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Comment by istjohn | Hacker News Reader

An honest question--because I don't know: Has the philosophy of science in its long history produced anything that has proven useful in the practice of science?

I do understand that some people may consider the philosophy of science intrinsically valuable.

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Yes, absolutely. The modern definition of "proof" and of "true". Logic was considered philosophy in the early 20th century. And the works of Russell, for example, helped define what we see today as a convincing proof. Basically, 120 years ago, math was not as rigorous as it is now (Cauchy is a prime example).

Also, philosophy of science is not necessarily about producing useful stuff for the practice of science, but usually helps better understand the relationship between humans and knowledge. It allows scientists to take a step back and see the big picture before diving back into their practice. As such, it shapes the way we think of and do science, and allows for better questions to be asked, and gives better ways to frame those questions.

Aren't those about the philosophy of mathematics, rather than that of science?

At this level, mathematics is a discipline that's entirely unlike science, in that (at least if you believe it's philosophers) science doesn't prove anything true, it just has a bunch of competing theories some of which get disproved by experiments.

It's definitely not just about mathematics. What the scientific community considers acceptable (as in publishable in a good journal) proof has been shaped by the last 100 years of logic practice. Yes, we had rational reasoning before 1900, but it did not look anything like today's "rationality". We used to do piggy-back mathematical models to experiments; now we build from the ground up models and we try to make sure that they match our experiments. This is basically the mindset change that happened in the math community when logicians said that "it's not math if it doesn't start with axioms" (no, I'm not actually quoting anyone).

Also, the second paragraph of my first comment is not about logic.

It's really hard to talk about "truth" anywhere, but it's really crucial to both talk about and agree upon the meaning of "truth" in science since, ultimately, that's the goal of the scientific process—the pursuit of the thing.

Karl Popper was a major study of this problem and wrote about probably the most common and universally acceptable notion of scientific truth in the mid 1900s. Before then this notion of truth was in practice used, but it may have been difficult to have a clear conversation about it. Worse, without a clear understanding of the properties which give rise to processes with generate "truth" (i.e. the "scientific method" which, even being really generous, is better thought of as a menagerie of related methods) it may have been a little hard to determine whether someone's scientific program would be effective or agreeable.

So Popper clarified the notion of "Science as Falsification", of "Truth as what weathers evidence". For Popper, nothing was science unless it was vulnerable to falsification and nothing was true unless it was both science and withstood all attempts to falsify it.

This has a major effect on modern statistics. Statistics can be regarded, not entirely incorrectly, as the quantification of the pursuit of truth. It seems to give mechanism to the idea of models relating to evidence and the pruning out of falsified models. It's difficult to ask questions about why statistics is a meaningful tool for scientific pursuits without invoking Popper.

>philosophy of science in its long history produced anything that has proven useful in the practice of science

The scientific method comes to mind.

I don't think the scientific method was "produced" by philosophy of science. I think it was merely described by it after a certain way of doing things has already "crystallized" among practitioners.

When practitioners "crystallized" their practices, what they were doing was effectively philosophy of science.

But they were focused on object-level problems when they were doing that crystallization. Can you accidentally do philosophy as a side effect?

I think falsifiability came from Popper.

Take a look at Francis Bacon's Novum Organum written in 1620, specifically the sections on the four idols of the human mind that sometimes prevent one from reaching truthful conclusions. To my mind, this is philosophy of science before any practices had really crystallized. Reading this in college, I remember being impressed that Bacon seemed so modern in his thinking 400 years ago. His awareness of and focus on the fact that cognition is influenced by cultural context is a huge step and I was unaware it had been made so long ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Organum

Full text here: http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm

Do you consider formalizing an action/set-of-actions a valuable contribution?

Ernst Mach has certainly had real significant influence on the physicists of his generation and the physics they did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mach

A better understanding of what it is they are doing. I am currently reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...), and I have difficulty imagining how it could not inform a scientist-reader about their own methods. (Except if they had already encountered these ideas distilled elsewhere.)

One important sociological constant for a couple centuries is if a hypothesis comes from a daydream, like the ring resonance structure of benzene, and its proven right, it comes from science. If a hypothesis comes from a philosophical argument, like the atomic theory of matter, and its proven right, we very carefully forget about where it came from and don't discuss it, very "Fight Club" like.

So its not like nothing has ever come from philosophy as a hypothesis successfully validated as a useful predictive model, its that it happens all the time and we do NOT talk about it, just like Fight Club.

(edit to add another way to phrase it is if a hypothesis is dredged out of one individuals unconscious random internal noise source, we call its source Science. If it comes from a rational and reasoned conscious debate between thinkers, we don't talk about it at all, or at best we call it common knowledge. Perhaps its an attempt not to appear vain or conceited?)

Here's an example of where the philosophy helps. You would probably agree that physics is a clear science and that its methods—philosophically reasoned about—produce (or discover) genuine truth. But would you agree that a "softer" science—say, psychology—still has enough methodological rigor to produce genuine truth? How about sociology? Economics? The more observationally ambiguous—the more abstract, profoundly complex, or "fuzzy" a science's subject is—the less confident we are that it's really a science, that it really produces truth. So how do you reason about what sciences or individual experiments are productive and which are flawed, uncertain or, frankly, bogus? Philosophy!

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