Why philosophy is largely ignored by science

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=4799

by derleth • 14 years ago

90 105 14 years ago

bmcleod• 14 years ago

Philosophy of Science is an extremely broad field. And like any academic field it's easy enough to find crazy stuff at the edges.

I do think far more scientists would benefit from a bit more of a look at some of the more established philosophers of the last century. It seems that most gained some knowledge of Popper but nowhere near enough people are really familiar with Kuhn's work(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/). Taking the time to think critically about what you're doing and what it would really take to change your views is critical to actually being open to broad possibilities.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

I do think there's a bit of a glass-house problem: finding scientists doing not-great philosophy is not hard. (It's perfectly fine, of course, for one to be ignorant of the other if they aren't trying to do the other one; nobody can do everything.)

Theoretical physicists are particularly prone to lapsing, in later career, into armchair philosophy without bothering to actually read anything in philosophy of the past 100 years. That tends, unfortunately, to result in them producing philosophy that has flashes of insight mixed with stuff that could be a lot better if only they had read some of the existing literature, and addressed the obvious problems with some of the standard positions (which too often they reinvent).

Of course, philosophers could understand more science too, but I actually think there is more effort being made in that direction: philosophy of science programs are increasingly requiring substantial amounts of technical coursework, and it's a huge plus, for advancement, if you publish at least a few articles in technical journals, too. But in the other direction, there might actually be less philosophy instruction in science programs than there was 100 years ago now (surface-level understandings of Popperian falsificationism seem to be about as far as anyone gets, including my own formal education it must be said). This seems like a recent affliction, too: the early-20th-c scientists (Einstein, Bohr, etc.) were actually quite well-read in the relevant parts of philosophy. Heck, folks like Alan Turing published in peer-reviewed philosophy journals.

reader5000• 14 years ago

Not really sure a guy whose exposure to "philosophy" apparently consists of awareness of a single writer is prepared to weigh in on the legitimacy of a field as old as civilization. But admittedly I haven't done a RCT to confirm this.

derleth13• 14 years ago

This sounds like the Courtier's Reply. How is it different from it?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Courtier%27s_Reply

_delirium5• 14 years ago

Can we have a variation that is something like: you have read even a modest amount on it? I'm not a philosopher, and my philosophical knowledge amounts to having taken 3 courses in undergrad (as electives while getting a CS degree), one in grad school (same), and reading a scattered set of books and blogs that interest me. I wouldn't consider myself qualified to opine on Philosophy In General. Yet, this blog post seems to be by someone who knows less about philosophy than I do, yet is more confident in his opinion to give a sweeping judgment of it. That's sort of impressive, but doesn't give me a lot of confidence that I'm receiving well-informed opinions.

Actually, that seems like a logical critique in any field. If someone who clearly had read only a handful of things about quantum physics holds forth on why quantum physics is bullshit, it would be a good heuristic to assume that they probably don't know enough to make that judgment, and maybe they should learn some quantum physics first.

wpietri5• 14 years ago

If you're going to condemn a whole field, I think you have to be able to demonstrate that you have a reasonably broad understanding of the field.

If somebody says they hate vegetables but their experience is limited to one attempt to eat creamed spinach in 1985, it's not a fallacy to say they don't know what they're talking about.

chris_wot8• 14 years ago

The argument is that science largely ignores philosophy. He almost solely quotes postmoderism for his argument (though he does mention Popper). Yet philosophy is so much large than just postmodernism. Ergo, solely judging philosophy from the tenants and postulations of postmodernism is not a sound argument.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

So, I'm a scientist. And I'm skeptical of the utility of a good portion of philosophy for science. But this is a... really ignorant post. It's not even wrong. Just... incoherent, and clearly unfamiliar with the subject it discusses.

He seems to be attacking something called "philosophy", first of all, but the targets are some kind of randomly thrown set of darts. Some analytic philosophers discussing probability in a way he doesn't like. The famous Sokal hoax, which trolled a French-influenced American social-theory journal (which incidentally lived in literature departments more than philosophy departments, and was intensely disliked by American philosophers). Just some general rambling. Why is this interesting? It feels like something an undergrad would cobble together off Wikipedia, an "understand and then denounce philosophy in 90 minutes" essay.

