Samenvatting
Summary Philosophy of Science IBA 2
Volledig uitgewerkte samenvatting van de slides, aangevuld met alle informatie gegeven tijdens college.
[Meer zien]Voorbeeld 4 van de 40 pagina's
Voorbeeld 4 van de 40 pagina's
In winkelwagengesponsord bericht van onze partner
Gekoppeld boek
Titel boek:
Auteur(s):
- Uitgave:
- ISBN:
- Druk:
Voorbeeld van de inhoud
Philosophy of ScienceEconomic crisis 2008: “There are three main critiques: that macro and financial economists helped
cause the crisis, that they failed to spot it, and that they have no idea how to fix it” (The Economist).
- The crisis of 2008 was not only a crisis in the economy (societal sphere of production,
distribution, consumption of goods/services), but also crisis of economics (scientific
discipline).
- In order to better understand what economics is, what it can do, what are its limits, where it
succeeds (as a science) and where it fails (dismal science), one should reflect critically on
both the economy (social sphere) and economics (science).
o Philosophical thinking – and philosophy of science in particular – can help in
understanding what the promises, strengths and limits are of economic models and
theories in both academic and business contexts.
Three kinds of questions that philosophical skills, insights and reflections can help address:
1. Business-related questions: E.g. How should we understand evolutions in financial companies
and the financial sector?
2. Normative questions: E.g. How should we deal with these evolutions? How should we
regulate companies and sectors?
3. Philosophy of science questions: E.g. What is scientific knowledge and what not? Where are
the boundaries? How do (economic) models and theories relate to reality? What are the
assumptions in economic models (e.g. about people’s beliefs, etc.) and why do we need
them?
Chapter 1
Science is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure
and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
The scientific revolution:
- European medieval thought centered around ideas that were inherited from Aristotle and
other Ancient Greek philosophers (including “natural philosophers” such as the astronomer
Ptolemy and the physician Galen).
- After the fall of Rome, many ideas of the Greeks had been preserved and further elaborated
upon in the Islamic world and were reintroduced only in the 12 th century.
- From about 1550 on, until about 1700, an intellectual revolution took place in Europe. An
innovation that was central to this revolution was a systematic interest in observation and
experimental methods.
- Three researchers introduced systematic observations into their fields: the father of modern
optics Ibn al-Haytham, the astronomer Galileo Galilei and the anatomist Andreas Vesalius.
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (c.965 – c.1040) can be said to be the founder of optics.
- He gave a correct account of how we see objects , showing experimentally that an earlier
theory (that light from our eyes shines upon objects) was wrong.
- Invented the pinhole camera, discovered the laws of refraction and gave a good reasoned
estimate of the height of the atmosphere.
- Used math and put an emphasis on using experimental data and the reproducibility of
results.
Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) championed Copernicus’ theory that the earth revolves around the sun
(and not vice versa).
, - He made it clear that he accepted that theory not only to facilitate the computation of the
positions of heavenly bodies, but also as a model of reality.
- He introduced the systematic use of telescopes in astronomy
Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564) set the study of human anatomy on an empirical path.
- Conducted detailed + systematic studies of human corpses. Before, astronomy had been
based on the work of Galen (129 – 210), whose observations had been restricted to those of
apes.
- William Harvey’s later (1628) discovery that blood circulates and the heart is a pump built
further on Vesalius’ work.
How can knowledge of the world be gained? And what makes science special?
1. Empiricism: the only source of real knowledge about the world is experience.
a. Scientific thinking and investigation have the same basic pattern as everyday thinking
and investigation. In each case, the only source of real knowledge about the world is
experience. But science is especially successful because it is organized, systematic,
and especially responsive to experience.
2. Mathematics: it is possible to obtain knowledge about reality with the help of pure reasoning
alone (rationalism).
a. What makes science different from other kinds of investigation, and especially
successful, is its attempt to understand the natural world using mathematical tools.
3. Social structure:
a. What makes science different from other kinds of investigation, and especially
useful, is its unique social structure: universities employ researchers, researchers
might work in teams, funding agencies provide funding, journals publish results after
peer review.
Chapter 2
There are two classical perspectives on knowledge:
- Rationalism: emphasizing the role of reasoning in acquiring knowledge.
