In the philosophy of science The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. In addition to these central problems for science as a whole, many philosophers of science consider these problems as they apply to particular sciences . Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science to draw, instrumentalism is the view that a concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality.
The instrumentalism of Ernst Mach Ernst Mach (February 18, 1838 – February 19, 1916) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, remembered for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and through his criticism of Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's relativity was criticized by Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce (September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Peirce was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. It is largely his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, and semiotics (and his founding of, the founder of pragmatism Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected. Pragmatism, in William James' eyes, was that the truth of an idea (and later pragmaticism Pragmaticism is a term used by Charles Sanders Peirce for his pragmatic philosophy after 1905, in order to distance himself and it from pragmatism, the original name, which had been used in a manner he did not approve of in the "literary journals". Today, outside of philosophy, "pragmatism" is often taken to refer to a). Peirce emphasized that a supposition of reality and truth seems to be the only way to explain scientific progress and to justify the scientific practice of seeking explanations of regularities in better theories. In particular, Peirce explained that unobservable objects had an important role in science, as long as their existence yields in principle empirical consequences that could be tested (in principle).[1]
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Critics
The philosopher of science Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy repeatedly rejects and criticizes instrumentalism in Conjectures and Refutations, perhaps regarding it as too mechanical:
Instrumentalism can be formulated as the thesis that scientific theories - the theories of the so-called "pure" sciences - are nothing but computational rules (or inference rules); of the same character, fundamentally, as the computation rules of the so-called "applied" sciences. (One might even formulate it as the thesis that "pure" science is a misnomer, and that all science is "applied".) Now my reply to instrumentalism consists in showing that there are profound differences between "pure" theories and technological computation rules, and that instrumentalism can give a perfect description of these rules but is quite unable to account for the difference between them and the theories. [2]
Instrumentalism denies that theories are truth-evaluable; instead, they should be treated like a black box into which you feed observed data, and through which you produce observable predictions. This requires a distinction between theory and observation, and within each type a distinction between terms and statements. Observation statements (O-statements) have their meaning fixed by observable truth conditions, e.g. "the litmus paper is red", whereas observation terms (O-terms) have their meaning fixed by their referring to observable things or properties, e.g. "red". Theoretical statements (T-statements) have their meaning fixed by their function within a theory and aren't truth evaluable, e.g. "the solution is acidic", whereas theoretical terms (T-terms) have their meaning fixed by their systematic function within a theory and don't refer to any observable thing or property, e.g. "acidic". Though you may think that "acidic" refers to a real property in an object, the meaning of the term can only be explained by reference to a theory about acidity, in contrast to "red", which is a property you can observe. Statements that mix both T-terms and O-terms are therefore T-statements, since their totality cannot be directly observed.
There is some criticism of this distinction, however, as it confuses "non-theoretical" with "observable", and likewise "theoretical" with "non-observable". For example, the term "gene" is theoretical (so a T-term) but it can also be observed (so an O-term). Whether a term is theoretical or not is a semantic matter, because it involves the different ways in which the term gets its meaning (from a theory or from an observation). Whether a term is observable or not is an epistemic matter, because it involves how we can come to know about it. Instrumentalists contend that the distinctions are the same, that we can only come to know about something if we can understand its meaning according to truth-evaluable observations. So in the above example, "gene" is a T-term because, although it is observable, we cannot understand its meaning from observation alone.
See also
Notes and references
- ^ Page 507 of Stewart: Stewart, W. Christopher (1991). "Social and Economic Aspects of Peirce's Conception of Science". Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society (Indiana Univerity Press) 27 (4): pp. 501-526. JSTOR JSTOR is a United States-based online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 40320349. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320349.
- ^ Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Routledge, 2003 ISBN 0415285941
External links
- Can politics be reduced to science by David Hume David Hume was a Scottish philosopher and historian, regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist
Categories: Philosophy of science | Theories of mind | Pragmatism | Metatheory of science
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Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:55:26 GMT+00:00
Review St. Louis (blog) I do, however, realize that this album is much more of a showcase for her voice than the instrumentalism , so what I'm saying is akin to going to a ...
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to act as an antidote to the underlying instrumentalism of capitalist culture Instead it announces the individual s relationship to the everyday in the language of instrumental rationalism Pia Lindman Public Sauna 2000 PS1 New York pia lindman
kpearce
Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:08:25 GM
john beaudoin's recent paper "sober on intelligent design theory and the intelligent designer" contains the following fascinating remark in a footnote: [william] dembski has suggested that the designer referred to in id theory need not ...
Q. I just finished watching this series and it got me really confused. I thought I understood the story when it was about fighting against angels and that there was something about the eva units. But in the later episodes, it showed some weird scenes about instrumentalism or something. The ending really left me asking "What the hell was that?". Can someone please enlighten me? Super thanks in advance!
Asked by rayne - Sat Aug 22 06:02:33 2009 - - 1 Answers - 0 Comments
A. Okay i posted my default answer for evangelion. It explains everything and i'm an expert. lol . But instrumentality was the whole goal of seele and what the hired gendo to achive and the show ending doesn't explain a thing. I suggest you read a little more of what i wrote The show ending was that way cause Hideaki Anno didn't have the time to tell ending the way he wanted. he ending he wanted was End OF Evangelion film. The show ending wasn't too confusing at times it was like wtf is going on and why? But that showed you more of the characters emotions and why they were the way they were, why asuka didn't want to be forgotten and not acknowledged why misato was so caring,, why rei was always battle a feeling that her soul wasn't hers, and… [cont.]
Answered by Flash Flood *IO SONO INTERISTA* - Mon Aug 24 03:12:52 2009
