[Scientific Methods] The art of demonstration

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:fountain_pen: :fountain_pen: :fountain_pen:

“All teaching and all learning through discourse proceed from previous knowledge.” - Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, start.

While Plato thought that learning was remembering what we had learned from direct impression by the forms before ‘falling’ into our bodies, Aristotle understood that science (episteme) could be caused in us, by way of argumentation proceeding from what we already know.

Notice that Aristotle does not say that all knowledge is caused by preexisting knowledge - this would lead to an infinite regress - but all learning.

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Ah an appeal to authority…

Aristotle claimed that since Earth was made of matter, which was a fundamental brick in the creation of everything, it must have always been present and will always be there.

He also believed women were inferior, and had the status of slaves.

According to Aristotle, the heart was the centre of consciousness whereas the brain served only as a radiator to get rid of extra heat.

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That is how one learns, and does not become utterly ignorant: by studying under great teachers, living and past. Aristotle is a great place to start a deep learning of scientific methods, having all but invented and perfected logic. That doesn’t mean we have to believe everything he says, obviously…

@Sheldon I invite you to engage with the claim itself :slight_smile: Any thoughts?

Not quite. He believed the natural place of the element “earth” was the center of the Earth. But the whole cosmos is made of matter, not just Earth, or even the “sublunary”.

He also believed, but for very different reasons, that the universe was sempiternal (“must have always been present and will always be there”, as you say). He thought that the universe was essentially static, as did most cosmologists as late as the early 20th century, until Fr. Georges Lemaitre’s defended his primeval atom theory as the best explanation of the data, at first mocked (by his atheist peers) as the “Big Bang” model.

Actually, he says the very opposite in book 1, section 1 of his Politics: “Now nature has distinguished between the female and the slave. For she is not niggardly, like the smith who fashions the Delphian knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use, and every instrument is best made when intended for one and not for many uses. But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female.” He would probably consider our modern societies “barbaric” in this regard, because women are put to servile work, in factories, construction work, etc.

This error is really striking isn’t it?! We almost feel our awareness as being in our head… Somehow this error didn’t prevent his works in biology and especially his work On the soul from become a foundational cornerstone of advances in psychology and even medicine, in later centuries.

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That’s the only point I was making.

It’s your quote, why don’t you explain why you think it is relevant, in a public debate forum that is predominantly atheistic?

I’d only say that it is obvious that being taught by others is not the only way to gain knowledge. Luckily for humans, or we’d have remained ignorant of the natural world.

The quote doesn’t say he thought "only" the earth was made of matter, unless I’ve misread it.

In fact the quote very specifically says matter is fundamental in the creation of everything.

Oh I think that depends how one is using the term, I am guessing contemporary views would view the status women had very differently

Put?

Again it is these types of distinctions that would separate the rights women experience now, from how they were then. The point is moot now, as you have since qualified your position - That doesn’t mean we have to believe everything he says, obviously…

No one suggested otherwise, only that who makes an assertion or argument is less important, than how they are verified. At least if one is to remain as unbiased as possible.

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Do you apply this same logic to Christianity as well?

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The key phrase here is through discourse. You have learning stuff by accepting what you receive from your elders and by discussing, deducing, and refining (through discourse), and you have learning by doing (i.e. experimentation, gaining experience, doing research). I will argue that the latter is how we obtain the most new knowledge.

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Well MAYBE that is how one learns to believe in magic.
:magic_wand: :mage: :magic_wand:

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He also believed that men had more teeth than women, and that heavier weights fall faster than lighter weights.

Aristotle would never ask men and women to open their mouths so he could count their teeth, because this would be a betrayal of the idea that all knowledge can be synthesized by thought alone.

Interestingly enough, Galileo defeated Artistotle on his own turf about falling weights when he asked what would happen if a heavy weight and a light weight were attached by a long, thin cord. Does the combination fall faster because the weights are added together, or does the lighter weight slow the fall of the heavier weight?

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for what it is worth: back in those days the “smart” people believed that a ball and an round fruit obeyed different laws of motion; because the ball was made by man to play a game, and the fruit was made by god to eat. They couldn’t possibly behave the same way :clown_face:

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So whilst the assertion that “All teaching and all learning through discourse proceed from previous knowledge.”, is almost trivially true, what one ought to be asking is how we weed out the erroneous teachings. If only we had methods that best achieved this, by say removing as much subjective bias as possible, and objectively verifying the results… :face_with_raised_eyebrow: :wink:

Would it be fair to say that people who learn from childhood that the universe is a few thousand years old, and was created using magic, along with humans in their current form, have been taught badly? And that much that proceeds from their teaching and learning will likely be more poorly reasoned as a result?

