Chapter 5.                 (continued) 

There are arguments against the empiricist way of thinking about thinking and its model of how human thinking and knowing work. Empiricism is a way of seeing ourselves and our minds that sounds logical, but it has its problems.

 

        

 

           Child sensing her world (credit: Sheila Brown; Public Domain Pictures)

Since Locke, critics of Empiricism (and Science) have asked, “When a human sees things in the real world and spots patterns in the events going on there, what is doing the spotting? The mind and the sense data-processing programs it must already contain in order to be able to do the tricks empiricists describe obviously came before any sense-data processing done. What is this equipment, and how does it work?” Empiricists have trouble explaining what this “equipment” that does the “knowing” is.

 

Consider what Science is aiming to achieve. What scientists want to discover, come to understand, and then use in the real world are what are usually called “laws of nature”. Scientists do more than just observe the events in physical reality. They also strive to understand how these events come about and then to express what they understand in general statements about these events, in mathematical formulas, chemical formulas, or rigorously logical sentences in one of the world’s languages. Or, in some other system used by people for representing their thoughts. (A computer language might do.) A natural law statement is a claim about how some part of the world works. A statement of any kind – if it is to be considered scientific – must be expressed in a way that can be tested in the real, physical world.

 

Put another way, if a claim about a newly discovered real-world truth is going to be worth considering, to be of any practical use whatever, we must be able to state it in some language that humans use to communicate ideas to other humans, for example, mathematics or one of our species’ natural languages: English, Russian, Chinese, etc. A theory that can be expressed only inside the head of its inventor will die with her or him.

 

Consider an example. The following is a verbal statement of Newton’s law of universal gravitation: “Any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.”

 

In contrast, the mathematical formula expressing the same law is:

                          

                           

Now consider another example of a generalization about human experience:

 

                                                     

                                     

                                   

                              Pythagoras' Theorem illustrated (credit: Wikimedia)

 

In plain English, this formula says: “The square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two adjacent sides”.

 

The Pythagorean Theorem is a mathematical law, but is it a scientific one? In other words, can it be tested in some unshakable way in the physical world? (Can one measure the sides and know the measures are perfectly accurate?)

 

The harder problem occurs when we try to analyze how “true” statements like Newton’s Laws of Motion or Darwin’s Theory of Evolution are. These “laws” claim to be about things we can observe with our senses, not things that may exist – and be true – only in the mind (like Pythagoras’ Theorem).

 

Do statements of these laws express unshakable truths about the real world or are they just temporarily useful ways of roughly describing what appears to be going on in reality – ways of thinking that are followed for a few decades while the laws appear to work for scientists, but that then are seriously revised or even dropped when we encounter new problems that the law can’t explain?

 

Many theories in the last 400 years have been revised or dropped totally. Do we dare to say about any natural law statement that it is true in the way in which “5 + 7 = 12” is true or the Pythagorean Theorem is true?

 

This debate is a hot one in Philosophy, even in our time. Many philosophers of Science claim natural law statements, once they’re supported by enough experimental evidence, can be considered to be true in the same way as valid mathematical theorems are. But there are also many who say the opposite – that all scientific statements are tentative. These people believe that, over time, all natural law statements get replaced by new statements based on new evidence and new models or theories (as, for example, Einstein's Theory of Relativity replaced Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravitation).