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The funny thing is that empiricists (Locke, Hume, Francis Bacon "the father of the scientific method", etc) didn't accomplish much in science, even though they

The funny thing is that empiricists (Locke, Hume, Francis Bacon "the father of the scientific method", etc) didn't accomplish much in science, even though they were clearly smart and tried hard. While deeply religious rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz) pretty much created science and were successful at everything they touched. It's utterly unreasonable to believe that the world is built on harmony that can be understood by the individual human mind. But that unreasonable belief is very helpful for discovering things, even at the highest levels, while having beliefs like "all knowledge is social" is like slashing your own tires.

paulpauper 9y ago
you cannot really compare mathematical accomplishments to continental philosophy . They are different domains. But Bacon is credited with creating the scientific method.
osullivj 9y ago
Empiricism's contribution is the emphasis on testing hypotheses. Provando e reprovando (test and test again) as Galileo said. That approach was brought to it's finest pitch with Popper's Falsificationism. But hypotheses need to come from somewhere. You're right to point to religious rationalists; I'd mention Newton too. Einstein's "god doesn't play dice", or the commonplace platonism of mathematicians is the same thing - an empirically unsupported metaphysical assertion.
- jack9 9y ago
  "god doesn't play dice" was a layman's phrasing of a complex subject, not a metaphysical assertion.
- paulpauper 9y ago
  The demarcation problem of falsifiability has applications for sciences (specifically, differentiating science from pseudoscience)
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Not that absolute applications though. See Feyerabend for a counter-argument.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  As I remember, Newton originally thought comets didn't have orbits and were directly influenced by God, so he seems to have been a sincere believer. I too would like to see more emphasis on "where hypotheses come from," in science education. It matters, since many hypotheses that are obvious in retrospect were overlooked for long periods of time. We know that scientists with broad interests (even outside science) tend to be much more productive than those who are more focused, for example. For good and ill Einstein followed his nose and instincts about what organizing principles in nature (such as Galileo's principle of relativity) were supremely important, and might point the way to discoveries. What's so interesting to me about his anti-dice (entanglement) paper is that Einstein-the-intuitive-guy shows the carefully reasoned implications of the theories and math of the rationalistic Copenhagen Interpretation guys (Bohr et al) that they weren't able to see themselves. Our minds our associative; we can't actually become fully rational actors or machines, mixing in some intuition let's more of our grey matter participate in finding solutions.
pjc50 9y ago
All knowledge is social, because it exists in the heads of humans. The processes by which we communicate it to one another are unavoidably social. And this can change both the meaning and (especially) the choice of which knowledge is considered important. This tends to cause problems with referer-refereant confusion. And people are not very good at spotting intrinsic or assumed knowledge. I learnt quite a lot about this from a guy who was trying to apply computational linguistics to chemistry papers; it turns out that even in this highly artificial environment the reader needs to infer things about chemicals mentioned from their pre-existing (socially constructed) knowledge.
Nomentatus 9y ago
Boyle didn't spend a lot of time writing philosophy, his close friend Locke undertook that; it was a very productive division of labor. Hume is often regarded as the founder of Psychology as a science. Descartes was willing to please the authorities with rationalist-religious smoke, and very proud of smoking them, too - until he too had to flee to Holland when his empiricism was no longer tolerated. So no, he was not "deeply religious." His codification of empirical methodology (which uses the word analysis in the title) was important to science and the philosophy of science but doesn't promote rationalism, quite the contrary. He did make key contributions to empirical science and mathematics. Leibnitz didn't create science or do experimental science per se, he was curious about binary numbers and created better notation for calculus (but these are tools not scientific discoveries). His contributions to science are vaguer - he sowed about as much confusion as light. I haven't looked at his biography in a long time, but I have lectured about him at a conference at Harvard. I certainly agree that scientists tend to be poor philosophers - it's not the same task. Heisenberg's book is just one recent example of that. Descartes and Galileo are exceptions, particularly with regard to codifying what the scientific method was.
- cousin_it 9y ago
  Do you think Descartes pretended to be religious?
  - Nomentatus 9y ago
    My professors absolutely did. Pascal was sincerely (but as a heretic) religious, and contributed to science. Descartes liked to stay alive, and was under pressure by the likes of Martin Schoock to show he wasn't an atheist and so should be tolerated. The church wasn't persuaded by Descartes and his books were ultimately banned. Pretending to be in some way religious is necessary when the Church is in charge. Egypt, today, holds a death penalty in store for those convicted of atheism; strong motivation for a little harmless pretence.
    - foldr 9y ago
      His whole line of argument in the medications would collapse if God didn't exist. He may well have been a heretic, but that is very different from not believing in God. The alleged reasons for thinking Descartes was an atheist basically amount to the observation that if he had have been an atheist he probably wouldn't have said that he was an atheist. That is true, but that is no reason to think that he actually was an atheist. By the same token, if he had liked eating babies for breakfast, he probably wouldn't have mentioned it in his work, but that is no reason to think that he in fact did.

