5 ms·

I thought what the philosophers were saying was quite cool, until I realized most of them said things that sounded nice without any link to the foundations of t

I thought what the philosophers were saying was quite cool, until I realized most of them said things that sounded nice without any link to the foundations of the hard physical sciences. When I made that link on why we behave the way we do, I realized that philosophy is a little like theology, and the real truths are much darker.

claudiawerner 7y ago
>until I realized most of them said things that sounded nice without any link to the foundations of the hard physical sciences. Part of philosophy's job is finding a solid epistemological basis for the "hard sciences", and what claims such sciences can legitimately make about the world. >I realized that philosophy is a little like theology, and the real truths are much darker. Philosophy has plenty of "dark truths". What are nihilism or moral skepticism, for instance, if not philosophical theories that negate the meaning of life and morality? Besides, to justifiably throw out philospohy because its claims are inconvenient to you (e.g. by "sounding nice") would require some philosophy to begin with.
- choonway 7y ago
  That part about what claims sciences can make - has been addressed in statistical significance. No need to invoke philosophy. The dark truths are even darker than that. It is what will get you deplatformed. Paul has a very nice article on this somewhere on his blog. somewhere. lazy to link. something about things you can't say.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    > That part about what claims sciences can make - has been addressed in statistical significance. No need to invoke philosophy. This is not what I meant, nor is it what the majority of philosophy of science concerns itself with. I specifically mentioned epistemological basis[4]. Questions such as what deliniates science from pseudoscience, and what empirical investigation tells us about how things really are, are questions in the domain of philosophy[0]. Even so, what rigorous justification deliniates a good statistical significance from a bad one? >The dark truths are even darker than that. It is what will get you deplatformed. Sure enough, philosophy studies those too[1][2][3]. >Paul has a very nice article on this somewhere on his blog. It's hard to see why PG should be considered an authority on philosophy. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/ [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/ [3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/ [4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#WhatKnow https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#WhatKnow
- philwelch 7y ago
  > Part of philosophy's job is finding a solid epistemological basis for the "hard sciences", and what claims such sciences can legitimately make about the world. Can you name a single positive result in all of philosophy that there is any consensus for across the field? Sure, philosophy provides a fair number of attempts at a solid epistemological basis for the hard sciences, but there are so many of them, and despite philosophers not really agreeing on one, physicists can somehow do their jobs perfectly well. Meaning that the philosophy part really doesn’t matter, at least not frequently. In fact, many philosophers implicitly admit this through how they do philosophy. Lots of philosophical arguments are just intuition pumps, with the only real work being to develop some logical theory that stitches together these intuitions. But there’s still the implicit assumption that those intuitions were correct to begin with, and if you’re making that assumption, why do you need the philosophy if you already have intuition?
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    >and despite philosophers not really agreeing on one, physicists can somehow do their jobs perfectly well Physics is an interesting example, because it has so many intersections with philosophy. The kind of claims physicists make may appear reasonable through intuition, and nobody would deny they are useful, but we must answer what it means to do a job well. Religion also does its job well, if considered to work as Feuerbach or Marx described. Many things are useful but undesirable. We separate science from pseudo-science, but there are still contentious areas. The notion that physics is useful but astrology is not on the basis of falsifiability, a theory popular a couple of decades ago, is no longer generally considered justified. It was philosophers who both proposed and refuted the idea that falsifiability is necessary and sufficient to declare something scientific. >Lots of philosophical arguments are just intuition pumps, with the only real work being to develop some logical theory that stitches together these intuitions. This