PHYLOSOPHY
OF
SCIENCE
Soemarno, 2013
Philosophy of science is the study of assumptions,
foundations, and implications of science.
The philosophy of science may be divided into two
areas:
Epistemology of science and
metaphysics of science.
Issues of ethics, such as bioethics and scientific
misconduct, are not generally considered part of
philosophy of science.
These issues may be studied in ethics or science studies.
Philosophers of science are interested in:
1. the history of concepts and terms and how they are currently used in
science;
2. the relation between propositions with arguments (Formal logic);
3. the reasoning connecting hypotheses and conclusions (Scientific
method);
4. the manner in which science explains natural phenomena and
predicts natural occurrences (observation);
5. the types of reasoning that are used to arrive at scientific conclusions
(deduction, induction, abduction);
6. the formulation, scope, and limits of scientific understanding;
7. the means that should be used for determining when scientific
information has adequate support (objectivity); and
8. the implications of scientific methods and models, along with the
technology that arises from scientific knowledge for the larger society
(applied science).
Nature of scientific concepts and statements
Science draws logical conclusions about the way the world works
and the way in which scientific theory relates to the world.
Science draws upon evidence from experimentation, logical
deduction, and rational thought in order to examine the world.
In making observations of the nature of individuals and their
surroundings, science seeks to explain the concepts that are
entwined with everyday lives.
Science in general is neither "natural" in its approach nor moral in
its purpose.
It's simply science: the application of a logic (often in form of
mathematics) to a set of objects or situations.
In a fundamental sense science is just a logic.
Objectivity of observations in science
It is vitally important for science that the information about
the surrounding world and the objects of study be as accurate
and as reliable as possible.
For the sake of this, measurements which are the source of this
information must be as objective as possible.
Before the invention of measuring tools (like weights, meter
sticks, clocks, etc) the only source of information available to
humans were their senses (vision, hearing, taste, tactile, sense
of heat, sense of gravity, etc.).
Because human senses differ from person to
person (due to wide variations in personal
chemistry, deficiencies, inherited flaws, etc) there
was no objective measurements before the
invention of these tools.
The consequence of this was the lack of a
vigorous science.
With the advent of exchange of goods, trades, and
agricultures there arose a need in such measurements,
and science (arithmetics, geometry, mechanics, etc)
based on standardized units of measurements (stadia,
pounds, seconds, etc) was born.
To further abstract from unreliable human senses and
make measurements more objective, science uses
measuring devices (like spectrometers, voltmeters,
interferometers, thermocouples, counters, etc) and
lately - computers.
In most cases, the less human involvement in measuring
process, the more accurate and reliable scientific data
are.
Currently most measurements are done by variety of
mechanical and electronic sensors directly linked to
computers—which further reduces chance of human
error/contamination of information.
This made possible to achieve astonishing accuracy of
modern measurements.
For example, current accuracy of measurement of mass is
about 10-10, of angles—about 10-9, and of time and length
intervals in many cases reaches the order of 10-13 - 10-15.
This made possible to measure, say, distance to
Moon with sub-centimeter accuracy (see Lunar
laser ranging experiment), to measure slight
movement of tectonic plates using GPS system with
sub-millimeter accuracy,
or even to measure as slight variations in the
distance between two mirrors separated by several
kilometers as 10-18 m—three orders of magnitude
less than the size of a single atomic nucleus
Theory-dependence of observation
A scientific method depends on objective observation in
defining the subject under investigation, gaining information
about its behavior and in performing experiments.
Observation involves perception as well as a cognitive
process. That is, one does not make an observation passively,
but is actively involved in distinguishing the thing being
observed from surrounding sensory data.
Therefore, observations depend on some underlying
understanding of the way in which the world functions, and
that understanding may influence what is perceived, noticed,
or deemed worthy of consideration.
Empirical observation is supposedly used to determine the
acceptability of some hypothesis within a theory.
