Philosophy of Science: Classical Empiricism

Professor Jeffery Kasser produced a series of 36 lectures through The Great Courses entitled Philosophy of Science.

These are my notes, commentary, and synopsis from Kasser’s lectures.  The author of this blog highly recommends this course as a high quality lecture on the philosophy of science.

One may purchase the entire course here.

Friday, June 29, 2012

The argument that concepts should be connected to experience has a long history, even apart from science.  Before the logical positivists and the logical empiricists began their arguments at the beginning of the 20^th century, philosophy had been considering these issues a few centuries before.  Empiricism asserts - roughly - that the source of knowledge is through experience, or, more precisely, through experience from the senses.

Locke is regarded as the first empiricist.  His project was to find and determine the limits of knowledge.  He also wished to investigate the sources of knowledge, and to place a scope on knowledge.

Locke claimed that experience was the source of thought.  Everything inside the mind came from the senses.  Ideas are inside the mind but are composed of attributes taken only through the senses.  The mind perceives sights, sounds and other sensations, but cannot directly sense the physical object.  The mind has two basic powers: combination and abstraction.  Abstraction focuses on parts of an idea.  Combination allows the mind to take these parts of ideas and then rearrange them into new ideas; in some cases these ideas are not found in the world of experience– unicorns, for example. 

This philosophical point of view places limits on what we can know.  The inner nature of things is unavailable to us since our ideas are limited only to the perceptions provided by our senses.  There is no practical way to understand how these external objects interact with our senses to create the ideas within our minds. 

Empiricism helps to clarify ideas.  However, it does not give confidence that we can assume things about reality before we understand the limitations that the perceptual process places upon our access to knowledge of external objects. 

George Berkeley, another empiricist, claimed that reliance upon experience implies more radical conclusions than Locke proposed.  He claimed that we have no direct experience of matter, and we cannot get a complete idea of matter through abstraction.  He asserts that we cannot imagine anything without its properties.  The process by which material objects produce sensations within our minds is mysterious.  He claimed that God puts these ideas into our minds directly, and does not use matter as a medium to transmit these ideas into our minds.  He wanted us to abandon the effort to go beyond our experience and sense organs to access the matter (or things) behind these sense impressions. 

What we experience through our senses is the world itself; there are no objects imprinting themselves upon our sense organs.  We can discover the patterns created within our experiences, and learn to predict subsequent patterns; Newton’s Laws are an example of the discovery of these patterns.  Science develops rules on the experiences we will have.

Berkeley wanted to purge skepticism and atheism from philosophy.  He saw his work contributing to these ends.

Dave Hume’s conclusions are more radical than Berkeley’s.  Hume takes empiricism to some of its logical conclusions.  Hume wanted to bring experimental methods to philosophy.  Applying this rigorously, Hume discovered that some of our crucial notions have a questionable link to experience.  Experience merely reveals one set of sensations followed by others.  These sequences of sensations do not reveal any causal link among themselves, and thus, our notion of causality (cause and effect) has no grounding in experience.  Our sense impressions are always changing, and thus, we do not experience anything enduring.  Even our sense of self does not endure.  Hume also speculated that we may not be thinking beings, but beings that experience one series of impressions followed by others. 

Can we call anything evidence that we do not experience now?  Can we be sure that our memory of experience and impressions is real, accurate or true?  This reasoning process ends in a deep form of skepticism.

Among Hume’s conclusions was that some of our core notions are meaningless or have no basis in experience, or mean something different from what we would think on first impression.  With this, Hume questioned philosophy’s position with regard to science.  Where does philosophy fit in with regard to scientific empiricism?  Hume also concluded with a notion of what is called “Hume’s Fork.” Hume’s Fork claims that meaningful statements must be in one of two forms:  (1) relations of ideas, or (2) matters of fact.  (1) can be things such as logic or mathematics, while (2) can be the empirical sciences.  Hume, as one would expect, was interested in matters of fact.  He saw his project as discovering the laws of the mind as Newton discovered laws of nature. 

