6 OBSERVATION IS IMPORTANT FOR GATHERING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE

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OBSERVATION IS IMPORTANT FOR GATHERING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE

Some thinkers in the history of philosophy valued armchair philosophy and claimed that productive results cannot be acquired by observational methods. It is of course possible to set up philosophical arguments or to develop mathematical theorems by armchair philosophy. Knowledge can be attained by thought experiments used in philosophical arguments or by theorems set up by deductive methods in mathematics without using observations. Part of the knowledge gained this way in philosophy and mathematics is also useful for natural and social sciences. For example, philosophy can help clarify the methodology of science, and mathematics is invaluable to both the natural and social sciences. But while philosophy and mathematics are valuable, without observations we don’t gain any knowledge of the world. Without observation and experimental methods it would have been impossible to discover the periodic table in chemistry, the inner structure of the sun or the organelles of a cell.
Experiment, perhaps the most important and fundamental method of modern science, is a process of observations systematically performed under precisely specified conditions. The belief that experiment is a successful method is based on two fundamental presuppositions. The first (the main focus of this chapter) is that observation is a reliable source of information to understand the universe. One who does not regard observation as a source of information cannot regard experiment (systematic observations) as an important method. The second is our fourth presupposition: “the laws of nature are universal”. The idea that the observations in laboratories are essential to understand the processes in the nature is based on the presupposition that the laws of nature are equally valid in the laboratories. Similarly, repeatability, the primary criterion of the experimental method, assumes the universality of laws (the laws do not change over time). As a result, a mindset with these two presuppositions would identify experiment as important and useful.
Today, virtually every scientist accepts observations of the phenomena of the universe or observations conducted in the laboratory as fundamental sources of information. But we learn from the history of science that observation did not play such a fundamental role in the past. In Ancient Greece, many prominent thinkers did not appreciate the importance of observation, except in the case of practical knowledge. Plato, for example, claimed that knowledge is unchanging, eternal, and timeless (ultimately of the so-called “Forms”); and this kind of knowledge can be acquired only through pure thought.44 Observation (of the changing and temporal) is not only not helpful in this process, it is misleading. Although Aristotle, by attaching the forms to matter, developed a philosophy which affirms observations more than Plato did, his epistemology science still seeks knowledge which is metaphysically necessary (like mathematical propositions). Contingent observations cannot attain to necessity. According to Aristotle, the aim of the knowledge is to comprehend the eternal forms attached to matter. Once one comprehends the essence of an object with rational thought one can infer everything related to that object by deduction; inference, not observation, is the way of knowledge. Even though observation is useful in comprehending the essence of the objects, it is not mandatory since essence can also be comprehended by pure thought. So, observation does not play a central role in Aristotle’s thought.
Other civilizations observed the phenomena in the universe to be safe from the floods or to make use of them in farming or in agriculture. While they gave importance to gathering observations of nature for their practical benefits, they did not requires observation for knowledge of the universe...

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