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30th November 2012, 02:01 PM | #361 |
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30th November 2012, 02:12 PM | #362 |
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30th November 2012, 02:45 PM | #363 |
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Another example of why the pursuit of philosophy has nothing to offer to scientists.
The author starts of by comparing manufacturing to research:
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The point that the author has glaringly missed is that research is done because we don't know the result. We don't decide what knowledge process to produce and the process changes according to what we find. At this point I nearly gave up but as one of the complaints in this thread has been that us ignorant scientists don't know what these philosophers do so we are unable to comment, I continued... His main gripe appears to be that there is bad thing called empiricism in science. To reach this conclusion he had to define empiricism as:
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As proof of this nonsense he calls on authority:
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So having produced some perverted view of how research is done, accused scientists of spending too much time collecting data and rewriting history we get:
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The pro-philosophers have several times told us that philosophy is useful to science, that we do philosophy every time we think and that we don't understand how wonderful is the world of philosophy. Will they now understand why we don't buy it? |
30th November 2012, 02:51 PM | #364 |
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30th November 2012, 04:18 PM | #365 |
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But seriously, can I throw out another word here? (An insult if some wish to see it that way though the terms I've been using like anti-intellectual, scientism and village atheist are, to my mind, merely descriptive.) Ressentiment. |
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30th November 2012, 04:28 PM | #366 |
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30th November 2012, 05:06 PM | #367 |
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If you don't want to answer further questions, don't dismiss entire posts with one word. If you aren't willing to write more than one word, don't post at all. If you aren't willing to refrain from posting, and you aren't willing to write more than one word, don't whine when others ask further questions.
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30th November 2012, 05:17 PM | #368 |
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To answer the question, yes, I understand why you don't buy it. If you did buy it, you'd probably have pursued a philosophy degree instead.
As to the "useful to science" part, I want to point out that use to science isn't the goal of philosophy, no more than it is the goal of mathematics. And that makes for a strong analogy. In the hard sciences I studied, mathematics was sometimes taught, but only to serve a direct purpose. It was never taught primarily to explore mathematics. Further, the kind of mathematics we found useful (statistics, algebra, calculus and so on) were very basic. I can hardly think that anything I ever did math-wise in science would have gotten more than the most miniscule shrug from a "real" mathematician. At most, we might ask if there were a mathematical tool available or for help with some difficult (to us) calculation. So too with the intersection of philosophy and science. Everything science needs from philosophy has already been adopted in the practice of science. They already accept that falsification adds strength to methodology. They already use Occam's razor (William of Occam, a philosopher) and parsimony -- principles from philosophy science finds useful. But just as mathematics has moved far beyond what science needs to function and explores surreal topologies and attempts to prove theorems the non-mathematician cannot parse, so too do philosophers talk among themselves about ideas interesting to them and specific to their field. This should surprise no one. Shock none. And if someone turns out to be allergic to philosophy, so be it. As long as they can adopt the rudimentary concepts (just as they might need to do algebra on occasion), there's no harm done. We can't all be interested in all things. I am not fond of history or linguistics. But I know enough grammar to get by and have some idea of how the Constitution was written. Most importantly though, I could no more disparage those who pursue the themes of history than I would accept their criticisms of my interests. What about pragmatic matters? Shouldn't we bow to science and empirical testing? Sure, where available. Just as I might look to a mathematician to decide how secure my password is, I would look to one of the scientific fields when I want to know something factual about the world. But this leave huge swaths of human enterprise still to be addressed. Law is a good example. What principles should govern our relationships with others? Who should win the case and why? And while we are at it, which area of scientific pursuit should I fund and which let fall by the wayside? The poisonous thing is to think that any single approach should address everything we are interested in. I think science fanboys demand too much when they want a world where only testable truth holds any merit. They want every meal to be their favorite meal and worse, everything that is not a meal as well. I think there's a result from philosophy, although I'm not sure where it appears: it is impossible to simultaneously model the universe and exist in the universe. In other words, to work, science must accept something less than the whole picture. Fanboys probably don't like that very much. |
30th November 2012, 05:18 PM | #369 |
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30th November 2012, 05:31 PM | #370 |
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I think this is mistaken. Contrary to the implication here, someone who argues their position this long and this well has thought about the topic rather more than someone who merely rejects it out of hand. There is a good argument to be made that philosophy has become a sterile endeavor. I'll wager there are philosophers who would do so. (But then again, they'll argue about anything.)
