Freethought & Rationalism Archive

dbporter · 04-15-2003, 09:35 AM

The scientific
method is really presuppositional. The norm (scientific theory)
itself is a fact and no fact is independent of other facts. All
observation is unavoidably theory bound. There is no "direct" knowledge,
because every fact is tied to other facts; they must all constantly
be related to each other. The facts themselves determine the meaning.

Feather · 04-15-2003, 10:11 AM

Er....okay?

Is there another point, or do you propose that the discussion center around whether science is, in fact, "presuppositional?"

Ernest Sparks · 04-15-2003, 10:31 AM

In science, theories can be just given up when there is no longer interest in them.

Two examples in popular science history:

GEOCENTRIC THEORY

This worked pretty well for many centuries. When Copernicus wrote his heliocentric alternative, he felt compelled to qualify it as just a different point of view and not necessarily reality. Of course his motive might have been fear of catholic authority, but his work wasn't submitted for publication until he was dying. there were some pretty good arguments against the heliocentric alternative. Things aren't swept off the rotating, revolving earth. It took Galileo and Newton to set that straight. Even then it wasn't so certain that the Earth's atmosphere wouldn't get left behind. What did happen was the verification by observation that Mercury and Venus most certainly go around the Sun, and the galilean satellites of Jupiter most certainly go around Jupiter. Also, Newton's successful demonstration of celestial mechanics with a universal gravitational force. This came to the top of the charts in the 18th century with a full-blown calculus. By the 19th century, the remaining geocentrists just disappeared.

CALORIC THEORY

Caloric is heat fluid. During the 18th century and part of the 19th century, it was the best explanation of heat flow phenomena. Eventually, however, it stopped answering new questions. Gradually, step-by-step, the energy idea and atomic/molecular particle picure began to take over. There was significant rear action resistance against these new approaches. Maxwell, Boltzman and Einstein were instrumental in promoting the new views. The final twist was that a new problem, radiation, fit the ideas of purely atomic/molecular kinetic techniques beautifully, leading to the Wein-Planck radiation law. Again, calorists just simply disappeared.

bottom line: Yes, science depends on theory. As experiments become more difficult, complex and expensive, theoretical background intrudes all the time. But the theory situation does change. The experimenter can have it both ways: Provide brilliant confirmation of what theory expects, or provide equally brilliant challenge to what theory expects.

Tom Sawyer · 04-15-2003, 01:32 PM

Of course the scientific method is presuppositional.

The scientific method depends on experimentation. Which experiments you do depends on what you're trying to discover, which necessarily needs some presupposition or else you have no way to structure an experiment and are just throwing random things together.

Any results given from these experiments are only valid within the parameters (presuppositions) that the experiments were set up in. If those parameters are correct, they are more likely to give valid results, if not, they are less likely to do so and those presuppostions must be changed until you have some that do give valid results.

It's how we move forward. We may never gain any "direct" knowledge outside of these presuppositions, but the more we test things within them and modify them to account for the results we obtain, the closer to some sort of "direct" knowledge we will get.

Asha'man · 04-15-2003, 05:53 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Tom Sawyer
The scientific method depends on experimentation.

I disagree. The scientific method depends on observation, which may or may not be tied to an experiment. Some sciences, such as Chemistry, work well in an experimental fashion. Others, such as Astronomy, can only be carried out via observation.

Remember the other part of science: verification via repeatability. It's not the experiment that is repeatable, it is the observation. To prove the correctness of a scientific statement, it must be verified. Sometimes that means publishing the exact details of the experiment for others to reproduce. Other times, it means telling others how and were to look.

As for the opening point, the only true assumption in science is that we can make valid observations about the world around us. Everything else can, and generally has been, verified repeatedly. If you really wanted to, you could go back and re-establish (or falsify) any theory that exists. However, most of the time, it is more productive to tentatively assume that most of current scientific theory is correct.

emotional · 04-16-2003, 04:28 AM

Science needn't be presuppositional. Unfortunately, in today's conditions, it is.

Quote:

Like all systems of truth seeking, science, properly conducted, has a profoundly expansive, liberating impulse at its core. This "Zen" in the heart of science is revealed when the practitioner sets aside arbitrary beliefs and cultural preconceptions, and approaches the nature of things with "beginner's mind." When this is done, reality can speak freshly and freely, and can be heard more clearly. Appropriate testing and objective validation can--indeed, *must*--come later. Seeing with humility, curiosity and fresh eyes was once the main point of science. But today it is often a different story. As the scientific enterprise has been bent toward exploitation, institutionalization, hyperspecialization and new orthodoxy, it has increasingly preoccupied itself with disconnected facts in a psychological, social and ecological vacuum. So disconnected has official science become from the greater scheme of things, that it tends to deny or disregard entire domains of reality and to satisfy itself with reducing all of life and consciousness to a dead physics.

As the millennium turns, science seems in many ways to be treading the weary path of the religions it presumed to replace. Where free, dispassionate inquiry once reigned, emotions now run high in the defense of a fundamentalized "scientific truth." As anomalies mount up beneath a sea of denial, defenders of the Faith and the Kingdom cling with increasing self-righteousness to the hull of a sinking paradigm. Faced with provocative evidence of things undreamt of in their philosophy, many otherwise mature scientists revert to a kind of skeptical infantilism characterized by blind faith in the absoluteness of the familiar. Small wonder, then, that so many promising fields of inquiry remain shrouded in superstition, ignorance, denial, disinformation, taboo . . . and debunkery.

(from http://www.survivalscience.org/debun...ebunkery.shtml)

Feather · 04-16-2003, 06:53 AM

That article is a joke, right, emotional? Please tell me it's a joke.

