Physicist and heathen Victor Stenger has written a peer-reviewed article for Science, Religion, and Culture, which is now accepted and available free online. It’s called “In defense of New Atheism: A response to Massimo Pigliucci.” It’s a critique of Pigliucci’s article “New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement” (Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37:141–53).
As one might expect, Stenger defends New Atheism against Pigliucci’s claim that it ignores or elbows out philosophy, and also argues that Pigliucci’s attacks on Sam Harris are misguided. Here’s a short excerpt:
I will grant that Pigliucci is justifiably miffed by the statements made by a
number of scientists that question the value of philosophy. Scientists as a whole are a hard-headed lot and can be skeptical, if not downright dismissive, of thinking that they see as vague and muddled – which, it is fair to say, is true of much of what passes for philosophy. But anti-philosophy statements are not unique to the new atheist movement, and it is disingenuous to link this viewpoint with New Atheism. And of course the best philosophers over the ages have been highly intelligent and clear-thinking. I personally have benefited greatly from my reading of philosophy and interactions with philosophers, such as Larry Laudan and Daniel Dennett, who, I have found, often know more about the nature of science than those scientists that criticize them.I do not think New Atheism is at war with philosophy.Nor are its principles in conflict with philosophy. Theology is another matter.
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Scientists spend a lifetime learning to work with the scientific method, the antithesis of muddled and vague.
Philosophers spend a lifetime learning to work with great swaths of knowledge that is not subordinate to the scientific method, much of which is muddled and vague.
The idea that scientists are going to be better at working through the muddled and vague than philosophers is … um …
The quite vain conclusions of a scientist who has no experience reasoning about the muddled and vague.
That is a peer-reviewed article? It hardly seems to have passed by an editor, if this sentence from p. 3 is any indication:
Neither was Rocks of Ages Gould’s last book (that was The Structure of Evolutionary Theory) nor did he die in 1999 (but in 2002).
It seems absurd that this sort of article can even be labeled “peer reviewed”, given that it’s really just an editorial.
I agree. I was also rather baffled at Pigliucci’s New Atheism paper being “peer reviewed”, and at Pigliucci regarding it as a “technical” philosophy paper, when it’s more just an opinion piece.
It’s a philosophy journal, not a science one. That makes it pretty hard to avoid including opinions. 🙂
*whooopishk*
(My onomatopoetic term for touché)
Nice article by Victor Stenger, though instead of pleading not guilty to the charge of “scientism” I’d suggest he should plead guilty to broad-definition-science scientism.
I guess that “scientism” is an issue like “free will”, where the different meanings of the terms are crucial.
Oh, I think the meanings of the words are quite clear:
Science – A careful analysis of available evidence that reaches conclusions I approve of or am neutral about.
Scientism -A careful analysis of available evidence that reaches conclusions I disapprove of.
Stenger says:
“well established cosmological knowledge indicates that the universe began with maximum entropy, that is, total chaos with the absence of structure…”
This is not the dominant view in physics. WEIT’s Official Website Physicist discusses the topic in many places, including his recent wrapup of his WLC debate:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/02/24/post-debate-reflections/
See also
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/07/09/cosmology-and-the-past-hypothesis/
That is odd. Best I can say, to try to salvage some of it, is that he may have meant to say the universe had minimal structure just after the big bang.
It’s not odd at all, I think. The concept of the entropy of the universe is even more arguable than concept of the energy of the universe. And remember that Sean is on the cautious side on the latter!
– On the global energy of the universe:
1) Energy – defineable/conserved?
“Energy isn’t conserved; it changes because spacetime does.” – Sean Carroll http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/
“And it’s not [an objection] that I’m going to weasel my way out of on the technicality [links to Sean] that in General Relativity, “energy” is not a technically well-defined quantity. Because even though that’s technically true, we still have a good intuition about energy and its different types.” “And that’s why energy, if you choose to allow it to be defined, can be conserved, even in a Universe with dark energy!” – Ethan Siegel https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/a26572cc6853
2) Energy – 0 in a FRW/relativistic universe?
“the energy of the universe is constant and zero for open or critically open FRW universes” [using dynamical system analysis] – Faraoni & Cooperstock http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/587/2/483/pdf/56020.web.pdf
“A covariant formula for conserved currents of energy, momentum and angular-momentum is derived from a general form of Noethers theorem applied directly to the Einstein-Hilbert action of classical general relativity.” ; “the cosmological energy conservation equation” – Phillip Gibbs http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9701028 ; http://blog.vixra.org/2010/08/17/energy-is-conserved-in-cosmology/
– On the global entropy of the universe:
1) Is entropy increasing/decreasing; is maximum possible entropy increasing/constant?
See the many “Semi-popular treatments” on page 8 in http://www.univers2009.obspm.fr/fichiers/Recherche/Session-Parallele/R7_Inflation_and_Dark_Energy/Lineweaver.pdf
There may be a dominant view, but perhaps only if one clump similar saying models.
It appears Stenger’s treatment is the same as Layzer’s from 2009: entropy and maximal possible entropy increasing both.
But Lineweaver & Egan from 2008 themselves adhere to the model that you get when accepting AdS/CFT holography: entropy increasing towards constant maximal entropy (heat death).
Also here: “To interpret the CEH [Cosmic Event Horizon] entropy itself as a maximum entropy is to invoke the holographic bound on the volume of the cosmic event horizon.” http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverEganParisv2.pdf
Holography and the holographic bound are arguable hypotheses. But yes, if there is an acceptable dominant view, it ought to be the L&E one.
No, Stenger’s position is indeed that the universe began in a state of maximum entropy (complete disorder in a volume of negligible size), but due to cosmological expansion its potential and actual entropy continues to increase. It is now roughly 100 orders of magnitude higher that at the time of the Big Bang. (Local entropy need not be maximal.)
See this excerpt, “Entropy and Cosmology”, from chapter 5 of The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, and “Time’s Arrows Point Both Ways – The View From Nowhen”, published originally in Skeptic.
I still might have got Stenger’s position wrong. Corrections welcome.
Hmm, he does seem to say that. There are different ways to describe the 2nd Law and the degree of entropy. I guess his position is that within the primordial hot bit of very early universe there was 0 structure and 0 information from its past, so max entropy. Like a black hole.
Its just that when one expands the view to include the primordial speck and the space outside it (and I would think Stenger would be ok with considering that there is space external to the universe) then one has a very very steep difference in matter and temperature. The entropy of this wider system would be very much lower. Note: I am not a physicist, so it is easy for me to say crazy things about this area.
He gets the maximum entropy condition from the thermodynamics of singularities (black holes), Hawking and others showed that a black hole contains the maximum possible entropy within it’s horizon. Hawking also showed that the universe is consistent with having started with a singularity.
In any case, the extreme isotropy (evenness in all directions) of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation indicates that there was very little or no structure (and therefore high disorder)in the early phases of the universe.
OK, but inflation is generally invoked as the cause of smoothness of the CMB.
I am not a cosmologist, but there may be equivocation here between the beginning of our current, visible universe with the big bang and the beginning of whatever we might call the greater reality that we are only one daughter universe or one of many cycles of.
Fairly sure that Stenger means that our universe started with max entropy, whereas many of Carroll’s writings stress that there may have been events before the big bang (for a certain value of “before”), that from a certain perspective the time arrow is arbitrary, and that the multiverse may simply have no beginning but go infinitely backwards.
See stuff like this:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2006/08/01/boltzmanns-anthropic-brain/
http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com.au/2004/10/arrow-of-time.html
Not that I really understand any of that, but this may be the crux of the seeming disagreement.
I think you are right. This equivocation is often a problem. It helps to use the term cosmos, for the totality of everything, with multiverse models that posit a background cosmos prior to the big bang, as we discussed in the previous WEIT thread on the Carroll/Craig debate. In an eternal multiverse model, one might expect the cosmos to be at thermal equilibrium. Then our particular universe would be the result of a rare fluctuation within that – like a bubble in a very flat ocean of champagne. Certainly it would be odd, in such a model, if the cosmos outside of our particular universe had *low* entropy.
I would argue that philosophy, insofar as it is disconnected from empiricism, is as problematic (though generally not nearly so malignant) as faith itself.
Indeed, the fundamental problem of faith is that it assigns belief not in proportion with an objective analysis of empirical evidence, but by some other means. And is that not what much of philosophy is also devoted to? It is, after all, the philosophers who are obsessed with answering the “Big Questions” of the origins and nature of morality, intelligence, and existence itself…yet they come to their positions generally without the benefit of evidence. And they’ve not made any progress at all in the past couple millennia at least. In contrast, it’s the game theorists and the ethicists; the neurophysiologists and the computer scientists; and the cosmologists and the particle physicists (respectively) who are taking an empirical approach to those problems, and they’re the ones who’ve made amazing advances that the philosophers largely ignore.
The problem isn’t faith — or, rather, it isn’t only faith. The problem is thinking that there’s anything that trumps evidence.
Cheers,
b&
“And they’ve not made any progress at all in the past couple millennia at least”
Pigliucci denies this; he claims there are some arguments that used to be made that can no longer be made in Philosophy circles.
Such as?
Well, a Google search for ‘discredited philosophy’ turned up ‘Idealism’ as being discredited. Platonic philosophy. Also the view that races differ in intellect.
“Also the view that races differ in intellect.”
That has been discredited by scientists rather than by philosophers, surely. Whether races differ in intellect is an empirical question.
This was my thought, more generally.
Which are the “arguments that used to be made that can no longer be made in philosophy circles” that have deprecated purely by philosophy and which by science?
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Be still, my beating heart!
Still, not quite as dramatic as going from Democritus’s atoms to Quantum Field Theory, eh? Or from Eratosthenes’s measurement of the Earth to Big Bang Cosmology? Or from humors and bloodletting to DNA-personalized medicine and chemotherapy?
In fact, I rather thing you’ve proven my point….
Then why was that the entire basis for William Lane Craig’s objections to Sean Carroll in their recent debate?
I don’t think there’s any way you could philosophize yourself to that being the most likely conclusion. Rather, genetic analysis has demonstrated that “race” is as much a cultural artifact as anything else, and aptitude testing has demonstrated that, no matter what definition of “race” you might propose adopting, it’s not a significant variable. Parental income is far more significant than race, as is socioeconomic status in general.
And those are all as empirical as empiricism gets.
Cheers,
b&
It’s comments like Ben Goren’s about the lack of value of philosophy that I find just strange in this context. Surely if anyone should recognize the value of philosophy it’s the new atheist supporters. Or do I need to note the following:
1. Sam Harris has a degree in philosophy.
2. Dennett is a professional philosopher.
3. Stenger works in a philosophy department.
4. Dawkins’ book positively cites philosophers Bertrand Russell, J. L. Mackie, Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett, and A. C. Grayling.
5. Even Hitchens book, The Portable Atheist, which he describes as containing “essential” readings on atheism, includes articles by Hobbes, Hume, Ayer, Marx, Dennett, and Russell. Surely there is value to philosophy in all these cases.
Seconded. When I read claims like this:
I would argue that philosophy, insofar as it is disconnected from empiricism, is as problematic (though generally not nearly so malignant) as faith itself.
… I think, really? Everything that isn’t empirical is worthless? I would wager we have all at some stage used thought experiments to great effect, and that is one of the major tools of philosophy right there.
And that is before we come to other non-empirical matters like the study of logic, or pure mathematics…
If by “philosophy” you mean “thought”, then yeah, philosophy is really useful.
If by “philosophy” you mean trying to construct proofs about what sorts of things must exist using modal logic, and taking time out to try to disprove those proofs with more modal logic, then, no, not so much.
In the same way that religious people try to lay claim to every good feeling (Beauty? That’s God. Awe? That’s God. Compassion? That’s God), as though those feelings were not the common heritage of humankind rather than the gifts of religion, defenders of philosophy try to claim for philosophy every kind of careful thinking, as though no one would be able to think, or do math, without the philosophers here to show us how. It’s equal measures insulting and comic.