- Empiricism: emphasizing the role of perception (seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling)
o Logical empiricism: a set of ideas about knowledge and science that combines
empiricism with a high regard for reasoning.
Rationalism is the view that reasoning can provide knowledge that is independent from
experience. It is almost uncontroversially accepted that reasoning alone can give us knowledge
about mathematical truth, and about truths of logic and theoretical computer science.
- But can reasoning alone give knowledge about other subject matters? Philosophers like
Pythagoras, Plato, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz thought so.
o This conviction is due to the fact that mathematics, in the form of geometry, was the
great scientific success story of their time. Geometry is based on pure reasoning, but
also seems to give us real information about the world around us.
The Pythagoreans (Pythagoras (c.570 – c.495)) were a religious sect. they were also geometricians
who discovered the Pythagorean Theorem (a 2+ b2=c 2) and the irrationality of √ 2.
- According to the Pythagoreans, reality, at its deepest level, is mathematical in nature. They
developed a mathematical astronomy and a mathematical musicology.
- Pythagoreans were vegetarians, they strove for release from the “cycle of birth”, and women
were accepted into the sect.
- Legend has it that the discoverer of the irrationality of √ 2 drowned at sea as a punishment
from the gods for divulging this secret.
,Geometry arose out of the need of measuring land, but its development confronted the Greeks with
a realm that was: Beautiful and pure, not in space or time, eternal and unchanging, while
discoverable through the intellect.
- We can well imagine that this created the hope that other deep truths about the world and
our place in it would be discoverable through pure thought as well.
The Greek octave had only five notes. Pythagoras wanted to give a theory of this musical system. He
found out that the question whether the sounds produced by two strings are “consonant” (=
verenigbaar) depends on the ratio of the lengths of the strings. In particular, he found that
each note in the Greek octave is the fraction of a string.
- If you start with a string of length 1 that produces an A, the next note is at 4/5 (a C,
roughly) and the ones after that come at 3/4 (≈ D), 2/3 (≈ E), 3/5 (≈ F), and 1/2 (≈ A
again).
Plato (428 – 348 BC) was convinced of a world of abstract forms. These forms are ideal types of
things we perceive in the sensible world. E.g. all dogs have the common Form Dog. There are also
Forms such as Man, Elephant, Beauty, Justice, and the Good. And of course, Triangle, Number, Circle,
etc.
- The sensible world is a world of appearances and only seems real. It is ever changing,
imperfect, and subjective.
- The world of Forms is eternal, unchanging, perfect, objective, and beyond space and time. It
is a precursor of Christian heaven.
René Descartes (1596 – 1650) in his treatise La Géométrie reduced geometry to a form of algebra by
introducing the idea of a coordinate system. This influenced the later invention of the calculus.
Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) was so much impressed by the axiomatic set-up of Euclid’s Elements
that he emulated it in his main work Ethica – Ordine Geometrico demonstrate.
Berkeley (1685 – 1753) correctly criticized the imprecise use of infinesimals (infinitely small numbers)
in the calculus.
David Hume (1711 – 1776) found Hume’s Principle which says that there are as many Fs as there are
Gs if and only if the Fs and Gs can be put in a one-to-one correspondence.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716) co-invented the calculus (he and Newton independently
discovered it). He contributed to the binary number representation and wanted to create a
Characteristica Unversalis: a universal symbolic language for science, mathematics, and metaphysics.
- He also dreamed of a Calculus Ratiocinator that was to give this universal language the
necessary computing power. These dreams were only realized to some extent with the rise
of modern logic. Leibniz also designed the Stepped Rechoner, a calculating machine.
The rationalist tradition emphasizes reason and assigns a high value to mathematical inference
(deduction). But during the 16th and 17th centuries a new scientific method emerged which also
strongly valued induction. Induction is inference from particular observed cases to general
statements.
- E.g. from observations about the positions of particular planets at certain times, the
conclusion is drawn that the orbits of the planets are elliptical Observation started to play
a crucial role
o Scientific Revolution
Empiricism is the theory that the only source of world knowledge is sense experience (perception,
observation). Important early empiricists were Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), John Locke (1632 –
1704), George Berkeley (1685 – 1753), and David Hume (1711 – 1776).
, - One of the attractions of empiricism is that it provides for a direct connection with reality in
terms of seeing, hearing, etc. Seeing is believing!