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You raise a very interesting point. We should start asking to which degree these teachings actually correspond to what we are able to meter out from looking at stuff in nature and in society, and to what degree. It strikes me that if we could count things, compare sizes, observe which things happen first and which other things happen as a consequence, keep records, etc., we might achieve what you are aiming for. Like putting things on top of other things until you get a structure like a brick wall that you can build a house on. There probably is a word for this already, but it escapes me at the moment. I’m pretty sure some intelligent gentlemen with enough time and resources on their hands could start to try figuring these things out.

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Since the word “all” is being used here, I’d say it’s generally true but would have to disagree if it’s meant literally. One learns through observation and while the accumulated learnings of humanity can’t practically be reproduced by each and every person, one can certainly discover things on one’s own.

As an example, the particular version of Christianity I was raised on taught me things like “god blesses the righteous and confounds the wicked” which, while it certainly sounds “truthy” at least in terms of how things, one would think, ought to be, and has a great body of theological pronouncements behind it in history, I discovered to be untrue in my own lived experience in any way as to be distinguishable from random happenstance. Wicked people (leaving aside the definition of “wicked”) can be observed to experience various blessings (leaving aside the definition of “blessings”) and righteous people (leaving aside the definition of “righteous”) can often be confounded. So … one then can spend a lot of time putting a square peg in a round hole by playing with definitions. One can come up with convoluted meanings for “righteous” and “wicked” and “blessing” and “counfounded” that technically maintain the truth of the aphorism, but that have very little to do with lived experience or observable reality. And also have very little to do with the motivation for the aphorism, which is to suggest that righteousness has temporal, and not just eternal, benefits, and that this might serve as an inducement and encouragement to righteousness (essentially paying attention to what god’s claims on you are, and fulfilling those claims, and thus being “right” with God).

Aside from any disappointments about cause and effect that may or may not be violated, this also leads to cognitive dissonance around what one should expect to observe if reality conforms not only to the aphorism but to the nature and character of the deity implied by them. And the more you really engage with such things rather than hand-wave away the plethora of exceptions as irrelevant for the circular reason that they conflict with orthodox faith, the more such cognitive burden you’re obliged to bear. You end up hiding behind “well that’s a complex theological question that you can’t possibly understand unless you believe yourself, and spend a lot of time squinting at it like I have”. And also behind “God moves in Mysterious Ways”, which is just a way of saying that things we don’t understand are left in God’s hands and not resolved or used as a basis to evaluate the coherence of the belief-system or to better understand actual reality on the ground. None of this is intellectually honest or engaged with lived experience or demonstrable reality, it is just a sort of shared fiction that everyone agrees to abide by.

As a scientist and a Catholic I’d imagine that you would try to transfer scientific pedagogy to theological pedagogy and say that the Church has a vast body of cogitations on all such topics and you must begin from that framing as more credible than the relatively pole-barn and hayseed branch of the faith that I come from. And for all I know that would be modestly less … “out there” overall. But I have given more thought to theology than most, as I studied it formally for a full year of my life that I will never get back, and I see it as a faux discipline based on flights of fancy. Apart from comparative religion, I see theologians as people who decide what made-up things they want to believe and don’t want to believe, not the product of any sort of true rigor other than the rigor of their ow chosen dogma.

My sub-sub branch of the faith came from Dallas Theological Seminary and the scribblings of Lewis Sperry Chafer and in particular his Systematic Theology which everyone who proceeded beyond freshman year bought a full boxed set of, and it’s pretty obvious that every other branch and root of Christianity would have similarly cast the die early in an acolyte’s tutelage. As an 18 year old dimwit who had been taught from practically the cradle that this was the be-all and end-all, how could I have had the presence of mind to have surveyed the vast world of Christendom (ignoring the beliefs of the other 2/3 of the human race of course) and made a quality decision that THIS was the way to invest my scarce time and resources? How would a Catholic in the exact same position have done any better in that sense?

