emphasis
added
Philosophy
of science
Science vs. Religion, from the
Renaissance to the Enlightenment
The shift in the western mind
from the medieval to the modern was underpinned by the growth of science.
However a two hundred year long intellectual battle was to take place between
the established Church and the emerging empiricism, before the Enlightenment
could flourish. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) challenged the view
that the Earth was at the centre of the universe. He suggested that the
observational evidence would be better explained by the theory that
the earth orbited the sun. Francis
Bacon (1561-1626) argued
for the use of experiment rather than deduction as a means to increase
knowledge. Johannes Kepler's (1571-1630) employment of observation
and mathematics enabled him to supplant the Pythagorean (ancient Greek
philosopher Pythagoras' (c. 530 BC)) theories of perfect heavenly spheres
by showing how planets moved in ellipses. Galileo
Galilei
(1564-1642) was placed under house arrest for agreeing with Copernicus.
Despite resistance from the
religious authorities, the success of science in explaining and predicting
the natural world could not be ignored. René
Descartes (1596-1650)
thought he had found a rational foundation for science based on his arguments
for his own existence and the existence of god. God, he argued, would not
deceive our senses. This felicitous reconciliation between Cartesian rationalism,
a belief in God and the support for empiricism did not survive for long.
The Ascendancy of Science: The
Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century
Isaac Newton's (1642-1727)
advances in physics based on his empirical and inductive methods were hugely
influential to the philosophers of the
Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) thought that Newton's laws could be shown to be true by reason
and that the scientific approach could explain the phenomenal world
(the world of appearances). He retained a dualistic view of the universe:
human beings lived in a world of rationality, autonomy and morality whilst
the material universe which they observed was explained in terms of cause
and effect.
Auguste
Comte
(1798-1857) argued that human thought developed through a number of stages:
mythical and religious, metaphysical and its final positive stage which
was characterised by the systematic collection of observed facts. He thought
that these "Positivist" methods should now be turned to the study of society.
With his invention of sociology, Comte was suggesting that our knowledge
of human beings could be explained using similar methods to those of the
natural sciences.
The revolutionary twentieth
century
Karl Popper
Karl Popper (1902- 94) was critical
of the inductive methods used by science. The empiricist David Hume (1711-76)
had argued that there were serious logical problems with induction. All
inductive evidence is limited: we do not observe the universe at all
times and in all places. We are not justified therefore in making a general
rule from this observation of particulars. Popper gives the following
example. Europeans for thousands of years had observed
millions of white
swans. Using inductive evidence, we could come up with the theory that
all swans are white. However exploration of Australasia introduced Europeans
to black swans. Poppers' point is this: no matter how many observations
are made which confirm a theory there is always the possibility that a
future observation could refute it. Induction cannot yield certainty.
Popper was also critical
of the naive empiricist view that we objectively observe the world. Popper
argued that all observation is from a point of view, and indeed that all
observation is coloured by our understanding. The world appears to us in
the context of theories we already hold: it is 'theory laden'.
Popper proposed an alternative
scientific method based on falsification. However many confirming instances
there are for a theory, it only takes one counter observation to falsify
it: only one black swan is needed to repudiate the theory that all
swans are white.
Science progresses when a theory is shown to be wrong
and a new theory is introduced which better explains the phenomena.
For Popper the scientist should attempt to disprove his/her theory rather
than attempt to continually prove it. Popper does think that
science
can help us progressively approach the truth but we can never be certain
that we have the final explanation.
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn (1922- ) was
critical of the simplistic picture that philosophers had painted of science.
Kuhn looked at the history of science and argued that science does not
simply progress by stages based upon neutral observations. Like Popper,
he agrees that all observation is theory laden. Scientists have a worldview
or "paradigm". The paradigm of Newton's mechanical universe is very
different to the paradigm of Einstein's relativistic universe; each paradigm
is an interpretation of the world, rather than an objective explanation.
For Kuhn the history of science
is characterised by revolutions in scientific outlook. Scientists accept
the dominant paradigm until anomalies are thrown up. Scientists then begin
to question the basis of the paradigm itself, new theories emerge which
challenge the dominant paradigm and eventually one of these new theories
becomes accepted as the new paradigm.
Paul
Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend thought that
the superiority of the modern scientific method should not be assumed.
He
argued for an anarchist approach to knowledge: we cannot predict what shape
future knowledge will have, so we should not confine ourselves to one
universal method of gaining knowledge. Feyerabend agrees with Kuhn that
the history of science is the history of different viewpoints, and for
Feyerabend this means that what counts as 'knowledge' in the future may
have paradigms we cannot yet know. As we cannot yet know them, we should
not attempt to forbid future intellectual enterprise by attempting to define
one narrow dominant paradigm of knowledge using the model of physics.
Science
and the post-modern World
In the 20th century, Einstein's
theory of relativity overthrew the Newtonian paradigm that had been dominant
since the Enlightenment.
This change of paradigm made philosophers
aware that the fundamentals of a scientific understanding were not a static
unchanging set of natural laws, rather these paradigms were human interpretations
of phenomena as much dependant on the community in which they surfaced
as on the nature of reality herself.
Scientific explanation can no longer
be looked upon as objective and neutral. At the boundaries of science
new paradigms are emerging to challenge the current orthodoxy, it is an
open question as to how the science of the next century will develop.
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