Yes, everybody can think carefully, and everybody can examine empirical claims. I just think it is a useful terminology to call the pros in careful thinking ‘philosophers’ and the pros in examining epirical claims ‘scientists’.
That there is a lot of nonsense that calls itself philosophy is no more relevant for assessing the value of philosophy than the undeniable fact that there is a lot of nonsense that calls itself science is for assessing the value of science. Most of us scientists aren’t even very good at policing against, say, homeopathy.
scientists don’t police homeopathy, legislators do
the man once overseeing science and technology in Canukistan is a quackupuncturist and a chiroquack
now he is the agriculture mandarin
ooops, not agriculture
Then scientists need to police legislators!
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That’s not relevant.
What is relevant is that the heart and soul of science is the one and only reliable method for assessing the value of thought, and that, by empirical observation, philosophy is entirely unable and / or unwilling to separate its own wheat from chaff.
It’s very easy to tell what is and isn’t good science: analyze the peer-reviewed literature. As a bonus, anything well established can be found by going to the required textbooks in the relevant field at any major accredited public university.
In contrast, just last week we saw an allegedly sophisticated and highly-regarded philosopher attempt to refute modern cosmology by privileging Aristotelian Metaphysics over Quantum Mechanics.
Again, the problem isn’t that there’re cranks in either field. It’s that science can and does weed out the cranks, but that philosophy doesn’t and can’t.
Cheers,
b&
Ben,
I really appreciate your contributions on this site.
Brief question if I may.
In your opinion what constitutes bad philosophy?
Also, what is your opinion of turgid writers such as Heidegger and Adorno?
Thanks.
Ah, but that’s just it! In philosophy, opinion is ultimately all that counts. In other words, philosophy is unable to justify itself; any philosophical standard one might apply will be incapable of reliably distinguishing the good from the bad.
If you actually want to figure out which philosophy is good and which is bad, you need to step outside of philosophy entirely and objectively analyze the data. That is, philosophy is incapable of justifying itself, but science can justify not only itself but what bits of philosophy are useful and which aren’t — in other words, by abandoning the philosophy and doing science.
I’m unfamiliar with their work. On which empirical observations do they base their work, and is their methodology and analysis sound? If all is in order, I could forgive a lack of clarity in presentation. If they’re proposing tests that could refute their hypotheses, as long as one can make sense of what they propose and that their proposal would actually constitute invalidation, again, I could live with that. It’d even be okay if they have a section in which they’re just speculating in the hopes of triggering an useful thought in somebody else. But if they’re making unfounded leaps or simply pulling shit out of their asses, I have no respect for them.
Cheers,
b&
Thanks Ben.
Final question. There is new book titled “Plato At The Googleplex” by Rebecca Goldstein. Here is an excerpt of the first review:
“Goldstein makes a plea for the continuing importance of philosophy as Plato (427–347 B.C.) conceived it, and for the enduring relevance of Plato’s contributions. (……..) Goldstein makes a compelling case that philosophy’s methods are useful to all, but that Plato’s high-mindedness will not satisfy those caught in the gears of making ends meet, or even raising a family. Yet you can read this as an imperative: If philosophy genuinely is required for people to reflect sufficiently on their lives and actions, society should put a priority on encouraging the development of critical thinking skills—not in the direct service of a vocation, but in service to people becoming better human beings. It is an ideal worth maintaining even for those of us far too busy to live the life of the mind”
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/03/review_of_rebecca_goldstein_s_philosophy_book_plato_at_the_googleplex.html
——-
Do you think it might be interesting?
I think a thorough grounding in the humanities, especially the Classics, is an essential element in every citizen’s education. Plato is an absolute must-read, as are Aristotle and Lucretius and the others. But so is Homer and Shakespeare and Machiavelli, and generally in the same basic context as the others.
I would absolutely agree that good skills at rational analysis are absolutely vital.
I would disagree that Plato is the best or only way to gain those skills, and I would vehemently disagree that Platonic philosophy is useful unto itself. As literature, as history, absolutely. But Platonism is so profoundly discredited — and its close cousin of Aristotelianism — that treating them as reliable for modern usage is as absurd as promoting the use of the Four Elements in chemistry classes.
I get the distinct impression that Goldstein is trapped in the late Bronze Age, and as such likely doesn’t have anything relevant to contribute to modernity, except perhaps accidentally.
Cheers,
b&
Why not find out yourself or read the reviews on Amazon, rather than ask someone who has no interest in the subject and almost certainly hasn’t read it!? Or is that final question some kind of troll?
It’s very easy to tell what is and isn’t good science: analyze the peer-reviewed literature.
I would have asked if you have ever participated in a journal club, but then I realized that this sentence answers the question.
In contrast, just last week we saw an allegedly sophisticated and highly-regarded philosopher attempt to refute modern cosmology by privileging Aristotelian Metaphysics over Quantum Mechanics.
Again, the problem isn’t that there’re cranks in either field. It’s that science can and does weed out the cranks, but that philosophy doesn’t and can’t.
Okay, how exactly does biology “weed out” the colleagues who believe in group selection, Croizat’s panbiogeography, or that native Americans cannot possibly have caused any deforestation or extinctions because they were so noble and in harmony with nature? Because I see them researching, teaching, and publishing happily along. How exactly do you figure that “science progresses funeral by funeral” is “weeding out”? (Not that I want people to be treated like chaff anyway…)
First, I never claimed perfection. This isn’t a case of a rabbit in the Precambrian invalidating Evolution; it is, as with so much of empiricism, a statistical claim. If you want absolutes, go back to the philosophy department; science doesn’t deal with the sort of naïve and unsophisticated absolutism you’re asking for.
And, as such, were you to examine the literature, you’d see how many people take up the different positions and how many others refer to the positions in question. To pick your last example in particular, I very much doubt you’ll find any significant numbers of biologists or climatologists who discount anthropomorphic near-prehistoric North American deforestation and extinction events, and I can all but assure you that the number of others who cite those who do take that position are practically nil.
Cheers,
b&
Aaron C: “…turgid writers …”
I’m curious as to just what you mean by that (and no, I’m not trying to joke about any double entendre here).
Ben Goren,
The problem is then that you are applying very different criteria to the two area. When a minority of scientists accepts the myth of the noble savage or completely rejects evidence for long distance dispersal, you dismiss them because they are a minority; but when a minority of philosophers believes in god, they suddenly devalue the entire discipline?
If you want absolutes, go back to the philosophy department; science doesn’t deal with the sort of naïve and unsophisticated absolutism you’re asking for.
YOU are the one demanding an absolute: that all philosophers agree on every question or else their discipline is worthless. I merely point out your inconsistency.
I don’t give a damn about how many philosophers believe in gods; that’s not at all what this is about.
What this is about is how many philosophers are quite literally centuries behind the science on what is supposed to be the strong suits of philosophy. We have “Philosophers of the Mind” who know nothing of information theory nor neurophysiology; we have “Philosophers of Morality” who wouldn’t recognize a satisfaction survey or an ethical review board if it bit them in the ass; we have “Philosophers of Existence” still stuck on Aristotelian metaphysics and utterly incapable of comprehending PBS-level cosmological principles. And all of them spouting oh-so-sophisticated “Philosophical” obscurantist bullshit.
No.
What I insist is that philosophers demonstrate a reliable method for separating the wheat from the chaff.
Science has that, in the form of empiricism.
Philosophy doesn’t, as evidenced by the fact that Aristotelians are many and respected.
Again. Demonstrate a reliable philosophical method of identifying good philosophy, and I’ll change my mind.
Not only does philosophy actually lack such a method, philosophical apologists have the utter gall to accuse scientists, who actually have such a method, of not having one because empiricism isn’t sufficiently philosophically justifiable. That’s every bit as obnoxious as any “no morality without Jesus” god-bothering we get from any Christian, and yet we’re supposed to respect it because all philosophers agree that it’s true.
Cheers,
b&
Ben Goren,
Okay, I may have partly misunderstood you then; it did sound as if your criticism was based on the existence of bad philosophers.
Demonstrate a reliable philosophical method of identifying good philosophy, and I’ll change my mind.
As far as I understand it, philosophy is not in the business of describing empirical reality (that is what empiricism is for!) but today rather constitutes the effort to clarify, conceptualize and think about how to think.
As such, a philosopher could quite simply make useful contributions to our knowledge by pointing out that a concept we use is ill-defined or self-contradictory, or perhaps that something does not even need to be examined empirically because it is incoherent. In other words, logic and other forms of abstract reasoning would be good methods for identifying good philosophy.
Alas, you will simply turn around and claim all useful reasoning to be science (even if it uses zero empirical data) and thus by definition leave only mistakes over for philosophy sensu Ben Goren.
Not only does philosophy actually lack such a method, philosophical apologists have the utter gall to accuse scientists, who actually have such a method, of not having one because empiricism isn’t sufficiently philosophically justifiable.
I am not very impressed by the problem of induction either, but if that is what ails you then your dismissal of all philosophy is quite the overreaction. There are always animosities between fields – the chemists who taught us biologists in uni thought we were stupid and not real scientists, and we thought the same of the medical students some of us taught a few years later.
But I don’t have to deny the usefulness of organic chemistry just because my relevant lecturer was an arrogant a’hole who started the semester by openly telling us we as biology students weren’t bright enough to understand his subject anyway. That’s maturity, I guess.
Then philosophy truly is utterly useless.
First, do you really think that scientists are incapable of recognizing problems in their own work that only philosophers are likely to spot?
Next, how do you expect a philosopher to know enough about a field in order to spot the logical flaws other than by going toe-to-toe with the actual scientists with all the nitty-gritty data and analyses? What non-scientist philosopher is qualified to critique quantum field theory or cosmogenesis?
Most importantly, what makes you think that philosophical notions of logical coherence are even vaguely relevant to science any more, or have been for centuries?
Philosophers told us that things only move when acted upon; Newton turned that on its head. Philosophers told us that cause always preceded effect; Einstein demonstrated that not even worng. Philosophers told us of the law of the excluded middle, and then the Quantum Mechanists showed us how practically everything at the subatomic level is an exercise in fuzzy duality.
Besides, once again, how are we to know that what a philosopher says is incoherent actually is? We go out and look for evidence — we do the science. If we left it up to the philosophical definitions of definition and contradiction and coherence, we’d still be stuck with Aristotle’s Prime Mover and the Four Elements, because all our advances since then have grossly violated all that the philosophers held dear.
Hell, even — nay, especially — math would have been royally fucked. The philosophers told us that parallel lines never met, that all numbers are ratios, that you can’t have less than nothing. And, philosophically, they were on the firmest possible ground.
I’ll leave you with one final point.
There are an infinitude of logically and philosophically sound, coherent, consistent, well-defined theoretical models of this or any other reality.
All of them save one are worng.
Of the ones that are worng, the overwhelming majority are worse than useless.
Coming up with useless-but-philosophically-pure theories is trivial. Any idiot can do it. I bet Sean Carroll thinks up six of them before breakfast every morning.
That’s not the problem.
What you’ve just identified as philosophy’s most important domain is, unsurprisingly, not something of even tangential interest to scientists, only to philosophers.
The whole point of science is to find that one theory that’s actually right, or at least as many that aren’t so worng as to be useless.
What do we care about how many worng-but-“pure” answers philosophers can come up with, how how many fruitful paths they don’t think are worth pursuing or how many disused and treacherous paths they think we should follow? That’s child’s play at best, a dangerous distraction at worst.
What we’re interested in is finding the key that actually fits the lock. Not the key that’s pretty, not the key that’s got somebody’s name engraved on it, no the key that would fit a lock if the key weren’t a banana and the lock wasn’t a fish on a bicycle…but the actual key that actually fits the actual lock.
