Naturalism and Realism (3 of 3)

okay so heretofore I've been talking principally about naturalism I want to turn now to say at least a little bit about the other half of the formula which I introduced in the beginning of this lecture and that's about the question of scientific realism there's been a question which has sort of been running through the courses I've been talking about so far but I haven't really directly explicitly addressed it and that's the question about whether or not science describes the quote-unquote real world now I think you asked most people most scientists this question they're gonna give a common-sense answer which is to say of course it does so what else is science studying that that's science ultimately about the real world it's trying to describe and make sense of the real world but you may not have noticed that if again if you have been following along with so far that basically all of the major positions I've been looking at in this series actually answer this question in the negative they're not a single one of the major positions I've addressed it's gonna say that science actually is about describing the real world start with the logical positivists the logical positivists were totally rejected the idea of a quote-unquote real world that sounds to them like metaphysics no there are no depths in nature according to the positivist there is just surface there is the way the world appears there is no real world beneath those appearances Karl Popper thought that science was sort of trying to describe the real world but because of the nature of falsification ISM it can never actually do that you can never really be sure that your scientific ideas have actually described they're the real world all you can say is that your scientific theories have not yet been falsified but that's that doesn't mean that what you're actually talking about when you're doing science actually is the real world Thomas Kuhn rejected scientific realism because he thought that our experience is always too deeply mediated by any particular paradigm and that paradigm is gonna fundamentally separate us from the real world in any interesting way so again it's not to say that there is no such thing as the real world and it's not to say that science isn't informed by the real world but at the end of the day the role of the paradigm simply puts too much distance between that real world and us now the most obvious examples of course I like the strong program in sociology and the post modernists they're gonna say yeah this called real-world is just a social construct that would you call the real world isn't really real and any deep or meaningful or a profound sense it's all just sort of a collective delusion as it were so if all of these positions reject the idea that science is about describing the real world maybe it makes sense to try to go back and take a look at some of these sort of problems from a realist point of view what would a philosophy of science that actually is realistic in nature that that says the job of science is to describe the real world look at look like and probably the best way to see this is by going back to the problem I discussed several times already this notion of the theory Laden as' of observation this I think is in many ways the one of the principal roadblocks to scientific realism if indeed our observation of the world is fundamentally conditioned by theory then again it might seem as though theory creates a gulf between the so-called real world and us that maybe unbridgeable now the theory lateness of observation has been a major theme in post Kuni and philosophy of science but it comes in a variety of different degrees now some of these I think are fairly uncontroversial fairly innocuous I think everyone's gonna agree for example that Theory guides observation your theory tells you you know that this might be a good experiment but that probably won't be a good experiment that kind of thing is not controversial at all if all we member the 30 ladyness of observation is that theory guides observation and that's not going to be a terribly big problem but other versions of the theory lateness of observation are much more extreme so for example remember Paul fire abend said it's not just that Theory guides observation he said theory dictates observation you're three tells you what you can see according to fire oven and that's a very extreme version of this view and of course is also in between views there's there's you're not mild not extreme but maybe moderate views that say things like for example that theory infects observation language you cannot talk about what you're seeing without using the some sort of theoretical language you can see things without the appealing to theory necessarily but you cannot characterize them that's sort of a more moderate version of this of this position now the exact extent of this problem for naturalist philosophy of science is going to vary the exactly which of these three varieties of the third lateness of observation is that we're talking about now one of I think the sort of most helpful ways of seeing past the three lateness of observation comes from the philosophy of science Jerry Fodor who wrote an article titled observation reconsidered in which he tried to sort of throw this idea of the sort of stronger versions of the theory lateness of observation for a loop and try to show that the stronger versions are simply not very tenable and the way he did this was by arguing that some theories are going to impact our observations in some ways but other theories actually don't impact our observations at all some observations actually are pretty much more or less theory independent and one of the great ways of seeing this is by looking at the phenomena of optical illusions now I I talked about optical illusions before in this context try to try to demonstrate the theory lateness of observation so I showed this picture right here again the picture of the old woman and the young girl right I I said that look if I tell you I'm about to show you a picture of a young woman and I show you this picture the first thing you will probably see is a young woman whereas if I tell you it's it's an old woman the first thing you'll probably see is the as the old woman and then if I sort of I can use this sort of theoretical framing as a priming device to push you one way or the other this is a good example of how Theory can influence observation what you see is conditioned by what how you think about what you're going to see but at the same time not all of the illusions work in this fashion in fact some illusions some of the best illusions defy our visual senses even when we know they are illusions we cannot talk ourselves out of them we just have to see the them in this illusory way so what an excellent illustration of this I think is this optical illusion right here now these two towers again --mess one actually won an award a few years back for being one of the best optical illusions now if you see this the way I do it apparent the way most people do the tower on the right looks like it's leaning