10 ms·

A growing number of philosophers are conducting experiments to test arguments

105 points by diodorus 8y ago

sharemywin 8y ago
That is one of the hardest things to wrap your head around. I caught myself the other day saying "well, a lot of people..." when actually it was me, just me, sample size one. "surely most people think the same way I do" or this group of people believe X.
- _rpd 8y ago
  aka the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
- coldtea 8y ago
  Well, you're not exactly a "sample size one". When you say "a lot of people" you also presumably witnessed, interacted with, talked to, and watched, other people that do the same. I can e.g. say "a lot of people have iPhones in NY" just from walking around in Manhattan, even though I never read any particular study. Seeing people and seeing that many of which you see everyday do X is still sampling.
  - fabatka 8y ago
    Yeah, but I would think that humans are generally bad in "intuitive statistics", e.g. when drawing conclusions based on their observations. Of course most of this may come from our inability to observe accurately/objectively when not dedicating significant brain-power to this task.
- incompatible 8y ago
  This sort of empirical determination of different groups of people's "intuitions" may be interesting social science, but should it really matter to philosophy? Shouldn't terms just be defined carefully enough that intuition doesn't come into it? Concepts like "justice" are just social constructs and not aspects of the Universe that exist outside of humanity. They will always be arbitrary.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  differentiating fact from speculation is a difficult and important venture that requires vigilance throughout one's entire lifetime. It's very hard, and we all slip up because it's not really how our brains like to work.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
empath75 8y ago
> First, as the positive programme in x-phi shades into psychology and vice versa, some have asked: is experimental philosophy really philosophy? Science is essentially a branch of philosophy ('Natural Philosophy), so in the broadest possible sense, yes. But I don't think what they are doing sounds like philosophy in the sense that most people would use it. It sounds like psychology. Which is fine! Psychology, after all, grew out of philosophy to begin with. I don't know why there should be a wall built up between the two fields. Think about the dawn of computer science as another example. A lot of the foundational work was done by people who would have considered themselves philosophers, and most of the work firmly remained in philosophical and mathematical journals until people started physically realizing their work in the new machines, and then it became 'engineering' and 'science'. There's not a fine line where one guy was doing philosophy and another guy started doing 'computer science'. It was a gradual shift.
- tnzn 8y ago
  Well, it's fine, except it wouldn't really fit the standards of what we call philosophy today. Doing psychology is fine, but why quit doing philosophy as well ?
- annywhey 8y ago
  I think this particular shift is more reflective of academia at large - it's trendy, and has been for a long while, to "scientize" everything with more experimental data, empiricism and math equations thrown into papers. And analytic philosophy in particular is more adaptable to such a trend since it's often described as being "like science" in its attempts to accumulate tiny stepping stones of knowledge that build on each other. Many established fields, on the other hand, retain a "philosophy of" subset that aims mostly to escape the technical aspects and continue probing basic assumptions. And I think that's a meatier discussion than the analytic approach, which can get very abstract without feeling profound - we have plenty of technical and social developments where ideological assumptions rule by default, because nobody's tried to champion even a slightly deeper approach.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Science departed from philosophy precisely when methodology about evidence and falsifiability of claims became involved. Without experiments to determine if a claim is false, a branch of study is really just one big session of just-so stories, where some authority explains what they think and why they think it, supposedly proving it if it's explained convincingly and eloquently enough. Which is part of why I absolutely can't stand listening to philosophy. It's just not useful to hear people's opinions on things they can't possibly know for sure because of the very nature of the subject. What are you supposed to do with it? It feels like superstition with a veneer of academic legitimacy. By the way, being able to spot one of these when you hear it is a useful skill in life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
Xcelerate 8y ago
> But Gettier suggested some counterexamples to this definition, by telling stories in each of which there’s a true, justified belief that he claimed isn’t a case of knowledge. For example, imagine that at noon you look at a stopped clock that happens to have stopped at noon. Your belief that it’s noon is true, and arguably it’s also justified. The question is: do you thereby know that it’s noon, or do you merely believe it? I've slowly been converging upon the belief that there's no such thing as "truth". There are only models and predictions, and some models lead to better predictions than other models. (What then is a mathematical truth?) For the clock example, "knowing" whether it's noon or not is useless in the framework of prediction. You instead develop a model with two (probability-weighted) possibilities: 1) the clock is broken and thus can't be relied upon as a correlate with other events or 2) the clock is functioning and this information can be utilized in some way to improve future predictions. From a utilitarian perspective, what value does knowing the absolute "truth" about the state of the clock add?
- sykh 8y ago
