The great conflict between the Copernicans and their opponents, culminating in the prosecution of Galileo by the Roman hierarchy, is well remembered. It should be clear also that the conflict was entirely about the question, whether the heliocentric system was real. Copernicus and his followers claimed that their system was a real image of the sun with the planets circling around it; their opponents affirmed that it was no more than a novel computing device.

For thirty years Copernicus hesitated to publish his theory, largely because he did not dare to oppose the teachings of Aristotle by claiming that the heliocentric system he had set up was real. Two years before the publication of his book in 1543, the protestant cleric Osiander responded to preliminary publications of the Copernican system by a letter pressing Copernicus to acknowledge that science can only produce hypotheses representing the phenomena without claiming to be true. Later, Osiander succeeded in introducing an Address to the Reader into the published book of Copernicus denying once more the reality of the Copernican system. The issue was still the same, more than half a century later, in Kepler’s defence ofTycho Brahe against his critic Ursus, and the same again when Galileo confronted Cardinal Bellarmine and afterwards Pope Urban VIII.''

It is funny to see how the catholic church was Popperian!!

A Polanyian Approach To Conceiving And Teaching Introduction To

Philosophy, Dale Cannon

''As William James put it in his classic essay, “The Will to Believe,” http://educ.jmu.edu//~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html

the reason behind the admonition to doubt is to avoid error — a worthy goal to be sure. But the objective of avoiding error, James commonsensically points out, by itself will not suffice to bring you to any truth that you haven’t yet attained. By itself, doubt never ventures to seek out things not yet known in hope of discovery. James points out that the admonition to avoid error needs to be conjoined with the admonition to seek truth, to venture beyond the security of present certainties in the confidence (fallible to be sure) that things now uncertainly intimated will become known. Like Polanyi, James advocates the practical necessity of what Polanyi calls acritical, methodological belief in given circumstances (circumstances that James calls genuine options), where evidence on the surface doesn’t resolve what should be believed. Both principles — “avoid error” and “seek

the truth” — need to operate in tandem, in an ongoing dialectical relationship, never one wholly without the other. One without the other is insufficient and liable to result in problems: either overbelief (credulity) orunderbelief (skepticism), both of which disable serious intellectual inquiry.''

Louis,

You say: "It is funny to see how the catholic church was Popperian!!"

I find your argumentation specious.

Any methodology (e.g., popperian) can be turned away from its due end when there is bad faith. The debate between Copernicus and the catholic church about heliocentricity was fully biased because of the primacy of the ideology from the side of catholic church.

Hence, I am afraid your example proves nothing relevant, just that bad faith is impossible to be argued.

Personally I think that science can of course produce a hypothesis representing a given phenomenon and must test it by observations and/or experiments.

If the hypothesis is not rejected by these observations and/or experiments it should not be considered as definitively true but at least not wrong within the performed observations and/or experiments.

I don't know any better methodology to look for the truth.

Marc,

''If the hypothesis is not rejected by these observations and/or experiments it should not be considered as definitively true but at least not wrong within the performed observations and/or experiments. ''

I do not disagree with this.

''I don't know any better methodology to look for the truth.''

My last post made it clearer than the previous ones that the critical attitude is not wrong in itself but it has to be complemented by acritical methodological belief. Dale Cannon has an interesting method to convey this in his introduction course to philosophy. You have to dwelt on this concept enough time for the spychological switch to occur in your head. It is very simple truth but that one that is simple after the switch has occured. It is not a matter of arguments. Read a bit more about it and if the switch does not occur to you then forget it!

Louis,

I am willing to read everything you advise me to read.

However, what puzzles me is when you say:

"You have to dwelt on this concept enough time for the psychological switch to occur in your head. It is a very simple truth but that one that is simple after the switch has occured. It is not a matter of arguments".

It looks like The Revelation and a religious conversion ... (!)

"A very simple truth": Louis, are you really convinced that there are DEFINITIVE truths?

Marc,

I do not beleive in definitive truths. I simply recommend to read at least one or two papers that I cited. Reading only the posts in this thread is not sufficient to understand the concept. It is my belief that we live into an era that is sick with sceptism and this methodological belief is beneficial in my opinion and experience.

Ok.

Among Dale Cannon's papers I see "SIX WAYS OF BEING RELIGIOUS: FRAMEWORK FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF RELIGION".

Well, it is sure it's not my cup of tea.

However I will have a look to "A Polanyian Approach To Conceiving And Teaching Introduction To Philosophy" and tell you my feeling.

Louis,

I have just finished to read Cannon’s paper "A Polanyian Approach To Conceiving And Teaching Introduction To Philosophy" and here are my comments on some quotations from Cannon’s text:

“My comments assume that Polanyi’s diagnosis and critique of the methodology of doubt that has characterized modern intellectual culture is substantially sound”.

This preliminary assertion doesn’t augur well but let’s see further.

“As William James put it in his classic essay, “The Will to Believe,” the reason behind the admonition to doubt is to avoid error”.

It is not the sole reason. There is also the will of not being impressed by somebody who emphatically asserts something.

“By itself, doubt never ventures to seek out things not yet known in hope of discovery”.

I fully agree with that. This is the case when a given scientist looks for putting a new and original hypothesis out (e.g., "life is a metaphysical concept" ... !).

“Both principles — “avoid error” and “seek the truth” — need to operate in tandem, in an ongoing dialectical relationship, never one wholly without the other”.

