Posted: Jul 11, 2014 2:17 am
Calilasseia wrote:VazScep wrote:It gets repeated that scientists have their own special technical meaning of the word "theory" which differs from the colloquial meaning, which apparently means something like "shitty guess", but I think that's wrong. Scientists use the word mostly the same way that mortals do, and I want to emphasise that meaning, arguing that it's the creationists who are overemphasising the interpretation of "theory" to mean "shitty guess".
Theory is the opposite of practice. It refers to the stuff you do with pen and paper (and nowadays, with a computer), as opposed to getting your hands dirty. So when you're learning to drive, the practical part will involve sitting behind the wheel of a car, but the theory part involves questions about rules and regulations and driving strategies that you're allowed to think about in abstract. When you learn to play the piano, a good deal will be spent mashing your chubby fingers on a keyboard like a cretin, but some of it will involve sitting with sheets of symbols and going through the purely abstract symbol manipulation of transposition.
Mathematics and computer science are full of theories, because most of maths and computer science is done with pens, papers and computers.
"Theory" in "theory of evolution" is consistent with these familiar usages. It's the abstract pen-and-paper thinking that goes when organising all those dirty fossils and other shite that irritating naturalists kept bringing back from the garden and from their voyages to the Galapagos Islands. Theories of gravitation are the equations you do on pen-and-paper to recover the ridiculuous amounts of data that astronomers generate. And so on and blah.
The latter two paragraphs above, constitute part of the reason that I've stated repeatedly what the word 'theory' means in science. In science, a theory is an integrated explanation for a class of phenomena of interest, that has been tested to determine if it is in accord with the data arising from said phenomena, and found to be thus in accord via said testing. It's as far removed from "made up shit guess" as it's possible to be. That which has not been tested comes under the heading of "hypothesis", with the understanding that scientists are going to perform the requisite tests the moment they are able to.
Nyet Cali. What is important in science is the formulation & testing of models about natural phenomena. "Explanation" is emergent from this in the "how sense". Likewise, mechanism[s] are nice when they can be reasonably inferred. But not essential, otherwise you would have to chuck out both quantum mechanics and Darwins Theory by natural selection [missing mechanism for inheritance, circa 1860-1950's] and label them as pseudoscience. Sure, scientist SEEK both mechanism AND explanation. But they are bonuses, not mandatory. Too much emphasis on mechanism and explanation [apart from the limited explanation of description and predict] drifts science away from methodological naturalism and towards philosophical naturalism, and indeed, metaphysical naturalism. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with metaphysical/philosophical positions in the philosophy of science[1], they have no place in science itself.
[1] And I have argued that there are ways to look at the metaphysical implications of science that do not have to be mystical, but can generate interesting speculations that are not evidence-free or irrational.