Has science rendered epistemological debate void?
- Yes
- No
Do the epistemological positions of philosophers such as of Kant mean anything anymore or have they become mere history?
Has science rendered epistemological debate void?
Do the epistemological positions of philosophers such as of Kant mean anything anymore or have they become mere history?
to kantians they do
-Imp
I don’t follow. Assuming it is so, how has science rendered epistemological debate void?
True science is epistemology:
“[S]cience is the simple realization that whatever is experienced – a self, a world, the law of contradiction, a god, or anything else – is nothing apart from its being experienced. When students complain of “identity crises,†I tell them not to worry, since neither they nor anyone else has an identity about which to have a crisis! For science, genuine knowledge of reality, reveals a world of nothing but empty experiences, impressions as Hume called them.”
[Harry Neumann, Politics or Nothing!]
Please, state clearly what you mean. What is this epistemological debate?
The debate in question is over knowledge; both how it is gained, and how it is ratified as truth. For example, science is instructive in the area of how we (humans) gain knowledge of the “outside world” (i.e. through sensory experience processed by the central nervous system, etc.). Empirical science has identified, say, how our sense of vision works, and how vision works in concert with audition to create a more complete experience of the “outside world” than we would have with vision alone. These issues were genuine debates in ages past, but science seems to have gone quite far in providing the answers. We experience the world “as it is” inasmuch as we have the sensory capacities to experience it (being visually privy to X amount of the overall electromagnetic radiation spectrum) and categorize it according to our cogitative abilities (varying degrees of intelligence). It is not a matter of either rationalism or empiricism, it is rationalism and empiricism, just as it isnt either correspondence or coherence, but rather correspondence and coherence. In dividing our pursuit of knowlegde according to false dichotomies we undermine that self same pursuit. Modern science, with its use of reason and empiricism seems to tear down that inhibiting barrier and render any debates based upon it obsolete.
JVS
Assuming you even believe science can reveal ‘objective truths’? I don’t think science has rendered epistemology in any way obsolete out of the mere fact that it cannot reveal truth to us in any ‘true’ way. It may have instrumental value in of what it can explain and allow us to accomplish, but the issues that arise out of scientific inquiry as revealing truth are themselves epistemological debates… which science CANNOT merely explain away by ‘proving’ more axioms or experiments.
BlueChicken is correct. Although perhaps many things have been described by science, it is inadequate in demonstrating the proof of axioms or ever discovering metaphysical truth. Science is only good for explaining what we can observe and test, and there is no reason why a law such as gravity will not change in the future (problem of induction).
On the final page of his book, Facing Up; Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, physicist, and Nobel Prize winner, Steven Weinberg, wrote
"…even when the physicists have gone as far as they can go, when we have a final theory…we will still be left with the question, ‘Why?’ "
Michael
I don’t disagree that the empirical sciences are only of value to a certain point, however, the portion of the epsitemology debate to which I am making reference to has to do with how knowledge is gained and how it is ratified as truth. Science makes use of both rationalism and empiricism to gain knowledge as it makes use of both correspondence and coherence to ratify what knowledge is true. This coordination of means would seem to nullify the debates of past ages that focus on how knowledge is gained. Metaphysical debate however, as even the name implies, is a realm not hemmed in by our current scientific limitations.
JVS
BlueChicken:
What other kinds of truths do you think there are?
Science is a perfect example of a truth-procedure for two important reasons.
First, because the only way to actually ‘do science’ is to have a subjective engagement with the real events involved in the processes implied-- whether the event is actual (experiences/affects) or virtual (images/concepts).
Second, science does in fact discover new ways of representing actual reality in a ‘universal’ way: what do we mean? That truths (of any sort) speak to everyone, because they are indifferent to differences.
In short, we’ve got to at least admit that science is really good at two things in particular-- the discovery and application of universally-applicable physical or mathematical truths.
But, of course, you’ll say there are other kinds of truth. Absolutely. In fact, we must also assert that there is no (natural) singularized ‘truth’, in the sense that such Truth would be separate from actuality… some kind of ‘pure virtual’ or so-called ‘Universal’ truth.
We only and always subtract truth from events, that is, from a subjective engagement with reality. So science is but one of several such generic truth-procedures, alongside which we ought to place love, politics and poetry (or art.)
(Incidentally, philosophy would not be a truth-procedure. The various truth-procedures would be the conditions of philosophy.)
spitfireatme:
But what is it that science observes and tests?
You might be implying that the fact that science aims at the real means that it will also always ‘miss’ reality (as in ‘not precisely coincide’)… This is right, but such a bifurcation must be examined more closely.
What this ‘split’ means is that an actual event is becoming-intense, reality is becoming-involved in the subjective truth process, so that we cannot ‘truly’ separate subject from object. Thus science examines the traces of events, calculates their trajectory. This is a subjective engagement in actual reality.
The traces of the subject-object event are excremental remainders, the minimal difference between the thing and itself. As this difference shrinks to the infinitesimal (with the calculus lies ultimately the rise of modern science rises,) that is, as the duration of the event begins to become-imperceptible, it diverges and escapes (from the causual/symbolic narrative chain.)
On the other side, the unconscious reforms the subject-object as a circle which then itself evolves and becomes non-self-identical.
Both the mystical/subjective position and the scientific/objective position ultimately support the same metaphysical topology: Self-different events rupture knowledges, the momentum of the event forces a conversion, a rearrangement around newly discovered truths.
We cannot deny truths, gentlemen, for we would thus deny ourselves (and thus our very own subjective position of enunciation.)
Jeremiah:
You’re definitely onto something here. The ‘debate over science’ is often misread, isn’t it–as either a ‘battle’ between the arts and science, or religion and science, or ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ … But the real contemporary question of science is the political one. How are systems of power connected to systems of knowledge? How does the equation ‘knowledge = power’ work?
Another interesting issue you’re getting at is whether it’s got to be science and philosophy. What do you think? How can philosophy extend, explain or contextualize quantum mechanics, or biological computation, or even general relativity? What, if anything, do they mean about the practice of philosophy itself?
Sauwelios:
Nice!!! You’ve definitely got it: there’s no stable identity, the ‘same’ is a self-destructive loop, even conceptually. But we’ve got to match up Hume and Nietzsche, here, right? Style is political. Generic politics are for faceless masses; we need a politics of ontological vibration. Where’s my molecular revolution?!?
/ Good quote, btw!
Subjective truth comes to mind as at least one alternative, and what I was getting at with my rejection of science as revealing objective truth. Honestly, I fail to see HOW science can reveal objective truths as scientific enquiry is only deemed valid when empirically falsifiable, and scientificly true (or more true to be more accurate) when empirically confirmed. The focus on the subjective experiment as a confirmation tool indicates the truth is contigent on human experience.
As for science revealing reality… this is contigent on the belief that: a) there is an objective reality, b) we exist in it currently, interact with it c) we can understand it ontologically. I think it is only possible to ever have 2 of these conditions, depending how you swing the argument, but the idea that science can reveal out reality seems like a farce when taken phenomenologically.
Just remember what Hume said about absolutes. Science is only as good as we consisently test it, which is only as good as “every time we test it it does this” not “it does this every time”.
Science demystified the argument, showing that whatever we call knowledge or truth is the result of biology and culture. The question “what is truth” becomes “what process leads me to believe this”. Or, what Nietzsche said.
Or science is merely the illusion that truth can be grasped objectivly, and the processes revealed may be mere facets of experience.