Can science address metaphysics? I tend to think it can inform but not address metaphysics.

@OrangeJuice how do you inform a field of study? You inform agents.

@OrangeJuice

Science is an epistemology. Not science is Epistemology.
Both tang and sunny d are juice but they are not orange juice, although I am.
It takes philosophy to validate science.

I have heard the very religious say the science is an ideology. If you everyone as members of competing ideologies you also see scientists as pushing an ideology.

@OrangeJuice Science isn't an ideology, but Scientism is. Scientism is the belief that all questions can be answered through science. Science tells us how things work and what we can do, but it doesn't tell us anything about what we should do. To answer that question, we need things outside of science, like philosophy and its sub-field, ethics.

Perhaps I should have said it is an epistemological approach?

Epistemology is the field of philosophy which deals with how to judge the validity of knowledge (is it good science or not?), science doesn't base itself on it, really.

@MarcO

epistemology (Gk., epistēmē, knowledge) The theory of knowledge. Its central questions include the origin of knowledge; the place of experience in generating knowledge, and the place of reason in doing so; the relationship between knowledge and certainty, and between knowledge and the impossibility of error; the possibility of universal skepticism; and the changing forms of knowledge that arise from new conceptualizations of the world. All of these issues link with other central concerns of philosophy, such as the nature of truth and the nature of experience and meaning. It is possible to see epistemology as dominated by two rival metaphors. One is that of a building or pyramid, built on foundations. In this conception it is the job of the philosopher to describe especially secure foundations, and to identify secure modes of construction, so that the resulting edifice can be shown to be sound. This metaphor favours some idea of the ‘given’ as a basis of knowledge, and of a rationally defensible theory of confirmation and inference as a method of construction. The other metaphor is that if a boat or fuselage, that has no foundation but owes its strength to the stability of given by its interlocking parts. This rejects the idea that a basis in the ‘given’, favours ideas of coherence and holism, but finds it harder to ward off skepticism.
The problem of defining knowledge in terms of true belief plus some favoured relation between the believer and the facts began with Plato’s view in the Theaetetus that knowledge is true belief plus a logos-Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

@OrangeJuice
Perhaps

@MarcO perhaps I am misunderstanding your statement. It seems to me we need philosophy, particularly epistemology, before can have science (natural philosophy.) I can’t quite see how science can be separate from epistemology.
There is bad philosophy and bad epistemology. For instance there might be logical fallacies and inconsistencies within a particular philosophical viewpoint, or epistemological approach.
Am I completely misusing the word epistemology and epistemological here?

@OrangeJuice I’m pretty sure you are using it correctly.

@OrangeJuice There is a lot of bad science being done and scientists in many fields don't know anything about epistemology; in some fields and universities, epistemology is first studied in the undergraduate level because it is considered fondamental, while in others you only see epistemology as a optional course during postgraduate studies.

@MarcO
Epistemology is studied in philosophy in undergrad courses and graduate courses, but I’ve never seen a science curriculum with an epistemological prerequisite. What university does that?

@Gatovicolo Well, in the University of Montreal's sociology department, epistemology is a mandatory course to get your undergraduate degree.

@MarcO
A mandatory course in philosophy to get a science degree? That’s different.

@Gatovicolo Well, sociology being what it is, the department considers that anyone who wants to seriously study sociology should have the means to tell the difference between a good study and some bullshit. I totally agree with their idea.

@MarcO
[philosophy.utah.edu]
[liberalarts.utexas.edu]
[phil.cam.ac.uk]

@Gatovicolo Well it's not that uncommon here; people in the fields of genetics often have to take a course in bioethics, which is philosophy too, if you think about it. Philosophy has a lot to say in every field, since science doesn't tell us what we should do, only what we can do.

@MarcO
The philosophy of science would be a better approach, but still, a requisite course in philosophy for a science curriculum is odd, even with it being sociology. I’ve studied that, and it’s more stats based than philosophically based.

@MarcO
Required courses for a science major are one thing. Recommended coursework for a degree in science is another. Informal logic is required for most degrees in the US, but it’s hardly a requirement to get a degree in chemistry. It’s just a liberal arts requirement. And technical schools don’t even require that. You can get a degree in computer science without ever taking a philosophy course.

@Gatovicolo Well, here in Quebec, Canada, there is a lot more interconnections between departments that it seems there are in the US. Law and nursing degrees both have mandatory sociology classes, we get history of science classes in sociology, ethics are now part of most degrees, etc. In our sociological epistemology classes, we see both general epistemology and epistemology specific to sociology. I've heard many people in science departments saying they with they had epistemology classes earlier, as many students can't tell a good research from bollocks even after getting an undergraduate degree.

Also, here sociology is split pretty evenly between quantitative and qualitative studies (well, the best studies combine both, but that's a different question). We get 3 mandatory classes of each during the bachelor's degree. The department of sociology is a weird yet interesting mismatch of things which look at the same things from different angles; because of that, it's important to know what you can and cannot tell from a study depending on its methodology and such. It's also a great place for new ideas to emerge, seeing how diverse it is.

Additionally, I don't respect scientists that believe in illogical things, like time travel.

Technically, those guys aren't really scientists. I'd go further, by definition they aren't scientists.

@DZhukovin Well, we always travel through time - forward! But, if you go near the speed of light, the time flow will be affected and your time will pass much more slowly than that of your point of origin (at the edge of the universe, where it's expanding, there are particles that haven't spent a minute in existence yet since the Big Bang!). It's really weird, but time is actually not some kind of universal constant, the way it flows changes depending on your relative speed compared to other objects; gravity also affects it, though I don't remember exactly how (the Interstellar movie's plot, with the rotating black hole and all, is such a case where gravity affects time).

@MarcO I disagree - I say Time is a Universal constant

@MarcO

Not really. Increasing speed only increases the distance one travels in a given point in time. There is a maximum actual speed for this reason, but that's it. V=D/T is the general case here so all the math flows from that.

@gater Yes, you are right. Time in the real sense is a pre-scalar, and then when it comes to math, it becomes a scalar, and that's why it's absolute and that's how it took the form of a scalar in the first place. It doesn't matter if you're at 100 or post-grad level mathematics, time is always the t-variable, and it's a scalar.

@DZhukovin yeah, time travel is so ridiculous

@DZhukovin Time is like a number line : -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 Where it always is at zero, moving like a second hand, minute hand, whatever. Where 1 means an hour or minute in the future and -1 means an minute, hour in the past.

The fact you don't believe in time dilation doesn't change that it's been experimentally proven times and times again. Atomic clocks which are perfectly in sync start diverging if you have one of them go very fast compared to the other. If you go near the speed of light comparatively to a point of reference, your time will go slower compared to the point of reference. Make a round-trip, and while a few minutes may have passed for you, years might have passed at the point of reference. That's why the speed of light limit works between all objects - even if 2 objects start from the same point and then go at the speed of light toward opposite directions, their speed relative to each others will still be lower or equal to the speed of light, Here's a wiki article to explain the phenomenon.

[en.wikipedia.org]

@MarcO I'll wait until someone builds a clock thats not effected by gravity.

@gater That would be a spiritual clock, since everything that is material is affected by gravity in a way or another.

@MarcO So that destroys the time dilation argument - lets call it clock dilation.

@gater How does that destroy the time dilation argument? It just means that gravity affects time too. By the way, rejecting time dilation also means rejecting Einstein's General Relativity Theory, by the way, as it is an integral part of it. When both the theory and the empirical observations agree, it usually means that the theory is pretty decent.

@MarcO No - it means gravity affects clocks