Ah, Dawkins provides an interesting review of Sokal here.
A neat link from the review:
An interesting satirical exercise. (Oh, but to satirize philosophy is to philosophize, right…)
Logic is a branch of philosophy. I should think that would be fairly important to a scientist, although I do run into “ordinary” people all the time who clearly haven’t made understanding the subject a priority in their lives. Ethics is also a branch of philosophy, and one that I would at least hope would be important to both scientists and Joe Average.
No, “they” don’t. This is surely true of some philosophers, but not all, and I cannot immediately recall ever being asked to “stop and ponder over the ‘fact’ that ‘reality’ cannot be defined” when I was getting my degree in philosophy. I have to wonder what your experience in the field is, since your statements bear no relation to what I have observed myself.
Again, when actually obtaining a degree in philosophy I don’t recall such things playing a prominent role. My knowledge of postmodernism comes from my other degree, in Communication (Film Studies), and I’ve always considered postmodernism a term/school of thought primarily useful when dealing with the arts.
Let me correct myself, because I have just claimed to have a more advanced education than I do! I do not (yet) have a graduate degree in any field. As an undergraduate, I was a double major in Philosophy and Communication. So I have one degree, a BA, with two majors.
I don’t know what I said that would suggest that. The question I think you need to answer is: why would science require the world to be any particular way? Or perhaps, Is ‘a science’ that requires the universe be a particular way more explanatory or less? Maybe even, What happens when the universe isn’t that way? --Is all our research instantly invalidated?
I do not believe I have denied the existence of the universe. Neither do I feel that I have suggested science can be done in a universe which doesn’t exist. So I’m puzzled at this reply.
I do not believe that is necessarily the case, even if we go ahead and suggest that the number of falsifiable hypothesis are countably infinite. The set of all natural numbers is still the same size as the set of all natural numbers excluding the first n numbers.
It is trivial to make assertions. For example, All reality is mind-correlative, Ghosts exist, Science is the study of physical entities that exist, but it is another matter entirely to back them up. I don’t think I’ve weakened science by suggesting it is only the study of quantifiable phenomena. If anything, I have limited the number of assumptions that need to be made. It is strange to think that someone keen on defending our current formulation of the scientific method would take pains to reject a more parsimonious basis of science.
Well, if you’re interested, might I recommend The Crisis of the European Sciences and Trascendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl. If you take it with the perspective that Popper’s falsification criterion was not yet formulated and substitute as necessary, you’ll get more out of it[sup]*[/sup]. Husserl’s concern was that science was ungrounded, same as Popper, but Popper was such a Kantian that they just took different courses. I don’t think either of them would contest any particular scientific finding. Critically, Popper specifically suggested that he was not intent on presenting any kind of theory of meaning. I find that to be a gaping hole in his philosophy, since science as a methodology is apparently free of semantics[sup]**[/sup] but science as done by humans is riddled with meaning. YMMV I guess.
Well, at least my diversions aren’t a hijack in this thread. 
*[sub]I remain puzzled at how anyone thinks the falsification criterion actually responds to verificationism without leading to infinite regress of falsification; that is, one verified that a hypothesis was falsified by verifying some result; if we instead suggest that it is only a simpler hypothesis that is itself falsifiable, then we have traded the mystique of verification for the mystique of infinite regress. Popper felt otherwise. I saw no reason why in his book.[/sub]
**[sub]Actually, I don’t believe this is true, either, because in order to justify scientific activity as a means of acquiring knowledge we must work within some semantic system, but the point I mean to make is that if science is a methodology, that methodology can be done by someone who does not know why it is a “good” methodology; i.e., one needn’t know how to justify scientific activity in order to engage in scientific activity.[/sub]
I’m always rather astonished by the rage I see from modern philosphers when their purported contributions to science are dismissed as irrelevant. When folks like Andrew Pickering can proclaim “…there is no obligation upon anyone framing a view of the world to take account of what twentieth-century science has to say,” what is the appropriate response but to ignore? It’s not because we feel left out of the discourse; it’s that the postmodernist approach to “reality” is so devoid of utility.
