B: “Why is science worth doing?”
A: “Well…”
B: “And you’re doing philosophy!”"
'via Blog this'
A: “Science doesn’t need philosophy! Science gets by on its own.”
B: “Why is science worth doing?”
A: “Well…”
B: “And you’re doing philosophy!”
Intervento di Caplan che equipara la filosofia al senso comune:
A: "Science doesn't need common sense! Science gets by on its own."
B: "How do you know that the universe is uniform? How do you know that the scientific laws won't just change tomorrow for no reason? How do you know that just because past electrons have all behaved one way that future electrons will behave the same way? How do you know that your experiments aren't modifying the behavior of the things you observe in such a way that makes your conclusions irrelevant for predicting outside behavior? How do you know..."
A: "Well..."
B: "And you're relying on common sense!"
B: "Ok, you got me. Those are interesting questions and science itself doesn't really answer them. So, does common sense have good answers to these questions? Have they solved these problems?"
A: "Basically. Common sense affirms all the assumptions science takes for granted: The uniformity of nature. The stability of causal laws over time. The existence of the physical world, the validity of sense perception, the reliability of human reason, and so on."
B: "But what about all the common-sense claims science has refuted?"
A: "Science only achieves this by using more fundamental common-sense claims to undermine less fundamental common-sense claims. For example, the validity of sense perception is a more fundamental common-sense principle than the apparent flatness of the Earth. So when observations show the Earth is round, the common-sense response is to change our mind about the shape of the Earth, not the validity of the senses. The same goes for, say, special relativity. It's weird, but it's what our eyes tell us when we scrupulously measure."
B:
