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Science features – summary 1

Science is the organized, systematic enterprize
that gathers knowledge about the world and our
theorizations and condenses it into testable laws
and principles.

The features of science that distinguish it from
pseudoscience are: repeatability, economy,
mensuration, heuristics, consilience.
Science features – summary 2
Repeatability: The same phenomenon is sought
again, preferably by independent investigation,
and the interpretation given to it is confirmed or
discarded by means of novel analysis and
experimentation.
 Economy: Scientists attempt to abstract the
information into the form that is both simplest
and aesthetically most pleasing – the
combination called elegance – while yielding the
largest amount of information with the least
amount of effort.

Science features – summary 3

Mensuration: If something come be properly
measured, using universally accepted scales,
generalizations about it are rendered unambiguous.

Heuristics: The best science stimulates further
discovery, often in unpredictable new directions;
and the new knowledge provides an additional test
of the original principles that led to its discovery.

Consilience: The explanations most likely to survive
of different phenomena are those that can be
connected and proved consistent with one another.
Epistemology - 1
Epistemology (or theory of knowledge) is a branch of
philosophy studying the nature and scope of
knowledge. From the Greek words episteme
(knowledge) and logos (account).
 It focuses on analyzing the nature of knowledge and
how it relates to notions such as truth, belief, and
justification.
 It also deals with the means of production of
knowledge, and skepticism about knowledge claims.
 It addresses the questions: "What is knowledge?",
"How is it acquired?", and "What do people know?"

Epistemology - 2
In epistemology, the kind of knowledge usually
discussed is propositional knowledge, also known
as "knowledge-that", as opposed to "know-how".
 To exemplify: in mathematics, there is knowing
that 2 + 2 = 4, but there is also knowing how to
count to 4. Or, one knows how to ride a bicycle
and one knows that a bicycle has two wheels.
 The distinction is between theoretical reason and
practical reason, with epistemology being
interested in knowledge of the theoretical kind,
not the practical kind.

Epistemology - 3
Sometimes, when people say that they believe in
something, what they mean is that they predict
that it will prove to be useful or successful in some
sense -- perhaps someone might "believe in" his
favorite football team.
 This is not the kind of belief usually dealt with in
epistemology. The kind that is dealt with is that
where "to believe something" just means to think
that it is true -- e.g., to believe that the sky is blue
is to think that the proposition "The sky is blue" is
true.

Epistemology - 4
Belief is a part of knowledge. Consider someone
saying, "I know that P is true, but I don't believe
that P is true." Persons making this utterance, it
seems, contradict themselves. If one knows P,
then, among other things, one thinks that P is
indeed true. If one thinks that P is true, then
one believes P.
 Knowledge is distinct from belief. If someone
claims to believe something, he is claiming that
it is the truth. Of course, it might turn out that
he or she was mistaken, and that what was
thought to be true was actually false. This is not
the case with knowledge.

Epistemology - 5

Suppose Jeff thinks a particular bridge is safe,
and attempts to cross it, but the bridge collapses
under his weight. We might say Jeff believed
that the bridge was safe, but that his belief was
mistaken.
We would not (accurately) say that he knew that
the bridge was safe, because plainly it was not.

For something to count as knowledge it must be
true.
Epistemology - 6
According to the theory that knowledge is justified
true belief, in order to know that a given proposition is
true, one must not only believe the relevant true
proposition, but one must also have a good reason for
doing so.
 One implication of this would be that no one would
gain knowledge just by believing something that
happened to be true.
 An ill person with no medical training but an optimistic
attitude, might believe that she will recover from her
illness quickly. However, even if this belief turned out
to be true, the patient would not have known that she
would get well, since her belief lacked justification.

Philosophy of science - 1

Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy
studying the philosophical assumptions,
foundations, and implications of science, including
the formal, natural, and social sciences.

It is closely related to epistemology and the
philosophy of language.

Issues of scientific ethics are not considered to be
part of the philosophy of science; they are studied
in such fields as bioethics and science studies.
Philosophy of science - 2

The philosophy of science tackles the topics:
– The character and the development of concepts
and terms, propositions and hypotheses,
arguments and conclusions, as they function in
science.
– The manner in which science explains natural
phenomena and predicts natural occurrences.
– The types of reasoning that are used to arrive
at scientific conclusions.
Philosophy of science - 3
– The formulation, scope, and limits of scientific
method.
– The means that should be used for determining
the validity of scientific information, in other
words, the question of objectivity.
– The implications of scientific methods and
models, along with the technology that arises
from scientific knowledge, for the larger society.
Philosophy of science - example
Evolutionary Psychology
and the Unity of Sciences
– towards an evolutionary epistemology
Luís Moniz Pereira
Centro de Inteligência Artificial – CENTRIA
Universidade Nova de Lisboa – UNL
Evolutionary Psychology and the Unity of Sciences – towards an evolutionary epistemology
First Lisbon Colloquium for the Philosophy of Sciences - Unity of Sciences, Non-Traditional Approaches
Lisbon, 25-28 October 2006
Abstract

This work concerns a non-traditional approach to the unity of sciences,
based on a challenging, albeit conjectural, articulation of views proceeding
from Evolutionary Psychology and Biology, non monotonic and decision
Logics, and Artificial Intelligence.

