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Defreni
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted November 15, 2004 12:04 AM |
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Kuhn VS. Popper
Well I took the title of this thread directly from a book bt Steve Fuller, who made his starting point from the only meeting between Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper on the 12. of July 1965, in a debate mediated by Lakatos.
The meeting was supposed to be a debate on what science is, but there wasnt any real consensus on the point. In this thread I will try to pinpoint the 2 philosophical stances, and why it is still a very important question regarding todays society.
The reason why the question "What is science?" is so important, is mainly due to the fact that the statement "It is scientifically proven" lends extreme authority to a given statement. If you look closely at both newspaper articles and commercials you can see that often times, they hints that this is indeed science. "Tested at laboratoarie Garnier" etc.
Another important point in question is the debate going on in US, where Christian fundamentalist are demanding that Creationism is given as much weight in schools as Evolution theory. This has a huge impact on what we judge is science, if their contention that Creationism is as much a science as Evolution theory is valid.
I will start with given a sketch of what Popper`s demarcation principle of science is, and then continue to stating Kuhns position. And finally I will compare the 2 positions and give my view of the matter.
Karl Popper (1902-94) Born in Austria but moved to England after Germanys Annschluss in 1938. Many introductionary works in the philosophy of science links him with the Vienna-circle or logico-positivist as their are also known. This is a trend found in humane- and social science books. This is wrong!
Popper did have something in common with (logico-) positivist, namely an urge to distinguish science from pseudo-science. The way positivist did this was by a criterion of verification. Any statement needed if it wanted to be a meaningfull statement, to have a correspondence with a direct sense-perception, or to be able to be broken down into statement that where empirically verifiable.
This leads to an extreme empirialism which is very hard to defend. Consider the statement "Unicorns doesnt exist". This statement would according to positivist be a meaningless statement.Popper did not share this view.
Instead he proposed in "Conjectures and refutations" a demarcation principle for science, that still stressed the empirical notion in science, but didnt make use of the concept of meaning.
His idea was basically that what is meant to be real science is the throwing out in the air a hypothesis about a given relationship (For instance light is beant by gravity) and then try as hard as you can to refute this theory, by making experiments or observations designed to show that the hypothesis are wrong.
If you are unable to show that your hypothesis is wrong, it is not considered true, but rather justified.
And at that point a hypothesis can be said to become a scientific theory. (A scientific theory is not to be confused with the ordinary use of theory, like "I have a theory that it was the butler who commited the murder").
This is what is called the hypothetic-deductive method of science or falsificationism.
The metaphysical implication of this theory is that eventhough science might be able to find the Truth, we can never be sure that it is the Truth we have found. (This is basically due to `scottish philospher David Hume`s problem of induction, it is never possible to make a logic link between singulares and universales. For instance "That swan is white, that swan is white. All swanes I have observed is white, therefore all swanes are white. Up untill the point a black swan was found in Australia).
This leads Popper to dub the scientific knowledge we gain by the hypothetic-deductive method to have versimilitude, which is the greek word for truth-like.
This has been extremely influential for especially natural scientist. 2 prominent physicist (Both nobel laureates) I can name who swears for this method are Richard Feynmann in his "The character of physical laws" and Steven Weinberg in his "Dreams of a final theory"
The most prominent critique of this method in the philosophy of science have come from Willard Van Ornam Quine who in his "Two dogmas of empiricism" spoused the view that you dont only test the single hypothesis as Popper suggest you do, but rather the whole body of scientific knowledge, in what Quine called the "Web-of-belief". Basically he is attacking the modus ponens part of Poppers argument. (If it has any interest I will elaborate on this point in a later post).
Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) American physicist most known from his 1962 book "The structure of scientific revolutions".
Kuhns claim is that science is not ......
Well guess I have to edit in the rest of this post, as I have no time to complete it today. Guess the rest will be edited in tomorrow.