And the one and only way anybody’s ever demonstrated even remotely effective at that grand quest is to just go ahead and put the damned key in the fucking lock, already, and give it a turn and see what happens.
Which is the one thing philosophers aren’t interested in — at least, no more than any other sniny thing that happens to SQUIRREL!
Cheers,
b&
Interesting, all the things that philosophers have apparently told you – I can’t remember any of them telling me about the straight lines, for example. And yes, obviously philosophers hundreds of years ago will have made a lot of empirical claims that turned out to be wrong. Newsflash: so did scientists. We didn’t magically start with perfect knowledge.
In addition, if you go back as far as you do with most of your examples you will find that there was no clear difference between philosopher, mathematician and scientist anyway. Somebody who hypothesized 2,300 years ago that all things need to be acted upon was the next best thing that time had for a scientist. He just wasn’t very good at it because the methodology wasn’t there yet.
Conversely, it is not very relevant for you to point out that scientists can obviously also think conceptually. Well, duh. (By the way, you do realize that I am a career scientist, not a philosopher?) And of course a philosopher of science will need to know their way around science.
The thing is still that it may be useful for some of us to specialize in making crossing experiments with fruit flies, in reconstructing the evolution of land plants, or in classifying fossils, because only if we do it a lot can we become good at it, but that leaves us too little time to examine conceptual issues and forces us to treat many things as a black box that we simply accept. And on the other side it is useful for some of us to specialize in examining conceptual issues, because only then can they become very good at that, but that leaves them little time to do the actual science.
But that’s the whole point.
How do we know that the empirical claims of philosophers that were incorrect were actually incorrect?
We certainly didn’t learn that through philosophy, but rather from making the observation. By doing science.
I have repeatedly emphasized the common practical practice of division of labor between theoretical and experimental science. I’ve generally used physics as an example because it’s so much more common in that field than in others.
But, even when such specializing is in practice, the ones doing the theoretical work are thoroughly soaked in (and breathlessly awaiting) the latest empirical results (even if they never don a lab coat) and the ones doing the lab work are either gathering raw data to fill gaps the theorists are desperately curious about or they’re beating up a theorists’s latest theory in an attempt to break it.
That’s pure empiricism; data is king. That’s the same dividing line I’ve been identifying all along.
And it’s the same dividing line that philosophy, empirically, doesn’t give a flying fuck about — again, witness all the Aristotelians in philosophy, for example.
Cheers,
b&
I agree with Alex SL. Here is Einstein’s view of the matter, and he was no dummy.
“I agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.” (Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944
I’m not enough of an expert on Einstein to put this more than tentatively, but that very strongly reads to me as a close parallel to his statements on God. That is, just as Einstein’s God was Spinoza’s, indistinguishable from the laws of nature themselves, Einstein’s philosophy would appear to be theoretical science. And Einstein would, I’m sure, have agreed with me that, as important as imagination and daring flights of fancy are to theorizing, they ultimately mean nothing unless the data offers confirmation. According to Einstein’s usage, quantum field theory would be philosophy, for example, but William Lane Craig’s Aristotelianism wouldn’t. Yet, according to actual general usage by both philosophers and the public, QFT is science, not philosophy, and WLC is a respected philosopher.
So, as valuable as Einstein’s insights into physics actually were, I don’t think he was the best lexicographer to draw upon for this sort of discussion.
Cheers,
b&
Unfortunately this isn’t the correct reading of Einstein’s understanding of philosophy. It’s quite clear that by philosophy he’s thinking of people like David Hume, among others, since he mentions studying Hume’s Treatise on Human Understanding at one point, which is standard philosophy pretty much. Here are Einstein’s views if you don’t want to take it from me.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2149/
Also you go on and on about Craig, as if one person discredits an entire field. This is just silly in my view. Are you really trying to generalize about a whole field from one person? I presume you don’t need a philosopher like me to inform you that that’s a pretty weak sample for your induction.
Yes, really.
Insofar as we construct mental models / theories, when they are based on reliable empirical knowledge, they are useful; that is the very definition of science.
When we construct those models on something other than sound empirical evidence, we get worthless nonsense.
The worth of the theory is directly proportional to how closely it aligns with reality, and the only method we have for figuring out what reality is is empiricism.
And this is all sound empirical conclusions; see, for example, the theory of the Luminiferous Aether which was far more robust than any thought experiment most people will ever construct. Completely useless, except that it prompted Michelson and Morley to see if they could find it; and, when they didn’t, that, in turn, was one of the huge driving factors that led us to Quantum Mechanics. Which, again, is not only far more sophisticated than any thought experiment ever cooked up by any philosopher, but we know it’s true because it works.
Cheers,
b&
I’ve never denied that certain individuals who wear hats with “philosophy” labels on them have done important work.
But I will argue that the important work that they’ve done is all firmly grounded in empirically-established facts. That is, that their important work is science, even if it’s theoretical rather than applied.
Where those people go off the rails — even if the ones in your set rarely do so — it’s because whatever they’re doing is disconnected from the established empirical facts. In other words, when they practice philosophy.
Cheers,
b&
“I will argue…that their important work is science, even if it’s theoretical rather than applied.”
That’s the “No True Scotsman Fallacy.” It appears on your view there is no evidence you will accept as showing that philosophy is useful, since you claim anything useful has to be science. You can argue this way if you want, but this makes your view apriori and irrefutable. So much for basing your view on empirical evidence!
Sorry, but I’m not playing bagpipes.
There is a painfully-bright dividing line between science and everything else: empiricism. If you’re apportioning belief in proportion with a rational analysis of objective observation, you’re doing science regardless of what label you attach to it. If that’s not what you’re doing, no matter what you call it, it isn’t science.
Some philosophers do science, according at least to that definition, even while they say they’re doing philosophy. A great many philosophers do not do science; they apportion belief by some means other than that congruent with the available data.
And, yes; it is a common division of labor to split the observation and analysis between different people, though the two camps are generally in very close contact with each other with the lines rather blurred. It’s safe to suggest that, for example, Stephen Hawking isn’t the one pressing the button at CERN to fire the next stream of protons down the LHC. However, his work is utterly dependent on theirs and vice-versa.
In stark contrast, a preeminent philosopher such as William Lane Craig can spew Aristotelian bullshit in Sean Freakin Carroll’s face and not be laughed out of the Philosopher’s Club. If anybody from CERN had taken that podium and made the particular arguments Craig did, there’d be a vacancy notice posted the very next day.
Cheers,
b&
Oh give me a break. Like science doesn’t have any cranks in it? How about Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells? Where is the vacancy notice for these people? You can evade the issue if you wish, but you are still committing the “No True Scotsman Fallacy” however you parse it.
I am unaware of Collins or Miller attempting to insert their religious beliefs into their science, at least within the confines of the formalized practice of their careers. Miller especially has demonstrated the utmost and unimpeachable professional integrity even as he privately demonstrates he has some rather crazy personal fantasies.
As for Behe, and Wells, I am unaware of either of them having gotten any of their crank ideas past the peer review process, or of anybody else citing their non-reviewed work favorably in the reviewed literature. As I recall — but I don’t feel inclined to investigate right now — neither of them have been cited all that often for their legitimate studies, either, indicating that they’re about as low on the totem pole as it gets. Hell, even the civil courts have raked them over the coals and dismissed them as cranks.
Your turn. How do you reliably separate the good philosophers from the bad without employing an empirical (and thus scientific) analysis of the question?
If you don’t have an answer, then I really don’t see the point in further debate on the matter.
Cheers,
b&
So you admit that Behe and Wells are cranks and yet haven’t been given a vacancy notice?
And this fact doesn’t bother you because now I must meet some further condition about peer review. You are shifting goal posts. I’ll pass thanks.
You’re clearly not aware of how the modern society of science actually works. Ever heard of, “publish or perish”?
Those two may well still draw paychecks, but their crank ideas have academically withered on the vine.
If you think informing you of the only metric for respectability actually used by professional scientists — a metric which, empirically, you’ve demonstrated complete ignorance of — somehow constitutes shifting the goalposts, then you must be discussing some topic entirely different from the one the rest of us are.
Cheers,
b&
I don’t think that Wells is a working scientist.
It appears on your view there is no evidence you will accept as showing that philosophy is useful, since you claim anything useful has to be science.
You realize that only just now?
So, in what way is Cantor’s set theory “firmly grounded in empirically-established facts?” It’s actually the other way around: set theory is foundational to the mathematical framework we use to construct modern theories. In Cantor’s day it was considered “philosophy” rather than mathematics because he expressly theorized about infinite quantities, something believed to have no empirical justification.
I paid off my mortgage in just a few years with applied set theory, also known as database programming. It’s kinda hard to get any more empirical than that.
Remember, what matters is not where the ideas come from, but whether or not there’s empirical evidence confirming that the ideas are valid. Even at a very high-level view, Cantor’s work laid the foundation for so much of modern math, especially including the work of both Turing and Gödel. And without what Turing did with Cantor’s insights, you wouldn’t have the computer you’re using to read these words. I’m not enough of a mathematician to know the practical applications of Gödel;’s work, but any working scientist can tell you how spectacularly helpful a tool math is.
Whether or not math is “more really” some sort of Platonic ideal is the sort of bullshit nonsense philosophers worry about, or that people get a kick about bullshitting about over a few beers. But that you can use real math to make real predictions about the real world is all the real empirical proof you need that it really works.
Cheers,
b&
“I paid off my mortgage in just a few years with applied set theory, also known as database programming.”
Congratulations on your mortgage, but “database programming” makes very trivial application of set theory. Set theory provides a foundation for huge swaths of modern mathematics, probability and statistics, physics and engineering. The key feature is its ability to handle infinite sets (especially continuous spaces). Databases, last I checked, are finite objects.
Cantor’s contemporaries considered his approach to be “philosophy” and he lectured in philosophy. It took some time for his views to be accepted in mathematics. Foundational contributions were also made by philosophers like Frege, Russell, and (as you mention) Godel, among many others coming from philosophy, mathematics, physics and engineering. I would suggest that many scientists and engineers (like Turing) also wore philosophical hats at times, and they made excellent contributions to philosophy without presuming to replace or dispose of it.
“Remember, what matters is not where the ideas come from, but whether or not there’s empirical evidence confirming that the ideas are valid.”
Ideas have to originate before they can be tested. Most of mathematics is done without any empirical input whatsoever. Mathematics is a highly philosophical and aesthetic activity. Applied mathematicians and scientists try to create mathematical models to describe physical systems, and those models can be empirically tested.
“Whether or not math is ‘more really’ some sort of Platonic ideal is the sort of bullshit nonsense philosophers worry about, or that people get a kick about bullshitting about over a few beers.”
This is precisely the category of “bullshit nonsense” that got us modern set theory and a rigorous foundation for science. Most philosophers don’t strike on a key idea that transforms science, but some do.
There’s a parallel discussion that I sometimes have with my engineering colleagues: Does pure science have any value? There are engineers who would happily dispose of the pure sciences and absorb their few “useful features” into engineering departments. The usual argument is that engineers make most of the basic discoveries that advance technology, and there are comparatively few technological advances that originate from the pure sciences.
In effect, pure scientists are just riding on the coat tails of engineers, so let’s cut them off. You can argue that there have been some big successes from science, but I can argue (A) those were in the past, we don’t need them any more; (B) the successes are very few compared to the large volume of results that go nowhere; (C) those successes would have come from engineers anyway; (D) those “successes” are often “pure knowledge” with no relevant application; (E) I don’t even want to hear about those successes because that’s just the “Courtier’s Reply”.
Once I decide that whole disciplines are useless, there’s not much argument you can make because I’m now in the privileged role of a “skeptic.”
I rather thought it should have been obvious that I was offering just one trivial type of example of the sort of empirical evidence that proves the utility of set theory. And you right there provided a rather more thorough list of examples, two of which are the ultimate in empiricism: physics and engineering.
