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Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy

95 points by seliopou 12y ago

bdfh42 12y ago
3:0 to Physicists I think
- bdfh42 12y ago
  Ha ha ha ha ha
- ISL 12y ago
  Sean Carroll is a physicist, and a good one.
vijayboyapati 12y ago
The trouble, I feel, with the overlap between science and philosophy is that most modern practitioners of what we know as "science" only have exposure to one epistomological world view: positivism. Granted, this world view has created a great abundance of valuable and life improving knowledge for humanity - as Bacon would have described it, it is good for more than disputation (no offense, to Ol' Aristotle) - but it does not encompass the entire sphere of knowledge. There is authentic knowledge to be gained from disciplines which are entirely a priori - such as mathematics, or as some argue, economics.
- inscrutablemike 12y ago
  Mathematics is not a-priori. No form of knowledge is.
  - abruzzi 12y ago
    Care to elaborate? A-priori is generally used to mean that it does not rely on experience or observation. So while the words and symbols we use to explain 2+2=4 (i.e. Two, plus, four, equals) are leaned concepts, the truth and the ability to understand that truth is independent of that experience.
    - zenogais 12y ago
      He's getting that argument from good ole Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason from 1781 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason). The basic argument, so far as I understand it, is that there must exist certain "structures in the brain" that make all our understanding possible. Since these are brain structures they must be a priori (everyone is born with them). On the side of aesthetic senses he boils these down to space and time. From our sense of space it is possible for us to reason about geometry and therefore much more abstract forms of mathematics without having to have recourse to the "outside" world. So we can envision and prove new geometrical proofs and our internal brain structures for understanding space ground these proofs in a sort of sense certainty. To go to your example of 2 + 2 we can say that nowhere in these symbols is contained the meaning 4 - so no amount of analysis (dividing these symbols up, reducing them to more primitive symbols, etc) will get us to the equality - we have to perform some operation internally and that operation has to be grounded on something a priori - these would be our sense of space where we can envision two things and two more things and perform the count and arrive at 4 - all done outside of experience. Now there are plenty of philosophers who came later who have tried instead - following in the shoes of Hume - to perform a materialist grounding of these faculties not in the brain but derived from sense experience itself - sense experience somehow constitutes the structures of the brain and changing external sense experiences can reshape or reconstitute these brain structures. For example, Gilles Deleuze seems to me to do something like this.
    - abruzzi 12y ago
      Ok, the only Deleuze I've read were his cinema books. Kant definitely sees mathematics as synthetic a priori.
    - Torgo 12y ago
      If I understand you correctly, you are saying that math isn't invented, it is discovered. I am not sure this is true. I think they are models that are not true or untrue, just consistent and more or less useful than other particular models. It is trivially true that if I have two things in my left hand and two things in my right hand and I put them together, there are four things because this can be mapped onto identity of things. But really quickly it doesn't scale and you need non-real concepts to solve more complex problems. Roman numerals mapped to things (I,II,III) but Arabic were more symbolic and enabled more complex calculations (but still were base-10, which is a choice, not reality, some bases are better for certain calculations than others.) But again they still represented things in some sense. Zero was invented, it had to be invented because it's not representing a thing that can be counted, it's the lack of a thing so it's, I think, fundamentally a concept and not "real." It's still fairly intuitive (despite the fact that it took millions of years to invent) but then there are concepts like infinity. But then it turned out that that just described an infinite number of "things", there was also uncountably infinite. Then there are imaginary numbers. They can solve real problems, but I don't even know what they are. They seem to be an artifact of math that let you solve quadratic equations even though they map into something that can't even be said to be a "lack" of something, like zero is. It is a mapping into a completely virtual space. It was invented to solve problems, but it's not real in any material sense. I'm not a math person, so there are a lot more that I don't know anything about. Maybe I missed the point of your statement, but I wanted to explain what I think. That math isn't reality, it is a human invention that describes reality. You can have things in math that aren't reality but are useful models.
  - ambler0 12y ago
    I have to agree with inscrutablemike here. Seems to me that all forms of human knowledge have both an empirical and a rational component.
    - cdixon 12y ago
      Sounds like you are interested in philosophy after all! :) Whether and how there can be a priori knowledge is an old philosophical question.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - drdeca 12y ago
    I don't understand. If I say Define L to be a thing of type J. Where j is a J, define T j L to be j Define T L j to be the same as j. Where j is a J define W j to be a J. And where a and b are both J, define T a W b to be the same as T W a b Define a K to be a J and either be L or W L or where k can be determined to be a K, W k. I think these definitions are sufficient to show that if a and b are both a K then T a b can be shown to be the same as T b a. ( though this does not neccisarily make addition over the natural numbers because I did not include the requirement that if a and b are both a K and are not the same then W a must not be the same as W b) And while I'm not totally sure about the definition of K ( specifically the whether something can be shown part), I think this would be based just on definitions, without really any axioms? Although I suppose it is possible that I included an axiom and just wrote "Define" before it. (tangent: I suppose one could say "define a system with the following axioms" and then make a proof about that system, and claim that it was a proof by definition?) Maybe I don't really understand what a priori really means (this seems fairly likely) but I don't think definitions are considered a priori?
    - abruzzi 12y ago