Many wonder if Hume’s project is psychology.  Many also wonder if the Philosophy of Science and Philosophy in general is psychology without the experiments.

Toward the end of the lecture, we observe several issues that the empiricists of the 17^th and 18^th centuries had to deal with:

• How to reconcile experience with reasoning in order to do serious science and philosophy?
• Can philosophy connect experience to reasoning processes to demonstrate its legitimacy?
• Is philosophy merely science without evidence?

Commentary

In contrast to Hume’s conclusions questioning the legitimacy of philosophy, he demonstrates the exact opposite.  If one claims that empiricism justifies science, Hume’s reasoning demonstrates the potential illegitimacy of empiricism, not philosophy.  Philosophy investigates and then subsequently poses questions.  If these investigations reveal the lack of grounding in philosophy for empiricism, the philosophical critique holds.  To conclude that this line of reasoning undermines philosophy is backwards.  When a messenger (philosophy) delivers a message (empiricism has no rational ground), one is not credible in questioning the messenger (dogmatically holding to empiricism and assuming – not proving – that philosophy is the culprit).

This discussion contributes to a widely held notion among defenders of science that lack of evidence to any idea places the idea outside the bounds of knowledge.  Even empirical science has to abstract several stages from experience to reason toward physical laws and principles.  Furthermore, scientists will question the evidence itself when such evidence contradicts an established theory; this common practice is a spectacular contribution to the demonstration of the legitimacy of philosophy.  When one rejects evidence on theoretical grounds, one is doing philosophy.  Finally, the empiricist assertion cannot be taken seriously when one considers the entire realm of mathematics, where one can reason completely within a system of thought without any evidence whatsoever.  It would be foolish to claim that mathematics is not knowledge.

In conclusion, we know from observing scientific work that evidence of the senses – experience - contributes to science, but it is not clear how to connect evidence to theory.  This effort was a spectacular failure of the classical empiricists.  Their promise of a method to connect experience to theory, and thereby setting all other knowledge outside the bounds of knowledge, does not work.

Philosophy of Science: Operationalism

Philosophy of Science: Operationalism

Professor Jeffery Kasser produced a series of 36 lectures through The Great Courses entitled Philosophy of Science.

These are my notes, commentary, and synopsis from Kasser’s lectures.  The author of this blog highly recommends this course as a high quality lecture on the philosophy of science.

One may purchase the entire course here.

Operationalism was part of a spectacular attempt, followed by failure, of logical positivism (or logical empiricism).  To understand operationalism, we must first discuss the effect of Einstein on the thinking about science at that time.

The principle of relativity pre-dated Einstein.  If two people are floating in empty space, they are moving with respect to one another without regard to any other objects – any other objects are not needed to define their motion with respect to each other.  A similar principle applies when one is on a ship at sea on smooth waters within a room inside the ship with no windows.  Objects move within that room as if they were in a room on land.  If I were running away from a guy named Jim at 10 miles per hour, and Jim threw a baseball past me at 30 miles per hour, then relative to me, the ball would be moving 20 miles per hour.  This idea worked out fine for all known objects at the time except for one: light.  No matter how fast an object moved, light always appeared to move away from that same object at the same speed in all directions.  The core problem for science at that time was the relativity of all other objects, and the non-relativity of the speed of light. 

Einstein proposed a radical solution to this problem.  He did not ignore the results; he accepted the measurements.  He instructed his peers that they needed to reevaluate core assumptions about space and time.  The mistake was to assume that we had clear ideas about time and length.  Einstein’s solution accepted the data by allowing time and length to expand and contract.  Our mistaken assumptions could be fixed if we focused upon the experience and measurements of the investigation.  This idea of focus upon the measurements and the data had a profound influence upon the scientists of that time.