When someone claims to have made an observation, it is
reasonable to ask them to justify their claim. Such a
justification must make reference to the theory operational definitions and hypotheses - in which the
observation is embedded.
That is, the observation is a component of the theory that
also contains the hypothesis it either verifies or falsifies.
But this means that the observation cannot serve as a
neutral arbiter between competing hypotheses.
Observation could only do this "neutrally" if it were
independent of the theory.
Thomas Kuhn denied that it is ever possible to isolate the
theory being tested from the influence of the theory in which
the observations are grounded.
He argued that observations always rely on a specific
paradigm, and that it is not possible to evaluate competing
paradigms independently.
By "paradigm" he meant, essentially, a logically consistent
"portrait" of the world, one that involves no logical
contradictions.
More than one such logically consistent construct can each
paint a usable likeness of the world, but it is pointless to pit
them against each other, theory against theory. Neither is a
standard by which the other can be judged. Instead, the
question is which "portrait" is judged by some set of people
to promise the most in terms of “puzzle solving”.
For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by,
but not ultimately determined by, logical processes.
The individual's choice between paradigms involves
setting two or more “portraits" against the world
and deciding which likeness is most promising.
In the case of a general acceptance of one paradigm
or another, Kuhn believed that it represented the
consensus of the community of scientists.
Acceptance or rejection of some paradigm is, he
argued, more a social than a logical process.
That observation is embedded in theory does not
mean that observations are irrelevant to science.
Scientific understanding derives from observation,
but the acceptance of scientific statements is
dependent on the related theoretical background or
paradigm as well as on observation.
Coherentism and skepticism offer alternatives to
foundationalism for dealing with the difficulty of
grounding scientific theories in something more than
observations.
Indeterminacy of theory under empirical testing
According to the Duhem–Quine thesis, after Pierre
Duhem and W.V. Quine, any theory can be made
compatible with any empirical observation by the
addition of suitable ad hoc hypotheses.
This is analogous to the way in which an infinite
number of curves can be drawn through any finite
set of data points on a graph.
This thesis was accepted by Karl Popper, leading him to
reject naïve falsification in favour of 'survival of the fittest',
or most falsifiable, of scientific theories.
In Popper's view, any hypothesis that does not make testable
predictions is simply not science.
Such a hypothesis may be useful or valuable, but it cannot be
said to be science.
Confirmation holism, developed by W.V. Quine, states that
empirical data are not sufficient to make a judgement
between theories.
In this view, a theory can always be made to fit with the
available empirical data. However, that empirical evidence
does not serve to determine between alternative theories does
not necessarily imply that all theories are of equal value, as
scientists often use guiding principles such as Occam's Razor.
One result of this view is that specialists in the philosophy of
science stress the requirement that observations made for the
purposes of science be restricted to inter-subjective objects.
That is, science is restricted to those areas where there
is general agreement on the nature of the observations
involved.
It is comparatively easy to agree on observations of physical
phenomena, harder for them to agree on observations of
social or mental phenomena, and difficult in the extreme to
reach agreement on matters of theology or ethics (and thus
the latter remain outside the normal purview of science).
Empiricism
A central concept in the philosophy of science is empiricism,
or dependence on evidence.
Empiricism is the view that knowledge is derived from our
experiences throughout our lives.
In this sense, scientific statements are subject to and derived
from our experiences or observations.
Scientific hypotheses are developed and tested through
empirical methods consisting of observations and
experiments.
Once reproduced widely enough, the information resulting
from our observations and experiments counts as the
evidence upon which the scientific community develops
theories that purport to explain facts about the world.
Observations involve perception, and so are
themselves cognitive acts.
That is, observations are themselves embedded in
our understanding of the way in which the world
works; as this understanding changes, the
observations themselves may apparently change.
More accurately, our interpretation of
observations may change.
A well designed experiment will produce identical
results when carried out in an identical fashion.
Whenever the social context of the observer is a factor
in an observation, objectivity is lost, and the
observation is no longer useful in a scientific sense.
