Chapter 6
-John Stuart Mill
-All maths and science derives from experience
-Numbers are physical phenomena - 2 will always represent pairs, etc.
-The sums of equals are equals
-Inductive
-John Henry Newman
-Reason is knowledge derived from beyond the reach of our senses
-Doesn’t perceive anything, links things that are perceived to things which
aren’t.
-Infer from premisses
-Assent to conclusions
-Simple assent can be rash and unconscious
-Complex assent
-Proof
-Sense of intellectual contentment
-Irreversible
-Certainty - Know stuff for sure (Victoria was Queen)
-Infallible - I know for certain what I did yesterday but my memory is not infallible
-Pierce on Methods of Science
-Method of tenacity - I can’t believe them because I’d be stupid if I did
-Provides peace of mind
-Method of authority - Listen to authority for right and wrong
-Disadvantage 1: Terrorism to one state isn’t terrorism to the other
-Disadvantage 2: No institution can regulate opinion on every subject
-A priori meditation
-No fixation of belief, neither metaphysical or idealist
-Scientific method
-Logic - Using guiding principles of stuff that we do know to find out stuff we do not
-Perfect methods and processes to get better, more accurate results
-Belief
-Something we are aware of
-Appeases irritation of doubt
-Establishment in our rule of nature as an action / habit
-Different beliefs are distinguished by different actions
-Frege on Logic, Psychology, and Epistemology
-If a proposition is mathematical, it’s justification must be mathematical
-A proposition may be thought of without being true but also it may not be thought of but still can be true
-Psychology = Cause of our thinking
-Mathematics = Proof of our thinking
-Pronoun ‘I’ - Special meaning, name of beholder, everyone is presented to themselves differently to as they are presented to others
-We do not have thoughts, thoughts are what is grasped, ‘I am in pain’
-Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description
-Bertrand Russel
-The real table is not what we immediately experience but is an inference of what we immediately known through sense
-Sense data is all we can be certain of
-Introspection - acquaintance with own thoughts, feelings, etc
-Memory - Acquaintance with past data
-Self - Potentially have acquaintance with ourselves
-No acquaintance with other minds or objects
-Objects are logical constructions of sense data
-Husserl’s Epoche
-Adumbrations - Awareness of external objects consists of glimpses and contacts with them
-Wittgenstein on Certainty
-Doubt needs grounds
-Genuine doubt effects behaviour
The next notes are taken from my blog here
Science and the Clockwork Universe
Our journey with science begins with Copernicus, an astronomer who lived between 1473 and 1543. Copernicus was the first person since the Heliocentrics to say that the sun is at the centre of the universe. He had some rather outlandish claims, two of which were that the earth rotates around the sun once a year and that the earth spins on it's own axis once a day. How preposturous!
The Catholic Church certainly thought so; Copernicus dedicated his work 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' to the Pope, but later the Church condemned the book claiming it was unholy. And low and behold, they had the backing of two philosophers. Luther was the first to derail the Heliocentric train when he said that there was proof in sacred texts that the theory was bonkers. He goes on to quote such a text and say that Joshua commanded the sun to stop, NOT the earth. There we go then. That's obviously conclusive proof. I asked for it to stop raining today, it didn't. Now I want Godly powers. Calvin also criticises the theory with God as his witness. He says that the world is stablished and cannot be moved and then questions who would believe the word of Copernicus over that of the Holy Spirit?
Russell points out that the important aspect of Copernicus' work is that it dethrones the earth from its geometrical pre-eminence. In other words, it throws it off-centre. Maybe this is what the religious bodies could not accept? Their whole works focus on the earth being the centre of everything, the be all and end all, yet now they've been shaken up by a new theory which basically suggests that the earth is not the most important object in the universe, and could even be used to suggest that without the sun we would not exist. Where's God hiding now?
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) holds a theory that is very much against Aristotle's view that the blanket above the moon (stars, planets, etc.) are immovable, that the sky looks the same from where ever you stand, be it on the moon or in Australia. Brahe supports this attack on Aristotle by noting the appearence of a new star in the sky, which is obviously beyond the moon. He also observed some very distant comets. Another of Brahe's important observations is that the sun and the moon rotate around the earth, but the other planets rotate around the sun. He was half-way there, I guess.
Our next important scientist is Kepler who roamed the earth between 1571 and 1630. Kepler was another Heliocentric who puts the sun at the centre of everything. He came up with the Three Laws of Planetary Motion, which I will try to explain here:
- Planets eliptically orbit the sun, not circually. This was hard for people the church and believers in Plato to believe as an elipse is an imperfect shape and a circle is it's perfect incarnation. Surely the Gods wouldn't create this imperfect universe?
