Philosophy of Science: Why Science Makes Progress | Intro Lecture

[00:01:29]what is the philosophy of science different ones among you might have different attitudes toward philosophy some of you might think of it as a very rigorous discipline logical others might think of philosophy is something kind of squishy and wishy-washy but probably all of you understand science to be very different philosophy and science are enormous ly different enterprises why then philosophy of science what is that those are the questions that we're going to be asking ourselves in this first segment let me ask you what what might make science philosophically interesting I mean it's interesting to scientists but why would my foot Karl this basis so meta fit metaphysics is one of the areas the traditional areas of philosophy is supposed to be investigating the the basic nature or roots or foundations of the universe at large physics certainly does a good job at it seems to be doing a good job of explaining the nature of the physical universe so physics is doing a good job at a traditional philosophical task namely understanding the natural world and so is biology and chemistry more and more in the 20th century or taking on the same kind of rigor and explanatory power that physics has had for some time that's so there's a deep metaphysical interest well I'm going to stress though is a different angle what I want to stress throughout the quarter is science as a means of just gaining knowledge again physics and the Natural Sciences will probably be our primary example throughout but it's interesting also to ask the question what is it that the social sciences aspire to I mean you know what are they trying to do well they're trying to explain a certain domain of activity they're trying to understand it they're trying to gain knowledge about well economics is trying to gain knowledge about social economic behavior and and the Sociology is trying to get some kind of knowledge about about the behavior of people in groups I suppose those are kind of the two rough glosses of those subject areas but that's their point their point is to try and gain knowledge and epistemology of course is one of the with metaphysics is one of the central disciplines within philosophy it's the study of knowledge and so philosophers from before Plato have made distinctions between things that we could really know and things that just appeared to be true or were mere opinion I mean what's the difference between the scientists assertion that the physical world is such such and such and my uneducated opinion that the physical world is such and such well the scientist has something or other one might think going for him or her the scientist has something behind his or her assertion that the layperson doesn't necessarily have it wasn't always possible to distinguish between science and philosophy because science and philosophy have common roots but in the in the pret in the modern era there is such a distinction there's there is a difference between for example metaphysics and physics sometimes difficult to figure out where you draw that line but there's a difference between them okay so science seems physics especially again there goes that example again but science seems to be doing a pretty good job of gaining knowledge what are some alternatives though I mean what are is there any other way of gaining knowledge I mean any other candidate that we have to choose from if we say well science does a good job you know that sounds very nice but as opposed to what what are other avenues to knowledge party history history is that Nazi that's what the Hillary in one of those puzzling areas I'm not sure whether history as a science or not you'd say perhaps not it's one of those fuzzy it's not like physics but people try to approach history scientifically at least some people would say it that way oh so it's anyway that's one of those fuzzy K I don't know what to say about history and whether it's an alternative to science or whether it's just a science one of the sciences this religion how about that I mean it often seems to at least some of its practitioners to be to offer an alternative to science a way of getting to knowledge that is different than and sometimes perhaps even opposed to science another at least another candidate again I think some people would argue with it some people in religion and some people in science would argue with that characterization of science as being a competitor of religion one claimed way of gaining knowledge might be through hallucinogens through mind-altering experiences within the religious tradition and here is at least a link between the two things that you suggested within religious traditions some of them very old and some of them very new there are there are mystical traditions there one of the things that sometimes supposed to distinguish science and religion as ways of knowing is that science relies on we're going to ask ourselves what but science relies to a certain extent on mathematics science relies to a certain extent on experimentation whereas religion is often said to rely on revelation that's a different kind of Avenue for gaining knowledge then is admitted in the sciences rather that is either through some great book like the Torah like the Quran like the like the Bible or perhaps revelation as it has passed along by wise persons I mean a wise guys know by by by wise men shaman's you know these are in in the pre literate and non literate cultures of the world there are no great books but what there are are great traditions which are learned wrote by the religious leaders of the community and passed along or and here's the link sometimes the revelation