Science features

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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.

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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.

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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.

4
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?"

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

10
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.

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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.

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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.

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Evolutionary Psychology and the Unity of
Sciences towards an evolutionary epistemology
Philosophy of science - example

• 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

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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.

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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.

16
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.

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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).

18
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.

19
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.

20
Archaeology

• Theoretical and field archaeologists, cf. Steven
  Mithen in The Prehistory of Mind (1996), are
  bringing in historical and pre-historical
  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.

21
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.

22
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.