HCJ3: Science

My first blog post after coming back to uni is of course about HCJ, the first lecture was about how philosophy and science are related.


As we all know, science is about finding the truth, however no one can ever know the whole truth (as proved by The Sun in 1989), however journalists can give their honest opinion.

Science before Kant

Truth is correspondence to objective reality in a 'cosmo' composed of independent things. Einstein, Bacon and Newton eventually find out everything, this is a perfect truth. Scientists have abandoned this theory, however Newtonian ideas still exist and are widely accepted in the scientific community.

Kant

He divided truth into 2 types, the first is a priori, this is is something you know is true by definition e.g. all bachelors are unmarried men. The second is a posteriori, facts rely on scientific study and gathering evidence e.g. all bachelors are messy. The problem with this would come when all the bachelors you study are actually all messy, however the chance of that happening is probably pretty low.

Kant's view of the cosmos is similar to a computer game, where the objects are created in a consciousness which then fades away e.g. a video game like GTA where if you go to a place in the game and then away from it, that place isn't there any more but if you go back to that place, then it is there again. The concept is a strange idea but if you use an analogy like the video game it becomes easier to understand. Kant said that each object has its own independent noumena, so it is a thing in itself (independent of the mind), which is also known as 'the unperceived object' as opposed to phenomena which is an object as it is perceived by the senses.

Schopenhauer said that 'the will' is the only universal noumena, of the university as a thing in itself. This theory links to the Star Wars films. From Kant and Schopenhauer we inherit the idea that nothing 'causes' existence, it is a necessary precondition of perception or consciousness. This idea was quashed in the 19th century as empiricism was rife. Humanity always strives to know more, this is similar to Nietzsche's 'will to power', the important part of this for journalists is to 'play dumb', a journalist can never know the truth so its best to just give your honest opinion.

Logic (deduction vs induction)

Deduction (basically the process of reasoning in which a conclusion follows on from the stated premise e.g All men are mortal, Socrates was a man, therefore Socrates was mortal. Deduction preserves the most characteristic idea of the Greco-Roman world. Deduction depends on a series of indisputable axioms known to a select group of philosophers and later to a hierachy of religious figures, it produces singular or particular truths from general principles, another example is this: all swans are white, this is a swan, so it must be white. It is not possible to doubt these axioms as reality would collapse. This Aristotlean system was a cause of the backwardness in the Islamic civilization, some of this is still present today.

Aristotle's system was denied by the enlightment, Francis Bacon's 'new organon' criticised Aristotle's 'organon' and reviews the axioms that Aristotle had set down as irrefutable. After Bacon, there was the idea that by using evidence, the axioms could be disproved.

Newton to Einstein

This period is know as the Copernican Revolution, over this time questions such as 'does the earth really orbit the sun?' and 'what is up and what is down?' were asked. What we percieve is entirely subjective e.g the amount of light in a room and what mood we're in. Time is a mental phenomena as we are the judges of how slowly time is going for ourselves e.g. I might think that an hour seems shorter because I am doing something that I enjoy, whereas if somebody else is doing something that they don't enjoy, the same hour may seem like 2 hours. According to Einstein's experiments, time not only elapses at different rates but also at different theoretical points e.g, black holes.

Wittgenstein

"The world consists of facts" - a quote from his work 'Tractatus'. There is no object truth, only language-games, Wittgenstein never makes it clear what these are. Early language-games are scrutinized for the insights they give on characteristics of language, 'regular' language-games include forming and testing a hypothesis, making up a story then play acting it, these bring out the openness of our possibilities in using language and describing it.

Ernst Mach and Vienna Circle

The Vienna Circle was a group created in honour of Ernst Mach, one of their ideas was the Verification Principle, which said that the truth of any proposition id the way you verify it. If it can't be verified then it is neither true or false. Betrand Russell comes up with any interesting theory converning the VP, he said that a china teapot is revolving around the sun, "no one would be able to disprove my assertion". Philosopher Karl Popper said that the Verification Principle itself can't be verified.


TB 2012