comes directly sometimes there is a direct experience of divinity alleged either by the leaders of the religion or within some religions by practitioners and you find this in the Christian tradition great Christian mystics in the Jewish tradition great Jewish Jewish mystics in the Islamic tradition and all of the main ones in the minor ones you there is a tradition underlying the organized doctrines of the churches there is reliance on to some extent or another the ability of the individual to get into direct touch with divinity with God you don't have to go that far you could go to born-again Christianity in which in which the relationship between the person and God is supposed to be direct no more through churches no more through priests the relationship between an individual and his or her God is alleged to be direct you know Jesus directly you don't just hear about Jesus and then believe somebody you have direct experience and you know that it's God so I understand I mean you I mean I have not been in the position where I have received such revelations or known such things in such ways but if you rely on witnesses if you rely on people who issue reports through all time and in all cultures there have been such reports people are as convinced about these things as they are of anything and the particular people who are convinced of these things are not drastically unreliable people they're often some of the most reliable people around and they're there among them are scientists among them are doctors among them are all kinds of people it's not like it's just a bunch of uneducated people who feel this way and this is an avenue to knowledge to understanding to truth which if it's there is certainly an alternative to what science offers I mentioned a moment ago that it's difficult to draw a real sharp line between philosophy and science because they have similar roots for one thing science in a sense a sense that I you know I suppose we'll touch on through in the quarter science grows out of philosophical efforts to understand the world around us and it never entirely leaves leaves philosophy in the 20th century both Albert Einstein for example and Niels Bohr thought of themselves first and foremost as natural philosophers which is the old word for physics before they had separate departments over there I mean the the major degree the the the highest degree and all of the sciences is what yeah PhD Doctor of Philosophy this harks back to a day when there weren't these separate departments the the granting of that highest degree meant and still means that the person is capable of dealing with the state-of-the-art questions the things that are sort of right at the periphery of the field that's what that degrees supposed to mean and those are even to the practitioners to this day often considered philosophical questions I mean you get disagreements that run on for while in this century you disagreement between Bohr and Einstein that went on for thirty forty years about the character of the of the subatomic world the world in within the structure of the atom disagreements I mean these are not people who don't know what they're talking about these are the best experts there are and they have disagreements about about what's going on at that level agree across the board on tons and tons of other things but there is at this at this edge at the state-of-the-art edge of the discipline there remain philosophical disagreements the the sciences perhaps not pushed out that far has not learned how to handle those things in a way that is generally accepted within the profession of scientists so those questions remain philosophical so science hasn't completely gotten away from it nevertheless I think I think if you looked at the way philosophers dealt with problems and tried to gain understanding and philosophers pride themselves in in trying to reach understanding and then if you looked at the way that physicists went about their business working physicists you know rather than trying to figure out how do we distinguish these fields in principle it seems to me that you'd be forced to the conclusion that there are differences between the way philosophers try to gain understanding and the way that working scientists try to gain understanding now what intrigues philosophers is that about science and especially about physics is that given the domain that physicists have chosen namely you know the the world of matter energy I guess we'd say right now you know what it is how it works what its structure is that's the domain that physics looks at within that domain physics especially over the last 300 years has been monumentally successful it has had runaway success compared to any other competitor that anyone can think of concerning the development of knowledge whatever that means understanding I mean it doesn't mean that physics I mean no one thinks I think well I don't say no I shouldn't say no one but not many people believe that you know the physics is sort of like established the absolute and never-ending truth within its realm perhaps least of all physicists but the understanding this year appears to be better than the understanding last year the understand ending in this decade appears to be superior broader deeper than the understanding in the decade before and the dunder standing in this century appears to be remarkably deeper broader better than the understanding in the end Lee in the century before there seems to be progress here whereas progress isn't even the question in that mystical revelatory way of knowing you get shots of insight with mystical revelation you don't get arguments that develop you don't get theories you don't get systems that can be applied