Is Philosophy crap?

[swansont]

Every view or stance you take is essentially philosophical. Philosophy is not about randomness. In the opposite, it's the critique of all your assumptions, truth-values, standards and behaviour.

 

You don't need to be an educated person to ask that question. It's quite arrogant, and I think along with Socrates one could say it shows an ignorance of your essentially human and personal ignorance in all things, in a sense making you less knowledgeable and more limited than someone having a lack of knowledge but admitting to it. A scientist knowing nothing about philosophy and talking about the value of philosophy is exactly an example of such double ignorance forbidding you even to get knowledge about what you're talking about.

 

A scientist constantly has to be philosophical in his own way. Critique of method, theory and the "nature" of your subject of inquiry is part of philosophy and subject to constant change, adaption. Same in other fields, that are not just natural sciences or homgeneous with other natural sciences. They often have to "take a step back" and see what they're doing. It's a basic human trait, one could say.

 

And yet a scientist may know nothing about philosophy but is still somehow able to do science. Doesn't that say something about the value of philosophy?

[Villain]

And yet a scientist may know nothing about philosophy but is still somehow able to do science. Doesn't that say something about the value of philosophy?

 

Are you talking about the history of philosophy? Or are you saying that one can do science without knowing why one holds belief in science or have I missed your point completely?

[EdEarl]

I think philosophy is good. In subtle ways, my wife became more interesting after she took logic and philosophy classes.

[swansont]

Are you talking about the history of philosophy? Or are you saying that one can do science without knowing why one holds belief in science or have I missed your point completely?

 

Knowing why (or that) science works doesn't require you to study philosophy.

[PeterJ]

Actually Swansont I would disagree. Wouldn't you have to do some philosophy to decide what you mean by 'science' and 'works'?

Edited May 29, 2013 by PeterJ

[Villain]

Knowing why (or that) science works doesn't require you to study philosophy.

 

Yeah, you certainly don't need to study philosophy to do philosophy.

[PeterJ]

And yet a scientist may know nothing about philosophy but is still somehow able to do science. Doesn't that say something about the value of philosophy?

Well, I would say it says something important about the value of science. Fortunately there are not too many scientists who take this approach. No need to do philosophy if we're checking for the decay of protons, but theoretical physics/cosmology demands a knowledge of logic and the ability to extrapolate from the data.

 

I really cannot understand why anyone would want to make the collaboration between science and philosophy a competition. It;s like deciding to tie your shoelaces rather than putting your shoes on. To me they would be inextricably connected activities, both pretty useless on their own.

 

I'm with Villain and Math on this, and I struggle to see any need for an argument. Maybe sometimes scientists do not realise how much philosophy they're doing.

 

As Villain points out, there seems to be a worrying lack of philosophical understanding in people who have an interest in science. Generally I do not see the same lack of scientific understanding in people who have an interest in philosophy.

[swansont]

Yeah, you certainly don't need to study philosophy to do philosophy.

 

If you consider science to be philosophy then the question is moot. If you consider that science has separated itself from philosophy and they are distinct subjects, then it is not.

[PeterJ]

I think what Villain meant is that doing philosophy requires little or no study, assuming a reasonable education. What requires study is the history of ideas, the names of the players, the dates of their birth and death, the details of a thousand failed theories and all that unnecessary (even if useful) stuff.

 

This is how it comes about that most people do metaphysics all the time without realising it.

 

I struggle to agree that science works in a complete sense. Clearly it works to an extent, and very well, but only in a limited self-defined field. The natural sciences cannot address many questions that really it ought to be able to answer. It does not satisfy me when I want to know the origin of the laws of physics and am told I can't ask because it's not a scientific question. Or when David Chalmes argues that the problem of consciousness cannot be solved because it's not a scientific problem This is turning a pragmatic definition of a discipline into a unnecessary barrier to knowledge. It's shooting oneself in the foot. A discipline needs to be well-defined to be efficient, and so that students know which building to go to for the next lecture, but for an individual researcher to limit their thinking in this way is a recipe for failure. The world is not divided up into departments like a university.