Does he realize that Alan Sokal, who he seems to like, is actually in favor of philosophy, but is against one particular current in philosophy, which his intervention is intended to diminish? He seems to group Sokal in with both the people Sokal opposes, and the people he supports! How does this make any sense at all? Heck, Sokal likes more philosophers, too: Marx, for example, is on his good list (Sokal is a leftist, fighting something of a civil war in favor of 'Old Left' economics/materialist-focused leftism, against cultural-theory/identity leftism).

derleth13• 14 years ago

> Why is this interesting?

Because it's an opportunity to explain, in accessible terms in an accessible forum (that is, as opposed to an article that costs five figures per year and uses words like "hermeneutics" without defining them), what value philosophy brings to science and understanding the real world.

FreakLegion• 14 years ago

Where to start with this one?

I wouldn't expect philosophy of science to be of much practical value to working scientists. Non-scientists, on the other hand, can benefit a great deal from rigorous analysis of the tools, methods and procedures of the sciences, if for no other reason than to dissolve some of the film of invincibility that attaches to them.

Of course there are as many quacks doing philosophy of science as there are doing science proper, so choice of texts is important. You can't condemn all philosophy of science based on a handful of publications (note the selection bias in the article) any more than you can condemn all science based on, say, the MMR vaccine controversy[1].

1. And while we're on the subject of hoaxes, let's just put the whole Sokal affair to bed, shall we? Social Text was an insignificant and unrefereed journal, but even if Sokal had managed to place something in The Philosophical Review, that wouldn't have, as the author put it, "exposed the astonishing intellectual fraud if [sic] postmodernism." Unless the significant number of even more damaging hoaxes perpetrated on science journals have exposed the astonishing intellectual fraud of science?

derleth13• 14 years ago

The difference with the Sokal Hoax is that it cuts to the core of what philosophers do: Whereas science has practical, tangible results to show, such as the polio vaccine, all philosophy has is thoughts and ideas, which the Sokal Hoax assaults very directly.

msutherl7• 14 years ago

Philosophy most certainly does have tangible results to show, for instance: modern democracy, the scientific establishment itself, the various international bodies that enforce civil rights, and the modern field of psychology. If you go far enough back, philosophy gave birth to all intellectual forms of knowledge, which in turn greatly influence all aspects of our society.

memla• 14 years ago

This comment of yours is also nothing but thoughts and ideas. What's your point?

wpietri5• 14 years ago

I like the general thrust of your comment, but can you demonstrate that Social Text was insignificant? At the time of the hoax I asked some lit and art history grad student pals and I'm pretty sure they thought it was notable in some neck of the academic woods.

Evbn• 14 years ago

Lit and art, not philosophy.

msutherl7• 14 years ago

"It may be asked why it is even worth spending time on these remnants of the utterly discredited postmodernist movement."

This is just so ignorant and backward that I have a hard time taking the author of this article seriously. There is no "postmodernist movement". The term refers to a hopelessly large field of practices. Most great so-called "postmodernist" theorists typically have not referred to themselves as such.

If you want to discredit theorists who have been critical of scientific practices, you need to put down the Sokal and actually engage with specific works. You might be surprised to find that many of these "postmodernists" are either trained scientists or actually know what they're talking about. Just a few suggestions if you want to dip your toes in the water:

– Gilles Deleuze wrote powerfully on metaphysics, integrating many incites from mathematics in the 60's and 70's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze#Metaphysics Check out "Difference and Repetition".

– Alain Badiou uses set theory in his ontology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou#Mathematics_as_ont... – I find his ontology lacking though; he should learn something from the failings of set theory in the early 20th century.

– Bruno Latour in a the domain of Science and Technology Studies has written voluminously about scientific and technological practices from a more anthropological point of view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour#Biography

– Isabelle Stengers has written something more along the lines of what's critiqued in this article, a critique of the authority of science in society: http://www.amazon.com/Cosmopolitics-I-Posthumanities-Isabell... – works like this question whether the privileging of science over all other forms of knowledge is good for society. This particular work argues that it is not.

– Mike Cooley argues powerfully that the deskilling of the engineering industry caused by computer-aided design and manufacturing is a travesty: http://www.amazon.com/Architect-Bee-Human-Technology-Relatio...