It doesn’t help that merely stating you rely on empirical evidence and logic gets you labeled a “materialist” or a “realist”, as if juxtaposing such a thing with, perhaps, an “antirealist” is supposed to provide a helpful perspective. If one notes admiringly the periodic table was a step in the right direction, they’re a “reductionist”. If one objects that a theory is not falsifiable, a philospher wants to trot out Popper and Kuhn, as well as all their critics, throw in a little Cartesian Skepticism, and debate forever whether “falsificationist” principles will eventually rescue or damn the M Theory Landscape. Like the M theorists ought to care. I’ve been guilty myself of criticizing that branch of science on the basis of falsifiablility (a crime I should have apologized for earlier, and much more publically), when in fact there is a raging debate in the field about whether such concerns are even important. I am quite sure the argument won’t be resolved by philosphers. That is to say: Philosophy will provide nothing of value to the present question of whether pursuing a theoretical framework that may predict either nothing or everything, and hence may not falsifiable by any means we can conceivably posess, is a good idea.
In fact, I cannot think of a single instance in history (after we figured out through practical means that merely pondering on nature was insufficient to accurately describe the natural world) that being defined as an adherent of materialist or realist (or any of the other isms) philosophy was of any practical value to the scientist. Nor can I see how their wrestling with postmodernist epistemologies could have any bearing whatsoever on making accurate predictions and interpretations of physical phenomena. I mean, really, how often do scientists in any field pick up a text on “neopragmatism” or other such things (I do not pretend to know what that’s all about) when seeking aid in interpreting a mysterious result, or feeling confident of the “reality” of a well-proven hypothesis. These abstruse convolutions of epistemology appear to be more paralyzing than illuminating, and appear to often be little more than attempts at using obfuscating obscurity to validate spiritualism and other outmoded notions by proclaiming all understanding of observation to be nothing more than alternate ontological exercise enjoying parity with popular metaphysics.
Loopydude, I am still failing to recognize any of this as being typical of the beliefs or behavior of modern philosophers, professors of philosophy, or even students of philosophy. Well, okay, maybe a few of the ones who thought it would be an easy major but switched to something else when they realized they’d have to learn formal proofs.
I have to ask: Why is logic necessarily an extension of “philosophy”? Can I use and understand logic without being a philospher? Can I say we inherited logic from philosophers who helped develop a rigorous system and and symbolism, sofrt of as an historical accident, but take that and run with it usefully in another discipline? If I use logic to write a computer program, is that philosophy? If I sit down with a set of results and use logic to muddle my way through them to form a hypothesis that informs my next experiment, am I truly acting as an unwitting philosopher, or am I merely using my head like a sane human being who is mindful of things like causality and temporal relationships? I understand that philosophy requires argument, and argment requires logic to be coherent, but are the dialectical tools and conventions we call “logic” to be defined as a kind of “philosophy”; or is it a tool used by philosophers, as well as many other specialists, in successfully structuring “arguments”?
I would never say that people who rely on empirical evidence are realists. That’s simply not what “realist” means. Do you find it surprising that “scientific realism” is actually an idealism? No, because you don’t care. I don’t want to make you care. But if you think people who pioneered science and scientific methods didn’t think about philosophy at all in doing so, you’re out of your friggin’ mind. I don’t think anyone is asking you to give a shit, but even a cursory glance at history shows that plenty of scientists and mathematicians throughout history have had quite a bit of a philosophical bent to them, and that those opinions influenced their work. So physicists might have given up on finding acceptable metaphysical interpretations of the results of QM (they haven’t, but whatever). That doesn’t mean that they didn’t have metaphysics in mind when they sought to interpret results. Be disinterested. Who cares. But don’t pretend that your disinterest characterizes science as a whole throughout history, because that’s one theory you’ll find falsified quite quickly.
Well, if you’ve been reading my posts, you’d see that it might be because science as a methodology adopts very few metaphysical assumptions. If you cared about methods of justification, you’d see that this makes it a very powerful explanatory device. But no one is making you care. Robots do a lot of pharmaceutical science, and they don’t care about the process or the results. So why should it be surprising that people could do it without caring, either?
Perhaps if you outlined what a postmodernist epistemology might be, we could agree with you or not.
Because “feeling confident” is truly the hallmark of science. :rolleyes:
The world is how it is. (This is of course not an assertion, but a tautology.) My initial reply (aimed at those who accept the existence of the physical, consider logic to be a valid epistemology here, speak English, and have access to a computer) stated that science is the method by which we test whether our mathemtical or linguistic descriptions of the world are how it is, or how it is not. I would suggest that this is accurate whether or not the world is physical.
Now, if the world were not physical, we must ask ourselves whether science would still be the best tool for determining how it is. The notion of physicality has within it a crucial assumption: that the world doesn’t cheat. That the how it is does not whimsically flit from one way to another like the thoughts of a scatterbrain.
It might be possible to conceive of some scenario whereby the universe looked for all the world like it actually existed independent of some non-physical entity like “mind” but was actually non-physical. But I would suggest that we could then no more assume that the world was being “honest” with us. We could not “trust” the world to be consistent, since the very notion of consistency might be nonsense fed to us by Descartes Deceiver. And so I would say that yes, our research is invalidated, because there I have no reason to trust either my memory or that the “true” nature of reality doesn’t change from moment to moment, making any science to date obsolete. I suggest that to accept “clear and distinct” entities, like Descartes did, is to accept the existence of the physical. (One can, of course, accept the existence of the metaphysical also.) Science is, I contend, incompatible with solipsism and the like. Indeed, I have never understood how geology, neuroscience and quantum cosmology matter to one who does not accept the physical: surely they are like Greek myths to me - interesting, but ultimately irrelevant?
Yes yes, but one can travel along a monotonically increasing graph. In any case, such similes are mere fripperies. The real power of science is in its bewilderingly accurate predictions. That Einstein could predict the previously inexplicable periheleon of Mercury to such absurd accuracy showed any reasonable person that General Relativity was not “as wrong as science had ever been”. If such predictions are so easy, I would request anyone impugning the “wrongness” of science to make a few themselves. I struggle to conceive of how science can be so monumentally wrong if it makes such astonishing predictions and, let’s face it, ultimately stops me and my loved ones dying like in past centuries.
Well, we could start assuming that we need not speak in a commonly understood language - that would be one less again. We must ask what assumptions are useful. Denying the physical and its associated consistency and “trust of our senses” is IMO as useful as the veritable chocolate teapot of philosophy, of which science is a part.
Husserl of the “Tripartite structure of consciousness”, I assume? I have not read his philosophy of science - I’ll have a look.
Surely everything done by humans is riddled with “meaning” (whatever that is)? We can never be certain of anything (I consider that if a biological computer evolved the ability to think in abstract, it could necessarily never be certain). Science is just the epistemology whereby we extract “truth” (whatever that is) from reality. We could all the universe nonphysical, just as I could call mathematics, logic and aesthetics “science”. But we might as well speak different languages.
Why is chemistry necessarily an extension of natural science? Why do you want to play airy-fairy semantics games?
Depends on how you define “philosopher”. More word games.
It was not an accident.
Sure.
Arguably not, but the subject at hand isn’t “Are all scientists philosophers?” (although a case can be made that they are, and indeed they were historically considered as such), but rather “What benefits can philosophy bring to science?” You have claimed that the answer to this is “none”. However, if philosophy gave us logic and you use logic to write a computer program then the field of computer science would certainly appear to derive some benefit from philosophy.
The average “sane human being” is not very mindful of things like causality and temporal relationships, or at least does not have a very good understanding of how they work. I was a tutor for both Practical Reasoning and Logic when I was a student, and believe me, these are not things that all ordinary people have an intuitive grasp of. To provide one common example, people confuse correlation with causality all the time. Luckily it’s not terribly difficult for most folk to learn about causality, correlation, and valid/invalid/sound arguments, at least not now that we have thousands of years of philosophical work to fall back on. If everyone had to come up with these ideas from scratch then I don’t think science would have progressed as far as it has to date.
There appears to be this “postmodernist” movement in philosophy, encompassing subdivisions like epistemological relativism, which appear to espouse the idea that natural knowledge is modeled upon a cultural substrate, and is thus ultimately dependent upon it. I’m not sure of the hierarchical tree that philosophers use to characterize such notions, but I think intrinsic to this postmodernist view is the notion that science does not, and can not, describe an objective reality, but due to its dependence on social constructs and other pervasive ideological structures forms but one of many forms of epistemology, none of which can claim primacy. Reality, it would seem, is literally what you make of it.
I’ve little issue with people who choose to spend their time contemplating such “profound” notions, but when they are introduced into the realm of policy and its exponents insist on interjecting such ideas into scientific discourse, I tend to feel that not only can philosophy offer us nothing of practical use, it might prove deleterious if taken too seriously. Some of this “postmodernism” seems to be actively anti-scientific; I think there’s even a branch of this “philosophy of science” that calls itself “anti-science ideology”, and wishes to teach that science is simply another belief system. It appears that this assessment is justified by placing it on an even epistemic footing with bona fide belief systems, and defines science as just another “cultural movement”, like any other. It boils down, again I think, to the simple notion of what one purportedly must recognize as some failure on the part of science to define “reality” in any special way.
Again, if there are those who insist privately I must define such things before I study them, they’re welcome to that oppinion, but I’ve never seen any practical impediment to generating and interpreting data whilst being blissfully unaware of such heady matters. No one I have ever encountered in twelve years of studying and practicing science appears to pay any of this esoterica any mind whatsoever in any demonstrably practical way. Some of us took philosophy courses and enjoyed them (or not), but some of us didn’t. Some of us studied logic rigorously, some just seem to have picked it up “on the job”, like “common sense”, and would be surprised to learn they are philosophers. It really doesn’t seem to matter, except if these philosophical issues might enter into policy. Then it would be a problem worse than irrelevance, I think.
I don’t. “Chemistry” is such an incredibly broad area of study, I’m not sure it’s a good analogy to “logic”, so I have no answer to that question.
Well, how do you define a philospher, if one can simply claim science as a branch of philosphy, or accuse critics of philosphy as practicing philosophy. Is the mere act of attampting to think logically about something philosophizing?
Why not?
Fair enough, if logic is “philosophy”, which I’m still not convinced of. So what besides have philosophers done for us lately (like, in the last thousand years or so) that I can point to all of my colleagues and say we depended upon it? If one wants to claim the scientific method as just another philosophy, then I guess there’s no argument, since philosophers can simply lay claim to any scientifically useful methodology or rule-of-thumb and claim it’s a philosophical development. I mean, when Galileo, for instance, decided doing experiments was a bit more useful than taking the Aristotlean approach to understanding things like acceleration and how unlike massive bodies fall, was he inventing “Galilean Philosophy”, or just breaking from philosophy entirely and doing something else? Depending on how meaningful (or -less) one wants to make a definition of “philosophy”, one could claim either, I suppose.
Ahhh, now perhaps we have hit on a way that philosophy can help science: by defending it against less rigorous philosophy!
I mean, acknowledgement that the world could be an illusion and acknowledgement of difficulties in rigorous epistemology due to quantum mechanics aside, insistence that science has no more meaning than a social phenomenon is absurd.
To the extent that science borrows enough from the rigorous philosophies, and to the extent that proponents of the social view also use rigorous characterizations, both science and philosophy can be improved. However, to the extent that proponents of the social view do no posit quantified assertions, fuck 'em 
Damn nomenclature. And no, I don’t care so much as I don’t take thinly-veiled assertions that I lack intellectual integrity or intelligence because I can’t always keep it all straight all that seriously. I’m sure you appreciate how incredibly profligate the philosophical “isms” really are, and there does seem to be a fair amount of overlap; it’s also not at all obvious from the names how “materialism”, “realism” and “idealism” are differentiated. I get them mixed up, and I’m sorry for that. But think because I have been curious about social critics that I can make blunders in my discussion of of philosphical movements that the majority of my colleagues can’t even commit because they don’t know Thomas Kuhn from Thom Thumb. My evidence for this? I asked my supervisor, his supervisor, one staff scientist, two technicians, and a secretary what they thought of Kuhn over lunch. Not surprisingly, I got blank stares (not to mention quizzical glances, since it was a serious change in gears from discussion about lines at polling stations). They simply didn’t know anything about him. Whether they “care” or not might be more determined by personal tastes in diversions than professional necessity. Should I inform them all they are unthinking “robots”, devoid of philosophical perspective? I’m literally surrounded.
[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
I am struggling to follow along. Is it fair to say that you meant “they are (to them) like Greek myths (are) to me”?
Thanks
TRT
I mean, did Kuhn really teach us that Popper was wrong about the nature of scientific progress? Is it really paradigm shifts or not? Does falsifiability truly delineate scientific or unscientific problems, a la Popper; or is it all dogmatism in the face of inconsistencey, replaced during periodic crises by supplanting theories, which become dogmas in turn, a la Kuhn?