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30th November 2012, 05:32 PM | #371 |
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Having read both Sokal and Bricmont and their detractors, I think the accusation that they were attacking straw men is a mendacious defence mechanism from the skewered Continentals. Sokal and Bricmont were very specific that they refrained from passing any philosophical judgments in Intellectual Impostures and were strictly documenting the structuralists' hilarious and embarrassing failure to understand the science they were pretending to explore.
Similarly Transgressing the Boundaries solely demonstrated that pomos couldn't tell the difference between "real" pomo writing and a collection of the most incredibly inane pomo quotations available linked by text which was deliberately written to have no intelligent content whatsoever. It did not attempt to demonstrate anything beyond this point. Pomos will try to pretend that anyone who disagrees with them is engaging in a "facile misreading" or some such. However I think it's been objectively demonstrated that many of their leading lights were engaging in an intellectual imposture, and that writings which they were trying to pass off as intellectually significant were in fact indistinguishable (even by acolytes) from deliberate nonsense. |
30th November 2012, 05:38 PM | #372 |
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30th November 2012, 06:01 PM | #373 |
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30th November 2012, 06:22 PM | #374 |
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Not quite, but if it was of utility I would use it.
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But be assured, if a better method was found, present day scientists would be the first to jump on the bandwagon. I've not seen your point about the universe but would think it was a mathematical proof. That doesn't stop us modelling it on a coarse resolution and of course that has been done several times. |
30th November 2012, 06:36 PM | #375 |
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Surely at the heart of this is confusing morality and ethics with philosophy? I know of the term ''moral philosophy'' but I'll wager the that the term was invented by a philosopher.
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30th November 2012, 06:43 PM | #376 |
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30th November 2012, 06:58 PM | #377 |
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30th November 2012, 07:00 PM | #378 |
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You do know that Sokal was a hoaxer?
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/weinberg.html |
30th November 2012, 07:05 PM | #379 |
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Disturbances of the semantic reactions in connection with faulty education and ignorance must be considered as sub-microscopic colloidal lesions - Alfred O. Korzybski |
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30th November 2012, 07:06 PM | #380 |
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Originally Posted by dafydd
Are you suggesting their critique of Popper was a hoax? |
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30th November 2012, 07:23 PM | #381 |
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30th November 2012, 07:59 PM | #382 |
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Now before we move on, please note that I've been busily attacking writing which is genuinely obscurantist nonsense (structuralism and post-structuralism). The passage you've found is actually perfectly coherent to a moral philosopher, and if you find it to be amusing gibberish that reflects a lack of background knowledge on your part more than anything else.
