Empirical and naturalistic are not synonyms. Naturalism is a metaphysical philosophy, empiricism is epistemology. They are connected, as someone ascribing to naturalism would often prefer an empirical approach to knowledge, but they are not the same.

But other than that and to answer your question; yes, science is far more than merely empirical processes.

If 'Natural' only applies to the physical world, and the physical world is all that can be observed or experienced with the senses, then really, they go hand in hand. Something can't be empirical but not natural, and vice versa.


Ok, can you give me an example? Something scientific that isn't natural or empirical?

That's a much better way of saying it than this:

which is pedantic.

Please refer to the dozens of posts I have written in response to you making this exact point over and over.

A linguistic analysis of an old book to determine when it was penned is diachronic, not empirical.

A medical case study would be qualitative, not empirical.

A study of pain using interviews of respondents is phenomenological, not empirical.

Comparing differing historical accounts is historical method, not empirical method.

Like I said, we're not actually disagreeing except on the issue of exactly which criteria matter to qualify something as a scientific theory

Would you be performing that on a physical object in the natural world and observing it and experiencing it with your senses? That's empirical, even if you then proceed to conclusions made entirely using pure theory or logic. You started with empirical data.

The definition of 'phenomenological' includes denoting or relating to an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.

So ditto for these. They may be a subject specialisation of something that falls under the empirical umbrella, but they're still empirical, or at least, fall within the realm of the empirical. They're also all entirely natural phenomena.

Yup. There is clearly nothing being conflated at all. "Natural" if and only if "physical world" if and only if "observed or experienced with the senses" which is all "empirical."

Computers can learn to play chess using empirical methods. (No theoretical basis. Just observations of games and information learned from those observations.)

Therefore, chess is... natural?

Please don't do random google searches when you don't know what you're looking for. You're looking at the wrong term.

This is what you're looking for:
phenomenology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descri..._in_psychology

As a philosophy of science it a school of scientific thought that explicitly rejects objective research, it is anti-reductionist in nature and you literally can't quantify variables. As a method it is qualitative, can not offer predictions, can not be generalized and its results can not be falsified or reproduced. It's typically used to explore terminology or to gather data when quantifiable data aren't useful or not enough (patient experience is the classic scenario).

Does it still sound like empiricism?

I replied regarding your misunderstanding of phenomenology in my last post, a subject important enough to warrant a reply of its own.

I'll just note that you're now disagreeing with every university level textbook on method on the planet, and all well known 20th century empiricist thinkers. I mean, your position is essentially some weird reverse postmodernism where everything is empirical.

Perhaps it is time to take a good hard look at this subject and consider if you don't have a thing or two to learn.


An unnecessary assumption. They are what they are.

Question for Mightyboosh: Do you know the difference between Methodological Naturalism and Metaphysical Naturalism?

Most recently, the term that was in play was "philosophical naturalism." But that was in a different thread.

I thought about this yesterday.

Consider that methodological naturalism and empirical method are very similar in practice.

So essentially all you are doing when applying MN is basically saying "for the purposes of this hypothesis, we will assume the natural world is all there is".

That's just unnecessary. The experimental ball is going to drop to the floor regardless of some meta-physical assumption about the world, and the experiment will work just as fine and the model be just as useful. Empirical method is simply cleaner and slicker. I guess it's the old programmer in me that is protesting, but unnecessary variables and functions is just clutter.

I suspect 20th century empiricists rejected MN for similar reasons. Why have an assumption / induction in your hypothesis when you could just use the deductive model and be on your merry way.

I think you can soften the assumption a little bit further, and it might be less offensive to your sensibilities in that context: "For the purposes of this hypothesis, we will assume that the phenomenon being observed is driven by some form of 'natural law' that is reliably consistent."

I think it functions a lot like "The universe can be rationally understood." All it's trying to do is establish the belief that the approach has the chance of yielding results. I don't think it really needs to assert something as strong as making a claim about the universe at large.

To draw up an analogy, it's like trying to make a gravity measurement, but instead of a controlled experiment you allow a 5 year old to mess around and interfere with the experimental setup. He can step in and grab the ball sometimes, or play with the timer, or whatever. You simply won't get meaningful results. So the assumption is not that the 5 year old doesn't exist, but that you have the ability to keep him out of the experiment.

Are you even serious right now? If I used a term you weren't familiar with you'd do what... walk away? Give up? Or maybe you'd try to find out what it means so you could take on board what I'm saying.... learn something and be able to continue in a conversation.

Please don't try to score cheap points, it's beneath you. I expect that from Aaron, not you.

Thanks for the links. It says "Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience"

So, I wouldn't say it was a science. It's more of "an approach to philosophy" (Also from one of those pages)

It's not unnecessary, it's a way to rule out explanations that simply can't be proven wrong, i.e any claim to supernatural explanations. They're not Useful. If you want to claim that gravity isn't actually a property of mass but in fact it's ghosts sitting on everything and stopping it floating away, go for it, but your explanation is not Useful.

Yes. Why?

I don't disagree, but an empirical approach allows for those assumptions without necessarily putting them into some grand meta-physical context.

And we also run into a problem in the other end of course. When we reach the current borders of experimentation we see that many of our views are challenged. Causality doesn't always seem to be all it is cracked up to be, though the jury is still out. But you're in a bit of conundrum when a deductive model yields results that question the main component of deduction.