A general note about so-called "postmodernism". The Wikipedia definition includes the following:

"Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. In essence, it is based on the position that reality is not mirrored in human understanding of it, but is rather constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality."

It's important to understand that "postmodernism" isn't critiquing the effectiveness of science. It is merely claiming that, as it says, reality is not mirrored in human understanding. The models we create to explain observed phenomena are not direct reflections of reality, they are simply characteristically human, linguistic models that correspond to our observations. As Niels Bohr wrote:

"There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature..."

The question is whether our habit of elevating scientific explanation to the 'one true truth' is (1) right and (2) a good thing. Most "postmodernists" argue that other forms of knowledge are perfectly legitimate (for instance, indigenous people who still live tribally lead perfectly happy lives without science) and that the privileging of science over other forms of knowledge is not a unilaterally good thing (for instance, it is reasonable to say there's a decent change that we will extinguish ourselves as a species in the next hundred years thanks to the exploits of scientifically advanced societies).

You may notice that both of those examples are anthropological. This hints at something very important about "postmodernism". When people talk about "postmodernism", they're often talking about "post-structuralism", which is another hopelessly broad category referring to theory that in some way extends "structuralism", which is in turn closely connected to the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the "father of modern anthropology". "Postmodernism" can be seen in this sense to be a kind of anthropologically informed philosophy. Rather than creating theoretically sound abstract models, they look at how those models actually play out "in the field" and draw conclusions. Hence the critique of science: despite the power of scientific explanation, it may not necessarily result in a better society and indeed the evidence shows that it does not.

And one final point, the author is totally wrong to claim that scientists have not been concerned with the philosophy of science. Many early twentieth century scientists – the ones who create the theory of relatively and quantum physics especially – even wrote books on the philosophy of science as well as its role in society. Some examples:

– Schrödinger - "What is Life": http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Life-Autobiographical-Sketches...

– Herman Weyl ("His overall approach in physics was based on the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, specifically Husserl's 1913 Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Weyl

– Heisenberg - "Physics and Philosophy": http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Philosophy-Revolution-Modern-S...

– David Bohm - "Wholeness and the Implicate Order": http://www.amazon.com/Wholeness-Implicate-Order-David-Bohm/d...

Here's a more modern book from an economist that references Deleuze and other "post-structuralists":

– "The Blank Swan": http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Swan-End-Probability/dp/0470...

chasingtheflow• 14 years ago

Your lucid explanation of postmodernism is great. Thanks.

quadhome• 14 years ago

If you want to discredit theorists who have been critical of scientific practices, you need to put down the Sokal and actually engage with specific works.

NB: I'm completely ignorant in this realm.

I thought one of the key points of "Impostures Intellectuelles" was that it defined the group of criticized "postmodernists" and referenced specific essays and papers?

msutherl7• 14 years ago

I've read at least an article that they wrote and all they did was take some quotes out of context and show how they were scientifically inaccurate when they seemed to me to be metaphorical from the start. I can't speak for the book, however.

msutherl7• 14 years ago

Oh, I forgot to add that probably my favorite "post-structuralist" author is Manuel DeLanda, who actually quit his job as a hacker to become a philosopher. He does a great job of making Deleuze's work more clear and his own work is fascinating: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...

"A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History" looks at the past thousand years in terms of the kinds of material processes that occurred (at all levels from geological to political) with reference to theories from dynamics. DeLanda generally continues the project that Deleuze started of taking insight from modern science and applying it to philosophical problems.

derleth13• 14 years ago

> The question is whether our habit of elevating scientific explanation to the 'one true truth'

This is a complete strawman and nobody who understands science could take this idea seriously. In fact, I dare you to ask a working scientist whether they're after 'Truth'.

Confusion3• 14 years ago

If you think there are no scientists who believe they are getting closer and closer to outlining what nature fundamentally, truly looks like, then you are sadly mistaking. Philosophy-savvy scientists may even deny doing so, but their day-to-day conversation and casual remarks tell another story. Most scientists definitely believe there is a single absolute unshifting reality below it all and they are outlining it.

