The last few years have seen a number of prominent scientists step up to microphones and belittle the value of philosophy. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are well-known examples. To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.
Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing.
- “Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”
This is the totally dopey criticism. Yes, most philosophers do not actually go out and collect data (although there are exceptions). But it makes no sense to jump right from there to the accusation that philosophy completely ignores the empirical information we have collected about the world. When science (or common-sense observation) reveals something interesting and important about the world, philosophers obviously take it into account. (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.)
Philosophers do, indeed, tend to think a lot. This is not a bad thing. All of scientific practice involves some degree of “pure thought.” Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be to a model-building phenomenologist. But at its best, the practice of philosophy of physics is continuous with the practice of physics itself. Many of the best philosophers of physics were trained as physicists, and eventually realized that the problems they cared most about weren’t valued in physics departments, so they switched to philosophy. But those problems — the basic nature of the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels — are just physics problems, really. And some amount of rigorous thought is necessary to make any progress on them. Shutting up and calculating isn’t good enough.
- “Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.”
Now we have the frustratingly annoying critique. Because: duh. If your criterion for “being interesting or important” comes down to “is useful to me in my work,” you’re going to be leading a fairly intellectually impoverished existence. Nobody denies that the vast majority of physics gets by perfectly well without any input from philosophy at all. (“We need to calculate this loop integral! Quick, get me a philosopher!”) But it also gets by without input from biology, and history, and literature. Philosophy is interesting because of its intrinsic interest, not because it’s a handmaiden to physics. I think that philosophers themselves sometimes get too defensive about this, trying to come up with reasons why philosophy is useful to physics. Who cares?
Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes.
- “Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”
Finally, the deeply depressing critique. Here we see the unfortunate consequence of a lifetime spent in an academic/educational system that is focused on taking ambitious dreams and crushing them into easily-quantified units of productive work. The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time. I suspect that a substantial majority of physicists who use quantum mechanics in their everyday work are uninterested in or downright hostile to attempts to understand the quantum measurement problem.
This makes me sad. I don’t know about all those other folks, but personally I did not fall in love with science as a kid because I was swept up in the romance of finding slightly more efficient calculational techniques. Don’t get me wrong — finding more efficient calculational techniques is crucially important, and I cheerfully do it myself when I think I might have something to contribute. But it’s not the point — it’s a step along the way to the point.
The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works. Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway. And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things. It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest. The universe is much bigger than we are and stranger than we tend to imagine, and I for one welcome all the help we can get in trying to figure it out.
Jesse, it should be clear from my most recent post, where I continued Verbose Stoic’s comparison between the Trolley Problem and Newtonian Mechanics, that I have no problem with models. My problem is with bad models, and the Trolley Problem is perhaps the worst possible model one could propose — again, as I hope I made clear.
And my problem with philosophy is that it has no means to weed out harmful bullshit like the Trolley Problems — and, indeed, that bullshit finds such a fertile ground in philosophy.
Yes, again, there are philosophers who are productive, but only when they’re firmly grounded in empirical observation and thus are doing science. And, far too often, we have philosophers arrogantly proclaiming themselves supreme experts of fields they’re not even remotely qualified to participate in, again as perfectly exemplified by the Trolley Problems: they’re supposed to probe human moral psychology, yet they demonstrate profound ignorance of introductory-level psychology and complete disregard for ethics.
We have a method to weed nonsense from that which is useful. In fact, we have only one such method for that task: science. In every discipline, the ratio of utility to bullshit is directly proportionate to how committed its practitioners are to closing the empirical loop, and that pattern repeats itself within the disciplines. And, until philosophers clean house and rout out the numerous anti-empiricists in their ranks, we’re going to continue to see philosophy be worthy of ridicule.
…but, you know what?
For every field that philosophy is supposed to reign supreme in, we already have empiricists far outpacing the philosophers.
Sean and his colleagues know far more about the nature of reality than any philosopher.
Jerry Coyne and Craig Venter and other biologists know far more about the nature of life than any philosopher.
Computer scientists and information theorists know far more about logic and the nature of knowledge than any philosopher.
Psychologists know far more about human nature than any philosopher.
Education researchers know far more about the nature of learning than any philosopher.
Ethicists and game theorists and evolutionary ethologists know far more about the nature of morality than any philosopher.
Neuroanatomists and information theorists know far more about the nature of cognition and intelligence than any philosopher.
…and the list continues.
Again, yes, there are people in those disciplines who like to wear hats that say, “philosopher,” on them, but the ones actually doing any good are doing straight-up empirical analysis or meta-analysis, just like any good researcher or theorist. The rest generally aren’t even worng — as we see, again, so well with the Trolley Problem.
So, remind me: what is it that philosophers qua philosophers are supposed to do that nobody else isn’t already doing (and better)?
b&
S.F.: Nozick and the Bleeding Heart Libertarians weren’t mentioned for their relevance to physics. They were (what I hoped would be) obvious examples of how academic philosophy doesn’t separate the wheat from the chaff in the way you hope. Ayn Rand may be dismissed as a hack by most philosophers, but there are professionals who do take her seriously. Immanuel Velikovsky is also a crank but there isn’t even a minority of scientists who will take him seriously. And certainly Popper is still in good standing as an academic philosopher, by whatever standards philosophers use. I think perfectly acceptable academic philosophy is harmful because it is founded on false principles that I partly listed.
I specifically disagree that brains in vats raises serious questions. My reasons were posted above, in the part directed to Verbose Stoic. I don’t think skepticism a la Hume was ever really intended to guide thinking about real questions of science, or any other kind of reasoning. If anything it was aimed at its current version of academic philosophy (Cartesian etc.) and at theology. Like Schroedinger’s cat was meant to show that complementarity wasn’t explanatory, Hume’s refutation of induction was meant to blow up introspective rationalism, rule it out tout court. Frankly, I think it succeeded.
Will Nelson: Your post was directed at the OP but might I offer theses examples?
Leucippus’ and Democritus’ notion of atoms; Leibniz’ and Berkeley’s criticism of Newton’s concept of absolute space; Bacon’s analysis of sources of scientific errors, what he called “idols”; Kant’s nebular hypothesis.
Most of the time examples of philosophers’ contributions either come from a time when philosophy and what we now call science were not separate, as in the days of Leucippus and Democritus. They may even have been amateur philosophers, like Bacon. I think the examples fail to establish the value of modern philosophy as practiced in the academy. Many of the purported examples such as Mach were more scientists and many were amateur philosophers, at least in the sense that they were not trained in a modern graduate school program of philosophy. And as the example of Mach, one of the most determined opponents of atoms (!) and relativity (!!) shows, we shouldn’t simply assume that their contributions are so wholly positive.
Sturgeon’s Law: It’s not at all obvious academic philosophy produces moral standpoints or even esthetic judgments. People without philosophy yet somehow have them. Since that is the case, your apparent belief that having values or whatever is automatically philosophy is in error. You also seem to believe that academic philosophy is a kind of science of abstract reason. This implies that is can correct the thinking of scientists and every other kind of lay person. I’m afraid that’s not at all obvious.
I recently read some posts by scientists concerned about incorrect use of statistical significance in drawing conclusions from studies. To me, that seems a clear cut example of what academic philosophy calls epistemology. But it doesn’t seem that academic philosophy emphasis on abstraction from context and content and semantic meaning contributes to more effective reasoning. It seems to me that notion creates an abstraction, Reason, that is very little more than an unconscious pseudonym for the Mind of God.
James: You are claiming that pretty much any kind of generalized or abstract reasoning concerning pretty much anything other than empirical data is philosophical. I actually think that academic philosophy does not concern itself very much with such things outside specialized fields called “philosophy of…” where the practitioners tend to be scientifically trained as well as philosophically trained. I’m not sure what these people have contributed over all.
But for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that this is philosophy. Does academic philosophy contribute to the solution of these problems? I don’t think there’s much of a case. Was Mach’s philosophical rigor about atoms helpful? Does Popper’s falsifiability criterion, which rules out historical sciences like geology, evolutionary biology and cosmology improve science? Does Bohr’s rigorous insistence that there’s only the experimental setup that determines which observables can be compared to theoretical prediction help us understand how the universe evolved from a quantum state to what we see today?
Is science a method or a discipline? You seem to want it to be both. Regardless, you continue to use the term “science” as if it was coextensive with “empiricism” and as if any achievement made using an empirical method is by definition science. That is itself a non-empirical claim.
If this were true, then it wouldn’t be the case that the top logic departments in the country were divided, and not unequally, between philosophers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. See Berkeley’s program, considered the top in the country by most official rankings, for an example.
This might be your most ridiculous claim in this thread yet. Ethicists are philosophers. The Director of NYU Langone’s Bioethics program, for example, is a PhD in the philosophy of science, and no, he did no “empirical work” for that degree. The Director of UPenn’s Bioethics program has a PhD in Political Philosophy. Etc. Every Bioethics program has philosophers in its faculty.
Anyone can produce moral standpoints or aesthetic judgments. But academic philosophy can both produce and challenge more rigorous ones than the layperson’s view. One of the claims of most philosophers is that philosophy is indissociable from those issues. To put it differently- most people can learn to cook a few things, but that doesn’t make professional chefs irrelevant.
I’m not sure what you mean by “science of abstract reason.” Can you elaborate?
Ben Goren’s comments simply must be a spoof, designed to irritate. Nobody could actually be that stupid and yet want to read a blog like this one. I advise people not to bother wasting time responding, since they’re probably just being laughed at.
On a more serious note, as someone who is in philosophy (grad student) but takes the idea that i might be wasting my time pretty seriously, one thing I think would help in this discussion was if people paid attention to the distinction between the level of evidence they have for the claim that philosophy doesn’t produce knowledge and the level of evidence for their particular beliefs about WHY this is so. If the evidence for the former is supposed to just be ‘well show us some philosophical progress then’, then I think this is a fair request and its not clear whether philosophers have an especially good answer. (Though I will also say that if you want to look for work by philosophers widely cited in the sciences, look for work cited by psychologists and linguists, not worked cited by phycisists. Here are a handful of examples: http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=917367867056681025&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=2998512591762468326&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=16379055851253434091&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=15904459451636999509&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=6335234739647329370&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=16778252644207127334&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en ) But this doesn’t tell us anything about WHY philosophy doesn’t make progress. I mean, it doesn’t (usually) do experiments sure, but then neither does pure maths and it clearly makes far more progress than philosophy. Plus its not really a very full explanation. Furthermore, a lot of the people here, clearly no little about what philosophers actually do. They may well (this is not sarcasm) still be correct in regarding philosophy as a waste of time, because it doesn’t settle questions very well, but to know WHY it doesn’t settle those questions you would really need to know something about philosophy, rather than just relying on the absence of famous philosophical ‘discoveries’.
I’ll end with a pessimistic thought. Scientists are often sure that philosophy is a waste of time because ot its lack of progress, whilst philosophers often respond to this by saying that actually, everyone makes philosophical assumptions in their thinking all the time, including but not limited to, scientists critiquing philosophy. But of course, these two claims aren’t inconsistent. It could be the case both that philosophical assumptions are usually bullshit and that everyone, not just philosophers, constantly makes and relies on them in intellectual life.
Here’s something Paul Grice discovered in his discussion of conversation and conventional implicature: the maxim of quality. It says that our conversations are governed by an expectation of quality, meaning that your conversational partners expect you to only say things you think are true, and things that you have evidence for. While Grice didn’t think this was a moral norm at all, it is supposed to describe how we generally communicate and the norms that govern actual conversation.
I propose a revision: conversation is governed by a maxim of quality except when it comes to discussing the value of philosophy, in which case evidence or even a philosophy-101 understanding of what philosophy is is not required or expected.
