ZOMBIE FORUMS

You said they were "the harder sciences", without a frame of reference (harder than what?) I assumed harder meant "harder than most other sciences), my bad.

Economics and Philosophy could in many ways be considered branches of anthropology and sociology. They are both studies of human behaviour without a solid scientific understanding of the programming of the human machine from a technical stand point.

On the contrary, anthropology and sociology, along with all the other sciences, could be considered branches or offshoots of philosophy. (After all, before science was called "science", it was called "natural philosophy".)

Philosophy is the pursuit of truth or knowledge in the most abstract sense. Science, on the other hand, is the pursuit of "knowledge" in a more pragmatic sense, i.e. the ability to predict, measure, and describe with appropriate models.

Science and natural philosophy are not the same thing, not at all.



The scientific method is not a philosophical method of inquiry. An aspiring philosopher who said, "X must be the case because I cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that X is not in fact the case" would not pass peer review, but that is exactly what a scientist says. From a philosopher's point of view, science is the systematization of formal fallacy.

Wikipedia is not always right. The fact is, anything resembling what scientists do would have been called "natural philosophy" before the 19th century. Even the article itself acknowledges that Robert Boyle referred to his very "scientific" (in the modern sense) approach as "natural philosophy". Newton called himself a natural philosopher, Galileo called himself a natural philosopher, every "scientist" before the 19th century would have referred to themselves as such. It seems like this article is trying to graft a conceptual distinction unto a mere difference in terminology. (Perhaps one could say that "natural philosophy" encompasses both science and proto-science, but I think one could see even the earliest examples of "natural philosophy" as merely early, crude, imperfect attempts at science.)



First of all, you're assuming that Karl Popper's explanation of science as grounded in falsifiability is accurate. This is something that not all scientists would agree with - many scientists who subscribe to more traditional Logical Positivist philosophies of science would claim that the criterion for scientific truth is verifiability (i.e. it doesn't matter whether a model could be conceivably proven false, but rather whether a model could conceivably be shown to effectively explain phenomena.)

Secondly, I don't think most scientists (or at least the more intelligent and thoughtful ones) would say that they believe scientific models to be true in the absolute sense; rather, a scientific model is true given one accepts certain criteria. (However, these are the same criteria which, in a looser sense, we use every day to simply survive in the world - "common sense" things like effectivity=truth, occam's razor, etc. (This makes the foundation of science arbitrary in some sense, but not arbitrary in the same way that, say, traffic laws are (too many parentheses, sorry!).)) My point being, science is a sort of sub-set of philosophy in this sense: that it is a sub-investigation (i.e., "if I accept x as true, then what else is true?") within the larger investigation that is philosophy (i.e., "what is true"). In some way, philosophy is the more abstract parent of all other, more specific disciplines. To quote Wikipedia*:






*Yes, I realize the irony of my attacking Wikipedia's authority and then quoting it as a source within the same post, but here I'm using it more as a concise and effective way of stating my point, rather than as a source of new information.

I rather expected a reply in this vein -- that, in essence, Wikipedia is not the ultimate authority on the definition of a term. It's the most convenient one to hand, however. I can go elsewhere, and now I shall. In particular, my source for the following quotations is Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged and particularly the 1971 printing of that tome. It's another book I have to hand.

(As an aside: if you say, "well, the dictionary isn't a good place to find my definitions of the words I am using" then you are failing to communicate with me. I am not a telepath.)

Here's the big one.



Now, the question, "what is philosophy" is naturally a very hard one to answer. Noah Webster did a pretty good job though. In particular, when I hear the word, my own understanding matches the denotations 1b and 1c. Even Noah Webster, though, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, considered the denotations 2a through 2e "archaic" -- and those are the ones that such as Isaac Newton would have used to describe themselves in context. Newton was a natural philosopher, and maybe he was a scientist; but, in his work on optics and gravity and mathematics, he wasn't a philosopher in the denotations 1b and 1c above.



Easy enough. Thus, if we use Mr Webster's definition, then, we can say that ...



Whoa! There are lots of different meanings for "science", but again, in context, I believe we are using denotation 3a. It refers to the ...



Thus, science (in denotation 3a above anyway) is far different from philosophy (of denotations 1b and 1c). If we are going to play games with definitions, we must state the rules. Mr Webster and his intellectual heirs produced a 2662-page rule book for us.

But perhaps you say that English is a slippery language, one where (as shown above) any given word can have a large number of denotations, or possibly so many denotations and connotations that without context, it cannot be understood at all. Even then, the whole idea of a context might be ambiguous. True enough also. If you prefer to use another language, one where every symbol within it is unambiguous, there are such languages available to you.

But science (as in, use of the scientific method) can be grouped under philosophy via definition 1c in Webster, i.e an examination of our fundamental beliefs. Use of the scientific method to gain "knowledge" constitutes a sort of investigation of our fundamental assumptions (particularly those regarding the nature of empirical observation and its relationship with truth) by applying those assumptions in a painstakingly systematic way.

The connection may seem somewhat tenuous, but my point is that science is an offshoot or development of philosophy, rather than vice versa, as a Zzarchov had claimed. (Certainly this is the case historically, cf. the earlier discussion on the term "natural philosophy". But I would argue this also applies logically/conceptually.)