Again, I fully agree with that: to test a given new hypothesis first you need to find it (see above).

"The real genius of the story of the cave, as I see it, lies in its illumination of the predicament of persons who simply take the mental representations that peers, experts, or other persons in authority give them to be reality”.

I agree with that.

“To attempt to do philosophy utilizing the strategy of avoiding error (methodological doubt) without also seeking truth (methodological belief) is to escape the predicament of the prisoners in the cave … It is to remain in the cave, to be stuck in the cave — and typically with the skeptical suspicion that there is no escape from the cave at all, no genuine knowledge of reality to be added. The skeptical suspicion that there is no external world, that it is radically other than we can know with our own powers of cognition, or that it cannot be known at all is a direct expression of this predicament”.

I do not much like the idea of an “external world”: what does it mean exactly? I hope it is not with reference to a metaphysical world (!).

“Another presupposition (implied in the foregoing) is the inherent capacity of each person to come to know the world in its transcendence beyond existing representations for herself, to come to know it by acquaintance, by personal relationship”.

Again, I do not much like the notion of any transcendence. To me it is too close to metaphysical transcendence.

“It (i.e., Socrate’s notion of “learned ignorance”) is a recognition that true knowledge, knowledge at this fourth level, is a developed consciousness of the present partiality, fallibility, uncertainty, and incompleteness of one’s explicit grasp of the reality in question vis-à-vis one’s recognition”.

If this means that we should be aware that our knowledge can only be partial, fallible, uncertain, and incomplete then I fully agree with that. As you know I have always said that observations and/or experiments can only show that a given hypothesis is not wrong within these observations and/or experiments, not that it is definitively true. Besides you have already said that you didn't disagree with that.

“methodological faith".

I find this expression too ambiguous. However the author tries to specify its meaning in the next citation.

“I do not directly challenge their faith. To the contrary, invite them methodologically to rely upon their present convictions in a philosophical way, as distinct from a philodoxical way. Post-critical reason (post-critical critical investigation and scrutiny) in this sense requires faith”.

I understand what the author wants to mean. However I am afraid there is much more to loose than to win by blindly following one’s faith than by being critical about it but I agree this is debatable.

No, science, and amusingly religion as well, are simply ASSUMPTION systems. And out of mostly emotional laziness, we do not like to question, let alone change our deeper, thus often less than fully conscious, assumptions.

In nearly all present science, for instance, binary logic is such an assumption. And as far as mathematics is concerned, physicists, engineers and other such users of mathematics do most firmly hold, for instance, to the Archimedean Axiom, and they do not even know that they hold to it. Of course, we do hold to many such assumptions. After all, this is called one's own "culture" ...

As for religion, the variety of assumptions different people hold to, and often do so without being aware of that fact, is simply mind boggling. After all, such assumptions being typically related to more global aspects of Creation, well, they can never be really tested in one's everyday life, thus they are quite safe from being falsified ...

In us humans, feelings, or emotions, arise rather instantly and effortlessly, while thoughts most often take some time and at least the sustained effort of focusing. Consequently, many of our most important assumptions - more precisely, those which we feel to be so - live in us rather in our emotions or feelings, than in our freely enquiring thinking.

So then, just imagine the consequences ....

Among them the immensity of occasions when we make critically important decisions, including in science, decisions which have very little to do with genuine thinking, and far more with emotions and feelings, many of them quite instant and automatics, and so much so, as mostly to escape our conscious awareness ...

Yes, this is to be a ... highly knowledgeable and intelligent jerk ... :-) :-) :-)

But then, who has ever said that ... life is a picnic ... ?!!???

Louis, I do think Science is a belief system; but, I also think, at least in the beginning, the litmus tests for any scientific theory was the use-value inhered. So, man, being a tool-maker, could only 'believe' in any scientific theory, if there was a definite pragmatic quality, a use-value, i.e. the proof is in the pudding. Now, for metaphysics, well, let's just say, "It is entertaining."

Luisina,

Can you elaborate the last sentence.

Elemer,

Our assumptions live in us in the sense that become part of the process call us. Our emotions reflects the satisfaction/dissatisfaction that are related to our situation with regards to what we profoundly wants, our goals, what we are about. Most decisions take place profoundly in our being and thinking may help the initiate the process and to explain some superficial aspect of it afterward. We are only willing to question our assumptions if we are very unhappy with the current state of affairs and we are passionate about changing it, when changing it become emotionnally vital.

Metaphysics provides entertaining thoughts or arguments, such as "What is the meaning of life?" Even if there is an answer to such a question, it is quite moot, for life is just whatever it may be and regardless of whether or not we be 'aware' of its meaning, life moves forward, with or without us, it is not contingent upon our knowledge of its meaning or any other metaphysical question. Our being is not contingent upon our knowledge of it; although, consciousness enables us to participate in this reality in a very unique way, otherwise, it would be more like algae, etc...

Our “knowledge” is poor, indeed, for we cannot explain anything, e.g. what is electricity? We can describe relations of electricity, control it, manipulate it, but to what it is exactly escapes us all. What is magnetism? What is a photon? They are simply what they may appear to us and that's all. Thus, to ask “Ding an Sich” is pointless, for we cannot answer such a question nor access that ground of being, neither are we able to reach underneath that ground of being and investigate there. Finally, I would say, “Metaphysics is pure entertainment.” To say such is not a slight of it, rather, it is its own essence...

