What qualifies as science?

For me i tend to see view it in the sense that most of social sciences are forensic by nature, meaning that you look at some data from the past, make up some theory but you aren’t able to propose anything really measurable for the future. I mean not all the time but in most cases

 

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In my opinion, a field of study can only be called a science if it fundamentally follows the scientific method. According to Wikipedia, archaeology is part of the social sciences. I remember that quite some time ago (in the '60s?) there was an international debate among archaeologists about whether archaeology should be transformed into a proper science or not. In the end, it was decided not to do that, as it would throw out too much of established archaeology (some of which is not much more than modern interpretations of, and arbitrary speculations about, incomplete evidence).

In other words, archaeology is part of social sciences, but archaeology isn't fully a science. (It does contain components that are fully scientific, though, such as archaeometry.) Thus the social sciences aren't fully scientific either. And I suspect there's a similar story for many of the other disciplines listed by Wikipedia.

 

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I don't consider all of the social sciences to be sciences. Certainly not in the same way that the natural sciences are.

It seems to me that the natural sciences proceed according to one of several explanatory paradigms.

One is the relatively familiar 'laws of nature' paradigm that arose during the scientific revolution with people like Galileo and Newton. Science consists of identifying underlying mathematical regularities in events so that physics professors can scrawl them in symbolic form on their chalkboards in front of uncomprehending students. In this one, equations feature prominently, and these typically take the form of mathematical functions.

Another is the causal-mechanism paradigm seemingly employed by much of biology (along with the earth sciences). In this one, scientific explanation consists of generating and justifying causal (in biology they are typically molecular) mechanisms that account for things like photosynthesis, cellular respiration or molecular genetics. Equations feature prominently in this one too, except now they are chemical equations describing chemical reactions. Here's a recent (hugely overpriced, it's Springer) book that I recently purchased (used) that explores in great detail the history of how one such explanatory episode unfolded in real life (it wasn't just the simple application of a "scientific method") and how biologists' current understanding of photosynthesis took shape over the period 1840-1960:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9401795819/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

And there's obviously another very different explanatory paradigm in use by biologists as well, namely the 'natural selection' paradigm proposed by Darwin and Wallace in the mid 19th century. A lot of biology today is explained in this way, by attributing selective advantage or disadvantage to various heritable states of affairs.

I'm not convinced that these are the only kind of explanatory paradigms possible in science. Others might exist or might be invented in the future. I fully expect that.

When it comes to things like sociology, I'm not convinced that any of these explanatory paradigms are applicable. Pretty clearly there aren't mathematically expressible laws of society analogous to the laws of physics. There aren't typically causal mechanisms (though some of the earlier Marxists tried to find them in economics). And natural selection doesn't seem to be the driver either.

It seems to me that the 18th century was intellectually electrified by the success of Newtonian physics. So the idea took hold that if this new scientific method could just be harnessed like lightening in a bottle and then applied to social problems, all forms of traditional obscurantism would be swept aside and a paradise would result. That faith is more or less what defines The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. (It also motivates "progressive" thought today.) During the 19th century that dream was turned into a program and a host of new "social sciences" were created to carry it out. The social sciences were created because people believed that social sciences needed to exist, not because a new explanatory method especially applicable to social and psychological realities had appeared that scholars had started employing.

I suspect that's one reason why Marx and Freud created so much academic interest on the European continent. Perhaps it was hoped that they might provide the needed explanatory paradigm. Today it might be literary theory that plays that role.

 

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I have now done quite a bit of reading on subjects which use the word "function".

And it seems that the common denominator in its use almost always indicates a prior "purpose".

As Yazata said, and both You, Iceaura, and NotEinstein stressed, the word "function" always introduces a teleological aspect.

As I never wanted to associate the concept of "purpose of function" to natural interactions, I see now why "function" always introduces a question of context.

I WON'T BE USING THE WORD "FUNCTION" ANYMORE, except (hopefully) in proper context.

Thank you for your persistence, it forced me to look deeper and learn something very important (to me anyway)!

 

This is not true for mathematical functions, but I think you're not referring to those at the moment.

No, thank you for actually looking into it, and learning! You (hopefully) have no idea how many people refuse to do that...

 

Does anyone else agree with this thought?