Scientists attempt to use induction, deduction and
quasi-empirical methods, and invoke key conceptual
metaphors to work observations into a coherent, selfconsistent structure.
Scientific realism and instrumentalism
Scientific realism is the view that the universe really is
as explained by scientific statements.
Realists hold that things like electrons and magnetic
fields actually exist.
In contrast to realism, instrumentalism holds that our
perceptions, scientific ideas and theories do not
necessarily reflect the real world accurately, but are
useful instruments to explain, predict and control our
experiences.
To an instrumentalist, electrons and magnetic fields
are convenient ideas that may or may not actually
exist.
For instrumentalists, the empirical method is used
to do no more than show that theories are consistent
with observations.
Instrumentalism is largely based on John Dewey's
philosophy and, more generally, pragmatism, which
was influenced by philosophers such as William
James and Charles Sanders Peirce
Constructivism
Constructivism is a view in philosophy according to
which all knowledge is "constructed" inasmuch as it
is contingent on convention, human perception, and
social experience.
It originated in sociology under the term "social
constructionism" and has been given the name
"constructivism" when referring to philosophical
epistemology, though "constructionism" and
"constructivism" are often used interchangeably.
In many ways, its views are similar to
instrumentalism and pragmatism, or can appear so
from the perspective of scientific realism.
For this reason, and because of its association with
relativism, the constructivist view of the philosophy
of science is not widely accepted among scientists
and has been criticized by realists in both the
scientific and philosophical communities.
Analysis and reductionism
Analysis is the activity of breaking an observation or
theory down into simpler concepts in order to
understand it.
Analysis is as essential to science as it is to all rational
enterprises.
It would be impossible, for instance, to describe
mathematically the motion of a projectile without
separating out the force of gravity, angle of projection
and initial velocity.
Only after this analysis is it possible to formulate a
suitable theory of motion.
Reductionism in science can have several different
senses.
One type of reductionism is the belief that all fields of
study are ultimately amenable to scientific explanation.
Perhaps a historical event might be explained in
sociological and psychological terms, which in turn might
be described in terms of human physiology, which in turn
might be described in terms of chemistry and physics.
The historical event will have been reduced to a physical
event.
This might be seen as implying that the historical event
was 'nothing but' the physical event, denying the existence
of emergent phenomena.
Daniel Dennett invented the term greedy reductionism to
describe the assumption that such reductionism was possible.
He claims that it is just 'bad science', seeking to find
explanations which are appealing or eloquent, rather than
those that are of use in predicting natural phenomena.
He also says that:
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only
science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without
examination. —Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea,
1995.
Arguments made against greedy reductionism through
reference to emergent phenomena rely upon the fact that selfreferential systems can be said to contain more information
than can be described through individual analysis of their
component parts.
Examples include systems that contain strange loops, fractal
organisation and strange attractors in phase space.
Analysis of such systems is necessarily informationdestructive because the observer must select a sample of the
system that can be at best partially representative.
Information theory can be used to calculate the magnitude of
information loss and is one of the techniques applied by
Chaos theory.
Grounds of validity of scientific reasoning
The most powerful statements in science are those with the
widest applicability. Newton's Third Law — "for every action
there is an opposite and equal reaction" — is a powerful
statement because it applies to every action, anywhere, and at
any time.
But it is not possible for scientists to have tested every incidence
of an action, and found a reaction. How is it, then, that they can
assert that the Third Law is in some sense true?
They have, of course, tested many, many actions, and in each
one have been able to find the corresponding reaction. But can
we be sure that the next time we test the Third Law, it will be
found to hold true?
Induction
One solution to this problem is to rely on the notion of
induction.
Inductive reasoning maintains that if a situation holds
in all observed cases, then the situation holds in all
cases.
So, after completing a series of experiments that
support the Third Law, one is justified in maintaining
that the Law holds in all cases.
Explaining why induction commonly works has been
somewhat problematic.
