Tuesday, March 14, 2006
4 theories that might be true (or maybe not)
Naturalism - The philosophical claim that all phenomena, supernatural or otherwise, can be studied by the same methods. A naturalistic approach to inquiry limits itself to natural, physical, and material approaches. Methodological naturalism, the variant used in the scientific method, assumes that all observations have a natural explanation, leaving no room for the supernatural. In other words, this philosophy, central to the scientific method, excludes the supernatural as an explanation before it begins. Another form of naturalism, called metaphysical naturalism, holds that the natural world is all that exists. True? Maybe. False? Maybe. Impossible to know? Yes.
Uniformity - This is the assumption that the future will resemble the past and that the past resembles the present. The philosopher Hume made much of this assumption in his works on miracles, claiming that the uniformity of the universe proves that miracles are impossible. The structure of the philosophy and the fallacy of making this assumption rigid can be demonstrated by a magic bag of marbles.
Assume that the universe is that bag and every scientific investigation is pulling a marble from the bag. The earliest scholars pulled marbles and found that red marbles are always followed by blue marbles, and vice versa, but did not have the scientific tools necessary to determine whether all of the red marbles were the same. Modern study has made this simple - every red marble is followed by a blue marble, which is followed by an identical red marble, etc. This is the case every time somebody performs an experiment and pulls a new marble from the bag.
Now, in some ancient work (or modern news story), we read about a man, perhaps claiming to be a prophet, who reached into the bag and extracted a red marble, and then immediately extracted another red marble. Horrors! Miracles! Signs and wonders! Naturally, given our experience with the bag, we might question the authenticity of that second marble. The observation was wrong, the man was a nutbag, or the ancients were simply stupid, confusing blue for red. Hume argued that we should distrust the earlier story because the total experience of mankind has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the bag contains only alternating red and blue marbles.
Is this justified? Since there is at least one instance in which two red marbles may have been produced, we cannot verify Hume's assumption. The total experience of mankind is ripe with stories of dual reds, dual blues, purples, greens, yellows, and aquamarines! We must discount all of these stories before we can even begin to assume that uniformity is true. Since we were not there, we can only do this by making the assumption that there are only alternating red and blue marbles in the bag - that is, we must assume that uniformity is true!
Empiricism - The assumption or philosophy that all human knowledge comes from experience or the senses. It is this assumption that has led to the great boom in experimental science over the past two centuries, and led to a great number of advances as a result. Humans, it says, are born with no innate ideas about the supernatural, the universe, etc. Therefore, the only knowledge we can say is true is that which has been demonstrated and tested via the scientific method. Some religions claim that there are other sources of knowledge - revealed knowledge, for instance - and that these should be given equal weight. Some quantum physicists also argue that the many-worlds interpretation shows that our experience is irrelevant. Who is right? It's impossible to be certain, but scientists assume for the sake of the scientific method that this is the case.
Instrumentalism - This important philosophy, largely ignored by the scientific community, claims that all of the concepts and theories produced by scientific research are merely tools that happen to be the best way to explain phenomena. These theories and concepts do not necessarily represent actual reality, but merely explain it. Scientists before the 20th century generally assumed this to be the case, but this philosophy is not given much attention in modern thought.
In the 19th century, scientists assumed that a fluid called luminiferous ether [2] [3] [4] permeated the entire universe and was the conduction medium in which light travelled. During its reign, the luminiferous ether provided elegant explanations for the behavior of light, electricity, and magnetism. The interactions between the aether and matter were well-documented and explained all of the known properties of light. James Clerk Maxwell, the pioneer of electromagnetic theory, expressed his famous equations in terms of the ether. Twenty years after Maxwell's death, clever experiments showed that the luminiferous ether did not exist and, twenty years after that, the theory was largely replaced by Einstein's theory of relativity. Maxwell's equations were adjusted into their modern form to compensate for the lack of ether.