(philosophers you may commence groaning about how I butchered this in an attempt to make a bad joke)
By the way, I think Sean Carroll’s comments are quite interesting and accurate, yet you don’t see any of the commenters actually engaging with them, just ignoring them. I frankly would just like it if physicists would leave us alone, since I know they’re going to convince bright students who like and enjoy philosophy to not study it because public intellectuals who don’t really know what they’re talking about when it comes to philosophy think it’s dumb. And that, frankly, strikes me as the greatest harm of all here. We’ll survive just fine (though cutting our paltry funding might happen, thanks guys, we’d love it if you made it even harder to get jobs teaching philosophy), but scaring students away from something they find interesting and intellectually stimulating is a seriously bad thing.
Also, logic classes don’t teach themselves.
Ben Goren,
“I’m sure the rail industry has put similar effort into disaster preparedness. Yet you, and philosophers in general, are not only unaware of that, you’re convinced that you know better than they how to ensure railway safety. And you have the nerve to do so in the name of “morality”!”
Wait … what? NO ONE is trying to tell the rail industry here how to prepare for a disaster. That’s not the point of the thought experiments at all. The best comparison to them is to Schrodinger’s Cat, and nobody thinks that the take away from that is that we should put cats into boxes with poison gas. The point here is to try to get at the underpinnings of morality by asking if the criteria for a moral action is the most happiness for the most people. If you think that, then in both examples — switch and fat person — you should always choose to sacrifice the life of one for the life of five. When we test that, we discover that the moral intuitions of most people align with that for the first case and not the second, which raises a problem for Utilitarian views. That’s it. Obviously all philosophers would rather such a case never happened and strongly support whatever measures the rail industry wants to put in place to avoid it, but that’s not the point here, anymore than the point of Schrodinger’s Cat is to see if cats will survive it.
How in the world did you get to the conclusion that philosophers were saying ANYTHING to the rail industry with that example, as opposed to simply finding a novel way to ask people if you should sacrifice 1 for 5 in a way that also gets at their intuitions instead of at their conditioned/reasoned responses? Heck, it’s not even the case that either solution should be considered RIGHT philosophically: Utilitarians will think that both cases should choose to sacrifice the 1, but Kantians, at least, will likely argue that at least the second case shouldn’t, if not the first case.
“How do you know that there isn’t some other alternative? What makes you think that there isn’t already something in place to prevent such disasters from happening, and that your proposed solution would even be an option should all the safety fallbacks simultaneously fail?”
Since we were presuming — assuming that you read the post — that this person was indeed an expert, you can’t retreat to the “How do you know that this is even available?” argument. We can presume they know. And if you want to try to argue that in our modern society it isn’t possible for this to occur, we can easily go back to a time where it WAS, indeed, possible for it to happen and ask the question, which is just as valid as asking “If you were in a society where slavery was legal and considered proper, would it be morally correct for you to buy a slave?”, which is a valid moral question and one that we should be able to answer.
“I’ve been trying to be gentle. If you knew anything at all about water safety, you’d know that untrained personnel attempting a rescue from in the water are almost certainly going to drown with the victim they’re trying to help. Yet you still, somehow, think that your completely uninformed philosophical perspective is somehow relevant!”
Because it’s obviously too much to think that maybe you have a life preserver handy that you can throw to them. Or a life jacket. Or you’re wearing a life jacket yourself. Or the drowning victim is a child and is unlikely to drag you under. Or you’ve had some training in how to do that but aren’t at lifeguard level (I did swimming lessons for a number of years and did learn how to safely rescue someone in the water, even without a floatation device, but never hit lifeguard level). Or any one of a number of things that you can have to make it so that you know that you are very likely to be able to successfully rescue that person.
No one is saying that if you can’t rescue the person you should morally jump in and try anyway. But the way you nitpick the examples, I strongly suspect that the reason that you refuse to answer is because you CAN’T, and have no idea how to answer the question.
