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Philosophy of science

Delirium said:
The explicit delineation between "chemical consciousness" and "metaphysical consciousness" makes it obvious what the argument is actually about - i.e. whether there it is likely that there is some phenomena which does not arise from the material universe which explains why we can think. RoyalNoises' position - hence the repeated reference to machines - is that the mind is reducible to particles interacting with each other. That's literally all the argument is about. For some reason it keeps being construed to be about other things, I can only assume it's because they're talking past each other sort of like here:
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No, I don't think it is. Royal Noises specifically denied that he has subjective experiences because he can't account for them in his preferred theory:
RoyalNoises said:
I don't mean some kind of subjective experience, which I experience but do not believe in, because I can't prove it exists.
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I am not trying to argue consciousness doesn't arise from the material universe, but that it exists at all. I tend to gravitate towards a physicalist view of the universe myself, but one that doesn't discard things we can't currently account for.
SeptimusMagisto said:
We have no particular reason to think they shouldn't, given that they demonstrably result in everything else the brain does.

We can trace the chemical and electrical activity within the brain as it experiences different colors, fond childhood memories and, as you say, psychoactives. We can show that such activity is responsible for motion, for memory, for love and fear and a thousand other things. Is there a particular reason to believe that they can do all that but can't produce consciousness?
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Electrochemical activity in the brain does definitely seem to be correlated to subjective experiences. But we don't tend to think chemical reactions or electrical discharges are conscious in the abstract (outside of panpsychism). We don't usually imagine household current, or fires, or rusting metal are having subjective experiences. So it makes sense to imagine there is some further fact that explains why animals do.

Mind you, I am thinking the further fact is something like "structure" (or "form" if you're feeling Aristotelian.), not ghosts.
 
SeptimusMagisto said:
Well, sure. It's the same reason plants grow and maintain homeostasis but a random mixture of everything a plant is made of would do none of that. The arrangement matters.
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It does, which is why I think it makes more sense to say biology and neurology result in consciousness. Because those are what you get when you have certain kinds extremely highly ordered, self sustaining electrochemical systems. That structure is still physical structure, but it is more than just chemistry.
 
I searched the thread to see if anyone dropped the name of Larry Laudan before me. I found his first book Progress and its Problems (1977) to be pretty darn sensible and powerfully applicable. I am a bit puzzled by the summary given in that wiki link for that book, but the same articles summary of the core themes of another book of his I have not read, Beyond Positivism and Relativism, seemed to be exactly what I got out of the earlier book I did read:

In Beyond Positivism and Relativism, Laudan wrote that "the aim of science is to secure theories with a high problem-solving effectiveness" and that scientific progress is possible when empirical data is diminished. "Indeed, on this model, it is possible that a change from an empirically well-supported theory to a less well-supported one could be progressive, provided that the latter resolved significant conceptual difficulties confronting the former."[10]​ Finally, the better theory solves more conceptual problems while minimizing empirical anomalies.
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In other words, epistemologically speaking, we humans are software running in meat, with our evolved senses feeding into a neural net that is more or less pre-configured to make a mapping of the external reality we mutually agree by faith claim assumption exists "out there" (I should stress Laudan does not approach talking about it this way, this is me talking). Everything we believe we see and otherwise infer objectively existing is in that sense a mere construct in our own minds. We never have direct knowledge of any damn thing.

That said, that apparent surrender to solipistic relativism tossed out there, we do generally agree that there really is this reality thing; all you zombies out there are real people too, and if I die I'm gone, and I will die without appropriate material inputs and conditions being maintained. Laudan shifts the ground from musing about attempting to measure and quantify our relationship with actual reality--if I want to get all mystical and woo woo I could call it the Tao--and turn to what actually seems to matter to real scientists and real people, which is arguing about and refining our models of this reality. In turn we need not fash ourselves about whether these models more closely approach reality or not; what drives and motivates us is problem solving. This involves empirical problems, like How Cave Man Zog Make Log Float Less Mushy or how we resolve the philosophical contradictions between a quantum mechanical and general relativistic approach to understanding basic theoretical physics. We can and do observe progress of a non-subjective, definable sort in this enterprise of clashing, rival theories being integrated into superior models that avoid or resolve conceptual problems while seeming to correspond acceptably well to empirical observations as well.