answer to whether philosophers rely so heavily (or at all!) on intuition is pretty contentious, and some argue that intuitions are indispensable[0], and in some fields there's evidence against it. Moral nihilism or moral error theory deny the intuition of there being (even relative) moral authority, for example; some argue that a statement like "murder is morally wrong" merely expresses a negative opinion on murder, yet others argue that the statement cannot possibly be true or false. Feminist philosophy denies the intuition that the scientific method is independent of historical and current gender roles. Philosophers both defend and object to intuitions that pornography doesn't count as art based on more than intuition. The notion that we "have rights" in some sense is a common intuition, but several schools of thought dispute this. The intuition that capitalism is desirable has been taken to task by Marxists. The economist's intuition that price has no relation to labour-time has been debated by value-form theorists. The intuition that things get better as time goes on has been taken to task by Adorno (with examples such as the Holocaust). The theory of contingent identity was one philosophy had nearly completely done away with: the notion that "all necessary truths can be known a priori", but Kripke showed that in cases such as the claim that H2O = water (which can't be known without experimental observation), this can't be true. But philosophers found problem with Kripke's answer[1]. That doesn't mean we're back where we started. Philosophers can't just make the same arguments again. The fact that people found a problem with Kripke's answer is surely a good thing. It would be an intellectual tragedy if we accepted a potentially wrong answer as a good answer. In that view, a "solved problem" in philosophy is actually suspicious, and not necessarily a good thing. Desirable, for sure, but we can't always have what we want. If, hypothetically, philosophers could come to a consensus that physics has no good epistemological foundation, it would mean that physicsts doing their job well has no more meaning than to say astrologists do their job well. In my own view, once you get past a certain point of making your work accord with intuitions about the world, a particular theory can be internally consistent, or internally inconsistent. Take logic, for example - the foundation of classical and formal logic that A != !A is purely an intuition. Some logics play with that rule, too. If the foundational rules of logic are decided by intuition, then mathematics as a whole is too. That doesn't mean I can say that d/dx x^2 = 3 - because it would be internally inconsistent. I'd first have to elaborate a system in which that statement makes sense. The notion of philosophical progress is, itself, highly debated, with many positions on the matter. Sometimes philosophical problems become solved when evidence from the physical sciences is provided (such as Molyneux's Problem). Other times, we need to define what progress really means[2]. In short, whether or not philosophy does make progress, and at what rate, whether the "fact" it doesn't make progress now rules out that it may some day make progress, whether progress is desirable are all philosophical questions anyway. The attempt to answer the question may not be "useful" to daily life, but a lot of mathematics is practically useless too. For that matter, so is the existence of the Higgs Boson or dark matter. So what? [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/experimental-philosophy/#DispRoleIntuPhil https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/experimental-philosophy/#... "For instance, some philosophers argue that in order even to pick out the kind of interest, we need to rely on our intuitive sense of what belongs in the category (e.g., Goldman 2015). To determine the characteristics of knowledge, we need to have a way of picking out which items are genuine members of the kind, and for this we must rely on our intuitive understanding of knowledge." [1] https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/11474 https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/11474 "People talk about the big problems and they propose positions on them, some of which are more convincing, some of which are less convincing. The problem is that you can't really call any of these positions definitive solutions because each position engenders other difficulties, and the solutions to those difficulties engender other problems. It's not that no progress is being made, in these cases. Rather, I think it's that philosophical problems are like fractals. We can delineate broad families of solutions to the big problems that seem reasonable." [2] https://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=eip https://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=139...