      Definitions can absolutely be a priori. Think of the definition of a triangle, some thing like "a closed geometrical shape with three sides." There is nothing about observation of the world that will tell you that this is or isn't true. It is true by definition. Then all closed three sided shapes are triangles, by definition. Then you can start building all sorts of proofs from that, and a few other definitions. You get to the Pythagorean theorem, trigonometry, and off you go, without ever needing anything other than the ideas and definitions.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    A priori knowledge is supposedly independent of experience. I agree with you that we have no evidence of knowledge outside human experience. But from a scientific perspective, both knowledge and experience arise from the physical properties of the universe; properties that predate humans and biological systems entirely. From that perspective, one could say that all knowledge is a priori. But whether we say it's all priori or posteriori doesn't really matter. The point is that making the distinction privileges the human perspective in a way that we have no scientific evidence to support. The entire exercise begs the question by assuming that human experience is determinative, or distinct in any way from the rest of the universe.
- leephillips 12y ago
  I really don't think so. Positivism is more a feature of how philosophers of science tried for a while to describe science than it is of actual science. And it seemed to fall out of favor decades ago. Actual science is marked by commonsense, naive realism. It has more in common with how a plumber looks for a leak than with most of the formalisms dreamed up by philosophers. EDIT: And this is the big one that the article leaves out: the main complaint by scientists against philosophy is that it's so often wrong, especially about science. Many scientists who get curious about philosophy dip into some "philosophy of science" for obvious reasons, and don't recognize there any of the descriptions of the science that they're familiar with. And when philosophers try to apply their general principles to instruct is about how the universe works, they're even more wrong. Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy is a good introduction to this wrongness. He devotes a good deal of it to showing how Kant derived so many wrong conclusions about physics that he thought must be true because of general principles.
  - rudimental 12y ago
    I agree. In my experience scientific researchers were not interested in philosophy of science and meta- questions that interested me in philosophy. They would engage in conversation but I doubt they concerned themselves with the big philosophy of science, epistemology or metaphysics questions. They were naive realists and that's ok- it seemed helpful for getting data, interpreting results, keeping the wheels of science moving forward.
  - alexqgb 12y ago
    Limiting themselves to the philosophy of science may be the problem. Far better to start with a history of philosophy in general. Not only does this provide a better introduction to philosophy qua philosophy, it also provides the necessary historical framework, which is essential in understanding how sciences can, and did, emerge from from the philosophic tradition. Aside from being interesting in its own right, this keeps you from making the mistake that philosophy is simply a precursor to science, and that it can be reliably judged based on how much ended up in the realm of empiricism.
  - biomcgary 12y ago
    I am a biologist with a love for philosophy of science and found that both Kuhn and Lakatos discussed science in ways that were at least intelligible. Lakatos in particular described a philosophy of science that seemed to match what I have observed in practice.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  If you want a word view where science is deeply rooted, it's pragmatism, not positivism. And creating value is what pragmatism does.
abruzzi 12y ago
Most people have a very mistaken view of modern philosophy, and unfortunately this article does little to clarify. Today, analytic philosophy (as opposed to the continental philosophers) is fairly rigorous and usually narrow focused. It can be about modeling systems (for example Bayesian epistemology, various forms of modal logic). It can be about decision analysis (game theory) It can be about number theory (Frege, Gödel, etc.) and it can be about scientific theory (Popper, Kuhn, Quine, Ulian). Some of these things have been profoundly influential, and important to the modern world.
- Locke1689 12y ago
  I agree. I minored in philosophy, and the one overarching issue isn't the comments made about philosophy by scientists, it's the misunderstanding of what modern philosophy consists of. The article states three example criticisms. I find the derision of the first two completely fair -- neither are very useful criticisms. The derision of the third is misguided. The criticism is completely fair -- which is why philosophy itself is the biggest voice of that criticism! Analytic philosophy is philosophy's answer to that entire criticism of (what is now called) continental philosophy. The biggest problem with scientists is not their criticism, it's that their criticism is dated. Philosophy had this debate decades ago and has since changed as a result.
- davorak 12y ago
  What divides these rigorous branches of philosophy form mathematics then? If it is because it is applied in some sense then they could fall under applied mathematics.
  - exelius 12y ago
    Very little; to be honest. But the convergence has happened from both sides over the last 150 years or so. Much of theoretical mathematics could probably land in the philosophy camp, but there's no clear delineation even from university to university. In some schools, symbolic logic is considered philosophy, in others it's mathematics, and in others it's computer science.
  - abruzzi 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
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pervycreeper 12y ago
The criticism certainly goes both ways, with the understanding of many (most?) in philosophy and the humanities in general of what science actually is and has done is deeply depressing (see Soakl and Bricmont's "Intellectual Impostures"). My personal observation is that there is a lot of resentment, envy, and repressed inferiority complexes that humanist academics hold towards scientists.
hyperliner 12y ago
We need someone to tell us not just how things work, but why they work.
bambax 12y ago
While a physicist should be commended for defending philosophy, I'm still not convinced that "asking deep questions about what it all means" isn't a complete waste of time. Regardless of whether anything "means" anything, I really don't get why it should. Uncovering actionable (and often very surprising) laws of nature sound much more exciting to me than pondering about "meaning", especially when done by people who don't have a deep understanding of physics. The only people who should be philosophizing are the physicists, but they'd rather do physics instead, and I think that's a good thing.
squozzer 12y ago
Some of the problem, as Locke1689 said, lies in how non-philosophers perceive philosophy. I'm betting most of the laity were exposed to philosophy through low-level survey courses where notions such as substrata and monads were thrown about. While interesting and entertaining, to the typical physics major, it seems akin to teaching chemistry using alchemy and cosmology using geocentrism. Young physicists also seem unusually biased towards mathematical forms of expression, as opposed to "mere" human language.
- jimbokun 12y ago
