8 ms·

It's a shame that philosophy has gained such a poor reputation in certain circles. I mean, it's understandable: the extent of most people's interaction with ph

It's a shame that philosophy has gained such a poor reputation in certain circles. I mean, it's understandable: the extent of most people's interaction with philosophy is with cartesian-style "but can we even know we exist??" navel-gazing -- or worse, with the intentionally obscure bits of continental philosophy. Because of this reputation, many (the majority of?) scientifically-minded people view it as a binary choice: you're either a good empiricist or you're one of those damn poststructuralist lit-crit people from the humanities department. IMHO: people who hold this mindset risk missing out on a powerful tool for their mental toolbox.

vinceguidry 11y ago
People tend to forget how utterly limited the capacity we have for scientific inquiry is, and how those limits shaped history and science. Before there was ever science there was philosophy, and that philosophy was shaped by religion, and the same people did all three of those things throughout history. If you took a king from the 1200s and had him look at our scientific establishment, he'd have called them monks. From this perspective, philosophy is religion without deity, and science is just philosophy of the empirical. Disciplines of the mind do not have to have this hard separation, its a shame cynicism and scorn have been allowed to take over the public discourse. Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  I feel that this reflects an ignorance about (a) the lives and work of scientists in the modern day and (b) the lives and work of monks in the 13th century.
- coliveira 11y ago
  > Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack True, but the problem with philosophy is that it is the study of how humans embrace reality, not the study of reality itself. For the simple reason that philosophy has no tools (other than science) to establish what is true or false in the world outside our own minds. If you understand philosophy as the ways we make sense of the world, instead of a tool of finding what is true, then we would have a better time dealing with it.
Retric 11y ago
Step 1: Name a single piece of information* gained from philosophy that is not currently debated. This is why people look down on philosophy. While people might pretend to disagree with this, I would take the complete lack of counter examples as agreement. PS: And because debate about word choice is so popular, information: facts provided or learned about something or someone.
- foldr 11y ago
  One neat result in metaphysics is the discovery that there can't be a property for every predicate, since this gives rise to analogs of Russel's paradox. (Does the property of being a non-self-exemplifying property exemplify itself?)
  - dkural 11y ago
    This is a result in logic, a branch of mathematics. Logic, as practiced inside mathematics, is far more advanced than what's practiced inside philosophy departments. Something like more than 95% logic professors inside philosophy departments cannot competently explain anything in logic after Godel & Tarski.
    - foldr 11y ago
      It's not a result in logic. The question of which properties (if any) exist is not a logical question but a metaphysical one. Of course, philosophers often make use of results in mathematics. If you arbitrarily decide that any philosophical work that does this in some sense "doesn't count", then of course you will find that the remaining work concerns results that are less than certain! It's in the nature of questions that can't be answered through mathematical methods to have less than certain answers. You might notice that many of the most important questions in life fall into this category, though.
    - drdeca 11y ago
      It seems to me that there is no clear break between logic and philosophy? Nor between logic and mathematics. There is also the idea that part of why philosophy is dismissed is because people tend to take results and say that the result isn't really part of philosophy. Could this be because their idea of philosophy is that it has no results, so any results they are shown are concluded to be not part of philosophy?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
MichaelGG 11y ago
I tried to see what it offered. For instance, those "A very short introduction" series of books. Tried out Philosophy of Science. I see things like "what does 'alive' really mean" as something that is what Philosophy of Biology would deal with. That seems... rather useless? Arguing over definitions and going round in circles without contributing, today, to anything? (Everyone used to be called a philosopher, so in years past I'm sure "philosophy" has done plenty.) Looked at Philosophy of CompSci on the Stanford Plato site. Read a lot of ... words... that were just fascinated they could work "duality" into computer programs. Cause a program is source right? But it can also be object code. Ooooh. And what about interpreted scripts, what does all this really mean? ... This would appear to have no redeeming quality. Perhaps I'm wrong I've just yet to see how this could be useful or even really intriguing. Then there's even top scientists like Feynman making mocking comments about philsci. So given even top scientists are unconvinced there's value, I start to think OK maybe I'm not missing out on much.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  We could easily pull up dozens of examples of spurious, dull or absurd results and claims from science. There are interesting things to be learned from philosophy even if some of it is dumb. It's especially important to address the claims of science to be a perfect method of knowledge; in the absence of religious justifications for human activity science has been set up as a valid replacement and its important to examine its right to the throne. We have a long history of attempts at scientific decision making that claims an objectivity it ought not to have (see: forced sterilizations, eugenics, mass medication and medicalization of human behavior) and tremendous consequence resulting from this sort of claim (environmental catastrophe, for example). If science is going to intrude on the domain of politics, of deciding what is human and who should be considered human, we seriously need to challenge the assumption of objective knowledge and think about science's fundamental dependence on metaphysical constructs. Easy to ignore if you are Feynman at the top of this pyramid, but scientific authority is just authority; it has to be accountable to something or it is going to produce monsters. As the article states, this exploration can only occur from outside science; we can't answer claims about its validity or access to truth from within science.

