Cutie Stories

Scientific Method

What follows is a description of various views on inductive inference and methods for inferring general theories as they have developed from the scientific revolution to modern times. Later, the development of methods for discovering causal relationships will be discussed.

MODERN METHODOLOGY. A strong influence on contemporary methodology is interdisciplinary research. In the twentieth century, the question of how we can use observations to attain empirical knowledge became the subject of research in a number of disciplines, such as statistics, econometrics, and computer science. Modern philosophy of method continues to contribute to and draw on developments in related disciplines.

Another strong influence on contemporary methodology arises from studies of the history of science, which captured the attention of philosophers because of the groundbreaking work of Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Scientific Realism

Scientific realism is a philosophical view about science that consists of three theses:

The metaphysical thesis: The world has a definite and mind-independent structure.
The semantic thesis: Scientific theories should be taken at face value. They are truth-conditioned descriptions of their intended domain, both observable and unobservable. Hence, they are capable of being true or false. The theoretical terms featured in theories have putative factual reference.
The epistemic thesis: Mature and predictively successful scientific theories are well confirmed and (approximately) true of the world. So the entities posited by them, or entities very similar to those posited, inhabit the world.

Metaphysics

Let us call the first thesis of scientific realism metaphysical realism. What exactly is involved in the claim of mindindependence? One way to construe the opposite claim that the world is mind-dependent, along the lines of traditional idealism and phenomenalism, is to argue that the world consists of mental entities, be they ideas or actual and possible sense-data. Thus understood, minddependence is a thesis about the kind of stuff that makes up the world.

Michael Scot

Michael Scot was an astrologer, alchemist, and translator of Arabic and Hebrew works into Latin. Born in Scotland late in the twelfth century, he spent most of his active life in Toledo, Palermo, and mainland Italy—perhaps at Rome. He first appears with any degree of certainty at Toledo in 1217, when he finished a translation of alBitrogi’s (Alpetragius’s) Liber Astronomiae (On the spheres).

The next certain date is 1220, when he is reported to have completed a Latin translation of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, probably at Toledo. Michael Scot seems to have become favorably known at the papal court, for he was offered the archbishopric of Cashel in Ireland in 1225.

Michael Scot refused the office because of his ignorance of Gaelic. Probably during this period he produced the translation of Aristotle’s De Caelo et Mundo, along with several other physical works of Aristotle with their Arabic commentaries by Averroes.

Scotism

Scotism refers variously to

a loosely identified body of views thought to be original with or characteristic of John Duns Scotus,
a tradition of texts, doctrines, and approaches that traces back to him, and
a via (“way” or perhaps “school”) that had an institutional presence in the universities of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

In the first sense scholars today speak of “logical Scotism” in the work of authors who perhaps have never heard of Scotus.

In both the first and the second senses scholars ask whether Charles Sanders Peirce, who had read Scotus with care but was a fiercely independent thinker, was a Scotist. In the third sense scholars inquire about the presence of Scotism in the arts and theology faculties of particular universities in the sixteenth century and investigate its fortuna.

John R. Searle

John R. Searle was born in Denver Colorado in 1932. He attended the University of Wisconsin (1949–1952), then Oxford (1952–1959) as a Rhodes Scholar. John R. Searle earned his PhD (Oxford) in 1959 and went to the University of California Berkeley, where he remained, and where he is Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language Over the past forty years, Searle has been working on a selection of problems in philosophy at three levels o description: mind (the basic level), language (the middle level), and society (the highest level).

In each case John R. Searle can be seen as following a certain pattern: he proposes analyses of facts at one level of description in which they cause, are realized in, or constitute, facts at another higher level. Brute facts can count as institutional facts, and some objective brute facts can cause and realize other subjective, brute facts.

Like phenomenological analyses Searle’s approach is not classically reductive, but there is an explanatory asymmetry: higher level phenomena often are to be explained in terms of lower level phenomena (explaining is not explaining away). However, as contrasted with phenomenology, this procedure does not require that conditions revealed by analysis be revealed in experience.

Self

In its normal use the English expression “self ” is not even quite a word, but something that makes an ordinary object pronoun into a reflexive one (e.g., her into herself). The reflexive pronoun is used when the object of an action or attitude is the same as the subject of that action or attitude. If I say Mark Twain shot himself in the foot, I describe Mark Twain not only as the shooter but as the person shot.

In this sense “the self ” is just the person doing the action or holding the attitude that is somehow in question. “Self ” is also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitudes, identifying the special case where the object is the same as the agent: self-love, self-hatred, self-abuse, self-promotion, self-knowledge.

“The self ” often means more than this, however. In psychology it is often used for that set of attributes that a person attaches to himself or herself most firmly, the attributes that the person finds it difficult or impossible to imagine himself or herself without. The term identity is also used in this sense. Typically, one’s sex is a part of one’s self or one’s identity; one’s profession or nationality may or may not be.

Self in Indian Philosophy

The human phenomenological experience of the universe consists fundamentally of the self or subject encountering a world of objects. Thus the two main objects of philosophy are the subject or the self—its nature and constitution—on the one hand, and the universe, along with its nature and constitution, on the other. Indian philosophy is no exception to this rule.

This experiencing self is referred to by several terms in Indian philosophy, the one most widely used being atman. The word is usually derived from the root an, which means “to breathe”; apparently the fact that the perceiving self is an animate being who faces other animate beings and inanimate objects is central to its emergence as the marker of the self.

It is called purua when its distinction from inanimate nature or prakti is emphasized, and it is called jiva when the atman is viewed as caught up in the cycle of sasara or birth and death, freedom from which becomes a goal of this empirical self (jiva). In many systems this freedom is attained when the jiva or empirical self discovers its true relationship to the atman or metaphysical self.