2012-02-20, 12:49 AM
ThatWasMyKil Wrote:While Plato was a philosopher I would lean more to the side of critical thinking on the part of the chained man - that said that's pretty much what Philosophy and Science fall into, the relm of critical thinking.
Partly yes. Science needs critical thinking to make sense (and make good sense) of its empirical data, it promotes critical thinking for this purpose. However, experiment is the soul of science. If you don't perform observable experiments to verify your theories, you're not doing science, however critically you may be thinking. On the other hand, if you don't give much thought at all to your experiments, you'll still be doing science, just bad science.
I have no idea how philosophically aware my Physics professor is, but he has on more than one occasion stressed that in science, knowledge is whatever we see happening and that science does not concern itself with essentialism.
So, if we want to encompass all of humanity's ability to obtain objective knowledge, like you said, we'd be talking about our critical thinking ability, yes. Though, that still doesn't give me any more confidence when I say human will obtain all the knowledge to explain everything, though. Besides, in a sense, we've always been able to explain most things, we just weren't accurate. Who's to say that we now are?
EDIT: To elaborate on the last point, instead of just jerking about it, I'd mention a video I was introduced to by devout atheists:
Spoiler
Near the end, he makes the point that our society, if put some billion years into the future, will do all the science we did today and come up with a picture of the universe which is entirely different from ours. And it's scientifically rigorous too. So, what's to say that our model of the universe is objectively correct if it is scientifically correct?
Summary of his presentation on that idea