  I have a slightly different take than you. Suppose you believe A to be true. Furthermore suppose no evidence could be presented that would convince you that A is not true. For you then, isn’t it the case that A is indeed true? It may not be true to someone else but for you that truth exists. I guess I’d say is person and time dependent. Perhaps you agree and would say there is no such thing as objective truth?
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    I wouldn't dignify that with the word "truth", and I don't think you should, either ("you" meaning sykh, not "you" meaning the person in your thought experiment). This person has a very strong belief, so strong that they put the label "truth" on it. But that's a different meaning than the word has had in this discussion thread - so different that different words should be used, to keep us straight. The version you mention here might be called "strongly-held belief" - held so strongly, in fact, that the person holding it can't imagine that it could be questioned, let alone false. But for the rest of the comments, I think that people are using "truth" to mean "correspondence to reality". I think that that is quite different from "strongly-held belief", because I don't think that strongly-held belief changes reality.
tathougies 8y ago
So they're natural philosophers? In other words... scientists? Empiricism is one way of providing evidence for a true statement, but -- from a philosophical perspective -- it is not obvious it is the best or only way. There are some things that are true that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to see or prove. That's supposed to be what philosophy is about (as opposed to psychology)
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  >Empiricism is one way of providing evidence for a true statement, but -- from a philosophical perspective -- it is not obvious it is the best or only way. But it does stop being science when you abandon testable predictions.
  - tathougies 8y ago
    No argument there...
  - aldoushuxley001 8y ago
    > But it does stop being science when you abandon testable predictions. No it doesn't. This is a common myth, but if you look at astronomy or biology you will obviously see that is not the case. Observational science does not require experiments. Yes, experiments provide more rigorous evidence, but to deny that observation also provides evidence is quite frankly to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Our entire science of classification would be moot. And these aren't even soft sciences, they are also hard science.
    - AmericanChopper 8y ago
      Observation is empirical. I genuinely think you’re confused about what science is. It is entirely based on empirical evidence. Broadly speaking it is one source of truth and knowledge, and while there are other sources of truth and knowledge that are also valid, being valid alone doesn’t make them science.
tabtab 8y ago
"If you believe you are a chair, then in theory I can sit on you. Let's test; hold still..."
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
aditya5670 8y ago
https://www.welookups.com/android/Android_ImageView.html https://www.welookups.com/android/Android_ImageView.html
seanvk 8y ago
I must confess the title made me think about Monty Python skits: Philosopher Competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2gJamguN04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2gJamguN04
mettamage 8y ago
> For example, imagine that at noon you look at a stopped clock that happens to have stopped at noon. Your belief that it’s noon is true, and arguably it’s also justified. I'm going to butcher stuff, but could someone please do an ELI 5 why you can't just infer that the clock isn't working? When I look at clocks I look at the hour hand and minute hand. Then I verify my believe by looking at the second hand. That process takes longer than a second, so I immediately notice the clock isn't working and that I cannot be sure whether it's noon. I actually have a bit of a tick when watching clocks in that I repeat this process multiple times at the weirdest moments when there is a clock available. I immediately notice a stopping or non-working clock. I always felt like that -- in first hand experience type of stuff -- we know something is true because we've seen it a trillion times before, like gravity and throwing a tennis ball.
- mushka 8y ago
  The clock doesn't really matter in this example. The point is some simple device that you use to relay on. If the clock exmple bothers you, you can think of a broken thermometer that happens to show the correct temperature.
- Someone 8y ago
  Many large public clocks have only two hands (church towers, for example)
- igravious 8y ago
  Consider your two cases: (1) deciding what time it is by using the mechanism of a man-made clock; (2) inferring there's this invisible thing called gravity at work when a tennis ball is thrown that dictates the flight of the tennis ball and that it is predictable enough that you could catch a thrown tennis ball by intuiting the arc from the velocity of the throw. In the first case you deduce the time. And, until the law of gravity is established, in the second case you induce the arc. In the first case it is entirely reasonable to be perform your little verification step because man-made objects sometimes fail. In the second case there is no need to second guess the universe because your intuition that the laws which govern things like the flight of a ball are not susceptible to revision is correct. I don't think you're butchering anything, I just think you have to be able to recognise when you are using the inductive method and when you are using the deductive method. Next question would be: do these two methods exhaust the range of methods we employ to acquire knowledge? If not, what are the other methods?
Exorus18 8y ago
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3657 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3657
himom 8y ago
Doesn’t what becomes testable in the real-world move out of philosophy to a science?

