It's a shame that philosophy has gained such a poor reputation in certain circles.
I mean, it's understandable: the extent of most people's interaction with philosophy is with cartesian-style "but can we even know we exist??" navel-gazing -- or worse, with the intentionally obscure bits of continental philosophy.
Because of this reputation, many (the majority of?) scientifically-minded people view it as a binary choice: you're either a good empiricist or you're one of those damn poststructuralist lit-crit people from the humanities department.
IMHO: people who hold this mindset risk missing out on a powerful tool for their mental toolbox.
I tried to see what it offered. For instance, those "A very short introduction" series of books. Tried out Philosophy of Science. I see things like "what does 'alive' really mean" as something that is what Philosophy of Biology would deal with. That seems... rather useless? Arguing over definitions and going round in circles without contributing, today, to anything? (Everyone used to be called a philosopher, so in years past I'm sure "philosophy" has done plenty.)
Looked at Philosophy of CompSci on the Stanford Plato site. Read a lot of ... words... that were just fascinated they could work "duality" into computer programs. Cause a program is source right? But it can also be object code. Ooooh. And what about interpreted scripts, what does all this really mean? ... This would appear to have no redeeming quality. Perhaps I'm wrong I've just yet to see how this could be useful or even really intriguing.
Then there's even top scientists like Feynman making mocking comments about philsci. So given even top scientists are unconvinced there's value, I start to think OK maybe I'm not missing out on much.
Step 1: Name a single piece of information* gained from philosophy that is not currently debated.
This is why people look down on philosophy. While people might pretend to disagree with this, I would take the complete lack of counter examples as agreement.
PS: And because debate about word choice is so popular, information: facts provided or learned about something or someone.
People tend to forget how utterly limited the capacity we have for scientific inquiry is, and how those limits shaped history and science. Before there was ever science there was philosophy, and that philosophy was shaped by religion, and the same people did all three of those things throughout history.
If you took a king from the 1200s and had him look at our scientific establishment, he'd have called them monks. From this perspective, philosophy is religion without deity, and science is just philosophy of the empirical.
Disciplines of the mind do not have to have this hard separation, its a shame cynicism and scorn have been allowed to take over the public discourse. Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack.
The argument is the same as some religious use: science can't explain everything, therefore we need religion. The counterargument is the same too: while science can't explain everything, religion and metaphysics explain nothing. The other inconvenient fact is that lots of things that were previously thought to be not explainable by science have since been explained by science. Science will continue to nibble at religion and metaphysics and the religious and meta-physicists will continue to move the goalposts.
That's one of the key points of the article. You can't reasonably extrapolate that the goalposts will always move. Just because science is able to discern more than we expected in the past and will continue to do so in the future, doesn't provide us with any concrete reason to trust that its eventual scope is equivalent to the full breadth and depth of potential understanding. In fact, quite the contrary since the great virtue of science is that its scope is limited to empirical, quantifiable truths.
You can avoid that uncomfortable question by proclaiming empirical reality to be the only reality, but that's a metaphysical claim with no greater merit than its opposite.
This article reminds me of my first two years in college when I was studying physics and taking some philosophy courses. The professors and the department chair eventually found out who the science kids were and then vehemently tried to recruit us into double majoring, or at least minoring in philosophy. And then a few of the kids from philosophy came over to the physics side to take some classes and some of them got minors/double majors. I never did get that minor, but those philosophy classes were some of the best I took over the 4 years.
The sciences and the philosophies are incredibly intertwined and to argue otherwise or dismiss philosophy as useless is just being lazy. While in many ways they are different, fundamentally they are identical. We are seeking a better understanding and explanation of the world we live in.
Like many subjects in recent times (last 50 years or so), they've gotten really entrenched and dusty because they're afraid to go beyond their well defined borders (and then get more difficult to teach and make industry out of).
IHO, from a bigger anthropological viewpoint, philosophy and religion are extremely rich areas of idea prototyping. They came first. They are based on intuition and are good-faith efforts to understand our world. Science came later and was much better at it. What needs to happen culturally is that people need to all be philosophers, they need to have a reverence toward the sacred and toward the cultures that hold it dear. However, they can't let religion, or philosophy, prematurely cut off in their minds what the realm of science can embody. There are long lists of famous scientists that did this, and even they were proven too quick to place arbitrary limits on science and prescribe "everything else" as religion, or metaphysics.
To me, philosophy/religion/metaphysics are all "pre-physics" in a way. Intuitions without proofs...yet. The intuitions of many individuals, over many centuries, however seemingly incorrect scientifically, aren't completely worthless. It's like saying art is worthless. They may not explain mechanically how something behaves, but they offer insight and new ways of thinking, which are really at the core of how to truly understand something difficult.
are the four fundamental forces not already "metaphysics" ? such is the position of both philosophy and common language , great tools for cooperation and ethics , but subjective semantic arguments are most certainly dead ends when observing and determining the most probable reality.
TL;DR: Man who's devoted his life to woolly thinking, thinks about things in a woolly fashion.
Note 1
"If we are embedded in a reality that can be beyond our reach, how can we hope to achieve any knowledge at all? Perhaps Kant was right, and what we think we know may simply reflect the categories of the human mind. We can perhaps only deal with things as they appear to us. How things are in themselves may forever be beyond our grasp. Alternatively, the reality that we seek to understand may not even be subject to rational understanding. It may be sufficiently chaotic and disordered to be unintelligible."
Note 2
"There is such a thing as scientific progress, and it happens through systematic trial and error or, in Karl Popper’s terminology, conjecture and refutation. A "scientific realist" has to be wary, though, about how such realism is defined. A realism that makes reality what contemporary science says it is links reality logically to the human minds of the present day. Science is then just a human product, rooted in time and place. Bringing in future science - or ideal science
- may sound more plausible, but even then there is a distinction between science reflecting (or corresponding to) the nature of reality and it being simply a human construction."
That's the problem with the article, and a lot of Trigg's ideas. He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of science is flawed". Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak different languages would express itself differently. However you analyse the structure of an atom is irrelevant to its structure: it is what it is. Sine qua non. There's something which is an atom, whatever you call it and however you discover it.
The postulate that "the universe my not be ultimately understandable" should only be taken as a priori at the point where it appears that that is in fact the case. Which it doesn't. (Don't confuse this as a dismissal of uncertainty - that certainly exists, but even that lack of certainty can be expressed in certain terms and understood).
Editing for clarity:
By "the output of science is flawed" - I phrased this poorly. I don't mean that the interpretation of results is flawed, which it obviously can be. See phlogiston, early models of the solar system and so on. Rather, I meant that he seems to imply that the nature of what's being studied can change given the human looking at it and their understanding. Which isn't correct. Whether you understand how the solar system works or not makes no impact on what it's doing or why it's doing it.
I'd have been more accurate to say "the eventual output of the scientific process, upon where it has arrived at the correct answer, is flawed".
> He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of science is flawed".
What's so wrong about this? It seems so obvious it should be uncontroversial. The first several dozen scientific hypotheses to explain any given phenomenon are all bound to be very very wrong. Even the big-t Theories have to be adjusted many many times before and after they start to get referred to as such.
We have no idea what's true until long after the fact. Many respected scientists of the early 1900s believed in and contributed to the science of eugenics. Scientists we still respect today for their contributions to other fields.
> Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak different languages would express itself differently.
Again, why the scornful dismissal? The scientific establishment of the West differs in many ways from the establishment in the East. Not just language, but culture also produces differences. We managed to collaborate with the Soviets to do space missions, but it took an awful lot of work to do it. Medicine can have some very striking differences.
> He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of science is flawed".
I didn't read this anywhere in the article, nor did I feel it was implied. He is simply arguing that statements about the capability of science must be made outside of science, and that objective reality is independent of the method of discovery (science). I see nothing controversial about this.
> The postulate that "the universe my not be ultimately understandable" should only be taken as a priori at the point where it appears that that is in fact the case. Which it doesn't.
I'm not sure this should be taken as an axiom, but rather could be a characteristic inherent of the system (à la Gödel's theorems).
> He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of science is flawed".
