Re: Theory vs Experimental Science

[Jerry Zhu <***>]

Happy holiday to Judith and all,

I have similar thoughts recently but with some
variation with Judith's.  Glad Judith brought that up.
 

My view is that all sciences are quantitative with
natural science being "hard" and social sciences being
"soft." OUr belief of whether the Sun moving around
the Earth or the Earth moving around the Sun does not
change the natural laws.  There is no "laws" of such
kind in social science.  Hence the assumptions in
social science is crucial important and the change of
which matters even more.   The scientific methods of
the two are different.  Karl Popper, as many faculty
members, do not differentiate the two while some do.

All sciences are deductive which is from general to
specific according to Alfred Taski "Introduction to
Logic"

Science is perceptual and the world of science is the
world of (external) sense and the language of which is
mathematics. Theory is conceptual and the world of
theory is the world of internal sense, the language of
which is archetypes.  Theory is inductive and
qualitative as opposed to science being deductive and
quantitative.  The two notions are hardly
differentiated in the scientific community.  Evolution
is a theory not science.  The study of complex sytsems
such as bio systems and social systems requires both
science and theory -- simultaneously inductive and
deductive.  To study a complex phenomenon, the
selection of sciences and theories is not determined
by the science or theory but is the realm of
philosophy. Philosophy is not about how science or
theory come about but the clarification of thoughts in
forming methodology.  See Wittgenstein "Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus"


Jerry Zhu

 

--- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:
> One of the big dualities my father often wrote about
> was the duality 
> between "hard" (quantitative) and "soft"
> (qualitative) science. He 
> likened this duality to a much larger duality which
> exists between 
> Experimental science and Theoretical science.
> Experimental science 
> regards itself as "hard" science and regards
> Theoretical science as 
> "soft" science. My insight has to do, in part, with
> recognizing that 
> Experimental science is often only dealing with
> and/or looking to 
> explain a particular aspect of causality, whereas
> Theoretical science 
> (as Robert Rosen employed it) is involved with
> entailment, i.e., using 
> causality to learn about the underlying entailment
> patterns and/or 
> exploring what we know about the entailment (via
> causality) of a system 
> in order to figure out what else must be  entailed
> within that system, 
> etc. I think this duality can be traced to the fact
> that the machine 
> metaphor, as a model for all natural systems, is
> tainting the view: In 
> a machine, one can limit one's self to causality and
> one will generally 
> get most of the entailments along with that.
> Furthermore, those answers 
> can be arrived at via reductionist science. When
> dealing with a complex 
> system, though, this is not the case at all-- there
> is far more 
> entailment within the system than what can be
> discovered via 
> reductionist science. The differences between the
> two types of system 
> are generated via relational means and therefore
> pertain to matters of 
> organization.



                
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