Summary What is this thing called science - Week 1
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Psychologie en Wetenschap
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Universiteit Leiden (UL)
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What is This Thing Called Science?
Summary of the most important pieces in the three chapters that will be discussed during the first week of the course Psychology and Science. Contains chapters 1, 2 and 4 of 'What is this thing called science? '. Written in English.
Summary of the book What is this thing called science? by Chalmers - Psychology and Science in International Bachelor of Psychology (IBP)
Summary What Is This Thing Called Science 4th edition, Leiden 2017/2018
Summary - Chalmers: what is this thing called science?
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What is this thing called science?
Chapter 1
History
Modern science was born in the early seventeenth century when the strategy of taking
the facts of observation seriously as the basis for science was first seriously adopted.
Knowledge was based largely on authority. Aristoteles, the bible. Only when this
authority was being challenged, was there room for modern science such as Galileo.
Galileo’s opinion was to accept the facts and build the theory to fit them. Galileo tested
the trial of strength by Aristoteles about the speed that the body’s reached the ground.
He challenged it by saying that the weight had nothing to do with the matter.
Empirics and Positivists
Common view of science: that scientific knowledge is derived from fact. They thought all
knowledge should be derived from ideas implanted in the mind by the way of sense
perception. The scientific knowledge should in some way be derived from the facts
arrived at by observation.
British empiricist was, John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume (17th/18th
century).
The positives had a somewhat broader and less psychologically orientated view of what
facts amount to but shared the view of the empiricists that knowledge should be derived
from the facts of experience.
There are 2 concerns involved in the claim that science is derived from the facts:
- These ‘facts’ and how scientists are meant to have access to them.
- How the laws and theories that constitute our knowledge are derived from the
facts once they have been obtained.
Three components of the stand on the facts assumed to be the basis of science in the
common view can be distinguished:
- Facts are directly given to careful, unprejudiced observers via the senses.
- Facts are prior to and independent of theory
- Facts constitute a firm and reliable foundation for scientific knowledge.
Logical positivism - Originated in Vienna in the 1920s, by Auguste Comte.
Two normal observers viewing the same object from the same place under the same
physical do not necessarily have identical visual experiences, even though the images on
their respective retinas may be virtually identical. – There is more than meets the
eyeball (Hanson 1958).
Observers can see the same things but that does not mean that they have identical
perceptual experiences.
For those who wish to claim that knowledge is derived from facts, they must have
statements in mind, and neither perceptions nor objects like mountains and craters.
Knowledge about the moon’s surface is not based on and derived from mountains and
craters but from factual statements about mountains and craters.
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