By the way, you're engaging in blatant special pleading and goalpost-moving by trying to carve away ethics and moral philosophy from the rest of philosophy so you can maintain that all of philosophy is rubbish. I suggest instead owning your mistake and adopting a more nuanced position where you admit that some of philosophy is in fact important or even necessary, and some of it is rubbish. Anyway, since you wanted an explanation: The author is saying they've got an idea for a new take on Kantian ethics, which they call "discourse ethics", and they're going to explain what that means later. Then in the second paragraph they're saying that Hegel made a bunch of criticisms of Kantian ethics, and they are going to talk about whether those criticisms of Hegel's still apply to their new version. One of those is some kind of argument that Kantian moral prescriptions are tautological - they don't explain how the argument works, they're just letting us know he will explain that later. Another is that Kantian prescriptions are universal not context-specific, and Hegel had some kind of problem with that, but exactly what is was we can't tell because the text cuts off. I'm not much of a fan of Hegel and I'm automatically suspicious of anyone who uses the word "discourse" since it's a buzzword of Continental philosophy which is a genre I do not care for. So I don't think I'd get a great deal out of reading the work that passage comes from. However I understand perfectly well what they are talking about. As I alluded to earlier, most people (including nearly all self-proclaimed skeptics) think that they are just about as smart as anyone needs to be. So when they encounter text they just can't parse they tend to assume that the problem is with the text, not with them. They also tend to assume that reading comprehension is a skill which they have raised the ultimate plateau, so that if someone claims to have superior reading comprehension that means they are calling you a moron. So I realise that by saying that I can read this stuff the way I read a newspaper and keep track of exactly what is being argued and on what basis, I'm saying something you will probably perceive as an attack. However the fact is I can do that, whether or not you believe it and whether or not it threatens you. Some philosophy is definitely obscurantist nonsense. Some philosophy is in fact saying something coherent (perhaps wrong, but that's a different issue) but laypeople can't parse it. Those laypeople just don't have the background knowledge and cognitive skills to 100% reliably tell which is which. |
30th November 2012, 08:44 PM | #383 |
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I think law is a good example to discuss as well, mainly for two reasons. The first is that, while determining facts is an important part, quite often disputes arise as to the meaning of those facts as well as the importance. We adopt a "reasonable man" standard, rather than one of experiment and reproducibility.
The second reason concerns the goal of the law. Justice is a concept that exists outside of the view of science. One can establish certain equities mathematically, but these serve the overarching goal of obtaining a just outcome, they do not define it. My claim is that while evidence is one of the foundations for the law, it serves the philosophical purpose of producing justice as embodied in the critical decision makers -- judges and juries. Interestingly, we also rely on juries to be finders of fact, instead of relying on what you might expect in an evidence based system: expert witnesses. |
1st December 2012, 05:40 AM | #384 |
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I have followed your link and made a good faith attempt to see where Stolzenberg has said anything whatsoever about Sokal and Bricmont's thorough destruction of constructionist nonsense in Intellectual Impostures, or about their demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of postmodernism in Social Text.
All I can find is a relatively subtle epistemological disagreement about the bases of scientific knowledge. Can you please point to the exact place where Stolzenberg addresses Intellectual Impostures or the Social Text hoax? Because currently I suspect that your claim that Stolzenberg shows that Sokal and Bricmonst were attacking straw men in Intellectual Impostures is simply false, and your implied attack on debunkers of Continental rubbish as "know-nothings" is both false and insulting. |
1st December 2012, 05:46 AM | #385 |
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I think this post sums up a lot of my issues with religion and philosophy.
First off we define things that science can't address. Questions that have no answers and may not even be legitimate questions. Then we say 'science can't answer these questions therefore we need religion and/or philosophy' but there's never any evidence that either of these things actually answer these questions any better than science. They merely win by default because they aren't 'scientific questions' So we define philosophy as the search for answers to questions which have no answers? And we're supposed to use this as an argument for philosophy not being pretty much a waste of time? |
1st December 2012, 08:37 AM | #387 |
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But we can test the 'reasonable man' hypothesis. For example the hypothesis may be that such a man gives reliance on certain types of evidence. For instance, eye witnesses were thought to be reliable, the evidence shows that is not so.
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1st December 2012, 12:44 PM | #388 |
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Is this what makes people so uncomfortable with philosophy? The looseness and the lack of focus on externally valid conclusions?