Edit: and I should add that most non-scientists also believe the same thing. In fact, I often catch myself depending on that hypothesis, even though I thoroughly believe it is wrong.

rsanchez13• 14 years ago

Exactly. If scientist were not concerned with the philosophy of science, they would not come up with different interpretations of quantum mechanics. There would just be quantum mechanics, and there wouldn't be the Copenhagen Interpretation, many worlds, pilot waves, etc.

The Niels Bohr quote drives this point home. Physics (and science in general) concerns itself with descriptions of nature. When scientists start to ask why, start to make interpretations of quantum mechanics, start to ask what came before the big bang, start to ask why there is something rather than nothing, that is when philosophy becomes central.

mjw• 14 years ago

Multiple interpretations can also be useful purely as a pedagogical tool though. Using a range of metaphors to tell stories around some formal concept can make it easier to communicate and understand.

That's not to say you should assume every mathematician who communicates their ideas as though the objects 'exist' in some objective sense is a platonist, or that any scientist who talks implicitly about truth when communicating about their work, is committed to a strong philosophical stance on the matter. It can be just a habit one gets into when trying to communicate.

No doubt some philosophical remarks could be made about this too, not that I'm qualified...

cdavid• 14 years ago

Thanks for your defence of recent works around the philosophy of science, I am genuinely surprised to find one on HN. One small book I liked that I would add is "predire n'est pas expliquer" from Rene Thom.

I don't get the mistrust of philosophy from many scientifically-inclined people. I find it especially sad that most people stopped at the falsifiability concept and don't go beyond.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

There is a meme going around groups aligned with the rationality movement, asserting that there's a hierarchy of worth in academic disciplines. Basically, the hard sciences are worth more, and the harder the science, the more it's worth.

Philosophy is near the bottom of this hierarchy, though some of the products of philosophy are deemed to be valuable. (Basically it's an evaluation of Signal to Noise ratios, more than a declaration of absolute worth across the discipline.)

goodside• 14 years ago

By what mechanism did you conclude that random controlled trials are more trustworthy than observational studies? Does that mechanism more closely resemble an observational study or a random controlled trial?

SudarshanP• 14 years ago

There is a lot of extra rigor in a random controlled study than an observational study because it is harder to "cook up data" to support the scientists own beliefs. This may even happen unconsciously.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

I believe the point was a meta one: when arguing in favor of studies with randomized controls, do you make the argument by setting up a randomized controlled study to test the superiority of randomized controlled studies? If the only things worth paying attention to are the results of randomized controlled studies, then that's the only possible way you could consistently argue in favor of them.

Instead, it seems more common to establish the "ground rules" of science by some other means, such as arguments about the pros/cons of various scientific methodologies, or even what counts as "scientific methodology" at all (and at this point, you're doing philosophy of science).

cwp• 14 years ago

So basically, he dismissed philosophy as irrelevant, then happened across some obscure papers by cranks at the margins of philosophic thought, and concluded that he was right all along. Unenlightening.

shalmanese• 14 years ago

Many who choose to use Sokal to highlight their point seem to be unaware that Science has had it's own reverse-Sokal with the Bogdanov affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

kevinalexbrown• 14 years ago

I do science. When I was younger, I devoured philosophy treatises, law reviews, and political science books. I still find it fun, but I lost the passion for it. However, I disagree strongly with this article in his characterization of philosophers.

I haven't left philosophy because everyone in it is stupid, as this article seems to suggest. I left philosophy because after all my reading, note-taking, class-discussioning, and debate tournamenting, I never felt like I'd made any progress, and that mattered to me personally. At the end of the day, the questions that were hard to answer were still unsolved, and the gray ethical areas were still gray. This is why I don't do philosophy, and I why I found the science bug. Not because philosophy lacks rigor or reasonable investigators.

In philosophy, real answers are difficult to find and prove, but in math and science, even though every answer brings 10 new questions, you can look back and say: I proved that theorem, I empirically verified the acceleration of the earth.

To quote my favorite xkcd T-shirt "Science, it works, bitches!". Most scientists I know that disregard philosophy do so because science gives them a feeling of getting somewhere, while philosophy, even at its most rigorous, just seems to leave them more confused than when they started. It's more of a personal preference for that kind of investigation than any rejection of the intelligence of a large group of people.

derrida3• 14 years ago

I agree with all of the above. Except there are isolated cases of philosophy actually pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge. Arguably Russell & Whitehead did in the Principia Mathematica, which attempted to put the foundation of mathematics in terms of logic. That system is the system where Godel found a paradox, which lead to Godels theorems. I'm sure Turing had it in the back of his mind that the Turing machine was a useful way of reasoning about those propositions which are 'true and provable'. Russell/Whitehead --> Godel --> Turing.