SULPHUR · 04-16-2003, 06:58 AM

[deleted tongue-in-cheek (hopefully) remark]

dbporter · 04-17-2003, 05:18 AM

You're right. It is all a joke. Actually, I was sort of taking a poll to see what range of belief actually persists, to see what kind of group I'd actually joined. Not very scientific but so far we have everything from those who know it is presuppositional but still cling to old paradigms, to a sort of floating theory ladenness, to those who no longer have a problem, to? But if science is as arbitrary as the religion it replaced, arbitrariness wins! Nothing new there. By the way, anybody read Paul Fairbin Against Method?

emotional · 04-17-2003, 05:21 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Feather
That article is a joke, right, emotional? Please tell me it's a joke.

Unfortunately no. Science has been for long not an honest search for truth, wherever it may lead, but an enterprise for the vindication of philosophical naturalism and materialism. "Science" today is absolutely presuppositional, the handmaiden of a particular philosophy which steers it on a narrow course.

Just take a look at Dawkins. He may have been a scientist in past, but just a cursory look at his books, such as Devil's Chaplain, demonstrates that today he is the High Priest of the Church of Materialism.

Quote:

"It is no more heretical to say the Universe displays purpose, as Hoyle has done, than to say that it is pointless, as Steven Weinberg has done. Both statements are metaphysical and outside science. Yet it seems that scientists are permitted by their own colleagues to say metaphysical things about lack of purpose and not the reverse. This suggests to me that science, in allowing this metaphysical notion, sees itself as religion and presumably as an atheistic religion (if you can have such a thing)."

Shallis M., "In the eye of a storm", New Scientist, January 19, 1984, pp. 42-43.

04-15-2003, 09:35 AM	#1
dbporter Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: USA Posts: 35	Scientific method is presuppositional The scientific method is really presuppositional. The norm (scientific theory) itself is a fact and no fact is independent of other facts. All observation is unavoidably theory bound. There is no "direct" knowledge, because every fact is tied to other facts; they must all constantly be related to each other. The facts themselves determine the meaning.

04-15-2003, 10:31 AM	#3
Ernest Sparks Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Portland, OR USA Posts: 1,248	theory can change In science, theories can be just given up when there is no longer interest in them. Two examples in popular science history: GEOCENTRIC THEORY This worked pretty well for many centuries. When Copernicus wrote his heliocentric alternative, he felt compelled to qualify it as just a different point of view and not necessarily reality. Of course his motive might have been fear of catholic authority, but his work wasn't submitted for publication until he was dying. there were some pretty good arguments against the heliocentric alternative. Things aren't swept off the rotating, revolving earth. It took Galileo and Newton to set that straight. Even then it wasn't so certain that the Earth's atmosphere wouldn't get left behind. What did happen was the verification by observation that Mercury and Venus most certainly go around the Sun, and the galilean satellites of Jupiter most certainly go around Jupiter. Also, Newton's successful demonstration of celestial mechanics with a universal gravitational force. This came to the top of the charts in the 18th century with a full-blown calculus. By the 19th century, the remaining geocentrists just disappeared. CALORIC THEORY Caloric is heat fluid. During the 18th century and part of the 19th century, it was the best explanation of heat flow phenomena. Eventually, however, it stopped answering new questions. Gradually, step-by-step, the energy idea and atomic/molecular particle picure began to take over. There was significant rear action resistance against these new approaches. Maxwell, Boltzman and Einstein were instrumental in promoting the new views. The final twist was that a new problem, radiation, fit the ideas of purely atomic/molecular kinetic techniques beautifully, leading to the Wein-Planck radiation law. Again, calorists just simply disappeared. bottom line: Yes, science depends on theory. As experiments become more difficult, complex and expensive, theoretical background intrudes all the time. But the theory situation does change. The experimenter can have it both ways: Provide brilliant confirmation of what theory expects, or provide equally brilliant challenge to what theory expects.

04-16-2003, 06:58 AM	#8
SULPHUR Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: hobart,tasmania Posts: 551	I CAN"T STAND IT [deleted tongue-in-cheek (hopefully) remark]

04-17-2003, 05:18 AM	#9
dbporter Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: USA Posts: 35	the joke is on us You're right. It is all a joke. Actually, I was sort of taking a poll to see what range of belief actually persists, to see what kind of group I'd actually joined. Not very scientific but so far we have everything from those who know it is presuppositional but still cling to old paradigms, to a sort of floating theory ladenness, to those who no longer have a problem, to? But if science is as arbitrary as the religion it replaced, arbitrariness wins! Nothing new there. By the way, anybody read Paul Fairbin Against Method?

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04-15-2003, 10:11 AM	#2
Feather Veteran Member Join Date: May 2002 Location: Gainesville, FL Posts: 1,827	Er....okay? Is there another point, or do you propose that the discussion center around whether science is, in fact, "presuppositional?"

04-15-2003, 01:32 PM	#4
Tom Sawyer Talk Freethought Staff Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Toronto, eh Posts: 42,293	Of course the scientific method is presuppositional. The scientific method depends on experimentation. Which experiments you do depends on what you're trying to discover, which necessarily needs some presupposition or else you have no way to structure an experiment and are just throwing random things together. Any results given from these experiments are only valid within the parameters (presuppositions) that the experiments were set up in. If those parameters are correct, they are more likely to give valid results, if not, they are less likely to do so and those presuppostions must be changed until you have some that do give valid results. It's how we move forward. We may never gain any "direct" knowledge outside of these presuppositions, but the more we test things within them and modify them to account for the results we obtain, the closer to some sort of "direct" knowledge we will get.

04-16-2003, 06:53 AM	#7
Feather Veteran Member Join Date: May 2002 Location: Gainesville, FL Posts: 1,827	That article is a joke, right, emotional? Please tell me it's a joke.

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