claudiawerner 7y ago

>until I realized most of them said things that sounded nice without any link to the foundations of the hard physical sciences. Part of philosophy's job is finding a solid epistemological basis for the "hard sciences", and what claims such sciences can legitimately make about the world. >I realized that philosophy is a little like theology, and the real truths are much darker. Philosophy has plenty of "dark truths". What are nihilism or moral skepticism, for instance, if not philosophical theories that negate the meaning of life and morality? Besides, to justifiably throw out philospohy because its claims are inconvenient to you (e.g. by "sounding nice") would require some philosophy to begin with.

choonway 7y ago
That part about what claims sciences can make - has been addressed in statistical significance. No need to invoke philosophy. The dark truths are even darker than that. It is what will get you deplatformed. Paul has a very nice article on this somewhere on his blog. somewhere. lazy to link. something about things you can't say.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  > That part about what claims sciences can make - has been addressed in statistical significance. No need to invoke philosophy. This is not what I meant, nor is it what the majority of philosophy of science concerns itself with. I specifically mentioned epistemological basis[4]. Questions such as what deliniates science from pseudoscience, and what empirical investigation tells us about how things really are, are questions in the domain of philosophy[0]. Even so, what rigorous justification deliniates a good statistical significance from a bad one? >The dark truths are even darker than that. It is what will get you deplatformed. Sure enough, philosophy studies those too[1][2][3]. >Paul has a very nice article on this somewhere on his blog. It's hard to see why PG should be considered an authority on philosophy. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/ [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/ [3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/ [4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#WhatKnow https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#WhatKnow
philwelch 7y ago
> Part of philosophy's job is finding a solid epistemological basis for the "hard sciences", and what claims such sciences can legitimately make about the world. Can you name a single positive result in all of philosophy that there is any consensus for across the field? Sure, philosophy provides a fair number of attempts at a solid epistemological basis for the hard sciences, but there are so many of them, and despite philosophers not really agreeing on one, physicists can somehow do their jobs perfectly well. Meaning that the philosophy part really doesn’t matter, at least not frequently. In fact, many philosophers implicitly admit this through how they do philosophy. Lots of philosophical arguments are just intuition pumps, with the only real work being to develop some logical theory that stitches together these intuitions. But there’s still the implicit assumption that those intuitions were correct to begin with, and if you’re making that assumption, why do you need the philosophy if you already have intuition?
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >and despite philosophers not really agreeing on one, physicists can somehow do their jobs perfectly well Physics is an interesting example, because it has so many intersections with philosophy. The kind of claims physicists make may appear reasonable through intuition, and nobody would deny they are useful, but we must answer what it means to do a job well. Religion also does its job well, if considered to work as Feuerbach or Marx described. Many things are useful but undesirable. We separate science from pseudo-science, but there are still contentious areas. The notion that physics is useful but astrology is not on the basis of falsifiability, a theory popular a couple of decades ago, is no longer generally considered justified. It was philosophers who both proposed and refuted the idea that falsifiability is necessary and sufficient to declare something scientific. >Lots of philosophical arguments are just intuition pumps, with the only real work being to develop some logical theory that stitches together these intuitions. This answer to whether philosophers rely so heavily (or at all!) on intuition is pretty contentious, and some argue that intuitions are indispensable[0], and in some fields there's evidence against it. Moral nihilism or moral error theory deny the intuition of there being (even relative) moral authority, for example; some argue that a statement like "murder is morally wrong" merely expresses a negative opinion on murder, yet others argue that the statement cannot possibly be true or false. Feminist philosophy denies the intuition that the scientific method is independent of historical and current gender roles. Philosophers both defend and object to intuitions that pornography doesn't count as art based on more than intuition. The notion that we "have rights" in some sense is a common intuition, but several schools of thought dispute this. The intuition that capitalism is desirable has been taken to task by Marxists. The economist's intuition that price has no relation to labour-time has been debated by value-form theorists. The intuition that things get better as time goes on has been taken to task by Adorno (with examples such as the Holocaust). The theory of contingent identity was one philosophy had nearly completely done away with: the notion that "all necessary truths can be known a priori", but Kripke showed that in cases such as the claim that H2O = water (which can't be known without experimental observation), this can't be true. But philosophers found problem with Kripke's answer[1]. That doesn't mean we're back where we started. Philosophers can't just make the same arguments again. The fact that people found a problem with Kripke's answer is surely a good thing. It would be an intellectual tragedy if we accepted a potentially wrong answer as a good answer. In that view, a "solved problem" in philosophy is actually suspicious, and not necessarily a good thing. Desirable, for sure, but we can't always have what we want. If, hypothetically, philosophers could come to a consensus that physics has no good epistemological foundation, it would mean that physicsts doing their job well has no more meaning than to say astrologists do their job well. In my own view, once you get past a certain point of making your work accord with intuitions about the world, a particular theory can be internally consistent, or internally inconsistent. Take logic, for example - the foundation of classical and formal logic that A != !A is purely an intuition. Some logics play with that rule, too. If the foundational rules of logic are decided by intuition, then mathematics as a whole is too. That doesn't mean I can say that d/dx x^2 = 3 - because it would be internally inconsistent. I'd first have to elaborate a system in which that statement makes sense. The notion of philosophical progress is, itself, highly debated, with many positions on the matter. Sometimes philosophical problems become solved when evidence from the physical sciences is provided (such as Molyneux's Problem). Other times, we need to define what progress really means[2]. In short, whether or not philosophy does make progress, and at what rate, whether the "fact" it doesn't make progress now rules out that it may some day make progress, whether progress is desirable are all philosophical questions anyway. The attempt to answer the question may not be "useful" to daily life, but a lot of mathematics is practically useless too. For that matter, so is the existence of the Higgs Boson or dark matter. So what? [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/experimental-philosophy/#DispRoleIntuPhil https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/experimental-philosophy/#... "For instance, some philosophers argue that in order even to pick out the kind of interest, we need to rely on our intuitive sense of what belongs in the category (e.g., Goldman 2015). To determine the characteristics of knowledge, we need to have a way of picking out which items are genuine members of the kind, and for this we must rely on our intuitive understanding of knowledge." [1] https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/11474 https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/11474 "People talk about the big problems and they propose positions on them, some of which are more convincing, some of which are less convincing. The problem is that you can't really call any of these positions definitive solutions because each position engenders other difficulties, and the solutions to those difficulties engender other problems. It's not that no progress is being made, in these cases. Rather, I think it's that philosophical problems are like fractals. We can delineate broad families of solutions to the big problems that seem reasonable." [2] https://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=eip https://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=139...