Observation provides a connection with reality, but the connection is imperfect. When you see a
thing, you might get only one perspective at a time and the colors you see have as much to do with
the properties of your visual system as with the properties of the thing.
- In a sense, you do not see the thing itself, you just have a sensation. If what we experience
are sensations and experience is the only source of knowledge, how can we know anything
about
the real world?
o Maybe the world is just a collection of sensations: phenomenalism (but if this is true,
why is it true that your sensations and mine tend to be correlated?)
Skepticism is the view that we cannot know anything. The first skeptic philosopher was Pyrrho (c.
360 – c. 270). Skepticism in this sense is very radical, less radical is skepticism about X – the idea that
we cannot know anything about subject X.
- Empiricists are sometimes skeptical about the existence of a world beyond their perception if
so, they believe that their immediate perceptions (sensations) exist, but they do not
conclude from that that there are things causing these perceptions. This is external world
skepticism (or phenomenalism).
o There is also a tendency for empiricists to be skeptical about induction – why think
that past patterns of sensations will also hold in the future?
Empiricism holds that the only source of world knowledge is a sense perception. But what about
mathematics? Is it really true that our knowledge that 22873/89 = 257 is based on perception? We
can find this out by means of long division, not perception..
- Fancier theorems of mathematics are (also) based on proofs and likewise have nothing to do
with perception. Logic and theoretical computer science are not empirical either.
o Empiricists often tacitly exclude these disciplines when they say that the only source
of knowledge is perception. What they mean, and sometimes explicitly add, is that
the only source of world knowledge is perception.
Mathematical knowledge is knowledge, but independent from any facts.
Empiricism is a theory about knowledge, but it usually comes with a world view that is:
- Strongly pro-science
- Anti-rubbish
- Worldly (empiricists can be religious, but in that case their religion does not influence their
views on knowledge and science)
- Politically moderate/progressive
Logical empiricism (earlier called logical positivism) is an attempt to combine classical empiricism
with insights from logic. Between 1922 and 1936 the center of gravity of the school of Logical
Empiricists was in Vienna (Vienna Circle).
- Increasing persecution by the Nazis then caused many members of the school to flee abroad,
mainly to the US. Moritz Schlick, a central figure within the group, was murdered in 1936 by a
former student with Nazi sympathies. The school continued its activities in various places in
the US, where it had a huge influence.
o Around 1970, logical empiricism had run its course. but in the last decade or so we
have seen a revival of interest (especially in Germany and Austria).
- An overview of the aims of the movement:
o Revolutionary, uncompromising version of empiricism, based on theory of language.
Voordelen van het kopen van samenvattingen bij Stuvia op een rij:
Verzekerd van kwaliteit door reviews
Stuvia-klanten hebben meer dan 700.000 samenvattingen beoordeeld. Zo weet je zeker dat je de beste documenten koopt!
Snel en makkelijk kopen
Je betaalt supersnel en eenmalig met iDeal, creditcard of Stuvia-tegoed voor de samenvatting. Zonder lidmaatschap.
Focus op de essentie
Samenvattingen worden geschreven voor en door anderen. Daarom zijn de samenvattingen altijd betrouwbaar en actueel. Zo kom je snel tot de kern!
Veelgestelde vragen
Wat krijg ik als ik dit document koop?
Je krijgt een PDF, die direct beschikbaar is na je aankoop. Het gekochte document is altijd, overal en oneindig toegankelijk via je profiel.
Tevredenheidsgarantie: hoe werkt dat?
Onze tevredenheidsgarantie zorgt ervoor dat je altijd een studiedocument vindt dat goed bij je past. Je vult een formulier in en onze klantenservice regelt de rest.
Van wie koop ik deze samenvatting?
Stuvia is een marktplaats, je koop dit document dus niet van ons, maar van verkoper TessaKappetijn. Stuvia faciliteert de betaling aan de verkoper.
Zit ik meteen vast aan een abonnement?
Nee, je koopt alleen deze samenvatting voor €5,49. Je zit daarna nergens aan vast.
Is Stuvia te vertrouwen?
4,6 sterren op Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)
Afgelopen 30 dagen zijn er 47561 samenvattingen verkocht
Opgericht in 2010, al 15 jaar dé plek om samenvattingen te kopen