here and there and everywhere you get revelations glimpses of truth at best I mean that's that's according to its practitioners that's not the courting I mean forget about whether it really is insight which is a very you know an open question I don't mean to beg that question but you know just yeah just accepting it for a moment as a possible way of getting of getting some kind of knowledge even it's prayer even its it its proponents say that what it gives you is glimpses insights you things are revealed to you aha whoa dynamite far out I mean you get these and they're often ineffable that's one of the characters of mystical experiences they're ineffable those who took a philosophy of religion course you know what ineffable means unable to be effed no I mean it's unexpressable you cannot express them there's no way of putting the truth that you've just learned into words I mean mystical revelations don't come in come in like this you shouldn't eat butter I mean this is committer like that it doesn't come in like this is plain things like that it goes whoa I see it that's the way revelations come in whether they are hallucinatory generated by drugs or whether they are religious they come in in such a way as to be unexpressable that makes them suspect to some of the rest of us who think that you should be able to express what you know or what you understand but lots of people perhaps all of us it's in some and some issues would say look I've got some knowledge that I just am NOT able to put into words there are some things I understand that are not easily expressible artists are perhaps the best evidence for the fact that truths or important things any way can be expressed that just couldn't be tackled with paragraphs and sentences poets to a certain extent again examples of the same sort of thing and what the mystic claims to get revealed is something that is singular not something that progresses or regresses their truths shots of truth and in particular shots of ineffable inexpressible truth and philosophy for all its pretensions and I'm you know a guy this is my career in my life but it seems plain for better perhaps and for worse it seems plain that philosophy doesn't really progress I mean each generation of philosophers seems to just kind of go back to the same go back to the basics try and re-establish foundations under everything works as far as it can and then it dies off and then the next generation comes out and says and now and then you know scrap the whole works go back to the Foundation's work up scrap the whole thing go back to the Foundation's work up repetitively very little progress what's intriguing about science long story finally coming to a circle what's intriguing about science is that there does seem to be progress we do seem to be getting somewhere that's the way it seems anyway we'll have occasion in the quarter to examine that claim to question it but boy it sure does seem like science makes progress that you know given that philosophy has always been concerned with knowledge and trying to gain knowledge and trying to gain understanding that right there is the main reason why philosophers are interested in science in physics especially philosophers are interested in how it is that we come to know what kind of thing knowledge is is interested in distinguishing knowledge from mere apparent truth is interested in distinguishing knowledge from mere belief physics somehow or another has appears to have developed a method for reliably repeatedly at least over long periods of time getting closer and closer to the truth or at least weeding out more and more error in other words making progress so that probably more than anything else is what interests philosophers you know in science in a way I think you could probably take a philosophy of science course to be just another name for an epistemology course a course in you know in the study again of knowledge if that's a foreign word to you you should know it epistemology is the study of knowledge at the study of stems or epistles letters it's the study of knowledge and philosophy of science is just an effort to look at the you know processes of acquiring knowledge focusing on those disciplines that seem to have had the most success in acquiring knowledge okay let me open the floor to any comments or questions you might have at this point I'm not sure that there are any that there might be again the thesis so far my argument or not argument but my contention so far has been that the main philosophically interesting thing about science is not so much the metaphysics the angle you know or where it tells us interesting things about the universe but more as a process more as a method for acquiring knowledge if we could figure out what science had going for it if we could figure out the core thing that physics does that allows it to be so successful in its realm maybe we could apply it in some other realm I mean but economics is kind of tried to do that it Bowl I mean you know what's the story of the calculus does anyone know about the invention of the calculus who invented it why the cart didn't surround the same years but Isaac Newton invented calculus if someone else had said is there any other candidate that want you I mentioned yeah Lyons Leiden it's also invented the calculus quite independently of Newton and they had a big fight about it but Newton invented the Callias both of them invented the calculus for the same basic reason because they're kind of designing a rigorous language a mathematical language that could take care of could accommodate could deal with what each of them thought were the basic truths of the world the basic truths of the physical world in particular now