Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science
One of the things that has struck me for a long time about social sciences (and sciences where, in general, the evidence is based on stochastic processes) is that the underlying philosophy of logic is modern symbolic (aka Boolean).<p>The biggest problem there is that hypotheses have no underlying mechanism to make sure that the potential cause and effect are semantically related.<p>If p then q seems innocent enough. It probably seems even more innocent (or at least more simple) than
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Socrates is therefore a mortal.<p>Because the required relationships in a syllogistic model can become a bit complicated.<p>I started off in this realm as a Philosophy major studying mostly Aristotelian models of deductive reasoning. It was mostly for kicks because I was a violinist at the time and needed a break from my music theory courses.<p>But when I got into the market research industry and started writing statistical software, I found serious problems with assumptions everywhere I looked. It seemed to me that there&#x27;s a real problem with the way people with informal or introductory experience dealt with statistical results, with the relationship between null and alternative hypotheses, and with the evidence generated by sampling processes.<p>This is probably largely irrelevant to high-level Physicists, but I think it&#x27;s at least partly relevant when we talk about what is and isn&#x27;t falsifiable.<p>There&#x27;s a comment in the piece where a guy says that Astrology is falsifiable, so we know that shouldn&#x27;t be the only criteria for something to count as Science. I think he&#x27;s on to something there because I think the fundamental hypothesis of Astrology is so far out of whack that it shouldn&#x27;t have been considered.<p>There&#x27;s nothing behind astrology that&#x27;s any better than a bad if p then q statement. But we have no way of evaluating these by form. One can simple say, &quot;If the grass is green, then the moon is made of blue cheese.&quot; This is formally a valid statement.<p>The problem I encounter many times (anecdotally, of course) is that people don&#x27;t treat this statement as a material implication. They treat it as a logical conjunct. So that seems somewhat safe in the grass&#x2F;moon example. They make the mistake of thinking of it as simply as, &quot;If the grass is green AND the moon is made of blue cheese . . .&quot; Well, that&#x27;s clearly false. So why bother?<p>But a material implication has consequences. You can flip it around and say (by axiom) that if p then q then !q implies !p. I can assert that green grass =&gt; blue cheese moon. And if you accept that as valid, you can likewise assert that !blue cheese moon =&gt; !green grass.<p>It&#x27;s easy to see the flaws in this contrived example, but it&#x27;s often very difficult to see these problems in realistic examples when you are looking at effect sizes in medicine, or changes in advertising techniques, or samples from thermometers, or the kinds of things that I have no knowledge of in theoretical Physics.<p>It&#x27;s often very difficult to assess when a scientific study has any realistic relationship between a null and alternative hypothesis. It would be nice if it were all statistically about whether or not these two numbers are the same or different, but that&#x27;s frequently not the case.<p>I think the idea is correct, that we do need Philosophers to come up with a better system. Even something as simple as &quot;The subject of a material implication must be included in the predicate of the material implication.&quot; might be a good start. Although it&#x27;s woefully naive.<p>It would be kind of interesting to see people testing hypothesis in the scientific world that were formulated as syllogisms.<p>i.e., based on studies x, y, and z we can make the following claims:
all (or some--doesn&#x27;t matter. Most &quot;some&quot; claims can be reduced to a subset of &quot;all&quot; claims) x are y
This study shows that z is x
Therefore z is y<p>Is it limiting and problematic? Of course. Where do new categories happen?<p>Well, there are negations. You can prove that phenomenon z is not a member of previously known phenomena and is therefore something else.<p>While I think a great many of people sort of feel this way about stuff, I think there&#x27;s a reason to codify it formally. Because so many people don&#x27;t think very clearly about these things in aggregate.<p>It seems kind of ugly. But it would be an improvement over what we have now, which is basically a free-for-all in certain realms of science, where any sufficiently complex idea is grounds for further research, even when the possibilities of proof are non-existent. I say that more to the social sciences than I do the theoretical physicists of the world, so perhaps I&#x27;m off point here.<p>But my general idea is that, yes, philosophy can and should step it up a bit.