- The lines joinging the planets to the sun sweep out equal distances in equal times. In the very mathematical way that Russell puts this: If S = Sun, and Planets at equal positions at certain times = P [to the power of]1 P2 P3 etc, then P1SP2, P2SP3 and so on prove that planets closer to the sun rotate around it quicker than those furthest away as they have less distance to travel.
- The square of the period of time the planet takes to complete one revolution is proportional to the cube of it's average distance from the sun. This compares measurements of different planets. If R = Average distance from the sun, and T = length of planet's year, then Rcubed divided by Tsquared is the same for all the planets. This helped to prove Newton's law of the inverse square for gravitation.
He is also noted for his work on projectiles. Up until Galileo, the general theory was that a projectile would carry on horizontally for a while, before vertical velocity took over and it dropped suddenly, almost at a right angle. Galileo showed that when vertical velocity takes over, the projectile still has the propulsion from the horizontal velocity, so the object would fall diagonally, covering both vertical and horizontal ground. Galileo's rule of inertia says that an object dropped from the top a tower hits the ground directly underneath it because it is carrying the velocity from the earth's rotation. This is why you don't land in your back garden when you jump 10 miles down the road. You keep the velocity of the rotation.
Now onto the telescope. Galileo already had heliocentric beliefs, so was obviously very keen to observe the sky. He knew that a telescope was being developed in Holland, so he made his own. Through it he could see the phases of venus, he could see that the Milky Way was made of a number of stars, and that Jupiter had four satellites. This is where religion, again, denounces science. They argue that seven is a holy number and that there are 7 holy bodies. Four more orbiting Jupiter will make that number 11, one with no holy significance, so how could Galileo be right? They accused the telescope of causing illusions and refused to look through it. Why? Because science was stomping all over their ancient beliefs and they did not want to lose the pillars of their ethos. Galileo was eventually condemned by the Italian inquisition, halting scientific progress in Italy for centuries.
Isaac Newton is known for discovering gravity, but he also proved Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. He also defined 'force' as a change of motion. If I jump, my force is taken me off the ground, however, when I fall, the force of gravity takes control, and thus I land. With his law of universal gravitation, Newton deduces everything in planetary theory from the planets, satellites, comets and the tides. The law itself states: "Every body attracts every other with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them." With this, Newton made the universe knowable to the masses, he made it clockwork.
There are other notable scientific discoveries in the 17th Century including: magnets, blood circulation, bacteria and the microscope.
Francis Bacon hated the Aristolean and Scholastic approach, he claimed it was both barren and circular, as it was undeveloped for many years and it kept on repeating itself. It didn't go anywhere. Critics of Bacon say that his biggest mistake is mixing religion and science as they have conflicting interests.
Bacon wasn't just a philosopher and scientist; at the age of 23 he joined parliament, then in 1618 he was made Lord Chancellor, but he lost this position after two years for accepting bribes. For this, he was sentenced to spend time in the Tower of London and to pay a £40,000 fine. Although he only spent four days in the tower and didn't pay the fine, he chose to spend the rest of his life writing books, avoiding the public eye.
He introduced the idea of induction: gaining knowledge, then testing it over and over to prove that it's right. This scientific method is still in use today. An example of how Bacon used it can be seen when he wanted to discover the nature of heat; he made a list of bodies that were hot, cold and those that had varying temperatures. He then tested them to see what aspects were heat specific - those that were present in hot bodies but absent in cold were clearly linked specifically to heat. He then tested this over and over in different circumstances to prove that he was right.
Bacon wasn't just a philosopher and scientist; at the age of 23 he joined parliament, then in 1618 he was made Lord Chancellor, but he lost this position after two years for accepting bribes. For this, he was sentenced to spend time in the Tower of London and to pay a £40,000 fine. Although he only spent four days in the tower and didn't pay the fine, he chose to spend the rest of his life writing books, avoiding the public eye.
He introduced the idea of induction: gaining knowledge, then testing it over and over to prove that it's right. This scientific method is still in use today. An example of how Bacon used it can be seen when he wanted to discover the nature of heat; he made a list of bodies that were hot, cold and those that had varying temperatures. He then tested them to see what aspects were heat specific - those that were present in hot bodies but absent in cold were clearly linked specifically to heat. He then tested this over and over in different circumstances to prove that he was right.
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