General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What pseudoscience is and is not. [View all]RainDog
(28,784 posts)philosophy in the west (and east, too, for that matter) breaks down to two basic views: continental philosophy and empirical philosophy.
Plato is the lineage for the first and its adherents include junk "scientists" like Lacan - informed by another junk scientist - Freud, informed by Hegel, etc. Derrida is another. Plato asserted the existence of "ideal forms" and claimed that we have access only to the "shadows on the cave wall" rather than the source of light that creates such shadows. Platonism aligns with revelation/religion, post modernism - what Feynman called "cargo crate science. The pretense of science without the actual practice. A priori knowledge.
Empiricism is where the scientific method was created. The idea behind empiricism is that our understanding of the world is limited by our physical senses or the things we create to magnify those senses - and this includes things like higher math, physics and the theories that seek to explain physical phenomena outside of time. A posteriori knowledge. It's the basis of democracy through testing of beliefs that some forms of humans are more "ideal" than others.
History and philosophy of science is a well-established discipline and doesn't say, about science, what the initial post on this subject claims - and no one here ever claimed there was no philosophy of science. Ask Quine about that one.
Edit history
Recommendations
0 members have recommended this reply (displayed in chronological order):