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What do you mean by empiricism? I was always under the impression that observation and experiment are what empiricism is all about so I don't understand what yo
by tdb7893 10y ago
What do you mean by empiricism? I was always under the impression that observation and experiment are what empiricism is all about so I don't understand what you mean by saying that it is empirical but not testable.
- foldr 10y agoI think the poster may be thinking of the kinds of statements that Kripke argued were necessary truths that could only be known a posteriori.
- woodruffw 10y agoI have Naming and Necessity on my bookshelf ;)
- woodruffw 10y agoPhilosophy engages in observation and experiment just like the sciences do. It's just that those observations and experiments tend to (but don't always!) run orthogonal to scientific ones. You can test metaphysical claims via a metaphysical framework or even "pure logic" (according to some), just not via normative physics. For example, how can physics even begin to prove that you or I exist? It can qualify our existence as objects in a world, but this says nothing about our minds, their "location", why they exist, why they're different "things" (if they are different things), and so forth. Edit: To the downvoter, please respond as well. Silence hurts more than disagreement.
- mannykannot 10y agoI did not downvote you (I have no time for people who downvote without explanation), but I do think that philosophical 'experiments' are not at all like science experiments, and the salient difference is precisely the lack of an empirical arbiter. Your second paragraph is a good argument for that point. One consequence is that philosophical experiments rarely reach a conclusion (except when science does catch up, as will probably happen over consciousness, for example.) I have come to realize that reaching a conclusion is not the point; the discussion is the point.
- woodruffw 10y agoI think the point of the empirical arbiter is an interesting one. My second paragraph can indeed be used as an argument for the absence of one in philosophy. But where is such an arbiter in science? After all, science is inductive, not deductive. It can give you lots of good reasons and evidence to believe a theory, but the principle of falsifiability requires that a counterexample must plausibly exist. If either philosophical or scientific experiments were to reach an unfalsifiable conclusion, I think we would have a serious problem on our hands.
- tdb7893 10y agoCan you give any examples of philosophical ideas proved experimentally?
- woodruffw 10y agoProof theory itself. You can thank Boole, Cantor, Peirce, Russel, Frege, and Peano (among many others) for that. Depending upon what you mean by a proof, there are also "ideas" in philosophy that are trivially true: 1. I am. 2. There is a thing that I am. 3. The thing that I am is me. 4. I am me. These are completely trivial, but they're also interesting from a language-and-object perspective.
- placebo 10y agoI'd expect philosophy to try and dive into what point 1 actually means rather than to jump to conclusions with points 2 to 4, otherwise it becomes mostly a practice of defining axioms within the realm of thought and manipulating concepts and relations, much like mathematics but without the practicality (in most cases). Of course, answering what point 1 means could require venturing beyond the scope of what can be reached by thought alone, which would place it outside the acceptable scientific boundary. It appears to me as if philosophy is in the unfortunate position where on one hand, it is ill equipped to answer the deepest questions and on the other it can't arrive at any important and empirically falsifiable conclusions. Would be happy to be proved wrong, though.
- woodruffw 10y agoOh, they were meant to be individual axioms, not a cohesive argument. That's what makes them interesting - they're four things that say essentially the same thing, but with profoundly different implications and preconditions. > otherwise it becomes mostly a practice of defining axioms within the realm of thought and manipulating concepts and relations, much like mathematics but without the practicality (in most cases) That tradition in mathematics comes from analytic philosophy. That's not to say that all philosophy is about defining and manipulating relations (it isn't, and shouldn't be), but that language-games (to borrow Wittgenstein's term) are a subject of valid inquiry. > It appears to me as if philosophy is in the unfortunate position where on one hand, it is ill equipped to answer the deepest questions and on the other it can't arrive at any important and empirically falsifiable conclusions. Yeah, it often appears that way. However, we except such a sorry state of affairs in theoretical physics and the workings of the mind -- why should we be any less charitable with philosophy? > Would be happy to be proved wrong, though. With emphasis added: wouldn't we all? ;)
- chongli 10y agoLook at something like archaeology. You can find an artifact in a garbage pit and record it as an observation. Few would challenge this activity as unempirical. On the other hand, no experiment will be able to reproduce your find: once you've dug it up, you've dug it up. The best you can hope for is to find something similar at another site.