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I'm curious why you believe all philosophers need to keep up with mathematics and science, as you appear to imply. Certainly philosophers working in branches th

I'm curious why you believe all philosophers need to keep up with mathematics and science, as you appear to imply. Certainly philosophers working in branches that deal directly with science, math, and the nature of reality must maintain an accurate perspective on the latest research and methods to properly do their job. Philosophers of science must actually study the focus of their research. Those working in metaphysics must ensure their theories do not conflict with those of physicists (or ensure they conflict in interesting and valid ways). But what of ethics, aesthetics, politics and other more humanistic branches of philosophy requires those doing working within them to keep pace with the latest developments in physics and maths?

fish55 10y ago
Those are nothing if not grounded in ontology.
- jmcmichael 10y ago
  Do you believe that the ontology of science, namely the fundamental entities of the standard model and general relativity, serve as the only valid foundation for all other ontologies encompassing the human experience?
  - fish55 10y ago
    I haven't thought of ontologies in the plural; I think it resists multiplicity by definition? I expect to be able to chase secondary facts back into their basis in reality.
    - jmcmichael 10y ago
      Anytime one attempts to abstract entities and features from reality in order to work with them - whether you're practicing philosophy, physics, medicine, writing laws, coding animal behavior, or describing a database schema, one must base one's work on an ontology whether it be implicit or explicit. Many ontologies exist - arguably at least as many ontologies exist as conscious entities capable of conceptualization. Your second statement assumes the affirmative to the question I asked; that the ontology of science does indeed serve as the only valid foundation for all other ontologies, unless I'm missing something. Philosophers call this the theory of 'causal closure'[1] It has many implications that you may or may not agree with in the areas of consciousness, free will, ethics, etc. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure
      - fish55 10y ago
        Very interesting, thanks. I was thinking of logic as the foundation, but now I realize that I was actually thinking of a combination of logic and science.
        jmcmichael 10y ago
        Yes, and logic + various epistemological disciplines besides science give us valid knowledge in other domains.
        fish55 10y ago
        I'm not sure about that. I was very persuaded by this essay, which makes exactly this distinction: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...
        jmcmichael 10y ago
        I don't think Latour's criticism of social theory applies to the causal closure of physics, or science's claimed exclusivity to describe fundamental ontologies; it criticizes the approaches of 20th century post-modernist critique. Are you familiar with his follow-up, 'Reassembling the Social'? I'm not, but in reading a summary it seems to propose better methods for comparing ontologies and systems.
        fish55 10y ago
        It's been a long time since I read that. After posting the link, I reread it, and it seems I misinterpreted it somewhere along the way. I thought that it develops an opposition between "matters of fact" and "matters of concern", and that it breaks along the same lines of the discussion here, but it doesn't.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    That depends what you mean by "foundation". The fundamental entities of physics (still somewhat unknown) can be the ontic foundation for reality even though various other available ontologies genuinely reduce down to them or abstract over them in our special circumstances. The problem comes from claiming that the other ontologies are not merely effective theories but instead fundamental theories, at which point you're starting to make very contentious metaphysical claims and meta-philosophical claims about what you mean by "ontology" and even "exist". Sure, those claims are often exactly those made in subdisciplines like metaphysics and plain-language philosophy, but they're still suspect in a way that, for instance, philosophy of science is not. Plain language is ambiguous and full of conceptual holes: everyone learns that. The difference in dealing with the sciences is that we try to ground all of our "sentences", as philosophers would say, in actions that an experimenter can actually perform in the real world. When you start elevating "plain language" above the actions that actually cash it out, you start running into problems.
wu-ikkyu 10y ago
While many major schools of philosophy are strongly related to the accepted mathematical/scientific theory of the day, OP seems to be making the unproven theoretical assumption that the answers to the metaphysical questions "where do I come from, why do I exist?" can be explained using mathematical models.
- SerLava 10y ago
  What kind of question is that though? In that sort of question, I sense a hostility toward a plain answer. We violently exploded and cooled, and the crispy outer crust of a planet started to organize itself, eventually resulting in a loose group of combinations of matter called people. I mean that's what happened. That, or we're here to be nice to other people... I don't think the mathematical models are at issue here.
  - ordu 10y ago
    > We violently exploded and cooled, and the crispy outer crust of a planet started to organize itself, eventually resulting in a loose group of combinations of matter called people. I mean that's what happened. Your answer is not the answer. How we was able to explode when there was nothing to explode? When there was no space to explode? Once upon a time lived a man named Newton. He invented gravitational theory. We study this theory in school and have no questions for it (or at least the most people don't). But the contemporaries of Newton had a lot of questions. They didn't like the idea of long-range interaction between planets. How planets can know their masses and masses of other planets to move smoothly by Newton's law of gravity? Make a break, think a little about how did you feel about newtonian gravity before you discover general relativity. Isn't newtonian gravity looked great theory explaining all the things? And if so, maybe general relativity in you mind is another semantic stopsign* like newtonian gravity was? Maybe its just the cheap way to answer complex questions without answering? I'm not sure about general relativity, but I'm almost sure about quantum mechanics: QM do not answer questions, QM is just a bunch of calculation methods to predict nature behaviour. Like Newton gravity equation was just calculation method, which is able to predict, but unable to explain. > That, or we're here to be nice to other people... I don't think the mathematical models are at issue here. Yes, you are right. Mathematics is unable to solve such a problems, because philosophy has not made sufficiently strict and clean abstractions, which mathematicians can use in their equations. Mathematics can't work with real problems, only with abstract ones. *) https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Semantic_stopsign https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Semantic_stopsign
JohnStrange 10y ago
I wasn't meant to imply that in general, only for the relation between physics and philosophy that Hawking had in mind. You don't have to "keep up" for doing philosophy in general (that would be impossible, cf. see below). But since I'm working in formal ethics, I can answer your last question. Many problems of value theory and practical reasoning can be solved with formal methods and have been studied by decision theorists since the 50s. For example: parity, value incommensurability, non-additive value aggregation, claims about the intransitivity of betterness, etc. There are mathematical models for all of these. You also cannot make informed claims about, say, practical reasoning and how reasons combine to a from decision or intention to act without knowing at least Arrow's theorem, the various ways in which it can be circumvented, the limitations of qualitative value aggregation, and some fundamental results from measurement theory. Similar things can be said about normative systems (laws, moral codes, deontic rules, etc.), which are also studied by computer scientists and AI. To give another example, social choice is an important part of politics and I don't think you could do proper political philosophy without knowledge of social choice and related methods from economics. Problems of distributive justice and and fairness have been studied extensively in welfare economics and they are not all based on "egoistic agents" and utility maximization. Mathematical method is needed to show that philosophical claims are consistent and to perhaps make them more precise. That certainly doesn't require keeping pace with the latest developments, though, it only requires awareness and some (limited) understanding of old results in applied mathematics, in fields like logic and model theory, order theory and measurement theory, or statistics. Obviously, all of this is just my personal opinion and you can find plenty of math-haters in philosophy.
posterboy 10y ago
I'd take that as a stance for rigor and agree, that isn't exactly rigorously laid out in the argument.