105 points by diodorus 8y ago

That is one of the hardest things to wrap your head around. I caught myself the other day saying "well, a lot of people..." when actually it was me, just me, sample size one. "surely most people think the same way I do" or this group of people believe X.

_rpd 8y ago
aka the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
coldtea 8y ago
Well, you're not exactly a "sample size one". When you say "a lot of people" you also presumably witnessed, interacted with, talked to, and watched, other people that do the same. I can e.g. say "a lot of people have iPhones in NY" just from walking around in Manhattan, even though I never read any particular study. Seeing people and seeing that many of which you see everyday do X is still sampling.
- fabatka 8y ago
  Yeah, but I would think that humans are generally bad in "intuitive statistics", e.g. when drawing conclusions based on their observations. Of course most of this may come from our inability to observe accurately/objectively when not dedicating significant brain-power to this task.
incompatible 8y ago
This sort of empirical determination of different groups of people's "intuitions" may be interesting social science, but should it really matter to philosophy? Shouldn't terms just be defined carefully enough that intuition doesn't come into it? Concepts like "justice" are just social constructs and not aspects of the Universe that exist outside of humanity. They will always be arbitrary.
vertexFarm 8y ago
differentiating fact from speculation is a difficult and important venture that requires vigilance throughout one's entire lifetime. It's very hard, and we all slip up because it's not really how our brains like to work.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

empath75 8y ago

> First, as the positive programme in x-phi shades into psychology and vice versa, some have asked: is experimental philosophy really philosophy? Science is essentially a branch of philosophy ('Natural Philosophy), so in the broadest possible sense, yes. But I don't think what they are doing sounds like philosophy in the sense that most people would use it. It sounds like psychology. Which is fine! Psychology, after all, grew out of philosophy to begin with. I don't know why there should be a wall built up between the two fields. Think about the dawn of computer science as another example. A lot of the foundational work was done by people who would have considered themselves philosophers, and most of the work firmly remained in philosophical and mathematical journals until people started physically realizing their work in the new machines, and then it became 'engineering' and 'science'. There's not a fine line where one guy was doing philosophy and another guy started doing 'computer science'. It was a gradual shift.

tnzn 8y ago
Well, it's fine, except it wouldn't really fit the standards of what we call philosophy today. Doing psychology is fine, but why quit doing philosophy as well ?
annywhey 8y ago
I think this particular shift is more reflective of academia at large - it's trendy, and has been for a long while, to "scientize" everything with more experimental data, empiricism and math equations thrown into papers. And analytic philosophy in particular is more adaptable to such a trend since it's often described as being "like science" in its attempts to accumulate tiny stepping stones of knowledge that build on each other. Many established fields, on the other hand, retain a "philosophy of" subset that aims mostly to escape the technical aspects and continue probing basic assumptions. And I think that's a meatier discussion than the analytic approach, which can get very abstract without feeling profound - we have plenty of technical and social developments where ideological assumptions rule by default, because nobody's tried to champion even a slightly deeper approach.
vertexFarm 8y ago
Science departed from philosophy precisely when methodology about evidence and falsifiability of claims became involved. Without experiments to determine if a claim is false, a branch of study is really just one big session of just-so stories, where some authority explains what they think and why they think it, supposedly proving it if it's explained convincingly and eloquently enough. Which is part of why I absolutely can't stand listening to philosophy. It's just not useful to hear people's opinions on things they can't possibly know for sure because of the very nature of the subject. What are you supposed to do with it? It feels like superstition with a veneer of academic legitimacy. By the way, being able to spot one of these when you hear it is a useful skill in life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

Xcelerate 8y ago

> But Gettier suggested some counterexamples to this definition, by telling stories in each of which there’s a true, justified belief that he claimed isn’t a case of knowledge. For example, imagine that at noon you look at a stopped clock that happens to have stopped at noon. Your belief that it’s noon is true, and arguably it’s also justified. The question is: do you thereby know that it’s noon, or do you merely believe it? I've slowly been converging upon the belief that there's no such thing as "truth". There are only models and predictions, and some models lead to better predictions than other models. (What then is a mathematical truth?) For the clock example, "knowing" whether it's noon or not is useless in the framework of prediction. You instead develop a model with two (probability-weighted) possibilities: 1) the clock is broken and thus can't be relied upon as a correlate with other events or 2) the clock is functioning and this information can be utilized in some way to improve future predictions. From a utilitarian perspective, what value does knowing the absolute "truth" about the state of the clock add?