vinceguidry 11y ago

People tend to forget how utterly limited the capacity we have for scientific inquiry is, and how those limits shaped history and science. Before there was ever science there was philosophy, and that philosophy was shaped by religion, and the same people did all three of those things throughout history. If you took a king from the 1200s and had him look at our scientific establishment, he'd have called them monks. From this perspective, philosophy is religion without deity, and science is just philosophy of the empirical. Disciplines of the mind do not have to have this hard separation, its a shame cynicism and scorn have been allowed to take over the public discourse. Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
I feel that this reflects an ignorance about (a) the lives and work of scientists in the modern day and (b) the lives and work of monks in the 13th century.
coliveira 11y ago
> Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack True, but the problem with philosophy is that it is the study of how humans embrace reality, not the study of reality itself. For the simple reason that philosophy has no tools (other than science) to establish what is true or false in the world outside our own minds. If you understand philosophy as the ways we make sense of the world, instead of a tool of finding what is true, then we would have a better time dealing with it.

Retric 11y ago

Step 1: Name a single piece of information* gained from philosophy that is not currently debated. This is why people look down on philosophy. While people might pretend to disagree with this, I would take the complete lack of counter examples as agreement. PS: And because debate about word choice is so popular, information: facts provided or learned about something or someone.

foldr 11y ago
One neat result in metaphysics is the discovery that there can't be a property for every predicate, since this gives rise to analogs of Russel's paradox. (Does the property of being a non-self-exemplifying property exemplify itself?)
- dkural 11y ago
  This is a result in logic, a branch of mathematics. Logic, as practiced inside mathematics, is far more advanced than what's practiced inside philosophy departments. Something like more than 95% logic professors inside philosophy departments cannot competently explain anything in logic after Godel & Tarski.
  - foldr 11y ago
    It's not a result in logic. The question of which properties (if any) exist is not a logical question but a metaphysical one. Of course, philosophers often make use of results in mathematics. If you arbitrarily decide that any philosophical work that does this in some sense "doesn't count", then of course you will find that the remaining work concerns results that are less than certain! It's in the nature of questions that can't be answered through mathematical methods to have less than certain answers. You might notice that many of the most important questions in life fall into this category, though.
  - drdeca 11y ago
    It seems to me that there is no clear break between logic and philosophy? Nor between logic and mathematics. There is also the idea that part of why philosophy is dismissed is because people tend to take results and say that the result isn't really part of philosophy. Could this be because their idea of philosophy is that it has no results, so any results they are shown are concluded to be not part of philosophy?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

MichaelGG 11y ago

I tried to see what it offered. For instance, those "A very short introduction" series of books. Tried out Philosophy of Science. I see things like "what does 'alive' really mean" as something that is what Philosophy of Biology would deal with. That seems... rather useless? Arguing over definitions and going round in circles without contributing, today, to anything? (Everyone used to be called a philosopher, so in years past I'm sure "philosophy" has done plenty.) Looked at Philosophy of CompSci on the Stanford Plato site. Read a lot of ... words... that were just fascinated they could work "duality" into computer programs. Cause a program is source right? But it can also be object code. Ooooh. And what about interpreted scripts, what does all this really mean? ... This would appear to have no redeeming quality. Perhaps I'm wrong I've just yet to see how this could be useful or even really intriguing. Then there's even top scientists like Feynman making mocking comments about philsci. So given even top scientists are unconvinced there's value, I start to think OK maybe I'm not missing out on much.

astazangasta 11y ago
We could easily pull up dozens of examples of spurious, dull or absurd results and claims from science. There are interesting things to be learned from philosophy even if some of it is dumb. It's especially important to address the claims of science to be a perfect method of knowledge; in the absence of religious justifications for human activity science has been set up as a valid replacement and its important to examine its right to the throne. We have a long history of attempts at scientific decision making that claims an objectivity it ought not to have (see: forced sterilizations, eugenics, mass medication and medicalization of human behavior) and tremendous consequence resulting from this sort of claim (environmental catastrophe, for example). If science is going to intrude on the domain of politics, of deciding what is human and who should be considered human, we seriously need to challenge the assumption of objective knowledge and think about science's fundamental dependence on metaphysical constructs. Easy to ignore if you are Feynman at the top of this pyramid, but scientific authority is just authority; it has to be accountable to something or it is going to produce monsters. As the article states, this exploration can only occur from outside science; we can't answer claims about its validity or access to truth from within science.