Yet you somehow seem to think that the fact that set theory is essential in physics and engineering somehow doesn’t constitute independent empirical confirmation of the validity and utility of set theory.
I’d be most curious to read your argument for why a physics experiment whose results can best be explained with applied set theory doesn’t constitute empirical validation of set theory, but it does constitute empirical validation of the rest of the math that goes into the physicist’s explanation.
Cheers,
b&
“Yet you somehow seem to think that the fact that set theory is essential in physics and engineering somehow doesn’t constitute independent empirical confirmation of the validity and utility of set theory.”
This is absolutely an empirical confirmation of the validity and utility of set theory; that’s why I’m talking about it. But set theory can’t be deduced from empirical observation or devised by scientific method. Set theory is arcane pure philosophy that got absorbed into mathematics and was later picked up by many other scientific fields with great success. If you would reject ideas because they lack empirical support at their inception, you would probably filter out many of the most interesting and impactful ideas in mathematics, logic, probability, statistics and other areas that draw primarily from deep analytical methods and a priori reasoning.
“I’d be most curious to read your argument for why a physics experiment whose results can best be explained with applied set theory doesn’t constitute empirical validation of set theory, but it does constitute empirical validation of the rest of the math that goes into the physicist’s explanation.”
1. Contemporary set theory is foundational to mathematics, but is not directly testable by itself, any more than you can empirically test infinite sums or asymptotic limits.
2. Mathematical models are tested as physical theories, which may fail for reasons unrelated to the mathematics. If we had adequate physical theories that never referenced set theory, set theory would not thereby be falsified. Models explain phenomena, and set theory is a mathematical foundation used to build the models.
3. A mathematical model can be supported by N observations but then fail in the N+1th observation. Additionally, an erroneous model can be continually adjusted with corrections to make it fit all past observations. Even if such a model “works” for all observations, it does not establish that the underlying set theory is correct.
4. Pure mathematics continues to be an activity of proof, interpretation and application; these activities proceed without any necessary grounding in empirical observation. Mathematicians do not seek empirical motivation and are not concerned with empirical validation for their proofs, nor is it possible to define a concept of empirical validation for a mathematical proof (unless you want to talk about equivalence between proof and computation).
I’ve never intentionally made any such statement. If anything I’ve written has given you that impression, I apologize for the confusion.
Indeed, I’m pretty sure I’ve repeatedly made the point that it doesn’t matter where the ideas come from, and even offered up Calvinball as a potential candidate.
What matters is the empirical confirmation.
If you get the idea that benzene molecules might have a ring shape after you have an Ouroboros-inspired dream, fantastic. But does that mean that benzene molecules actually have a ring shape? Who knows? Until, of course, you go and do the experiment to confirm or refute your theory.
What philosophers want us to do is privilege their philosophical fantasizing over other sources of inspiration. And that might be reasonable if philosophers actually had some sort of track record to point to in that department…but, as it turns out, all of the major advancements in knowledge over the recent centuries have come from people intimately acquainted with the extant empirical evidence. Newton was famously an experimentalist. Galileo was amongst the first to do serious telescope-based astronomy. Van Leeuwenhoek may have been the first to actually use a microscope in a methodical manner. Darwin sailed the world’s oceans collecting specimens. Rutherford bounced electrons off of gold foil. Finally, by the time you get to the Twentieth Century you start to see a divide between theoretician and experimentalist, most famously with Einstein…but, make no mistrake, Einstein knew exactly what was going on in the labs — and such is and has been the case with every scientific theoretician in modernity.
Not a single advance has come out of philosophy, except for those philosophers who’ve been as immersed in the data as the scientists — at which point, the “philosopher” label is a cultural affectation no more significant than a bow tie and top hat.
Cheers,
b&
“Not a single advance has come out of philosophy, except for those philosophers who’ve been as immersed in the data as the scientists — at which point, the ‘philosopher’ label is a cultural affectation no more significant than a bow tie and top hat.”
With this statement, you’ve clarified that your argument is “no true philosopher” and nothing else. I’ve cited examples of philosophers who made real contributions, and it seems your answer is to say they aren’t really philosophers.
Your insistence on “the data” really ignores my example of set theory and the pre-empirical nature of logic and mathematics. Pure mathematicians work with axioms and proofs; “data” is usually not relevant, and scientific applications are neat but not really the goal of pure mathematics.
I know we’ve been down this path before.
My position is that science is the process of apportioning belief in proportion with a rational analysis of empirical observation, and that anybody engaged in that enterprise is doing science no matter what it says on that person’s hat. All of your examples of philosophers making real contributions did so by rationally analyzing empirical observation — by doing science.
And, yet, there are copious examples of philosophers, respected well-published and cited philosophers, whose work is contemptuous of empirical observation and full of rationalization rather than rationalism.
If you can offer to me a definition of “philosophy” that both encompasses philosophy as it’s practiced today and that demonstrates its utility, I’ll change my position. But, despite repeated pleas for that, all examples have failed miserably, with the best of them so far being “people who think up new ideas.” Whoop-te-do, and good luck thinking up the new idea that’ll solve quantum gravity without an intimate knowledge of the latest data to come out of CERN and NASA.
Cheers,
b&
“My position is that science is the process of apportioning belief in proportion with a rational analysis of empirical observation, and that anybody engaged in that enterprise is doing science no matter what it says on that person’s hat. All of your examples of philosophers making real contributions did so by rationally analyzing empirical observation — by doing science.”
That is absolutely not the case. My examples were of contributions in pure mathematics and logic — totally non-empirical. There is nothing empirical in the development of set theory or its many applications in logic and mathematics. There is nothing empirical, for instance, in the axiomatic construction of the real numbers.
The fact is that virtually all mathematical systems have some application to physical science or engineering, but mathematics is developed without any empirical foundation or justification. This should demonstrate that there is an extraordinary fountain of useful knowledge that comes from a completely non-empirical source.
My position, perhaps complementary to yours, is that anyone who engages in pre-empirical analysis of theoretical foundations is doing philosophy, even if they usually wear a scientist’s hat. Regardless of what hats we usually wear, when we do science we should do it rigorously with respect for the standards of the disciplines; likewise if we step into pure mathematics or philosophy.
And we’ve again been down this path, too. Math that has no real-world application may be entertaining or aesthetically pleasing, but it’s every bit as useless as a Bach Cantata or a Shakespeare play. And, of course, you can then go on to empirically analyze the composition or the performance if you want to get a better understanding of it; indeed, again, an empirical analysis is the only way you’re actually going to understand it.
When the math gets applied (or otherwise empirically validated), that’s when it becomes more than mere poetry; that’s when it become actual knowledge. But without at least some empirical evidence supporting its validity, it’s just more Calvinball.
Now you’re the one playing bagpipes. Or are Craig, David Malet Armstrong, Stephen Mumford, and James Franklin (to pick an handful of names from Wikipedia) “true” philosophers, despite their embrace of Aristotelianism?
And, once again, you’re claiming the ultimate glory for philosophy; you would hold that the crown jewels of science, the hard-fought victories such as, most recently, the Higgs Boson, rightfully belong to philosophy. After all, the scientists just pressed some buttons, and it took a real philosopher to make sense of it all. Fuck that noise, as the saying goes.
I’ll offer you another chance to demonstrate the utility of philosophy. One of the biggest questions today in science is coming up with a quantum theory of gravity. How might one philosophically engage in pre-empirical analysis of theoretical foundations but without the aid of hard data (for that would constitute empiricism) approach that problem?
No — scratch that; I’ll make it even simpler.
Without an intimate knowledge of the hard data, (again because that makes it scientifically empirical) how might one philosophically determine which theoretical foundations to pre-empirically analyze in the quest for a theory of quantum gravity?
Give me a satisfying answer to that question and I’ll at least grant the possibility that there might be something to philosophy after all. If you can’t answer that question, you’ll only help convince me further of the utter uselessness of philosophy, except for whatever aesthetic pleasure it might give its practitioners.
Cheers,
b&
I am not in the business of pegging “true” philosophers or “true” scientists, and I don’t think any of the named disciplines (philosophy, mathematics, science, engineering) deserves “ultimate glory.” I am simply suggesting that each discipline has its professional peer groups, with their respective standards of rigor, and contributions can be made by all regardless of who wears what hats. A scientist can work in the philosopher’s sandbox, but must honor the standards of rigor that apply there (and vice versa). My chief example is the Vienna circle, and since you cited Godel (who was in the Vienna circle) I’ll assume you agree with me on that example.
A philosopher doesn’t approach that problem. A mathematician doesn’t approach that problem. An engineer doesn’t approach that problem. But philosophers develop logic and analytical methods, and mathematicians develop mathematical systems and interpretations, and engineers develop instruments and materials, and maybe a physicist working on quantum gravity will draw direct or indirect benefits from the whole enterprise.
It’s plain nuts to suggest that a discipline’s value is measured by its contribution to quantum gravity. I have no plans to contribute to quantum gravity, and I’ll bet Jerry Coyne doesn’t expect to contribute to quantum gravity. I guess we should all pack up and quit.
One doesn’t work on theoretical foundations for a specific problem. One works on general theoretical foundations — like the meaning and axiomatic construction of real numbers, Hilbert spaces, probability and statistics. Philosophers also work on the resolution of apparent logical paradoxes, which sometimes result in advances in our understanding of theoretical foundations. It is up to practitioners to determine if these theoretical developments affect their particular scientific work.
This is simply how it is done. I just spent the past week at a theoretical conference where I listened to a few dozen presentations on purely theoretical and mathematical results. One of the topics was even “big data” — but the mathematical work is done without reference to any specific data. We just conjecture that there exist data sets with certain minimally defined abstract features, and the rest is all pure analysis and mathematical proof. I suppose you could say there is a minimal basis in empirical fact — that this kind of data set exists or might exist — but the truth is that this mathematics was being done anyway and “big data” is just the latest fad in potential applications. If there is really any application, it will be assessed later and probably by someone else; theory just exists for theory’s sake.
So now we’re back to the division of labor in the sciences, the utility of mathematics and other theoretical work, and the attempt to claim math and theory for philosophy despite their essential reliance upon scientific empiricism for validation.
All of which I’ve by now repeatedly addressed; that which is useful we can determine empirically, and philosophy encompasses far more than that which is useful. If philosophy were marketed as one of the expressive arts, that’d be fine and dandy; that philosophy is instead marketed as the ultimate source of true knowledge and meaning, not so much.
Plus, you’ve now acknowledged that philosophy is utterly useless in what is alleged to be its forte, in the solving of Big Hard Problems and in the origination of new ideas. Never mind that the solution to quantum gravity will likely constitute the best-ever answer to questions on the nature of reality and the origins of the Universe, the holy grails of philosophy; no philosopher is even remotely qualified to step into even the shallow end of that pool.
Sorry, but, unless you can add something new at this point, there’s nothing further to discuss. You’ve done a spectacular job at demonstrating the unbridled arrogance and ultimate futility of philosophy, albeit unintentionally, and for that I thank you.
Cheers,
b&
“Sorry, but, unless you can add something new at this point, there’s nothing further to discuss. You’ve done a spectacular job at demonstrating the unbridled arrogance and ultimate futility of philosophy, albeit unintentionally, and for that I thank you.”
Ben, you seem like a smart guy most of the time, but you’ve really not understood my points in this discussion. I’m not a philosopher, but I am enthusiastic about the subject, and I support a strong respect for the diversity of rigorous scholarship in all academic fields. That isn’t “unbridled arrogance.”
I am a very applied researcher in engineering, but my work regularly overlaps with pure mathematics and, occasionally (and perhaps surprisingly), with philosophical subjects pertaining to epistemology and foundations of probability. The mark of philosophers’ contributions is clearly evident to anyone who studies with sufficient depth.
And my last point on the subject: you know of the utility of the various theories and techniques you apply how? Because you have evidence to support the claims of utility.