That's science. It is a specialized and refined form of the generic common sense that permitted humans to become technological in any sense.

So it isn't solipistic relativism nor is it the kind of absolutist thinking that drives me batty on many a thread in many sites Laudan associates with Popper. Improving our models--and the very theme of the book and apparently his general work is that we do have objective ways of defending the idea one theory is better than another--is what the job's about.

FWIW like a number of other books pretty influential on my thinking I found it in a student house library at Caltech in the mid-1980s, where I was struggling to remain a student for quite a number of years, and I believe it was a text in a Caltech course on the subject.

To do justice to the breadth and depth of his approach I suppose I can't do much better than refer people to the book, and ask if anyone else has ever heard of this fellow or anything anyone says here is informed by it or by a critique discrediting it.
 
@RoyalNoises So going by your statements nothing can be proven as it must be filtered through our point of view and since our experiences are wrong and inherently do not exist no observation made by it can exist. So nothing can be proven. Seems fairly easy way to say "I believe what I want."
 
SeptimusMagisto said:
Any examples of this?
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Replacing Ptolemaic concepts of the form of the solar system or rather, the heavens, to the Copernican one. We know today as "common sense" fact the Sun outmasses the Earth tremendously and the latter orbits the former, so Copernicus appears to the casual glance as a great progressive visionary. But in fact over a thousand years and change of development, the geocentric Ptolemaic model had been much refined and its predictions of the motions of various planets, as that system defined them, were superior to the best approximations Copernicus could come up with in his model, in which planets including Earth as one of them instead of the Sun still moved in circles which still required epicycles, deferents and other Ptolemaic bric a brac to attempt to square the presumption celestial mechanics had to work in terms of "perfect" systems involving circles with observations we know now result from the motion of objects in mutual potentials with conservation of energy and momentum, that in turn we approximate into idealized ellipses conserving these categories and then account as we go along for transfers of both between various objects due to the fact that the forces involved are not entirely central--in a central force system, energy and momentum are conserved for each object separately forever. But such a system never exists unless everything is in fact collapsed into a single such object, or if we had just exactly two bodies--any third body means central forces are not the whole story.

Anyway, just comparing Copernicus to Ptolemy, the latter actually yielded superior outcomes in terms of pragmatic prediction of observations. It also had the conceptual advantage of appearing to match what "common sense" told the casual observer must be going on--Earth holds still at the center, the heavens revolve around Earth; the Sun is a wanderer, a planet, as is plain to any observant child growing up and noticing the correlation of seasons with solar motions. I suppose with sufficient fussy refinement of epicycle numbers and detailed parameters, it might have been possible to overall match the level of predictive accuracy the geocentric model offered--but one of the conceptual advantages I believe Copernicus wanted to stress as reasons for considering a heliocentric model was that his system involved fewer such kludging elaborations. So in that contest for academic consensus there was a tradeoff between undercutting the basis of the claim of priority in favor of superior predictive effectiveness, versus figuring people would forgive some fluctuation between theory and observation and find it more helpful to reimagine the basic layout on what turned out to be the closer model to reality.

Neither could close the gap between observation and model without abandoning the idea of circular motion completely and turning to ellipses, and then Kepler found he had to assume different constants of what turned out to be conserved angular momentum for different planets not realizing what was going on was that each sun-planet pair is a two body problem with "reduced mass" and effective angular radius dependent on the mass balance between Sun and planet. That is, Earth is a bit closer to the Sun than Jupiter would be orbiting in an orbit with the same period and eccentricity, since the Sun actually also orbits, or anyway were it not for perturbations from other planets and objects would orbit, the barycenter between the two masses; Earth being so much smaller the offset of the solar center from the barycenter is much lower.

In turn once we account for reduced mass, it turns out we need to factor in perturbations. Then relativistic considerations came along...

We just never arrive at perfect models that correspond to observed reality exactly, so it is inherent in doing science that we make judgements on the quality of our data based on various conceptual criteria, and accept deviation as inevitable. So the inferior performance pragmatically of the newer model counted against it, but is offset in acceptance by conceptual considerations that gained weight as more observations were made. As a finished model it was a step backward, especially from an empiricist-positivist model of science that claims superior theories always result in superior conformity of data to predictions, but without it it would have been impossible to leap forward to the Keplerian and then Newtonian-Laplacian model, and eventual realization that a certain degree of chaos is always with us and any model we attempt will deviate in some way.
 