  "I'm betting most of the laity were exposed to philosophy through low-level survey courses where notions such as substrata and monads were thrown about." But at least it was a good grounding for becoming a functional programmer!
davorak 12y ago
> (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.) The impression that most physicists I know is that the percentage of bad philosophers or bad philosophy papers is much high then in chemistry, physics, biology and several others. I could not take the arguments here and convince those friends/peers otherwise. > Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be to a model-building phenomenologist. The problem is that philosophers have so little data to work with. The problems they are pointed at often need tremendous amounts of data or very hard to collect data. Instead of making an incremental improvement on collecting that data or analyzing existing data it seems to often be the case that philosophers decided to work with guess work instead. >The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time. A theoretical paper that examines the various quantum calculation techniques through the lens of information theory and attempts to make rigorous claims on which methods or fundamentally more simple(form an information theory definition) sounds like solid science and an interesting read. "trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality" - does not sound like something I would want to fund or read. >And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things. I would want an example of an issue where calculation plays no role. Being able to communicate the ideas to fellow humans might be thought to involve not calculation, I would argue that starting with the simplest mathematical models then isomorphically(or at least minimize information lose) tweaking for human understanding would be the non-practical ideal method and use considerable calculation.
guygurari 12y ago
I found the article vague and unconvincing. If philosophy is useful for physics research, where is the evidence? What new thing did philosophy contribute to physics in the last 100 years? I am a physicist who cares deeply about the foundational issues mentioned in the article. And yet I honestly don't see any meaningful input about these issues coming from philosophers.
- rudimental 12y ago
  From a blog comment- is it convicing? "One central question in the philosophy of physics is how we should understand quantum mechanics (QM). We may want to know what we should take QM to be about. It’s worth noting that, in some (but not all) cases, this is no longer an empirical question: for instance, the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of QM is empirically equivalent to the Everett "many worlds" interpretation of QM. So, if we can’t do an experiment to settle the issue, we need to resort to some other method, which is where philosophers of physics come in."
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    If we can't do an experiment to settle the issue, then maybe the two are equivalent, and Occam's Razor says don't get all theoretical about many universes without good reason? On the other hand, sooner or later, someone may figure out how to do an experiment that can tell the difference (unless it's provable that the two interpretations always give the same physical results).
    - scott_s 12y ago
      I'm currently reading Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...). A common point he makes is that most scientists operate under an informal paradigm. A paradigm, to Kuhn, are the set of shared understandings and interpretations that are not themselves formal theories. The importance of such paradigms is that they seem to determine what scientists investigate, and what they're primed to even see. An example Kuhn gives are X-rays. Their discovery caused some consternation, even though their existence did not need a full theoretical overhaul. The consternation was that they were completely unexpected, but they also must have been present in many prior experiments, yet never directly reported. To directly address your point, scientists are human, and will probably lean one way or another on understanding quantum mechanics. How they lean will influence what sort of questions they investigate, how they investigate it, and what sort of outcomes they will look for.
skizm 12y ago
I might misunderstand philosophy, but I think about it like this: scientists gather data, run experiments, etc. while philosophers draw conclusions. Sure most/maybe all scientists draw their own conclusions (it is pretty much the only way to get published) but sometimes the conclusions are not so obvious. Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle mean we have free will? Can free will exist? What sort of (theoretical) evidence would we need to disprove free will? Is that line of questioning philosophy or science? I'm really not sure. I think you take a headlong leap into science when you start running tests, but I'm not sure at what point talk turns from philosophy to science. In the end, everyone is just trying to make a more accurate map, right?
- Amezarak 12y ago
  You don't need to go all the way to physics for free will - you need look no farther than psychology to determine whether free will exists or not. Actually, you don't need to look any farther than a serious philosophical treatment of what you mean by "free will" to see that the question itself is a confused one based on untenable (or even more confused) assumptions. Nevertheless the belief in free will is very important for human happiness; or at least, happy and/or successful people tend to believe in free will, or just that their will is free and they're the master of their fates and the captain of their souls. That is often the motive behind free will arguments, which generally have a very powerful smell of rationalization about them, but a thing is not necessarily true because human happiness (or even life) requires believing it is true or leads to the feeling it must be true.
- vacri 12y ago
  In the end, everyone is just trying to make a more accurate map, right? Pretty much... which is why philosophy and science are not mutually exclusive. If they were, there wouldn't be an area of philosophy called the 'philosophy of science', which concerns itself with the best ways to acquire knowledge. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science
rudimental 12y ago
Best quote: "Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes." Philosophers interests overlap at times with mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, physicists. Sometimes they have valuable things to say to each other. E.g. Experimental philosophy is a trend in philosophy, and people who have never done scientific experiments before could learn how to do them better from scientists who have that experience and knowledge. I support people that find common ground and work together to help each other tackle the puzzles they're working on.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Reminds me of an anecdote: for a long time, when faced with the non-intuitiveness that is quantum theory, physicists had one simple rule shut up and do the math.
jgallag8 12y ago