Edited May 29, 2013 by PeterJ

[Villain]

If you consider science to be philosophy then the question is moot. If you consider that science has separated itself from philosophy and they are distinct subjects, then it is not.

 

Science and the scientific method wouldn't and can't exist without philosophy.

[swansont]

Science and the scientific method wouldn't and can't exist without philosophy.

 

I take it then that you're in the "science is philosophy" camp. So studying science necessarily means studying philosophy. By definition.

 

Ok, then. Nothing to discuss.

[Villain]

I take it then that you're in the "science is philosophy" camp. So studying science necessarily means studying philosophy. By definition.

 

Ok, then. Nothing to discuss.

 

No, science is not necessary to philosophy.

[swansont]

No, science is not necessary to philosophy.

 

True, and completely irrelevant to what I was saying. One difference is that science must be compared to the world around us and made to agree. Philosophy is free from that restriction.

[Villain]

True, and completely irrelevant to what I was saying. One difference is that science must be compared to the world around us and made to agree. Philosophy is free from that restriction.

 

I see I have misunderstood your last post. I am saying that in order to progress to science one first has to address philosophy, otherwise science is merely another form of mythology.

[PeterJ]

Hang on Swansont. I don't think philosophers are free to claim that the Earth is a cube.

 

Now I'm going to have to stop arguing for philosophy and start arguing for science.

Edited May 30, 2013 by PeterJ

[swansont]

Hang on Swansont. I don't think philosophers are free to claim that the Earth is a cube.

 

Now I'm going to have to stop arguing for philosophy and start arguing for science.

 

Is the shape of the earth a philosophical argument? I would say no, but I think there's a divide between science and philosophy.

[PeterJ]

Well, I can imagine someone having a philosophy of cubes. But you're right, it was a poor example.

 

I was trying to say that philosophers cannot work in a vaccuum. I'm sure you'd agree. A philosopher who doesn't; understand QM reasonably well wouldn't be able to get a job these days. A philosopher who did not understand evolutionary theory would be a joke. Science would be necessary as a contraint on philosophical theories just a philosophy would be necessary as a contraint on scientific theories.

 

That is, logic and experience would be a contraint on all our theories. If we don't pay attention to these contraints then our theories will be unscientific, logically absurd, easily falsifiable, irrational, useless or some combination of these.

 

For an example of how to put them all together I'd recommend Brian Redhead, Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism - A Prolegomenon to the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics.

 

I really don't think it makes a iot makes sense to argue that science and philosophy are better or worse than one another.

[swansont]

My perspective is that the philosophy of physics to which I have been exposed has been mostly interpretations of QM, none of which are actually testable. Understanding QM is one thing, but if you make untestable observations, you aren't comparing your model to nature.

 

And ultimately, the choice of interpretation has not impeded me in doing my job. Shut up and calculate works just fine, but I'm an experimentalist. Theoreticians seem to have a different view.

[PeterJ]

Well, I'd say that the philosophy of physics is a very small and quite unimportant part of philosophy.(unless ones only interest is in physics). If you find it a useless muddle, well, so do I.

 

I'm surprised that you don't consider it a responsibility of physics to find an interpretation of QM. Strictly speaking I suppose you're right, but I would have thought that curiosity would win out over definitional boundaries.

 

Philosophical theories and hypotheses are testable in logic using the dialectic, so are not woolly hypotheses with no way to decide between them. Thus to test the idea that the earth is a cube and a globe at the same time we do not need to do any physics. If we believe the mystics then philosophical theories are also empirically testable, but we either know this is the case or we don't so no point in arguing that one. .

 

For me the problem is that although I believe that metaphysics is of vital importance to physics and can shed light on many problems, most people associate metaphysics with the indescribable mess that western metaphysicians usually make of it rather than sorting it out for themselves. So I end up seeming to argue for a load of rubbish. .

