Jotting down ideas from Ladyman’s Intro to Philosophy of Science.

Baconian science

Key things he thinks science are: knowledge derived from observation and induction. Pre-scientific revolution, our notion of what science was came from Aristotle and the general though was that from thinking alone, we could figure out the ultimate causes of things. The heavens were seen as separate from the Earth, fire floated up because it wanted to rise to it’s natural place, and empiricism was dead.

Looking back on this, this is insane. Most people today wouldn’t call what these “scientists” were doing real science. Instead, post Copernican-revolution, Bacon puts out this notion that to actually accumulate knowledge, science has two steps: observation and induction. Observation in that seeing the real world is actually important and science cannot just be done in the mind. Induction is that we look at the data, then come up with theories that will explain the data.

There’s also this reduction of scope of science. Rather than looking for the ultimate cause, science is about the physical causes of things. We can explain the immediate cause of why smoke floats up but not the ultimate cause of why those physical laws should be the way they are. Observations should be taken independent of anyone’s previous bias. In a naive sense, once you’ve observed a large number of diverse data points that support a notion, then it is rational to make an inductive claim that your generalization is true.

His antiquated example is you list things that are hot and cold, then try to find something that varies with it and can explain the whole range of hot & cold values.

Sometimes if you have two competing theories, then you’ll have to do a “crucial experiment” where the result will tell which one is correct. Science then is this extremely rational collection of data and then generalization process.

Popperian science

We take it for granted that science these days is about classification. Rather than saying we are looking for the ultimate truth, we say that are continuously refining a theory that explains more and more of the universe we observe.

What makes something science vs. psuedo-science? Popper argues that the part that makes something science is that a theory is falsifiable. If there isn’t an empirical experiment that you can use to determine whether a theory is false. If you can’t prove a theory is false, then it isn’t within the realm of science. Theories should be as compact as possible while explaining as much of the world as possible.

We should also note that how Scientists develop their ideas can be irrational as long as their ideas can be tested. If they claim it was the beauty of nature, LSD, or god that brought them an idea, none of that affects whether something is science! This is also a break from the past where it was presumed that scientists followed a rational approach to generate hypothesis by looking at a large amount of data and thinking very hard about what might explain it.¹

TODO: Go more into falsification.

Carnap science

TODO

Kuhnian science

TODO: the key break here is that you can’t decide between two theories since they can have entirely different notions of what is considered science. Because of that, sciences is inductive but irrational. While positrons showed up in the data, it wasn’t til they were posited that people actually noticed it. Scientists notice what their theories allow them to, and what is agreed as science seems largely like a social convention. (I THINK KUHN DOESNT GO FULL SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST SO I SHOULD BE CAREFUL WHEN I GO TO WRITE THIS SECTION)

Culmination and the matrix of how they view science

TODO: Also add Hume