On 03 Jul 2015, at 14:11, Bruce Kellett wrote:
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.
Which one? From what I read, and not wanting to be long, I would say
that physicist use model in the sense of young children:
simplification. Like with children toys, or Bohr planetary atoms.
Models means here what logicians call a theory. Logicians use the word
model like painter: the model is the naked reality.
In fact, some would say that "it is models all the way down".
I have no idea what you mean by model. But keep in mind that logicians
used it as the possible interpretation of a theory. A theory is seen
as a syntactical machine-like device to produce theorems? A model is a
structure which satisfies (interpret) those axioms and theorems of the
theory.
We ultimately have nothing but models that must constantly be
subject to revision in the light of new or more evidence.
Yes, I agree with this (using models meaning theory).
The idea that we can interpret the data without using theory is due to
the facts that most of our theory are instinctive and wired up in our
brain. Without a theory, all data does not make sense. We
instinctively bet in our existence and in the existence of some
reality. That is already a theory (model, for physicists). Indeed, it
is already a theology (a part of it becomes false when assumed).
I am still waiting for your assessment of the six first steps of the
UDA, so that we can discuss step 7 and step 8 at ease.
It seems to me that you did understand step seven, as you got the
point by yourself once (and present it as a problem for comp, but you
ignored that that was the point). The UDA *is* a problem for the
computationalist: to eliminate the white rabbits, or equivalently to
justify the laws of physics. The ontological commitment toward a
primitive physical reality simply does no more work after step 8 (MGA,
or Maudlin).
Bruno
Bruce
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