It concerns me that Einstein may have encouraged reckless physics students to operate locomotives past their recommended operating speed with the windows blacked out. There is no evidence that Einstein held a certification in train operations or safe working, or even any knowledge of basic signalling.
And don’t get me started on James Clerk Maxwell encouraging the evocation of malevolent spirits…
Science is the apportioning of belief in proportions indicated by a rational analysis of empirical observation.
Congratulations! You’ve just nullified the marriages of everybody who has an undergraduate degree. Oh — and you’ve also solved the Italian financial crisis, too; it’s the United States of Amerigo Vespucci Land, after all, so his dependents own the whole country. And the rest of the New World, too.
Those sorts of puerile games may be impressive in philosophical circles, but they’re offensive and the sure sign of the sophistry of somebody desperate who knows the argument is already over.
Even if that claim is true, either he relied heavily on the empirical work of others, such as patient release surveys and morbidity studies, or he’s a fraud. Sean, I would suspect, himself did no empirical work for his degree, yet his degree would not have been possible without unbelievable mountains of such work — and he’ll be the first to tell you that.
b&
And yet you yourself, in this very thread, have insisted that safety procedures for the rail industry should be informed by people’s responses to the Trolley Problem.
(In reality, of course, anything you tried to communicate to the rail industry about the Trolley Problem would go straight to the lunatic bin, alongside the people complaining about the anal-probing martian sasquatch hobos.)
Philosophy in a nutshell, and everything that’s worng with it.
Drop the presumptions in favor of observations, and the reality-based community will welcome you with open arms.
Cheers,
b&
In a critique of inflationary cosmology, A. Penzias wrote that:
“As scientists, what we really seem to do is engage in a form of art criticism: ‘my theory is prettier than yours.’. . . I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of. My personal view is that our esthetic sense is the only reliable guide we have.”
This comment connects to the relationship between physicists and philosophers, I think, in that philosophers tend more toward the esthetic sense, to point out where a theory or body of evidence may be particularly strong, or weak, crooked or strained, and to frame the physics into as coherent a picture as possible.
In his book on the Higgs particle, Carroll has suggested that, “When it comes to understanding the architecture of reality, the low-hanging fruit has been picked.” In the above post, Carroll suggests that “calculation isn’t good enough” to understand ” the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels.” As a physicist, Carroll implicitly agrees that even the combination of calculation plus “thinking deeply” ultimately doesn’t cut it. Empirical evidence obtained directly from Nature is the ultimate arbiter.
Playing the role of philosopher, then, I would point out that, with respect to our understanding of gravity, a very low-hanging fruit remains conspicuously unpicked. In 1632 Galileo wondered what would happen “if the terrestrial globe were pierced by a hole which passed through its center, [and] a cannon ball [were] dropped through [it].” This experiment could be done using smaller bodies in an orbiting satellite or Earth-based laboratory.
Almost 400 years have passed since Galileo proposed the experiment. My esthetic sense tells me that, once becoming aware that we in fact have a large hole in our empirical knowledge of gravity, the correct course of action is to fill it. Our picture of gravity may seem complete from the surface upward, but we do not really know how test objects move through the centers of larger bodies because the experiment has never been done. How do the physicists respond to this suggestion: To pretend that the result of the experiment is already known even without evidence? Or to abide by the ideals of science and actively seek to do the experiment?
For more information about Galileo’s experiment, see
http://www.gravitationlab.com/Grav%20Lab%20Links/Light-and-Clocks-SGM-Pt-1.pdf
Ben Goren:
Sir, your words are so blazingly provocative, so clearly aimed at emotional responses instead of real challenges and so wholly oblivious to their own self-referential irony and devoid of real evidence that I am led to believe, in the parlance, “LOL WUT.” You’re trolling, and it’s increasingly obvious with every further post.
Can you (or some other commenter) give some examples of simple mistakes physicists would make without doing philosophy?
No, it’s not. You are describing an omnipresent process of reasoning that can be ascribed even to chimpanzees. A lab ape solving puzzles is no scientist- unless that’s how little respect you have for the sciences. This is an anti-empirical, subjective definition of science with no regard whatsoever to the history or the sociology of any particular science.