What would have served me better would to have been free to pay attention to the leakiness of all these abstractions without living in terror of the ultimate sin – the sin of Doubt – and not subscribed to ANYTHING of that sort until it could demonstrate some kind of coherence and veracity and evidence and all those sorts of pesky things.

While I think Sheldon calling your OP here an “appeal to authority” when it’s not yet clear what sort of appeal you’re beginning to construct is technically premature, I suspect he is intuitively correct: at the end of the day it will be some version of “Catholicism is the one true faith because Aristotle and [long list of other august sages] pointed in that direction”. If I’m wrong, then fine, but understand that folks like us are unlikely to lose the thread and buy whatever it is you’re selling, because no matter how indirectly, we cannot really abide unprovable speculations.

If you are going to convince an unbeliever to (re)consider any religious faith, no matter which one, you are going to have to demonstrate in the first place that it’s even falsifiable, much less that it has survived serious attempts at falsification with adequate controls for bias. Indeed, the NT specifically derides skeptical inquiry as “mere human wisdom” and elevates religious faith from a vice to a virtue.

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In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle is concerned with the art of demonstration, namely the kind of deductive reasoning that produces certain knowledge (episteme), or science.

Demonstration, as a kind of deduction, is a sort of learning through discourse, where one moves from something already known, to something not yet known, as for example in a geometric proof. “Discourse” here should not be taken to mean exclusively verbal discourse, although that’s the most manifest, as when a teacher and student interact, but includes mental, internal discourse.

Yes – and of course that includes by making deductions, and occasionally those sorts of deductions we call demonstrations. The prior knowledge that is a prerequisite for demonstration, is knowledge in the one who is learning, not primarily knowledge of elders or teachers or previous knowers. I will start detailing in a later post, what kind of previous knowledge is needed.

You are right to suggest that not even all learning proceeds from previous knowledge, but only the kind here called “through discourse.” We can make experiences of new things for example. So, we are in a rough level of agreement here, I think.

A lose statement to signal some fundamental disagreements possibly lurking in the background: let me suggest for now that “experimentation”, “research”, and the like, will have to include or be joined to demonstration – or at deductive reasoning - to generate the newest knowledge, as you say.

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I’m guessing that was written by an AI…

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No, it is not written by an AI. Nothing I post here is AI generated.

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I think you downplay observation, experimentation, and the experimental branches of the sciences severely. This is something seen all too often from pure theoreticians…including those too deeply invested in disciplines such as philosophy. It is very easy to take the triumphs of theory one step too far and think that theory or theoretical musings will solve everything. Like I’ve stated earlier, theoretical approaches are excellent tools, but they are near worthless without any corrections from and calibrations with reality. You can theorise and deduce and learn all you want through “discourse”, but your conclusions will only be as good as the weakest link in this process. If you neglect to calibrate your assumptions via the experimental branches of the relevant disciplines, your risk that your assumptions are shit. So as a result your conclusions will be shit. And your entire discoursive endeavour will be shit. Shit in, shit out. This is something a lot of researchers have had to learn the hard way, including me.

While historical philosophical musings from antiquity can be well worth a study for the first steps in the understanding of science and scientific discourse, they are by now antique. More modern approaches tend to be more appropriate for direct application, and the days of the self-funded gentleman researchers are long gone. It is by now exceedingly difficult to find new knowledge about the real world through philosophy alone. All academic fields that attempt to tell us something about the real world have far surpassed philosophy as knowledge generators.

I will go so far as to claim that philosophy depends on input from the sciences, or at least from data about the real world. It cannot disconnect from the sciences if it wants to stay relevant. It is only within areas such as mathematics and logic that you can still do relevant work without having to apply it to empirical data in the real world. And in these fields they can do their work without ever talking to or interacting with a philosopher.

What really enables and makes the production of new knowledge efficient is the interplay between the theoretical and the experimental branches (and in some fields also the applied branches) of the relevant sciences. Example: theoretical physics, mathematical physics, and applied mathematics get inspiration from experimental physics to improve their theoretical framework, while experimentalists work hard to confirm or falsify new theory (or they just go out and get new data not predicted by any theory – because they can). I don’t think I’m too mistaken if I suggest that the vast majority of new knowledge from the academic sector results from this kind of spiraling interplay.

In the broader field in which I am working, I’d be hard pressed to think of anthing where a philosopher could make a meaningful contribution. Stretching it a bit, the only relevance I can think of is to look at it from an ethical angle, and then an interdisciplinary panel of experts would probably be more useful.