I really have no idea. I can’t say if or if not either guy is right. They both had interesting things to say, I think, but I can’t say at all if either one contributed something concrete to the practice of gathering data and attempting to interpret it. Neither ever seemed to me to give a complete description of “science”, and add all kinds of qualities to it that I don’t thing are really there in all instances. There doesn’t appear to be any one way that science moves forward, nor any need to define one. If there’s no one scientific method, if studying nature requires some flexibility for technical reasons as much as any other, is it important to define any and all advancements from the Baconian method or whatever, while we’re doing it, so as to provide proper perspective in data interpretation? Well, if we do, I can damn near guarantee the majority of us worker bees are oblivious to it. Would be we better off knowing we may or may not have the benefit, perhaps sometimes, of Bayesian inference to save us from the problems of induction (or was it THE problem of induction? I forget)? Is it even “science” to weigh beliefs statistically?
Can someone explain to me again why inductive thinking must be a problem in the first place? Can I not use it ever? Is that not allowed? Am I breaking a rule I simply must know about to proceed? Can I jump to a conclusion now and again? Can I make a wild-arsed guess, or stumble upon something by sheer dumb luck? Have I committed an ethical sin by not recognizing and catagorizing any and all of my occasinal deviations from the prescribed algorithm laid out in the hypothetico-deductive method? Have I already spent way, WAY too much time worrying about these things when I could be getting some work done? Is this what scientists must be subjected to do their jobs, or can they be happy to chalk up their successes to a servicable knowledge base, O.J.T., and the correcting rigors of peer review?
It’s a PITA.
If I wanted to call you stupid, I would have. Honest. You don’t care. You see no point in it. You said so. That’s fine… but I don’t want to let anyone reading this thread get the impression that your comments stand for the opinion of scientists all around, or were every particularly appropriate. Really, a great many scientists don’t give a crap at all. That’s fine. No one is requiring they care. But science wouldn’t have the form it did today were it not for people quite interested in such things.
Quite so, quite so.
I did not intend to suggest you were unthinking robots. I did intend to suggest that the methodology does not require anyone to care about philosophical issues. We seem to agree on this point. I’m frustrated with your apparent unwillingness to care about an issue I feel strongly about (the overlap of philosophy and science), but I am not trying to browbeat you or anything. Honest. Don’t care. You don’t have to. But you’re also trying to suggest that it doesn’t matter. Don’t mistake your own apathy for a factual indifference. That is truly all I ask.
If philosophy has had such a great impact on scientific thinking in a positive way, I must balance that assertion with this epistemic relativism which seems to go in about as negative a direction as I can imagine. I can’t tell if philosphy molded science, or evolved alongside it. Mostly when I read about philosophy and its relationship to science, I hear about how we abandoned Aristotilean approaches, say, or positivist approaches, in the course of making progress. Is a stringently “reductionist” philosophy* now leading some folks to wrongly assume that a Grand Unfied Theory must exist to the exclusion of other, messier possibilities? Can philosophers provide help in solving that problem, or predict the solution any better than anyone else with an oppinion can? What philosophy is not frought with peril if clung to too tightly or applied inappropriately? Is it best to be philosophically agnostic so as to not become locked into an “ism”? Is that just another philosophy?
*Meaning, it would appear, taking from observations and descriptions of reducible complexity a guiding principle of investigation that seeks to discover underlying simplicity and beauty in many, and perhaps all, phenomena.
Loopydude: Mostly when I read about philosophy and its relationship to science, I hear about how we abandoned Aristotilean approaches, say, or positivist approaches, in the course of making progress.
Then your sources are leaving out information about how we replaced such approaches with, say, Platonist or empiricist ones. Those are philosophical influences too.
Look Loopydude, I’m not sure how much clearer I can make this for you, but your impression of what philosophy is all about is wrong. There can’t be much debate here if your entire position is based on faulty premises. If you insist upon defining philosophy as some sort of postmodernist circle-jerk then of course “philosophy” is of little to no value to science. But in my experience, this peculiar view of philosophy seems only to be held by people who don’t know a thing about the subject.
Now, I am admittedly not the world’s leading expert on philosophy. I did, however, spend a few years studying it. I know a lot of other students of philosophy. I know several professors of philosophy, some quite well respected in their field. And I never, ever encountered one of these “postmodern” philosophers who seem to bother you so much. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but if they’re the dominant force in contemporary philosophy then it sure passed me by. That’s a possibility, but since you’ve repeatedly avoided identifying how you came by your ideas about philosophy (did you take a class once? read an article? have an unpleasant dinner conversation with a philosophy student?) then I’m more inclined to believe that you’re simply full of it.