This has the benefit of being right, at least. Look at the history of science. Look at all the models of planetary movement we've had -- a succession of incorrect models getting closer and closer to the truth. Look at any field of scientific inquiry, and compare the results of what they had 100, 200 years ago with what we understand to be correct today. Look at the speed of light:
In 1675 we thought the speed of light was 220,000 km/s. Jump into 1849 and it was measured at 315,000 km/s. Right now it's at 299792.458 km/s and is likely to stay there because we have now defined the meter in terms of the speed of light.
I mean, people know this. Everyone knows we still teach Newtonian physics in school even though Einstein proved them wrong before many of us on this website were even born. The history of science is a history in incremental improvement. Science IS flawed. There are plenty of things that we believe now because of science that will be disproven in the future -- some of them days or weeks from now, some of them decades away. To admit that science is flawed is not to take away from either the power or the importance of science, it is simply being honest about what we are doing.
>That's the problem with the article, and a lot of Trigg's ideas. He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of science is flawed".
And the output is flawed. Which is why science comes with a disclaimer 'to the best of our knowledge, this is how it works'.
We can never know how the universe works, only come up with a model that predicts all results we see. Unless that is how you define 'knowing how something works'.
Edit: I think a scary number of you guys are conflating the process of science with our current observational model. Quantum theory is the product of science, it's not science itself.
This is a strange belief to hold, considering we can prove this not to be the case with pure logic.
Suppose we observe that when A happens, B occurs. This does not imply that A causes B. In fact, we can never confirm that A causes B, regardless of how closely we measure the reaction. 'Preposterous!' I hear you say on the other end of the intertubes.. but alas, it is true. Beyond the realm of reality and hubris we might observe that in fact X causes Y, and that A is simply an observable effect of X. Similarly, B is just an effect of Y. If you really want to explode that mind, think about how broadly this concept can be applied.
Case in point: mathematics. It's completely misguided to think mathematics is empirical or within the realm of science. Math has empirical applications and is useful for scientific endeavors, but the actual discipline itself is entirely proof-based and rational.
So can science explain how a photon traverses the slits in the famous two slit experiment? So far, it has provided any number of ideas about that, but it's not been able to settle the question: and some believe it's beyond the realm of knowing (the predominant position if I'm not mistaken.)
To be fair, I actually agree with you. Science may not have all the answers today, and it may not have some answers for a very long time. But I don't think there are aspects of the universe that are inherently "unknowable". Many times throughout history we have not had access to certain facts due mostly to our technical progression and eventually we have found ways to overcome those obstacles. I see a reality that is, in fact, real and knowable, even if our access to some of that knowledge is not yet possible.
Of course, that thinking would be due to my positions on metaphysics. :-) This is where metaphysics can be important; because it can inform your choices about what can even be pursued.
[+] [-] draaglom|10 years ago|reply
I mean, it's understandable: the extent of most people's interaction with philosophy is with cartesian-style "but can we even know we exist??" navel-gazing -- or worse, with the intentionally obscure bits of continental philosophy.
Because of this reputation, many (the majority of?) scientifically-minded people view it as a binary choice: you're either a good empiricist or you're one of those damn poststructuralist lit-crit people from the humanities department.
IMHO: people who hold this mindset risk missing out on a powerful tool for their mental toolbox.
[+] [-] MichaelGG|10 years ago|reply
Looked at Philosophy of CompSci on the Stanford Plato site. Read a lot of ... words... that were just fascinated they could work "duality" into computer programs. Cause a program is source right? But it can also be object code. Ooooh. And what about interpreted scripts, what does all this really mean? ... This would appear to have no redeeming quality. Perhaps I'm wrong I've just yet to see how this could be useful or even really intriguing.
Then there's even top scientists like Feynman making mocking comments about philsci. So given even top scientists are unconvinced there's value, I start to think OK maybe I'm not missing out on much.
[+] [-] Retric|10 years ago|reply
This is why people look down on philosophy. While people might pretend to disagree with this, I would take the complete lack of counter examples as agreement.
PS: And because debate about word choice is so popular, information: facts provided or learned about something or someone.