Still, philosophy continues to be an important academic discipline, in particular as academic memory and as a tradition carrier, but it’s no longer the main front where new knowledge about the real world is produced.

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This gives me occasion to say in passing that I consider the following two claims to be false:

  1. Rational and reality driven thinking about world, about what is – nature, being, phenomena, etc. – is no more and no less than scientific thinking.
  2. Scientific thinking – or the scientific method – is no more and no less than hypothetico-deductive thinking, or “hypothesis testing” whereby one falsifies proposed hypothesis by way of experimentation.

Regarding the second, my view is rather that while hypothesis testing is a fundamental argument structure for science, and enabled its advance at many turns (my favorite: the Poisson spot), it is not the only one, and it is not even the ideal structure towards which science tends. A corollary of this is that Popper’s recipe for rejecting proposed theories based only on their falsifiability is probably methodically much too crude.

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Once again you neglect the experimental and applied branches of the disciplines, where they can go out and get new data not covered by any previous theoretical approaches. This can give us new knowledge from outside the hypothetical-deductive loop.

There are plenty of examples of breakthrough discoveries within the natural sciences that started off by direct observation led by curiosity (“What happens if I do this?”) An example that springs to mind is the discovery of the interplay between magnetical forces and electricity, which kickstarted electromagnetism. Another is the discovery of photovoltaic effects and the photoelectric effect, which challenged the idea that light is a wave phenomenon, and suggested that light is carried in discrete energy packets.

Popperian falsificationism is a nice first-order meta-approximation for describing how advances in science are done. And it serves as an ideal for how to formulate scientific theories, i.e. make them falsifiable. But other than that, I agree that it is much too crude, simple, and naïve, and it is certainly not a one-size-fits-all recipe.

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Again, I think I generally agree with you here. I’ll comment in parts:

I agree that downplaying observation, experimentation, and the complexity they reveal is something theoreticians are too often guilty of. It’s something I am acutely bothered by myself, when I see it in others. But (of course) I don’t see that in myself. I would however be grateful for specific feedback on ways in which I do that or at least seem to do that. This is why I consider discussion with peers (and strangers) to be essential: to enlighten us about our inevitable blind spots.

I’d also like to say that I don’t consider myself a pure theoretician - even though part of my work, my philosophical research on the foundations of measurement in science, is indeed classifiable as “pure theory”. Most of my work is in, or directly connected to, the laboratory.

How we come to know things through experimentation is at the forefront of my interests and concerns.

I don’t entirely agree that they are antiquated. I think we find in history and philosophy of science studies, important insights, many of which may have been lost sight of, or obscured for various reasons. A wonderful example of this kind of work is Hasok Chang’s book Inventing Temperature (2007). There are some very interesting insights in this work about the strong dependance of data on theory - not that we can build a worthwhile theory without any input from the world, but how more precise data depends on sophisticated theorizing as well.

Modern metrology is a testimony to this.

While there are parts of philosophy that are “pure philosophy” I generally (and wholeheartedly) agree, philosophizing about the natural world or the fundamental structure of reality should be done in engaged conversation with various scientific fields.

Exactly :100:

I agree that in the vast majority of technical fields of research, we generally don’t expect philosophers as such to make direct contributions. The generalities that interest them just aren’t the key to resolving the overwhelming majoring of technical problems.

Nevertheless, I would not want to exclude a priori, too quickly, the possibility of fruitful input. Five years ago, I would have thought “What could a philosopher possibly contribute to effective medical practice?” But over the past couple of years, I’ve seen some very interesting work produced in this area by my colleagues in philosophy. Epistemology, systems thinking, questioning assumptions, these are things philosophers excel at.

There are some fields where the need for philosophy is more acutely felt than others. Perhaps today some aspects of AI, and continued debates over the interpretation of quantum mechanics are good examples? Maybe.

In my broad field of measurement science, philosophers have had, and continue to have, a lot of input, especially at the higher, conceptual, foundational, and regulatory levels.

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Yes, I agree.

Part of what being a young earth creationist involves, tragically, is systematically cutting oneself off from great scientific teachers - those who know and can actually teach us better.

As a general rule, to grow intellectually, it’s important to cautiously broaden one’s circle of trust, or at least of people we are willing to engage with.