Luisiana,

We do not access the ground of being intellectually although we cannot intellectually stopped trying to gradually create a more unified image of the cosmos. Each of us are a center of participation in this cosmos. I think that It does matter a great deal what we think consciously and subconsciously what the cosmos IS and what we are. In fact. It is not an intellectual game but a survival battle. I see most of human problems on this planet at this current crisis time as link to this lack of a global cosmology which can only be a unified cosmic evolution framework. We are getting there very rapidly. It is not simply a scientific process; it is a political and social process, an artistic process, a religious process, a technological process. We are not consciously directing these processes but they converge towards the unification of our minds together on this planet.

A. N. Whitehead's "Philosophy of Organism", eh? I like Whitehead quite a bit...

I hear ya, but I disagree on one thing: there is no real consequence for Man's consciousness. We like to think so, and we point to our little tools, like the iphone or whatever, as an example of Ecce Homo. The Cosmos could care less about us and frankly, just because we may be looking and being conscious of it all, does not mean the Cosmos shares in our vanity.

Let us not mix up the EMERGENCE of science or religion, with what they ENDED up being in their more mature present day state.

And as far as I happen to see it, in their PRESENT state, be it mature enough or not, BOTH science and religion are NOTHING ELSE but mere logical systems based on ASSUMPTIONS. Now of course, here I mean by religion rather what one sees in the respective theologies, or any kind of more rational discourse about them, such as for instance priests use when trying to propagate it, than the endless and highly emotional or habitual aspects which, especially the masses of simple and uneducated people keep holding to and practicing.

And then, I am afraid, the only more important difference between science and religion can be in the NATURE of their assumptions.

Now, in science, as also pointed out by Luisiana, the practical, utilitarian aspect has a paramount importance, and in fact, just about an exclusive one, at the origin of its emergence. On the other hand, already in ancient Greece, as so much distinct from Rome, for instance, knowledge, and in particular science, has also been pursued for its own sake. And this "its own sake" is an absolutely incredible, and here on Planet Earth, exclusively human venture. A venture which is so high, so elevated, so refined, so spiritual, one may say, that even in our own, allegedly so immensely advanced days, our civilization still does not really think that it can afford it ...

But when it comes to the DIFFERENCE between science and religion, the point, I am afraid, is as follows :

The assumptions in science - except of course for mathematics - are supposed to be VERIFIABLE, and thus also FALSIFIABLE empirically. And the reason for that is simply in the fact that science does not much deal with cosmological size issues, but with so to say more "local" ones, local both in space and time ...

On the other hand, by definition, or rather, by its most typical essential nature, religion is supposed to deal with ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING AND ACROSS ALL ETERNITY ...

And then, may I kindly ask anybody who may be ... ready, willing and able ... to reply :

How on Earth could anyone ever VERIFY all the assumptions of any of the existing, let alone, possible religions ?

So that, as far as I happen to see it, HERE, and just about ONLY here, is THE difference between religion and science ....

Elemer,

Science, philosophy and all religion as practices are are not logical systems. They are different types of participatory mythologies. We are a theatrical animal that participate in mythological universes we call realities and which entertain themself in fictive mythologies in free time. Since the end of paganistic days in the west, the do take our philosophical and our theological mythologies very seriously. In the last hundred year the fashion in the west is to participate into a mythology call scientism that is even more serious about being true because it pretent that it is possible to eliminate anything that cannot be tested from its realm, According to this mythology, we do not need to beleive anything. This is the central beleif of that mythology.

Another mythology: Progressivism. As if everything is destined to be better than it was yesterday! In some sense all human belief systems suffer from this central hope of Man, that tomorrow will be better and bring a resolution to nagging problems... Religion is preoccupied with Death. Science use to promise resolutions, solutions to whatever nagging problem that Man may have faced, but today, with the advent of Global Warming, Science has become obsessed with teleology and the End of all things. Could this be realism, fatalism or just plain some miserable desire of Man to see all thing send, because his personal life will someday end too.

Luisana,

The cosmos share all our vanities in the sense that we are the part of the cosmos that share it. We have to care because nobody else will. I hope to have time one day to dig into Whitehead.

Regards

Fully agreed with what you say, and in fact, in my view, you put it rather politely. The issue what I address, however, is not so much, say, the "semantics" and "pragmatics" of all those ventures, but rather the "syntax". Or in terms of the "dismal science" called "economics", I addressed the "micro-economics", rather than the "macro-economics" ...

In other words, I try to talk about - and, also to - persons who are modern, intelligent, highly educated, and possibly not only in humanities - to use the famous 1959 division in "two cultures" of C.P. Snow - and who may be ... perplexed ... - to use the title of the 12th century book of Maimonides - about religion,and about its possible, or as they see it, rather impossible compatibility with modern science ...

Yes, it is, I am afraid, a priori totally impossible to ... save ... just about everybody ...

Buddha did not manage it, even if he ever tried it, which itself is highly doubtful ...

And the same went with Jesus, and all other great saviors ...

So then,let us try and be a bit more ... modest ... :-) :-) :-)

Yes, and try to save only those who are ... manifestly savable ... :-) :-) :-)

And how does one recognize those who, indeed, are so ?!!???

