as well as a philosopher.They can both go hand in hand.I recommend a science major, with a philosophy minor. Dont make one or the other a sideline, or something to be ignored.......
Philosophy is NOT useless, it teaches scientists to be rigorous in their endeavours and not to make conclusions based on anything thing but observation and logic. Anything less would disqualify a person from being a scientist, as well as a philosopher.
They can both go hand in hand.
I recommend a science major, with a philosophy minor. Don't make one or the other a sideline, or something to be ignored. They both go hand in hand.
Descartes established the concept that the –existence- of the universe isn’t a faith commitment - it is a "properly basic belief" based on verifiable evidence. A properly basic belief in physical reality is anchored is what is testable and true whether individually observed or not. The experience is the same for everyone.
http://stacweb.stac.edu/~dkeppler/phil31…
But belief that the universe is self-explanatory or self-existent is not a properly basic belief. This is a problem in defining the -focus- of the concept of belief versus acceptance of facts.
Natural Philosophy contains science and sets the testing framework and the foundation of defined terms and conceptual parameters of the methodology. Natural philosophers define the concepts, like 'proof', 'paradigm', 'true' or 'theory', and add to human knowledge while researchers apply a theory, collect empirical data, look for falsification and add to human knowledge.
The natural philosopher Karl Popper wrote about and defined the criterion of falsifiability in establishing a scientific theory. All new theories that attempt to explain how the world works must agree with ALL observed facts. Any one fact in disagreement falsifies it.
A theory is tested stepwise by a scientist proposing a hypothesis to try the theories' ability to predict the outcome. A hypothesis then is a proposition stated in a manner that can be seen as either true or false. Such propositions are considered truthbearers (true or false and nothing else).
Sufficient agreement between several hypotheses provides evidence to support the workings of a theory, establishing it as a working explanation of the process behind the collective results. Nonvalidating evidence that falsifies the originating theory requires the theory be modified or replaced by one that does explain all the data.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper…
Taking some philosophy of science and logic should be part of every students background rather than trying to cram the science and its developmental history together in a class.
All models are wrong, but some are useful - G. Box