they both had monumentally different theories but they're writing at about the same time they're both influenced by the same developments in science I mean you know that or you may know you should know that among other things Newton is writing in this context Hannes Kepler has figured out that the rotation of the planets around the Sun can't be circles as Copernicus had it even Galileo thought they were circles that the planets rotated around the Sun in circles we've gotten beyond the older theory which we're going to come back to and dwell upon at nauseating length the older Ptolemy in theory that said that the earth was at the center of everything we're now in the mid 1600s and pretty much the scientific community has managed to gain pretty widespread agreement on something like the Copernican theory now Kepler is the fellow who's figured out that it can't be circular orbits it's got to be ellipses and Kepler also figured out the mathematical equations that told you just how those planets move as any arbitrary planet goes around the Sun it cuts these segments areas area one area to area three what Kepler was able to establish was that the planets as they move they cut out equal segments in equal times Galileo had figured out something entirely different forget about the planets now Galileo had figured out how objects move you remember Galileo he isn't really the guy that dropped the the balls off the tower of pizza pizza Pisa in Italy and had them land you know different mass a big ball a little ball dropped him off the tower aborted the ground at the same time he's not the guy that really did that he worked with inclined planes but what he did do was to figure out what the mathematical laws were laws of motion that will allow us to tell when we took the ball and put it up here just exactly how far along the incline it would be if we just let it go from this height and you know let a certain time elapse he was able to figure out those equations which you all know very well it goes on x equals x sub 0 plus feet setter etcetera etc he was able to figure out those equations although he did that all geometrically by the way he didn't have algebra yet only Descartes when he came along his contribution was to give an algebraic interpretation of these geometric things that that Galileo had figured out in other words he invented analytic geometry which allows us to express geometric truths in algebraic terms but here we have forget about Descartes now we have Keppler whose figured out the the rules for the movement of the planets the rules of motion for planets around the Sun we have Galileo apparently doing a completely different science he's doing motion a physical object Kepler's doing astronomy Galileo figures out the equations of motion that governs such things as cannonballs you can now calculate just exactly how much power to put in your cannon to give it the the right and put it the right tilt to hit the the people over there either side of the the channel or whatever it is that you're aiming at so Galileo has figured out this stuff Kepler's figure out this stuff what Newton was able to do is to bring all this stuff together to show that the same basic laws of motion apply to the planets and the heavens as a why - the cannonballs on the earth and to the marshmallows on the inclined plane and a perfectly marshmallow frictionless surface but you know all the laws of motion are the same for all of these things and Newton was able to figure out what those laws were only because he invented the calculus so Newton Newton's invention the calculus was done with the you know a particular end in mind a particular end to X you know to try to explain physical phenomena phenomena of motion whether on the surface of the planet or whether planetary in space well what I'm getting to now you remember I mentioned economics some time ago in the twentieth century what economists have done is take the calculus over bodily as a tool for explaining the movement of money as a tool for explaining of facts in what's called econometrics trying to explain economic facts about this abstract thing money but the gross national product the calculus is used in that discipline now what would have led anybody to think that you could use something like the calculus in such a which was designed for this purpose in such a disparate field well the same motive that I'm ascribing to philosophers and looking at science the economists you know lots of people but the account of John Maynard Keynes among them we're looking very hard at physics and they were saying look what can we do to improve our understanding of Economic Affairs economic matters boy physics sure does a good job over there I wonder what it is that physics is doing that's got it right maybe it's mathematics maybe in particular the calculus let's see if we can borrow that technique move it over here and get something like you know equivalent or similar success in the 19th century we release uh ants tamaak was a physicist cult who's whose first name escapes me right now was someone who invented sociology but they're the cult especially thought that sociology should become the new religion in the world that we should abandon all faith in gods and instead accept faith in science he thought that societies needed a religion and for cult that religion should be science and that meant that it would be science that establishes our social goals science that establishes our policy and and of course that meant in the nineteenth century that we really got to work hard to make our study of human societies in our study of human individuals more scientific Karl Marx also in the mid 19th century is famous among academics I mean academics