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3 ideas
16971 | Plato says sciences are unified around Forms; Aristotle says they're unified around substance [Aristotle, by Moravcsik] |
Full Idea: Plato's unity of science principle states that all - legitimate - sciences are ultimately about the Forms. Aristotle's principle states that all sciences must be, ultimately, about substances, or aspects of substances. | |
From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE], 1) by Julius Moravcsik - Aristotle on Adequate Explanations 1 |
8054 | Social sciences discover no law-like generalisations, and tend to ignore counterexamples [MacIntyre] |
Full Idea: Social sciences have discovered no law-like generalisations whatsoever, ...and for the most part they adopt a very tolerant attitude to counter-examples. | |
From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 8) | |
A reaction: I suspect that this is as much to do with a narrow and rigid view of what 'science' is supposed to be, as a failure of the social sciences. Have such sciences explained anything? I suspect that they have explained a lot, often after the facts. |
19091 | Seeing reality mathematically makes it an object of thought, not of experience [Macbeth] |
Full Idea: As mathematically understood, the world is not an object of experience but instead an object of thought. | |
From: Danielle Macbeth (Pragmatism and Objective Truth [2007], p.183) | |
A reaction: Since I am keen on citing biology to show that science does not have to be mathematical, this nicely shows that there is something wrong with a science which places a large gap between itself and the world. |