One cannot use deduction, the usual process of moving
logically from premise to conclusion, because there is simply
no syllogism that will allow such a move.
No matter how many times 17th century biologists observed
white swans, and in how many different locations, there is no
deductive path that can lead them to the conclusion that all
swans are white.
This is just as well, since, as it turned out, that conclusion
would have been wrong.
Similarly, it is at least possible that an observation will be
done tomorrow that shows an occasion in which an action is
not accompanied by a reaction; the same is true of any
scientific law.
One answer has been to conceive of a different form of
rational argument, one that does not rely on deduction.
Deduction allows one to formulate a specific truth from a
general truth: all crows are black; this is a crow; therefore
this is black.
Induction somehow allows one to formulate a general truth
from some series of specific observations: this is a crow and it
is black; that is a crow and it is black; therefore all crows are
black.
The problem of induction is one of considerable debate and
importance in the philosophy of science: is induction indeed
justified, and if so, how?
Falsifiability
Another way to distinguish science from
pseudoscience (e.g. astronomy from astrology), first
formally discussed by Karl Popper in 1919-20 and
reformulated by him in the 1960s, is falsifiability.
This principle states that in order to be useful (or even
scientific at all), a scientific statement ('fact', theory,
'law', principle, etc) must be falsifiable, that is, able to
be tested and proven wrong.
Popper described falsifiability using the following
observations, paraphrased from a 1963 essay on
"Conjectures and Refutations":
1. It is easy to confirm or verify nearly every theory — if we look
for confirmations.
2. Confirmations are significant only if they are the result of risky
predictions; that is, if, unenlightened by the theory, we should
have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory
— an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. "Good" scientific theories include prohibitions which forbid
certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it
is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory.
5.
Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify or refute it.
Theories that take greater "risks" are more testable, more exposed
to refutation.
6.
Confirming or corroborating evidence is only significant when it
is the result of a genuine test of the theory; "genuine" in this case
means that it comes out of a serious but unsuccessful attempt to
falsify the theory.
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still
upheld by their advocates — for example by introducing ad hoc
some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc
in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always
possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price
of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status.
Coherentism
Induction and falsification both attempt to justify scientific
statements by reference to other specific scientific statements.
Both must avoid the problem of the criterion, in which any
justification must in turn be justified, resulting in an infinite
regress.
The regress argument has been used to justify one way out of
the infinite regress, foundationalism.
Foundationalism claims that there are some basic statements
that do not require justification.
Both induction and falsification are forms of foundationalism
in that they rely on basic statements that derive directly from
observations.
The way in which basic statements are derived from
observation complicates the problem.
Observation is a cognitive act; that is, it relies on our existing
understanding, our set of beliefs.
An observation of a transit of Venus requires a huge range of
auxiliary beliefs, such as those that describe the optics of
telescopes, the mechanics of the telescope mount, and an
understanding of celestial mechanics.
At first sight, the observation does not appear to be 'basic'.
Coherentism offers an alternative by claiming that
statements can be justified by their being a part of a
coherent system.
In the case of science, the system is usually taken to be the
complete set of beliefs of an individual or of the
community of scientists. W. V. Quine argued for a
Coherentist approach to science.
An observation of a transit of Venus is justified by its
being coherent with our beliefs about optics, telescope
mounts and celestial mechanics.
Where this observation is at odds with one of these
auxiliary beliefs, an adjustment in the system will be
required to remove the contradiction.
Social accountability
Scientific Openness
A very broad issue affecting the neutrality of science
concerns the areas over which science chooses to
explore, so what part of the world and man is
studied by science.
Since the areas for science to investigate are
theoretically infinite, the issue then arises as to what
science should attempt to question or find out.
Philip Kitcher in his "Science, Truth, and Democracy"
argues that scientific studies that attempt to show one
segment of the population as being less intelligent,
successful or emotionally backward compared to
others have a political feedback effect which further
excludes such groups from access to science.
