Science and Certainty

Science - "the truth"

The absolute truth can never be known, of anything, however, people will always have an honest view on something. The universe is unknowable --> it cannot be known because of phenomena. Phenomena is something that you are directly able to look at and as the universe is so large, there is no way to directly look at it therefore it cannot be known.

Kant divides truth up into two types -    

1. A Priori --> something that is true before you experience it ( for example, a triangle has three sides, you know it has three sides).
2. A Posteriori --> facts that are dependent on measurements, surveys, graphs, charts etc.

Aristotle, Bacon and Newton believed in matter in motion - that eventually you will find everything out - a perfect picture of 'truth'. But this is now no longer important due to Einstein and such scientists.

Science before Kant was a mirror theory of mind, reality and causation - in a cosmos of objectively independently existing things. Plato also believed that forms existed independently of human conciousness.
Kant's view was that cosmos is actually like a computer game in that the objects, landscape, characters, space and time etc are all created in conciousness and they fade away into something that no longer exists as the computer game develops and moves along.

But Bacon, Newton and the empiricists (mechanical Materialists) believe the cosmos is the sum total of many different things - some are very small or large but all are there even when they are not being observed they are still always there.

Nietzche - nothing causes existence - it just is.

From Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzche - we have to inherit the idea of existence because nothing causes something to exist, nothing causes any existence - existence is a necessary precondition of perception.

Logic - Deduction VS Induction
Deduction --> moving from a general proposition to a particular proposition.
It creates truths from rules - all swans are white - this is a swan - therefore it is white. (belonging to a category called swan causes the object to be white).
It is impossible to doubt the axiom in this system.
Induction --> moving from a particular proposition to a general proposition (generalising it).
The opposite reaction to this would be to deny that things come from 'norms' - for example - white swans are actually black.

From Newton to Einstein
-The Copernican Revolution-
Does the Earth really orbit the Sun? Where is up, where is down? Where is the centre of the universe?
If Newton's laws of motions describe motion from one point to another. This can therefore be any motion if there are an infinite distance.

-Perception is subjective-

The Rise of Science
Copernicus
Kepler
Galileo
Newton
These four men were considered to be the creators of science.