Where there is evidence, there is knowledge; where there is none, there is no knowledge. The more evidence (and it doesn’t always take as much as you might think), the more knowledge. When your confidence in your knowledge is matched by the quality of your evidence, you’re doing science.
Cheers,
b&
“Where there is evidence, there is knowledge; where there is none, there is no knowledge. The more evidence (and it doesn’t always take as much as you might think), the more knowledge.”
My last point, then, is that this is a hopeless flawed and incomplete picture of knowledge. Knowledge is not just a dung heap of “evidence.” We need logical systems and theoretical frameworks before we can even distinguish “evidence” from otherwise insignificant information.
Have you not read any of many times I’ve defined science as the apportioning of belief in proportion with a rational analysis of empirical observation? What do you think a rational analysis is but a logical system of theoretical frameworks?
But you can have an infinitude of logical systems of theoretical frameworks; only the empirical observation can tell you the utility of any particular one, which is why empiricism remains the keystone of science and all knowledge.
b&
“Have you not read any of many times I’ve defined science as the apportioning of belief in proportion with a rational analysis of empirical observation?”
Of course I’ve seen that you’re fond of this expression, but it begs the question of how we obtain sound methods of “rational analysis” and whether those methods can be exclusively derived from empirical observation (they cannot).
Notice what’s just happened to Goren’s argument. It turns out that the only thing that counts as “science” for him is “empirically validated knowledge.” As he says above at his 11:53: “When the math gets applied (or otherwise empirically validated), that’s when it becomes more than mere poetry; that’s when it become actual knowledge.”
But this doesn’t seem right if you think about it. This is because it implies that any previous scientific theory which we’ve come to believe is false isn’t really part of science. So when Darwin proposed the inheritance of acquired characteristics in the Origin (which is in fact false) he wasn’t doing science. And when Newton claimed space and time are distinct variables (which is in fact false) he wasn’t doing science. And on it goes. This just shows how misleading the characterization of science is that’s being used here. You can’t define “science” as whatever is empirically validated without doing violence to the whole history of science. Since we expect many current theories to turn out to be false eventually, this means most of what we count as science isn’t in the end!
Oh, for —
Look. I’m sorry that the real world doesn’t offer the kind of absolutist philosophical perfection you’re so clearly yearning for.
Yes. Science is one giant exercise in getting things worng. Always has been, always will be.
It’s also a giant exercise in getting things less worng.
So all you’re doing now is building straw men out of the “apportioning belief in proper portion” part of my definition.
We already know that both Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Mechanics are worng.
But the fact that we know they’re worng and by how much is what science is all about.
There aren’t going to be any working physicists who think that Relativity is the ultimate answer to physics, but there are still plenty of well-respected philosophers who think Aristotelian metaphysics trumps modern cosmology.
The scientists are the ones whose beliefs are apportioned proportionally to what the rationally analyzed evidence shows; again, notice all the careful hedging before the discovery of the Higgs about how we might or might not find it and the six-sigma caveat that accompanied its announcement.
In stark contrast, we get philosophers laying down absolutes left and right, like how it’s somehow obvious that something can’t come from nothing.
Or, in your own exact case that I’m replying to, that science isn’t real unless it’s perfect.
<sigh />
Why am I even bothering any more…?
b&
I get the impression that all BG is really trying to say is that the judgment as to whether a particular theory fits into the real world is whether when you evaluate it against real world data it has some predictive utility in the real world. That’s fine as far as it goes, since obviously for a theory to have predictive power in relation to a particular system, it must predict some recurrent event/s in that system. But, of course, that’s a limited claim and says nothing about how theories get formulated in the first place – and you’d have to be very naive to imagine that all theories *arise* from scrupulous analysis of empirical data in the real world. And also the idea that the only knowledge that is valuable is knowledge of how certain theories react to data obtained by measuring stuff on earth is parochial to say the least.
I have no clue what to make of this. If you’re arguing for the non-universality of science, that’s something that’s been refuted by every astronomical observation ever made. In particular, there remains no convincing evidence in the change of the fine structure constant over observations that span billions of years and lightyears, though it remains an open question as to whether it might actually be variable.
If you’re implying that it’s impossible to make such measurements of distant phenomena, you’ve gone completely off the deep end.
If you’re implying that, yes, we can point our telescopes at distant phenomena but they somehow don’t count because we’re not actually there, that’s every bit as much off the deep end.
The universal applicability and constancy of science, along with naturalism (and therefore atheism) are conclusions of science based on overwhelming observations. In no way are they a priori presumptions. What’s more, much of science remains dedicated to looking for very subtle exceptions and anomalies of all different sorts; the types of exceptions and anomalies proposed by religionists would stand out like a nuclear bomb going off at your dinner table by now.
I must admit, I really am dismayed at the superstitious and anti-scientific disdain for empiricism on display here. If it’s this popular at a Web site devoted to evolutionary biology, I hate to think of what it’s like in the general population.
b&
No – you just don’t get it and have a very simplistic concept of what scientific methodology really is. Noone here is anti-scientific or devaluing empirical evidence. Hint: many of the people you argue this with *are* scientists in one field or another. What is being argued is that, although empirical observations are of immense value in determining the correctness of theories as they relate to the world, theories often do not arise from empirical data and they are not always about things of which we have direct experience. Therefore conjecture and axiomatic argumentation is a valuable part of the aquisition of knowledge – we don’t just blindly amass data measurements, we need ways to interpret and evaluate data and those are *not* implicit in the data.
Empirically, that statement simply isn’t true — and I’ve repeatedly offered the empirical evidence to refute it. Pythagoras almost assuredly derived his famous Theorem through empirical observation; Newton was an experimentalist; Einstein devoured all the papers he could get his hands on; and so on.
…again with the crashing through an open door. How many more times do I have to type, “rational analysis” as part of the definition of science?
Except, of course, that that’s exactly what so many scientists in so many fields do — “stamp collecting,” remember?
Again with the open-door-crashing.
NO! NO! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!
The only way to ever evaluate anything in any field anywhere is with the data itself.
You can have the most brilliant and elegant and sophisticated theory imaginable, but it’s utterly meaningless unless it’s consistent with the data. Evaluating theories in light of the data is the whole point of science!
Yes, of course, there are all sorts of useful and formalized as well as informal and casual or whatever ways of coming up with ideas. But coming up with ideas isn’t the problem! Knowing which ideas are true and which are false is the problem — and that problem can only be solved by checking the ideas against the data.
Ultimately ground your ideas in data and you’re doing science. Don’t and it doesn’t matter what you do, save for whatever aesthetic pleasure you might derive from it.
b&
I would second roqoco’s comments. I’m in philosophy and I’m definitely not anti-science or anything. I just don’t think that science exhausts the whole of useful contributions to knowledge.
As to Goren’s claim, “but there are still plenty of well-respected philosophers who think Aristotelian metaphysics trumps modern cosmology.” This is a made up assertion on your part. As a matter of fact, over 70% of philosophers are atheists according to a recent poll, and yet you go on and on about William Lane Craig being this super respected philosopher by everyone in the field. There is no basis for this claim really. Craig no more discredits the field of philosophy than Michael Behe discredits the field of biology.
See the relevant Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism
for a list of modern Aristotelianists, including such disrespected nobodies as Kant and Hegel.
And do you really want me to start dredging up the copious bullshit that passes for sophisticated philosophy being published today? Um, hello — postmodernism, anybody? Derrida? Heidegger?
I’m unaware of any postmodernist influences in the (hard) sciences, but it’s infested huge swaths of philosophy. That alone is more than ample empirical evidence as to the worse-than-useless nature of philosophy. That we still get philosophers blathering nonsense about unmoved movers is but the tip of the iceberg.
b&
Ben,
QUOTE: And do you really want me to start dredging up the copious bullshit that passes for sophisticated philosophy being published today? Um, hello — postmodernism, anybody? Derrida? Heidegger?
I’m unaware of any postmodernist influences in the (hard) sciences, but it’s infested huge swaths of philosophy.
————-
You are right…. but don’t forget English, comparative literature, history, musicology, art history, and religious studies.
Bad academic writing nowadays has become something worse than an aesthetic offense. A lot of academic writing in our own time exhibits a disregard, not merely for style, but for truth. Once upon a time, no matter how badly they wrote, scholars imagined that they were contributing to knowledge. But no longer. Much of the scholarship now published in the humanities has no other purpose than to confirm the scholar’s own status and authority. It is not a contribution to knowledge, but to political power.
Yes!
And you point to other important factors to consider.
First, science’s immunity to PoMo is very strong evidence consistent with its utility and worth.
That, in turn, suggests that the other disciplines should be able to, at least in principle (but, of course, we won’t know until we have the evidence) adopt the same techniques that science has to immunize themselves both from PoMo and whatever the next destructive philosophical fad might be.
…and, of course, that just goes right to the next important lesson. It’s not just that philosophy is useless, but that it’s worse than useless. We as a society know less than we would have were it not for the philosophy of Post Modernism that’s gone and polluted so many other academic disciplines.
Perhaps philosophy isn’t quite as toxic as theology, but I’m really at a loss to spot any significant distinction between the two. Indeed, I’m really not all that sure if philosophy is just theology without the gods, or if theology is just another branch of philosophy; equally valid arguments exist in either direction and I can’t think of an empirical way to settle the matter.
Cheers,
b&
“…such disrespected nobodies as Kant…”
You’re seriously out in the weeds now. Kant was a prolific philosopher and scientist (there was little distinction in his day) who wrote many things on diverse topic. He was an important paradigmatic influence in several fields. Among his contributions: he contributed to the theory of tidal forces and their effect on the Earth’s rotation. Also, according to Kant’s Wikipedia entry:
“Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. He thus attempted to explain the order of the solar system, seen previously by Newton as being imposed from the beginning by God. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized also formed from a (much larger) spinning cloud of gas. He further suggested the possibility that other nebulae might also be similarly large and distant disks of stars. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy: for the first time extending astronomy beyond the solar system to galactic and extragalactic realms.”
That sounds like a pretty legitimate contribution, but you demand that modern philosophers treat Kant as “discredited.”
After Kant’s time, his philosophy was a paradigmatic influence, which means many subsequent thinkers used Kant’s approaches as a reference point and framework for developing their own distinct theories. For instance, Kant was carefully studied by Frege, Godel, Carnap, Russell, Einstein (and virtually everyone else with serious philosophical interests). Of course they all rejected various elements of Kant’s philosophy; that’s an essential part of progress and innovation in any academic field. It doesn’t discredit Kant at all; it marks his work as an essential step, a springboard in the development of modern thought.
That is just a rant, and fails in the logic department. CJWinstead already gave you plenty of examples of the interaction between philosophy, mathematics and science. And post modernism is not a synonym for philosophy. Analysing your argument:
1) Post modernism has no value.
2) Post modernism is considered to be a branch of philosophy.
3) Therefore all philosophy has no value.
QED? Hardly, and I don’t think it needs any empirical evidence to see where the fallacy lies.
What a lovely example of the types of failures one would expect when attempting to apply philosophy to what is a scientific question.
The claim is that philosophy is an useful means of producing knowledge.
If that claim is true, then philosophy should not produce substantial quantities of useless bullshit; yet, it does. In spades. Aristotelianism, Platonism, Postmodernism, Theology, Objectivism — all thrive under the banner of philosophy. And lots more, and you know it as well as I do.
Therefore, the claim that philosophy is useful is empirically demonstrated false.
Why that should be the case is irrelevant, unless one is interested in examining the matter further.
And how does science fare? Well, again the claim is that science is an useful means of producing knowledge.
And, you know what? It works. Bitches. The useless bullshit is almost (but, of course, not perfectly) absent from science.
I’ll take it one step further. The only reliable method for determining what knowledge is and isn’t valid is to compare the claims with the evidence.
When we apply that method to science, we discover that that’s already what it’s all about; it’s the very essence of science, and what it obsesses over constantly.
