This guy comes to your lab and tells you to start reading on philosophy of your field

And if he goes to leave?
Do you chase him, dick in hand?

ahaha!!! upboated

Someone explain for a pleb plz

There are roughly four epistemologies in science. Two mainsteam ones: realism and positivism, and two less common among scientists so I won't discuss them: pragmatism and relativism.
Basically here is the crux of the problem: science has to face its past failures, and provide some definition for the notion of scientific progress, which we all pretty much agree is a thing.

Realists claim science can evaluate truth-values of propositions, basically tell us what is the case and what isn't. This leaves us with a very big problem: since the previous scientific theories are now shown to be wrong, does it mean those old scientists weren't doing science at all? And if our current theories are shown wrong in the future does it mean what we're doing is worthless too?

Positivism is probably the most mainstream position (at least among engineers and applied scientists imo), even held by people who don't know the name. It holds that science really isn't about making truth claims, but simply about the experimental fitness of theories. In this framework, the notion of progress is simple: new theories are a progress over the old one if they fit the experiments better, quantitatively.

Popper is a realist. His solution is that we can't know that we're right, but we can now that we're wrong. Scientific progress is thus eliminating wrong hypothesis over time.

What pisses me off is you can't be a positivist and a Popperian. Popper system only works if you think scientific theories do have truth values.

>Positivism is probably the most mainstream position (at least among engineers and applied scientists imo), even held by people who don't know the name. It holds that science really isn't about making truth claims, but simply about the experimental fitness of theories. In this framework, the notion of progress is simple: new theories are a progress over the old one if they fit the experiments better, quantitatively.
What? I thought Positivism was essentially Verificationism and Popperiansm espoused falsificationism?

The definition you give of Positivism sounds like falsifcationism.

Falsifcationism is essentially the removal of what doesn't fit, thus leaving what fits the best, which is what your definition of positivism is about.

This guy slaps the documents out of your desk in your office and tells you that you can't have a unitary time evolution operator in the interaction picture of Wightman's QFT. What do you do?

>he does constructive QFT
>laughinggrills.jpg

Nah, positivism does not make claim about truth values, so if models can't be right they can't be wrong either.

Let's take an example: quantum mechanics since it is a field where those differences become significant.

What if we ask "which one is correct, Heisenberg representation or Schrodinger representation".
A positivist answer would be: "the question in meaningless since we can show that, when predicting the results of experiments, both representations give the same quantitative results. Since experimental fitness is all that matters, both representations are the same."

But a realist would say that no, you are talking about physical objects, whether or not they are observable, so one of those representations is right and the other is wrong (or both are wrong), it's just that our formalism is insufficient to decide which one. That, since we can formulate that statement rigorously, it has to have a truth value.

I'd say the huge majority of quantum physicists (or people who use quantum physics) are positivists: they have no interest in the field of interpretation of quantum mechanics and might consider it a waste of time.
Your average cosmologist, however, is probably a realist: he is talking about actual objects and trying to make true statements about them.

>he doesn't want sound mathematical foundations of whatever the fuck physicists are doing
>wonders why his QCD S-matrix elements aren't asymptotically summable

>philosophy of civil engineering
is there even such a thing?

>pragmatism and relativism

Is there such a thing as a constructivist epitemology or would that fall under pragmatism?

DUDE FREE WILL IS REAL BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE PEOPLE CAN'T BE PUNISHED FOR ACTIONS THEY'RE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR AND THIS IS MY ONLY ARGUMENT LMAO

Dan Dennett is an attention seeking hack philosopher. Even someone like Sam Harris has more rigor and that's saying something.

Pleasure to read

Though it's pretty obvious you're a realist, as am I. There are many thoughtful positivists though, I wonder how they justify it.

I'm a math major. I would have to ask myself whether performing operation on infinite series ir valid or not

I'd tell him to follow his own advice, since he seems to be rather ignorant of the philosophy of his own field.

