Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 03 Jul 2015, at 04:00, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Bruce Kellett wrote:
Russell Standish wrote:
Let me put it another way - Bruce do you accept Laplace's "je n'ai
besoin de cet hypothese" when talking about God?
I understand what Laplace means, but I also think that not even
Laplace would claim that this entails the non-existence of God. In
other words, he might not need to hypothesize a god in order to
explain the operation of his mechanistic universe. But God might not
be an explanatory hypothesis, it might play a different role.
Talking about hypotheses, it is interesting to compare Newton's
"hypotheses non fingo." This is normally taken out of context, but the
original context in the Principia is interesting. Newton is
summarizing his account of cometary orbits, and he says: "I have not
as yet been able to deduce from the phenomena the reason for these
properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. For, whatever is
not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and
hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult
qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In
this experimental philosophy, propositions are deduced from the
phenomena and are made general by induction."
But that is what the modern will called the hypothesis. The general law
extrapolate from the observation.
Newton's philosophy of science is very interesting, and quite
different from modern accounts of the scientific method. He sees it as
a purely deductive process, not hypothetico-deductive as in modern
accounts.
How can we deduce propositions without axioms/hypotheses (implicit or
explicit).
We start from the data, observational and experimental, not from axioms.
There has been some resurgence of interest in Newton's "deduction from
then phenomena" in recent times. I met the idea in a 2000 paper by John
Worrall, the British philosopher of science from the LSE:
"The Scope, Limits, and Distinctiveness of the Method of 'Deduction from
the Phenomena': Some Lessons from Newton's 'Demonstrations' in Optics."
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 51(1), pp. 45-80 (2000).
Although Newton's method has some similarity to hypothetico-deductive
methods, there are distinctive differences, and we should always be
cautious about interpreting 17th and 18th century thinking about science
in terms of modern ideas. However, the main point I wanted to make was
that, with Newton, one should see the data (phenomena) as primary, and
hypotheses, especially metaphysical hypothesis about what is and what is
not primary, should always be seen as secondary.
What physicists lacks is the notion of model, which is somehow
intermediate between a theory and a reality.
Physicists have a well-developed notion of models. In fact, some would
say that "it is models all the way down". We ultimately have nothing but
models that must constantly be subject to revision in the light of new
or more evidence.
Bruce
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