Science
Tinbergen’s four questions:
What is the evolutionary history of the thing at hand?
How does the thing at hand develop?
What is the function of this thing?
How does it perform its function (ie. What are the proximate mechanisms)?
These questions can also be asked of the sciences:
What is a science’s history? This field would be history of science.
How does it develop? Philosophy of science/Sociology of science/science studies
What is the function of science? Also Philosophy of science
How does science perform its function? This too.
There is a debate regarding whether or not you need to do a history of science in order to do philosophy of science generally.
Ptolemaic system vs. Copernican system of the stars.
Kepler pointed out that the circles in the copernican view are wrong, and are actually ellipses, which shift.
Said that ”all planets move in ellipses, with the Sun as one focus”, ie. Is a general law.
Galileo built a telescope, and observe new stuff.
All bodies accelerate at the same rate, but friction affects different bodies differently.
Newton derived both Galileos and Kepler’s laws of motion
Unified terrestrial and heavenly physics
Einstein thought that space time itself can be deformed. If you are moving through space at a constant velocity, the physics for you is not gonna be different for somebody in a different part of the universe travelling at the same speed.
If you have two events, which happened first depends entirely on your referens frame. As such, cause and effect is kinda wacky.
In the newtonian universe there was a now. This does not exist in general relativity. Newtonian laws are special cases in which speeds are not too fast and the gravitational pull is not too strong.
What mass was for Newton is different form Einstein however, so Einstein is not just an elaboration of Newton’s system.
Hypothetico-deductivism (falsificationism), Popper.
Science operates through deduction
hypotheses are generated, observable consequences are deduced, then falsification is attempted.
Popper hated Marx and Freud.
He thought their theories were not scientific as you cannot falsify them. General relativity doesn’t seem to have this problem, as if we don’t observe general relativity we would say that it’s not the case.
Three step process
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Conjecture: prediction based on prior theory-making
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The scientist attempts to falsify the prediction, to observe an instance that does not confirm the prediction
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Dedution: the theory or hypothesis must be false.
This kind of theory seems to mainly apply to physics according to professor. Chemistry barely uses this method.
This is also not how it has been done historically.
eg. the ’discovery’ of Vulcan. The intitial reaction to getting information that falsifies your current theory is usually to fix that theory. eg. Newtonian mechanics.
Lakatos’ Falsificationism
The apparent falsification of a particular statement in a theroy does not mean we should reject the theory
The focus should be on research programs, not isolated theoretical claims.
Research programs can be progressive or degenerative.
Progressive research programs ’lead to the discovery of hitherto unknown facts’, despite each seperate unit of research not doing so.
In general, if you come up with a new theory, scientists are actually trying to find out whether it’s true or not. No one actually wants their theory to be false. Other people might be falsifying your theory however. As such, scientific progress happens in collaborative reserach programs.
For Popper, it is very important to distinguish between science and pseudo-science sharply.
For Lakatos, it is difficult to distinguish science from pseudo-science.
For Wittgenstein, we cannot say that sciences are distinguished by 1 certain trait, they are only distinguished by family resemblances. If we look at a picture of a family, they are all going to share certain facts, and not share others. Games, or the sciences as a specific case of a game, lack essence, but instead have overlapping properties.
Until the 70s, philosophy of science generally used physics as a kind of ideal type for science, which ended up being a bad idea because no other science is like physics. Philosophy of science was really philosophy of physics.
Do explanations in biology work the same way as in physics?
As such, there needs to be a philosophy of sciences
What does the article Biology and Philosophy generally do?
16% Historical or social context: understanding past or contemporary debates or theories in terms of their origins or the social motivation behind them. For example, to what extent was huan sociobiology theory or its critiques politically motivated?
11% Concept explication: Trying to become clear about what the concepts that biological concepts refer to actually mean; what is a gene; what is a species; what is life?
24% Exporting biological concepts or frameworks: using tools, concepts or models from biology and applying them outside of biology. Like applying evolutionary theory on eg. whether it undermiens moral realism.
43% The logic of Biology: Understanding how biology works, how models or theories should be interpreted, how inferences are made. Whether we should think of the models as semantic or syntactic.
43% Theoretical biology: Biologists propose mechanisms or models or evoltuionary scenarios. There are subdiscipline-specific cirteria for the evidential basis of such proposals. Philosophy has different standards and philosophers often have the freedom to publish more speculative, exploratory ideas. eg. Ramsey’s article on the evolution of guilt.