Is There a Scientific Method?

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
The World ◽  
Innate Ideas ◽  
External Causes

Modern science relies largely on method or, rather, on the claim that by employing a systematic, impersonal method, human reasoning can transcend the mind’s subjective experience of reality and discover the true, external causes of experience. In the early stages of modern science’s emergence out of medieval and Renaissance nature philosophy, Francis Bacon argued that this method was to be based on induction and experiment, without a priori mental input and with a minimum of mathematics. Rene Descartes argued that the required method was to be based on deduction, mathematics, and a priori and innate ideas, with a minimum of experiment. For Descartes, experiment served primarily as a check on deductive reasoning; for Bacon, experiment was a source of knowledge and constrained our inductive reasoning about empirical facts. Despite their differing styles, Descartes and Bacon together concretized the idea that a systematic method of reasoning could give us knowledge of the world.

Algebra As Thought Experiment

1998 ◽  
pp. 106-111
Author(s):  
Jagdish Hattiangadi
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Algebraic Method ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Synthetic A Priori

This paper addresses the problem of understanding what mathematics contributes to the exceptional success of modern mathematical physics. I urge that we give up the Kantian construal of the division between mathematics (synthetic a priori) and physics (experimental), and that we ask instead how algebra helps synthetic a posteriori mathematics improve our ability to study the world. The theses suggested are: 1) Mathematical theories are about the empirical world, and are true or false just like other theories of empirical science. 2) The air of artificiality in mathematics lies exclusively in the use of algebraic method. 3) This method is constructive much like all fiction is, but this construction is for the purpose of experimental investigation of the physical world to the extent that anything in the world has objects like those in the fictional world of a particular algebra. 4) This is why algebraic techniques are successful even when the assumptions of the system are false: they may still be applicable to some things considered from some perspective. 5) The success of mathematical physics is also due to Descartes' discovery of a remarkable truth: we live in space and time which can be described as a whole. 6) Therefore, what distinguishes modern science from earlier and later philosophy is not a general method of science, but the fact that it happened to find a truth, and a particular way of studying reality which bore fruit.

scholarly journals Inverse probability and the use of Likelihood

1932 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Large Class ◽  
Classical Theory ◽  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
Inverse Probability ◽  
Observational Material ◽  
Statistical Work

Logicians have long distinguished two modes of human reasoning, under the respective names of deductive and inductive reasoning. In deductive reasoning we attempt to argue from a hypothesis to its necessary consequences, which may be verifiable by observation; that is, to argue from the general to the particular. In inductive reasoning we attempt to argue from the particular, which is typically a body of observational material, to the general, which is typically a theory applicable to future experience. In statistical language we are attempting to argue from the sample to the population, from which it was drawn. Since recent statistical work has shown that this type of argument can be carried out with exactitude in a usefully large class of cases(2, 3), by means of conceptions somewhat different from those of the classical theory of probability, it may be useful briefly to restate the logical and mathematical distinctions which have to be drawn.

Understanding reasoning: Let's describe what we really think about

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 269-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Sternberg
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
Ecological Relevance ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Life Decision

AbstractI suggest psychologists would more profitably study a totally different area of human reasoning than is discussed in the target article – the inductive reasoning people use in their everyday life that matters in consequential real-life decision making, rather than the deductive reasoning that psychologists have studied meticulously but that has relatively less ecological relevance to people's lives.

scholarly journals The hitchhikers' guide to reading and writing health research

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arindam Basu
Keyword(s):  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
Inductive Reasoning ◽  
General Term ◽  
Abductive Reasoning ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Best Fit

In this paper, we introduce the concepts of critically reading research papers and writing of research proposals and reports. Research methods is a general term that includes the processes of observation of the world around the researcher, linking background knowledge with foreground questions, drafting a plan of collection of data and framing theories and hypotheses, testing the hypotheses, and finally, drafting or writing the research to evoke new knowledge. These processes vary with the themes and disciplines that the researcher engages in; nevertheless, common motifs can be found. In this paper, we propose three methods are interlinked: a deductive reasoning process where the structure of the thought can be captured critically; an inductive reasoning method where the researcher can appraise and generate generalisable ideas from observations of the world; and finally, abductive reasoning method where the world can be explained or the phenomena observed can be explained or be accounted for. This step or reasoning is also about framing theories, testing and challenging established knowledge or finding best theories and how theories best fit the observations. We start with a discussion of the different types of statements that one can come across in any scholarly literature or even in lay or semi-serious literature, appraise them, and identify arguments from non-arguments, and explanations from non-explanations. Then we outline three strategies to appraise and identify reasonings in explanations and arguments. We end with a discussion on how to draft a research proposal and a reading/archiving strategy of research.

scholarly journals Eco-Psychological and Phenomenological Approach to Sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 262
Author(s):  
Larry W. Riggs ◽  
Sandra Hellyer-Riggs
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Crucial Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Progress