Tellos said:
@RoyalNoises So going by your statements nothing can be proven as it must be filtered through our point of view and since our experiences are wrong and inherently do not exist no observation made by it can exist. So nothing can be proven. Seems fairly easy way to say "I believe what I want."
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The thing is, yes, that's true. I don't even really think it's much in dispute. It's just that as human beings we kind of have to shrug and go with our best and most effective methods, regardless of their philosophical incompleteness. And that would be science.

If something is real, you can demonstrate it to be real. If it's just something you -feel- then that's meaningless.
 
RoyalNoises said:
The thing is, yes, that's true. I don't even really think it's much in dispute. It's just that as human beings we kind of have to shrug and go with our best and most effective methods, regardless of their philosophical incompleteness. And that would be science.

If something is real, you can demonstrate it to be real. If it's just something you -feel- then that's meaningless.
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Feelings are as real as anything else, and all of what you are saying is in dispute. Like, this isn't wisdom you're throwing around, it's just a bunch of weird assumptions and extrapolations. The data doesn't actually support any of what you're saying, you're just cherry picking what you're willing to define as data. You're not even doing good science, you're starting with the bleakest sort of nihilism and using whatever you can find to justify it, apparently not noticing the inconsistencies and contradictions?

Like, you can believe whatever you want, but you aren't doing anything like science. It's just bog-standard cherry picking to confirm your biases and assumptions. Nothing scientific about it.
 
So anyway, has anyone else ever studied Laudan's approach or confronted it? I like it a lot, but it has been years since I last read the book and I am not exactly up to speed in modern philosophy. It is an approach that looks and feels like science to me. No absolute sweeping claims of n captured the secrets of the universe, just do the research, and say what it looks like things are doing for reasons, and debate these without worrying too much about what it Ultimately Means.

Of course one thing about Laudan's approach, if you have a "research tradition" in which deep claims about Ultimate Meaning are part of the baggage, you can still have scientists doing good science, more or less. It is not absolutely out of bounds in Laudan's approach to include faith claims like "An omniscient and omnipotent God has designed the cosmos intelligently and the order we find in nature is a window onto the Mind of God." Lots of important scientific work was done by people believing that, in the Islamic world, in Europe, and I believe someone sufficiently educated and experienced enough to understand nuances in say Indian or Chinese history will find strong scientific "research traditions" there too, all with some dialog going with stuff we today would reject out of hand as legitimate science in the research tradition we have hitherto developed.

Laudan once testified before a court regarding the status of "creation science" AKA "Intelligent Design Theory" also known by rude disrespectful names, justly so in my opinion. His testimony was that the proponents were not wrong in claiming that the assumption of a Creator was indeed once a major and important part of the research tradition of Europe, but that by the process of successive testing and succession of hypotheses (or whatever technical term there is for widely accepted models he uses, I forget) which is measurably progressive in terms of relative success in addressing problems deemed important in the research tradition, whether conceptual or empirical, that model element was left behind as not conducive to superior problem solving a while back. In short, it was indeed historically a valid scientific thing but now is not, thanks to progress. So he was able to not deny the important role faith based reasoning has in fact played in the history of science, while explaining why and how it was abandoned eventually for good reasons.

So there is no hard and fast eternal rule about what kinds of concepts might be a progressive part of a research tradition; it depends on whether adding some new approach or consideration in leads to superior problem solving or not. Solipsism solves nothing save perhaps being some reassuring or alternatively self-deranging consideration for some individual, but it is no basis for scientists to get together and hammer out interesting approaches to solving problems.
 
