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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

I have a degree in philosophy and did quite a bit of my work in philosophy of science. I feel qualified to smugly dismiss lisper's comment as an example of the well-known phenomenon of tech people on HN assuming that mastery and understanding in one field translates to mastery and understanding in all fields, sight unseen.

For example, defining just what is and is not "science" or "the scientific method" is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries. But this thread is full of HN randos basically chiming in with "here's my grade-school textbook's definition, guess we don't need all those so-called experts, lol". The level of not just ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, HN users routinely display in this kind of conversation is frankly staggering.

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I first thought the article was a bit of a fluff piece, but after seeing this thread and the misunderstanding and over-simplification, it does seem apropos and worth discussing. The toolkit that makes a scientist does not necessarily make a philosopher of science and vice-versa. Thankfully I am neither so I can see both sides :)

(and the comments section on the nytimes site is a mixed bag as well)

So why didn't the author even mention falsification?

Because many philosophers of science reject Popper's views as unrepresentative of the way science is done by real people in the real world. The Wikipedia page for falsifiability enumerates some of these criticisms.

Well, then those real people aren't doing science.

This is the No True Scotsman fallacy, and a rather obvious example of it.

OK, so what do you consider to be science with hypotheses that can't be falsified?

Edit: Much cosmology and some theoretical physics seem pretty iffy to me, but at least there's the possibility of falsifiable hypotheses.

http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/f...

Interesting, but it doesn't mention Kuhn.

Also, there's seems to be some attachment to the idea that truth can be proven.

I took one class in the philosophy of science in college, and feel qualified to smugly dismiss the article.

The article makes the point that knowing what something is and defining it are different. He then repeats that claim about 55 times, and says nothing else about science at all, certainly nothing about attempting to define the scientific method.

(I don't really want to spend time arguing about Popper or Lakatos here. But that's not relevant to the content of the article at all.)

> is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries

That's true. But that does not mean that the problem is unsolvable, and it does not mean that the problem has not been solved. It has. Popper solved it.

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