The author seems to be saying that the main reason physicists should pay attention to philosophers is that philosophy can be useful in the study of physics. I think he could have made his point better by noting that pretty much any thinking about why we study physics leads directly to philosophy. What is the point of doing science? What is knowledge, and why should we be interested in it? These are just the sort of questions philosophy as a discipline is intended to answer. Any physicist who is interested in any 'meta' questions about his/her work is necessarily interested in philosophy. One can disagree with the particular methodologies of modern academic philosophy, but it is hard to see how any intellectually curious person can dismiss the field entirely. It seems to me that this is a stronger argument for the relevance of philosophy to science.
- michaelsbradley 12y ago
  As I read Dr. Carroll's blog post, I was reminded encouragingly of how a famous philosopher and Parisian professor[1] – the student of a great medieval experimentalist[2] – in 1265 began his opus magnum with a critique aimed at those who argued that philosophy was the pinnacle of human intellectual pursuit, encompassing all else. See Article One, Question One of the First Part[3] in the Summa Theologica[4]: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Great http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Great [3] http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Theologica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Theologica
imurray 12y ago
Somewhat related: I'm currently enjoying Scott Aaronson's "Quantum computing since Democritus". A snippet: Not every branch of science was scouted out ahead of time by philosophy, but some were. And in recent history, I think quantum computing is really the poster child here. It's fine to tell people to "Shut up and calculate," but the question is, what should they calculate? At least in quantum computing, which is my field, the sorts of things that we like to calculate — capacities of quantum channels, error probabilities of quantum algorithms — are things people would never have thought to calculate if not for philosophy. For more: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ — it's been posted here a bunch of times, although without any comments.
mathattack 12y ago
Something I think Philosophers should also stop saying silly things about Physics.
oso2k 12y ago
I've heard many research scientists say, "Science is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
- sigmaml 12y ago
  I heard a variant thereof. ``Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. Science is what I'm doing once I figure that out!"
hackuser 12y ago
HN naturally attracts people with expertise in STEM. Is it really meaningful or interesting that they think their own field is more valuable and important than others?
deleted 12y ago
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asgard1024 12y ago
I found the following, I think apt, quote from Dan Dennett: "In a review of Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, in New York Review of Books, the British geneticist Steve Jones had the following comment to make: "To most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex. It is cheaper, easier and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it." Now that view is all too common, and I understand it from the depths of my soul. I appreciate why people think this, but I think it is also important to combat this stereotype in a friendly and constructive spirit, and no place better than in a center for research in cognitive science. What philosophers can be good at – there aren't many things we can be good at – is helping people figure out what the right questions are. When people ask me whether there's been any progress in philosophy I say, "Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."
- bladedtoys 12y ago
  >"Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer." To this I might add a rhetorical question: how would science have gone about discovering the scientific method? Indeed, in which discipline would that question fall even today?
  - abruzzi 12y ago
    An the answer to a rhetorical question in case anyone is interested: Philosophy of Science. Specifically read Hume (Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding) who demonstrated that inductive reasoning to universal laws (empiricism) was fundamentally based on circular reasoning. Then Karl Popper developed the idea of falsification to show that while Hume is correct--you cannot prove natural laws as true, you can prove them false. He essentially codified the idea that scientific laws have to be testable, and falsifiable. So scientific laws are contingent. They are they closest we have to the truth, until someone devises a test that proves them wrong.
seanewest 12y ago
There is a whole other sector of philosophy that is almost completely divorced from science that is often called "Continental Philosophy". It deals with all of the classic problems -- meaning, love, truth, etc. The U.S. tends to not hear a lot about it, but it's huge in the non-english speaking world. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy
- abruzzi 12y ago
  Yup. Modern philosophy is usually divided into Analytic and Continental. Analytic is by far the most common in England (its birthplace) and the US. Continental (as the name implies) is most common in France and Germany. It can be much more abstract. Phenomenology and Existentialism are two strains of Continental philosophy (Husserl for the first, and Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard for the other.)
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  It's also frequently pretty silly. For the science-trained reader it can be painful to read. For example a popular rhetorical technique in this area is to take a well-defined scientific idea and use it as if it was a metaphor, then use the metaphor to imply some claim, then claim that the scientific idea entailed the claim. Also, explaining things in an elliptical and opaque way is often considered OK, since it provides a certain kind of experience for the reader. In the Anglo-American tradition, clarity is an objective, rather than giving off a vibe where you kind of get the idea. These guys point out some howling examples where technical terms are abused to the point of meaninglessness: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861971249/o/qid=979258668/sr=2-4/026-0995052-9994019 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861971249/o/qid=97...
aidenn0 12y ago
I think a big part of why many physicists reject philosophy as a useful endeavor is that a lot of popularly-known philosophy places inductive reasoning below deductive reasoning.
goldenkey 12y ago
Philosophy is more concerned with consciousness being a black-box and thus physical measurements not being able to be fully trusted. Science assumes a physical world that does not lie above untrusted surface. However, philosophy takes nothing for granted. It's possible that you are the only real conscious person, and everyone else is just merely 'reactive.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism There is not a divide between Philosophy and Physics. Their axioms are merely different. Physics has axioms. Philosophy is about life, and therefore examines it with NO precepts. In order to discover the truth about the universe, one must make no assumptions. One must simply understand the level of truth each thought holds. This is the 'golden key.'