Thus such studies undermine the broad consensus
required for good science by excluding certain people,
and so proving themselves in the end to be unscientific.
Scientific infallibility
A critical question in the philosophy of science is, to
what degree the current body of scientific knowledge
can be taken as an indicator of what is actually true
about the physical world in which we live?
The acceptance of such knowledge as if it were
absolutely true and unquestionable (in the sense of
theology or ideology) has been called scientism.
Claims of scientism ignore a key requirement of the
scientific method that all claims be falsifiable and that,
given adequate evidence, a scientist must abandon old
theories and adopt new ones.
In spite of the past record of incremental progress in
science (a repeating cycle of widely accepted
theoretical views being rejected and replaced with new
widely accepted theoretical views), scientism envisions
no further progress and accepts as correct the body of
scientific knowledge as it is currently constituted.
Critiques of scientific method
Paul Feyerabend argued that no description of scientific
method could possibly be broad enough to encompass all the
approaches and methods used by scientists.
Feyerabend objected to prescriptive scientific method on the
grounds that any such method would stifle and cramp
scientific progress.
Feyerabend claimed, "the only principle that does not inhibit
progress is: anything goes.“
Limitations of science
Many people consider science to be the most powerful
human system ever devised for the discovery of truth.
Certainly, science has been extremely successful, in the sense
that scientific theories underly the operation of all of modern
technology.
For example, humans could not have devised computers,
aviation, telecommunications, civil engineering, or Western
medicine without the guidance of science, because all of these
fields depend deeply on the basic and particular properties of
the physical universe for their operation.
However, there are limitations to what any truth-finding
method based on objective replication of experiments can
discover.
Some fields, such as economics, ecology, or social science can
be very hard to experiment with.
Even more problematic is the study of human consciousness,
which is by nature subjective, yet undeniably "real" in some
sense.
The human race does not at this time possess reliable
techniques to study these and other subjects; better methods of
truth-determination for these difficult areas are (or should be)
an ongoing project of epistemology, the study of knowledge.
This is why science, though extremely powerful,
cannot by itself give rise to a truly complete or
balanced worldview.
Just as those who do not understand or do not trust
science cut themselves off from what may be the
largest and most accurate body of knowledge and
technique that humankind has ever accumulated,
anyone who studies only scientific fields denies a
huge amount of knowledge, both currently known
and potentially knowable.
Sociology and anthropology of science
In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Kuhn argues that the process of observation and
evaluation take place within a paradigm.
'A paradigm is what the members of a community of
scientists share, and, conversely, a scientific
community consists of men who share a paradigm' .
On this account, science can be done only as a part of a
community, and is inherently a communal activity.
For Kuhn, the fundamental difference between science and
other disciplines is in the way in which the communities
function.
Others, especially Feyerabend and some post-modernist
thinkers, have argued that there is insufficient difference
between social practices in science and other disciplines to
maintain this distinction.
It is apparent that social factors play an important and direct
role in scientific method, but that they do not serve to
differentiate science from other disciplines.
Furthermore, although on this account science is socially
constructed, it does not follow that reality is a social construct
Phenomenalism
In epistemology and the philosophy of perception,
phenomenalism is the view that physical objects do
not exist as things in themselves but only as
perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli (e.g.
redness, hardness, softness, sweetness, etc.) situated
in time and in space.
In particular, phenomenalism reduces talk about
physical objects in the external world to talk about
bundles of sense-data.
Historical overview
Phenomenalism is a radical form of
empiricism and, hence, its roots as an
ontological view of the nature of existence can
be traced back to George Berkeley and his
subjective idealism.
John Stuart Mill had a theory of perception
which is commonly referred to as classical
phenomenalism.
This differs from Berkeley's idealism in its account of
how objects continue to exist when no one is
perceiving them.
Berkeley claimed that an omniscient God perceived
all objects and this is what kept them in existence,
whereas Mill claimed that permanent possibilities of
experience were sufficient for an object's existence.