For me, the recipe of asking questions and getting answers is very limited. The form of the question generates the answer. I prefer the freedom of exploring ideas for the sake of exploring ideas with no preconceived destination in mind. Much like the runner who finishes her daily exercise at the same place she started, I enjoy and find benefit in the process, not the destination. Perhaps this is a "style of mind" thing. Consider how we are educated in a system where the answers are in the back of the book (or at least the odd-numbered answers). Even when we can't derive some result, we are confident an answer exists, some correct answer is there to find. Translate this mechanism beyond mere schoolwork and some remain convinced that there are still answers in the back of the book. Only now, the book is nature and the answers take a bit more work to dredge up. I find little appeal in this. When I was in school, I enjoyed finding other questions, questions where the answers weren't in the book and couldn't be found in the larger library of nature. Why? Because answers are sterile things that kill thinking. And thinking is an enjoyable activity. Should I then disparage all of science as deficient? Hardly. Because scientists spend a great deal of time searching for useful questions and exploring. At some point, they have to find measurable results and publish, but in-between times, they ruminate and wonder and try to think useful things. That's an exciting part of the enterprise and not the rote empirical testing that mischaracterizes what scientists actually do. In practice, they don't just sit around gathering factoids and putting them into little boxes. There is purpose and intent. They ask more general questions and distill out that small portion that is practical to test. They do something akin to philosophy instead: they seek explanations, not simply answers to questions. Philosophers and scientists have the same ultimate goal. Everyone wants to understand how reality actually is. The difference comes in when the scientist finds no way forward because they cannot figure out a useful research program. This is why we get hybrid sciences like psychology or sociology -- fields we refer to as "soft" sciences. Rather more opinion and argument comes into play and rather less direct measurement. And at the outside extreme, we have philosophy, where the conceptual can take up entire sub-disciplines. The rules are different. What you can say is different. Science, as characterized in this thread, leaves out a critical element of what's actually going on-- the scientist herself. It gets touched on in things like: What is the meaning of a probability function in QM? Is that a real thing or just a description of a real thing? And if it is a real thing, what sort of thing is it? But mostly, these kinds of questions are troubling but not ultimately important when we want to add another answer to the solutions at the back of the book. And this brings up one other critical difference. When a scientist is trained, they learn, by rote, all that has come before. Their job will be to extend this linear script. When a philosopher is trained, they learn what has come before, but must put themselves into the mix -- their own opinions matter and there is a process of self discovery. Early on, philosophers are asked to add their input to whatever Kant or Hume wrote, to compare and contrast, to offer an opinion and support it. I can say that I discovered I was an atheist, that something about my composition directs me to that stance. But I could never say I discovered I was a biologist. In some sense, science would like to remove the human element. Not so in philosophy. Without scientists, nature would still be what nature is. Not philosophy. Without philosophers, the enterprise is dead. |
1st December 2012, 01:03 PM | #389 |
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Once again we have the strawman scientist, cold, hard, dead to the higher aspects of the world trapped in his dead end view of reality as contrasted with the free thinking philosopher who contemplates the universe and leads the way forward into that brave new word of discovery.
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1st December 2012, 01:56 PM | #390 |
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Don't forget, what is being contrasted in this thread are the cartoon versions of these things, not the actual disciplines. We shouldn't abandon the game mid-play.
Here's the tl;dr version of my previous blatherings: The philosophical question raised in this thread and the answer-- Q: Of what use is philosophy to science? A: It can point out the limits of the scientific method. |
1st December 2012, 02:14 PM | #391 |
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1st December 2012, 03:51 PM | #392 |
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I agree with the boldened part. Though while science can't figure out normative morality, neither can philosophy. Except for saying that there is no objective, universal normative morality to be figured out.
I also agree that it is wrong to reject philosophy in its entirety. Though much of it is rubbish, especially the Continental (as opposed to the Analytic) variety. |
1st December 2012, 05:10 PM | #393 |
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1st December 2012, 07:19 PM | #395 |
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1st December 2012, 07:21 PM | #397 |
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Which branch of philosophy really knows the meaning of meaning?
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1st December 2012, 07:34 PM | #398 |
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1st December 2012, 07:41 PM | #399 |
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Double and triple bollocks. Either you had a lousy science education (quite possible) and are committing the fallacy of hasty generalisation, or you slept through science class and are just making this up.
That's not how scientists are "trained" at all. Not remotely. Absolutely key to studying science is how established facts and theories became established - and how wrong ideas were falsified. You spend a lot of time repeating experiments that were done decades, even hundreds of years ago, so that you understand how we got where we are, and how to continue the process.
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There's reality. And there's only one of those. And in science, unlike philosophy, that matters. |
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1st December 2012, 07:42 PM | #400 |
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