The resulting amalgam sets forth a consilience stance, wherefore the unity
of science is heuristically presupposed by means of a set of pragmatic and
productive default assumptions. It is by virtue of them that we conduct
scientific inquiry, the consilience arising from a presumed unity of objective
reality, itself of a heuristic and pragmatic conception.

The attending hinges to Artificial Intelligence inevitably suggest the
emergence of an innovative symbiotic form of evolutionary epistemology.
Consilience

Arguments in favour of the unity of knowledge have been
strongly put by Edward Wilson, a creator of sociobiology, and
author of Consilience – The Unity of Knowledge (1998). He
postulates there is a single physical nature, and one not
persuadable through argumentation. Science is not mere
convention.

Consilience is the result of co-evolution involving (cultural)
memes and genes (see below). Our cultural memes have a
genetic basis and cannot, in the long run, stand against the
genes who guarantee their survival, although such attempts
may potentially exist – viz. through genetic manipulation.
Evolution and the Brain

The first bipedal primates establish the separation between the
human species and the other simians. To fathom the abilities of
the human brain it is necessary to understand what exactly
were the problems our ancestor primates were trying to solve
that led them to develop such an extraordinarily intricate brain.

We cannot look at the modern human brain, and its ability to
create science, as if the millions of evolution-years which
attuned it to its present configuration had never taken place.
Among the eventual problems we have those of status,
territorialism, mating, gregariousness, altruism vs. opportunism,
building of artefacts, and the mappings of the external world.
Evolutionary Pscychology

Evolutionary Psychology is a consummate example of
successful ongoing scientific unification, engendered by a
deeply significant combination of Psychology, Anthropology,
Archaeology, Evolutionary Biology, Linguistics, Neurosciences,
and Artificial Intelligence (David M. Buss, 2005).

Evolutionary Psychology has been studying the brain from the
evolutionary perspective, thereby originating some extremely
relevant contributions. In that perspective, it has been strongly
supported by Anthropological Archaeology in its empirical study
of the cultural evolution of mankind (Stephen Shennan, 2002).
Genes and Memes

In human life, we have two reproductive mechanisms: one is
sexual reproduction, in which the replication unit is the gene;
the other is mental reproduction.

Authors from Evolutionary Psychology have construed the
notion of “meme”, in complement and contrast to the gene. A
meme is that which substantiates a second reproductive system
executed in the brain; the mental unit corresponding to the
gene.

Memes gather in assemblies, in patterns, similar to the way
genes gather in chromosomes. Memes are patterned by
ideologies, religions, and common sense ideas. Certain memes
work well together, mutually reinforcing each other, others not,
so that correcting mechanisms may be triggered.
Science Memes

In this view, scientific thought emerges from distributed
personal interaction, albeit it at a spacial and temporal
distance, and never in an isolated way. It must be erected from
several confluences, or in teams, as is the case in science. In
truth, knowledge is not constructed in an autonomous way;
rather it is engendered by networks of people, and processed in
appropriate environments, one being education, in which we
carry out memetic proliferation.

Language is the instrument with which to fabricate knowledge
together. We go so far as to state that there is no isolated
consciousness, that all consciousness is distributed. When we
consider consciousness we should take it out of the brain and
spread it through culture; this is the importance of language.
Archaeology

Theoretical and field archaeologists, cf. Steven Mithen in The
Prehistory of Mind (1996), are bringing in historical and prehistorical evidence that our ancestors began with a generic
intelligence, such as we find in apes.

There has been a broad discussion – reproduced within the
Artificial Intelligence (AI) community – about whether
intelligence is a general functionality or else best envisaged as
divided into specific ability modules or components.

Archaeologists have come to demonstrate, through their records,
the human species went from a first phase of a simple general
intelligence to a second phase of three major specialized
modules: one for natural history and naive physics - Knowledge
of Nature; one for Knowledge and Manufacture of Instruments;
and one for Cultural Artefacts, i.e. the rules of living in society
and the very politics of coexistence.
Specialized Modules and General Cupola

These three specialized intelligences were separately developed
and uncommunicating, and it is only at a newer stage –
corresponding to Homo Sapiens, and the appearance of spoken
language – that it becomes necessary to have a cupola module,
articulating the specific ones. How else do the different
specialized modules connect, and how can people - as module
envelopes - communicate among themselves?

That need gave birth to the generic cupola module, a much
more sophisticated form of general intelligence, the cognitive
glue bringing the specialized modules to communicate and
cooperate.
The Evolution of Reason: Logic



The formal systems of logic have ordinarily been regarded as
independent of biology, but recent developments in evolutionary
theory suggest that biology and logic may be intimately
interrelated. William S. Cooper (2001) outlines a theory of
rationality in which logical law emerges as an intrinsic aspect of
evolutionary biology.
This biological perspective on logic, though at present
unorthodox, could change traditional ideas about the reasoning
process. Cooper examines the connections between logic and
evolutionary biology and illustrates how logical rules are derived
directly from evolutionary principles, and therefore have no
independent status of their own.
Laws of decision theory, utility theory, induction, and deduction
are reinterpreted as natural consequences of evolutionary
processes. Cooper's connection of logical law to evolutionary
theory ultimately results in a unified foundation for an
evolutionary science of reason.