Sure. That goes back to the conversation of natural vs. supernatural. There is no functional definition that splits the two, even though we have intuitive notions about how the universe functions that guide us towards making such distinctions.

In many places in the world, what can be called the "spiritual world" is seen as a fact of reality in exactly the same way as we see gravity as a fact of reality. It's there and stuff happens as a result.

Historically, I think it's rather peculiar to have some sort of distinction of natural vs supernatural. I think this can be traced back to early enlightenment thinking, but I'm not 100% confident on that one. (Something deistic-feeling, where God set up the universe and we're just watching it play out, I think.)

Unfortunately, while I believe it's possible to do science without forcibly putting it into a metaphysical context, I have a much harder time seeing us as creatures doing the same. And those implicit metaphysical assumptions that we make will find their way into the conversations that we have, which impacts the direction of science.

It reminds me of a statement that I've heard, which is roughly that the next emerging scientific theories must wait for the current generation of scientists to die off. Again, science is socially constructed.

I study and work within "phenomenology" and know that the work is absolutely within objective research.

Examples are better: you've seen this before.

Goethe studied the passage of light through a prism and comprehended the work of Newton.

Newton, as is the method of science then and science now, stated that there were corpuscles of different color light in the light ray which were split off by the prism. He posited or theorized these little corpuscles to which the experimental findings do not confirm. He stuck to an "atomistic" approach to the path of light through the prism.

Goethe, upon seeing the "phenomena" realized that the "rainbow of color" occurred at the intersection of "light" and the prism's edges. Further study clarified that the "rainbow of color" is consequential to the image on the wall maintained within the intersection of "light and darkness".

This can be seen as the beginnings, so to speak, of the knowledge path of the scientific comprehension of light, darkness, and appropriately color. No theory but an "objective" understanding of the experiment. The modern "atomistic" scientist cannot keep "objectivity" for himself and deny it to others, a flagrant lie.

Huygens was another who disagreed with Newton but time marches on, and the errors of the beginnings have compounded into the present. this in no way obviates the technological progress of Man, for this is self evident.

The question as to what is contained within psychology by that supposed approach I can't answer but I'll await clarification.

In this context phenomenology refers to the philosophy of science by Husserl and the derived scientific method. The former rejects objective research and the latter admits that it can't achieve it.

What you and Mightyboosh think of as phenomenology is irrelevant to this, since I'm referring a specific terminology within some types of scientific research.

If I'm not allowed to use terminology as it is actually applied within the fields I'm commenting on, this debate is completely pointless. Perhaps I too should use random google and dictionary searches on whatever words people use and then demand that these apply to them. Nothing like making any debate into our own little Tower of Babel.

I'll abandon the other debate, as it grew silly. This one was more interesting.

The bible references the four corners of the earth, both in OT and NT. It's even in the revelations, so it sounds pretty important.

And if the Bible is infallible, then surely the earth must have four corners.

And yes, I know of the arguments of verses about discs and arguing about errors in translation, which is an interesting debate in itself - why some things are allegorical or we're jumping through hoops of linguistic analysis, but in others it's face value all the way down and "it's infallible, therefore right".

But that debate isn't that relevant here (but if you want to comment on it, that's fine). The point is that there must be four corners on the earth, if we apply an assumption of infallibility to these verses.

So why don't you believe in them?

This only means that you have no idea as to what's going on, and are pursuing a close minded approach. You're giving no credit and are stretching a name to anything and everything thus making the point moot and false.

If the Goethe paradigm didn't strike you then you're right, no need for discussion for there is nothing new to be learned for you know it all or can refer to it all but there must be a point to which common sense takes hold and we can think for ourselves.

Before we get into what branch of science lays claim to "phenomenology" I ask again; was the Newton approach to "corpuscles of light which contain color" a sound reasoning or not ?

Conversely was the Goethean approach sound reasoning or not ?

To be clear, Goethe didn't say to himself "I want to be a phenomonologist" but his intelligence led him to the point of studying nature without preconception . He saw the phenomena in nature and displayed how intelligence is contained within and brought forth through Man in order to gain knowledge of scientific findings; the science "to know" the Latin, "sciere".

Only in passing have I come across Husserl and so I'll pass on that but will say that "phenomonological science" , in the Goethean sense, appears not the same as the philosophical constructs of the Husserl school but no use quibbling.

Ideology has only one access point, which is definitely not rationality.

Cheers.

I haven't laid claim to anything.

I gave an example of a study using phenomenological method as a case of a scientific approach that was not empirical. Mightyboosh then tries to argue a definition of phenomenological which does not apply in this case. And that is not up for debate, it doesn't. These people using phenomenological method in medicine and psychology are not using the definition Mightyboosh tried to peddle and they are not using yours.

That you have some other use of the term is fine. But only in your mind is this some intellectual civil war over the property rights of the word phenomenological.

I agree. Your insistence that I don't understand what qualifies something as a scientific theory because of the criteria that I think it must meet, whilst simultaneously applying your own criteria to something like ID so that you can show how it's not a scientific theory, is silly.

We're not getting anywhere, and I don't think that you really understand the work Falsifiability is doing, let's just leave it.

Wrong thread.

And pick up a method101 book, seriously.

When you're claiming interpretation of testimony is valid empirical method, you're clearly in the need of some basic introductory lessons.