As a practicing social scientist, I think some stripe of pragmatism is ultimately the most helpful view for philosophy of science. I actually had a wonderful chat about this today with a rhetorician from MIT. His big points (drawing mostly on Rorty, Kuhn and his own work) were that science is:
  • Rhetorical and value laden: At its core, the choice to research a topic is not neutral. There is no way to describe a thing that is neutral or objective as you are always making the choices of what to mention, what not to mention, what to emphasize, etc. Research on a theory or hypothesis gets done because someone decided that thing was worth testing for reasons that are situated and value-laden. Objectivity and neutrality in the concrete, rather than aspirational sense, are absurd notions that have no place beyond self-aggrandizement in the sciences, much as with journalism. The ways one frames a study or develops theory cannot be neutral and science itself demands that prospective scientists adhere to very specific ideology and assumptions regarding scientific process, theory, testing, etc. In this sense, science is not and cannot be ethically void, objective or purely observational. The act of theorizing is one of modeling and designing mechanisms to describe things that happen, not a statement of how things are.

  • But useful: Despite the fact that it is inevitably situated in biased and rhetorically grounded, rather than objective, perspectives, science makes novel predictions and explains more as time goes on. Technology advances, and progress occurs, though not strictly toward a big T universal truth. Not all theories are equally valid or useful in all circumstances. We wouldn't flip a coin to decide if we build a space shuttle based on well-understood concepts of engineering or literary analysis. A physics PhD student couldn't go to their advisor and announce "I've decided to pursue my degree on experimental Aristotelian physics," but these distinctions aren't bound to a rigid hierarchy of hard>soft or further from or closer to Truth, but a contextual one based on utility.
 
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Shevek23 said:
Replacing Ptolemaic concepts of the form of the solar system or rather, the heavens, to the Copernican one. We know today as "common sense" fact the Sun outmasses the Earth tremendously and the latter orbits the former, so Copernicus appears to the casual glance as a great progressive visionary. ...
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While that is a good example, those are somewhat odd characterisations of things and don't really explain what exactly are 'significant conceptual difficulties confronting [the preceding system]'.

For example, saying that Ptolemaic model has bric-a-brac to square the assumptions of perfect circles with observations neglects that although Ptolemy deliberately deformed those assumptions to fit better with observations, epicycles were for a long time simply the mathematical state of the art. And there's nothing wrong with epicycles anyway; ultimately they're just a Fourier expansion suitable to for any quasiperiodic planar motion. (On the other hand, it would be extremely impractical to discover, say, Kepler's third law before the invention of logarithms.)

To match the observational accuracy of the Ptolemaic system, a modified Coperniacan system can be found from just a coordinate transformation of the former. From there, it is clear that the Copernican system can be said to be an improvement in the sense of unifying the sizes of the deferents of the inferior planets and the epicycles of the superior planets. But while this is an important virtue, the heliocentrism is accidental rather than explanatory here because e.g. the exact same thing is also achieved by (geocentric) Tychonic system.

If you want to tie this with heliocentrism vs geocentrism, the most significant conceptual problem to the Ptolemaic system doesn't have much to do with anything directly to do with circles (although they were originally connected). Rather, it's the ancient assumption that the celestial bodies are physically different and more perfect than earthly matter. This is exactly what the Tychonic system implicitly kept and the Copernican system denied, while later Newtonian mechanics explicitly unified celestial motion with earthly gravity under one law. By no coincidence, the 'Copernican principle' is used in many other models to deny the specialness of our neighbourhood if it's not observationally warranted.

Observationally, things like Julian moons, rings of Saturn, etc., would provide direct challenge to that.
 
Shevek23 said:
So anyway, has anyone else ever studied Laudan's approach or confronted it? I like it a lot, but it has been years since I last read the book and I am not exactly up to speed in modern philosophy. It is an approach that looks and feels like science to me. No absolute sweeping claims of n captured the secrets of the universe, just do the research, and say what it looks like things are doing for reasons, and debate these without worrying too much about what it Ultimately Means.

Of course one thing about Laudan's approach, if you have a "research tradition" in which deep claims about Ultimate Meaning are part of the baggage, you can still have scientists doing good science, more or less. It is not absolutely out of bounds in Laudan's approach to include faith claims like "An omniscient and omnipotent God has designed the cosmos intelligently and the order we find in nature is a window onto the Mind of God." Lots of important scientific work was done by people believing that, in the Islamic world, in Europe, and I believe someone sufficiently educated and experienced enough to understand nuances in say Indian or Chinese history will find strong scientific "research traditions" there too, all with some dialog going with stuff we today would reject out of hand as legitimate science in the research tradition we have hitherto developed.

