Constructive empiricism > scientific realism.

K so you drop a pencil 500 times and assume that this is a set law of physics and it will never change. Then after 1000 times a freak gust of wind makes it fly back up and land on the table. It seems scientific realism isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Yes it was reasonable to assume the pencil would always go down, but it is unreasonable to declare that a law of physics. Constructive empiricism is about necessity, this is the acceptable theory because of our analysis what we have observed, nothing more. Scientific realism is about evil wizards and genies flying around using their magical powers to grant us with super happy spells. It's total madness.

Discuss.

 

Actually in physics they eliminate the freak wind gust from the equation. shit half the problems in my physics class eliminated friction which would happen all the time.

 

Its true, we can never know everything.

In your pencil situation, the pencil flying up and landing on the table is a result of our failure to control an aspect of the environment - the airflow. Knowing of airflow, this experiment would be considered invalid. However, what if this experiment was done before people considered that air could actually lift objects, or that airflow was even something that varied in the universe. We wouldnt be able to use the same tools to detect airflow as we use to detect the pencil - we see the pencil whereas we cannot see the airflow unless it influences the pencil. Unless we humans could detect and distinguish everything in our physical world, there will always be some factor that we cannot take account of in experiments.
It is impossible for us humans to see the world beyond a certain point because the energy we must remove or add to the system in order to detect anything is greater than the actual variance of that energy we are detecting.

 

Well physics is a set of observations. Science is about obtaining facts and inducing theories from them. Yes newtonian physics works within a certain degree of accuracy, but it wasn't a 100% truth law.

This fits stonerbill's analogy perfectly. Newtonian physics is the belief the pencil will drop, the freak gust of wind is einstein's relativity. However it STILL isn't enough and can never be enough, partially because of heisenburg's uncertainty principle and partially because we can never discount the possibility that eventually something odd will happen that defies our theories of physics.

We observe the pencil not moving directly downwards when dropped, we also feel some pressure and cooling on the side of our face when this happens. There is a strong correlation between them so we have reason to believe there is some sort of causal link.


I've been reading up on this, it stems from inductive reasoning in logic in through experience we have a reason to form an a priori judgement concerning a set of phenomena we have observed.

 

the gust of wind can be explained with newtonian mechanics, if enough calculations are done. heisenbergs uncertainty principle comes into practise only across very small distances and energies... more importantly though it was part of the formation of quantum theory... which in the 20th century led to the invention of just about everything from modern chemistry to computers. infact the very existance of heisenbergs uncertainty principle is necessary for a flash drive as its only through quantum tunelling that it can operate.

dont run away with the idea of heisenbergs uncertainty principle as being a limiting factor in the scope science.... seriously. you dont know what you're talking about.

it seems to me that people treat science with unfounded scepticism and maybe its religion. the bible is the great compelling case for christianity (based on the assertion that the bible is of divine origin). the great thing it has going for it is that even people who dont speak the language its written in can read it through a translation and through this they can get at this truth.

science is also based on an assumption, that the universe obeys certain laws and that by observing the universe we may learn them. unfortunately the language of physics is mathematics, english provides merely the context. people who dont understand the mathematical language (which gets increasingly more complex as the physics gets more complex) can never fully comprehend the perfection and beauty that is contained in physics.

 

the thing about science is that it's value lies in it's utility, or usefulness, and not in it's depiction of an 'ultimate reality'. I think this is the clearest distinction between science and religion. Religion tries to give a complete picture of the universe, it's workings, and our relationship to it, while science looks for ways of testing it.
So, to take your pencil metaphor, whether or not you'll have a freak occurrence where your pencil gets caught in an updraft, or turned into a pineapple, or spontaneously combusted is kind of second fiddle (though important nonetheless) to the fact that we can predict that it will fall nearly 100% of the time.
It's like Newtonian Gravity, in that he doesn't really understand what gravity is, just how it maybe works, and through that, how we can make predictions. Not only does a pencil fall, it will fall at such a rate. We can also deduce how the planets stay in orbit.
Not bad for an 'incomplete' theory.

 

"the gust of wind can be explained with newtonian mechanics, if enough calculations are done."
um well that was an analogy, the gust of wind represents a new phenomena for instance the observed position of mercury could not be explained by newtonian physics.

"heisenbergs uncertainty principle comes into practise only across very small distances and energies"
I know... But due to the butterfly effect, whether an electron interacts with a photon or not can change the distant future substantially.

"it seems to me that people treat science with unfounded scepticism"
Science is about skepticism, scientists perform experiments just to find flaws in existing theories because if they find something they cannot explain they have precious facts to devise better theories and discover more things.


"Religion tries to give a complete picture of the universe, it's workings, and our relationship to it, while science looks for ways of testing it."
Well the bit about religion is irrelevant, but you are right about science. Scientific theories are only correlations observed between observations, they are not absolute truths and should never be assumed to be.