who sort of are interested in Marx whether they're because their political fans are just interested in him as a sort of a theorist are likely to tell you that one of the first people to to be dissatisfied with societies like the Soviet Union or China would have been Karl Marx he would have been one of the the grave the gravest opponents of those particular regimes because they had nothing to do with what he said should happen in particular this is a little bit chapter out of political philosophy Marx said you can never force social change social change happens when it is ready to happen you can't have a little clique of intellectuals turn or you know have holding a revolution and changing all of society that's Leninism for Marx you get changes in society when they're ready to happen and they are driven by changes in the material conditions of production enough about that that's but his he wanted to try and have a theory of scientific socialism that explained just exactly why Sciences Earth's I'm sorry societies change why it is the societies move why it is they progress why it is they regress what conditions are they that are required if a society is going to is to make progress in any measurable way is there anything that individuals can do Marx would have said not really much I mean this is just societies just kind of move and evolve for objective reasons so what he tried to do is to establish a science of societies all this movement in the 19th century to try and take something like what was so successful in physics and to apply it to two other realms that's what philosophy of science is all about trying to figure out what is it that that physics especially has going for it that we can take away perhaps and apply in new realms okay now let me pause and again ask if there's any comment sir or questions there I sort there are blunt pause but okay I mean back address is a lot of things that are more or less well like with physics we've got certain laws and they've discovered the laws and they're independent of us you know the people around them like doesn't matter how you well it matters how you throw the ball but you can always describe how it's going to work whereas psychology or whatever there's no real laws well I guess that we could say that they've discovered yet that you know given a you know somebody's always going to be or whatever it just seems like there's not a certain laws of the science yet they've discovered maybe that's the difference between the two fields there's a lot of yets there are you sort of thinking that well at the very least psychology is young right can I can I ask you to make a leap of faith and sort of speculate do you think that psychology ever can get to be as rigorous as Sciences physics probably not because we've already discovered how we can change a lot of our own just the behavioral end of it so you could constantly modify like if you came up with a law that said if somebody sees red they're going to get mad or whatever well behaviorally enough I think if you worked at it you could change it around so them people saw red you calm them down they just learn how to change people too much let me just make this up then go on then go on to the other questions progress in science seems to be measured among other things by knowing what kind of regularities are not knowing but hitting upon the right kind of regularities there have been since well since the dawn of written thinking this is the dawn of writing you know way before the pre-socratics in Greece over three thousand years anyway there have been there's evidence of speculation about what the what the basic processes are in the universe and what the basic regularities are in other words what the basic laws are but for motion I mean we got Aristotelian physics and Aristotelian doctrines about motion which talked about laws of motion for example in Aristotelian physics the reason this goes over there is because it's seeking its natural place okay and it just apparently found it at least temporarily unless I removed the floor from under it but that's what it was doing this has a lot of impetus in it too and so motion is described in there too Aristotelian physics by impetus within objects as they're thrown sort of pushing it along now that's not altogether gone in physics we still have this strange thing which I never understand I don't know if you remember this from physics courses but right now this has got a lot of something-or-other in it what is it potential energy right there goes took a lesson suppose it's all gone no no at least a lot of its gone again until I remove the floor out from under it but it had a lot of potential energy in it which was released now that's a funny way of thinking it seems to me but it's still taught to this day as far as I know in physics books so that's of the aristotelian stuff that's there let me make this suggestion about a law of human behavior not something as simple or on the surface as if somebody sees red then they get mad but rather something like this when any organism person or other when any organism is in a state of deprivation among one of its primary needs food water maybe affection I mean what the primary needs are are things that are still you know debatable but that when any organism is in a state of deprivation and receives some gratification let's say it's hungry it gets some food whenever that happens it would be more it will be more likely it the likelihood is increased that it will repeat whatever behavior it is that preceded the I mean that's the way to train dogs I mean I'm trying to state an abstract principle but let's say you make your dog really hungry let's say what I want to do is to get my dog