Laudan once testified before a court regarding the status of "creation science" AKA "Intelligent Design Theory" also known by rude disrespectful names, justly so in my opinion. His testimony was that the proponents were not wrong in claiming that the assumption of a Creator was indeed once a major and important part of the research tradition of Europe, but that by the process of successive testing and succession of hypotheses (or whatever technical term there is for widely accepted models he uses, I forget) which is measurably progressive in terms of relative success in addressing problems deemed important in the research tradition, whether conceptual or empirical, that model element was left behind as not conducive to superior problem solving a while back. In short, it was indeed historically a valid scientific thing but now is not, thanks to progress. So he was able to not deny the important role faith based reasoning has in fact played in the history of science, while explaining why and how it was abandoned eventually for good reasons.

So there is no hard and fast eternal rule about what kinds of concepts might be a progressive part of a research tradition; it depends on whether adding some new approach or consideration in leads to superior problem solving or not. Solipsism solves nothing save perhaps being some reassuring or alternatively self-deranging consideration for some individual, but it is no basis for scientists to get together and hammer out interesting approaches to solving problems.
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Vis a vie noneuropean historical " scientific" traditions I think you may be confusing science, a process, with knowledge.

It's a fiddly subject, but I think the term natural philosophers is probably a better catch all for the people working in those spheres , including european sources from before the doctrine was established.


Basically it is possible to learn things in a non scientific way, but there is a different rigour for "scientific" knowledge.
 
Vyslanté said:
Well, of course. If something can be shown to exist, it's, by definition, not supernatural :p
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This actually runs up on one of the places that science is blind. Things which are truly unpredictable (not just stochastic) or which possess an ability to act freely can't be reduced to a set of rules and verified by observation. That doesn't mean they can't exist, just that they aren't subject to scientific quantification or verification. Ruling them out is useful not because they aren't real, but because assuming they are real means we have hit a brick wall scientifically and have to engage some other mode of investigation or simply accept the situation as mysterious. Neither of those advances science, but they might in fact be the correct response in some situation.

If a phenomenon truly wasn't governed by predictable laws, you could never show it. The possibility would always remain that something was missed or unobservable that actually determined its behavior.
 
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mesonoxian said:
This actually runs up on one of the places that science is blind. Things which are truly unpredictable (not just stochastic) or which possess an ability to act freely can't be reduced to a set of rules and verified by observation. That doesn't mean they can't exist, just that they aren't subject to scientific quantification or verification. Ruling them out is useful not because they aren't real, but because assuming they are real means we have hit a brick wall scientifically and have to engage some other mode of investigation or simply accept the situation as mysterious. Neither of those advances science, but they might in fact be the correct response in some situation.

If a phenomenon truly wasn't governed by predictable laws, you could never show it. The possibility would always remain that something was missed or unobservable that actually determined its behavior.
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This seems like a god of the gaps arguement re skinned at best.


Out of wild curiosity what is a thing that can "act freely" and what does it mean in this context?
 
kjyl said:
This seems like a god of the gaps arguement re skinned at best.


Out of wild curiosity what is a thing that can "act freely" and what does it mean in this context?
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It isn't an argument for anything.

A "god of the gaps" argument is where you look at whatever phenomena is unexplained and say "must be the gods/magic/whatever". It is taking places we're ignorant and inserting your favorite explanation. This is the opposite of that, an acknowledgement that something if something is in fact inexplicable by science, you will never know for sure because the possibility always remains that some means of explaining it exists and is undiscovered. Showing otherwise would involve proving a negative empirically.

By act freely I just mean something that's behavior isn't governed by predictable physical laws, either deterministically or probablistically. I'm not positing that any specific thing fits this criterion here.

The point is that science doesn't exclude the "supernatural" because it is impossible, but because something that can't be systematized or predicted can't be captured by scientific analysis. It is important to recognize the limits of your tools so that you don't accidentally transpose the limits of your methodology onto the reality you are studying.

EDIT: To be clear, I am not arguing (here) that any such thing exists in the universe. Merely that we should be careful not to draw conclusions about the universe that do not take into account the limits of our tools. Reality is under no obligation to be discoverable by our methods or comprehensible under our logic.
 
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mesonoxian said:
Things which are truly unpredictable (not just stochastic) or which possess an ability to act freely can't be reduced to a set of rules and verified by observation.
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"has a random effect each time we see it" and even "does whatever the fuck it want" are still things we can observe and categorize.
 