 

Not really

Below is a made up scenario

You might look at the past and make a claim about a particular group in society

10 years later because of social changes the group may not exist or has tripled in size with a evolved set of values

Not as, to coin a phrase, a exact science

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I am sure that will be a big help. I strongly suspect that using other words in place of "function", wherever possible, will remove a great deal of the confusion and exasperation for all concerned.

I think is helpful too to avoid other terms that have a whiff of teleology about them, such as the way people sometimes speak of the way nature "works", when what they really intend to say is the way nature "behaves". (In fact, even more strictly, one should say "seems to behave", as we should never presume our current conception of it is complete or wholly accurate).

 

Noted......

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Mathematical 'functions' don't imply that.

If this never-ending constantly-meandering argument (it reminds me of talking to Jan Ardena on religion) started with some expression by you of Tegmarkian 'mathematical-universe' metaphysics, then I expect that you were using the word in its mathematical sense.

And as I argued in earlier posts, I don't think that there's anything wrong with using the mathematical term in that more metaphysical way. I'm just not sure that it correctly captures how things truly are.

No, no, no. I can't speak for the others, but speaking for me, I never said that. (Actually I did say something that can be interpreted that way in #519, but that wasn't what I meant.) Let me clarify my thinking. I don't believe that it's true that the word 'function' always implies teleology. Mathematical functions don't imply any teleological aspect. They describe relationships between variables. ("Laws of nature" are functions in that sense.)

I believe that's what people like Tegmark are speculating about. It isn't unique to him, I think that most theoretical physicists share the same kinds of views. They start to believe that what is most real isn't the physical world, but the abstract structures captured in their mathematics. The physical world just illustrates the mathematics somehow. That kind of idea is implicit in much of the something-from-nothing theorizing. It's also implicit when physicists argue that some event is physically impossible, and for their argument put up a torrent of mathematical symbolism. They are obviously thinking that the mathematics, or the ontological structures that it symbolizes, constrain and control what can and can't happen in reality. We've seen that style of argument right here on Sciforums.

I did say that biologists often use 'function' to describe the role that a particular item plays in a larger system. (The heart's function is pumping blood. Nervous systems have the function of processing information and controlling behavior. The eye's function is vision.) Many biologists believe that biology is dependent on the 'function' concept in this sense. (The 'function' concept is a topic of long-standing controversy in the philosophy of biology.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(biology)

For a more philosophical discussion, see here

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/

http://www.iep.utm.edu/func-exp/

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functions-biological-and-artificial-worlds

In the past, these kind of functions (roles in a system of interacting parts) were indeed taken to be evidence of purposeful design. That's the thrust of the design-argument in natural theology. Paley made the point very forcefully with his 1802 watch-maker analogy. (If we find a watch lying on the ground, we would naturally assume that its existence implies the existence of a watchmaker.)

The intellectual impact in the 19th century of Darwin and Wallace's natural-selection is that it provided the outline of another kind of explanation for functions/roles in biological systems, a new kind of explanation that didn't require the existence of a purposeful designer. I think that virtually all biologists today embrace natural selection and the mode of explanation it implies, but they continue blithely to employ the word 'function'. (Just do a web-search for the phrase 'biological function'.) I don't think that 99% of them want to imply anything about intentional purpose or conscious design.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=biological function&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiunvb8g4zXAhXJwFQKHc7_BQkQgQMIJjAA

I think that might be an over-reaction. If you want to discuss 'mathematical-universe' metaphysics, I think that the word 'function' has a perfectly valid use.

Just write 'function (in the mathematical sense)' or something like that, if that's what you mean. Or 'function (in the biological sense)', or 'function (in the teleological sense)' or whatever, to clarify your intention. Try to disambiguate what you write by making the distinctions, so that readers will have less trouble interpreting what you say. If others can't follow it after you do that, then it might be their problem, not yours.

My concern is that you are letting combative people bully you.

 

Well, I got NotEinstein to actually state that.....

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I was, but was told there is only physics and that's it! So I tried to approach it by trying to work backward from expressed physical behaviors to the more subtle underlying principles......

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I agree, but the concept is not new and the ever increasing ability to make predictions based on mathematical behaviors of physical properties, argues in favor of a strong mathematical aspect to universal behaviors of physical objects.