Well, obviously, this is but the ONLY important question in the whole business of ... salvation ... :-) :-) :-)

And now back to your comment :

Yes, I am only and only addressing those who , in Snow's terms, are sufficiently familiar with BOTH cultures, and in addition, have a proper personality, as well ...

Please, any possible objections against that ?

By the way of the business of ... salvation ... :-) :-) :-)

It is a basic elementary fact known in Systems Theory, and also by many practically involved production engineers, that the more complex an entity, the more its various instances do inevitably spread across a wider spectrum.

Now, we humans, are from non-physical, non-anatomic, non-physiological point of view by far the most complex entities known to us here on Planet Earth. Thus no wonder that, as in the old English saying, we range ... from sinners to saints ...

Which, needless to say, it is quite a ... hell of a lot of ... spectrum ...

And of course, there are quite a few other relevant spectra where, again and again, we do spread in a similarly immense manner ...

And then, why, and based on what, should we ever think, let alone claim, and then try even to enforce, that ... salvation is for just about everybody ... ?!!???

Yes, according to the ancient Hebrews, we were all made in the image of God, as stated in Genesis 1:26-28 no less than four times. And according to the same source, the only difference mentioned between humans is that some are men, and some are women.

However, it is important to note that the idea of equality between all humans is only an implication of the above, and even then, if at all ...

Certainly, it is not explicitly stated ...

And there is no known earlier book mentioning even that much ...

Now, in modern times, English liberals in the 1600s came up with the idea that we humans should also be equal before the law ...

A truly generous idea ...

Yet, not quite sure a right one, as well ...

And then, massively encouraged by such somewhat extravagant incursions into what is desirable, versus what is indeed right, came various versions of socialists, who stated, demanded, and whenever they could, also enforced the equality of opportunity ...

And as if that was not already stretching things a bit too much, then came the communist type of ... saviors ... and murdered hundreds of millions, in order to impose as well equality of outcome ...

Which they nearly managed ...

Except of course for their own elite ...

So then, should we now clamor for ... equality in salvation ... ?!!???

Should we ... perfect ... the above list of modern aberrations by adding to it a more ... spiritual ... one, as well ... ?!!???

One that - precisely due to its more spiritual nature - was of course missed by poor miserable and unfortunate communists ?!!???

Louis,

" I hope to have time one day to dig into Whitehead".

Alfred North Whitehead believed in a god although Whitehead's idea of God was somewhat different from the traditional Christian notion:

"It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operates by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present" (in "Process and Reality"). I would say it is a romantic idea of God: "love, love, love" (!).

However, IMO, either a philosopher or even worse a scientist who takes into account the hypothesis of a god in his thoughts is likely not very interesting. The concept of God may explain everything and hence, explains nothing.

Better science through art.

Richard P. Gabriel, Kevin J. Sullivan

QUOTE:

Some of the oldest stories we know, including creation myths, were attempts to make sense of the world. Those early storytellers invented answers to the mys¬teries all around them. Why does the rain come? Why does it stop? If a child is created by two adults, from where did the first two adults originate? What is the earth like beyond what we have seen, and beyond what the people we know have seen? What lies beyond the stars? [11]

We call these stories literature now, or religious tracts. But at the time, they passed as science.

Looking at art objectively, given this more enlightened view, it seems that artists, engineers, and scientists are not so different after all.

They all create knowledge of one sort or another—some¬times “hard science” knowledge, sometimes “how to” knowledge, and sometimes “what about it” knowledge. Artists cre¬ate language and other sorts of realities (like engineers). They work through the medium of the pieces of art they endeavor to create. Theses pieces are devices used to understand and explain the world. —And not just the natural world, but the world of human perception, conditions, values and ethics, emotions, etc. The subject matter and means of investigation are different, but the architecture of the processes are similar across the art, science, engineering spectrum. Should we coin a word for this process? Is it research?

Robert Boswell, the fiction writer, puts it like this:

I have grown to understand narrative as a form of contemplation, a complex and seemingly incongruous way of thinking. I come to know my stories by writing my way into them. I focus on the characters without trying to attach significance to their actions. I do not look for symbols. For as long as I can, I remain purposefully blind to the machinery of the story and only partially cognizant of the world my story creates. I work from a kind of half-knowledge.

In the drafts that follow, I listen to what has made it to the page. Invariably, things have arrived that I did not invite, and they are often the most interesting things in the story. By refusing to fully know the world, I hope to discover unusual formations in the landscape, and strange desires in the characters. By declining to analyze the story, I hope to keep it open to surprise. Each new draft revises the world but does not explain or define it. I work through many drafts, see is always dwarfed by what I cannot know. What the characters come to understand never surpasses that which they cannot grasp. The world remains half-known.

…

There can be no discovery in a world where every¬thing is known. A crucial part of the writing endeavor is to practice remaining in the dark. [27]

In the cycle of explore-discover-understand, creative acts take place in the discover phase, where abduction—guessing—happens. Exploring with an open mind—perhaps with defocused attention—an artist or scientist might guess / hyothesize that something might be the case or might be worth turning into a work of art. Then in understanding the guess—either verifying / validating it as a scientist or working out its best artistic expression as an artist, one can then embark on further exploration, further discovery, and further understanding.

...

We need to look closely at what creative work is really like and adopt techniques and processes that support it. Education is part of it. Possibly artistry has been pushed aside because it’s not well understood. A common definition of an artist is “a person who expresses himself through a medium.” Certainly some artists do this, but not all, and perhaps not the majority. It would be just as true to say that an engineer is “a person who expresses himself through bridges.”

