Talk:Scientific method

message: This 2018 diff shows that the vision for the 'History' section of the article had been to give a brief overview with a link to the article 'History of scientific method'. It has now grown and there should probably be a conversation about what to do with it and the 'Theory' section. 
*Should the section keep growing? In my opinion the main article should have a complete (even if brief) History section and that means expansion at the moment. (Which is why I introduced sectioning, to encourage and organise; even if I don't know if the focus is entirely correct.)
*Is the heavy use of notes justified? And is it implemented in the best way... is perhaps the better question.
*The 'Theory' section I introduced should probably be moved or even merged elsewhere. I just didn't know what to do with one particular paragraph formerly in the 'History' section and wrote an introduction to a fitting section. ~
JackTheSecond (talk) 19:42, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I added an anchor to characterization; credit for this term is due to user:Banno back in 2004. --Ancheta Wis    (talk  | contribs) 11:24, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Direction of the 'History' section. 

message: While adding details to a math sub-article in lambda calculus I was surprised to see a note explaining how John Forbes Nash arrived at his Nobel-level result in Nash equilibrium. (Nash's method was to apply the fixpoint concept to game theory. Nash used the Kakutani fixed-point theorem.  A Hair whorl is a concrete example of a fixpoint;  fixpoints are a feature of lambda calculus, but the meaningful use of fixpoint requires the ability to shift one's ontological level midstream during one's investigation (This can be implemented with lambda calculus' abstraction operator \lambda  etcetera  . (The lambda and the dot demarcate the level of discourse about the topic, which is denoted etcetera here). Thus philosophical training (e.g. ethics, ontology, deontology ...) is needed to understand a scientific result (see John Locke's influence on scientific training). I learned this scientific requirement from a comment by Allen Newell (namely that he usually thinks on multiple levels simultaneously). The discussion on this talk page is an illustration of our need to denote the contextual level when we are communicating with each other.   
There is a surprising breadth to the Wikipedia corpus, isn't there. (This italicized name was bestowed by the big data websites.) The Wikipedia Corpus  Search the Wikipedia Corpus
 
-- Ancheta Wis    (talk  | contribs) 08:43, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Surprising science: fixpoints yield a Nash equilibrium 

message: JackTheSecond, you can remove my lengthy response as appropriate. I learned this from another editor, The Tetrast. American readers might recognize the relationship to Deism (which is not a religion --see Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Douglas Hume, Freemasonry, etc.).   Basarab Nicolescu has another stance/theory. Here is a real-time example for the discovery of like-minded collaborators. -- Ancheta Wis    (talk  | contribs) 11:26, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, something useful to think about! I do note though that none of that is in the lead. I find a title like that generally hard to justify in a scientific context. JackTheSecond (talk) 15:29, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Musement 

message: JackTheSecond, here are some other sources for Elements of reason in the article (so we don't have to rely so much on SEP):
 