to sit up I can't do this successfully but this is what trainers do is first of all I get the dog hungry yeah and then and then they just wait and get a bucket of food but they just sort of wait and the dog behaves animals tend when they're hungry start pacing moving around jumping on and down barking yelling doing all kinds of things they want food and especially if you lock them in a room which is a good idea if you try to train them or lock them in an area where they can't get food on their own they're just going to start behaving and so you kind of wait for the and the dog will have a propensity to be around you because the dogs been fed by you before so it's not like it's completely random but you wait for the dog to behave when the dog begins to do something like what you wanted to do like it begins to sit up you feed it you give it one bit of food you don't you don't feed it so it's a ciated you give it something okay and then the dog is more likely to repeat that the dog is not going to be quite so random in its behavior as it was before it will do it'll still be moving around bouncing up and down doing all kinds of things so you wait till dogs does something a little bit more like what you want it to do and you feed it and you continue this process you do what the trainers and behaviorists call shaping behavior and you can do this with any organism you can do with an amoeba do with a dam plant you certainly deal with people then and so then you and then what you do if you're looking for a law is you'd look for something general like that abstract you'd say alright the law is going to be whenever I reinforce an organism a behaving organism in in some continuum where it is in need it will have a tendency nothing certain they will have a tendency to be more likely to repeat that behavior that immediately preceded the reward than it would otherwise have been now there's a law of behavior it's really quite general that would be the sort of thing that you'd look for so I mean maybe it's not so unlikely that there could be laws of human behavior but that they're going to be complicated and maybe pretty abstract yeah it really is and so back anyway the original discussion here oh yeah um like in the field of quantum mechanics yeah you've got if you've got a really small particle you can't tell exactly where the particle is but there's a region of probability where you will probably find the particle and that's what you can draw a parallel to in psychology if you tell some if you if you put red and for somebody who it is likely that they will get angry all right is more like that so long wait the laws of psychology need probabilistic rather than deterministic again we'll be making some of those distinctions further later so I'm not that's good I mean it's a Nealon so that we might be able to you know interestingly enough quantum mechanics is is is as predictive rigorously predictive a science as anything else in physics but what it predicts or probability ranges and it does this with certainty it will with certainty be able to predict you know with near absolute certainty as near absolute is in any other area of physics will be able to predict you a range within which a certain phenomenon will occur a range of time and a range of space whatever but it can't get it can't get you the exact thing and indeed in quantum physics there is a good there's lots of good reasons to say that the electron doesn't have a particular position it only has that range but that gets a little weird look I hope we get there toward the end of the quarter you know I was just going to say that there may be a point in time where we have more scientific evidence in regards to the biochemistry as to the reasons for behaviour just like we was mentioning in that I think we probably probably won't have some solutions to those problems even look at what's happening clone me so near in time in time I'm not surprised I'm not hearing from those who think that no there's an in principle difference here here's one analogy the economists they try to predict what's going to happen tomorrow on Wall Street and then they publish their predictions the screwing them up and it happens to your psychology subjects after you start publishing your psychology textbooks on or your sociology textbooks like um what happens if I publish a textbook which in psychology I prove that if 50% of the people live in the city and 50% of the people live in the farmlands those people who live in the farmlands are going to be happy but only if that 50% is maintained my 50/50 ratio is going to get messed up because everybody's going to move out to the farmlands to be happy you know you're going to run into a paradox like that because the mind has that capability of taking into account laws and using that as a basis for action I think that money gives us a quantum mechanics examples that right oh no what what is what you're doing when you publish your results is adding another uncertainty in the in the question it's another thing that's going to move the people if um if there's 50 percent of the people in love and the finally the 50 percent of the people in the city and the 50 50 percent of people are in the fine lines are happy then people are going to move when you publish your information but that's because that's because you publish your information not not for any other reason let me see if I got to bring this kind of back the a central move that seems too many to be at the foundations of the success of physics is that it has been able to distance the observer from the observed it is able to give what are called objective analyses it sets up objective experimental conditions it tries to do this I mean I