Phil Roberts, Jr.  wrote:

> John Wilkins wrote:
> > Phil Roberts, Jr.  wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>John Edser wrote:
> >>
> >>>PR:-
> 
> >>
> >>The folks I have cited (Bhaskar, Kuhn, Toulmin, Feyerabend, Manicas
> >>and Secord, Harre, Brown, Hanson, Polanyi, etc., have absolutely
> >>nothing to do with post modern reconstructivism, a decidedly
> >>philosophical bent.  The fact that the criterion of certainty
> >>has been abandoned in favor of the more realistic criterion
> >>of reasonableness has nothing in common with the thesis that
> >>pretty much anything goes (post modernism, as I understand it).
> > 
> > 
> > In analytic philosophy this is most often associated with the so-called
> > Gettier counterexamples, where something that was justified (made
> > reasonably certain) true and believed was not knowledge. But the attack
> > on the idea that knowledge required certainty was best made by
> > Wittgenstein in _On Certainty_.
> 
> The little brewhahhah over whether or not knowledge is "justified true
> belief" (the tripartite criterion, or some such rot) has never played
> much of a role in what philosophers of science have had to say about
> the nature of science.  Indeed, I would say its the sort of tempest
> in a teapot that gives philosophy a bad name.  The best author on
> this matter for me has been A. R. White, and his almost unheard of
> nifty little book, 'The Nature of Knowledge'.  He debunks the notion
> of justified true belief, and argues the issue of justification lies
> within the domain of epistemics, not epistemology, a view that Alvin
> Goldman has also come to embrace.  For White, knowledge is simply
> 'right representation'.

Don't know White - may look him up.
> 
> Haven't read Witt's 'On Certainty', but I think its widely understood
> that the real blow to certainty was the demise of Newtonain mechanics.
> Science is rarely influenced by developments in philosophy, I am told.

Then you are told wrong. Locke, Hume, Mill, Whewell, and the positivists
including Mach, Pearson, and of course people like Russell and Popper
all had an impact on the ways science was done. Einstein in particular
was influenced strongly by various philosophers, at least in the way he
approached the topic. What caused the demise of certainty was - I
believe - Hume's arguments against pyrrhonian skepticism, well before
Newtonian mechanics hit the edge of uncertainty :-)
> 
> In philosophy, I suspect Hansen's assault on "the myth of the given"
> has probably have more impact on philsopher's of science, if we
> are talking about philosophical influences.

The myth of the given was attacked by Wilfred Sellars. N. R. Hanson was
the "theory-dependence of observation", along with Popper shortly
afterwards.
> 
> > 
> > Postmodernism is a kind of "anything goes", but it is
easy to overstate
> > this. Caricatures don't help. Some postmodern views have a fairly good
> > grounding in things like social and conceptual relativisms.
> > 
> 
> Yes.  Much better.  Its about relativism, and as such, the foregoing
> of the notion of truth, etc.  Everythings pretty much a matter of
> opinion.  Perhaps thats a little better way of saying it.
> 
> Rather than merely opinion, underlying most modern science is the
> thesis of versimiltude, (e.g., Newton-Smith and others).  Scientists
> don't regard their work as merely opinion, but rather as
> getting closer to the truth, but perhaps with the acceptance that
> it is a goal that can never be entirely attained.  Its scientific
> realism devoid of certainty, I suppose.

As I recall it from my long-distant undergraduate days, verisimilitude
was Popper. But I am not entirely sure how it underlies science. So far
as I can tell, science proceeds identically if it adopts a realist or
anti-realist perspective (a la van Fraassen) although of course the
motivation for doing it is hard to find if one is a thoroughgoing
antirealist.
> 
> > 
> > Popper was most certainly *not* a positivist, and few who know the
> > history of 20thC philosophy would take him to be one. His abandonment in
> > philosophy of science and epistemology comes from the recognition that
> > falsificationism, even when made sophisticated, simply fails to account
> > for much of epistemic dynamics.
> > 
> 
> Authors I have read see an affinity in the fact that falsificationism
> was a critque and an attempt to repair verificationism, and cut
> from the same cloth in sharing the view that their is a simple
> algorithm for the doing of science.  Its part and parcel of the
> view that reasoning can be
> reduced to logic, rules, procedures.  But Ross Pero nailed it for
> me with his 'There ya go.  Now you've got it.  Ya see.  You're thinkin'
> outside the box'.

Don't recall Perot from philosophy of science 101...