P. W. Bridgman attempted a solution to this problem in light of Einstein’s proposals.  His solution is called Operationalism.  Operationalism insists that one’s concepts and ideas should never supersede looking directly at nature – looking directly at the measurements and the experiences of the scientific investigation.  We must always ensure that something in nature – something in the experience of the investigation – clearly corresponds to our concepts. 

Operationalism defines scientific concepts in terms of operations we must perform to measure or observe things corresponding to the concept.  Length, for example, is not a property inherent in an object, as one may suppose; but a series of operations or procedures one uses with a device such as a meter stick.  For operationalism, this is all length is – similarly for any other property.  One must also ponder that this also means that all different procedures from measuring the same property are, strictly speaking, different operations; using a meter stick versus using radar are two different definitions of length.  Bridgman proposed that some phenomena are directly observable and need no operational procedure. 

Operationalism has some problems which seem to defy solution.  How does one specify that during the performance of an operational procedure one does not have any additional factors affecting the measurement?  For example, how does one design an operation that eliminates forces of magnetism and radiation pressure for the measurement of an object’s weight upon a balance scale?  There is a strange and open question as to how one can claim that a mercury thermometer and an alcohol thermometer measure the same characteristic of temperature when the operational procedures are not the same.  Another example Kasser points out is the measurement of temperature on the Sun.  We have no measurement device to perform this operation (we are told).  Thus, what we call temperature on the surface of the sun is not an operational definition, but assumes temperature as a concept apart from a measurement device, which is against the point of operationalism.

Brief Commentary

It seems that we cannot get away from abstract concepts.  Many in science claim that it is strictly empirical and focused upon observation and data.  However, even a basic, observable idea such as length is an abstract concept.  One must use abstract reasoning to understand that length measurements of a radar and length measurements of a meter stick have in common the exact same concept of ‘length.’ 

The old Problem of Universals in philosophy has been around for thousands of years, and nobody can get around it, as far as we can tell.  For example, nobody can point in space to a physical object corresponding to the idea of ‘the square root of two.’  One must use non-physical abstract reasoning to understand the square root of two.  And, nobody can provide empirical evidence of the existence of the square root of two.  However, only a strange person would deny the reality of the square root of two.  The same problem seems to apply to science: all its units are abstract ideas.  Empirical claims do not rely strictly on observation.  Science cannot ignore these metaphysical problems.

Strange Writing Phenomena

This probably goes without saying with hard core readers, but, in every text, there is the apparent meaning and the hidden meaning (Perhaps for every text, there are even multiple layers of meaning). I used to think that this hidden meaning only applied to the great books like the Holy Bible, Plato’s Republic, or Shakespeare. Everyone has come back to some writing after a few years, to reread it and find some new meaning that was not apparent on the first scan. The strange thing is that I have even found this phenomenon with my own writing; things I wrote ten years ago I read again, and find some hidden meaning that I as the author did not understand or know about. Perhaps this phenomenon is congruent with Jung’s suggestion that most of what goes on in our minds is unconscious. The little light that we experience as consciousness is a very small portion of what is going on. He even speculated that consciousness was a creation of the unconscious mind for particular purposes. So, we have (using Jung’s terms) our Shadow, our Anima or Animus, and our Self quietly sitting on our shoulders as we think and write, revealing themselves in multiple layers that are not even apparent to us. Even what is “out there” as we perceive it, may perhaps be one of these hidden aspects of our psyche, and even something called a numinous Archetype expressing itself as a Complex. As I wrote a few days ago, “Who knows?” The Shadow knows.

Philosophy of Science: The Problem of Demarcation

Philosophy of Science: The Problem of Demarcation

Professor Jeffery Kasser produced a series of 36 lectures through The Great Courses entitled Philosophy of Science.

These are my notes, commentary, and synopsis from Kasser’s lectures.  The author of this blog highly recommends this course as a high quality lecture on the philosophy of science.

One may purchase the entire course here.

What makes science so special?  It seems to be special.  It makes extraordinary claims.  It usually speaks with authority in our courts and in all sections of government policy.  What is the basis of its power or prestige?  Does it deserve this prestige and power?