fish55 10y ago

Those are nothing if not grounded in ontology.

jmcmichael 10y ago
Do you believe that the ontology of science, namely the fundamental entities of the standard model and general relativity, serve as the only valid foundation for all other ontologies encompassing the human experience?
- fish55 10y ago
  I haven't thought of ontologies in the plural; I think it resists multiplicity by definition? I expect to be able to chase secondary facts back into their basis in reality.
  - jmcmichael 10y ago
    Anytime one attempts to abstract entities and features from reality in order to work with them - whether you're practicing philosophy, physics, medicine, writing laws, coding animal behavior, or describing a database schema, one must base one's work on an ontology whether it be implicit or explicit. Many ontologies exist - arguably at least as many ontologies exist as conscious entities capable of conceptualization. Your second statement assumes the affirmative to the question I asked; that the ontology of science does indeed serve as the only valid foundation for all other ontologies, unless I'm missing something. Philosophers call this the theory of 'causal closure'[1] It has many implications that you may or may not agree with in the areas of consciousness, free will, ethics, etc. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure
    - fish55 10y ago
      Very interesting, thanks. I was thinking of logic as the foundation, but now I realize that I was actually thinking of a combination of logic and science.
      - jmcmichael 10y ago
        Yes, and logic + various epistemological disciplines besides science give us valid knowledge in other domains.
        fish55 10y ago
        I'm not sure about that. I was very persuaded by this essay, which makes exactly this distinction: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...
        jmcmichael 10y ago
        I don't think Latour's criticism of social theory applies to the causal closure of physics, or science's claimed exclusivity to describe fundamental ontologies; it criticizes the approaches of 20th century post-modernist critique. Are you familiar with his follow-up, 'Reassembling the Social'? I'm not, but in reading a summary it seems to propose better methods for comparing ontologies and systems.
        fish55 10y ago
        It's been a long time since I read that. After posting the link, I reread it, and it seems I misinterpreted it somewhere along the way. I thought that it develops an opposition between "matters of fact" and "matters of concern", and that it breaks along the same lines of the discussion here, but it doesn't.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  That depends what you mean by "foundation". The fundamental entities of physics (still somewhat unknown) can be the ontic foundation for reality even though various other available ontologies genuinely reduce down to them or abstract over them in our special circumstances. The problem comes from claiming that the other ontologies are not merely effective theories but instead fundamental theories, at which point you're starting to make very contentious metaphysical claims and meta-philosophical claims about what you mean by "ontology" and even "exist". Sure, those claims are often exactly those made in subdisciplines like metaphysics and plain-language philosophy, but they're still suspect in a way that, for instance, philosophy of science is not. Plain language is ambiguous and full of conceptual holes: everyone learns that. The difference in dealing with the sciences is that we try to ground all of our "sentences", as philosophers would say, in actions that an experimenter can actually perform in the real world. When you start elevating "plain language" above the actions that actually cash it out, you start running into problems.