>a very big problem: since the previous scientific theories are now shown to be wrong, does it mean those old scientists weren't doing science at all?
not a real problem, nice false dilemma

Admitedly I simplified it a little bit. A big part of what motivates positivism is the following. I think that will answer too.
Basically Francis Bacon formulated the idea that, contrary to what most laypeople think, science doesn't proceed through revolutions that throw away everything that was done before, but proceeds by accumulation. That when a new theory takes over, it still contains the old theory. Thus there is only progress and no regression.

Now, this notion is a bit problematic. What do we mean when we say the old theory is contained in the new one? If that's the case, then the false conclusions of the old theory would be in there too. The answer to that is generally "we found out the old theory was only valid in its limited field of application, and the new theory is more general".
But what is its field of application? There the answer is "the field in which it's valid". So really if you're a realist you're saying the old theory was true except when it wasn't, which really is nothing but a tautology, so you didn't actually accumulate much knowledge.

But then the XXth century came along, and this was the big victory for positivism, because of both special relativity and quantum physics. In the case of special relativity, if you take the equation of motion and consider its limit at low speeds, you see it converges toward Newton's equation of motion. In the case of quantum physics, if you consider a large number of particles, you fall back on the regular laws of electrodynamics.
This gave us a proper, rigorous definition of the Baconian ideal: old theories are limit cases of the new theories. Or rather they have formulas that are limit cases. Truth values don't have limits, a statement can only be true of false, but quantitative formulas do, therefore this was a positivist triumph.
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Quantum physics pushed that further. The field of quantum physics interpretation proved to be particularly fruitless. There are more interpretations than I can possibly count and none of them ever led a scientist to an interesting discovery. This confirmed the positivists in saying "who cares about the truth, having a good fit between theory and experiments is all that matters, and quantum mechanics without any specific interpretation does just that".

My objection to positivism is that, although it works really well in the case of QM and SR, you actually won't find that many other cases where the limit formula worked. It doesn't work with the old theory of impetus for example.
Another objection is about the transition from Cartesian to Newtonian physics. Descartes in his model had an explanation for why all the planets are in the same plane and orbit in the same direction: space wasn't empty and there was a vortex making the planets turn around. The thing is Newton had NO explanation for that fact in his physics. Of course it is possible to show why this happens using Newtonian physics, but this was done a century after everybody had already accepted Newtonian physics as the better theory. Newton himself couldn't do it, and it actually had him write down a "God of the gap" argument. This leaves the positivist with a big thorn in his foot: how come Newtonian physics was rejected when this led to a loss of experimental fitness? Cartesian physics did a better job of modeling the motion of planets in the solar system.
Of course the realist within us has a heartfelt answer to this: "Because it's not true, goddamit!"

I'm not sure what you would call a constructivist epistemology. Do you mean as in mathematical constructivism ?

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Falsificationism and positivism are very well compatible. You and Popper are fucking retarded.

Hey everyone, look at this guy! He still thinks that QFT is fundamental to physics and that it won't be supplanted with a theory that's compatible with general covarianve!

By now it's pretty obvious that QFT as we know it is an effective description, not a fundamental one. This warrants constructive QFT more or less pointless

>Your average cosmologist, however, is probably a realist: he is talking about actual objects and trying to make true statements about them.
No. Cosmology isn't about objects, it's about the nature and evolution of the universe is a whole. It differs from most sciences in that independent trials are impossible. The only way to tackle cosmology is by fitness of models. You can always add an extension to your model which will save it from the next observation. Cosmologists are positivists almost exclusively. Cosmologies are consistent with the data, never true.

I gave up on the philosophy of science after reading Kuhn
All he does is state some obvious facts and put a couple of scientific sounding names on them

i have no mouth and i must scream

I'll assume you're too.
Show how instead of arguing like an ape. Are you validating theories by a better numerical fit or by virtue of it lacking experimental abberations. Are you or are you not pretending to make true statements as part of your theories.

Fuck him in the ass like the ancients philosophers.

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This picture unironically describes the best way to deal with a hard problem.