Given recent posts here at TSZ challenging the validity of presuppositions and self-evident truths I thought the following list might be worthy of debate.
Presuppositions of Science
1. The existence of a theory-independent, external world
2. The orderly nature of the external world
3. The knowability of the external world
4. The existence of truth
5. The laws of logic
6. The reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth gatherers and as a source of justified true beliefs in our intellectual environment
7. The adequacy of language to describe the world
8. The existence of values used in science
9. The uniformity of nature and induction
10. The existence of numbers
When critics object to the Logos as a presupposition and offer instead 10 other presuppositions, Ockham’s Razor flies out the window.
And now you know why cats should be worshiped.
From which it follows that for you the entire edifice of physics (particularly Newtonian mechanics and gravitation), chemistry (particularly of combustion), materials science and engineering, planetary astronomy, aerodynamics (e.g. parachute design), and so forth does not qualify as knowledge, nor contain assertions the truth of which is justified by obvious successes in prediction and control.
From your position it follows that the 21st century understanding of the physical world reflects no increase in knowledge or justified true belief relative to the corresponding understanding of the 15th century.
See #8: The existence of values used in science
tbh I’m not quite sure what a “presupposition” is. Can someone explain?
I use “knowledge” as it was used by the ordinary man in the street, growing up in Australia. And the ordinary Australian was impressed by the knowledge of people who could get something done, but not so much impressed by sophistimicated speech.
Then, as a mathematician, it was clear that mathematical knowledge referred to the ability to solve interesting problems. Merely being able to express mathematical truths didn’t count for much.
I see it. Is its visibility suppose to imply some sort of conclusion?
ETA: My point is it’s difficult for me to respond when it is not clear what point, if any, you are making.
I understand you have generated a lot of comments with the thread (great OP), but if you want to respond to a lot of them and only have time for a brief, drive-by comment for mine, then best to skip mine.
Something that sounds more profound than “wishful thinking” while not differing from it in kind.
Glen Davidson
Given that you define evidence in such a way as to exclude beliefs that you disagree with, that’s not saying much. Also consider whether or not you demand evidence for your own stated belief here.
Straw man
Objective Morality?
Good to see someone picked up on this.
You have a strange sense of humor, like me. I like that. Are you Canadian?
This made me chuckle. We can’t know for certain what knowledge is, but we can be certain something is extremely likely to be knowledge.
I don’t think he has to show any such thing. All he needs to show is that your own beliefs about knowledge are incoherent.
Are you certain about your definition of knowledge? Isn’t it your position that you cannot be certain of your definition of knowledge?
Science does not need to presuppose the adequacy of language because it invents new language when existing language is inadequate to meet its needs.
I do agree that there has to be a communicating community for science to be even possible. But I don’t see that as a presupposition of science per se.
In general, my problems with any item in the whole list involve one or more of the following for the given item.
1. The stated presupposition is a condition of human existence, not science per se.
2. The stated presupposition is not a fixed input to science, but rather is pragmatically updated as part of the process of science.*
3. The negation of the stated position is also consistent with doing science, hence it cannot be a presupposition.
I don’t see how your last comment about early geometry relates to anything I have said.
—————-
* “process” is a simplification: as I and RB and others have stated, there are many processes in science, although they share core features
It seems to me that some people are using the word “truth” to mean what I would call “reality”. Is that the case, or am I missing something?
Your God. Snicker.
Actually it just occurred to me that Stan Lem wrote in Solaris about an ocean, the only apparent sentient life on a planet, that appeared to the human observers to be conducting science experiments (some of them on the humans by reading their thoughts).
So if SF stories count as evidence, I’d have to amend that quote from my post to say communicating communities are needed for human science.
No,
Those things qualify as knowledge to the extant that they cohere to the Logos (the truth that God reveals). It does not qualify as knowledge on it’s own but as part of a larger worldview in which knowledge exists.
IOW it’s knowledge in my worldview. Whether it qualifies as knowledge in yours is an open question
How do you know stuff in your worldview?
peace
peace
otoh, why do science if at best it provides us with false beliefs?
Bzzzt. I’m afraid you don’t get to poach scientific knowledge for your own world view. The difference between 21st century knowledge of the physical world and that of the 15th century – the knowledge you wish to poach – arose from the dialog between theoretical and empirical activities of many sciences, along with the technological and engineering activities made possible by that science. It was only due to those ultimately empirical activities that this large body of knowledge exists for you to poach at all, as the “logos” contributed exactly zilch to the acquisition of that knowledge over those centuries, and today contributes exactly zilch to to it’s ongoing extension.
I prefer to try to nail the wall to the jello.
fifthmonarchyman,
That’s easy. It is useless at best and dishonest at worst to declare your personal religious beliefs to be beyond criticism and to not require support.
If you’re making a claim that your god exists, you have the burden of proof to support it. If you can’t, simply admit that you have faith in the absence of evidence. Don’t pretend your assumptions are anything more than that.
fifthmonarchyman,
I have no idea what it might mean for truth to exist. True statements can be made, with varying degrees of certainty and appropriate contexts. Reciprocating Bill has detailed some of those.
You understand you’re conversing with a Christian, right?
“and when He may come — the Spirit of truth — He will guide you to all the truth, for He will not speak from Himself, but as many things as He will hear He will speak, and the coming things He will tell you;” (John 16:13)
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. (Matthew 16:17)
“At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” Matthew 11:25
There you go again making ‘science’ into an agent using verbs about what ‘science’ autonomously does (IT ‘invents’). Will you accept correction about this BruceS?
Well who does the science and who communicates it then? You’re not just flummoxed by ‘presupposition’ to say such absurd things, are you?
What kind of ‘science’ is there other than ‘human science’ (meaning ‘science’ done by human beings)? Forgive me for the aim at clarity, but sometimes you sound like a (ideologically scientistic) Martian, BruceS, talking dehumanising (or lacking humanity) nonsense. Nice Canadian that you probably are. 😉
Why not? Atheists poach from other world views all the time. In fact, that’s the basic nature of the argument fifth is making. Stop poaching from the Logos!
😉
Reciprocating Bill,
Don’t be silly. Without ‘logos’ there would be no extension.
We haven’t even landed on the moon yet. The idea that we’ve landed on Mars is absurd. You people will believe anything if you see it on TV.
Well, some Christians believe that when Jesus comes back up in the sky it will be globally televised. Then you will have to believe. Hah!
It sems to do better than that.
Otherwise, one could invoke “usefulness,” but I hardly think that usefulness is the only reason for which we do science (is it very useful to know what Pluto looks like?). In one sense it seems likely that what we “know” is bound to be false in part when actually compared with reality (since propositional knowledge is the map, not the territory), but it may be quite true propositionally.
Science is about “truth” indeed, which is why it is used by courts to produce truthful “facts.”
Glen Davidson
A number of responses indicated that the list in the OP was not exclusive to science. I’m not sure how that’s relevant. I am certainly not saying that any of them are exclusive to science.
As Gregory has been pointing out, science is a human endeavor.
“But while the Gnostics admitted that given such a world it needed revelation to gain knowledge, our scientists believe that they can some how reason their way from illusion to reality. They are Gnostics, yes, but rather confused ones.”
– Paul Feyerabend
It seems to me that any auto recursive mechanism (science, evolution) will get there in the end. We might be stuck at local maxima from time to time, but pragmatically that’s okay I think.
Religion declares itself the top of the mountain yet provides us no view.
TRVTH is what you invoke when when you have been proved wrong by any standard that would be acceptable in a court of law.
Neil,
I addressed that in the old thread:
Don’t make me laugh. Science is a direct offshoot of my worldview. It’s my worldview that gave birth to science.
quote:
“O God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee.”
end quote: Johann Kepler
After being birthed and nurtured in the Christian worldview Now you want to act as if science is a stand alone enterprise and does not need Christianity. Science derives it’s entire existence from my worldview.
This is nothing personal and please don’t take this the wrong way but your worldview is nothing but an orphan parasite on mine. Science can’t account for truth but truth is the life blood on which it exists
If it weren’t for the occasional influx from my side it would have already died on the vine long ago.
To say that my worldview can’t “poach scientific knowledge” is like to quote a famous illustration
a child climbing up on her father’s lap to slap his face.
peace
Granted, I’ve never read any Feyerabend, but I’ve never really understood how the emphasis on methodological pluralism raised by Feyerabend — or the role of paradigms raised by Kuhn — were supposed to undermine scientific realism as a metaphysical claim, or even be inconsistent with it.
While there might be some fairly serious problems with scientific realism, I’m having a hard time seeing how the turn to scientific practices in philosophy of science is supposed to undermine it. There is something right about the idea that scientific institutions function (ideally) as iterated filters for mitigating individual and cultural biases over time.