paulpauper 9y ago

you cannot really compare mathematical accomplishments to continental philosophy . They are different domains. But Bacon is credited with creating the scientific method.

osullivj 9y ago

Empiricism's contribution is the emphasis on testing hypotheses. Provando e reprovando (test and test again) as Galileo said. That approach was brought to it's finest pitch with Popper's Falsificationism. But hypotheses need to come from somewhere. You're right to point to religious rationalists; I'd mention Newton too. Einstein's "god doesn't play dice", or the commonplace platonism of mathematicians is the same thing - an empirically unsupported metaphysical assertion.

jack9 9y ago
"god doesn't play dice" was a layman's phrasing of a complex subject, not a metaphysical assertion.
paulpauper 9y ago
The demarcation problem of falsifiability has applications for sciences (specifically, differentiating science from pseudoscience)
- coldtea 9y ago
  Not that absolute applications though. See Feyerabend for a counter-argument.
Nomentatus 9y ago
As I remember, Newton originally thought comets didn't have orbits and were directly influenced by God, so he seems to have been a sincere believer. I too would like to see more emphasis on "where hypotheses come from," in science education. It matters, since many hypotheses that are obvious in retrospect were overlooked for long periods of time. We know that scientists with broad interests (even outside science) tend to be much more productive than those who are more focused, for example. For good and ill Einstein followed his nose and instincts about what organizing principles in nature (such as Galileo's principle of relativity) were supremely important, and might point the way to discoveries. What's so interesting to me about his anti-dice (entanglement) paper is that Einstein-the-intuitive-guy shows the carefully reasoned implications of the theories and math of the rationalistic Copenhagen Interpretation guys (Bohr et al) that they weren't able to see themselves. Our minds our associative; we can't actually become fully rational actors or machines, mixing in some intuition let's more of our grey matter participate in finding solutions.

pjc50 9y ago

All knowledge is social, because it exists in the heads of humans. The processes by which we communicate it to one another are unavoidably social. And this can change both the meaning and (especially) the choice of which knowledge is considered important. This tends to cause problems with referer-refereant confusion. And people are not very good at spotting intrinsic or assumed knowledge. I learnt quite a lot about this from a guy who was trying to apply computational linguistics to chemistry papers; it turns out that even in this highly artificial environment the reader needs to infer things about chemicals mentioned from their pre-existing (socially constructed) knowledge.

Nomentatus 9y ago

Boyle didn't spend a lot of time writing philosophy, his close friend Locke undertook that; it was a very productive division of labor. Hume is often regarded as the founder of Psychology as a science. Descartes was willing to please the authorities with rationalist-religious smoke, and very proud of smoking them, too - until he too had to flee to Holland when his empiricism was no longer tolerated. So no, he was not "deeply religious." His codification of empirical methodology (which uses the word analysis in the title) was important to science and the philosophy of science but doesn't promote rationalism, quite the contrary. He did make key contributions to empirical science and mathematics. Leibnitz didn't create science or do experimental science per se, he was curious about binary numbers and created better notation for calculus (but these are tools not scientific discoveries). His contributions to science are vaguer - he sowed about as much confusion as light. I haven't looked at his biography in a long time, but I have lectured about him at a conference at Harvard. I certainly agree that scientists tend to be poor philosophers - it's not the same task. Heisenberg's book is just one recent example of that. Descartes and Galileo are exceptions, particularly with regard to codifying what the scientific method was.

cousin_it 9y ago
Do you think Descartes pretended to be religious?
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  My professors absolutely did. Pascal was sincerely (but as a heretic) religious, and contributed to science. Descartes liked to stay alive, and was under pressure by the likes of Martin Schoock to show he wasn't an atheist and so should be tolerated. The church wasn't persuaded by Descartes and his books were ultimately banned. Pretending to be in some way religious is necessary when the Church is in charge. Egypt, today, holds a death penalty in store for those convicted of atheism; strong motivation for a little harmless pretence.
  - foldr 9y ago
    His whole line of argument in the medications would collapse if God didn't exist. He may well have been a heretic, but that is very different from not believing in God. The alleged reasons for thinking Descartes was an atheist basically amount to the observation that if he had have been an atheist he probably wouldn't have said that he was an atheist. That is true, but that is no reason to think that he actually was an atheist. By the same token, if he had liked eating babies for breakfast, he probably wouldn't have mentioned it in his work, but that is no reason to think that he in fact did.