sykh 8y ago
I have a slightly different take than you. Suppose you believe A to be true. Furthermore suppose no evidence could be presented that would convince you that A is not true. For you then, isn’t it the case that A is indeed true? It may not be true to someone else but for you that truth exists. I guess I’d say is person and time dependent. Perhaps you agree and would say there is no such thing as objective truth?
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  I wouldn't dignify that with the word "truth", and I don't think you should, either ("you" meaning sykh, not "you" meaning the person in your thought experiment). This person has a very strong belief, so strong that they put the label "truth" on it. But that's a different meaning than the word has had in this discussion thread - so different that different words should be used, to keep us straight. The version you mention here might be called "strongly-held belief" - held so strongly, in fact, that the person holding it can't imagine that it could be questioned, let alone false. But for the rest of the comments, I think that people are using "truth" to mean "correspondence to reality". I think that that is quite different from "strongly-held belief", because I don't think that strongly-held belief changes reality.

tathougies 8y ago

So they're natural philosophers? In other words... scientists? Empiricism is one way of providing evidence for a true statement, but -- from a philosophical perspective -- it is not obvious it is the best or only way. There are some things that are true that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to see or prove. That's supposed to be what philosophy is about (as opposed to psychology)

AmericanChopper 8y ago
>Empiricism is one way of providing evidence for a true statement, but -- from a philosophical perspective -- it is not obvious it is the best or only way. But it does stop being science when you abandon testable predictions.
- tathougies 8y ago
  No argument there...
- aldoushuxley001 8y ago
  > But it does stop being science when you abandon testable predictions. No it doesn't. This is a common myth, but if you look at astronomy or biology you will obviously see that is not the case. Observational science does not require experiments. Yes, experiments provide more rigorous evidence, but to deny that observation also provides evidence is quite frankly to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Our entire science of classification would be moot. And these aren't even soft sciences, they are also hard science.
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    Observation is empirical. I genuinely think you’re confused about what science is. It is entirely based on empirical evidence. Broadly speaking it is one source of truth and knowledge, and while there are other sources of truth and knowledge that are also valid, being valid alone doesn’t make them science.

tabtab 8y ago

"If you believe you are a chair, then in theory I can sit on you. Let's test; hold still..."

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

aditya5670 8y ago

https://www.welookups.com/android/Android_ImageView.html https://www.welookups.com/android/Android_ImageView.html

seanvk 8y ago

I must confess the title made me think about Monty Python skits: Philosopher Competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2gJamguN04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2gJamguN04

mettamage 8y ago

> For example, imagine that at noon you look at a stopped clock that happens to have stopped at noon. Your belief that it’s noon is true, and arguably it’s also justified. I'm going to butcher stuff, but could someone please do an ELI 5 why you can't just infer that the clock isn't working? When I look at clocks I look at the hour hand and minute hand. Then I verify my believe by looking at the second hand. That process takes longer than a second, so I immediately notice the clock isn't working and that I cannot be sure whether it's noon. I actually have a bit of a tick when watching clocks in that I repeat this process multiple times at the weirdest moments when there is a clock available. I immediately notice a stopping or non-working clock. I always felt like that -- in first hand experience type of stuff -- we know something is true because we've seen it a trillion times before, like gravity and throwing a tennis ball.

mushka 8y ago
The clock doesn't really matter in this example. The point is some simple device that you use to relay on. If the clock exmple bothers you, you can think of a broken thermometer that happens to show the correct temperature.
Someone 8y ago
Many large public clocks have only two hands (church towers, for example)
igravious 8y ago
Consider your two cases: (1) deciding what time it is by using the mechanism of a man-made clock; (2) inferring there's this invisible thing called gravity at work when a tennis ball is thrown that dictates the flight of the tennis ball and that it is predictable enough that you could catch a thrown tennis ball by intuiting the arc from the velocity of the throw. In the first case you deduce the time. And, until the law of gravity is established, in the second case you induce the arc. In the first case it is entirely reasonable to be perform your little verification step because man-made objects sometimes fail. In the second case there is no need to second guess the universe because your intuition that the laws which govern things like the flight of a ball are not susceptible to revision is correct. I don't think you're butchering anything, I just think you have to be able to recognise when you are using the inductive method and when you are using the deductive method. Next question would be: do these two methods exhaust the range of methods we employ to acquire knowledge? If not, what are the other methods?

Exorus18 8y ago

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3657 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3657

himom 8y ago

Doesn’t what becomes testable in the real-world move out of philosophy to a science?