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It used to be that philosophers/scientists/mathematicians etc. had a lot of overlap. That is why I constrained my question to the last 100 years. I agree with y

It used to be that philosophers/scientists/mathematicians etc. had a lot of overlap. That is why I constrained my question to the last 100 years. I agree with you that philosophy had useful input for scientific research in the distant past. Can you offer more recent examples? It seems to me philosophy has not been relevant for a long time.

vacri 12y ago
The entire arena of String Theory was a clearly philosophical detour in physics. It captured the hearts and minds of the physics world for years... yet it was pretty much entirely conjectural.
- guygurari 12y ago
  > clearly philosophical detour No. I am a string theorist. String theory was created by physicists to solve concrete theoretical challenges -- first the description the strong force (this did not work as intended), and later quantum gravity. These were longstanding open questions in physics. I am familiar with the history of string theory, and as far as I know no philosophers had any influence on it. Perhaps my question wasn't clear, so let me rephrase. What contribution did philosophers make to science in the last 100 years?
  - vacri 12y ago
    There's a significant fault in your reasoning, that 'philosophy' is only performed by people who are socially recognised as being 'philosophers'. It's like saying that the only people who cook food are chefs - professionals recognised as food cookers. People who are professionally recognised as 'philosphers' are a miniscule fraction of the people who use and engage in philosophy, just like chefs are a miniscule fraction of the people who cook. What you describe about string theory is philosophy. It's just not your personal definition of philosophy, which is based on a faulty stereotype. The funny thing is that it's only because you assign philosophy a stigma that you want to distance yourself from it.
    - mercer 12y ago
      I'm not sure if it's faulty reason, but maybe I'm reading it wrong. It seems to me he's asking the equivalent of "what value do chefs have nowadays in the area of food preparation," which is a fair question independent of whether many people cook, and independent of whether cooks have in the past been immensely useful. One answer I can think of is that keeping the 'profession' of philosophy alive encourages non-philosophers to ask important questions too, and even if it's nothing more than that, that might be good enough. That said, while I think the profession of philosophy is much more than just that, I would also like to hear some answers to his (or otherwise just my) question.
      - vacri 12y ago
        Well, the chef analogy breaks down a little because much of what a chef does has a time limit measured in hours. Modern-day philosophers don't have a lot to offer modern-day physicists I guess... because most of the relevant philosophical problems have largely been solved, especially in the area of experimental design. I'm not a philosopher, and I don't bill myself as one. I was trained in science, have done a partial PhD on the visual system, and worked as a medical scientist. I have had zero formal classroom training in philosophy. I have one article published in a second-tier peer-reviewed journal. I see myself as a scientist and spent a quarter of my career working as one. I started out with the same ridiculous prejudices against philosophy as the naysayers here in this thread. Then I started looking in a bit more detail about how and why we do experiments the way we do. The stuff we take for granted - things like minimising independent variables, or the null hypothesis, or peer review, or ethics in research, or the importance of being very specific in your starting definitions, or knowing how to ask a robust, testable question - all these kinds of things were reasoned about and a path(s) was found to the best way to do things to get robust results. And these things aren't inherent to the physical world - they're issues around reasoning. Not physics or biology or chemistry. It was eye-opening just how much ridiculous stigma and bad stereotypes are promoted by a certain kind of scientist. Thing is, the two fields are not in conflict. For the most part, they are looking for truth in different areas - hence why doing physics and doing philosophy aren't mutually exclusive. They're not in competition, for the most part, and one field isn't 'better' than the other field. It's a silly, childish thing to suggest that these fields are competing; that there has to be a 'winner'. Does psychology 'win' over chemistry? Who 'wins' in the competition between music and mathematics? These fields aren't seen as being in competition (and there's some synergy between maths and music, just like