These permanent possibilites could be analysed into
subjunctive conditionals, such as, if I were to have ytype sensations, then I would also have x-type
sensations.
As an epistemological theory about the
possibility of knowledge of objects in the
external world, however, it is probable
that the most perspicuous formulation of
phenomenalism is to be found in the
transcendental aesthetics of Immanuel
Kant.
According to Kant, space and time, which are
the a priori forms and preconditions of all
sensory experience, "refer to objects only to the
extent that these are considered as phenomena,
but do not represent the things in themselves".
While Kant insisted that knowledge is limited to
phenomena, he never denied or excluded the
existence of objects which were not knowable by
way of experience, the things in themselves or
noumena, though he never proved them.
Kant's "epistemological phenomenalism", as it has
been called, is therefore quite distinct from Berkeley's
earlier ontological version.
In Berkeley's view, the so-called "things in
themselves" do not exist except as subjectively
perceived bundles of sensations which are guaranteed
consistency and permanence because they are
constantly perceived by the mind of God.
Hence, while it is true that for Berkeley, objects are
merely bundles of sensations (see bundle theory),
unlike other bundle theorists, objects do not cease to
exist for Berkeley when they are no longer perceived
by some merely human subject or mind.
In the late 19th century, an even more extreme form of
phenomenalism was formulated by Ernst Mach, later
developed and refined by Russell, Ayer and the logical
positivists. Mach rejected the existence of God and also
denied that phenomena were data experienced by the mind
or consciousness of subjects.
Instead, sensory phenomena, for Mach, are "pure data"
whose existence is to be considered anterior to any arbitrary
distinction between mental and physical categories of
phenomena. In this way, it was Mach who formulated the
key thesis of phenomenalism and that which separates it
from bundle theories of objects: objects are logical
constructions out of sense-data or ideas.
Phenomenalism and the bundle theory
Phenomenalism is frequently confused with the
bundle theory of perception and vice-versa. According
to the bundle theory, objects are made up of sets, or
bundles, of ideas or perceptions.
To say that the pear before me exists is simply to say
that certain properties (greenness, hardness, etc.) are
being perceived at this moment.
When these characteristics are no longer perceived or
experienced by anyone, then the object (pear, in this
case) no longer exists.
Phenomenalism is the view that objects are
logical constructions out of perceptual properties.
On this view, to say there is a table in the other
room when there is no one in that room to
perceive it, is to say that if there were someone in
that room, then that person would perceive the
table.
It is not the actual perception that counts, but the
conditional possibility of perceiving.
Phenomenalism of the positivists
Logical positivism, a movement begun as a small circle which
grew around the philosopher Moritz Schlick in Vienna,
inspired many philosophers in the English speaking world
from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Important influences on their brand of empiricism included
Ernst Mach--himself holding the Chair of Inductive Sciences
at the University of Vienna, a position Schlick would later
hold--and the Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell.
The idea of the logical positivists, such as A.J. Ayer
and Rudolf Carnap, was to formulate the doctrine of
phenomenalism in linguistic terms, so as to define
references to such entities as physical objects in the
external world out of existence.
Sentences which contained terms such as "table" were
to be translated into sentences which referred
exclusively to either actual or possible sensory
experiences. Roderick Chisholm definitively refuted
this version of phenomenalism in 1948.
To see how he did this, note that C.I. Lewis suggested
that the physical claim "There is a doorknob in front
of me" necessarily entails the sensory counterfactual
"If I should seem to see a doorknob and if I should
seem to myself to be initiating a grasping motion, then
in all probability the sensation of contacting a
doorknob should follow."
Of course, this statement itself contains references to
physical objects which would have to be substituted
by sense-data expressions, but the point is clear
enough.
Chisholm showed that the statement "There is a
doorknob..." does not entail the counterfactual
statement.