From the start I feared (and stated) the discussion being reduced to semantics and asked for a liberal interpretation of my use of certain terms, which can be interpreted in several ways.

After rereading the post I spotted that error also. I should have said that you suggested possible conflict with interpretation. It was too late to correct it. My apologies.....

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Bohm calls it the Explicate or Unfolded order.

I agree....

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That remains my position also, IMO, the Fibonacci Sequence is a natural function. This was explained by a scientist in the Mathematical Universe clip.....

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As well as the "Exponential function" as explained by Professor Emeritus, Dr. Albert Bartlett, which I have posted in prior discussions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(biology)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/

http://www.iep.utm.edu/func-exp/

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functions-biological-and-artificial-worlds

I assumed that in a science forum, we could dispense with having to explain function as necessarily being connected to an intentional watchmaker.

I agree, by all accounts, the process of evolution can create function. It needs no sentient watchmaker.[/quote]
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?...ved=0ahUKEwiunvb8g4zXAhXJwFQKHc7_BQkQgQMIJjAA

One can also say that evolution is a "blind" watch maker.

I was always using the word in that context....

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You are correct, I was too confident that my use of the word would be taken in context of my original expressions in support of Tegmark's mathematical universe. Clearly I was wrong.

I am not that easily intimidated and I knew they were speaking from their perspective in Physics. I was just trying to stop this endless semantic argument, which I predicted would inevitably happen when looking at the world from different perspectives . I am a pretty good chess-player and decided to sacrifice a pawn to regain a positional balance.

That's why I qualified my statement;"I WON'T BE USING THE WORD "FUNCTION" ANYMORE, except
(hopefully) in proper context. With that I meant , I won't use the word anymore in context of Physics, but that doesn't mean I would not use the term in context of mathematics and biology (thank you), where
evolution is the blind watch maker and is a natural function of spacetime, IOW a potential imperative (in the meta-physical sense)....

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I think that in the previous clips I provided answers to all these questions because they were already addressed by actual scientists and in context. I didn't hear any objection to the use of terms in those presentations. Perhaps no one bothered to watch them and consider the implications of their scientific arguments, or just dismiss them as "popularized" presentations and thus could be dismissed as "not science"

 

I don't remember stating that; please point out to me where you have read this. And if I did state that, that was obviously a mistake, and I apologize. If you read the opening lines of my post #545 you'll see that I don't hold that view.

Not liberal to the point of being wrong. Not liberal to the point of being confusing. You are trying to communicate on a forum; clarity of language is fundamental to that. Saying that wavelengths interact may be a convenient shorthand, but when somebody asks you about it, you should immediately specify you are talking about waves with certain wavelengths that interact, not wavelengths. One must be able to explain the shorthand. You couldn't do that.

The discussion at many points reduced to semantics because you were using words in unusual ways without defining them. You forced us to ask about semantics!

"Their perspective" being mainstream science. You just stated that we are "in a science forum". Please switch to using language appropriate for a science forum then!

 

Other than maths, where the word function is an integral part.

Correct, and I was always speaking from Tegmark's mathematical perspective.

Correct, because I was always speaking from a mathematical perspective in the general discussion, not from some teleological standpoint.
And it proves that you are able to adopt another's viewpoint. Why stop the discussion by semantic quibbling?
You always knew from what perspective I was approaching the subject.

I am the one who is trying to advance Tegmark's hypothesis of a mathematical universe. So my use of the word function in that context was correct.

When asked, I have always tried to explain that I used the word function in a mathematical context

There it is, you are converting the mathematical functions of wavelengths back to physical wave interactions.
In a prior post I already explained that the mathematical values of wavelengths (I know of no other wavelengths unless associated with waves) are either compatible or not. IMO, Harmony and Disharmony are not physical concepts, they meta-physical mathematical concepts.
Symmetry and symmetry breaking. Is that a physical interaction or a mathematical function?

While it is true that our ears receive waves, the brain processes the mathematical properties of the wavelengths, not the waves themselves. Some music is pleasing, some is unpleasant to the senses, IMO, that is a mathematical function of the neural network in the brain, which admittedly is causal to the release of certain physical chemicals, which in turn express themselves at the physical level such as pain.
This is what Anil Seth addressed in his presentation of ; https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality

But this phenomena would not take place without the a priori mathematical functions (computations) of the brain's neural network (the computer).