Vyslanté said:
"has a random effect each time we see it" and even "does whatever the fuck it want" are still things we can observe and categorize.
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Not necessarily. A phenomenon that is truly unpredictable is going to be very hard to quantify. It is easy to imagine such anomalies would evade detection because our minds and our science look for patterns and regularities. Something truly unpredictable might get written off as error or attributed to some other cause precisely because we can't predict it.

But beyond that, even if we do nail down such a phenomenon, we are very unlikely to figure out how it works. We are likely to spend a very long time looking for underlying rules or causes because the alternative is throwing our hands in the air. As an example, numerous interpretations exist that would render quantum mechanics deterministic were they true. If we somehow disproved all of them, we could never eliminate the possibility we missed one. If it is truly indeterministic, I think we might keep looking for deterministic causes underlying it for a very long time to come.

We shouldn't give up on scientific investigation of seemingly intractable problems, but we should also keep the possibility of unanswerable questions in our back pocket when we are thinking about how the universe works. As an example, Cartwright suggests that the natural world is not as determined and orderly as it appears, but seems so because we model it in very orderly fashions, and since we can't ever wholly isolate a single cause, true unpredictability would get mistaken for something we can't predict only because we lack certain knowledge.
 
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mesonoxian said:
It isn't an argument for anything.

A "god of the gaps" argument is where you look at whatever phenomena is unexplained and say "must be the gods/magic/whatever". It is taking places we're ignorant and inserting your favorite explanation. This is the opposite of that, an acknowledgement that something if something is in fact inexplicable by science, you will never know for sure because the possibility always remains that some means of explaining it exists and is undiscovered. Showing otherwise would involve proving a negative empirically.

By act freely I just mean something that's behavior isn't governed by predictable physical laws, either deterministically or probablistically. I'm not positing that any specific thing fits this criterion here.

The point is that science doesn't exclude the "supernatural" because it is impossible, but because something that can't be systematized or predicted can't be captured by scientific analysis. It is important to recognize the limits of your tools so that you don't accidentally transpose the limits of your methodology onto the reality you are studying.

EDIT: To be clear, I am not arguing (here) that any such thing exists in the universe. Merely that we should be careful not to draw conclusions about the universe that do not take into account the limits of our tools. Reality is under no obligation to be discoverable by our methods or comprehensible under our logic.
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So to break it down. Two statements.

There are some things that are just unexplainable.

And

There are some things for which we do not have an explaination.


The first, which is kind of the end point you are driving at, is at the end of the day just another unprovable teapot, by its very nature it is a god of the gaps argument respun without a godhead, but rather an unknowable something that must be.

But that's kind of a null set, because there is no way to prove that something unknowable exists, and if it is a null statement, why take it into account?


To put it another way inmagine the the cups and balls trick, now imagine that you will never know how it is done, that does not make the trick not beholden to the natural laws of the universe, it just means you don't know the trick.



Also, the term " things" really needs to be defined.
 
kjyl said:
So to break it down. Two statements.

There are some things that are just unexplainable.

And

There are some things for which we do not have an explaination.


The first, which is kind of the end point you are driving at, is at the end of the day just another unprovable teapot, by its very nature it is a god of the gaps argument respun without a godhead, but rather an unknowable something that must be.

But that's kind of a null set, because there is no way to prove that something unknowable exists, and if it is a null statement, why take it into account?


To put it another way inmagine the the cups and balls trick, now imagine that you will never know how it is done, that does not make the trick not beholden to the natural laws of the universe, it just means you don't know the trick.



Also, the term " things" really needs to be defined.
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"Things" is necessarily vague.

We should take the possibility of unknowable things into account because failing to do so causes us to overestimate how certain our knowledge is. If our goal is to seek truth, we should keep in mind that reality is not obligated to be comprehensible. That's it. Just remembering that we have a limited perspective and limited tools and thus we might be missing things.

Also, I think you are conflating different kinds of unexplainable.

There are things we don't know, but might learn. This is the vast majority of unanswered scientific questions. How old is that fossil, how big is that star, how stable are pentaquarks, etc.