So proving that Bioethics as an interdisciplinary field is heavily reliant on philosophy by citing evidence that several of the top 5 bioethics programs in the country are run by academic philosophers is a “puerile game?” And this from you, a commenter who not only appears to have no sociological information about the scientific fields about which you make broad claims, but also provide no evidence for those claims whatsoever. Why exactly should we accept your definition of science, since there is no empirical consensus or reasoning behind it?
Regardless, ethics is not a science, as we all know. So if you are suggesting that the philosophers running these Bioethics programs are not really philosophers at all, and not doing philosophy, then I must ask what you think they’re doing.
So relying on empirical work is now the acceptable criteria for a science? Does this mean that an artist can be a scientist, so long as they take a look at empirical work and create some meta-theoretical statement about them in an artistic form? If so, then surely there is nothing that can’t be a science, since the subjectivity of the actual discipline appears not to matter as long as it involves “the apportioning of belief in proportions indicated by a rational analysis of empirical observation.”
Here is Einstein’s comment on the relevance of philosophy at one point. He clearly sees some value in it.
“I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”
–Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944
‘But those problems — the basic nature of the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels — are just physics problems, really.’ This is a philosophical statement about reality that Sean is making, and it is a problematic one; see https://www.academia.edu/6261144/Loke_Andrew_2014_._The_benefits_of_studying_philosophy_for_science_education
Nevertheless Sean does much better than Hawking and Krauss by acknowledging the importance of philosophy.
Something I wrote as a FB comment to Levi Bryant, a philosopher (blog: Larval Subjects), who had been addressing this same issue. Why I’ve love both you, and Levi–for so openly bringing your respective disciplines into a larger conversation.
>Interesting that Sean is a blog veteran, with the old Cosmic Variance, this extraordinary conversation between those tops in their field(s) … emphasis on the cross boundry conversions, and aware that there were those who were deeply interested in what particle physicists were doing, but impatient and distrustful with the media translators, who oversimplified, often with an agenda. Here was a way to read those who were tops in their respective fields, without condescension–with the trust that there’s a place where we can converse and contribute–from very different fields of knowledge and reference.
I’m aware, as an artist and poet–of how, historically, the intersection of these fields, when the boundaries have been most permeable, have been most fecund–without question, for the arts, and though less often recognized… this has gone both ways. So to feel a part of what I sense to be the most interesting and mind fizzing stuff in both science and philosophy–with blogs like Cosmic Variance (and many more), and Larval Subjects… make me very happy to have lived long enough to experience this.
Two quick thoughts:
1) Despite thousands of years of philosophy, I have yet to hear a philosopher offer a convincing refutation of nihilism. This suggests to me that philosophy isn’t making much progress, and isn’t about “progress” in the sense that science is.
2) It may be more appropriate to compare philosophy to poetry or mysticism — it’s an interesting way to explore language, occupy our minds and deconstruct ideas, but not one that’s getting us any closer to “objective truth” (whatever that is).
“There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science. Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally, by pure thought, without any empirical foundations—in short, by metaphysics.
……………………………………………………………..
I believe that every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a ‘positivist’ he may fancy himself.
………………………………………………………………..
The metaphysicist believes that the logically simple is also the real. The tamed metaphysicist believes that not all that is logically simple is embodied in experienced reality, but that the totality of all sensory experience can be ‘comprehended’ on the basis of a conceptual system built on premises of great simplicity. The skeptic will say that this is a ‘miracle creed.’ Admittedly so, but it is a miracle creed which has been borne out to an amazing extent by the development of science.”
—Einstein, “On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation”, 1950, reprinted in Einstein,
Ideas and Opinions, 1954.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0210035.pdf
Advice to philosophers: Instead of ranting on comment threads trying to convince people that you are relevant and needed by the scientific community, just produce results that has some meaningful impact on science a we know it today.