 

When I defend metaphysics I certainly do not mean what Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap and their like mean. Just as in physics, there would be little point in spending much time on the work of people who have failed to make any progress. But these people and their like are so well known that people tend to think that nobody could make any progress, whereas in my opinion metaphysics a doddle once you get the hang of it. I once asked Spencer Brown, a colleague of Russell's, why Russell did not see the solution for metaphysics, even though he endorsed Brown's book in which it is explained. 'Oh', he said in a kindly way, 'Bertie was a fool'. This is also my opinion. I can completely understand someone thinking that philosophy is rubbish if they've only read Russell, Wittgenstein and other such authors. They can be distuinguished by their failure to get anywhere with it.

 

I agree with you that for an experimentalist who is working on localised and self-contained problems metaphysics is usually unnecessary and maybe not even useful. But when I say 'physics' I mean the attempt to understand the entire physical world, not just, say, acceleration under gravity.

 

At any rate, I find it impossible to define theoretical physics so as to exclude metaphysics, and would say that the attempt is pointless and self-defeating. Physics cannot have a fundamental theory of anything by definition, so on its own it is rather unambitious. I want to understand it all.

Edited May 31, 2013 by PeterJ

[swansont]

Well, I'd say that the philosophy of physics is a very small and quite unimportant part of philosophy.(unless ones only interest is in physics). If you find it a useless muddle, well, so do I.

 

I think the question at hand was the reverse: is the philosophy of physics an important part of physics?

 

I'm surprised that you don't consider it a responsibility of physics to find an interpretation of QM. Strictly speaking I suppose you're right, but I would have thought that curiosity would win out over definitional boundaries.

 

I can't find one because there is no way to test them to see if they are right. You can pick one that "feels right" but, much like religion, there's no way to be sure your particular view is correct.

 

 

I agree with you that for an experimentalist who is working on localised and self-contained problems metaphysics is usually unnecessary and maybe not even useful. But when I say 'physics' I mean the attempt to understand the entire physical world, not just, say, acceleration under gravity.

 

Sure, attempting to understand the world is the goal. But if you can't test to see if the model is correct, then you don't really know anything. Once you can test to see if it's correct, then it's science and not philosophy (in my view). It seems to me the two views I've described are mutually exclusive and also span the spectrum of the argument: either science is part of philosophy, or it's been split off from it.

 

I can see how a particular choice of philosophy might influence a thought process and lead to progress, but that's a personal choice and doesn't mean the philosophy is correct.

 

At any rate, I find it impossible to define theoretical physics so as to exclude metaphysics, and would say that the attempt is pointless and self-defeating. Physics cannot have a fundamental theory of anything by definition, so on its own it is rather unambitious. I want to understand it all.

 

Which you never will.

[PeterJ]

Okay. Not everyone wants to know anything about philosophy. I don't see much point in me discussing it here when nobody is interested.

 

As I have now given up on this forum I'll risk some spam and mention my page at philpapers.here..

 

http://philpapers.org/profile/profile.pl?_mmsg=<font%20color='green'>You%20are%20now%20logged%20in%20as%20Peter%20Jones</font>

 

I shan't;be at all offended if you don't read any of this, but I'll be utterly amazed if you can find a valid objection to any of it, and if you do you'll be the first. I hope it might even change your mind.

 

Of course it is possible to understand the world. It is ludicrously pessimistic to assume otherwise.

 

Thanks for the chat.

[swansont]

Of course it is possible to understand the world. It is ludicrously pessimistic to assume otherwise.

 

That's not what you said. You said you want to understand it all. There are things we can't know about. e.g. you will never know, to arbitrary precision, the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously. There will be statements in self-consistent mathematics that are true that you will never be able to prove. I think that this spills over into science as well, seeing as science is based on math. Pessimistic? No, I disagree. It's what the science itself tells us.

