Monumental advance in number theory posted to the ArXiv by Yitang Zhang

Re:Monumental advance in number theory posted to the ArXiv b... by woodruffw on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @08:24AM (#33518669)

I don’t think this is going to be productive, but to be clear: the claim isn’t that science didn’t exist before Popper, or that Popper somehow gets credit for all of science. It’s that Popper has produced the best description of science’s epistemic underpinnings thus far, allowing science to progress without imploding under the demands of positivism. In other words: when we “do” science, the epistemic model we use is less than a century old.

The claim that propositional calculus is in the domain of philosophy and mathematics is not controversial in either domain. Nor is it unusual: the history of philosophy is the history of discharging subjects once they develop a field of their own.

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Re:Monumental advance in number theory posted to the ArXiv b... by LudwigNagasena on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @10:01AM (#33519701)

> It’s that Popper has produced the best description of science’s epistemic underpinnings thus far, allowing science to progress without imploding under the demands of positivism

I am not sure what that claim means precisely. Popper saved science from… a certain group of philosophers?

> when we “do” science, the epistemic model we use is less than a century old

The epistemic model is whatever the scientist in question uses. One can be a Popperian, another can claim they are guided by God, and someone else would just say “shut up and calculate.”

Popper didn’t like Bohr and his Copenhagen interpretation from the philosophical standpoint yet he didn’t deny that Bohr was a good physicist.

> The claim that propositional calculus is in the domain of philosophy and mathematics is not controversial in either domain. Nor is it unusual: the history of philosophy is the history of discharging subjects once they develop a field of their own.

The context of this discussion is that philosophy progresses over time. You cannot say that it progresses just because we put a label “philosophy” on every new thing that isn’t formalized yet. In that trivial sense, of course, philosophy had great progress; especially in its subfield of natural philosophy also known nowadays as science. But did Frege really stand on the shoulders of Hegel, Spinoza and Kant and improved on their ideas?

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Re:Monumental advance in number theory posted to the ArXiv b... by FabHK on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @10:32AM (#33520064)

> Popper has produced the best description of science’s epistemic underpinnings thus far

Ok, sure.

> allowing science to progress without imploding under the demands of positivism

How is giving a description of something necessary for its continued progress? Were people not having sex before evolutionary psychologists and biologists elucidated how and why?

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