Post-seminar 3

For this week I prepared by reading the material and finding a research paper in a journal to examine. I also spent some time discussion the concept theory with comrades taking the course which I felt was really helpful for all of us in understanding the concept. At the time of making my first blog post I felt quite sure of the concept of theory as well as identifying theory in the paper I had chosen.

At first I felt unsure whether I would get so much out of the seminar, and while it didn’t really enhance my understanding of theory, I had a really interesting discussion in my group.

We mainly touched on theory and “truth”, which also was discussed in the larger group at the seminar. To me, a theory can be true, but we can never really know if the theory is true since observed occurances can also be a series of exceptions leading one to maybe propose a limited or wrong theory, and we are also limited in our observations by our senses and our mind as discussed in previous seminars.

This also is interesting to me since it leads to the question: can we really ever say that a theory can be true? Since we are limited by our on faculties of knowledge, can we ever propose a theory that can be true, regardless of whether the observed occurances are true or not? Is it a possibility for the human being to formulate a theory that can be true and to what extent?

As stated in the lecture concerning theory, a theory can be considered or be accepted as truth if a majority of experts in the field have tested and accepted it. So even though we can never really objectively consider it as truth, it can be accepted as truth. And indeed, theories that we now consider false have once been considered true, such as the universe revolving around the earth.

One simple explanation of theory is that theory is proposed answer to why an observed phenomena, behavior or occurance has occured. We discussed that if this is true, then how do theories such as quantum physics and string theory fit into this definition since they do not depend on perhaps immediately observable behavior. We concluded that they rely on other theories that in length depend on observable behavior. And all kinds of theories do depend on other theories. Our seminar leader challenged us to find a theory that does not depend or build upon other theories, which I still haven’t.

One subject that was often the topic of our discussions was mathematics, and if mathematics could be considered theory. Since mathematics is synthezised a priori knowledge, it has to depend on learning it first. We concluded that within mathematics there are theories. You need to have theory to make a proof, but unlike observed occurances in the external reality, once a proof is formulated, it can be considered true. Although it can only be true if the fundamentals of mathematics are true, the axioms. So how do we know they are true? Here we were unsure how to continue the discussion, much like Theaetetus and Socrates.