Marc,

'' either a philosopher or even worse a scientist who takes into account the hypothesis of a god in his thoughts is likely not very interesting. The concept of God may explain everything and hence, explains nothing.''

Pierce or Whitehead , Leibniz did not have such minimal concept of God. They are monistic philosophers and for such philosopher reality is God and trying to understand the world is as Leibniz described for us through our quest of knowledge like it is for the Salmons spawning return. I do not think that such feeling can be thoutht.

Louis,

Three centuries ago when Leibniz was living it was nearly impossible to distinguish religion from science. I think, fortunately, this is no more the case today.

What do you think Charles Sanders Peirce's metaphysics (e.g., objective idealism which rejects naturalism according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things) has brought to science or even to philosophy?

Marc,

From the little I know about Peirce, I would classify him as a naturalist monist. Naturalist in the sense that there is no super-natural realm, all that exists is the natural realm. But his natural realm includes the highest human value which is love and it is not evolving from physical matter in the later phase of evolution but is central to the creation of the cosmos. Peirce's 1893 essay ''Evolutionary Love'' claims that “growth comes only from love.

Louis,

Really, do you believe in such an idealist explanation of how our physical world works, based on love?

I agree that attachment is crucial in humans and more generally in animals. For instance I recommend you to read a book like "Au risque d'aimer" by Claude Béata.

However, apart from our knowledge on animal group umwelt, attachment cannot be the basis of our knowledge on how our physical world works.

Marc,

Do we know what ultimately reality is? No, from that we do not have to disagree on what we both acknowledge we have no clue about.

Charles Sanders Peirce cited as the origin of his Tychism. Many other sections of Renouvier's work. Here are good quotations from Renouvier :

Sorry, in more modern terms, it is not about God or religion, but about ontology. And it is not about concepts expressible in language, but about what, at best, such concepts can point to. Remember the Zen-Buddhist saying : You show the fool the Moon, and he is looking at your finger.

Language, be it usual, philosophic, or scientific, cannot come anywhere near to describe properly such everyday things like paintings or music. How could then describe God ?

In Hebrew tradition, God does not have a name, but only substitutes, and some of them are not even allowed to be said, the reason being that, otherwise, one gets the absolutely wrong feeling that, well, one managed to grasp what God is ...

The famous ancient Chinese "Book of Tao", starts with the sentence : The Tao one can speak about is not the true Tao.

And Wittgenstein ends his book "Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus" with the statement : What one cannot talk about, one must keep silent.

But the best is of course the mentioned Zen-Buddhist saying ...

And of course, all of the above was but a very very short course in ... ontology ... :-) :-) :-)

Hear, Hear, Elemer! The ineffable truth! It's not about answering the questions, it is about sharing the thoughts of Man, to one another, and that alone! All-too-often does a person take on the tack that “they must win the argument”; virilly, there is no argument to win and it is the agon that we are discussing, that alone.

Lao Tzu and the Tao de Ching must be recongized as the king of all metaphysical writings... no other book speaks of the ineffable with such diligence and ease.

Dear Luisiana, If you and I keep writing like that in public, well, soon we may have to go into hiding : all those priests, theologians, religionists, not to mention the writers, editors and publishers of their endless balh-blah, will come after us to hunt us down for sabotaging their many millennia long ongoing business ... :-) :-) :-)

As for the mentioned Zen-Buddhist saying, it has a more ... down to Earth ... version as well, namely :

You show the fool the Moon, and he is looking at his own dirty toe ...

Nice, isn't it now ?!!???

Elemer... very true, indeed. It would appear all things are, in some sense or another, a jobs-program.

As for the Buddha, no doubt, a very clear, honest and penetrating philosophy. One of my favorite sayings of the Great Buddha is, "all things seen by the eyes are void."

"Like it or not, if you look at your own mind you will discover it is void and groundless; as insubstantial as empty space." Buddha.

Dear Marc Tessera,

It is called love attachements is different. Love is energy, to wake up each day for instance. Does it fit into idealism?, unfurtanetely, in modern science it does.

And that is the core of these questions, that phrase is what is holding classic science up. Not to allow words like love into equations 'per se'.

I have a joke on this issue:

What is the Integral of love? It gives work...

Three words from Heraclitus : ‘’phusis Kruptestai philei’’ ‘’Nature loves to hide’’ echo throughout history the mystery of reality.

The veil of Isis, Pierre Hadot

Hadot discussed two method for unveiling the secret of Nature: the promethean method and the orphic method. The later being the central theme of this thread.

''The Orphic attitude to nature tries to understand her secrets through contemplation and aesthetic perception. The study of nature is a spiritual exercise that fosters magnanimity. Hadot finds this approach to nature in Plato's Timaeus, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Simplicius, among other classical writers. Philo, for instance, considers nature as God's poem. This notion resonates in the Renaissance metaphor of the book of nature, and takes a particularly important turn in the German mystic Boehme, for whom the book is not open but coded. Goethe takes this approach as do many of the German Romantics, e.g., Schelling, Novalis, Baader, and Hadot finds it in work of Klee, Van Gogh, and Cezanne as well.''

Well, we do not have to go so far in space and back in time like recalling Buddha. Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) is an extraordinary good and also prolific teacher. His sermon on "Detachment" is one of the marvels. It states in brief : ... but I praise detachment above the love of God, since being detached obliges God to love one ...

