Is Philosophy Science?

I’ll just post some impressions of tonight’s seminar. I’ll not mention Chris Hughes since he was being too reasonable to warrant comment.

Wilfried made some beautiful statements that I found myself agreeing with. There is no know how/ know that distinction, if knowledge doesn’t have an application then it fails to be right or wrong and there is no criteria for truth. There is no criteria for correctness in philosophy so philosophy is like singing.
But I wasn’t convinced that this made philosophy any different from science. Wilfried also said that in science you stand on the shoulders of giants, whereas in philosophy you bring the giants to their knees. There is a one to one relationship between philosophers and theories. Science created his pen and was the fact that his TV didn’t work. I doubt that the TV repair man is anymore of a scientist than a philosopher, nor that the beautiful fountain pen relied on any scientific principles that weren’t around in Archimedes time.
David Papineau made a couple of interesting outrageous comments: That philosophy did not involve conceptual analysis and that philosophy was unlike science when it concerned itself with modality, but that modality was only peripheral to philosophy anyway.
Of course in a room full of philosophers there was a lot of singing going on about what philosophy was, and a lot of agreement in this regard. But there was no clear idea of what science was.
Science is exclusively modal (I polemically claim) Science tells us what is possible, what is necessary and what is impossible. Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. A modal claim. It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. A modal claim. Scientific laws extend to counterfactual cases, so any statement of scientific law is a statement about what might be, what can be, what can’t be and what couldn’t have been.
Science is not directly practical. Very little technology is developed by scientists. It is true that a good bridge builder, or pen manufacturer will use principles that have been worked out at some point by scientists. But they will also use aesthetic principles and operate within a political environment that has been shaped by ideas of a softer kind. The pen that Wilfried Ostended was as much a product of Bentham and Marx as it was of any science. Einstein, the archetypal scientist, was not a scientist because of Hiroshoma, he wasn’t even a scientist because of the motion of Mercury. If his theory had been proven false he may not have been so famous, but he would still have been doing science. Science without application is not thereby philosophy and philosophy with application is not thereby science.

What is Space, Stephen Tiley

The Reality of Space


Two questions immediately arise:

1) what is space? [metaphysical question]

2) how can we know space? [epistemological question].

Needless to say, both questions are intricately connected: in order to ask what space is we must ask how, if at all, we can know acquire knowledge of it.

The two main historical positions concerning the nature of space are absolutism [or substantivalism] and relationalism.

Absolutism, most prominently expressed by Newton , argues that space has an existence over and above the objects contained within it.

Relationalism, most prominently expressed by Leibniz, argues that space has no existence over and above the relations between objects contained within it.

Both offered intricate arguments to support their respective positions.

According to Newton , as space is ontologically prior to the objects contained within it, viz., space can exist even when there are no objects contained within it, his view entails that objects in space can have absolute positions and velocities.

For Leibniz, on the other hand, space exists only as a relation between objects, and therefore has no existence apart from the existence of those objects; motion exists only as a relation between those objects.

Leibniz believes that such notions as absolute position and velocity, as espoused by Newton ’s absolutism, are meaningless and lead to contradictions.

The two arguments he offers us rely on his principle of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles.

Leibniz thought-experiment:
He asks us to imagine two universes situated in absolute space. The only difference between them is that the second is placed five feet to the left of the first, a possibility available if such a thing as absolute space exists. Such a situation, however, is not possible according to Leibniz, for if it were:
a) where a universe was positioned in absolute space would have no sufficient reason, as it might very well have been anywhere else, hence contradicting the principle of sufficient reason, and
b) there could exist two distinct universes that were in all ways indiscernible, hence contradicting the Identity of Indiscernibles.


In defence against Leibniz, Newton offered us his famous ‘Bucket’ thought-experiment.

Newton’s Bucket:


The rotating bucket argument attempts to show that true rotational motion cannot be defined as the relative rotation of the body with respect to the immediately surrounding bodies. It is one of five arguments from the "properties, causes, and effects" of true motion and rest that support his contention that, in general, true motion and rest cannot be defined as special instances of motion or rest relative to other bodies, but instead can be defined only by reference to absolute space.

Water in a bucket, hung from a rope and set to spin, will start with a flat surface. As the water begins to spin in the bucket, the surface of the water will become concave. If the bucket is stopped, the water will continue to spin, and while the spin continues the surface will remain concave. The concave surface is apparently not the result of the interaction of the bucket and the water, since the water is flat when the bucket first starts to spin, becomes concave as the water starts to spin, and remains concave as the bucket stops.

This argument attempted to demonstrate the necessity of the existence of absolute space to account for phenomena like rotation and acceleration that cannot be accounted for on a purely relationalist account. Clarke argues that since the curvature of the water occurs in the rotating bucket as well as in the stationary bucket containing spinning water, it can only be explained by stating that the water is rotating in relation to some third thing, namely absolute space.

http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/phisci/Newsletters/bucket.jpg

According to Newton , absolute space has the following properties:

1) Space has an ontologically prior existence to the objects contained within it.
2) Space can affect the objects/matter contained within it, but these objects cannot affect/influence space itself.

On a first reading absolute space seems to be endowed with a rather bizarre ontological status: it can exert an influence on objects contained in it but cannot itself be affected. It is immutable, eternal and unchanging.

Furthermore, if we cannot exert and influence of space itself, how can we possibly acquire knowledge of its existence?

As all we can really interact with are the objects contained within space, surely it follows that only these objects can be said to exist….?