Not if you had kept in mind that I approached all physical phenomena from a mathematical standpoint.

If you mean appropriate language in Physics, you are correct. But is mathematics not also part of mainstream science?
Your interpretation of mainstream science is from the Physical perspective, mine is from a Mathematical perspective. So we are both talking Mainstream science, just from different perspectives. You promptly dismissed my mathematical perspective as not being mainstream science, thereby also dismissing the contributions of Archimedes , Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, and more recently Tegmark, Greene, Loll, et al, as not belonging to mainstream science.
Perhaps with "mainstream science" you mean currently "established science" and the rest is woo? You did not hear me quibble about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis

But I believe that many animals can count and perform mathematical calculations, albeit at a rudimentary level. But it is still doing mathematics.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-animals-have-the-ability-to-count/

Small Cuttlefish males avoid confrontation with bigger males by disguising themselves as females by hiding one of their arms and imitating the color of a typical female. How does it know that a female Cuttlefish has one less arm (tentacle)? Can it count? How does it know that females have certain colors, that can be used as a disguise? There appears to be certain sophisticated cognitive ability at work here.

How can a homing pigeon tell the differences in the earth's magnetic field and remember which specific field to follow? In one experiment a pigeon (in an enclosed cage) was driven many miles into the desert and released. It easily beat the car back to home.

IMO, those are all examples of inherent mathematical abilities. One can argue that neural networks (fractals) in the brain are physical systems. But it seems that these networks also have an inherent ability to make specific mathematical calculations or learn them from experience or observation.

It seems then that doing mathematics is not an exclusive human invention. We are just able to symbolized it into scribbles on a blackboard, which makes that a human invention, but not the existence of mathematical functions as an inherent part of this, our universe.

 

This argument is not about science. It is about metaphysics. Which is fine, but let's not confuse the two. The proposition that reality is mathematics is untestable. Ergo it cannot be a scientific proposition.

P.S. Please don't reopen the tedious argument about "function". You said you would avoid it, and yet here you are, already misusing it again, by claiming its mathematical meaning includes physical processes such as "computation" and physical phenomena such as "symmetry-breaking". Just do what you said and stop using it.

 

In other words, you can't point me to that statement. Can I conclude you misread what I said, and are now unwilling to explicitly admit that?

Because semantics are important when communicating?

Example: A tree falling does not cause a tidal wave, except when blue or brown.

Did that make any sense? I'm using my own definitions here for various words, but I'm not telling you. See? No useful communication happened. Semantics (and especially definitions of words) are quite important.

I did not; please stop misrepresenting me. Only with post #386 was I finally able to decipher your position:

​

Except in this sentence:

Or in this one:

​

Except your mathematical context is significantly different than that of mainstream science, so your explanations (initially) made no sense.

No, wavelengths are not mathematical functions, but mathematical values, so you just proved you are still not using the word function correctly. And I'm not converting, I'm matching the description with what it describes.

See? You know their are values, so why did you just call them functions? It's this kind of inconsistency which creates a lot of the confusion. You would do well to use words correctly consistently.

It cannot be a mathematical function, because the concept of symmetry (breaking) isn't a function. Please use the word function correctly.

No, because in this quoted text you've confused mathematical functions with computations, gave mathematical properties a physical reality, gave wavelengths physical reality, and made mathematical functions real objects that are affected by causality. None of that is part of mainstream science, so you are most definitely not using a perspective compatible with mainstream science.

So? (Modern) science didn't exist in the time of Archimedes, Plato, Pythagoras, and Euclid. A lot of (for example) Plato's ideas aren't scientific at all, but they are part of philosophy. You are no doubt making that distinction as well, so my dismissal is neither here nor there.

Is there some other mainstream science that isn't established?

Never said that. Philosophy is not woo.

Since I never brought that up, neither did you hear me quibble about that.

I have no idea how this is relevant to the current discussion?

Are you saying you can't experience anything if numbers don't have physical reality?

But how would that make the number three any more real? That something appears universally applicable doesn't mean it's fundamentally there. Most of these animals can also solve basic logic puzzles. Does that mean "logic is physically real"?

And let's ramp up the difficulty with giving numbers reality. Numbers aren't fundamental in mathematics anyway. Set theory is a layer below them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-theoretic_definition_of_natural_numbers

Does an empty set exist?