Yes, philosophy was once the foundation for science and mathematics. No one is disputing this. All that was useful about philosophy has been incorporated into the scientific process a long time ago. The criticism is that what is left and being done in philosophy departments today is largely useless and of no relevance to science.
“There seems to be two definitions of free will. One is the scientific definition: Can determinism or indeterminism allow us to have a will that is uncaused and that we can control?” “This is a legitimate definition of free will that is too often dismissed by philosophers. It is not a “waste of time” because there are some people who think that indeterminism or randomness could give us the ability to have this type of free will.”
Okay, first, there are much more than two definitions. Second, that isn’t the ‘scientific definition of free will’, you are mistaken if you think that kind of definition of free will isn’t thoroughly explored in academic philosophy. That kind of definition is probably one of the oldest definitions of free will. Third, if you want to argue that our actions are uncaused and that we can therefore control them, you better make sure you give a good argument, which involves being good at using logic and conceptual analysis and the problem is most of them are not very good at either. They will state some facts about how the brain operates, which is all fine and good, but then they will make non-sequitor leaps from those premises to unjustified conclusions. Sometimes its just because their logic is bad. Often its because of poor conceptual analysis, for example, they will conclude that we can ‘control’ our actions, or that they are ‘uncaused’, without ever really thinking about what they, or people in general, even really mean by words like ‘control’ or ‘uncaused, or ‘choose’ in this context. They generally end up saying something insignificant that doesn’t really have any impact on anything people generally care about when discussing the free will question. Anyone can make up a definition of free will and prove it exists, but what is the point unless its a definition that corresponds to what people care about when they worry if we have free will? You have to ask yourself, which definition most accurately captures what people actually care about when they question whether they have free will and does, for example, proving indeterminism actually give that kind of free will or does it give us something else you’ve simply decided to call free will that doesn’t have much at all to do with it?
It’s true that most experts in the area today don’t think the determinism vs indeterminism debate is that relevant to the free will question anymore, but that is for good reasons that the scientists who publish books like that probably would have benefited from reading up on before writing their books.
“1) Despite thousands of years of philosophy, I have yet to hear a philosopher offer a convincing refutation of nihilism. This suggests to me that philosophy isn’t making much progress, and isn’t about “progress” in the sense that science is.”
You say “despite thousands of years of philosophy” as if you have actually been reading it all. Do you read all of the modern philosophy being produced?
I see your kind of argument a lot, Sean should add it to his list. “Oh well I’m not personally aware of ‘x’ so it doesn’t exist, even though I haven’t really tried hard to see whether its there”. It’s common to hear creationists dismiss evolution based on the fact that no one has ever been able to ‘prove’ it’s true to them. They will say things like “I’ve never seen any evidence evolution is true”. That is because they haven’t really looked for it. It’s sad when people don’t bother to put in the hard work to learn about something and instead decide that unless someone else does the work for them and comes to them and convinces them, then they must be right.
jeremy- in the post above yours I tried to clarify that we are not saying that the philosopher should solve physics problems but to solve important issues the PHYSICIST will incorporated some philosophy that he originates with the help of many sources. Including current understanding, the history of science, other philosophers takes and so on.
Ben Goren:
I’ve read your posts for years over at Why Evolution is True, and I’ve found your insight both insightful and valuable to me. I can’t even think of a time I’ve really disagreed with something you’ve wrote, and I always appreciated your tone and civility.
Your posts on this thread are markedly different than anything I’ve read from you before. Your errors have been thoroughly corrected and rebutted, very kindly I might add, by several posters multiple times. Your rhetoric is inflammatory and uncivil. If you are actually trolling, you’d be doing us all a favor by stopping.
Sigh, if the philosophers have a refutation of nihilism, I’d love to see a reference. It’s true that I haven’t read all philosophy in existence, but one would think that a demonstration of an irrefutable philosophy would be big news. Otherwise, philosophy seems analogous to a science which, despite many, many centuries of pontification, has yet to produce a single law of nature or testable theory. At some point, people are going to start wondering why the emperor seems so scantily clad.