If it were to do so, then it must do so without
regard to the truth or falsity of any other
statement. But suppose the following statement is
true: "I am paralyzed from the neck down and
experience hallucinations such that I seem to see
myself moving toward the door".
If this is true, then there could be a doorknob in
front of me, I could seem to myself to see a
doorknob, and I could seem to myself to be
performing the correct sort of grasping motion
but with absolutely no chance of having a
sensation of contacting the doorknob.
Likewise, the statement that "The only book in
front of me is red" does not entail the sensory
statement "Redness would probably appear to
me were I to seem to myself to see a book"
because redness is not likely to appear under a
blue light-bulb.
Some have tried to avoid this problem by extending
the conditions in the analysandum: instead of "There
is a doorknob in front of me" one could have it that
"There is a doorknob...and I am not paralyzed, etc."
But if one complicates the analysandum, one must
also complicate the analysans.
In this particular case, one must analyse in purely
sensory terms what it means not to be paralyzed and
so on.
The same problems would arise with respect to the
new analysis and we would have an infinite regress.
Other Criticisms
Another common objection to phenomenalism is that
in the process of eliminating material objects from
language and replacing them with hypothetical
propositions about observers and experiences, it
seems to commit us to the existence of a new class of
ontological object altogether: the sensibilia or sensedata which can exist independently of experience.
Indeed, sense-data have been dismissed by some
philosophers of mind, such as Donald Davidson, as
mythological entities that are more troublesome than
the entities that they were intended to replace.
A third common objection in the literature is that
phenomenalism, in attempting to convert
propositions about material objects into
hypothetical propositions about sensibilia,
postulates the existence of an irreducibly material
observer in the antecedent of the conditional.
In attempting to overcome this, some
phenomenalists suggested that the first observer
could be reduced by constructing a second
proposition in terms of a second observer, who
actually or potentially observes the body of the first
observer.
A third observer would observe the second and so
on.
In this manner we would end up with a "Chinese
box series of propositions" of ever decreasing
material content ascribed to the original observer.
But if the final result is not the complete elimination
of the materiality of the first observer (which it
cannot be), then the translational reductions that
are proposed by phenomenalists cannot, even in
principle, be carried out.
A criticism especially relevant to classical
phenomenalism is that the phenomenalist can
give no satisfactory explanation of the
permanent possibilities of experience.
The question can be asked; what are the
subjunctive conditionals which ground the
existence of objects true in virtue of?
One answer given by phenomenalists is that the
conditionals are true in virtue of past regularities
of experience. However the problem with this
answer is that it leads to circularity.
A final, and perhaps the most devastating objection, to
phenomenalism was formulated by R. Firth (1950). The
objection stems from perceptual relativity: white
wallpaper looks white under white light and red under
red light, etc.
Any possible course of experience resulting from a
possible course of action will apparently underdetermine
our surroundings: it would determine, for example, that
there is either white wallpaper under red light or red
wallpaper under white light, and so on.
On what basis are we to decide which of the hypotheses
is the correct one if we are constrained to rely exclusively
on sensibilia?
Arthur Danto
Philosopher Arthur Danto explained phenomenalism
as a reference to sensations. He asserted that
Nietzsche was not "… a phenomenalist, believing that
whatever is finally meaningful can be expressed in
terms of our own [sense] experience.“
In Connections to the World, he claimed that "The
phenomenalist really is committed to the most radical
kind of empiricism: For him reference to objects is
always finally a reference to sense–experience … ."
Objects of any kind must be related to experience.
"John Stuart Mill once spoke of physical objects
as but the 'permanent possibility of experience'
and this, by and large, is what the phenomenalist
exploits:
All we can mean, in talking about physical objects
— or nonphysical objects, if there are any — is
what experiences we would have in dealing with
them … ."
However, phenomenalism is based on mental
operations.
These operations, themselves, are not known
from sense experience.
Such non–empirical, non–sensual operations are
the "…nonempirical matters of space, time, and
continuity that empiricism in all its forms and
despite its structures seems to require … ."