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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

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.

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.