THEORY AS PHILOSOPHY

[Post by Jessie Rosenberg]

THEORY AS PHILOSOPHY: Quare had some very interesting points about philosophy and science several days ago. Being somewhat knowledgeable about the scientific side of such matters, I thought I’d add my two cents worth.

I will use physics as an example, it being the field I know the most about. Thinkers about physics can be classified into three types: philosophers, experimentalists, and theorists. Philosophers come first in the development of a new field, thinking about the possibilities of the field, how that field should be organized. Aristotle, for instance, stated that objects would fall with a speed proportional to their weight, because that was the way he thought objects should fall. Aristotle had no experimental data, but he thought that his theory seemed probable and aesthetically pleasing, making it a good candidate for a possible theory. However, along came Galileo, the experimentalist, who executed experiments to find that, instead, all objects fell at the same rate, regardless of their mass. This is where Quare left off, with the experimentalists having discovered the truth about events.

The next step in scientific development, though, is all-important: the theorists enter the picture, to integrate experimental results and philosophic thoughts into a consistent theory. They take facts about the universe and arrange them according to an ideal of mathematical beauty: common sense, simplicity, and their ideas of the way the world should work… the same ideals as the philosophers. In the study of gravity, the theorist was Newton, who created a theoretical model of gravity that explained Galileo’s observations in an elegant, simple, and intuitive manner.

That is the way science usually progresses: the experimentalists find results that do not fit with the current theory, and the theorists amend the theory. Within this scheme, the philosophers are the first theorists, giving the experimentalists something to work with, an idea to prove or disprove. When the experimentalists come up with some data, the theorists go on to create more informed theories based on the data, which are then tested, and so on. But, the philosophers come first and give the other scientists some idea of what they should expect.

There are some exceptions to this linear progression of philosopher, experimentalist, theorist. In the normal course of events, the experimentalists are ahead of the theorists, discovering data inconsistent with the current theory. Sometimes, however, the theorists come first, with a picture of how the theory should look, to make the equations prettier, with no experimental evidence directly backing them up. The effort to create a more aesthetic theory has been a driving force for many improvements in physics, and I assume in other sciences.

In this capacity, the theorists act as philosophers. There are no experimental results directly indicating that their theory is better than the current one. However, since their theory is so much simpler and more elegant than the one previous, they believe theirs must be more correct. The experimentalists test the new theory, and in many cases it is found to be a better fit to the data. These new theories often predict entirely new realms of science, some never predicted by the authors. Thus, we have the second, more astounding type of scientific progress: that of the philosophers.

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