When we prove a certain truth by a scientific experiment, a philosophical law or a simple sense perception, do we not only attempt to have the proof as a cause of the knowledge of that truth?

I’ve yet to find a “philosophical law” that has substance in any physical experiment.

Did I miss something?

Scientific “proof” goes so far as to upgrade a “hypothesis” into a “theory” e.g. the theory of gravity. Knowledge of truth, when discussed by philosophers, seldom dives below the floorboards, e.g. deep enough to debate the physical structure the floor sits on, such as gravity (thing of it as holding the floor to the foundation).

Science deals with notions that have materially measurable properties. These can be falsified with material tests and are called hypotheses. When falsification fails after all the tests scientists can dream up, they eventually say the hypothesis may now be referred to as a theory.

For instance Plato, a Greek contemporary (I think a student) of Socrates held that a conceptual object such as “a chair”, e.g. the perfect and ideal form of a chair, existed on the perfect plane of thought. How’s that for a working definition of knowledge and truth? Think of Plato’s ideal chair the same way you could think of a theory such as the theory of gravity.

“Knowledge” and “truth,” however, are important to word-lovers, which is what philo-sophers are, in the original Greek. They exist on a different plane than theory, which one can connote as “Plato’s ideal.”