95 points by seliopou 12y ago

bdfh42 12y ago

3:0 to Physicists I think

bdfh42 12y ago
Ha ha ha ha ha
ISL 12y ago
Sean Carroll is a physicist, and a good one.

vijayboyapati 12y ago

The trouble, I feel, with the overlap between science and philosophy is that most modern practitioners of what we know as "science" only have exposure to one epistomological world view: positivism. Granted, this world view has created a great abundance of valuable and life improving knowledge for humanity - as Bacon would have described it, it is good for more than disputation (no offense, to Ol' Aristotle) - but it does not encompass the entire sphere of knowledge. There is authentic knowledge to be gained from disciplines which are entirely a priori - such as mathematics, or as some argue, economics.

inscrutablemike 12y ago
Mathematics is not a-priori. No form of knowledge is.
- abruzzi 12y ago
  Care to elaborate? A-priori is generally used to mean that it does not rely on experience or observation. So while the words and symbols we use to explain 2+2=4 (i.e. Two, plus, four, equals) are leaned concepts, the truth and the ability to understand that truth is independent of that experience.
  - zenogais 12y ago
    He's getting that argument from good ole Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason from 1781 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason). The basic argument, so far as I understand it, is that there must exist certain "structures in the brain" that make all our understanding possible. Since these are brain structures they must be a priori (everyone is born with them). On the side of aesthetic senses he boils these down to space and time. From our sense of space it is possible for us to reason about geometry and therefore much more abstract forms of mathematics without having to have recourse to the "outside" world. So we can envision and prove new geometrical proofs and our internal brain structures for understanding space ground these proofs in a sort of sense certainty. To go to your example of 2 + 2 we can say that nowhere in these symbols is contained the meaning 4 - so no amount of analysis (dividing these symbols up, reducing them to more primitive symbols, etc) will get us to the equality - we have to perform some operation internally and that operation has to be grounded on something a priori - these would be our sense of space where we can envision two things and two more things and perform the count and arrive at 4 - all done outside of experience. Now there are plenty of philosophers who came later who have tried instead - following in the shoes of Hume - to perform a materialist grounding of these faculties not in the brain but derived from sense experience itself - sense experience somehow constitutes the structures of the brain and changing external sense experiences can reshape or reconstitute these brain structures. For example, Gilles Deleuze seems to me to do something like this.
  - abruzzi 12y ago
    Ok, the only Deleuze I've read were his cinema books. Kant definitely sees mathematics as synthetic a priori.
  - Torgo 12y ago
    If I understand you correctly, you are saying that math isn't invented, it is discovered. I am not sure this is true. I think they are models that are not true or untrue, just consistent and more or less useful than other particular models. It is trivially true that if I have two things in my left hand and two things in my right hand and I put them together, there are four things because this can be mapped onto identity of things. But really quickly it doesn't scale and you need non-real concepts to solve more complex problems. Roman numerals mapped to things (I,II,III) but Arabic were more symbolic and enabled more complex calculations (but still were base-10, which is a choice, not reality, some bases are better for certain calculations than others.) But again they still represented things in some sense. Zero was invented, it had to be invented because it's not representing a thing that can be counted, it's the lack of a thing so it's, I think, fundamentally a concept and not "real." It's still fairly intuitive (despite the fact that it took millions of years to invent) but then there are concepts like infinity. But then it turned out that that just described an infinite number of "things", there was also uncountably infinite. Then there are imaginary numbers. They can solve real problems, but I don't even know what they are. They seem to be an artifact of math that let you solve quadratic equations even though they map into something that can't even be said to be a "lack" of something, like zero is. It is a mapping into a completely virtual space. It was invented to solve problems, but it's not real in any material sense. I'm not a math person, so there are a lot more that I don't know anything about. Maybe I missed the point of your statement, but I wanted to explain what I think. That math isn't reality, it is a human invention that describes reality. You can have things in math that aren't reality but are useful models.
- ambler0 12y ago
  I have to agree with inscrutablemike here. Seems to me that all forms of human knowledge have both an empirical and a rational component.
  - cdixon 12y ago
    Sounds like you are interested in philosophy after all! :) Whether and how there can be a priori knowledge is an old philosophical question.
- deleted 12y ago
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- drdeca 12y ago
  I don't understand. If I say Define L to be a thing of type J. Where j is a J, define T j L to be j Define T L j to be the same as j. Where j is a J define W j to be a J. And where a and b are both J, define T a W b to be the same as T W a b Define a K to be a J and either be L or W L or where k can be determined to be a K, W k. I think these definitions are sufficient to show that if a and b are both a K then T a b can be shown to be the same as T b a. ( though this does not neccisarily make addition over the natural numbers because I did not include the requirement that if a and b are both a K and are not the same then W a must not be the same as W b) And while I'm not totally sure about the definition of K ( specifically the whether something can be shown part), I think this would be based just on definitions, without really any axioms? Although I suppose it is possible that I included an axiom and just wrote "Define" before it. (tangent: I suppose one could say "define a system with the following axioms" and then make a proof about that system, and claim that it was a proof by definition?) Maybe I don't really understand what a priori really means (this seems fairly likely) but I don't think definitions are considered a priori?
  - abruzzi 12y ago
    Definitions can absolutely be a priori. Think of the definition of a triangle, some thing like "a closed geometrical shape with three sides." There is nothing about observation of the world that will tell you that this is or isn't true. It is true by definition. Then all closed three sided shapes are triangles, by definition. Then you can start building all sorts of proofs from that, and a few other definitions. You get to the Pythagorean theorem, trigonometry, and off you go, without ever needing anything other than the ideas and definitions.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  A priori knowledge is supposedly independent of experience. I agree with you that we have no evidence of knowledge outside human experience. But from a scientific perspective, both knowledge and experience arise from the physical properties of the universe; properties that predate humans and biological systems entirely. From that perspective, one could say that all knowledge is a priori. But whether we say it's all priori or posteriori doesn't really matter. The point is that making the distinction privileges the human perspective in a way that we have no scientific evidence to support. The entire exercise begs the question by assuming that human experience is determinative, or distinct in any way from the rest of the universe.
leephillips 12y ago
I really don't think so. Positivism is more a feature of how philosophers of science tried for a while to describe science than it is of actual science. And it seemed to fall out of favor decades ago. Actual science is marked by commonsense, naive realism. It has more in common with how a plumber looks for a leak than with most of the formalisms dreamed up by philosophers. EDIT: And this is the big one that the article leaves out: the main complaint by scientists against philosophy is that it's so often wrong, especially about science. Many scientists who get curious about philosophy dip into some "philosophy of science" for obvious reasons, and don't recognize there any of the descriptions of the science that they're familiar with. And when philosophers try to apply their general principles to instruct is about how the universe works, they're even more wrong. Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy is a good introduction to this wrongness. He devotes a good deal of it to showing how Kant derived so many wrong conclusions about physics that he thought must be true because of general principles.
- rudimental 12y ago
  I agree. In my experience scientific researchers were not interested in philosophy of science and meta- questions that interested me in philosophy. They would engage in conversation but I doubt they concerned themselves with the big philosophy of science, epistemology or metaphysics questions. They were naive realists and that's ok- it seemed helpful for getting data, interpreting results, keeping the wheels of science moving forward.
- alexqgb 12y ago
  Limiting themselves to the philosophy of science may be the problem. Far better to start with a history of philosophy in general. Not only does this provide a better introduction to philosophy qua philosophy, it also provides the necessary historical framework, which is essential in understanding how sciences can, and did, emerge from from the philosophic tradition. Aside from being interesting in its own right, this keeps you from making the mistake that philosophy is simply a precursor to science, and that it can be reliably judged based on how much ended up in the realm of empiricism.
- biomcgary 12y ago
  I am a biologist with a love for philosophy of science and found that both Kuhn and Lakatos discussed science in ways that were at least intelligible. Lakatos in particular described a philosophy of science that seemed to match what I have observed in practice.
marcosdumay 12y ago
If you want a word view where science is deeply rooted, it's pragmatism, not positivism. And creating value is what pragmatism does.