When we apply that method to philosophy, we discover that only those who apply evidence-based constraints to their work are avoiding the spewing of copious bullshit. And, further, we discover that, though they’re wearing philosopher’s hats, they’re really doing the exact same thing that is which is definitional for science.
So, yes. Of course you can philosophically “prove” anything you want about anything at all, including the validity and / or invalidity of philosophy. That’s because philosophy can’t be used to actually do anything — and certainly not to justify anything (even if pretending otherwise is a favorite pastime of apologists of philosophy)
But the moment you apply empiricism to the question, everything comes into sharp focus, you get your answers and your justification and you get results and therefore knowledge. But before you close that empirical loop, you’re left with nothing but daydreaming — philosophy, in other words. Also known as, “bullshit.”
Even if later empirical discoveries cause you to realize the utility of what was once merely bullshit.
Cheers,
b&
“But the moment you apply empiricism to the question, everything comes into sharp focus, you get your answers and your justification and you get results and therefore knowledge. But before you close that empirical loop, you’re left with nothing but daydreaming — philosophy, in other words. Also known as, ‘bullshit.’
“Even if later empirical discoveries cause you to realize the utility of what was once merely bullshit.”
Can you honestly not see the circularity in this statement? So, if you’re a university administrator and you’ve got some pure mathematicians cranking out theorems, and some philosophers grinding away on logic puzzles, what do you do? Do you say to them, “this is all bullshit, you guys have to go,” even while you acknowledge their work may one day become relevant to empirical science? In your view Godel was just a bullshit artist who’s shit retroactively turned to gold. That’s just stupid.
Ben, in spite of your aggressive confidence, I’m concerned that you have a very superficial knowledge of science, philosophy and mathematics. You are demanding things of philosophy that science can’t satisfy (there isn’t a clear method for sorting “good” scientists from “bad” ones — an issue that costs a huge amount of time and grief in my professional job). You say that philosophy encompassed a lot of junk, but you refuse to acknowledge its subdivisions — particularly the analytical branches that include the rigorous study of logic, epistemology and foundations of science and mathematics.
You also fail to recognize that you are doing philosophy, and you are doing it very badly. You are arguing a simplistic view of epistemology, a totally inapplicable philosophy of science, and your philosophy of mathematics is “it’s bullshit until science because science” — pure dismissal. I think if you penned a treatise on all these opinions you’d find your own ideas stamped “useless pseudo-philosophy” by scholars who are genuinely trying to understand the world. I’ve really tried not to be rude up to this point, but you’re just being a jerk and making ridiculous arguments at the same time.
Wow you really don’t know what’s going on in that wikipedia entry do you? Look, I realize you’re doing your best with this, but your information about philosophy is really poor.
First, Kant was born in 1724 and Hegel in 1770. And you are offering them as an example of “modern Aristotelians” who you disapprove of? Seriously? That’s like me arguing that modern biology is crap because of what Lamark wrote in 1770. Who the heck around here is talking about Kant or Hegel? Aside from this note that neither of these people are Aristotelians in any relevant sense and Kant opposes Aristotle in the history of philosophy in fact. So the claim that Kant is an Aristotelian just makes no sense.
Second, the only other “Aristotelians” mentioned in the section called “Contemporary Aristotelians” in the entry you cite are Gadamer, McDowell, MacIntyre, and Hursthouse. But if you look at the text it makes clear they are only favorable to Aristotle’s ethics. And the few others mentioned don’t say anything about accepting Aristotle’s broad metaphysics. So I’m still waiting for ANY evidence you have for your assertion that “there are still plenty of well-respected philosophers who think Aristotelian metaphysics trumps modern cosmology.” None of the people mentioned support this claim. (Does it matter that there are 10,000 members of the APA and you’ve referred to five or six people here?)
Third, your last gasp to establish your original claim that William Lane Craig is this very respected philsopher by all these people in the field is to start talking about postmodernism? What kind of nonsequitor is this? I’m sorry to say but this seems a little desparate. Is there any evidence you have that reveals WLC is this very respected person by most people in the field of philosophy? I’m still waiting for some evidence.
Why not? Would you disagree that modern biology started with Darwin, only 39 years Hegel’s junior? And it’s the empirical evidence that discredited Lamarck, but I’m unaware that Kant and Hegel are considered to be discredited philosophers; indeed, from my outsider’s perspective, their philosophy is every bit as respected today as Darwin’s biology, even if there remains no consensus about the philosophical validity of either man’s work. Then again, the mere notion of philosophical consensus is laughable; those words just don’t go together — yet another demonstration of the worthlessness of the endeavor.
My entire thesis is that philosophy is infested with bullshit and is no more capable even in principle of cleaning itself than theology, and I’ve provided copious evidence of philosophical bullshit.
You apparently agree that postmodernism is bullshit, but think that’s irrelevant to the matter of philosophy’s bullshit problem, and instead are interested in playing philosophical “gotcha” games over who is and isn’t in your own favored circle of philosophers.
You apparently still think you have some as-yet-not-articulated sure-fire philosophical method to separate the good philosophers from the bad. Problem is, you can’t even get other philosophers to agree with you that anything past personal opinion is ultimately capable of doing that; even if you do have your own personal method, it’s clearly not one embraced by the field as an whole.
b&
“If that claim is true, then philosophy should not produce substantial quantities of useless bullshit; yet, it does. In spades. Aristotelianism, Platonism, Postmodernism, Theology, Objectivism — all thrive under the banner of philosophy.”
As someone who works in philosophy this is complete BS. (1) Postmodernism is basically dead since 1980, and actually it’s main critics were maistream analytic philosophers like Dennett, Grayling, Blackburn, and Searle. Where postmodernism still has a hold is in English and History. (2) Theology is not a branch of philosophy, and doesn’t belong here. (3) Objectivism is a popular view with the public but has no respect in mainstream philosophy. If you doubt this see the results of the poll here:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/now-heres-a-tough-poll-to-answer.html
(4) That leaves Aristotelianism and Platonism. Nobody in philosophy accepts Aristotle’s broader cosmology that I know of, though some follow his ethics. With Platonism there is a legitimate issue here since there are some platonists in the field. But people like Godel and Frege were mathematical platonists it should be noted, and this view can’t be dismissed as obviously crankish. There are problems with the view but that is a different matter.
You’ve got to be shitting me.
Philosophers decide who to kick off the island with random Typepad blog polls accompanied by paid advertisements for a grand for whoever can write the best essay justifying pot? And you think that constitutes empirical evidence?
And, oh-by-the-way, the previous blog entry was one on theology. Oops. Guess it does belong in your own pantheon of “real philosophy” after all.
Sorry, but I’m laughing too hard to have anything else to contribute right now.
b&
The artists whose exhibitions I go to, sometimes, in London are extremely bad, they just can’t stop themselves from turning out dismal pictures. So what can we conclude from that? Should we conclude that all artists are crap on the basis of the fact that if any art was any good, then those London artists wouldn’t be responsible for such travesties?
So… If you want to say that philosophical arguments are rubbish, then you need to put your own contributions at the top of that list. And if you imagine that no one is capable of telling good philosophy from bad philosophy, then I can assure you that I’m not the only person capable of spotting the fallacies in your arguments and deciding which side of the divide they fall on.
If you want to reduce philosophy to an aesthetic enterprise akin to painting, I’m all for that. Indeed, that’s exactly where I think philosophy belongs — in the literature department. In that sense, I heartily agree with your analogy and suggest you run with it.
Fuck the fallacies — that’s philosophy, which is worthless. You can’t use philosophy to justify anything, especially itself
What does the data say? Do a scientific analysis of philosophy, and the empirical evidence is that it’s little more than atheistic theology. Except, of course, for the philosophers who go off reservation and ground their work in the data and therefore do science.
Cheers,
b&
“You apparently still think you have some as-yet-not-articulated sure-fire philosophical method to separate the good philosophers from the bad.”
I’m sorry but you’re losing the thread of the topic we’re discussing. The issue is whether philosophy has made useful contributions to our knowlegdge. I claim it has. You can’t disprove this claim by arguing that “there is no sure-fire philosophical method to separate the good philosophers from the bad.” I would probably grant that there isn’t any sure fire method, but this point has absolutely no bearing on whether some philosophers have made useful contributions to our knowledge in the West. Why should I have to show there is some clear method to know that some have made useful contributions? Clearly Adam Smith (who invented modern capitalism) and Marx (who invented modern socialism) are widely influential in the modern world. I don’t think I need some account of “their methods” to establish this. So your whole concern about postmodernism and whatever is irrelevant in my view.
Finally! I do believe we’ve pinpointed the source of the problem: you’re doing philosophy, not science.
You believe that a single philosopher making a useful contribution to knowledge validates philosophy, regardless of the nature of that contribution or how we know it to be useful and valid.
And that’s a perfectly valid philosophical approach to the problem. Of course. Any argument is perfectly valid in philosophy — even Objectivist PoMo Aristotelianistic Platonism!
But your argument tells us absolutely nothing whatsoever about the predictive value of philosophy as a discipline (if you can call it that), as opposed to a few random philosophers.
If you want to correctly do the science you’re groping for, you’d have to show evidence that philosophers are at least roughly as likely, by some objective measure (such as percentage or total number of practitioners), to make positive contributions to knowledge as scientists. Or, you could show that the contributions to knowledge by the collective discipline of philosophy are as significant as those of science.
But, again, that’s not what the data shows. Instead, the data shows that philosophy gives us Postmodernism at the same time that science gives us quantum field theory, and that even the minority of philosophers making useful contributions to knowledge only do so when they embrace empirical scientific validation of their work.
Cheers,
b&
Um…., if you actually read the previous blog entry, you’ll see it was about J. L. Mackie’s book The Miracle of Theism. This book is cited by Dawkins in The God Delusion in fact. This is because it’s the leading philosophy book on atheism in the world.
It’s strange to me that someone could profess a view of philosophy as bad as your’s Mr. Goren. Either you are joking or you are ignorant of the history of the subject. Here is a list of ideas that were first proposed or developed over the years by people we think of as philosophers. Anyone who thinks that philosophers don’t make extremely important contributions to society doesn’t know their history very well. To try to argue that all this is “useless” or merely a product of “science” is beyond belief in my view.
# Socrates – Critical reasoning
# Aristotle – Formal logic
# William of Ockham – Ockham’s razor
# Adam Smith – Capitalism, field of Economics
# Francis Bacon – Scientific method
# David Hume – Empiricism
# Voltaire – Civil liberties, freedom of religion
# Montesquieu – Separation of powers
# John Locke – Liberalism, natural rights
# René Descartes – Analytic geometry
# Liebniz (w/ Newton) – Calculus
# Jeremy Bentham – Utilitarianism
# Godel, Frege, Boolos, Foundations computing theory (basis of modern computers)
# C.S. Peirce – blinded, randomized experiments
# Singer – Animal rights movement
# Rawls – Just democracies
#Russell – Logic (winner Nobel Prize)
#Sarte – Ethics (winner Nobel Prize)
◾Henri Bergson — Life (winner Nobel Prize)
#Albert Camus — Literature (winner Nobel Prize)
Still doing philosophy, I see, and not science.
How do we know that there is value in Socratic critical reasoning? Because we have empirical evidence that it works. Except, of course, that it’s most outdated by now and Socrates would think us barking lunatics for what we know to be true.
How do we know that there is value in Aristotelian formal logic? Because there are certain limited situations in which it can be useful, though, to be honest, it’s become much more of a bullshit generator these days than anything else — with your continued philosophical apologetics as Exhibit A.
How do we know that there is value in Ockham’s Razor? Because an empirical analysis demonstrates that it has good predictive value of the utility of a theory. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.
…and then we get to Adam “Invisible Hand” Smith?
Really?