I'm saying there is between physics and philosophy). Asking "so, what have philosophers given physicists lately"(the occupations) is really a meaningless question, and implies that philosophy (the field) is only valid if it's constantly giving new insights to physics (the field). One could just as easily say "what have physicists given philosophers lately? Are philosophers of consciousness better able to discuss their topic because of the work of physicists?". Put that way, it's clear how silly it is to make these fields compete. Yes, there may be some conflict on the fringes ('what is the nature of existence' type stuff), but for the most part, they're harmonious entities, not enemies. In short, the two fields are not dichotomous. You are in fact a significantly better scientist if you understand the reasons underlying why you conduct experiments the way you do. It allows you to modify your experimental procedures in a robust way. It's amusing to see people so stigmatising philosophy that they demand that their own philosophical utterances are due to a different field - as if it somehow hurts to say "this part of what I do is philosophy, that part is physics, and the other part is chef work". Elsewhere in this thread you'll see a lovely example, where someone uses Occam's Razor against philosophy... :)
SatvikBeri 12y ago
One example is falsifiability. As of today, statements which are unfalsifiable are seen as pseudoscience and not science. This distinction was largely promoted by Karl Popper, a philosopher. And widespread adoption of falsifiability happened mostly in the 60s and 70s IIRC. Prior to that point, theories were often accepted as true if they had a lot of explanatory power, in other words, if they seemed to explain a large set of observations. This made it very difficult to rigorously argue that, e.g., Astrology should not be considered scientific, because it seemed to have a lot of confirming evidence. This is one of those things that seems really obvious in hindsight, but was a surprisingly big advance in how science was conducted in several fields. A more concrete example is how it affected social sciences like Psychology. Prior to Popper there were a lot of widely held theories that made no falsifiable predictions, today theories that seem to explain everything are generally seen as substantially less rigorous and scientific than ones that are falsifiable.
- guygurari 12y ago
  Interesting. Let me stick to physics because that is the field I am most familiar with. If the idea of falsifiability was not well understood before the 60s, then how did physics manage to progress after Newton? I mean well before the 60s physicists had discovered mechanics, electrodynamics, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, etc. There were many other proposed theories, but these were the theories that survived empirical tests. Theories that made no testable predictions did not survive. So, based on the history of physics, it seems to me that physicists understood this idea well before Popper came along. Do you agree? If you agree, then perhaps Popper was responsible for spreading this idea to the social sciences, but he was not the one who introduced it to science. Now, falsifiability is in fact an outdated notion, and this too was appreciated well before the 60s. As a first example, consider quantum mechanics which was formulated in the beginning of the 20th century. It postulates that the state of a system is described by a wave function, but only certain aspects of the wave function can be observed. The theory makes many testable predictions, but not all aspects of it can be tested (and therefore falsified). Popper argued against this theory (along with Einstein), but it turns out he was wrong. So it seems to me that, not only did physicists understand falsifiability before Popper, but they actually understood more than Popper did (or at least some of them did, like Schrodinger). A second point about falsifiability is that it is in fact quite a naive and unproductive idea, even without the complexities of quantum mechanics. It is true that theories cannot be proven, but it is also true that they generally cannot be falsified, except in very simple cases. If I have a theory that the sun rises every day, this theory can be falsified. But most theories rely heavily on statistical measurements, which are inherently uncertain. Therefore we can only assign a probability to whether the theory agrees with measurements or not. If we start thinking that we actually 'falsified' some theories, this can actually damage the progression of science. If you like Bayesian statistics, for each theory we can assign a probability of it being correct, based on our measurements, but the probability is rarely 0 or 1. This, again, is well understood by physicists, and I don't think this idea was introduced to physics by philosophers.

