Theory and Reality Gönderileri
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Many empiricists have been willing to say that they don’t care about the possibility that there might be real things lying behind the flow of sensations. It’s only the sensations that we have any dealings with. Maybe it makes no sense even to try to think about objects lying behind sensations. Perhaps our concept of the world is just a concept of a patterned collection of sensations. This view is sometimes called “phenomenalism.”
Epistemology is the side of philosophy that is concerned with questions about knowledge, evidence, and rationality. Metaphysics, a more controversial part of philosophy, deals with general questions about the nature of reality. Philosophy of science overlaps with both of these.
Tanımlayıcı bir teori, değer yargıları yapmadan gerçekte neler olup bittiğini veya bir şeyin neye benzediğini tanımlama girişimidir. Normatif bir teori değer yargılarında bulunur; ne olması gerektiği veya nasıl olması gerektiği hakkında konuşur. Bilimle ilgili bazı teorilerin yalnızca açıklayıcı olması gerekiyor. Ancak görüşlerin çoğunun resmi veya gayri resmi bir normatif unsuru var. Bilimle ilgili genel iddiaları değerlendirirken, sürekli şu soruyu sormak iyi bir ilkedir: "Bu iddia açıklayıcı mı yoksa normatif mi, yoksa her ikisi birden mi?" Bazı insanlar için, bilim hakkında cevaplamamız gereken en önemli soru, bunun "nesnel" olup olmadığıdır. Ancak bu terim son derece kaygan hale geldi, çok farklı şeyler ifade etmek için kullanıldı. Bazen tarafsızlık, önyargının olmadığı anlamına gelir; nesnellik tarafsızlık veya adalettir.
Bilim felsefesi içinde, epistemolojik meseleler ile metafizik meseleleri ayırt edebiliriz. Epistemoloji, felsefenin bilgi, kanıt ve rasyonalite hakkındaki sorularla ilgilenen tarafıdır. Felsefenin daha tartışmalı bir parçası olan metafizik, gerçekliğin doğası hakkındaki genel sorularla ilgilenir. Bilim felsefesi her ikisiyle de örtüşüyor.
Yirminci yüzyılda, birçok filozof bu fikri reddederek mantıksal bir bilim teorisi aramamız gerektiği konusunda ısrar etti. Yani, bilimsel teorilerin soyut yapısını ve teoriler ile kanıtlar arasındaki ilişkileri anlamaya çalışmalıyız. Üçüncü bir seçenek, bir metodoloji, bilim adamlarının yaptığı veya uyması gereken bir dizi kural veya prosedür bulmaya çalışmamız gerektiğidir. Daha yakın yıllarda, tarihsel çalışmalardan etkilenen filozoflar genel bir bilimsel değişim teorisi vermek istediler. Burada çok önemli olan bir ayrım, tanımlayıcı ve normatif teoriler arasındaki ayrımdır.
Popper’s Unique Place in the Philosophy of Science
Karl Popper is the only philosopher discussed in this book who is regarded as a hero by many scientists. Attitudes toward philosophy among scientists vary, but hardly ever does a philosopher succeed in inspiring scientists in the way Popper has. It is also rare for a philosopher’s view of science to be used within a scientif i c debate to justify one position over another. This has happened with Popper too. Within biology, recent debates about the clas-sif i cation of organisms and about ecology have both seen Popper’s ideas used in this way (Hull 1999). I once went to a lecture by a famous virologist who had won a Nobel Prize in medicine, to hear about his work. What I heard was mostly a lecture about Popper. In 1965, Karl Popper even became Sir Karl Popper, knighted by the queen of England.
Popper’s appeal is not surprising. His view of science is centered around a couple of simple, clear, and striking ideas. His vision of the scientific enterprise is a noble and heroic one. Popper’s theory of science has been criticized a great deal by philosophers over the years. I agree with many of these criticisms and don’t see any way for Popper to escape their force. Despite the criticism, Popper’s views continue to have an important place in philosophy and continue to appeal to many working scientists.
What connection between an observation and a theory makes that observation evidence for the theory? In some ways, this has been the funfamental problem in the last hundred years of philosophy of science. This problem was central to the projects of logical positivism and logical empiricism, and it was a source of constant frustration for them.
Although there are “depths” in science, what is deep at one time can come to the surface at later times, and there may be lots of ways of interacting with what is presently deep.
Neurath said that in our attempts to learn about the world and improve our ideas, we are “like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea.”
Let us put all these ideas together and look at the picture of science that results. Logical positivism was a revolutionary, uncompromising version of empiricism, based largely on a theory of language. The aim of science —and the aim of everyday thought and problem-solving as well— is to track and anticipate patterns in experience. As Schlick once put it, “what every scientist seeks, and seeks alone, are ...the rules which govern the connection of experiences, and by which alone they can be predicted” (1932–33, 44).
We can make rational predictions about future experiences by attending to patterns in past experience, but we never get a guarantee. We could always be wrong.
The logical positivists accepted and embraced the fact that error is always possible. Although some critics have misinterpreted them on this point, the logical positivists did not think that science ever reaches absolute certainty.