EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
Emergence of Life
Bruce W. Fouke, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E Philosophical Benchmarks in Science Notes taken on August 8, 2014 by Edward Tanguay |
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what does science provide us?
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Socrates (470BC-399BC)
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one of the great heroes of scientific endeavor
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society was hierarchical
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Socrates employed critical free thought to this hierarchical society and its ideas
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use reason and discuss
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dialectical method
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learning through disciplined, rigorous, and thoughtful dialogue and logically defending one's ideas during intensive questioning
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the step forward for accuracy in understanding the natural world
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Aristotle (384BC-322BC)
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did a lot of hiking in the mountains throughout Greece
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found marine fossils high in mountains
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philosophized about their origin
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in this sense he was an early paleontologist, someone who studies life through geologic time based on the principle of geology and biology
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assumptions and evidence were important to him: what are your theories assuming and what evidence do you have to support your claims?
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what kind of predictions are you making and how are they testable?
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analogy identifies anomaly
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analogy: we as humans have an experiential base which we bring to anything we are a part of
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if we see something new, the first thing we do is compare it to something else we have experienced before
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anomaly: those areas where our analogy does not fit completely to the phenomena being observed
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it is exactly these things that become interesting, concerning, or startling about what is being observed, and something that should be identified as a topic of further investigation
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René Descartes (1596-1650)
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French philosopher and mathematician who spent most of his life in the Dutch Republic
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1637 book: Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
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carefully and accurately using critical reasoning and our senses, we can acquire knowledge about the natural world and build a foundation to acquire more knowledge
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Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)
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1962 book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
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one of the natures of science is that it is done by humans within society
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some of the most important developments in science have been accompanied by pain, struggle, and rejection
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those scientific discoveries that have been shunned by society which were also based in reproducibility and testable predictions, have generally prevailed