PhilSci - Getting Started

       It certainly seems like we can’t prove scientific theories for certain, so things are very interesting and we get to decide, but I find it kind of disturbing that we’re just making up theories by trial and error without any firm foundations. I’m interested in physics and a friend of my family told me that physicists in our modern era will be influential in answering philosophical questions about space and time. It’s kind of interesting how in order to make any “progress” a scientist must make assumptions (such as, for example, the idea of absolute space and time) and then eventually the assumptions are usually disproved. And the theories are wrong, only serving as approximations until a new theory comes along that explains more stuff in a better and more precise way, perhaps in a way that overthrows the assumptions of the old theory but does not deny the validity of the observations that the old theory used. But often the old theory’s observations were not precise enough. Is it possible to get infinitely precise measurements? Does the universe consist of infinite levels, as the physicist David Bohm believed? It seems like mathematics is more reliable than physics because it relies on logic, whereas physics is about finding patterns. But geometry, a branch of mathematics, is closely related to physics, and my philosophy teacher last semester told me that geometry too relies on some assumptions about the nature of space (such as the assumption that parallel lines never cross that could not be proved with logic) that were later disconfirmed with physics. So we need observations as well as logic to do science, but the observations are misleading or false, and sometimes we may be imposing an order that isn’t really there, but only exists as an approximation on a macroscopic scale that fits what we can observe… 

       I also wanted to discuss something from the reading that I thought was interesting but that I didn’t quite get. Earlier philosophers tried to explain why things have common essences. Popper says that the way this can be explained is through their obeying scientific laws which describe properties or behavior of things as not being inherent to the things themselves but to the the relationship between things, I guess because the property, such as gravity, to take a common example, can’t exist if it weren’t for more than one thing interacting? This seems like a very comprehensive way of viewing the universe as a whole, not in terms of properties of objects but of properties of “our world itself” as he says on p. 167, or reality. Or in terms of reality itself. Perhaps it’s false to think that you can treat properties as separate to objects, inherent to the objects. You can only treat properties as belonging to the whole interrelated system. What else could explain why the properties of objects are similar?

       There are the laws and the various manifestations of the laws, which show similar behavior in objects, but the reality is in the law, which describes the relationships between things. But doesn’t a relationship such as gravity depend on the nature of the things themselves, such as having mass, etc, and why doesn’t this depend on the nature inherent in things? I’m still really confused about this.