[DARK HUNTER]

Philosophy is NOT crap. As said before,we owe a lot to philosophy. And sometimes it can hold answers that science alone doesn't have.

 

(Btw. I've read in some theosophy book it is bad that science,philosophy and religion are put on seperate foundations,and they should be considered one and the same. Why do you think of this?)

 

e.g. you will never know, to arbitrary precision, the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously.

Who knows? Technology is advancing...

[pwagen]

And sometimes it can hold answers that science alone doesn't have.

Like what?

 

(Btw. I've read in some theosophy book it is bad that science,philosophy and religion are put on seperate foundations,and they should be considered one and the same. Why do you think of this?)

Personally, I think it's a bad idea to mix a study which gives answers based upon evidence, with one that doesn't require evidence and one which says it has all the answers.

 

Who knows? Technology is advancing...

I have a hunch swansont was talking about this. No amount of technological advancement will change that.

[ydoaPs]

And yet a scientist may know nothing about philosophy but is still somehow able to do science. Doesn't that say something about the value of philosophy?

And yet a driver may know nothing about engineering but is still somehow able to drive a car. Doesn't that say something about the value of engineering?

Actually Swansont I would disagree. Wouldn't you have to do some philosophy to decide what you mean by 'science' and 'works'?

You mean philosophy of science and epistemology? My gods!

 

 

Science and the scientific method wouldn't and can't exist without philosophy.

I take it then that you're in the "science is philosophy" camp. So studying science necessarily means studying philosophy. By definition.

 

Ok, then. Nothing to discuss.

 

 

No, what he's saying is that science doesn't give you the epistemological tools. Philosophy gave the tools, science just uses them. "You didn't build that".

True, and completely irrelevant to what I was saying. One difference is that science must be compared to the world around us and made to agree. Philosophy is free from that restriction.

Give me an experiment to show that the one-way speed of light is constant. Remember you can't assume that it is in setting up the experiment for things like syncing your distant clocks.

Is the shape of the earth a philosophical argument? I would say no, but I think there's a divide between science and philosophy.

It was when it was an issue.

I was trying to say that philosophers cannot work in a vaccuum. I'm sure you'd agree. A philosopher who doesn't; understand QM reasonably well wouldn't be able to get a job these days. A philosopher who did not understand evolutionary theory would be a joke. Science would be necessary as a contraint on philosophical theories just a philosophy would be necessary as a contraint on scientific theories.

Indeed, it's a sympathetic relationship. They work off of each other. Much of my work relies upon QM and Modern Synthesis. And there's far more metaphysics hanging around in the foundations of physics than people like to believe. Especially when it comes to things involving light and/or relativity.

My perspective is that the philosophy of physics to which I have been exposed has been mostly interpretations of QM, none of which are actually testable. Understanding QM is one thing, but if you make untestable observations, you aren't comparing your model to nature.

The different interpretations of QM *do* make testable predictions. Consider Bell Inequalities. For those reading along that don't know, Bell's Theorem tells us that QM cannot be both a local theory and a hidden variable (read deterministic) theory.

 

There are explicitly non-local hidden variable interpretations like Bohmian Mechanics. As we both know, standard QFT has SR built right in, so we know from the get go that Bohmian interpretations make different predictions than QFT.

 

And both Copenhagen and MWH take the local non-deterministic route. This means telling them apart experimentally will be a bit harder. As of now, I don't know of any experiment that could tell those two apart, but that's not to say they in principle can't be distinguished experimentally.

 

As someone who likes to point out that "this is a science forum ..." when discussing speculations, I'd think you'd have a higher opinion of philosophy since it is philosophy of science, not science itself, which tells us what is and is not science. There is no scienceometer to read how many kiloscienceons a conjecture is giving off. It's conceptual analysis and methodology which determine what is and is not science. And that's firmly in the domain of non-science philosophy.

