Theme 1: Theory of Science pre-reflection

The sentence "theory of science" is a quite interesting topic, for in my everyday studies the word "science" is usually used as synonym for theory. But of course, there need to be some kind of theory for that we can consider theory or knowledge. I am a little familiar with this theory since I majored in philosophy in upper secondary school  in Swedish “gymnasium”) in Finland, but have no more understand than the basics of the different schools of epistemology  theory of knowledge).

So reading the Betrand Russel's "The Problems of Philosophy" brings me back to familiar theory, but goes deeper than I have been before. In the beginning of the text, Russel talks about what we perceive as true and what we actually can know as being true. Here he makes the distinction between sense-data and physical object. With the word sense-data Russel means the impressions we get when we perceive something. For example, if we see something one would consider to be a car, the sense-data when one sees a car would be the smell of gasoline, the color of the car, the sound of the engine etc. These sense-data are easily associated with what the know as a car. A physical object on the other hand would be the car itself, if there is such a thing as a car, because this is something we cannot be sure of.

Likewise, if we in a scientific practice observe something happening, we need to consider data. But no matter how many times something occurs, how can we ultimately be certain of that this will always be the case? Just because all humans so far have been mortal, it doesn’t mean that the next born human have to be. So science needs to consider data, but we can only minimize the doubt, not conclude something as being absolute truth.

A common word I read I scientific papers and articles is the verb “to propose”, e.g. “in this article a new algorithm for … is proposed”. These papers are bringing something new to the table, which they cannot conclude as scientifically true and therefore they “propose” it. This proposition is then inspected by other scientists, of which some trough own experiments might find it true and some false. Later if enough scientists and good proofs also consider it to be true, this proposition will change into a statement of facts, i.e. a word describing something that we consider to be truth. So in the spectrum of words, going from highly uncertain to very true, a proposition would be something new introduced to the scale with good evidence, not like a “I think so and so”. In Swedish the word for ‘think’ and ‘believe’ is the same and my grand father always told me when I began a sentence with “I think/believe…”: “Do you know? Believe is something we do in church”. So what he wanted from me was more a statement of fact than something else, i.e. something that he could believe to be true due to good evidence and common sense.

Further Russel talks about different kinds of knowledge, namely knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. The difference between these two lie in how this knowledge is gained. Knowledge by acquaintance means that we learn something trough our sense-data, i.e. by experience. Knowledge by description on the other hand is gained through e.g. reading or having something described to us. For example, what learning facilities sometimes do is to include “learning by doing” and thereby expand the old reading  i.e. possible knowledge by description) with some doing  i.e. possible knowledge by acquaintance). He later specifies knowledge by description to what he calls definite description, by which he means a specific description like “the man” instead of the ambiguous  “a man” that could mean any man and therefore cause some confusion. Describing me as who I am more accurate than describing me as solely “a man”.

So how can we state some theory as being true or a statement of fact? In chapter 13 Russel talks about the problem with the traditional view of truth and speaks of the following example:

“If a man believes that the late Prime Minister's last name began with a B, he believes what is true, since the late Prime Minister was Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman. But if he believes that Mr. Balfour was the late Prime Minister, he will still believe that the late Prime Minister's last name began with a B, yet this belief, though true,  would not be thought to constitute knowledge”

The problem with this is that the outcome is true, but the reasoning is not. So as a parallel to science and what I said before, we need to show evidence for being able to say something is true.