The problem, in my view, is that scientific institutions have been largely co-opeted by the non-scientific demands of state-supported capitalism — not even profit, alas, but even the illusion of profitability is enough, lest we see that Mammon has no clothes.
The very furthest I’d be willing to go here — and actually I would not even want to go this far — is that scientific practices are unlikely to yield reliable knowledge of objective reality insofar as those practices are entangled with institutions complicit with the subordination of all social and political goods to the maximization of profit.
But that’s hardly a point against scientific realism as a metaphysical view, is it?
fifthmonarchyman,
Your “worldview”, by which you really mean your unquestioning and unsupported beliefs, has nothing to do with science. Revelation and similar self-delusions are the antithesis of the scientific method.
The fact that some early scientists happened to be Christian (in a time when it was dangerous to be otherwise) no more makes science a product of Christianity than mathematics is a product of Islam.
When your revelations result in a net gain of real world knowledge, then you can have a seat at the same table as science. Now all you and your coreligionists do is attempt to hold back scientific progress.
you definitely need to get out more
By the way
how do you know stuff in your worldview?
peace
just a quick clarification:
Mathematics is not a product of Islam. Islam merely transferred the knowledge of the Christian and pre-Christian Greeks to the western world. Rather than advancing as it did in countries influenced by Christianity Mathematics slowly withered in the Islamic world
peace
That’s actually not true. At best it’s a gross exaggeration. There were really serious and interesting conflicts between the Church and medieval scientists, with lots of different ways in which each accommodated the other — for example, Aquinas made Aristotelianism “save” for Catholics, and Descartes hoped to make Galilean mechanistic physics “save” for Catholics in much the same way.
The great natural philosophers from Roger Bacon to Nicholas of Cusa — up to the great William Whewell, who coined the term “scientist” in English — all had different ways of distinguishing between where the authority of the Church began and ended. It took a very long time for our collective understanding of scientific practice to be prised apart from the theological worldview that nurtured and sustained them for millennia, and that work is far from complete — as the debates in this thread make quite clear.
fifth,
Let’s recap.
You presuppose the truth of Christianity. You realize that doing so is as ridiculous and arbitrary as presupposing the truth of Scientology or Zoroastrianism — that is, unless you can show that the presupposition is actually necessary. You attempt to show this by arguing that knowledge is impossible unless Christianity is true.
The legitimacy of your presuppositional move therefore rests on two claims:
1. Knowledge is impossible within a non-Christian worldview.
2. The truth of Christianity makes knowledge possible.
You’ve been unable to support either claim.
Earlier, I explained what would be needed to support claim #1:
So far (to use one of your favorite clichés), it’s been crickets.
Likewise for claim #2. You say that the Incarnation is the special sauce that gives Christianity its epistemological oomph, but you fold when presented with eight simple and obvious questions about it. I’ve asked:
More crickets.
Since you can’t support either of your two claims, your presupposition remains arbitrary and unjustified. You might as well be a Scientologist telling us that Xenu shipped trillions of frozen people to earth on spaceships that looked like DC-8s. You’re no more believable than that.
You might want to look up the origins of the word “algebra”.
Also, you’re a racist.
What!? And you call yourself a philosophist! No wonder you still teethe at the nip of Sellars.
How to Defend Society Against Science – by Paul Feyerabend
But thou hast arranged all things by measure and number and weight.
– Wisdom of Solomon
And oh those ignorant Christians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sylvester_II
To make the book sell I thought l should make my contribution a provocative one and the most provocative statement one can make about the relation between science and religion is that science is a religion.
🙂
Politics too!
presupposition: a thing tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument or course of action.
I don’t call myself a “philosophist” — that’s your term for me.
I do know that Sellars wrote about Feyerabend and took him quite seriously. I just haven’t gotten yet myself. These days I’m reading mostly political philosophy.
But so what? I’ve been reading other things!
That was Popper’s entire thesis about the scientific process. That doesn’t mean, however, that the truth does not exist, as Elizabeth clearly pointed out.
Misquote, sir. It should read:
Science has no foundation, or means to “truth,” analogous to the foundations you claim for your Christianity.
Islam is not a race, It’s a religion. There are Muslims of all races.
It’s racist to equate race with religion IMHO.
And I’m not saying that there weren’t great Islamic mathematicians who expanded on earlier Greek thought.
I’m not even saying that Islam was bad for mathematics I’m only pointing out the fact that mathematics withered in as Islam after the Medieval period as apposed to what happened in countries influenced by Christianity
I’m not sure that is even up for debate check it out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam
peace