abruzzi 12y ago

Most people have a very mistaken view of modern philosophy, and unfortunately this article does little to clarify. Today, analytic philosophy (as opposed to the continental philosophers) is fairly rigorous and usually narrow focused. It can be about modeling systems (for example Bayesian epistemology, various forms of modal logic). It can be about decision analysis (game theory) It can be about number theory (Frege, Gödel, etc.) and it can be about scientific theory (Popper, Kuhn, Quine, Ulian). Some of these things have been profoundly influential, and important to the modern world.

Locke1689 12y ago
I agree. I minored in philosophy, and the one overarching issue isn't the comments made about philosophy by scientists, it's the misunderstanding of what modern philosophy consists of. The article states three example criticisms. I find the derision of the first two completely fair -- neither are very useful criticisms. The derision of the third is misguided. The criticism is completely fair -- which is why philosophy itself is the biggest voice of that criticism! Analytic philosophy is philosophy's answer to that entire criticism of (what is now called) continental philosophy. The biggest problem with scientists is not their criticism, it's that their criticism is dated. Philosophy had this debate decades ago and has since changed as a result.
davorak 12y ago
What divides these rigorous branches of philosophy form mathematics then? If it is because it is applied in some sense then they could fall under applied mathematics.
- exelius 12y ago
  Very little; to be honest. But the convergence has happened from both sides over the last 150 years or so. Much of theoretical mathematics could probably land in the philosophy camp, but there's no clear delineation even from university to university. In some schools, symbolic logic is considered philosophy, in others it's mathematics, and in others it's computer science.
- abruzzi 12y ago

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pervycreeper 12y ago

The criticism certainly goes both ways, with the understanding of many (most?) in philosophy and the humanities in general of what science actually is and has done is deeply depressing (see Soakl and Bricmont's "Intellectual Impostures"). My personal observation is that there is a lot of resentment, envy, and repressed inferiority complexes that humanist academics hold towards scientists.

hyperliner 12y ago

We need someone to tell us not just how things work, but why they work.

bambax 12y ago

While a physicist should be commended for defending philosophy, I'm still not convinced that "asking deep questions about what it all means" isn't a complete waste of time. Regardless of whether anything "means" anything, I really don't get why it should. Uncovering actionable (and often very surprising) laws of nature sound much more exciting to me than pondering about "meaning", especially when done by people who don't have a deep understanding of physics. The only people who should be philosophizing are the physicists, but they'd rather do physics instead, and I think that's a good thing.

