CP Reflection Sheet -1

PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MANAGEMENT

By
Puneet Kumar – PGPGC202100279

Professor:
Mr. Ajay Pandey & Mr. Sebastian Morris

Academic Associate:
Mr. Ahmed Ashhar

Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

July 31, 2022
David Hume’s Ideas
One of the most important idea that Hume goes on to explain in depth is - “causality can't be explained by
logic”.
Hume was an empiricist, which means he thought that all our ideas & imaginations can be reduced to
impressions from the senses. For Ex: even if I imagine a creature/ a human personality that doesn't exist, it is
actually made up of things that I haven’t felt in the real world before.
We use mental processes that are essential to being human to organise the information we get from our
senses. Therefore, Hume talks about three of these:
1. Similarity
2. Time or Place Continuity
3. Cause and Effect

Hume also put the ways how we think into two categories:
Relations of Ideas (sometimes called "a priori"):
When it comes to math and sentences like "All squares are rectangles," if I say "All squares are not
rectangles" it would be a contradiction.
Things That Are True (also known as a posteriori)
Sentences like "The sun will rise from east tomorrow" are examples of empirical info. that can be negated
without causing a contradiction. It would not be a contradiction to say that the sun will not rise tomorrow.
Hume made a very important point when he said that all Matters of Fact can be broken down into Cause and
Effect. Hence it's important to remember that most of what we know is called "Matters of Fact."
For example, how come we know, that the sun will come up tomorrow? How do we know that one domino
will hit another, the first domino will make the second domino do something?
Say we answer that the sun has always come up. Or maybe it would be better to say that scientists can figure
it out. Then the next question will be "How do you know scientists can predict it?"
Whenever we are asked to defend a Matter of Fact, all we have to do is give a new Matter of Fact. At the
end, we can say, "Scientific Data." But Hume could ask, "How do you know that, say, General Relativity
can make the same predictions tomorrow as it did yesterday?"
Here is where Hume's idea comes from. At some point of time, we will just eventually say, "Well, we've
always predicted these things this way, and it's worked every single time." But how do you know that what
has always worked and never failed will work and never fail again tomorrow? "Well, what has always
worked has always worked. There have never been any exceptions." Now you're back where you started,
which is called Hume's fork (or The Problem of Induction). At the end of the day, all arguments for Cause and
Effect are just based on what people have seen.
Hume's point is that since all "Matters of Fact" can be reduced to "Cause and Effect," and "Cause and
Effect" can be reduced to "Experience," then "Matters of Fact" and "Cause and Effect" are not based on
reasoning.
Conclusion
When it comes to matters of fact, we are not much different from a lion or even a dog whose tail wags when
it sees a leash, even though we are smarter. It's just in our nature to think that things that have always
happened before will continue to happen.
Immanuel Kant’s Ideas
Kant says that space and time are just "forms of intuition" that structure all experience, and that even though "things-
in-themselves" exist and are part of experience, they are different from the objects of experience. From this, it follows
that the things we experience are just "appearances," and that we can't know what things are like in and of themselves.
In response to the skepticism he found in David Hume's writings, Kant devised the theory of experience - to answer
the question of whether synthetic a priori (which means "before the fact") knowledge is possible. This would to figure
out the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel between his ideas and the Copernican revolution when he
said that the objects of our senses must match our spatial and temporal intuitions. This means that we can know about
the objects of our senses without using our senses.

Further, according to Kant, we can only know what we can experience, and that our cognitive faculties and abilities
shape what we can experience. When we think about what these observations mean, it becomes clear that it doesn't
make sense to say that we can know reality as it is apart from our minds.

Finally what he believes is that “what applies to one must apply to all”

Conclusion
In short we can conclude that If I am a reasonable person then I am exactly as reasonable as every other being in the
universe. Otherwise I am NOT 100% rational. There is something lacking in me if everyone is not exactly like me.
Given that everyone is equally rational, subjectivity is removed from experience and even abstract consideration.
Therefore, given certain facts, each and every rational human must always reach the same conclusion.

Thomas Kuhn’s Ideas

Kuhn's main idea is that "normal" science is different from "revolutionary" science. In normal science, to explain
as much as possible, we use a framework like Newton's three laws of motion in mechanics. But we also know that as
scientists use these "paradigms" to explain more and more things, puzzles come up that the paradigm can't solve well
or quite reasonably. At this point, it's time for a paradigm shift.

For example as also discussed in the lecture, when Maxwell's equations couldn't explain how radiation came from a
"black box," this was one of the first things that led to quantum theory." Scientists started to find out new things about
light. Most of these new things could not be explained by the wave theory. Experimenters, for example, gathered a lot
of information about how the amount of energy radiated from a heated cavity (called a "black box") depends on the
wavelength of the radiated energy. Maxwell's equations were not able to explain what was seen.
As we saw, Maxwell's equations hide everything about electromagnetic waves. Since this is the case, Maxwell's
equations must be able to explain the experimental results of black-body radiation. Everyone did their best.

But the result – They all lost. ( Finally before Planck comes into the picture)

Kuhn says that scientific revolutions have a sociological aspect. This means that the acceptance of a new paradigm has
a lot to do with how the people who came up with it tried to convince their peers, which sometimes worked and
sometimes didn't. One part of this is that sometimes the older generation has to die off before a new paradigm is
accepted and "normal" science using the new paradigm can start to work again.
Conclusion

Kuhn says that scientific revolutions have a sociological aspect. This means that the acceptance of a new paradigm has
a lot to do with how the people who came up with it tried to convince their peers, which sometimes worked and
sometimes didn't. One part of this is that sometimes the older generation has to die off before a new paradigm
is accepted and "normal" science using the new paradigm can start to work again.