> Strong Scientism: Of all the knowledge we have, scientific knowledge is the only “real knowledge.”
Stupid question. What is an example of a hypothesis that is not falsifiable by experiment but should still be considered "knowledge"?
Stupid question. What is an example of a hypothesis that is not falsifiable by experiment but should still be considered "knowledge"?
I switched from physics to art to (ultimately) design and programming. You have no idea how much ignorance many physicists have of research that isn't easily quantifiable and turned into predictive formulas. I had to go through a period of growing more "aware" of my tunnel-vision myself. As a result, flat-out rejection of entire fields of research, claiming they do not create "real" knowledge is common.
On the flipside there's people trying to apply physics-style reductionism to problems that simply don't fit, because human societies aren't built up of spherical frictionless humans in a vacuum[1].
Example: I did my master thesis of interaction design on gesture interfaces (the waving-hands-in-the-air kind, not the touchscreen kind), a topic that has been researched over forty years but has yet to really break through. One paper I read mentioned that on average the right index finger was raised one-point-zero-something times more often than the left. Sample size twenty or so. I still don't know how that is supposed to help me design better interfaces; right-handedness being the norm is a known, and I cannot conclude anything from these numbers. But hey, it's quantified and measured, therefore "proper" knowledge!
A lot of people believe that fundamental principles of ethics also belong there. For example, we may be able to demonstrate whether or not something is a net benefit to the combined happiness of sentient beings, but I cannot see how one might even attempt to falsify the hypothesis that sentient beings matter at all.
If it doesn't aid in understanding the world then I'm not sure it qualifies as knowledge.
(Or, if as in the other comment chain, 1+1=2 is too obvious, you can take any sufficiently non-trivial theorem of your choosing).
You can investigate whether it is consistent with other definitions. I believe that doing so is empirical work, which I think is consistent with a broad notion of science
The experiment would be to go about the deduction. It is falsifiable.
If you include thought experiments based on nothing but arbitrary axioms, a lot of crazy claims about supernatural beings and other metaphysical curiosities would also qualify as falsifiable. I'm not sure whether you'd like to go down that rabbit hole. Science is about understanding the actual physical world that we live in -- not some fantasy world no matter how internally consistent it might be.
What does the number 1.97 even mean in a world where 1 + 1 ≠ 2? When you falsify 1 + 1 = 2, you also end up denying the validity of the very experiment that you used in the process. If a hypothesis can only be falsified by self-invalidating experiments, does it count as falsifiable?
1+1=2 does not relate to an experiment; it is a statement about relations of concepts, not material entities.
As the paper points out, things like the following are problematic from a purely experimental approach:
"Scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge."
Yet many scientists treat it as common knowledge.
Isn't this a falsifiable hypothesis?
If you analyzed various predictions made by scientific and non scientific knowledge then you could compare them and determine if one was "better".
That historical performance might not hold but the sun may not rise in the east.
That the scientific method has not be employed because our heuristics say the answer is obvious does not mean it cannot be employed.
I do agree that the scientific method is too high a bar for something to be considered knowledge.
The problem is labelling what is beneficial and what is not. That is a value judgement. But if certain human rights are universal, we can agree on at least a subset of benefits.
That's an acceptance that philosophy is useful. Pragmatic utilitarian is one kind of philosophy.
> The problem is labelling what is beneficial and what is not. That is a value judgement.
See my reply to the other post above. [1] Philosophy is the discipline that specialises in the problem of rational analysis of value judgements. A good way to agree on which rights and valuable benefits to use is to discuss them philosophically.
Isn't the loss of objectivity just a result of the question having more degrees of freedom than it does constraints, and the subjectivity just comes from picking which constraints to assume? Doesn't a well defined goal turn that question into a positive question?
A simpler example could be, "is it better for me to build a bridge over a highway out of cardboard or out of steel?"
It's superficially normative but becomes a positive question as soon as you define the constraint that a bridge that no one needlessly dies while walking across is better than one that kills people.
At that point all of these questions become scientifically approachable, although some are likely still hopelessly complex, as soon as you assume an axiom like, "it is best to maximize the ratio of well being over conscious suffering."
What that axiom should actually be is likely a nearly unapproachably complex amalgamation of philosophy, but it seems more reasonable to work with something than assume that there is no right answer, especially when we seem to be rapidly approaching the point of needing to have software systems make quick ethical decisions.
Science is necessarily neutral in that regard; it's a tool to achieve some goals that, as you said, require a judgement value. There is some moral knowledge that provides value and motivation, and which is not scientific knowledge.
> Is this not just an underdetermined question?
Not in philosophy, no. The mother of all sciences has ways to deal with the question, which is meaningless from a purely scientific POV, but which nevertheless merits being studied. For example, it could guide you to choose and refine the guiding principles for programming your autonomous car, and to analyze whether your missing something in your "amalgamation of philosophy" that you used as the basis of that technology project.
1) Who are you talking about.
2) What is sperm.
3) What do you mean by conceived.
4) Whether the statement is literal or requires specific context.
And no, apples are not the same things as numbers.
(and BTW, there are real-world situations where '1' and '1' do not make '2'... e.g. putting a snake and a mouse in a box. We only apply maths statements like that to the kinds of entities/situations where they will apply).
In other words, if you can imagine a reality where 1+1=2 for some meaning of '1', '2', '+' and '=', then a series of conclusions will hold true.
You can hardly accuse that of being an axiom, or just introducing frameworks of thought.
Science is based on (lots of things but primarily) empirical induction. You observe some phenomena, decide that they are of the same type, generate a model that predicts how all phenomena of that type behave. By necessity you observe an infinitesimal fraction of the phenomena in your type.
In math proofs are universal and timeless and complete. There is no additional observation to be made. A proof can be wrong, but if we conclude that it is logically correct then that's it. (edit: well, there's the incompleteness theorem: it could be that a set of axioms is inconsistent, but then EVERYTHING based on those axioms becomes invalid. It's still quite different than scientific progress which changes models a little bit at a time.)
Scientific models are approximations of reality(very good approximations often!) but they get tweaked as new observations come in. Or just wholesale thrown out(or at least become obsolete), see Newtonian orbital mechanics vs relativistic orbital mechanics. Newton was right-ish, but relativistic solutions are right-er(possibly fully correct?)[1].
With deductive reasoning you are expanding a definition. With inductive reasoning you are guessing at connections between observed events.
[1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26408/what-did-ge...
Newtonian orbital mechanics is not obsolete: Within the limits of its applicability, it's a perfectly fine framework and in use to this day.
Was I 100% precise? No. Did you add something meaningful to the discussion? That's for you to answer.
The scientismist's (?) standpoint could be that it exists because it is manifested as a concept in human brains. But by the same argument, wouldn't they then need to acknowledge that God exists?
The crux of the matter is to do science, you need formalism to express your theories, to interpret measurement results etc. Those formalisms are what we usually call "math". But any mathematical system has axioms, i.e. something we need to just "believe" in in the first place, and those believes are not themselves provable by science.
Is it an axiom of the scientific method? [No?]
Is it a tautology? [Maybe?]
Are there other examples other than the basis of knowledge being knowledge? [?]
These all need to be taken as axioms if any further knowledge is going to be possible.
There's a book called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology which covers this in much more detail. (Ayn Rand gets a bad rep, but few people know about her theories of concepts and knowledge. They indicate the path to solving many of the issues in philosophy of science).