Hi Krim
Philosophy is one word, another is critical thinking.
This seems to me key and goes further than science.
Science stays focused on experience and experiments.
But to do science or anything else we nee language
and concepts. Philosophy and critical thinking get us to
think about language and concepts, challenging them,
checking out our understanding of them, asking if we need
new concepts and new languages and suiggesting what these
might be. Science started as natural philosophy and got going
once the right concepts and approaches were available.
It works well now, but we cannot assume that its current concepts
are complete and fully adequate. It has many tricky problems, these
may be overcome by experiments and experience, or they may
need new concepts. This is why Einstein thought experiements are
as much philosophy as science as they challenge and change our
concepts.
DM
[Krimel]
Gosh Chris I thought you were the historian. The history of western
civilization is the history of philosophy shattering into sciences.
[Chris]
"Science" is a certain way of doing things based on the philosophy that is
currently in charge in a certain culture.
It feels a bit ridiculous to write this on the MOQ forum but:
[Krimel]
Science breaks away from philosophy when we develop methods of addressing
philosophical questions head on. Physics developed both mathematical
tools,
like calculus and instruments like telescopes and clocks that rendered
philosophical speculation irrelevant.
[Chris]
One can never escape metaphysics.
[Krimel]
Are you saying the philosophy has been reduced to metaphysics? Because,
that
is great news! A recent example would be scientists who dismissed string
theory as metaphysics because it offered no testable predictions. If they
are right and metaphysics is merely a set of ideas that purport to offer
lofty explanations with no testable outcomes and no impact whatsoever on
the
world of shared experience then I would agree, perhaps we can't "escape"
metaphysics but we can sure afford to ignore it.
[Chris]
How hard is that to get?
[Krimel]
It isn't at all hard to ignore. Have you read Ham's thesis?
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