[+] [-] vinceguidry|10 years ago|reply
If you took a king from the 1200s and had him look at our scientific establishment, he'd have called them monks. From this perspective, philosophy is religion without deity, and science is just philosophy of the empirical.
Disciplines of the mind do not have to have this hard separation, its a shame cynicism and scorn have been allowed to take over the public discourse. Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jules|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camelNotation|10 years ago|reply
You can avoid that uncomfortable question by proclaiming empirical reality to be the only reality, but that's a metaphysical claim with no greater merit than its opposite.
[+] [-] shasta|10 years ago|reply
Next we ask this expert on extraterrestrial life whether extraterrestrial life exists.
[+] [-] jevgeni|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snake_plissken|10 years ago|reply
The sciences and the philosophies are incredibly intertwined and to argue otherwise or dismiss philosophy as useless is just being lazy. While in many ways they are different, fundamentally they are identical. We are seeking a better understanding and explanation of the world we live in.
[+] [-] brianclements|10 years ago|reply
IHO, from a bigger anthropological viewpoint, philosophy and religion are extremely rich areas of idea prototyping. They came first. They are based on intuition and are good-faith efforts to understand our world. Science came later and was much better at it. What needs to happen culturally is that people need to all be philosophers, they need to have a reverence toward the sacred and toward the cultures that hold it dear. However, they can't let religion, or philosophy, prematurely cut off in their minds what the realm of science can embody. There are long lists of famous scientists that did this, and even they were proven too quick to place arbitrary limits on science and prescribe "everything else" as religion, or metaphysics.
To me, philosophy/religion/metaphysics are all "pre-physics" in a way. Intuitions without proofs...yet. The intuitions of many individuals, over many centuries, however seemingly incorrect scientifically, aren't completely worthless. It's like saying art is worthless. They may not explain mechanically how something behaves, but they offer insight and new ways of thinking, which are really at the core of how to truly understand something difficult.
[+] [-] matthferguson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petewailes|10 years ago|reply
Note 1
"If we are embedded in a reality that can be beyond our reach, how can we hope to achieve any knowledge at all? Perhaps Kant was right, and what we think we know may simply reflect the categories of the human mind. We can perhaps only deal with things as they appear to us. How things are in themselves may forever be beyond our grasp. Alternatively, the reality that we seek to understand may not even be subject to rational understanding. It may be sufficiently chaotic and disordered to be unintelligible."
Note 2
"There is such a thing as scientific progress, and it happens through systematic trial and error or, in Karl Popper’s terminology, conjecture and refutation. A "scientific realist" has to be wary, though, about how such realism is defined. A realism that makes reality what contemporary science says it is links reality logically to the human minds of the present day. Science is then just a human product, rooted in time and place. Bringing in future science - or ideal science - may sound more plausible, but even then there is a distinction between science reflecting (or corresponding to) the nature of reality and it being simply a human construction."
That's the problem with the article, and a lot of Trigg's ideas. He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of science is flawed". Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak different languages would express itself differently. However you analyse the structure of an atom is irrelevant to its structure: it is what it is. Sine qua non. There's something which is an atom, whatever you call it and however you discover it.
The postulate that "the universe my not be ultimately understandable" should only be taken as a priori at the point where it appears that that is in fact the case. Which it doesn't. (Don't confuse this as a dismissal of uncertainty - that certainly exists, but even that lack of certainty can be expressed in certain terms and understood).
Editing for clarity:
By "the output of science is flawed" - I phrased this poorly. I don't mean that the interpretation of results is flawed, which it obviously can be. See phlogiston, early models of the solar system and so on. Rather, I meant that he seems to imply that the nature of what's being studied can change given the human looking at it and their understanding. Which isn't correct. Whether you understand how the solar system works or not makes no impact on what it's doing or why it's doing it.
I'd have been more accurate to say "the eventual output of the scientific process, upon where it has arrived at the correct answer, is flawed".
[+] [-] vinceguidry|10 years ago|reply
What's so wrong about this? It seems so obvious it should be uncontroversial. The first several dozen scientific hypotheses to explain any given phenomenon are all bound to be very very wrong. Even the big-t Theories have to be adjusted many many times before and after they start to get referred to as such.