out further than the tower on the left but in point of fact this is these two are 100% identical this is two copies of the exact same picture but somehow because of the way our eyes worked about lines of perspective we sort of naturally see the tower on the right as pulling more to the right and the tower on the left being a little bit more straight hopefully you see that the same way I do if not then this example probably won't have much traction but I do think most people do see this right away and here's the thing is you can take out a measuring stick if you want you can look at these two pictures you can overlay them you can prove to yourself that these are the exact same picture but try as you might you cannot help but see that right tower as pulling further to the right than it actually is the theory does not change the observation the theory says these two things are identical but the observation still sees them as different despite the fact that we know the trick we cannot see past it so this is an example and think it's kind of example at photo talks about that shows that theory does not always overpower observation sometimes observation is just intractable now there's some pretty serious implications for the theory lateness of observation from photos critique if theory if fire abend was right if theory dictates perception then the second we know that something is an allusion to something we know something is a trick it should shatter that illusion and we should see it through the sort of theoretical lens that we now understand but that just isn't the way a lot of these illusions work sometimes our theories have absolutely no effect at all in our perceptions go back yet again to what I opened up with a class with right.we a theory tells us that all physical objects are 98% empty space my bust of Albert Einstein is mostly empty space according to theory but we can't help but see it as solid as just continuous now ultimately this doesn't eliminate the problem of the theory lateness of observation but it does limit it any restricts it shows it's not as big a problem as someone like Paul fire Robin would have you believe now this is sort gonna help sort of broadly in peer-assisted approach something at the logical positivist think would have applauded Fodor here he's not for isn't pushing for positivism but it at least sort of pushes us back in there direction empiricism is gonna carry a little bit more weight in the light of voters critique because the third lesson three lateness of observation is now mitigated this is not as big a problem as it was now paradox Athena's actually can create problems for empiricism in a variety of other ways empiricism says for example that experience is primary and theory is secondary but this example does sort of show that at least some observations are subordinate to theory now in short what shows that there's sort of a fluid relationship here sometimes the theory dominates sometimes observations dominate and these things can shift back and forth depending on context so there is no sort of straightforward simple reductionist approach in which you can say that the fundamentally theory is is is foundational and or experience is foundational and again that's the sort of the whole point about naturalism we should expect an organic relationship between the two now in sum I think the natural ists are going to see this as a win this is going to be a win for naturalism observation after all is a natural phenomenon when human beings observe the world they're not doing something supernatural they're not doing something that transcends the underlying laws of science that the government dictate everything observation isn't mystical it shouldn't be treated as something that's fundamentally different observation is a phenomena and Kant that cording Lee it can be studied by science we can understand how observation works by using science the kind of armchair reflections that old-school philosophers have made about the nature of observation near the old empiricists people like John Locke for example they're probably not gonna be worth a whole heck of a lot you know they may have been good at their time but now we can start using again the tools of empirical science to have a better understanding of how exactly observation works what it's good at and what its limitations are Peter Godfrey Smith outlines two sets of questions that are relevant here first off to what extent is observation reliable that is to say can we use observations to get fundamental absolute universal and all be all truths about the world or maybe more modestly can we get at least lowercase T true beliefs about the world maybe they don't have to be fundamental and absolute necessarily but they can at least be reliable enough to for true in a meaningful sense of the word second question is observation neutral between competing theories to use a word that I introduced when talking about Thomas Kuhn maybe observation can be an inter subjective way of settling scientific disputes of settling when you have two different theoretical perspectives on something maybe observations can be used not in an objective way but at least in an inter subjective way now what naturalism is gonna say in this context is that we can use science to sort of bootstrap our way into sort of deeper and more profound answers about these questions we take a first pass kin observation settle competing theories maybe it can't settle it necessarily completely but maybe you can push us in one direction rather than other and that once we're there we can sort of reassess and come up with a new set of theoretical apparatus which may then push it pushes back to one to the original theory or further reinforce the the initial winning theory now in particular where some of the most interesting stuff is done is in the field known as evolutionary epistemology which tries to sort of use understandings about how it is that the human brain evolved and then of course understanding the tools of things like neuroscience to get a better understanding of how it is that human beings come to know things evolutionary epistemology is something that Quine was very interested in and he can he tried to sort of suggest that maybe but once we have gonna a sort of cognitive science grounded epistemology and evolutionary grounded epistemology we can actually then in turn take those same tools - and then go back and take a look at how scientific communities have disagreements and maybe we can use these tools to then resolve disputes between scientific communities it's not entirely clear this is going to work obviously there's a lot of promissory notes going on here but it's in a very least is a very promising research project to use lack of a progressive research project to use a term from black Atocha and it should be very exciting and in the coming decades to see how cognitive science evolves and how it starts to expand into more philosophical domains

Channel: SisyphusRedeemed

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Id: 0U3clF4u280

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2017