Neural networks are not fractals. Please learn what fractals really are, because that is a misconception I've heard many crackpots use.

Yes, the brain is an amazing thing. This doesn't mean maths is real. It just means that being able to do maths give a survival advantage.

You are right: it's an animal invention. That still doesn't mean the number three is any more real than if it was a human-only invention.

You haven't proven that mathematical functions have any existence. In fact, you haven't proven that mathematical functions can have any existence. That viewpoint is not part of mainstream science.

 

Exactly. This is the heart of the bogus argument Write4U makes. The term "function", supposedly in its mathematical sense, is wrongly applied to physical processes and phenomena, and thus the false conclusion is reached that reality is mathematics!

It is not a scientific argument, since the proposition is in any case untestable, but it is not even a decent metaphysical argument, because the logic of it is faulty, due to the misuse of terms.

 

Well, I still believe that mathematics are essential in explaining observed phenomena.. Without mathematics, these phenomena assume the character of observed "miraculous events", as they did in the very first observations of natural phenomena.

Mathematics explain these events from a logical perspective of assigning values and the functional interactions (mechanics) of physical objects.

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----Calculus ----Vector calculus-Differential equations-Dynamical systems-Chaos theory-Complex analysis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Mathematics_as_science

I still believe that Mathematics is an integral part of Science, at least equal in importance as Physics..

 

It might be even worse: it's a (silent) assumption. So if it's reached as a conclusion, it's begging the question.

I have tried to stay away from that whole argument, because Write4U seems to have trouble even understanding what is part of mainstream science and what not. But of course you are right: if Write4U (or anybody else) wants "maths is real" to be part of science, (s)he needs to come up with a test to determine this. No test, no falsifiability. No falsifiability, no science.

 

Don't play the slippery eel. That is a different, weaker, proposition, and even here you are trying, deviously, to slip in your favourite word. I presume by "functional interactions" you mean "interactions". The word "functional" adds nothing whatever to the meaning of "interactions" in physics so far as I can see. Are there any "non-functional" interactions? Can you give examples of each? I bet you can't. It's bullshit. I can only think your purpose in slipping it in here is to cling to your bogus argument. I'm sorry if I appear tetchy but I am getting really quite fed up with this. Make your argument without using the damned F-word and I'll pay attention to it. Otherwise it's a waste of everyone's time.

More seriously, i.e. leaving aside your interminable "function" shenanigans, I disagree with your proposition. It is untrue to say that observed phenomena would appear "miraculous" without mathematics. Do you think Darwin needed mathematics to advance his theory of evolution? Do you think mathematics are needed to avoid the theory of plate tectonics seeming miraculous? Do you need mathematics to develop the theory of morphology of glaciated landscapes?

I'll give you a bit of my own opinion about all this crap. I think certain mathematical physicists have become arrogant enough to think that all science is mathematical physics or would become so if we could do it rigorously enough. I think that is an untested notion. It was rpenner, I believe, who pointed out that just about all the mathematical physics we have is applied to artificially simplified situations, so all of our models can only approximate real physical observation. It seems a bit rich in the circumstances to claim the primacy of mathematics in the metaphysical hierarchy. As I pointed out earlier on this thread, you can't even describe physical concepts with mathematics, only the relationships between them. That's because maths is abstract and you need to give it something physical to operate on, before it can help describe the physical world.

 

Although I object to the word "essential" (as I already said earlier, maths may be replaced with something better in the future), I agree. Maths is currently extremely important in the explanation of observed phenomena. But that doesn't mean mathematics is real, or that the number three is.

Actually, this is a good approach to take. Start with those "miraculous events". What can we learn? We start seeing patterns. Rocks always fall downwards. The sun always rises. From there we start to describe these phenomena. We start to describe their regularity. We invent a language to do so. That language is mathematics. A descriptive tool, not a prescriptive law.

Yes, you can extend the concept of mathematics into a prescriptive thing, where numbers are real. This however is not part of science. It's meta-physics at best.

No, the word is "describe".

Please define "functional interactions"

I don't challenge that. But it's used as a tool in physics, chemistry, biology, ... not as a "these things are real". Numbers are used to describe thing; numbers are not used to derive things from.