As for our basic question here : Science and religion are BOTH "assumption systems". But then the emotional messiness of us humans turns them into all sort of derivative quagmires ...

Louis,

"Charles Sanders Peirce cited as the origin of his Tychism. Many other sections of Renouvier's work. Here are good quotations from Renouvier".

Here is one of these quotations:

"In his last correspondence with James on Freedom and Determinism, Renouvier briefly described his model of freedom. It clearly involves non-physical, or metaphysical, mental forces".

Hence, clearly, Renouvier's 'free will' notion is metaphysical and I agree that such a notion can only be metaphysical

Marc,

A metaphysical idea is an idea that intend to describe an important aspect of reality. If you take any scientific model empirically validated , this model is also based on mathematical and scientific framework which involve a priori that are not empirically validated, that cannot be empirically validated because they have to be assumed before we can write the model and validate it. So science is based on a metaphysics.

A metaphysic idea such as the conservation of energy is not necessary useless and false.

Louis,

In my view 'metaphysical' means 'philosophical' and thus a metaphysical notion is not scientific because, as you say it, it cannot be validated, i.e., cannot be tested by any observation and/or experiment.

I agree to say that some scientific results may come from metaphysical assumptions to the extent that the a given hypothesis to be tested might be metaphysical when it was considered. However, once the hypothesis has been tested (and most often several times), the result becomes scientific and is no more metaphysical.

A notion like the one of 'free will' won't never be scientific as it is impossible to test it.

Of course, much of Marc's above argument is fine. Yet, one should by all means note that the very concepts of "scientific observation" and "scientific testing" are in fact themselves metaphysical or philosophical, and seem bound to remain so for evermore ...

So then, Dear Marc, what may be a way out of that conundrum ?!!???

Elemer,

I don't see any conundrum.

Actually I am mainly interested in something I call 'scientific' approach which is based on testable hypotheses by observations and/or experiments. This is because the practical outcomes from such an approach are tangible, that's all but that's sufficient, at least in my view.

Marc,

In each era, there is a dominant philosophy that is moslty implicit in the practice of doing science. It is perfectly alright to not analyse what is this dominant philosophy and to examine all the underlying metaphysical assumption it assumes. It is alrigth to stay naive and a lot of the greatest scientists were totally philosophically naive.

Sorry, it seems I was not clear enough : very concepts of "scientific observation" and "scientific testing" are NOT at all remaining ever the same in eternity, and instead, they keep changing, depending on many factors of which "science" is only one of them, thus in fact, these concepts, as well as the concept of "science", are inevitably metaphysical or philosophical, and seem bound to remain so for evermore ...

And then you say that this is ... not a conundrum ... ?!!???

Elemer and Louis,

It would be useful if you could be more specific: can you give some real examples such as a given observation and/or experiment which hasn't refuted a given hypothesis at first according to an initial specific philosophical view but which would have refuted it subsequently because of a different philosophical view?

Sorry, I did not mean that.

What I meant is that, as with all concepts throughout history, they changed and kept changing for as long as they were not abandoned. And the same is inevitable to happen with the concepts of "science", "scientific observation", or "scientific testing". In this regard, a most trivial example is given when completely new branches of science appear. For instance, that was the case with electromagnetism, quanta, relativity, genetics, and so on. In such cases not only the respective new branches change massively the meaning of "science", but they also add lots of new possibilities for "scientific observation", or "scientific testing". But then of course, there are far more subtle ways in which the concepts of "science", "scientific observation", or "scientific testing" can - and do - change in time. Well, I suppose, all of that should be rather obvious ...

Elemer,

I think the term "obvious" should be used with caution, in particular in science.

Your example seems to be mainly about the emergence of quantum mechanics and the effect of measure.

However, even when an experiment and/or an observation has been recently performed for example to refute some theoretical deductions of quantum mechanics I don't see to what extent the methodology used to carry out this experiment and/or observation has changed in comparison with an earlier period? The methodological criteria have remained the same.

There is the view of the "frog" or even of the "worm", and there is also the view of the "bird" ...

And nowadays, we are far too much into to the former ..., instead of trying to practice all of them ...

As for your latest comments, they seem to have as priority a contrarian attitude, instead of trying to see what may, even if only by chance, correspond to the truth in the arguments of the other persons ...

And as far as I understand, and please, try to be a bit more generous for a brief moment, what I was saying regarding the concepts of "science", "scientific observation", or "scientific testing" when seen in general, that is, from the view point of a "bird", was rather clear, and so sorry, also ... obvious ... :-) :-) :-)

Dear all,

There are no belief systems. There are only believers and nonbelievers. Believing is a consequence of the human will. Two examples will illustrate the topic.

Suppose that Smith accepts the Theorem of Pythagoras, because he knows its logical proof. In this case Smith does not believe in this theorem, he knows the theorem.

By contrast, suppose that Smith accepts the Theorem of Pythagoras, because his teacher says that it is true. In this case, Smith "believes" in this theorem and in his teacher. He accepts the theorem by authority argument, not by logic.

In other words, what makes a topic to be a believe is not the involved doctrine, but the human attitude. The underlying method.

If I do not accept any doctrine to be either true or false until a concluding proof is provided, I am not a believer. Accordingly, the proper title for this thread would be: There are some people that believe in science? or, perhaps, there are some people that takes science as a believe system?