wu-ikkyu 10y ago

While many major schools of philosophy are strongly related to the accepted mathematical/scientific theory of the day, OP seems to be making the unproven theoretical assumption that the answers to the metaphysical questions "where do I come from, why do I exist?" can be explained using mathematical models.

SerLava 10y ago
What kind of question is that though? In that sort of question, I sense a hostility toward a plain answer. We violently exploded and cooled, and the crispy outer crust of a planet started to organize itself, eventually resulting in a loose group of combinations of matter called people. I mean that's what happened. That, or we're here to be nice to other people... I don't think the mathematical models are at issue here.
- ordu 10y ago
  > We violently exploded and cooled, and the crispy outer crust of a planet started to organize itself, eventually resulting in a loose group of combinations of matter called people. I mean that's what happened. Your answer is not the answer. How we was able to explode when there was nothing to explode? When there was no space to explode? Once upon a time lived a man named Newton. He invented gravitational theory. We study this theory in school and have no questions for it (or at least the most people don't). But the contemporaries of Newton had a lot of questions. They didn't like the idea of long-range interaction between planets. How planets can know their masses and masses of other planets to move smoothly by Newton's law of gravity? Make a break, think a little about how did you feel about newtonian gravity before you discover general relativity. Isn't newtonian gravity looked great theory explaining all the things? And if so, maybe general relativity in you mind is another semantic stopsign* like newtonian gravity was? Maybe its just the cheap way to answer complex questions without answering? I'm not sure about general relativity, but I'm almost sure about quantum mechanics: QM do not answer questions, QM is just a bunch of calculation methods to predict nature behaviour. Like Newton gravity equation was just calculation method, which is able to predict, but unable to explain. > That, or we're here to be nice to other people... I don't think the mathematical models are at issue here. Yes, you are right. Mathematics is unable to solve such a problems, because philosophy has not made sufficiently strict and clean abstractions, which mathematicians can use in their equations. Mathematics can't work with real problems, only with abstract ones. *) https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Semantic_stopsign https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Semantic_stopsign

JohnStrange 10y ago

I wasn't meant to imply that in general, only for the relation between physics and philosophy that Hawking had in mind. You don't have to "keep up" for doing philosophy in general (that would be impossible, cf. see below). But since I'm working in formal ethics, I can answer your last question. Many problems of value theory and practical reasoning can be solved with formal methods and have been studied by decision theorists since the 50s. For example: parity, value incommensurability, non-additive value aggregation, claims about the intransitivity of betterness, etc. There are mathematical models for all of these. You also cannot make informed claims about, say, practical reasoning and how reasons combine to a from decision or intention to act without knowing at least Arrow's theorem, the various ways in which it can be circumvented, the limitations of qualitative value aggregation, and some fundamental results from measurement theory. Similar things can be said about normative systems (laws, moral codes, deontic rules, etc.), which are also studied by computer scientists and AI. To give another example, social choice is an important part of politics and I don't think you could do proper political philosophy without knowledge of social choice and related methods from economics. Problems of distributive justice and and fairness have been studied extensively in welfare economics and they are not all based on "egoistic agents" and utility maximization. Mathematical method is needed to show that philosophical claims are consistent and to perhaps make them more precise. That certainly doesn't require keeping pace with the latest developments, though, it only requires awareness and some (limited) understanding of old results in applied mathematics, in fields like logic and model theory, order theory and measurement theory, or statistics. Obviously, all of this is just my personal opinion and you can find plenty of math-haters in philosophy.

posterboy 10y ago

I'd take that as a stance for rigor and agree, that isn't exactly rigorously laid out in the argument.