There is a deep undercutting of the positivist approach in Popper's
attack on verification. Not least is the fact that he fails to reject
metaphysics even as an element in science, which is what really
*defines* positivism. When he characterised Darwinism as a "metaphysical
research programme" in his _Unended quest_, that was not a claim it was
unscientific, for example. For a positivist it would have been, but for
him it was a guiding set of ideas for research. of course he was wrong
about that, but the point is that he did not behave like apositivist in
any way. He is a positivist the way atheists are Christians.
> 
> > But to leap from that to aesthetic claims for knowledge is to equally
> > misrepresent things. Elegance is a test based on parsimony, which is a
> > guiding principle in empirical science. 
> 
> It depends on the level of abstraction you are working at.  That,
> and other factors, such as the existence of competing hypothesese,
> stiff resistance, etc.
> 
> The two examples I've cited were of two of the major discoveries of
> our century, relativity and DNA.  Both seemed to be heavily driven
> by aesthetic considerations.  I know that sounds crazy, but I'm not
> making this stuff up:
> 
>     Mike Douglas:
> 
>        'But how did you know that Linus Pauling's model of DNA
>         couldn't possibly be correct with only a brief chance
>         to examine it?'
> 
>     James Watson (with Crick's nodding approval in the background):
> 
>        'Because.  It wasn't beautiful.'
> 
I'm not denying that, but all the aesthetic considerations are not
ultimate justifications. They are derivative, heuristic rules of thumb.
If you have a clean and coherent theory to assess some hypothesis
against, then you can say something is elegant. But elegance is
insufficient to do more than guide you in your choices, and even then
may not be enough. Sometimes, ugly theories are the best.
> 
> Einstein's explanation of what got him thinking about relativity
> can be found in his book 'Ideas and Opinions'.  As I mentioned,
> it was to a large extent a result of his disatisfaction with
> the assymetry in Maxwell's equations.  That, and a number of
> thought experiements that couldn't be actually conducted, not
> even in principle.   I do think a minor test was proposed in
> the 1905 paper, but it never was of much interest to anyone.
> Eddington's experiment was dreamed up by someone else, as I
> recall.
> 
> > If something is adequate to the
> > task and elegant, then it is to be preferred to something that is
> > elegant to the task and baroque. 
> 
> Yes.  There are many considerations, and they occur in a dazzling
> array of hierarchies and machinations.  But that's more or less
> my point.  There is no simple royal road to science.  This is
> all part and parcel of the romantic notion that you can reduce
> reasoning to logic.  We have lots of reasons to believe this
> just ain't going to happen, ranging from Godel's proof to all
> sorts of paradoxes and contradictions starting to show up in
> decision theory (e.g., Newcomb's Problem, prisoner's dillema,
> etc.).

Can't dispute you on that. There is no Scientific Method. But there are
scientific methods, a whole family of them, and they resemble each other
like a family does. Some of them are even illegitimate...
> 
> e.g., check out Coleman's little spiel:
> http://pages.britishlibrary.net/blwww3/education/cooperation.htm
> 
> > 
> > Sometimes. There is a classical example of siologists of knowledge going
> > into the field and ignoring the science in favour of the "power
> > relations" or "institutional structures and functions" etc. 
> 
> Prof. Kuhn, no doubt.

No. Kuhn was not that sociological. He always maintained that there was
a core of prgessive knowledge to science. This goes by the general label
of "sociology of knowledge", and names like Bloor and Irigay pop up.
It's not my field.
> 
> > 
> >>Again, don't confuse me as arguing that testability is of no value.  Its
> >>a HIGHLY VALUED epistemic tool, the gold standard, as a matter of fact.
> >>Its just that its not the only one available, and rarely of concern when
> >>first formulating hypothesese.
> > 
> > 
> > Arguable. One thing that is uppermost in the minds of those I know is
> > whether or not they can adduce experimental evidence for a novel idea.
> 
> Depends on the context, and the level of abstraction, would be my point.
> And, as hard as it is to believe, beauty is often a hallmark of truth
> to some of these folks.  For example, subatomic physics is deeply
> concerned with symmetry.  If you find a particle of such and such,
> you can pretty much bet the farm you are going to find a contrasting
> counterpart somewhere in the mix.

In this case it is theoretical biology through to medical research.
> 
> > Typically, they devise an experiment. Many do not work out, and the
> > ideas are dropped, even when they put a lot of work into it.
> > 
> 
> What experiment did Dalton propose when he postulated atomic theory
> to account for the law of multiple proportions?
> 
> What "test" did Rutherford propose to confirm his hypothesis that
> the alpha particle angles were caused by atomic nucleii?
> 
What reason do we have for thinking that what people did before the
"technological revolution" of the post-War era is what scientists do
now? Anyway, it matters not what people themselves propose as a test -
it is what the discipline or speciality can be expected to propose.
> > 
> > 
> > Darwin's tests were manifold. 
> 
> On what page of 'Origin', or perhaps just the chapter, will I be able
> to find Mr. Darwin proposing these tests?
> 
> > Some of them involved finding adaptations
> > that served other species, or the lack of a feasible pathway for the
> > development of *any* organ or arrangement over evolutionary time. Since
> > on of the major explananda was the arrangement of groups within groups
> > in taxonomy (explained by common descent), the existence of cases that
> > did not meet this would be a test of the universality of common descent
> > (and with lateral transfer and studies on hybridisation, Darwin's thesis
> > *has* been substantially modified since).

Go to a web version (the first and sixth edition are at the Darwin
online site) and search for "objections", "fatal to my
theory" and so
forth. The discussion on the eye is a case in point, but also the
discussion on eusocial insects.
> > 
> 
> Remember, we are not talking about subsequent "tests", but
those proposed
> by Darwin himself, given your and John's contention that one can not
> possibly propose a theory without also proposing a means of testing it,
> that such behavior would be "unscientific".

Sorry, I don't think I suggested that.
> 
> > 
> > Reproductive fitness is not now and hasn't been since Wright began
> > publishing in the 1930s, the sole test of evolution. This is a classical
> > overselectionist mistake.
> 
> I could use a bit of elaboration on this, old bean.   :)  Are we talking
> Sewall Wright?
> 
Yes, we are.

-- 
John Wilkins
B'dies, Brutius
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