Absolutely great !!!

Thank God, there are still real philosophers, and some of them are even among us !

And thanking God above, need not be seen as an act of belief ... :-) :-) :-)

And now, a few comments.

Any logical proof, including that of the Pythagoras Theorem, is still based on accepting certain assumptions, and not only those about logic, but also some about geometry. So that, so sorry, there seems to be no way whatsoever to avoid basing oneself on some ... accepted wisdom ...

And then, to that extent, all of us are all of the time some sort of ... believers ...

Thus the only difference which exists among us humans is ... between believers and believers ...

That is, some believe totally, completely, absolutely, aggressively, and even ... murderously ...

Others only believe more or less expediently, opportunistically, and so on ...

Here therefore, with our inevitable condemnation to mere belief, is one of the essential differences between us humans, and on the other hand, all other possible more ... divine ... beings ...

Anyhow, the temptation to believe, the need to believe, is an affective failure, rather than a cognitive one ...

So that, there may be still some hope for us humans, to the extent that we may escape our affective slavery, and venture more into the realms of the affectively not abused cognitive ...

William James, the truly great American thinker = by the way, rather an oxymoron :-) :-) :-) = wrote a book about a century ago, entitled "The Will to Believe", in which the story of affective versus cognitive in matters of belief is nicely debated.

More than two centuries before him, the even greater, much much greater German thinker, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had this to say in this regard :

"Whatever is thought by us is either conceived through itself, or involves the concept of another ... So one must either proceed to infinity, or all thoughts are resolved into those which are conceived through themselves ... Every idea is analysed perfectly only when it is demonstrated a priori that it is possible ... Since however it is not in our power to demonstrate the possibility of things in a perfectly a prioir way, that is, to analyze them into God and nothing, it will be sufficient for us to reduce their immense multitude to a few, whose possibility can either be supposed and postulated, or proved by experience ..."

Of an Organum, or Ars Magna (c. 1679)

Elemer,

"There is the view of the "frog" or even of the "worm", and there is also the view of the "bird" … And nowadays, we are far too much into to the former …, instead of trying to practice all of them ...".

Sorry, but this kind of speech is totally incomprehensible to my understanding: what are you talking about? Is it just a joke at my expense?

"And as far as I understand, and please, try to be a bit more generous for a brief moment, what I was saying regarding the concepts of "science", "scientific observation", or "scientific testing" when seen in general".

Please, could you be more explicit instead of saying generalities? In which specific way the 'scientific' approach (as I defined it) has changed over time?

Elmer,

You forget possibility of testing. Of course, every assumption arises from some previous one. But some assumptions are based on experimented facts.The difference between belief and knowledge is the possibility of testing.

That 2+2 = 4 is a statement that is tested billions of times each day in by the my computer succesfully. It works at 2.3 Ghz. Can you test the existence of angels billions of times each day?

If you identify the degree of truthfulness in both cases you have a very deep problem..

In any case, using multivalued logic you can be absolutely a non-believer. You can assign a truth value less than 1 to each statement. I am not a believer, because I do not assign never the truth value 1 to any statement. At most 0.99. In fact, true science does not assign the truth-value 1 to any statement. Every scientific law is accept while it works fine, but it is open to any modification. By contrast, believe systems are accepted even against all evidences. This is why the only way to be accepted, is frequently the elimination of non-believers. By contrast, Theorem of Pythagoras is accepted by proof. Do you know somebody who was closed in jail by negating any theorem? I know some nonbelievers who were killed by negating some beliefs. This is a great difference.

Juan-Esteban,

Of course I fully agree with the approach of assigning a truth value less than 1 to nearly all statements.

However don't you think that, for instance, these statements:

1. human beings are mortal,

2. the arrow of time is deeply innate to the reality (at least of our universe),

are 100% true?

Dear Marc, Please, forgive me : what you ask can be dealt with by studying the history and philosophy of science, and more generally, of ideas ...

If you do not understand the story with "worms", "frogs" and "birds", I am afraid, I cannot help in a mere few lines. Anyhow, these terms are rather well known in science, and certainly, I did not invent them.

As for certain things being ... general ..., well, thank God, we do not have to go ahead all the time just like "worms" or "frogs", but may on occasion also "fly" like "birds" ...

Dear Juan-Esteban, why do you not argue with ... Leibniz ... ? What he says in the citation I mentioned seems quite clear to me ... How about you ?

Elemer,

Why not answering my simple question: in which specific way the 'scientific' approach (as I defined it) has changed or is changing over time?

Once again, simply read some history and philosophy of science : a decent answer takes quite a few hundred pages at the very least ... :-) :-) :-)

Elemer,

Can't you cite one example or one reference at least in support of your statement?

Sorry, it is NOT "my statement", but it is a well known fact, at least among those of my generation ... :-) :-) :-)

Indeed, I wonder how can one be in science and not know such a thing ...

As for reference, well, perhaps you ask some historian or philosopher of science : they may be more familiar with recent, and thus easier available, such books ...

Really, I would like to help, but I am rather put off by the fact that such a basic and elementary issue, at least for my generation, seems not to be known nowadays ...

Elemer,

Personally too, I find your behavior rather unusual as a scientist.

You assert that it is well established that the scientific approach, i.e., an approach based on testable hypotheses by observations and/or experiments, has recently changed or is changing over time. However you are totally unable to give at least one example or to cite at least one reference in support of such a so-called well established statement.

