Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!omicron.cs.fsu.edu!fsucs.cs.fsu.edu!peterson Newsgroups: news.groups From: peterson@fsucs.cs.fsu.edu (Eric J Peterson) Subject: Re: reorganization? (Was: SCI.PHILOSOPHY.OBJECTIVISM) Message-ID: <9002052354.AA03054@fsucs.cs.fsu.edu> Reply-To: peterson@nu.cs.fsu.edu (Eric J Peterson) Organization: Florida State University Computer Science Department References: Date: 6 Feb 90 00:05:37 GMT Lines: 47 In article , Thomas Gramstad writes: | >From: cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) | >Date: 1 Feb 90 15:50:52 GMT | | >When Webster's talks about philosophy as a "science", "science" is surely | >used in the very loosest sense. Science is empirical; to be scientific, a | >question must--at least in theory--be capable of resolution by experiment. | | The bit after the ";" is a non sequitur. | | Your view that only experimental sciences are science is a belief system | that you share with a few philosophers and probably some religions. | | Do you really want to exclude astronomy, cosmology, evolutionary biology, | ecology, most of psychology, sociology, history, economics, education etc | and so on from the realm of science? I do not understand why you believe that some of these disciplines are not verifiable by experiment. About the only one of these disciplines that inherently cannot be conducted by experiment is history. Astronomy and cosmology are inherently experimental -- we can do nothing but observe the Universe and test our theories derived on the earth. Evolutionary biology is similar to cosmology -- while we cannot actually watch it happening, we can take a look around, whether in the sky or on/in the ground, and test our theories. All of the rest of these sciences can be experimented on likewise. I believe what truly differentiates these sciences from the more "mainstream" ones, such as physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth, is that the above sciences are more limited in the scope of the kinds of experiments you can do, due to the nature of the subject. We can't go out and get pieces of stars. We can't easily monitor the activity of the human brain. But just because our observations are more limited doesn't rule out experimental possibility. (BTW, I am a Computer Science student minoring in Physics and Astronomy, while my girlfriend is majoring in Education and Psychology ...) Just wondering ... no flaming attitudes intended. Eric -- Eric J. Peterson <> peterson@nu.cs.fsu.edu <> uunet!nu.cs.fsu.edu!peterson Florida State Univ * CS Systems Support Group * Room 011 Love * (904) 644-2296 echo "This is not a pipe." | lpr -P laserjet; more ~/.disclaimer