We have no idea what's true until long after the fact. Many respected scientists of the early 1900s believed in and contributed to the science of eugenics. Scientists we still respect today for their contributions to other fields.
> Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak different languages would express itself differently.
Again, why the scornful dismissal? The scientific establishment of the West differs in many ways from the establishment in the East. Not just language, but culture also produces differences. We managed to collaborate with the Soviets to do space missions, but it took an awful lot of work to do it. Medicine can have some very striking differences.
[+] [-] chestervonwinch|10 years ago|reply
I didn't read this anywhere in the article, nor did I feel it was implied. He is simply arguing that statements about the capability of science must be made outside of science, and that objective reality is independent of the method of discovery (science). I see nothing controversial about this.
> The postulate that "the universe my not be ultimately understandable" should only be taken as a priori at the point where it appears that that is in fact the case. Which it doesn't.
I'm not sure this should be taken as an axiom, but rather could be a characteristic inherent of the system (à la Gödel's theorems).
[+] [-] cwyers|10 years ago|reply
This has the benefit of being right, at least. Look at the history of science. Look at all the models of planetary movement we've had -- a succession of incorrect models getting closer and closer to the truth. Look at any field of scientific inquiry, and compare the results of what they had 100, 200 years ago with what we understand to be correct today. Look at the speed of light:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
In 1675 we thought the speed of light was 220,000 km/s. Jump into 1849 and it was measured at 315,000 km/s. Right now it's at 299792.458 km/s and is likely to stay there because we have now defined the meter in terms of the speed of light.
I mean, people know this. Everyone knows we still teach Newtonian physics in school even though Einstein proved them wrong before many of us on this website were even born. The history of science is a history in incremental improvement. Science IS flawed. There are plenty of things that we believe now because of science that will be disproven in the future -- some of them days or weeks from now, some of them decades away. To admit that science is flawed is not to take away from either the power or the importance of science, it is simply being honest about what we are doing.
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
And the output is flawed. Which is why science comes with a disclaimer 'to the best of our knowledge, this is how it works'.
We can never know how the universe works, only come up with a model that predicts all results we see. Unless that is how you define 'knowing how something works'.
[+] [-] TerryADavis|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jackmaney|10 years ago|reply
[cringe cringe twitch]
[+] [-] debacle|10 years ago|reply
Yes.
Edit: I think a scary number of you guys are conflating the process of science with our current observational model. Quantum theory is the product of science, it's not science itself.
[+] [-] bottled_poe|10 years ago|reply
Suppose we observe that when A happens, B occurs. This does not imply that A causes B. In fact, we can never confirm that A causes B, regardless of how closely we measure the reaction. 'Preposterous!' I hear you say on the other end of the intertubes.. but alas, it is true. Beyond the realm of reality and hubris we might observe that in fact X causes Y, and that A is simply an observable effect of X. Similarly, B is just an effect of Y. If you really want to explode that mind, think about how broadly this concept can be applied.
[+] [-] stem_lord|10 years ago|reply
Case in point: mathematics. It's completely misguided to think mathematics is empirical or within the realm of science. Math has empirical applications and is useful for scientific endeavors, but the actual discipline itself is entirely proof-based and rational.
[+] [-] sbuttgereit|10 years ago|reply
To be fair, I actually agree with you. Science may not have all the answers today, and it may not have some answers for a very long time. But I don't think there are aspects of the universe that are inherently "unknowable". Many times throughout history we have not had access to certain facts due mostly to our technical progression and eventually we have found ways to overcome those obstacles. I see a reality that is, in fact, real and knowable, even if our access to some of that knowledge is not yet possible.
Of course, that thinking would be due to my positions on metaphysics. :-) This is where metaphysics can be important; because it can inform your choices about what can even be pursued.
[+] [-] pjmlp|10 years ago|reply
1 - Science hasn't yet discovered why something as it is => Metaphysical explanation
2 - Mankind needs an explanation for things they cannot understand => feel better with the unknown
Scientific knowledge is the enemy of any religion as it can eventually explain why something is the way it is.
[+] [-] adrianN|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamzultan|10 years ago|reply