It seems that since science is so powerful and prestigious that we should have some criteria by which to define something as scientific.  There should be a procedure by which we can determine whether or not something is called science: we should be able to clearly determine what is included in science and what is excluded from science.  This is called the Problem of Demarcation.  Thus, we should define what is considered science and what we can call pseudo-science.

One may claim that a scientific claim is true, and that a pseudo-scientific claim is false.  One should be very careful with this claim, because upon close examination, it does not stand.  Science often makes claims that are false.  If the criterion for being scientific is falsifiability, then if one is to do science, some false predictions will happen, and are expected.  On the other hand, many pseudo-sciences often make true claims.  Astrology occasionally makes true claims with regard to your horoscope; some claims are false, but so are many scientific claims.  Thus, the truth or falsity of a claim cannot be the sole criteria of whether or not something is scientific.  If false claims are excluded from science, then we cannot get started with science by testing whether or not some claims are false in the first place.

Karl Popper made a useful contribution to the philosophy of science by attempting to define a core feature of a scientific claim, which was widely influential in his time and even today.  Popper wanted to distinguish what science was doing as opposed to that Freud, Marx, and Adler were doing; he considered the work they did as outside of the boundaries of science.  In their time, however, their work was widely considered scientific. 

One of Popper’s shocking assertions is that science is not special because of its conformance to observational evidence.  Pseudo-science uses plenty of evidence.  Astrology is a good example.  Observation is cheap: one can use observations to prove virtually anything.  Freud and Marx could make just about any evidence fit their theories.  This was a bad characteristic of their theories, according to Popper.  Evidence does not falsify pseudo-scientific claims.  Fitting data well is not is not the mark of a scientific theory. 

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was a genuine scientific theory according to Popper.  Einstein’s theory made predictions.  These predictions were testable.  More importantly, these theories were falsifiable.  Einstein claimed that the sun’s gravitational field would bend light.  The theory survived a severe test after experiments observed this bold claim.

Popper claims that a scientific theory is falsifiable.  Science should make bold claims and then seek to falsify them.  Popper claimed that this is what scientists actually do and what they should do: this was an “is” and an “ought” proposition from Popper.  This, however, is not to be interpreted as a necessary condition; it is only a sufficient condition.  Not all falsifiable claims are scientific, but all scientific claims are falsifiable. 

Popper was not saying that people like Freud, Marx, and Adler did not say important things.  He was merely asserting that we cannot call their work scientific.  Popper even originally claimed that Darwin’s theory was pseudo-scientific, until later on when he changed his mind after a closer inspection of the theory.

Such a nice, straight-forward criteria for at least entry into the category of science sounds about right to many, but there are some problems with Popper’s approach.  Kasser’s example is a good illustration, “There is at least one gold sphere at least one mile in diameter in the universe.”  Such a claim does not appear to be falsifiable, but it does not appear to be unscientific either.  Statistical claims also appear unfalsifiable.  Kasser’s example is that a run of 50 sixes in a row does not falsify a claim that the die is fair.  Another problem is that if a theory is treated scientifically, is it science, or does the theory have to be stated scientifically?  It is also not clear if theories should be rejected simply because the theory does not conform to some observed results; the measuring instruments could have been defective, or the data may have been subject to fluctuations within the tolerance of the aforementioned statistical error. 

The virtue of Newton’s theory was that it explained a lot, not that it was falsifiable.  Thus, is it not clear that a theory is not scientific if it provides good explanations.  Perhaps if the data fits perfectly to the theory, the theory should be taken seriously in some cases.  Thus, Popper’s claim, while somewhat useful, is not air-tight, and in some cases, it appears not to offer any help in defining the necessary conditions of a scientific theory. 

