What is Scientific Philosophy?

Scientific philosophy is the search for truth, the search for very general laws, the universal. Other sciences such as biology, physics are special sciences. Everyone with the power of thought has a world-view.

Why Is Scientific Philosophy Important?

Scientific philosophy weeds out myths, and oppressions and searches for liberation. Scientific investigation demands inquiry of difference, transition connection.

Why Is Philosophy Mistrusted?

Philosophers tend to be seen as impractical in their search for profundity. Like Thales who, preoccupied with stargazing, fell into a well. Sometimes philosophy is seen as to deal only with abstraction and empty generalities, a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing, ingenious attempts to think fallaciously. Is this evidence that people are indeed wise and not myopic? Distortions, platitudes, hairsplitting, jargon, and other vices are the hallmark of considerable portion of philosophy. Many people's distrust for philosophy leads them to reject all philosophy.

Historical Evolution of Scientific Philosophy

Science begins in toolmaking as well as myths and superstitions, which to some extent represent efforts to grapple with reality and which develop from more absurd to less absurd beliefs. Scientific philosophy breeds antiscientific philosophy. There cannot be true without false, north without south, and left without right. Socrates, Confucious, Darwin, Hegel, Galaleo were the some of history's scientific philosophers. Darwin put an end to the species of animals and plants are unconnected among themselves, fortuitous, and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an scientific basis.

Three Broad Laws of Scientific Philosophy

Things are Connected - The Unity of Opposites

Quality and Quantity - The Unity of Contiuous and Discrete

Irreversibility - The Negation of the Negation

Things are Connected

To put this in a more exact philosophical terms "The Unity of Opposites". In prescientific views this was Yang and Yin, light and dark, heaven and earth. Every day examples: north south, plus minus, action reaction, sharp flat, left right.

Scientific investigation demands inquiry of difference, transition, and connection. Proper inquiry properly stops at connections and changes of "negligible significance." To properly analyze things one must look at all connections, the sum of all contradictions. In the network of connections between things, to single out and isolate one aspect as cause and another as effect is to restrict explanation via these abstractions to an approximate validity in a limited framework.

If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well.

Quality and Quantity

Quantity is the unity of discrete units which can be counted and continuous magnitudes which can be measured. Quality an inherent feature of a thing can only be changed by changing the quantity of matter or motion. Every perception entails a quantity-into-quality process in which a network of subliminal impressions reaches a sufficient concatenation and intensity requisite to pass the threshold of consciousness. Quantitative change of a thing, leading to its qualitative change, involves both the continuous and the discontinuous, both gradual and sudden changes. Gradualness does not exist without leaps, nor leaps without gradualness. Each arises from the other and cannot be reduced to the other. Purely uninterrupted or absolutely interrupted development is a fantasy.

Let the sea determine the quality of the canoe.

Irreversibility

You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing upon you. You can't go backwards.

The technical law for the third term is the negation of the negation. Various types of negation include: empty negation (a mere negative, a cutting off of a thing's further development), futile negation ( a mere aimless, ineffectual negative), skeptical negation, vacillation and doubt (mere paralyzing, immobilizing doubt) is characteristic and essential in scientific philosophy - which undoubtedly contains the element of negation and indeed as its most important element - no further development, but negation as a moment of connection, as a moment of development retaining the positive, ie. without any vacillations eclecticism.

Categories of Scientific Philosophy

The Relative and the Absolute

Everyday phrases indicative of cognition of the inseparable absoluteness and relativeness of things include: it all depends, it's all in how you look at things, it could have been worse, circumstances alter cases. Laws of development are aspects of the ceaseless movement of things, their absolute instability. No real thing is entirely absolute: the boundary line, the difference between the relative and the absolute is itself relative.

The Finite and the Infinite

The course of knowledge from the superficial toward the profound is equally a cognitive transition from the finite by itself toward its unity with the infinite-the universal, the eternal.

Possibility and Actuality

We live in a seething cauldron of possibilities. Comprehension of the interpenetration, the transformation into each other, of possibility and actuality, is vital for science - in the laboratory, in everyday life - for its orientation and achievements. Development is the continuous conversion of possibility into actuality, and of actuality into possibility. The dialectical reflection of possibilities is indispensable for survival as well as for progress.

The Particular and the General

Grasping the particular and the general has a central role in the construction of concepts. An adequate description must be neither too general nor to particular.

The Abstract and the Concrete

Doubt is, at most, an openness, a guide to inquiry and is not in and of itself a terminus obviating concrete knowledge. Rejection of abstractionism of glossing over or excluding the profound concrete is a basic condition for socialist success, especially in a revolution: The substitution of the abstract for the concrete is one of the greatest and most dangerous sins in a revolution.

Analysis and Synthesis

Analysis and synthesis are a mode of cognition, an instrument that mentally breaks down an object into components and then integrates or builds up these components into objects, the better to comprehend their nature. Analysis and synthesis, in the sense of breaking down and a building up, is an objective, very general process, ceaselessly occurring in all things, at every level of being, inanimate and animate, including the human body. Thus living cells continually synthesize proteins from amino acids and continually take proteins apart. Analysis-synthesis, new analysis-new synthesis, is an endless progression, with each new series capable of attaining a higher level of accuracy, profundity, and completeness. No analysis or synthesis is so complete and final as to be exempt from further analysis and synthesis.

Theory and Practice

Reliance only on theory or only on practice is a siren song that will lure thought and action to shipwreck in a whirlpool of unreality or on a reef of superficiality. There is nothing so practical as a good theory. Only through the test of practice can objective reflection pass from abstractness to profound concreteness, the status of confirmed truth, of scientific knowledge. The cardinal overall criterion for the test of truth is practice. Theory and practice are high level outgrowths of reciprocal processes of mental enrichment occurring in continual doing and knowing. Theory and practice flower in their unity.