From the positivist perspective, causality isn’t something that exists because it’s about counterfactual reality. Positivism is a philosophy that held science back a lot.
Could you provide actual examples please? I’m asking genuinely not rhetorically, but it seems to me that the question of positivism mostly just affected edge cases and not that strongly. People say that behaviorism was a mistake that came from positivism, but wasn’t it based mostly on experimental limitations regardless?
And what do we mean by “causality is something that exists”?, and how much can our heuristics change with an account of causality compare to another?
I used two examples. Barry Smith’s work, which is central to the bioinformatics ontology project obofoundry and Judea Pearl’s work on causality.
And what do we mean by “causality is something that exists”?
Read Judea Pearl. There was no good reason why that notion of causality couldn’t have been conceptualized 30 years earlier and the reason it hasn’t is about positivism.
Without implying that I’m giving a full definition, causality is about the claim that if X didn’t happen Y wouldn’t have happened. It’s a statement about what happens in counterfactual worlds.
If you want to read metaphysical philosophy that’s useful for science, read Barry Smith. He’s a philosophy professor and someone who made a useful contribution to bioinformatics with his work on ontology.
Science is about creating knowledge. Ontology is about the structure of knowledge. People who are positivists and believe that thinking about counterfactual worlds is unscientific can’t create knowledge about causality and that holds science back.
Objections against Bayesianism come from positivist ideas that shun subjective knowledge. Scientists don’t preregister their credence before experiments because they shun subjectivity.
Could you provide actual examples please? I’m asking genuinely not rhetorically, but it seems to me that the question of positivism mostly just affected edge cases and not that strongly. People say that behaviorism was a mistake that came from positivism, but wasn’t it based mostly on experimental limitations regardless?
And what do we mean by “causality is something that exists”?, and how much can our heuristics change with an account of causality compare to another?
I used two examples. Barry Smith’s work, which is central to the bioinformatics ontology project obofoundry and Judea Pearl’s work on causality.
Read Judea Pearl. There was no good reason why that notion of causality couldn’t have been conceptualized 30 years earlier and the reason it hasn’t is about positivism.
Without implying that I’m giving a full definition, causality is about the claim that if X didn’t happen Y wouldn’t have happened. It’s a statement about what happens in counterfactual worlds.
If you want to read metaphysical philosophy that’s useful for science, read Barry Smith. He’s a philosophy professor and someone who made a useful contribution to bioinformatics with his work on ontology.
Science is about creating knowledge. Ontology is about the structure of knowledge. People who are positivists and believe that thinking about counterfactual worlds is unscientific can’t create knowledge about causality and that holds science back.
Objections against Bayesianism come from positivist ideas that shun subjective knowledge. Scientists don’t preregister their credence before experiments because they shun subjectivity.