mean traditional physics has portrayed the world that it looks at as being you know even more than at arm's length not sure that's clear so let me try and go back over it again physics is objective whereas philosophy and religion are sometimes held to be non objective or subjective because what the physicist tries to say about the data about the realm that he's studying is supposed to be not colored by his interests not colored by or her goals the the institution of science is set up so as to correct for possibilities of personal bias so that even if a researcher has some professional interest or private interest that they cannot control the institution of science is supposed to keep these influences out to make sure that the descriptions of the realm are objective and then the whole idea here is what's going on in the physical world is independent of what we think about it is independent of us we are examining an independent world we the observer the mind or the or the minds that look at that world we can sort of stand back and and try and figure out how the world works apart from us independently of us because it it it there are laws of physics that are that that are determiners of what happens out there they are not affected by us so this whole ideal of objectivity the objectivity of the researcher or of research methods has seemed to be essential throughout the history of physics look though at anthropology I mean we've chosen some other examples but look at anthropology how can an anthropologist believe that same thing I mean anthropologists study cultures there are no big cultures that are kind of unaffected I mean the anthropologist comes from some culture and he's studying some other culture how can he put the culture on you know like a petri dish plate and study it how can the anthropologist study the the tribe in question without interfering with it I mean you ask it questions you can't control it either I mean what you want to do in an ideal physical experiment is to look at a phenomenon unaffected by anything around it you want to isolate that phenomenon make sure that you know exactly what the variable our variables are that are making one thing or another happen you want to control those variables anthropologists would have a very difficult time doing that with any mainstream culture so of special interest to anthropologists have been cultures that appear to have been isolated from all other cultures I mean they're sort of like me you don't have to be able to in order to study something you don't have to be able to put it on a petri dish or manipulate it I mean astronomy has been a very successful science and it's real difficult to put a planet or a star or a galaxy on a petri dish but but still it's been tough with with with societies for anthropologists and so they thought boy it really is great if we could only get a previously unknown culture to work with you know in the 20th century I mean it's debatable how isolated the societies really have been that have been discovered by anthropologists I mean sometimes it's occurred later boy these people have been in contact with that tribe over there for years and they are constantly at McDonald's hanging out no no that's not quite like that but but so they found these cultures and then the anthropologist is faced with this crazy question let's say they find a culture that's never been in touch with outside civilization before I mean let's say they somehow detect it from the top of a mountain there it is down in the valley you know like you can Tamara mean you can't how do they study it with binoculars well you're not going to learn their language you're not going to learn their customs that way you're not going to learn what they think about this that the other thing you're not going to learn how they work I mean how are you going to learn about this culture well you can go down in there and enter into it you can enter it or wouldn't learn their ways from the inside but if you do that you're you're you're the very thing you've been trying to protect against you are the outside influence are they going to behave the same when they know they're being studied by some outsider hardly they may worship you are they going to are they going to them is it gonna be the same culture are you going to be able to see really how they operate with one another when you come walk it in and here you are probably different complected differently dressed different ways different language there's their interactions with you the objective scientists are going to be different than anything that they've ever done before how can you see them objectively how can you study them without interfering with a very phenomenon that you that you set up so sometimes some people would say you cannot have the same degree of objectivity in the social sciences as you have with physics because you inevitably interfere with the phenomenon and then in the 20th century as we'll see later in the quarter physics fell to the same argument at the quantum level in quantum mechanics you cannot talk about the you cannot measure or look at or investigate anything that goes on in the quantum domain without radically interfering with it science is philosophically interesting because it's so successful philosophers want to know what does science have going for it possibly just out of curiosity about understanding knowledge that's a classic part of philosophy after all but also perhaps and in many instances they're interested in trying to figure out how to apply whatever it is that physics say has going for it somewhere else what we need to do now though is to look at some specific proposals about just what it is that science has going for it