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If you look at the history of these accounts of science though, they are "pre modern" in a negative sence. We didnt have formal methods of causal analysis to t
by mjburgess 2y ago
If you look at the history of these accounts of science though, they are "pre modern" in a negative sence.
We didnt have formal methods of causal analysis to the 1920s, and it took til the 80s to have a real robust formalism and account of causal analysis.
Before, experimenters would "have in their heads" the causal knowledge of how to conduct and interpret these results -- but this was never formalised, or given explicitly.
So accounts of science before this "causal revolution" of the late 20th C. are broken, and based on a philosopher's literal reading of scientific experiments (and the like) with little undersatnding of how the experimenters actaully thought about them -- and philosophers often doctrinally opposed to entertaining these thoughts seriously.
Today the partition between science/engineering, prediction/explanation, etc. can be given on much more robust grounds, and there's few philosophers of science working that adopt positions wholly at odds with my account. What you find from ML-ists is humean conceptions which ideologically honour their curve-fitting methods with equivalent status to actual experimentation and explanation