We have a test coming up, and I realized that my post about Scientific Realism never even saved as a draft, so I will quickly overview the idea and talk a little about time as well.
What is Scientific Realism? At first, I was confused about what this means. And to be honest, I still don't really know. I have a feeling it is the idea that there is a scientific answer to every question. There have been arguments for or against this, and I have no idea how I feel because I still don't know what this is. lol. If my groupmates have explanations, that would be great!
Time: Time is not the present, the future, or the past. It is when it is. Time can only be in relation of when it happened, earlier or later in time than another part of time. The "past" does not truly exist, or something would ALWAYS be in the past, never in the future or present. We talked about time in terms of stars and light. Light we see from the closest star is from 3 years ago, which makes their past our present and their present our future. Can time be manipulated, can we go back, forward?
FQ: Does time have tenses?
Answer: No. We create that to understand time better, but in reality, time has no category in which to put it in.
Scientific realism is simply the view that the unseen entities science alleges (like atoms) are real, and that scientific theories incorporating those entities depict the world more accurately than alternative approaches that omit them.
ReplyDeleteAlrighty guys, I went ahead and went through our chapters and got a few questions we can discuss in class tomorrow. Now, I just kind of threw these together, so we can all refine them a bit in our discussion and have them ready for the test.
ReplyDeleteTrue or False: Tim Crane believes that a scientist would be more capable of solving the question of how the mind interacts with the body by looking at the physical brain as opposed to a philosopher studying the non-physicality of consciousness.
False. Time Crane believes that consciousness is not physical and therefore could not be studying by dissection, scans, or physical tests.
True or False: According to A.W. Moore, infinity can not be defined.
True. Moore believes the whole point to infinity is that is in not tethered to one single definition or parameter.
According to David Papineau, what does a scientific realist believe?
They believe that the unobservable world exists. That there are things that we cannot sense with our five senses, such as atoms, viruses, radio waves, but that does not mean they are not present.
True or False: A skeptic would believe something exists if he could experience it with one or more of his five senses.
False: According to Barry Stroud, relying on your senses and how you perceive things to be true is the exact opposite of skepticism.
And Megan, I like your time one, so that added to these covers all of our chapters since the last test.
Is infinity included in this exam, even though it was included in the last exam?
ReplyDeleteI'm confused about that part. lol. Great questions! Hopefully we can delve more into the questions in class.
Thanks Dr. Oliver for making it more understandable. The chapter took a lot of dissecting to get to the point. They seem to talk a lot about the same things.
I think the point of the tenses thing is best understood by looking at time as another dimension, similar to the spatial dimensions. You use tenses as a relation between two points in time, just as you use spatial dimensions as a relation between 2 points in space. Depending on when you're talking about it, our class could be in the future, in the present, or in the past. Just like depending on where you are in the world, Tennessee could be to your North, to your South, East/West etc. It all depends on where (or when) you are when you make the relation.
ReplyDeleteFollowing from this (although it took until the early 20th century for someone to figure this out completely), both time and space are relative. Meaning, there is no absolute point to measure from. We think of this as 2013 but that is only true relative to the Christian "beginning" point for year zero. By the Jewish calendar, the year is 5773! It turns out that any measurement you can make in either distance or time MUST be relative to some other measurement. You can't use a spatial dimension as an absolute statement. Imagine asking someone where they live and getting an answer like "3 miles". Unless they specify a mutually referenceable location that they are measuring from ("3 miles from campus") it makes no sense.
Even more warped is that time and space relativity are actually interrelated. If you move quickly enough through space, your relatively measured time becomes shorter than the relatively measured time of others moving slower through space relative to you. And compression of space by massive gravitation can also affect the passage of time... this is one of those areas where science and philosophy come together in very interesting points.