Then there is the possibility of questions we can never know the answers to. Imagine libertarian free will exists. It would be essentially impossible to prove it. If it didn't exist we could disprove it in theory, with extreme enough effort we might be able to predict every action a person is going to take. But if it does exist, we are unlikely to ever be able to prove it because we can always look for further possible determining factors or probabilistic curves. In that case there would be an answer, but we could never access it. Similarly, causally disconnected parallel universes, etc.

Then there are questions which just don't have answers. Brute facts. Some people have suggested the existence of the universe is a brute fact. It just is. Basic physical elements of reality might be brute facts, too. Why is there time, or electrical charge, or whatever. "There just is." That isn't a very satisfying conclusion, but reality isn't obligated to be satisfying. Something without a cause happening would also be a brute fact. Why did it happen? It just did.

All attainable scientific knowledge falls into the first category. All reality may not. That's it. There is nothing we should do about it, other than keep it in mind.

EDIT: The place where this becomes relevant is with things like the conversation that started this thread. Consciousness exists, even if we can't explain how it works. We should attempt to look for explanations for it, and we should avoid using it to "fill the gaps" in other theories. That's good science.

But we should remember that we are doing so because it is good science, and not because it must have a comprehensible explanation nor because we are sure it doesn't actually have any effect on the world.
 
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Oh damn seems like that one "philosophy of engineering" course has some use.

Shadell said:
As a practicing social scientist, I think some stripe of pragmatism is ultimately the most helpful view for philosophy of science. I actually had a wonderful chat about this today with a rhetorician from MIT. His big points (drawing mostly on Rorty, Kuhn and his own work) were that science is:
  • Rhetorical and value laden: At its core, the choice to research a topic is not neutral. There is no way to describe a thing that is neutral or objective as you are always making the choices of what to mention, what not to mention, what to emphasize, etc. Research on a theory or hypothesis gets done because someone decided that thing was worth testing for reasons that are situated and value-laden. Objectivity and neutrality in the concrete, rather than aspirational sense, are absurd notions that have no place beyond self-aggrandizement in the sciences, much as with journalism. The ways one frames a study or develops theory cannot be neutral and science itself demands that prospective scientists adhere to very specific ideology and assumptions regarding scientific process, theory, testing, etc. In this sense, science is not and cannot be ethically void, objective or purely observational. The act of theorizing is one of modeling and designing mechanisms to describe things that happen, not a statement of how things are.

  • But useful: Despite the fact that it is inevitably situated in biased and rhetorically grounded, rather than objective, perspectives, science makes novel predictions and explains more as time goes on. Technology advances, and progress occurs, though not strictly toward a big T universal truth. Not all theories are equally valid or useful in all circumstances. We wouldn't flip a coin to decide if we build a space shuttle based on well-understood concepts of engineering or literary analysis. A physics PhD student couldn't go to their advisor and announce "I've decided to pursue my degree on experimental Aristotelian physics," but these distinctions aren't bound to a rigid hierarchy of hard>soft or further from or closer to Truth, but a contextual one based on utility.
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These points seem to be closer to the philosophy of engineering, not science. The philosophies are close, but not quite similar. The choice to research a certain topic lies more into the realm of engineering philosophy then the eventual hypothesis formation and the resulting analysis. Engineering is not neutral at all, and therefore doesn't ascribe to the same goals as science.
kjyl said:
Also, the term " things" really needs to be defined.
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The "Thing" you are looking for is the hypothesis. At the core of the philisophy of Science is the circle of hypothesis formation and rejection. You observe a effect in the universe based on your senses (which you do not doubt ever because at that point you move away from science and into descarte's philosophical realm which is nice but useless for the philosophy of science in particular), you then form a hypothesis, and you attempt to disprove either this new hypothesis or a older hypothesis which conflicts with the new one. You test your hypotheses and based on the results one of the two is rejected. This leads back to the front of the circle with new understanding gained.

Repeat forever.

Essentially science does not care about the proof, but adheres to the truth of disproving things. Ala popper, since well, that's largely where it's from? The way hypotheses are then substantiated is by the amount of times they have come under fire and withstood it or the overlap with which they adhere to observations.

Nothing can be proven, but things can be proven to be false. All things that cannot be disproved stand as viable hypotheses until the day they can be disproved.
 
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