Scientific Thought

1. Scientific Thought • Science has been able to achieve its goals due to a specific way of thinking. Science has changed the world in the past 200 years more than the world changed in the previous 2000 years • Assumes regularity in nature. • Requires honesty in reporting of results. Science would have gotten nowhere if cheating were as prevalent in business as reported in the Wall Street Journal. • Has increased knowledge as its only objective. It is non-materialist in nature. • Is non-dogmatic and is always open to change. • Relies on human curiosity to ask questions to which answers can be obtained by experiment or observation. • Utilizes mathematics whenever possible.

2. The Mother of All Problems • What is evidence? • What is the relationship between evidence and hypothesis? • How does one verify a hypothesis? • Does inductive verification work? • How does one know anything?

3. Assumption • The goal of science is to make general statements about the universe. • Science aims to reduces all empirically obtained knowledge to several all-encompassing theories

4. Alert • The following discussion seems to indicate that scientific generalization are not either verifiable nor falsifiable. • In other words science appears as isolated realms of empirical data.

5. Problems with Induction • Inductive arguments are not valid, logical arguments

6. Problems with Induction • The principle of induction cannot not be logically deduced from experience

7. Problems with Induction • Ascribing non-zero probabilities to individual rather than universal predictions is epistemologically counter-intuitive • Universal statements are inevitably involved in the estimation of the likelihood of a given prediction being successful

9. Hypothesis Selection Through any number of points it is possible to fit an infinite number of curves with the same correlation coefficient squared. This means it is neither possible to verify nor falsify any hypothesis. Only interpolation is permissible within the range of the data points; extrapolation is not. It appears as if science works in isolated domains. How then does one choose among hypotheses? No one knows. The guess is that the most relevant hypothesis is chosen. But how is relevant defined?

10. Inductive arguments are not erosion proof Bertrand Russell's Inductivist Turkey `` The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, that he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that ``I am always fed at 9 a.m.''. However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut.''

11. The Problem of Induction • Simple induction: a large proportion of our beliefs are obtained by a process of projecting from observed (past or present) events to cases that are either unknown, unobserved, or in the future, e.g.: Every swan I have ever seen has been has been white. (likely) the next swan I see will be white. • The old problem of induction (David Hume): what reason do we have to believe that simple induction is rational? • The new problem of induction (Nelson Goodman): which inductive conclusion is the right one to make from a particular set of observations?

13. The theory dependence of observation There are assumptions involved in the simplistic inductionist's position: • science starts with observation • observation yields a secure basis from which knowledge can be derived.