From induction---  Newton's account of the System of the World:(Newton (1846) Principia III 506-507 Motte translation) says:
From deduction--- There was a rival to Aristotle's logic (see Stoic logic#Arguments): Indemonstrable argument from the Stoics and Epicurus. The table below rewrites the Indemonstrables as Sequents. We can use sequents styled from Gerhard Gentzen's LJ natural deduction, in which we start from arguments A1, A2, A3 ... and arrive at conclusion C1. In symbols:  \Gamma A_1, A_2, A_3 ... \vdash C_1 □ . Note the single conclusion C1 for case  \Gamma . This allows systematic debugging of a process, by
abstracting out  \Gamma A_1, A_2, A_3 ... \vdash C_1 □  using case-based reasoning about that process. 
Also if we look at propositional calculus, Peirce's law says that ((p→q)→p)→p. Equivalently ((p\to q)\to(p\land q))\to p. In Sequent form: ((p \to q)\;\to p)\;\vdash\; p. In words, " p must be true if there is a proposition q such that the truth of p follows from the truth of (p→q)". 
In LJ sequent form we can even denote the hypothesis  \Gamma\; (p \to q) \to p \; \vdash p  to distinguish hypothesis from the conclusion p, which comes after the turnstile (\;\vdash\;), while hypothesis comes before the turnstile.
Indemonstrable arguments    	Indemonstrable arguments                                	Indemonstrable arguments                	Indemonstrable arguments
Name                        	Description                                             	Modern sequent                          	Example
Modus ponens                	If p, then q.  p.  Therefore, q.              	p \to q,\; p\;\; \vdash\;\; q           	If it is day, it is light. It is day. Therefore, it is light.
Modus tollens               	If p, then q.  Not q.  Therefore, not p.      	p \to q,\;\neg q\;\;\vdash\;\neg p      	If it is day, it is light. It is not light. Therefore, it is not day.
Modus ponendo tollens       	Not both p and q.  p.  Therefore, not q. 	\neg(p\and q),\;p\;\;\vdash\;\neg q     	It is not both day and night. It is day. Therefore, it is not night. 
Strong modus tollendo ponens	Either p or q.  Not p.  Therefore, q.         	p\underline\or q,\;\neg p\;\;\vdash\;\;q	It is either day or night. It is not day. Therefore, it is night.
Strong modus ponendo tollens	Either p or q.  p.  Therefore, not q.         	p\underline\or q,\;p\;\;\vdash\;\neg q  	It is either day or night. It is day. Therefore, it is not night.
If we add an idea from our own time, the Markup language, and cast it in Sequent form, we can highlight a problem that Newton posed to himself, by comparing the markup with his original statement:
Newton founded his System of the World on experimental physics. He saidfrom unpublished notes for the Preface to Opticks (1704) quoted in Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1983) by Richard S. Westfall, p. 643 
Newton also saidMemoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27)
:Now Newton's 'ocean of truth' quote brings The rising sea to mind: Alexandre Grothendieck's mathematical method. The rising sea (Grothendieck's quote is on p.9 in a book of the same name, by Ravi Vakil, 2017). Rather than heroic methods of solution, Grothendieck's method is patience. He muses, and lets analogies come to mind. He demonstrates the solvent action of small processes (the water), so that problems are addressed naturally when reading the steps of a proof. (Colin McLarty: Grothendieck is trying to reach the natural topos for a problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmcbm5FxRJE&t=518s . Compare to Grothendieck's scheme with Johnstone's Sketches of an Elephant, which seeks to determine the natural topos of a problem, in order to solve it. ) 
:Lee Smolin has characterized  the use of topoi as the proper setting for solving the cause of gravity. (In the meantime, perhaps we might well have to be patient, and just wait for new developments. 
:Thank you for your work on the article.)
 -- Ancheta Wis    (talk  | contribs) 15:46, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll probably write a section on logic... somehow. And I agree that references to the SEP article can be reduced--it's just quite the ardous talk to do so, when you don't know where to look for specifically. (If you want a look at the current state of... vague ideas: they live in my sandbox currently.) JackTheSecond (talk) 20:33, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Natural deduction from induction, deduction  

message: The article on the Deductive-nomological model mentions that the model fell to new discoveries being made through discovery of "causal mechanisms". I wonder if anyone knows the model of inquiry that replaced it. It sounds like something that could be talked about in relation to Einstein's theory of relativity reducing Newton's laws to "relations" (quoted in Weinert 2004) and maybe invariant explanations, I don't really know. Anyway, somebody here who can drop a source on whatever it is? JackTheSecond (talk) 12:10, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: pinging @User:Occurring just in case they are still around and have an answer. JackTheSecond (talk) 12:18, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  causal mechanisms 

message: The most major issue with the 'Elements' section is that it is unsupported by its sources (by which I mean that all of them are misrepresented). Also, the only sources findable are educational resources, handwaving communication, and bad scholarship.
*Educational sources are not what the article is built on, I would even say that it avoids them. The article is structured to resemble them, though. 
* When Gauch talks about "principles" he means principles of logic, not anything like elements. 
* Godfrey-Smith has a section in his Glossary where he talks about typical representations of hypothetico-deductivism, without making explicit whether they are right or wrong. (As I read it, he thinks they are poor representations.)
* Crawford s, Stucki L are talking about an a posteriori view on things for peer review purposes.
* Peirce is attached to anything and everything in general.
Voit is what I would describe as the maximal philosophical consensus. It being that the method of science cannot be extended beyond its logic. And that the Elements is are how method is taught in education, and that the article would need to reflect that.
... or was taught in education. If one looks at the visitor-data for this article, then for the last few years the previously present spike is not quite as pronounced as it once was. Did they change something in (American) education or something? This source indicates that there was a shift of some kind? There doesn't seem to be any kind of news coverage of this though, which seems weird. JackTheSecond (talk) 13:49, 25 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Elements and (current?) education