 

Remember that science is a subset of philosophy both historically and taxinomically. It is just that this subset has gradually defined more and more strict rules governing what is acceptable. There's no clearcut line in history between Aristotle and Einstein where one part of the endeavor was 'scientific' and the other is not. What is 'scientific' has gradually changed over time, but the demarcation for modern science is now pretty much settled with Ruse's criteria.

 

And ultimately, the choice of interpretation has not impeded me in doing my job. Shut up and calculate works just fine, but I'm an experimentalist. Theoreticians seem to have a different view.

It does matter when constructing new theories. There's a lot of metaphysics involved in, say, making a TOE. And experimentalists in general can lose sight of what a theory is about. They'll get caught up in Lorentz Transforms and co-ordinates and lose sight of that the theory isn't about them and doesn't need them. SR is about the geometry of spacetimes and can be formulated with nothing but simple spacetime diagrams and the Minkowski 'metric' (which really isn't a metric, btw). When you're dealing with the theory, the theory and underlying metaphysics is important. If you're dealing with experiments, all you need worry about is what the needles on the gauges say.

 

While the math is indeed extremely important and it is the math that tells us what we need to know, sometimes people take the "shut up and calculate" line a bit too far and don't consider what it is the math is saying about reality. It's like learning German grammar and skimming paragraphs to find answers to questions without learning what any of the words mean. If you want the full understanding, you need to slow down a bit. And sometimes this overuse of the "shut up and calculate" mentality leads people to the untenable position of scientific anti-realism.

At any rate, I find it impossible to define theoretical physics so as to exclude metaphysics, and would say that the attempt is pointless and self-defeating.

I'm fairly sure it is.

I can't find one because there is no way to test them to see if they are right. You can pick one that "feels right" but, much like religion, there's no way to be sure your particular view is correct.

That's such a mischaracterization of philosophy that I'm a little offended. The days of walking around in a toga talking about how your underpants are made of fire is over. Welcome to the days of mathematical and experimental philosophy.

 

 

I'll let you in on a hint: there are these things called 'intrinsic probablitiy' which, by definition, are not based at all in the evidence. This is not only an objective measure of which interpretation of QM is correct, but of scientific theory choice in general. For any given data set, there are an infinite number of theories which explain the data equally well.

 

For example, why do you go with Special Relativity to explain time dilation and length contraction rather than Neo-Lorentzian 'Relativity'?

 

The Lorentzian route postulates more ontic entities than SR, so it is inherently less likely. Similarly, the MWH postulates an uncountably infinite number of more ontic entities than the Copenhagen interpretation, so it is inherently less likely. So, until we find something else like the Bell Inequalities to tell them apart experimentally, we've got good reason to choose Copenhagen rather than MWH and to choose SR rather than NL.

Sure, attempting to understand the world is the goal. But if you can't test to see if the model is correct, then you don't really know anything.

You seem to be confusing not being able to know something yet and not being able to know something in principle. Just because we can test something now in no way tells us that we won't be able to test it later. And, as I said above, there are ways of telling what is more likely to be true even before you look at any evidence. The evidence narrows things down unimaginably, but, not having evidence in no way means you can just choose whatever and still be rational in doing so.

Once you can test to see if it's correct, then it's science and not philosophy (in my view).

So, Logical Positivism was science rather than philosophy?

There will be statements in self-cons

Like what?

 

Personally, I think it's a bad idea to mix a study which gives answers based upon evidence, with one that doesn't require evidence and one which says it has all the answers.

 

I have a hunch swansont was talking about this. No amount of technological advancement will change that.

istent mathematics that are true that you will never be able to prove.

 

 

No, there's not. There will be statements in self-consistent mathematics that are true in the system that can never be proven in the system, but that in no way means that they can never be proven. You can always step outside into higher system.

I think that this spills over into science as well, seeing as science is based on math. Pessimistic? No, I disagree. It's what the science itself tells us.

Science uses math as a tool, but it does not incorporate all of the math there is, so it's quite possible that none of the undecidable theorems have any use in science.

Like what?

Like, "Are fields ontic entities or mathematical constructions?".