Regards
Defreni
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Svarog
Honorable
Supreme Hero
statue-loving necrophiliac
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posted November 19, 2004 02:37 AM |
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Edited By: Svarog on 18 Nov 2004
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In expectation of Defreni's analysis of Kuhn, I'll take the right to post an essay I had to write the other day on a closely related topic. So I figured this could also be a place for it, since the essay deals with philosophy of science, particularly the issue of objectivity of science, and I clearly take the Kuhnian view, which might explain further his ideas. Here goes:
Can scientific work be objective
The view that the nature of scientific research is essentially objective, in other words that it is based on universal, eternally valid principles and rules is a theory which has long been advocated in the history of science. However, the reality of the constant turnabouts and scientific revolutions which have taken place, and most likely, will always take place, forces us to reexamine this dogma and ask ourselves whether science truly has a cumulative nature. Is science the part of the world that man irreversibly conquers, by exploring it, or is it actually the world, such as the man subjectively represents it in his global conscience?
In order to answer that question, one must naturally examine scientific research, as the only process through which science itself is defined and observed. It is generally accepted in scientific theory and in philosophy of science that that process consists of two vaguely defined entities – gathering scientific evidence through experiments and construction of scientific theories based on such experiments. In fact, it is the theories who give the only sense of scientific evidence, through their explanation and interpretation. Otherwise, they would only have a limited validity in strictly defined circumstances, and thus would have little if any practical implementation.
It is a historical fact that in the last hundred years almost all the theories, which have been thought to objectively describe nature have proven wrong. (Here, above all, I have in mind the two greatest revolutions in history of science – Einstein’s theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics) Consequently, common logic leads us to imagine that in fifty years or so, most of the current scientific theories will have proven wrong also. The historical discontinuity in the development of scientific theories confirms even more that the new theories are not in essence improved versions of the old ones, but completely independent ones, which creates an entirely new observational ambience for the world around us, transforming thoroughly all the understandings derived from the interpretation of the old theory. This certainly cannot denote the former scientific work as completely objective, since it would imply that all its theories would have to be still valid today.
It remains only to consider the alleged objectivity behind the scientific evidence gathering. Indeed, I believe it is true that the circumstances under which an experiment is conducted can be objective, but it is a problem of objective standards when we try to give any meaning whatsoever to that experiment outside its narrowly defined framework. Throughout the history, the same experiments were constantly conducted, the results were always the same, but what the scientists saw in them had been changing. Then, the “objectivity” of circumstances is really irrelevant, when what is observed, and at the same time the only thing that testifies for the nature of scientific evidence gathering, is necessarily subjective and dependant on the context of the corresponding scientific theory examined by the scientist, because no scientist studies anything without expecting anything or at least without having a general idea about the direction the experiment would go in. In this sense, scientists are slaves of their theories, which deprives them of any objectivity, both theoretical and observational.
In the end, I could conclude that scientific work can hardly be considered an objective process, but that should not be understood as a handicap for humanity and its researching capacity, but rather as its characteristic, which drives its successful intellectual progress.
edit note: the essay's short because it was limited with words, so i had to extract the essense at the expense of nice examples and evidence. Furthermore, the english version was an optional requirement, so have in mind that it's translated more or less directly from the macedonian original, losing sense a bit maybe.
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The meek shall inherit the earth, but NOT its mineral rights.
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Defreni
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted November 19, 2004 05:19 PM |
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Nice post Svarog.
Got completely swamped this week so I have had absolutely no time to finish this post. But I havent forgottten it.
Incidetly my Bachelor is about the possibility of truth in science. My thesis was that it is possible for science under certain parameters to know the truth with a capital T.
I used a variant of the anthropocentric argument to underline my thesis. But because we have no final theory yet, its still up for grabs.
Regarding objectivity. Well its a controversial concept, which is still discussed in allmost all parts of philosophy, alongide knowledge, truth and justification.
Im sorry I cant seem to find time to order my post and make them more thorough, but right now I have to read 5 books on African regional integration, aswell as my metaethic class, and metaphysic class. (Luckily both of them are just surveys of the topics, Im not up for reading more of Blackburns quasi-realism right now  )
Regards
Defreni
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