Just in the first four of your examples, we have two not-entirely-but-almost discredited ancients (including one whose profound worngness continues to this day to do great violence to knowledge), one theorist whose ideas stand up to scrutiny, and an Utopian Idealist. That’s a damned piss-poor hit rate. I could trivially do far better for science just by limiting myself to Jerry’s Phd. students.
Anyway, if I were to keep going, there’s only one reliable way of separating the Smiths on your list from the Newtons: the acid test of empirical analysis. And, by including the lunatic whackjobs you did, you again demonstrated that philosophy has no means of separating wheat from chaff.
Not to mention, of course, that, just like a theologian, you’ve claimed scientists as your own for no good reason whatsoever.
I mean, really? Leibniz and Newton as philosophers? Why not just declare Einstein the greatest philosopher of all time because all physics is for the greater glory of Jesus^Wphilosophy and be done with it?
Damned pathetic, it is.
Cheers,
b&
I didn’t mean that Newton was a philosopher, sorry. I was merely indicating that I know he’s (also) considered an inventor of calculus. But Leibniz certainly was a philosopher by any standard. In any case, you are certainly right that philosophy hasn’t contributed anything useful to the world. I mean, if you define “useful” as “solving the problems of quantum mechanics or other problems of physics” then you’re right. This doesn’t strike me as a very interesting idea, though, since you’re merely playing games with words at this point. The odd thing is that your approach makes you resemble the postmodernists like Derrida you so despise (who thought language was infinitely flexible and could be made to mean anything). Playing games with words is well and good I suppose. But they get boring after a while.
I have to go now. It’s been fun.
I am tired of these one-on-one (or one-on-two) exchanges that dominate a thread. Your posts should rarely constitute more than 10% of the total comments of a thread. When it gets like this, please take it to private email!
Capiche?
Fair enough. Consider it closed.
Apologies. Won’t happen again.
Ben,
I find it amazing that you point to: (1) an almost necessary antagonism between philosophers and those who only accept “empirical evidence” (which is, to anybody who has ventured further than an “introduction to philosophy”, a false antagonism); and (2) an extremely narrow conception of “advancements in knowledge”.
For now, I will rely on others for the numerous examples of the ways in which philosophy has recently advanced knowledge (most vaguely, and likely inadequately [by your standards], we can discuss cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, economics, distributive justice, etc). Saying that, I do realize that you will most likely cop out and note that those who may in fact be contributing towards this vague conception of knowledge (that which you will hump until it is dry) are really just opting for this exclusively non-philosophical empirical basis (that philosophers might even actively avoid).
I mean, if we were to accept your basic premises, you’re totally right! Unfortunately, they are nothing but misrepresented views of philosophy that the weak love to attack.
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I think that Atheism and New Atheism are also forms of philosophy. If one can agree that they are, then this tiff is an example of in-fighting within different camps of philosophers. That is certainly nothing new!
A response from Pigliucci, in the same journal, is already up:
A Muddled Defense of New Atheism: On Stenger’s response
Popcorn is available in the lobby…
I have taken a liking to our local theater popcorn, where you can sprinkle in your desired ‘gourmet’ flavoring.
Boy was that weak. When threatened, re-assert that there is no data or lack of data that can convince. He asserts an Abrahamic God that would subvert natural law and mess up the lives involved merely to continue to go undetected, because such a God would supposedly be a contrarian, like himself, presumably. Pigliucci must have a pretty nasty view of human nature. Seems like a Good and powerful God (even if not perfectly so) would be happy to let the minions detect him… it’s a win-win. The issue is settled scientifically, more people get to benefit from knowing the science is solid behind prayer healing, and God gets to revel in increased adulation (also he’d have to deal with a lot more requests, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the thing that created everything).
Instead he tap dances *just so*, moves the goalposts, and declares the observation invalid while going nyah, nyah, see?!? scientism! That guy is the epitome of data-free armchair buffoonery. I hope he’s never on a jury; he’d let obvious murderers off by inventing increasingly improbable scenarios and ranting about them to the other jurors until they gave up in frustration.
Oh my giddy aunt, Pigliucci has gone and called this web site a bl*g (page 2/8)!
He further states that he is a scientist & that it behoves philosophers to be familiar with the science. I gently pointed out to him that on two consecutive pages in his book “Nonsense on Stilts” he gets it wrong.
(1) the origins of radio astronomy,
(2) why everyday objects appear solid.
Seems no, it was me that was wrong in how I read his words.
Being familiar with science doesn’t mean getting everything 100% right. I’m willing to grant that Massimo is familiar with science. Can’t we be a bit charitable?
Sure, but let him go first.
Oh we all make mistakes.
But if the response to gently reporting of errors in a book, whose subtitle is “How to tell science from bunk,” is to continue defending the bunk???
In “Nonsense on Stilts”, Massimo has some exceptionally silly things to say about genomics:
“But by the 1990s molecular biology
hard science, soft science 11
began to move into the new phase of genomics,5 where high throughput instruments started churning a bewildering amount of data that had to be treated by statistical methods (one of the hallmarks of “soft” science). While early calls for the funding of the human genome project, for in- stance, made wildly optimistic claims about scientists soon being able to understand how to create a human being, cure cancer, and so on, we are in fact almost comically far from achieving those goals. The realization is beginning to dawn even on molecular biologists that the golden era of fast and sure progress may be over and that we are now faced with unwieldy mountains of details about the biochemistry and physiology of living or- ganisms that are very difficult to make sense of. In other words, we are witnessing the transformation of a hard science into a soft one!”
He may used to be a biologist, but the above paragraph says how grotesquely out of touch it is with what biology is about these days.
Isn’t he just saying that using the data from the human genome project has turned out to be somewhat more difficult in practice than was anticipated, due to the complex interactions between genes. That seems reasonable, and others have made the same sort of point. There has been a similar realisation in computer artificial intelligence, where early optimism has been somewhat tempered by the huge complexity involved in many of the things that appear trivial to us, such as interpreting images and language – largely due to the huge amounts of contextual information that these things require.
No it isn’t. It is not more difficult than anticipated – do not confuse media hype with what scientists thought they could do and in which time frame. In fact, many things in genomics are much much easier now than we ever anticipated they would be in 2014.
Massimo was selling funny argument that because you now have a lot of data, you need statistics, it is “soft science”. You need statistics because you measure something for 20000 genes at a time, so you need to take into account everything that could lead you astray. In “classical” molecular biology you would measure something (e.g. expression level) for one gene at a time. You get exactly the same measurement for the same gene from a high-throughput experiment – you just ignore the same measurement for other 19,999. How is mere having the measurement for the other 19,999 genes turning it into a “soft science” this is soothing only somebody with a thoroughly confused idea of genomic can claim. Of course, by having the same measurement for 20000 genes at the same time, you can – in addition – ask questions about the entire set of genes that you can not if you have measured only one or a handful. Still not soft science, not any more than statistical physics is softer than atomic physics.
“this is SOMETHING only somebody with a thoroughly confused idea of GENOMICS”
(I apologise, these are my first posts here, I didn’t expect autocorrect)
Ah – I can see now why you see that passage as offensive and agree that the claim that statistical techniques is “one of the hallmarks of soft science” is nonsense.
Thanks for pointing that out–I can’t believe how ludicrous this genomics-is-a-soft-science-becuz-too-much-data idea sounds. 😀 Nonsense on stilts, indeed.
I suppose the discovery of the Higgs was squishy, too….
b&
I was going to mention Higgs boson, too, but was too afraid that I might get something wrong (I am not physicist). But yes – it required tons of data to get within a (statistical) confidence interval that would let people believe that what they are observing is indeed Higgs boson…
“I think Stenger’s response to my paper makes some of my points about New Atheism painfully clear: his tone is both defensive and outraged”
Oh please.
And Massimo’s tone in his response isn’t … 🙂
Wait for it…peer-reviewed, right?
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This seems key:
That should be true. Anecdotally I tie both my effective atheism and distaste for philosophy and its Philosophism™ [see, they started it millenniums ago!] to my skepticism.
While I tie my gnu atheism to the political effort that follows from observing the harm of religiosity on society at large, including science and education.
This seems muddled:
The problem isn’t that some, or much, philosophy is vague and muddled.
The problem is clearly that the method of philosophy is vague and muddled. It doesn’t use empiricism, so it can’t say anything on nature. What philosophy can do is, at best, say something on discordant axiomatic systems. I.e. it is story telling.
Which “method of philosophy”? It’s certainly vague to refer to a “method of philosophy” without defining which method you are referring to. Is syllogism vague and muddled, for instance? And on what empirical basis do you conclude that attempts to clarify language and arguments are of necessity vague and muddled? Are you saying you have conclusive empirical evidence that no one has managed to clarify a concept after it’s initial inception, or are you actually using a philosophical argument yourself, which would create a somewhat confusing circularity?
The thing is empiricism is actually a form of philosophy – that’s really where it all began.
Philosophy is essentially the art of making arguments in a logical, clear and productive manner.
This means there are clear rules to it – for example one should avoid fallacies, but also understand why they are fallacies.
Pigliucci’s major failing is that he breaks the rules of philosophy by arguing from authority.
His chief complaint about his opponents is that they aren’t philosophers and don’t show much respect to philosophy – not that there is actually all that much wrong with their arguments.
He accuses his opponents of scientism – and that’s really all he has got.
Meanwhile figures like AC Grayling and Daniel Dennet, who he wishes to separate out from his opponents because they have authority to his mind, aren’t all that willing to be separated.
Further one should point out that the current New Atheist movement is much, much more varied that Pigliucci would have it.
It is not simply a scientific movement, but also a movement for human rights. Leo Igwe for example is one of the great heroes to our movement – he is neither a philosopher nor a scientist yet his input has been extremely valuable.
The New Atheist movement includes feminist critiques such as those of Ophelia Benson, as well as those who oppose her. It includes leaders who are gay rights advocates, unionists, and people who are really just folks.
Heck we are even seeing more and more former Muslims becoming important within the movement.
And Pigliucci wants these voices silenced, because most of them aren’t philosophers. They do not have the authority it requires for him to allow them to speak.
As much as Pigliucci accuses his opponents of scientism, I have yet to hear them deride someone for not being a scientist.
I have heard them criticise people for getting scientific facts wrong, often alongside an explanation of the relevant science.
I have learned a lot about quantum mechanics, biology, medicine, history, mathematics, geology etc… simply by following the arguments between different atheists in various fields.
Which gets to the crux of the matter, mostly I have seen New Atheists correct each other, or other people, but not with a sense of “You’re not a scientist, therefore your viewpoint is worthless” in the way I get from Pigliucci.
I don’t recall reading that Pigliucci wants anyone to be “silenced.”
Oh, please — not this again.
Claiming that scientists are really doing philosophy is as incorrect and offensive as claiming that astronomers are really doing astronomy or that chemists are really alchemy.
And I could make and defend a very similar argument that all philosophy is just a form of theology, since that’s where philosophy started. Would you not be a bit peeved if I did that? Claimed that by doing philosophy you were really trying to comprehend the mind of some god or other as embodied in the Universe, even if you didn’t want to admit it?
Because that’s really what this amounts to, or at least how it comes across: philosophers trying to take credit for everything that science has done, ignoring all the while that, far and away, the most important thing that scientists have done is to leave philosophy behind.
Cheers,
b&
Philosophy is to science as Australopithecus is to us – an ancestor but not really the same thing.
That said we aren’t talking about science so much as empiricism, and that is very definitely a school of philosophy born out of various efforts to arrive at some sort of epistemology.
Still not getting it.
Science is empiricism, and empiricism is that which separates science from everything else.
The moment that we had empiricism, however we came to it, we finally had a reliable means of assessing beliefs. There wasn’t anything special about philosophy that should have made it the only way to stumble across empiricism; any drunkard’s walk would eventually become more successful as soon as it happened down that path.
But now that we have empiricism, we know that it’s all that matters. Why? Because we have the evidence demonstrating that it works, and nothing else does.
http://xkcd.com/54/
Cheers,
b&
“Science is empiricism, and empiricism is that which separates science from everything.”