Is it the new way of doing science that you are referring to?

Sorry if your feelings got hurt. Anyhow, we should not get too many feelings into the discussions of science. This here is not politics, religion, football partisanship, and the like ... As for your request, it is not my duty, and it is not even possible in the limited space here, to give you a sufficiently detailed course on the history and philosophy of science. And in the respective state of ignorance you plead to be, it is highly unlikely that one single example or reference may ever manage to help you ... Instead, please, by all means, make yourself a favour, and get on with it on your own, as much, and as soon, as possible ... The history and philosophy of science, and more generally, of ideas, is an immensely fascinating subject ... By the way, the history of ideas has become an academic subject only in the last several decades, and still, it is pursued only at rather few universities ... So that, well, no one is to be blamed too much if such a thing is not yet widely enough known ...

Have a nice day ...

Anyhow, and just not to seem that I am ... totally unconcerned ..., you could perhaps read the 1962 book :

Thomas Kuhn : The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

And please, do not fall for many of its critical reviews :

You are - may I kindly suppose ? - fully aware that the "publish or perish" method of science management emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s when, following the so called "missile gap" which befell the Americans after the launching in 1957 of the first soviet "sputnik", there was a sudden immense expansion of science and technology university education and research in the USA. And then, the only way they managed to find to manage it, was by the "dog eats dog" method of "publish or perish".

So that, poor academic philosophers, by far most of whom could never ever come up with ideas like that of Kuhn, had to contend with the ... second best ..., and start criticizing Kuhn in more and more ... original ... and thus hopefully publishable ways ...

The fact, however, remains that nearly all of that criticism was mere ... crap ...

So that, perhaps, you may find time, and above all, leisure, to read the mentioned book ...

Indeed, history and philosophy of science cannot possibly be read in any useful manner, except ... at leisure ... :-) :-) :-)

Elemer,

I am sorry to say that I catch you in the act of mixing everything up or even worse of bad faith.

In his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Thomas Kuhn never asserts that the scientific approach has changed from an approach based on testable hypotheses by observations and/or experiments to a different approach.

Kuhn's approach to the history and philosophy of science can be described as focusing on conceptual issues: what sorts of ideas were thinkable at a particular time? What sorts of intellectual options and strategies were available to people during a given period? What types of lexicons and terminology were known and employed during certain epochs? etc.

However it is true that Kuhn argues that the evolution of scientific theory does not emerge from the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities according to the general historical school of non-linear history.

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was critized to be itself a profoundly Eurocentric work, although it is often perceived as opening the door to the multicultural turn in historical studies of science. Kuhn seems to ignore the significant impact of Arabic and Chinese science when he writes:"Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws and so on. In many cases those facets of civilizations have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes".

Marc,

Kuhn's book is a profound re-thinking of what is science. Most of Kuhn's thesis had been developed earlier by Michael Polanyi and it is exactly what this thread is exploring. Science is not objective; it could only exist as a system of beleifs. We have to have faith in it for it to thrive. I am a total beleiver. A paradigm is a system of beleifs and practices sustaining it. In the ''Stability of Beleifs'' , Polanyi provided an early version of this social conception of science:

My critic to Kuhn is his total academic dishonesty in not acknowledging the origin of his ideas.

Sorry Louis, but I cannot agree with you when you assert that the scientific approach (as I defined it, i.e., an approach based on testable hypotheses by observations and/or experiments) is not more objective than other approaches such as religious approach, i.e., the approach of believers.

I don't think Kuhn asserts that.

What he seems to assert is that the evolution of scientific theory wouldn't emerge from the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities according to the general historical school of non-linear history.

This is quite different as Kuhn doesn't mean that an approach as objective as possible such as the scientific approach cannot exist (i.e., an approach which reveals "facts").

Marc,

Polanyi did not denied the empirical character of science. He was a first rank physical- chemist. His analysis goes below the surface without denying the surface. He denied abosolute objectivist non in the spirit of relativist or post-modernist. I accepted the universal character of science. He was strongly opposed to relativist and post-modernists but saw those as going along the logical road traced by the sceptical basis of modern science which he found excessive in its reaction against the religious dogmatism of pre-enleightment. But he saw this anti-dogmatist pill becoming a toxic drug in the long run. He proposed a post-critical method where faith is re-established without it becoming a seed of dogmatist.

Marc, You can from now on save yourself the trouble to read or comment on what I write ... :-) :-) :-)

Your interest is far more in being a contrarian, than in anything else ...

Have fun ...

Why don't you get into politics ?

It Is far more suited for your personality ... :-) :-) :-)

And you may even make it more there, than in science ...

Louis,

You try to follow a narrow ridge crest between what you call the “empirical character” of science, i.e., what I prefer to specify by “an approach based on testable hypotheses by observations and/or experiments”, and the firm conviction that the scientific approach is not objective, that the scientific facts only exist as a system of beliefs.

I cannot agree with the latter assumption.

Regarding the philosophical part in the scientific approach I have already said in this thread that I agree that it would be stupid for a scientist to censor his intuition when looking for new hypotheses. But I immediately added that, once a scientist has found a given hypothesis, he must follow a rigorous approach to test it.

By the way I asked you the following question: “regarding tradition do you have some examples for which it has been a good guide for generating fruitful hypotheses?” but you didn’t answer. I would be very much interested if you could give us such examples.