vacri 12y ago

The entire arena of String Theory was a clearly philosophical detour in physics. It captured the hearts and minds of the physics world for years... yet it was pretty much entirely conjectural.

guygurari 12y ago
> clearly philosophical detour No. I am a string theorist. String theory was created by physicists to solve concrete theoretical challenges -- first the description the strong force (this did not work as intended), and later quantum gravity. These were longstanding open questions in physics. I am familiar with the history of string theory, and as far as I know no philosophers had any influence on it. Perhaps my question wasn't clear, so let me rephrase. What contribution did philosophers make to science in the last 100 years?
- vacri 12y ago
  There's a significant fault in your reasoning, that 'philosophy' is only performed by people who are socially recognised as being 'philosophers'. It's like saying that the only people who cook food are chefs - professionals recognised as food cookers. People who are professionally recognised as 'philosphers' are a miniscule fraction of the people who use and engage in philosophy, just like chefs are a miniscule fraction of the people who cook. What you describe about string theory is philosophy. It's just not your personal definition of philosophy, which is based on a faulty stereotype. The funny thing is that it's only because you assign philosophy a stigma that you want to distance yourself from it.
  - mercer 12y ago
    I'm not sure if it's faulty reason, but maybe I'm reading it wrong. It seems to me he's asking the equivalent of "what value do chefs have nowadays in the area of food preparation," which is a fair question independent of whether many people cook, and independent of whether cooks have in the past been immensely useful. One answer I can think of is that keeping the 'profession' of philosophy alive encourages non-philosophers to ask important questions too, and even if it's nothing more than that, that might be good enough. That said, while I think the profession of philosophy is much more than just that, I would also like to hear some answers to his (or otherwise just my) question.
    - vacri 12y ago
      Well, the chef analogy breaks down a little because much of what a chef does has a time limit measured in hours. Modern-day philosophers don't have a lot to offer modern-day physicists I guess... because most of the relevant philosophical problems have largely been solved, especially in the area of experimental design. I'm not a philosopher, and I don't bill myself as one. I was trained in science, have done a partial PhD on the visual system, and worked as a medical scientist. I have had zero formal classroom training in philosophy. I have one article published in a second-tier peer-reviewed journal. I see myself as a scientist and spent a quarter of my career working as one. I started out with the same ridiculous prejudices against philosophy as the naysayers here in this thread. Then I started looking in a bit more detail about how and why we do experiments the way we do. The stuff we take for granted - things like minimising independent variables, or the null hypothesis, or peer review, or ethics in research, or the importance of being very specific in your starting definitions, or knowing how to ask a robust, testable question - all these kinds of things were reasoned about and a path(s) was found to the best way to do things to get robust results. And these things aren't inherent to the physical world - they're issues around reasoning. Not physics or biology or chemistry. It was eye-opening just how much ridiculous stigma and bad stereotypes are promoted by a certain kind of scientist. Thing is, the two fields are not in conflict. For the most part, they are looking for truth in different areas - hence why doing physics and doing philosophy aren't mutually exclusive. They're not in competition, for the most part, and one field isn't 'better' than the other field. It's a silly, childish thing to suggest that these fields are competing; that there has to be a 'winner'. Does psychology 'win' over chemistry? Who 'wins' in the competition between music and mathematics? These fields aren't seen as being in competition (and there's some synergy between maths and music, just like I'm saying there is between physics and philosophy). Asking "so, what have philosophers given physicists lately"(the occupations) is really a meaningless question, and implies that philosophy (the field) is only valid if it's constantly giving new insights to physics (the field). One could just as easily say "what have physicists given philosophers lately? Are philosophers of consciousness better able to discuss their topic because of the work of physicists?". Put that way, it's clear how silly it is to make these fields compete. Yes, there may be some conflict on the fringes ('what is the nature of existence' type stuff), but for the most part, they're harmonious entities, not enemies. In short, the two fields are not dichotomous. You are in fact a significantly better scientist if you understand the reasons underlying why you conduct experiments the way you do. It allows you to modify your experimental procedures in a robust way. It's amusing to see people so stigmatising philosophy that they demand that their own philosophical utterances are due to a different field - as if it somehow hurts to say "this part of what I do is philosophy, that part is physics, and the other part is chef work". Elsewhere in this thread you'll see a lovely example, where someone uses Occam's Razor against philosophy... :)

SatvikBeri 12y ago

One example is falsifiability. As of today, statements which are unfalsifiable are seen as pseudoscience and not science. This distinction was largely promoted by Karl Popper, a philosopher. And widespread adoption of falsifiability happened mostly in the 60s and 70s IIRC. Prior to that point, theories were often accepted as true if they had a lot of explanatory power, in other words, if they seemed to explain a large set of observations. This made it very difficult to rigorously argue that, e.g., Astrology should not be considered scientific, because it seemed to have a lot of confirming evidence. This is one of those things that seems really obvious in hindsight, but was a surprisingly big advance in how science was conducted in several fields. A more concrete example is how it affected social sciences like Psychology. Prior to Popper there were a lot of widely held theories that made no falsifiable predictions, today theories that seem to explain everything are generally seen as substantially less rigorous and scientific than ones that are falsifiable.

guygurari 12y ago
Interesting. Let me stick to physics because that is the field I am most familiar with. If the idea of falsifiability was not well understood before the 60s, then how did physics manage to progress after Newton? I mean well before the 60s physicists had discovered mechanics, electrodynamics, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, etc. There were many other proposed theories, but these were the theories that survived empirical tests. Theories that made no testable predictions did not survive. So, based on the history of physics, it seems to me that physicists understood this idea well before Popper came along. Do you agree? If you agree, then perhaps Popper was responsible for spreading this idea to the social sciences, but he was not the one who introduced it to science. Now, falsifiability is in fact an outdated notion, and this too was appreciated well before the 60s. As a first example, consider quantum mechanics which was formulated in the beginning of the 20th century. It postulates that the state of a system is described by a wave function, but only certain aspects of the wave function can be observed. The theory makes many testable predictions, but not all aspects of it can be tested (and therefore falsified). Popper argued against this theory (along with Einstein), but it turns out he was wrong. So it seems to me that, not only did physicists understand falsifiability before Popper, but they actually understood more than Popper did (or at least some of them did, like Schrodinger). A second point about falsifiability is that it is in fact quite a naive and unproductive idea, even without the complexities of quantum mechanics. It is true that theories cannot be proven, but it is also true that they generally cannot be falsified, except in very simple cases. If I have a theory that the sun rises every day, this theory can be falsified. But most theories rely heavily on statistical measurements, which are inherently uncertain. Therefore we can only assign a probability to whether the theory agrees with measurements or not. If we start thinking that we actually 'falsified' some theories, this can actually damage the progression of science. If you like Bayesian statistics, for each theory we can assign a probability of it being correct, based on our measurements, but the probability is rarely 0 or 1. This, again, is well understood by physicists, and I don't think this idea was introduced to physics by philosophers.