Most scientists believe in plenty of things they can't see, such as magnetism, viruses, gravity, etc.
What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them.
But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen nor (again, arguably) measured, like love, freedom, happiness, and even God.
I am reminded of this anecdote about a dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:
My dear.
I Have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed
interpreter of your behaviour. I think I have been able to identify
nearly every thought that has made you smile! My research has even
made such a progress that I no longer need to understand you IN THIS
WAY. I'm happy to say I'm now in a position, with the aid of an
apparatus which I shall promptly attach you, to assign to each body
movement you make a specific antecedent condition in your cortex.
In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight.
I trust you will not resist if I bring along this apparatus then to
help me determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological
idiosyncracies which obtain in your system.If you claim to be unable to observe love, freedom, and happiness, and to believe there can be no possible observation of God (such as a revelation at Sinai, for example, and its archaeological after-effects), then you're just being plain silly.
>What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them.
Yes, we do see their effects. Science deals with latent properties and objects all the time. After all, scientifically speaking, everything beyond our sensory nerve-endings is latent and is inferred.
Nothing abnormal here.
(Never mind the philosophers who claim to know their perception is veridical because it's more intuitive that way rather than because they examined how it was working.)
>I am reminded of this anecdote about a dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:
I am once again reminded of how philosophers completely fail to understand science and scientists, and thus caricature us as blind idiots every chance they get.
This is not a scientific claim, it is a philosophical one, and a dubious one at that (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/).
Science doesn't operate from the first person perspective. The data of science is not neural firings, it is public observations and measurements.
The sense in which a subatomic particle is inferred from its effects is completely different from the sense in which the brain "infers" things based on neural signals. The former is part of theorizing, the second is a bit of information processing that's prior to theorizing of any kind. The former is a fact about how science works. The latter is a scientific discovery which does not (directly[0]) affect how we do science.
[0] I say directly because there are contexts where we have to account for bias, optical illusions, and whatnot. It's the same sense in which astronomy is not directly about telescopes, though astronomers spend a lot of time worrying about telescopes.
Ah, isn't the imperialism of philosophers so likeable? Hey scientists, you're not talking about the stuff in your experiments, you're talking about this other thing we made up! Because we say so!
>The sense in which a subatomic particle is inferred from its effects is completely different from the sense in which the brain "infers" things based on neural signals. The former is part of theorizing, the second is a bit of information processing that's prior to theorizing of any kind. The former is a fact about how science works. The latter is a scientific discovery which does not (directly[0]) affect how we do science.
Actually, according to our most up-to-date paradigm, they're both instances of hierarchical Bayes inference, one of which is implemented in hardware, and the other of which is using said hardware as a primitive base to build higher-precision inferences.
For someone trying to stick up for philosophy, you should read more of it, since I'm getting many of the details from Andy Clark's recent book.
As far as I can tell, it's not a majority position, and that's a damn shame upon philosophers. They still want to cling to their Platonic Forms, even while claiming not to be Cartesians.
Well, it doesn't work that way. We scientists are going to keep asking to see the Form of the Power-Set, the Form of the Good (oh boy does that one ever cause fights!), and of course the Form of "Materialism" (scare-quoted because the "materialism" so pilloried by philosophers tends to bear little resemblance to the content of any science post-Newton). If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles.