skwinty skwinty skwinty don't you realise unless your application for a grant to do scientific research promises untold wealth in a very short time for your benefactors you have no hope of any support.
If you even mention anything as esoteric as philosophy you will be labeled as a nut or worse. The word unsound comes to mind!
Here are two examples.
1.
This proposal is to stop (pick your disease or problem) by eliminating all social and environmental causes before we embark on only uselessly treating the resultant symptoms.
2.
With mass screening of many compounds and nanotechnology and many other expensive methods we will produce a cure that will bring many benefits for the organisation in a healthy cash flow that will never cease as the problem is still really there so we can treat the symptoms in perpetuity untill ...
Which alternative proposal sounds emminently logical to the members of the board (who generally know stuff all about anything, let alone science or philosophy)?
That is why scientists seem to fall into this mold. They need to eat as well.
You are quite correct mere philosophy barely rates a mention, as that it asks us all to question what is really going on.
No method on its own can give us insight into how things tick. Sitting in an armchair just thinking without any empirical guideposts will leave you none the wiser. Deluded maybe but not wiser.
As Kokatha man (Darryl) said a very interesting book by Douglas Hofstadter goes into these questions to try to understand how a self referential system can exist and still be logical. It can't (Godels Theorem) as there will always be contradictions or paradoxes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6...Escher%2C_Bach
Einstein was very disturbed by quantum mechanics especially action at a distance or quantum entanglement. I personally think that the fact that at a fundamental level that the Universe is a sea boiling with uncertainty and only a localised experiment can force the system to a logical picture for only that locality and observer does not exclude all other possibilities.
Words are puny devices for conveying ideas. That is why we have art and music. It is curious is it not that all 'primitive' human societies conveyed their store of knowledge by art and music.
I should stop now.
Bert