Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!quiche!utility
From: utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: SCI.PHILOSOPHY.OBJECTIVISM
Message-ID: <2166@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 9 Feb 90 01:00:03 GMT
References: <3284@iitmax.IIT.EDU> <3285@iitmax.IIT.EDU> <9442@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <2018@cjsa.WA.COM> <5056@convex.convex.com>
Reply-To: utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN)
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 22

In article <5056@convex.convex.com> cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) writes:
>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.
>Modern philosophy deals with precisely those questions that cannot--*even
>in theory*--ever be resolved through experiment.  If one can devise an
>experiment that would solve a question, then that question is not a
>philosophical one.  Philosophy is therefore not "scientific".
	What you doubtless MEAN to say is that 1) many people mean an
empirically based system of inquiry when they say "science" and
2) that is what the sci newsgroups are all about -- THOSE sciences.
	However, I can't agree that science IS empirical.  Remember when
Bacon first talked about an empirical science?  That's a new idea (relatively
speaking).  And I don't think its quite correct to say philosphical things
are immune to empirical query -- modern philosophy is just concerned with
some things which are quite abstract and which require a good bit more
theory to figure them out.  After all, the use of the senses is very
empirical, and all data must come from them (i.e. there is also room for
empirical input to philosophy -- if you prefer to say that scintists provide
all of this to philosophers, then so be it -- the dividing line is quite
thin -- what is the difference between an applied epistemologist and a
person in AI?)
		Ron