Chapter 3.                          Part E 

         Now the problems described so far bother philosophers of Science a great deal, but such problems are of little or no interest to the majority of scientists. They see the law-like statements that they and their colleagues try to formulate as being testable in only one meaningful way, namely by the results shown in experiments done in the lab or in the field. Thus, when scientists want to talk about what knowing is, they look for models not in Philosophy, but in the branches of Science that study human thinking. However, efforts to provide material proof of Empiricism, e.g. in neurology, also run into problems.           

In his writings, the early Empiricist, John Locke, basically dodged the problem when he defined the human mind as a “blank slate” and saw its abilities to perceive and reason as being due to its two “fountains of knowledge”, Sensation and Reflection. The first, he says, is made up of stores of sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences. The second is made up of the “ideas …the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself”. How these “operations” got into human consciousness and what it is that is doing the “reflecting” on these “operations” he doesn’t say. (5.)   

         Modern empiricists, both philosophers of Science and scientists themselves, don't care for their forbears giving in to this kind of mystery-making. Scientists, especially, aim to figure out what the mind is and how it thinks by studying not words but physical things, things such as the human genome, and what it makes, namely, among its many other creations, the neurons of the brain. That is the modern empiricist way, the scientific way.

For today's scientists, talk about what knowing is, no matter how clever the talk, is not getting us any closer to understanding what knowing is. In fact, scientists don't respect talk about anything that we may want to study unless that talk is backed up with scientific theories or models of the thing being studied, and the theories are further backed up with research done on real things in the real world. 

Scientific research, to qualify as scientific, also must be designed so that it can be replicated by any researcher in any land or era. Otherwise, it’s not credible; it could be a coincidence, a mistake, wishful thinking, or simply a lie. Thus, for modern scientists, the analysis of material evidence offers the only route by which a researcher can come to understand anything, even in this case in which the thing that she is studying is what is happening inside of her as she is studying.

She sees a phenomenon in reality, gets an idea about how it works, designs an experiment, tests her theory, then records the results and interprets them. The aim of the statements she then makes is to guide future research onto more and more fruitful paths and to build technologies that are more and more effective at predicting and/or manipulating events in the real world. Electro-chemical pathways among the neurons of the brain, for example – individual paths and whole patterns of such paths – can be studied in labs and correlated with subjects’ own reported perceptions. (The state of research in this field is described by Delany in a 2011 article available online and also in several articles, notably Revonsuo’s, in a book edited in 2000 by Metzinger, also available online.) (6.) (7.) 

Material things that can be observed and measured by all are the things that Science cares about. The philosophers’ talk about what thinking and knowing are is just talk.