Another area where there have arguably been successes (even through failure), is in the attempts to formalise natural languages into logic (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein). This is the tradition that informed Chomsky, whose theories of grammar inform modern compiler design.

There are philosophers alive that I believe have advanced the frontier of knowledge, but as with some areas of pure mathematics it's hard to say practically what that means. I have in mind Kripke.

derleth13• 14 years ago

> Chomsky, whose theories of grammar inform modern compiler design

That's math, though, not philosophy.

The difference: Math is a symbol game that occasionally produces useful tools for other fields, whereas philosophy is a discussion of human problems.

katsaroles2• 14 years ago

Philosophy is about posing new questions, not providing answers. It's about imagination more than it's about deduction. Of course, in the same manner that math teachers emphasize deriving proofs rather than crafting new mathematical constructs as the fundamental activity of mathematicians, people who teach philosophy emphasize philosophical argument over opening up new frontiers of discourse as the fundamental activity of philosophers. As a result, students come to perceive philosophy as pointless.

jseliger• 14 years ago

Philosophy is about posing new questions, not providing answers.

I'm increasingly under the impression that philosophy is "about" whatever the individual philosopher or reader or writer wants it to be about, and that a lot of philosophers really like arguing about what philosophy is about. Granted, this comes mostly from sporadic reading in the field and from listening to Philosophy Bites, but the combination has still made me increasingly skeptical of explanations about what philosophy is about.

Link: http://www.philosophybites.com/

Alex39174• 14 years ago

"Most scientists I know that disregard philosophy do so because science gives them a feeling of getting somewhere, while philosophy, even at its most rigorous, just seems to leave them more confused than when they started."

The things you dislike about philosophy are exactly the things that make it so useful, and the things you like about science are the reasons why most (if not all) of it is ultimately illusory.

derleth13• 14 years ago

> the things you like about science are the reasons why most (if not all) of it is ultimately illusory.

How is science illusory?

rsanchez13• 14 years ago

I think philosophy is a worthy pursuit for a scientist. It's easy to get a feeling of going somewhere with science, because someone else has done a lot of thinking for you making you comfortable with your result. But if you leave philosophy more confused than when you started, you won't have the mental fortitude to make real progress in science. I think philosophy is ultimately the study of human thought. It's why courses on logic are an important component of undergraduate studies in philosophy. Having a good understanding of human thought, how we come to the decisions we make and how we fool ourselves with lazy thought, is invaluable in making deep scientific discoveries. When you don't come away more confused, but with a deeper understanding, you are better prepared to understand the why, instead of just accepting the how. You would know why science works, instead of making snarky remarks about science and that it works.

If you really think about it, the situation in science, that the questions that were hard to answer were still unsolved, is very similar to the situation in philosophy. Ask anyone what an electric field really is. No one knows.

derleth13• 14 years ago

> It's easy to get a feeling of going somewhere with science, because someone else has done a lot of thinking for you

Any field that is actually advancing builds on itself. That doesn't make future progress easy in an absolute sense; it merely makes it possible.

paganel2• 14 years ago

> I haven't left philosophy because everyone in it is stupid, as this article seems to suggest. I left philosophy because after all my reading, note-taking, class-discussioning, and debate tournamenting, I never felt like I'd made any progress, and that mattered to me personally. At the end of the day, the questions that were hard to answer were still unsolved, and the gray ethical areas were still gray. This is why I don't do philosophy, and I why I found the science bug.