Clearly, although the ether does not exist, it provided a powerful framework in which scientists developed everything from the telephone to the radio to the electric light. Contemporary science writers did not lament the lack of information about the ether. They speculated how it might behave, but its actual nature (and even existence) was irrelevant. How many modern theories, concepts, and structures will be viewed in a similar light in 100 years?
Uniformity - This is the assumption that the future will resemble the past and that the past resembles the present. The philosopher Hume made much of this assumption in his works on miracles, claiming that the uniformity of the universe proves that miracles are impossible. The structure of the philosophy and the fallacy of making this assumption rigid can be demonstrated by a magic bag of marbles.
Assume that the universe is that bag and every scientific investigation is pulling a marble from the bag. The earliest scholars pulled marbles and found that red marbles are always followed by blue marbles, and vice versa, but did not have the scientific tools necessary to determine whether all of the red marbles were the same. Modern study has made this simple - every red marble is followed by a blue marble, which is followed by an identical red marble, etc. This is the case every time somebody performs an experiment and pulls a new marble from the bag.
Now, in some ancient work (or modern news story), we read about a man, perhaps claiming to be a prophet, who reached into the bag and extracted a red marble, and then immediately extracted another red marble. Horrors! Miracles! Signs and wonders! Naturally, given our experience with the bag, we might question the authenticity of that second marble. The observation was wrong, the man was a nutbag, or the ancients were simply stupid, confusing blue for red. Hume argued that we should distrust the earlier story because the total experience of mankind has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the bag contains only alternating red and blue marbles.
Is this justified? Since there is at least one instance in which two red marbles may have been produced, we cannot verify Hume's assumption. The total experience of mankind is ripe with stories of dual reds, dual blues, purples, greens, yellows, and aquamarines! We must discount all of these stories before we can even begin to assume that uniformity is true. Since we were not there, we can only do this by making the assumption that there are only alternating red and blue marbles in the bag - that is, we must assume that uniformity is true!
Empiricism - The assumption or philosophy that all human knowledge comes from experience or the senses. It is this assumption that has led to the great boom in experimental science over the past two centuries, and led to a great number of advances as a result. Humans, it says, are born with no innate ideas about the supernatural, the universe, etc. Therefore, the only knowledge we can say is true is that which has been demonstrated and tested via the scientific method. Some religions claim that there are other sources of knowledge - revealed knowledge, for instance - and that these should be given equal weight. Some quantum physicists also argue that the many-worlds interpretation shows that our experience is irrelevant. Who is right? It's impossible to be certain, but scientists assume for the sake of the scientific method that this is the case.
Instrumentalism - This important philosophy, largely ignored by the scientific community, claims that all of the concepts and theories produced by scientific research are merely tools that happen to be the best way to explain phenomena. These theories and concepts do not necessarily represent actual reality, but merely explain it. Scientists before the 20th century generally assumed this to be the case, but this philosophy is not given much attention in modern thought.
In the 19th century, scientists assumed that a fluid called luminiferous ether [2] [3] [4] permeated the entire universe and was the conduction medium in which light travelled. During its reign, the luminiferous ether provided elegant explanations for the behavior of light, electricity, and magnetism. The interactions between the aether and matter were well-documented and explained all of the known properties of light. James Clerk Maxwell, the pioneer of electromagnetic theory, expressed his famous equations in terms of the ether. Twenty years after Maxwell's death, clever experiments showed that the luminiferous ether did not exist and, twenty years after that, the theory was largely replaced by Einstein's theory of relativity. Maxwell's equations were adjusted into their modern form to compensate for the lack of ether.
Clearly, although the ether does not exist, it provided a powerful framework in which scientists developed everything from the telephone to the radio to the electric light. Contemporary science writers did not lament the lack of information about the ether. They speculated how it might behave, but its actual nature (and even existence) was irrelevant. How many modern theories, concepts, and structures will be viewed in a similar light in 100 years?
# posted by Dev @ 9:03 AM 