squozzer 12y ago

Some of the problem, as Locke1689 said, lies in how non-philosophers perceive philosophy. I'm betting most of the laity were exposed to philosophy through low-level survey courses where notions such as substrata and monads were thrown about. While interesting and entertaining, to the typical physics major, it seems akin to teaching chemistry using alchemy and cosmology using geocentrism. Young physicists also seem unusually biased towards mathematical forms of expression, as opposed to "mere" human language.

jimbokun 12y ago
"I'm betting most of the laity were exposed to philosophy through low-level survey courses where notions such as substrata and monads were thrown about." But at least it was a good grounding for becoming a functional programmer!

davorak 12y ago

> (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.) The impression that most physicists I know is that the percentage of bad philosophers or bad philosophy papers is much high then in chemistry, physics, biology and several others. I could not take the arguments here and convince those friends/peers otherwise. > Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be to a model-building phenomenologist. The problem is that philosophers have so little data to work with. The problems they are pointed at often need tremendous amounts of data or very hard to collect data. Instead of making an incremental improvement on collecting that data or analyzing existing data it seems to often be the case that philosophers decided to work with guess work instead. >The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time. A theoretical paper that examines the various quantum calculation techniques through the lens of information theory and attempts to make rigorous claims on which methods or fundamentally more simple(form an information theory definition) sounds like solid science and an interesting read. "trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality" - does not sound like something I would want to fund or read. >And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things. I would want an example of an issue where calculation plays no role. Being able to communicate the ideas to fellow humans might be thought to involve not calculation, I would argue that starting with the simplest mathematical models then isomorphically(or at least minimize information lose) tweaking for human understanding would be the non-practical ideal method and use considerable calculation.

guygurari 12y ago

I found the article vague and unconvincing. If philosophy is useful for physics research, where is the evidence? What new thing did philosophy contribute to physics in the last 100 years? I am a physicist who cares deeply about the foundational issues mentioned in the article. And yet I honestly don't see any meaningful input about these issues coming from philosophers.

rudimental 12y ago
From a blog comment- is it convicing? "One central question in the philosophy of physics is how we should understand quantum mechanics (QM). We may want to know what we should take QM to be about. It’s worth noting that, in some (but not all) cases, this is no longer an empirical question: for instance, the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of QM is empirically equivalent to the Everett "many worlds" interpretation of QM. So, if we can’t do an experiment to settle the issue, we need to resort to some other method, which is where philosophers of physics come in."
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  If we can't do an experiment to settle the issue, then maybe the two are equivalent, and Occam's Razor says don't get all theoretical about many universes without good reason? On the other hand, sooner or later, someone may figure out how to do an experiment that can tell the difference (unless it's provable that the two interpretations always give the same physical results).
  - scott_s 12y ago
    I'm currently reading Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...). A common point he makes is that most scientists operate under an informal paradigm. A paradigm, to Kuhn, are the set of shared understandings and interpretations that are not themselves formal theories. The importance of such paradigms is that they seem to determine what scientists investigate, and what they're primed to even see. An example Kuhn gives are X-rays. Their discovery caused some consternation, even though their existence did not need a full theoretical overhaul. The consternation was that they were completely unexpected, but they also must have been present in many prior experiments, yet never directly reported. To directly address your point, scientists are human, and will probably lean one way or another on understanding quantum mechanics. How they lean will influence what sort of questions they investigate, how they investigate it, and what sort of outcomes they will look for.

skizm 12y ago

I might misunderstand philosophy, but I think about it like this: scientists gather data, run experiments, etc. while philosophers draw conclusions. Sure most/maybe all scientists draw their own conclusions (it is pretty much the only way to get published) but sometimes the conclusions are not so obvious. Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle mean we have free will? Can free will exist? What sort of (theoretical) evidence would we need to disprove free will? Is that line of questioning philosophy or science? I'm really not sure. I think you take a headlong leap into science when you start running tests, but I'm not sure at what point talk turns from philosophy to science. In the end, everyone is just trying to make a more accurate map, right?

Amezarak 12y ago
You don't need to go all the way to physics for free will - you need look no farther than psychology to determine whether free will exists or not. Actually, you don't need to look any farther than a serious philosophical treatment of what you mean by "free will" to see that the question itself is a confused one based on untenable (or even more confused) assumptions. Nevertheless the belief in free will is very important for human happiness; or at least, happy and/or successful people tend to believe in free will, or just that their will is free and they're the master of their fates and the captain of their souls. That is often the motive behind free will arguments, which generally have a very powerful smell of rationalization about them, but a thing is not necessarily true because human happiness (or even life) requires believing it is true or leads to the feeling it must be true.
vacri 12y ago
In the end, everyone is just trying to make a more accurate map, right? Pretty much... which is why philosophy and science are not mutually exclusive. If they were, there wouldn't be an area of philosophy called the 'philosophy of science', which concerns itself with the best ways to acquire knowledge. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

rudimental 12y ago

Best quote: "Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes." Philosophers interests overlap at times with mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, physicists. Sometimes they have valuable things to say to each other. E.g. Experimental philosophy is a trend in philosophy, and people who have never done scientific experiments before could learn how to do them better from scientists who have that experience and knowledge. I support people that find common ground and work together to help each other tackle the puzzles they're working on.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

Reminds me of an anecdote: for a long time, when faced with the non-intuitiveness that is quantum theory, physicists had one simple rule shut up and do the math.

