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From: jeff@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Definition of science and of scientific method.
Message-ID: <147@aiva.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 10-Aug-87 18:15:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: aiva.147
Posted: Mon Aug 10 18:15:10 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 12-Aug-87 05:03:51 EDT
References: <122@aiva.ed.ac.uk> <369@hubcap.UUCP>
Reply-To: jeff@uk.ac.ed.aiva (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 34

In article <369@hubcap.UUCP> steve@hubcap.UUCP (Steve ) writes:
>in article <122@aiva.ed.ac.uk>, jeff@aiva.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) says:
>> .... Making them explicit is Philosophy of Science, rather than Science.
>> It is Science itself that determines what exists, what we can observe,
>> and what representations are useful.

>Whoa.  I thought that was the senses and perception and measurement etc.
>This is/was the purview of philosophy.  Science "determined" that "aether"
>was real until another "science" decided it was not.  What you are calling
>"Science" I would call modeling.

Senses tell you various things, but what's actually going on (photons,
etc.) is not something that philosophy tells you.  The reliability of
the senses (and the extent to which they are reliable) was something
people had to discover (think, e.g., of various optical illusions),
not something they needed before they could begin.  Philosophy comes
along after and trys to figure out what happened.  

I don't see the significance of your aether example.  Do you think
there's some better idea of what's real than what science gives us?
A wrong answer doesn't mean that it wasn't science.  And you seem
to be using "modeling" in the way Creationists use "theory".

There was a proposed axiom:

>       What we (and our instruments) perceive is the "actual" universe.

Well, is it?  There are various notions of actual.  Some would say
that all of this world (that we seem to live in) is illusion and that
actual reality is quite different.  Do we need this view to be false
before we can do science?  The world we (and our instruments) perceive
is the world investigated by science, but the notion of "actual"
important to science is one that is developed by this investigation,
not something that starts it off.