Kevin Solway wrote:I have no idea what you mean by "personal science". There is either science, which is about things which can be objectively measured, and which are verifiable by others, or there is philosophy, which is a personal thing and which concerns only one's own observations. Science is uncertain whereas philosophical, personal observations, are not. For this reason it is a mistake to confuse the two. Science is a social activity whereas philosophy is personal.
You have made this distinction before.
Yet you develop a philosophy and explicate it at length. If it is personal, and is not verifiable by others, why do you do that? Why join in at GF?
Science includes a frank admission of its own limitations, if it is good science. No lab course or theory course would presume to do otherwise. And philosophers can and do disagree. If any philosophy is complete, a disagreement on a detail by two equally qualified philosophers casts both philosophies into doubt, as logic is a chain, and we would have a contested point, a weak link. No verification, according to you, is possible, as this would be "social" and not "personal."
Your distinction is thus invalid. I may accept it as a sort of general description ("science is
more like this" and "philosophy is
more like that.") But even on its face, your description just doesn't feel correct. Isaac Newton was not a social person, for example, and his science was something he rather pronounced than shared. In fact, his inability to get along with the one person of his day, Leibnitz, who shared the same insights would make Newton appear to be a philosopher by your definition.
Which, of course, he was. Scientists have traditionally been philosophers. Your observed dichotomy between philosophy and science, in my view, does not historically appear until after the turn of the 20th century. What you have is an evolution away from the Royal Academy-type science to a more engineering science as the Industrial Revolution required more application-oriented science.
You are failing to take into account the existence of philosophy departments in universities all over the world. Philosophy is a living process whereby you not only examine things rigorously yourself, perhaps doing the dismantling David talks about, but where you find out what others before you have done, and others around you
are doing. Ergo this web site. There are as many books filled with people's philosophy as there are filled with man's science.
Science is indeed uncertain in some respects, but these respects are necessary logically to underscore the respects in which it is relatively certain.
I agree it is a mistake to confuse science with philosophy. They are different, much like the left eye and the right eye are similar but not the same. But together they can produce results, an added dimension, that either alone cannot.