jgallag8 12y ago

The author seems to be saying that the main reason physicists should pay attention to philosophers is that philosophy can be useful in the study of physics. I think he could have made his point better by noting that pretty much any thinking about why we study physics leads directly to philosophy. What is the point of doing science? What is knowledge, and why should we be interested in it? These are just the sort of questions philosophy as a discipline is intended to answer. Any physicist who is interested in any 'meta' questions about his/her work is necessarily interested in philosophy. One can disagree with the particular methodologies of modern academic philosophy, but it is hard to see how any intellectually curious person can dismiss the field entirely. It seems to me that this is a stronger argument for the relevance of philosophy to science.

michaelsbradley 12y ago
As I read Dr. Carroll's blog post, I was reminded encouragingly of how a famous philosopher and Parisian professor[1] – the student of a great medieval experimentalist[2] – in 1265 began his opus magnum with a critique aimed at those who argued that philosophy was the pinnacle of human intellectual pursuit, encompassing all else. See Article One, Question One of the First Part[3] in the Summa Theologica[4]: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Great http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Great [3] http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Theologica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Theologica

imurray 12y ago

Somewhat related: I'm currently enjoying Scott Aaronson's "Quantum computing since Democritus". A snippet: Not every branch of science was scouted out ahead of time by philosophy, but some were. And in recent history, I think quantum computing is really the poster child here. It's fine to tell people to "Shut up and calculate," but the question is, what should they calculate? At least in quantum computing, which is my field, the sorts of things that we like to calculate — capacities of quantum channels, error probabilities of quantum algorithms — are things people would never have thought to calculate if not for philosophy. For more: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ — it's been posted here a bunch of times, although without any comments.

mathattack 12y ago

Something I think Philosophers should also stop saying silly things about Physics.

oso2k 12y ago

I've heard many research scientists say, "Science is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

sigmaml 12y ago
I heard a variant thereof. ``Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. Science is what I'm doing once I figure that out!"

hackuser 12y ago

HN naturally attracts people with expertise in STEM. Is it really meaningful or interesting that they think their own field is more valuable and important than others?

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asgard1024 12y ago

I found the following, I think apt, quote from Dan Dennett: "In a review of Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, in New York Review of Books, the British geneticist Steve Jones had the following comment to make: "To most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex. It is cheaper, easier and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it." Now that view is all too common, and I understand it from the depths of my soul. I appreciate why people think this, but I think it is also important to combat this stereotype in a friendly and constructive spirit, and no place better than in a center for research in cognitive science. What philosophers can be good at – there aren't many things we can be good at – is helping people figure out what the right questions are. When people ask me whether there's been any progress in philosophy I say, "Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."

bladedtoys 12y ago
>"Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer." To this I might add a rhetorical question: how would science have gone about discovering the scientific method? Indeed, in which discipline would that question fall even today?
- abruzzi 12y ago
  An the answer to a rhetorical question in case anyone is interested: Philosophy of Science. Specifically read Hume (Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding) who demonstrated that inductive reasoning to universal laws (empiricism) was fundamentally based on circular reasoning. Then Karl Popper developed the idea of falsification to show that while Hume is correct--you cannot prove natural laws as true, you can prove them false. He essentially codified the idea that scientific laws have to be testable, and falsifiable. So scientific laws are contingent. They are they closest we have to the truth, until someone devises a test that proves them wrong.

seanewest 12y ago

There is a whole other sector of philosophy that is almost completely divorced from science that is often called "Continental Philosophy". It deals with all of the classic problems -- meaning, love, truth, etc. The U.S. tends to not hear a lot about it, but it's huge in the non-english speaking world. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

abruzzi 12y ago
Yup. Modern philosophy is usually divided into Analytic and Continental. Analytic is by far the most common in England (its birthplace) and the US. Continental (as the name implies) is most common in France and Germany. It can be much more abstract. Phenomenology and Existentialism are two strains of Continental philosophy (Husserl for the first, and Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard for the other.)
robotresearcher 12y ago
It's also frequently pretty silly. For the science-trained reader it can be painful to read. For example a popular rhetorical technique in this area is to take a well-defined scientific idea and use it as if it was a metaphor, then use the metaphor to imply some claim, then claim that the scientific idea entailed the claim. Also, explaining things in an elliptical and opaque way is often considered OK, since it provides a certain kind of experience for the reader. In the Anglo-American tradition, clarity is an objective, rather than giving off a vibe where you kind of get the idea. These guys point out some howling examples where technical terms are abused to the point of meaninglessness: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861971249/o/qid=979258668/sr=2-4/026-0995052-9994019 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861971249/o/qid=97...

aidenn0 12y ago

I think a big part of why many physicists reject philosophy as a useful endeavor is that a lot of popularly-known philosophy places inductive reasoning below deductive reasoning.

goldenkey 12y ago

Philosophy is more concerned with consciousness being a black-box and thus physical measurements not being able to be fully trusted. Science assumes a physical world that does not lie above untrusted surface. However, philosophy takes nothing for granted. It's possible that you are the only real conscious person, and everyone else is just merely 'reactive.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism There is not a divide between Philosophy and Physics. Their axioms are merely different. Physics has axioms. Philosophy is about life, and therefore examines it with NO precepts. In order to discover the truth about the universe, one must make no assumptions. One must simply understand the level of truth each thought holds. This is the 'golden key.'