Kasser claims that it is difficult to interpret falsifiability whereby physics passes the test and Freud does not.  Perhaps this is because in the process of doing physics, many ideas are falsified, and then reworked until they fit, as they would in Freud’s work and approach.  Kasser is not claiming that there is no difference between, say, Astrology and Physics; he is claiming that it is very difficult to see how Physics meets the falsifiability criteria while Astrology does not. 

In doing science, one cannot merely reject theories that have failed confirmation by evidence; if this were the case, science would stop.  A major task of science is reconciling the theory and the data: refining, regrouping, rearranging, and correcting failures of fit.  One must always be reminded that one cannot merely reject false theories as unscientific while asserting falsifiability criteria.  Popper stresses that science should make bold assertions and then seek to falsify them.  Thus, even false theories can be scientific, if they can be formatted according to the falsification criteria, according to Popper.  Such fields such as medicine tolerate a lot of false claims and theories due to its extreme complexity, but one can hardly claim that medical research is not scientific.

Other criteria have been proposed as solutions to the scientific Problem of Demarcation.  None look as hopeful as Popper’s criteria.  One proposal is that progress is a mark of science.  However, fields such as Chemistry have not progressed much in the last 50 years, while one may argue that Astrology has made progress with more data available on the position of the planets and the stars to aid in predictions for horoscopes.  Another proposal is that pseudo-science has no explanatory mechanism, while science does.  On the contrary, one must be reminded that one of the most successful scientific theories in history, Newton’s laws, posit the attraction of planets toward each other with some mysterious force called gravity that “reaches out” and “pulls” these large bodies together.  Newton does not attempt to explain the mechanism of gravity, but merely describes what happens with predictions that are more or less accurate.  Another proposal is that science is whatever a community of scientists says it is.  One must be reminded, however, that in the Soviet Union, there was a state-sponsored consensus on the truth of the biological theories of Lysenko, which is considered pseudo-science today.  There are proposals that pseudo-science is of dubious origin.  This does not work because almost all of science emerged from mythology or speculation; Alchemy preceded Chemistry.  A final illustrative proposal is that pseudo-science uses defective forms of reasoning in their theorizing.  If this is true, what of scientific theories that use reasoning by analogy, such as the gas laws which assume that gas molecules are little round balls?  Pseudo-science uses plenty of argument by analogy, and so does what is considered as real science. 

Kasser discusses an important debate in the court system which bears on the scientific Problem of Demarcation.  Forms of Creationism have not fared well within the US court system, where is has generally been declared to be pseudo-scientific.  However, as we have discussed above, there is no sure way of Demarcation in science, and all the arguments claiming that Creationism is pseudo-science can be applied to other legitimate branches of science.  It seems that the Problem of Demarcation has not been solved, and thus, calling something pseudo-science is problematic without this solution.

Kasser concludes with the claims that most philosophers do not think that the scientific Problem of Demarcation has received enough attention.  We cannot develop sure criteria for distinguishing between poor scientific theories and non-scientific theories.  If we do not address the Problem of Demarcation, we have no basis to declare that Astrology or Creationism as unscientific.  Furthermore, if we do not develop an adequate basis for scientific Demarcation, then declaring something as scientific is not much of an accomplishment.  For clarification, Kasser explains just because there are no criteria for scientific Demarcation does not mean that none can be formed. 

In conclusion, the scientific Problem of Demarcation is extremely difficult to formulate, and no criteria are satisfactory to date.  This presents problems because institutions must choose some criteria for scientific funding.  If there are no criteria for defining what is and is not science, how can we formulate acceptable criteria as to what is good science worthy of funding?  There are also legal and political consequences for this Demarcation problem since courts often decide what is good, bad or pseudo-science with regard to public policy on issues of public school curricula (creationism), environmental policy (pollution), regulations (smoking), medical funding, and health care, among other things.  Often, governments institute laws and regulations from the basis of scientific studies and scientific authority.  However, this study has illustrated that we cannot easily define what science is, much less why it is special and deserves such authority and recognition.

We often feel that science is special and deserves some authority and respect, but we have not gotten past its definition any further than, “I know it when I see it.”