Re: The Intellectual Origin of Positivism
From: Lester Zick (lesterDELzick_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 07/17/04
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Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 16:37:22 GMT
On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 19:37:02 GMT, "Abakus" <abakus@ntlworld.com> in
comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>"Lester Zick" <lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
>news:40f6f0ab.28998983@netnews.att.net...
>> I never said or suggested that speculation is not a necessary part of
>> the practice of science. And if you want to learn about the practice
>> of science, you have to learn about speculation. If you want to learn
>> about the science itself, you study validated results of speculation
>> and not speculation itself. You learn geometry the same way by
>> learning the axioms, theorems, and proofs of Euclid and Pythagoras and
>> not the speculations they used to arrive at their insights.
>>
>> Obviously you consider the practice of science the same as science
>> and draw no distinction between them. If you think I'm not trying to
>> understand your position it's only because I see a valid distinction
>> between what is known and how it got to be known.
>>
>> Regards - Lester
>
>I understand your position more clearly now. It is true that sometimes
>science is defined or understood both as the methods used for building a
>body of knowledge and as the body of knowledge itself, which is acquired
>using those methods. I can see now that you understand science as the second
>definition, ie, as the body of knowledge. In general, though, most
>scientists and philosophers of science tend to view science as the process
>of acquiring scientific knowledge, not the knowledge itself. And that is
>why, with this definition, speculation is an integral part of science. Like
>Bridgman said in his book Reflections of a Physicist: "science is what
>scientists do".
Science can certainly be understood both ways. However, I think there
are very good reasons for differentiating the concepts, particularly
with respect to the doers of the subject and the subject itself in the
abstract. There is nothing speculative in the subject of a science
insofar as validated results are concerned, but there is definitely
speculation associated with the accumulation of ideas on the subject.
A real problem occurs when the subject is confused with practitioners
of the subject and their methods. For instance, your final quote
"science is what scientists do" subjectifies science and is often
taken to be "science is whatever scientists do", which is nonsense.
Otherwise we are locked in an infinite regress with no definition for
science.
I classify science by subject studied according to the properties used
for analysis. We have physics and the physical sciences associated
with the study of physical or material interactions with experimental
methods dictated by those properties. And we have sentient behavioral
sciences characterized by the experimental analysis of sentient
interactions.
What we do not have, however, are sentient behavioral sciences with
the experimental analysis of physical interactions or physical
sciences characterized by the analysis of sentient interactions of
matter. When we characterize sciences in terms of what scientists do,
we run afoul of such distinctions because we have no independent
definition for the science itself.
When we associate speculation with science rather than practitioners
of science, the difficulty we run into is trying to formalize or
generalize speculation as a facet of science. Science generalizes
knowledge not speculation. Knowledge can be generalized. Speculation
cannot. There are no definitive methods of speculation which are valid
an others which are not. The fact is that we don't know how scientists
arrive at their insights. But we do know that those insights can be
and are generalizable in relation to other insights.
This is why I consider it critical to distinguish scientific insights
from those indeterminate and unscientific speculative processes
leading to those insights. The former we can study systematically as
subjects of science. But the latter can only be studied historically
according to who had what idea under what circumstances and so on.
Regards - Lester
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