This is a naive view. There’s an awful lot of pre-emperical reasoning required to construct logical and mathematical systems. The lines between science, philosophy and mathematics (and even engineering) are blurred at the foundations. Often scientists have contributed to philosophy or vice versa (just read up on the Vienna Circle for a complex example of cross-disciplinary activity). When you step into another domain, you need to do your homework and proceed rigorously.
How do we know that the math works? By testing it. How do we know that the engineering works? By testing it. How do we know that the theories — what you’re perversely labeling “philosophy” — work? By testing them.
At every stage, the only way that we actually know that anything is actually any good is by putting it to the test.
If that’s not empiricism, I don’t know what is.
And, no. I don’t need to do any further homework on philosophy; that’s the Courtier’s Reply. If you’ve got philosophy that’s backed by sound reasoning of good evidence, wonderful — but that’s science. And if you don’t have sound reasoning of good evidence, whatever you have isn’t worth wasting my time with.
Cheers,
b&
“How do we know that the math works? By testing it.”
Mathematics, by itself, doesn’t make any empirical claims. It is driven by methods of analytical proof and analysis (increasingly also by computational analysis). None of it is falsifiable by any physical experiment.
“At every stage, the only way that we actually know that anything is actually any good is by putting it to the test. ”
The majority of things — concepts, theories, designs, whatever — cannot be tested “at every stage.” It is often very difficult to devise tests for complex theories (or for engineering designs). In my research, I am interested in rare failures that are sometimes too rare to be observed. You can test the system as much as you want, and it won’t be sufficient to prove that it “works” according to my definition. The best we can say is that I used a reasonable model and calculated an extremely low failure probability; the observation is almost useless.
My view is that “theorizing,” and the design of experiments to validate or falsify theories, are highly philosophical activities in which we tread into the territory of logic, epistemology and mathematical foundations. Most scientists don’t think too hard about the structure of those foundations, and simply follow established procedures. But there are still a lot of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers working on the foundations, and what they are doing is important.
This is true but irrelevant.
This is false and relevant.
A mathematician might construct a geometric model that is mathematically elegant or meets whatever criteria the mathematician is interested in. Euclid did so rather famously. But we don’t know if that actually has any bearing on reality until we go out and measure it. And, indeed, at least in the early days, it was the exact other way around; I can assure you that Pythagoras came to his Theorem not through mathematical reasoning, but by drawing triangles with squares on their sides and comparing the areas of those squares.
As it turns out, Euclidean geometry “just happens” to be spectacularly useful — so useful that it’s all the math most people mostly need for most of their lives.
But — and here’s the point — mathematically, it’s every bit as valid as Calvinball. It just happens to be far more useful than Calvinball.
Same thing with Newton, who basically just took Euclid and added on mass and time, thereby inventing The Calculus. Doing so made that geometry even more useful than Euclid’s.
But, ultimately, Newton’s geometry has been as thoroughly falsified as Calvinball — though, of course, it still remains profoundly useful over the ultiamte domains. And, for the past century or so, we’ve had a couple different geometries even more useful than Newton’s, but both are still (already) as falsified as Calvinball, despite being dramatically more useful than anything we’ve ever used before.
I’ve just followed one branch of math, but you can see the parallels everywhere. Imaginary numbers were mathematically interesting, but they didn’t tell us anything about the real world until physical experiments confirmed that they make an amazing tool for electrical engineering. It was mind-blowing that the zeta function should assign the sum of the infinite set of the counting numbers a value of -1/12, but it took quantum field theory (and similar harmonic systems) to discover that that really is a quite useful thing to do — and it’s hard to get more into Calvinball territory than that one, except that this one actually works.
There’s no question but that math is a most fertile field filled with all forms of flights of fancy. But the only way that we know which bits are useful or not is to try to use them — either in physics, which is any more “merely” applied math, or to build even more math, or the like.
Cheers,
b&
“There’s no question but that math is a most fertile field filled with all forms of flights of fancy. But the only way that we know which bits are useful or not is to try to use them — either in physics, which is any more ‘merely’ applied math, or to build even more math, or the like.”
You seem to be missing my point: there have to be philosophers and mathematicians in order to produce the mathematics BEFORE you can extract the useful bits. Going back a few posts, I gave you some examples of philosophers who made important pre-empirical contributions to mathematics, and you agree they are important contributions (you even named Godel, another fine example). You argued that non-empirical theorizing is useless, and therefore philosophy is useless (though you seem to agree that mathematics gets to stay). There’s a fundamental chicken-egg problem here.
Not really. Science isn’t quite as limited as empiricism is. For example the standard model didn’t require someone to directly observe the Higgs Boson for it to be science.
Science uses empiricism as a bit of a gold standard – but it does go a fair bit further than that form of philosophy really allows.
It’s been centuries since empiricism has been thought of as being limited to what you see with your unaided senses. Galileo and van Leeuwenhoek, I should think, laid that notion to rest.
The LHC experiment at CERN that discovered the Higgs is today’s gold standard in empirical research. If your definition doesn’t consider that, “empirical,” you need to get a dictionary authored sometime at least since the American Revolution.
Cheers,
b&
The LHC is indeed a high watermark to empirical research – but it only managed to empirically confirm the Higgs Boson existed in 2012.
That doesn’t everything written based on the standard model in 2011 unscientific though does it?
Haven’t we been down this path before? I’m sure we must have.
Science is about the apportioning of belief in proportion with a rational analysis of empirical observation.
Before the confirmation of the Higgs, we had lots of good reasons to think it likely that we’d find it, enough that plenty of people did good work to get a jump start on “what comes next” by assuming that we’d find it.
But, until we actually did find it, we didn’t actually know that it existed.
And everybody actually associated with that branch of physics did an amazing job at clarifying just how much confidence they had in it, what it would mean if we didn’t find it, what it would mean if we did — all of it one giant exercise in specifying just where those error bars were and what lay within and without their bounds.
That’s science. It’s pure science; it’s everything that science (today) can possibly hope to be. We had lots of evidence suggesting we’d probably find the Higgs; in particular, the Standard Model which had been so successful at predicting so many other discoveries. And so we were confidently hopeful we’d find it, but we weren’t certain.
Now, at least with six sigmas, we’re certain. And so we can move on to the next gap to fill — which, oh-by-the-way, the CERN team is as they’re overhauling the LHC to operate at even more stupendously mind-boggling energies.
And the process repeats. It’s a fairly safe bet that the upgraded LHC will find evidence of supersymmetry, but it’d almost be more exiting if it didn’t. We’re back in the speculative phase, a phase that — once again — cannot be resolved by any form of philosophy, but only by smashing the protons and seeing what pops out.
Stay tuned! There’s lots more to come.
Cheers,
b&
If every philosophy department and program closed down, never to re-open, would there be any impact to human progress? If the same happened to any science discipline what would be the result? Philosophy makes a great deal of noise for contributing next to nothing.
To be fair, there are certain classes, such as formal logic, that unjustly get shuffled off to or lumped in with the philosophy department. But those really belong in their proper domains — for example, it should be mathematicians teaching logic, not people still hung up on pre-scientific Aristotelian metaphysics.
Cheers,
b&
You would lose a lot more than you would think.
Ethics particularly – the topic isn’t really at a point where it is ready to be proclaimed a science, but a disciplined approach is needed in order to avoid the pitfalls of authoritarianism.
We just need to see current philosophers actually using the discipline they are trained in more, rather than acting full of themselves over being philosophers.
Philosophical ethics is mostly trolley car bullshit. The real ethicists are doing hard empirical work and spending most of their time with patient surveys and correlating that with morbidity analyses, or they’re mathematicians studying game theory.
Cheers,
b&
“If every philosophy department and program closed down, never to re-open, would there be any impact to human progress? If the same happened to any science discipline what would be the result? Philosophy makes a great deal of noise for contributing next to nothing.”
I have argued elsewhere in this thread that most science departments can in fact be shut down, that their results largely do not have much impact, and that any useful applied activities can be absorbed into engineering departments. “Science” is just overhyped navel gazing on useless theoretical problems, and real progress happens in engineering. Any real contributions made by scientists could easily have been discovered by engineers. Can we do without physics? Absolutely. We’ve got electrical and mechanical engineering. Can we get rid of biology? Sure, we’ve got bioengineering, medicine and pharmaceutical engineering. The pure sciences only exist to shoulder the course load of introductory undergraduate subjects.
While I only half believe this argument, I have colleagues in engineering who would eagerly approve. If I really beat the drum on this argument, it would be pretty hard for scientists to defend their existence, since the argument is constructed on unfair terms and has moving goalposts built-in.
I must admit that Pigliucci is right about at least one thing: Stenger and Harris really appear naive and disingenuous, respectively, with the “I only want science to have a place at the table” remark. Harris does run around and claim that science can decide moral issues, and the subtitle of his book seems indeed very clear.
That being said, Pigliucci does pretty much the same:
Stenger begins by accusing me of saying that only philosophers can write competently about atheism, […] Nowhere do I make the first statement.
Really? That is pretty much the gist that I got those past few years: theism is a philosophical question, scientists have nothing to say on it!
Plus he consistently ignores Stenger’s clarification what god(s) he considers to constitute a hypothesis, and instead says, hey, you cannot scientifically test the goalpost-moving views of god you have painstakingly excluded from your argument, therefore your subsequent argument is false.
Now I am not a philosopher but that is not how I learned logic…
I haven’t read much from Stenger, but I agree that Harris is pretty disingenuous. Don’t forget that Harris’s book on morality says he won’t even engage in works by moral philosophers because he finds it all boring. So that is your way of asking for a seat at the table? To tell the people already sitting there that their work is not worth discussing?
That criticism of Harris has appeared already and is unfair. He was writing a book on moral philosophy as an antidote to moral relativism. The moment he might have started discussing utilitarianism and compatibalism in The Moral Landscape, the readers’ eyes would have petrified.
Has Harris written more to clarify his philosophical opinions on these points? Most definitely on his own website and in debate with Dennett and Jerry has linked to those arguments extensively here. He engaged big time with Russell Blackford and I’m pretty sure he has chatted with a few hacks in moral philosophy like Peter Singer, Anthony Grayling, and Steven Pinker.
You are selectively quoting Harris and it does you no favors.
What do you mean by calling Singer, Grayling, and Pinker as “hacks in moral philosophy”?
I think that was irony.
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This was meant to be sarcastic–sorry if it didn’t translate. I was tongue-in-cheek responding to Couchloc’s accusation that Harris does “not even engage with the works by moral philosophers.” If Singer, Grayling, Pinker, and Dennett aren’t moral philosophers then I don’t know what Couchloc is talking about and the snipe about Harris not engaging them is untrue.
Pigliucci responds to Stenger::
*** A Muddled Defense of New Atheism: On Stenger’s response ***
Massimo Pigliucci
http://smithandfranklin.com/uploads/articles/1393679455Response%20to%20Stenger.pdf
Oh no! In his supposed rebuttal to Stenger, Pigliucci just invoked “The Matrix Gambit”–that we’re all just simulations on some alien’s hard drive where miracles are just glitches in the program.
If that is deemed one of philosophy’s better contributions to the scientific conversation on the Big Bang then I’m really starting to sympathize with Ben Goren. This has to be the deus ex machina of logical thought, no?
Let’s run with this fascinating new theory of existence and reality: maybe God is actually the code that describes all of reality…wait, no, God is the computer on which it runs…wait! God must be the original programmer! Yeah. Unless he was himself programmed…hmmm…
Goddamn I knew I should have swallowed the blue philosophy pill. (Please Stenger, write another “peer-reviewed” rebuttal to Pigliucci’s article of 3h ago titled “‘Philosophy Swallows the Red Pill’ and Other Screenplays”)
“This has to be the deus ex machina of logical thought, no?”
That, and Last Thursdayism.