Our purpose is to show the value of eco-psychology and phenomenology for a cognitive paradigm fostering sustainable development. Our hypothesis is that those fields help lay the groundwork for truly sustainable development. Our method is a review of scholarly and theoretical work on the origins of the modern paradigm that has governed conceptions of development, and on eco-psychology, phenomenology, cognitive science, and sustainable development. Our contribution is a fully informed understanding of psychological and socio-cultural issues relevant to sustainability. The prevailing conception of development derives from the origins of modern science in seventeenth-century Europe. Francis Bacon and René Descartes elaborated a vision of development, or material progress, based on exploitation of a nature without inherent value, as a source of raw materials for human purposes. Eco-psychology aims to repair the rift between humanity and nature. Our dominant idea of development implies the alienation from nature that makes it difficult to prioritize authentic sustainability. Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes the crucial point that “we can never grasp the world in its totality but we grasp it according to the mode in which we inhabit it” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, as cited in Buckley, 2013). What will we sustain? How will we negotiate the socio-cultural and psychological obstacles and achieve reconciliation? What are some examples of meaningful, practical movement toward sustainability?Keywords: eco-psychology, phenomenological, sustainability, mindset/paradigm, mindfulness, emotions, healing

1968: On Social, Epistemic, and Historiographic(?) Revolutions

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto D. Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Young Students ◽  
Historic Significance ◽  
Agent Of Change

This article addresses the meaning and significance of the “world revolution of 1968,” as well as the historiography of 1968. I critically interrogate how the production of a narrative about 1968 and the creation of ethnic studies, despite its world-historic significance, has tended to perpetuate a limiting, essentialized and static notion of “the student” as the primary actor and an inherent agent of change. Although students did play an enormous role in the events leading up to, through, and after 1968 in various parts of the world—and I in no way wish to diminish this fact—this article nonetheless argues that the now hegemonic narrative of a student-led revolt has also had a number of negative consequences, two of which will be the focus here. One problem is that the generation-driven models that situate 1968 as a revolt of the young students versus a presumably older generation, embodied by both their parents and the dominant institutions of the time, are in effect a sociosymbolic reproduction of modernity/coloniality’s logic or driving impulse and obsession with newness. Hence an a priori valuation is assigned to the new, embodied in this case by the student, at the expense of the presumably outmoded old. Secondly, this apparent essentializing of “the student” has entrapped ethnic studies scholars, and many of the period’s activists (some of whom had been students themselves), into said logic, thereby risking the foreclosure of a politics beyond (re)enchantment or even obsession with newness yet again.

How Reality is Reasonable

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Dimensional Manifold ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Fundamental Entity ◽  
Spatiotemporal Relations ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This chapter begins with a systematic presentation of the doctrine of actualism. According to actualism, all that exists is actual, determinate, and of one way of being. There are no possible objects, nor is there any indeterminacy in the world. In addition, there are no ways of being. It is proposed that actual entities stand in three fundamental relations: mereological, spatiotemporal, and resemblance relations. These relations govern the fundamental entities. Each fundamental entity stands in parthood relations, spatiotemporal relations, and resemblance relations to other entities. The resulting picture is one that represents the world as a four-dimensional manifold of actual ‘qualitied contents’—upon which all else supervenes. It is then explained how actualism accounts for classes, quantity, number, causation, laws, a priori knowledge, necessity, and induction.

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Structural Description ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
The World ◽  
Empirical Realism

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.

Introducing Victim Impact Statement in India: Reconceptualizing Victim Status

2021 ◽  
pp. 251660692199175
Author(s):  
Devansh Dubey ◽  
Payas Jain
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Therapeutic Tool ◽  
Victim Status ◽  
Victim Impact Statement ◽  
The World ◽  
Due Process Of Law ◽  
The Right

The right to fair trial is inherent in the concept of due process of law, which now forms part of Article 21 of Indian Constitution after the Maneka Gandhi judgement. Pertinently attached with the same comes the responsibility of the criminal system to treat victims with increased awareness and sensitivity. However, the established convention shows that in planning and developing administration of criminal justice, proper attention is not given to the victims of crime in achieving goals of criminal justice; the major cause of it being that a victim is heard only as a witness not as a victim. A credible response to the said issue has emerged in the form of victim impact statement (VIS) in the modern legal system across the world. With that being said, the researchers through this article try to deduce the need for incorporating a VIS in India through the various jurisprudential understandings of what it means to be a victim, including the gap between the subjective experience of the sufferer and the interpretation of the same by others, and what restorative justice would mean to heal a victim. Establishing upon the same premise of victim status, the researchers try to suggest that the introduction of VIS, with the primary purpose of it being a therapeutic tool and not an instrument of changing the course of justice, will serve to make us reconsider our contours of a ‘victim’.

Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the “Doctrine of Essence”

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
The World

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought — at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we “abandon […] the notion of ‘essence’ altogether”, along with “the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences”.It would be wrong to maintain that these writers understand the concept of essence in precisely the same way, or that they are all working towards the same philosophical goal. Nevertheless, they do share one aim in common: to undermine the idea that there is some deeper reality or identity underlying and grounding what we encounter in the world, what we say and what we do. That is to say, they may all be described as anti-foundationalist thinkers — thinkers who want us to attend to the specific processes and practices of nature and humanity without understanding them to be the product of some fundamental essence or “absolute”.

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