I get your point, but for all intents and purposes that's one of the things that makes philosophy great, i.e. the fact that Heraclitus's sayings are as actual today as they were 2,500 years ago. You'll also have to agree that deciding once and for all (or "proving" by scientific means) what makes as taking "moral" decisions, or if "morals" even exist at all, or what makes us not kill each other once we've stopped believing in gods etc., is better left "unresolved", because this "philosophical quest" is what makes us humans.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

I think that's a little sad. If the state of the art hasn't improved in 2500 years, why bother?

ajb• 14 years ago

"Of philosophy I will say nothing, except that when I saw that it had been cultivated for many ages by the most distinguished men, and that yet there is not a single matter within its sphere which is not still in dispute,..." (Descartes, 1637)

chris_wot8• 14 years ago

The title is misleading. It really should be "Why postmodernism is largely ignored by science (and mostly everyone else)."

joelmichael2• 14 years ago

Are we to regard Ethics as irrelevant? Logic? Aesthetics? Epistemology? Metaphysics? These are the five branches of philosophy.

I majored in Computer Science and have a minor in Philosophy. I consider philosophy the most important element of my life, and the lives of everyone else, often unknowingly. I see philosophy all the time on Hacker News and elsewhere. What do you call debates over law, for instance? Are those scientific? No, those are philosophy. So much of what humans do is philosophy that to suggest they do not participate in it because they aren't talking in "academic" terms is simply inaccurate.

derleth13• 14 years ago

> Ethics as irrelevant?

Having it or arguing about it?

> Logic?

Depends on what kind of logic you mean. There are multiple different entities covered by that word, some of which are not philosophy.

And for the rest: Arguments that never end produce what?

joelmichael2• 14 years ago

They produce our civilization. Right now you are speaking philosophically. Why bother?

xenophanes2• 14 years ago

So he says at the start he dismissed the best philosopher in the field, Karl Popper, without reading him.

Maybe most scientists ignore Popper's philosophy of science (the only worthwhile one) because they are ignorant and judge which philosophy to read by inaccurate reputation rather than merit.

Though bear in mind, quite a few scientists, big and small, did not ignore Popper and actually liked his ideas and found them helpful. E.g. Richard Feynman, David Deutsch, and Albert Einstein.

da-bacon• 14 years ago

Popper's great. Your reference to Feynman, however, reminded me of this classic qip: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” ― Richard P. Feynman

xenophanes2• 14 years ago

If you're interested in Popper, please let me invite you to the best Popperian discussion group on the internet:

http://beginningofinfinity.com/discussion

I'm aware of that Feynman quote. But he apparently had in mind typical philosophers as he did read and understand Popper.

Here's a quote from David Deutsch (correcting someone who claimed that Feynman had never heard of Popper):

> For what it's worth, I happened to mention Popper in the one conversation I had with Feynman, sometime in the 80s, and he did not say "who's that?" but replied meaningfully to the point.

I know Deutsch and have heard the full story. Feynman showed substantial understanding of Popper. Plus avoided all the usual epistemological errors.

Feynman may have been introduced to Popper by Wheeler. Here is Deutsch on Wheeler:

> Wheeler ... (my boss and Feynman's thesis advisor and subsequently his collaborator), knew a lot about Popper and was honoured and delighted when Popper quoted one of Wheeler's aphorisms as a chapter epigraph. Wheeler and I discussed Popper in detail on several occasions and I tried to persuade him to become a Popperian -- ultimately without success, because he preferred Polanyi (!). Nevertheless there were specific aspects of Popperian philosophy of science that he very much agreed with, especially that scientific theories are not derived from anywhere, that they are conjectural and full of errors, and that science makes progress by correcting these errors.

richardjordan• 14 years ago

What an incredibly uninformed comments thread. Firstly to the main post, of course philosophy isn't ignored by science. Science is an offshoot of philosophy and happily so. It's a ridiculous premise not born out by the article itself.

Secondly, it sounds like several commenters have studied little or no philosophy in an academic setting, and as a result are posting garbage comments based on straw men of their own creation.

Is it hard to take on modern philosophers on their own ground? Is the language they use sometimes confusing to the layman? Is that sometimes frustrating? Sure it is. But that's because they have to shortcut a few thousand years of philosophical reasoning to make the points so that we don't end up in the weeds with every discussion. It's no different (as a trained Physicist myself) to the manner modern Physicists talk about our discipline in ways which are confusing to the layman, because we use cutting edge math to short cut a few thousand years of philosophical reasoning to make their point.

Study any subject to the edge of current thinking and you get to incredible levels of specialism because we've been at academia, as a global civilization, for an awfully long time. Not everything can be boiled down to an elevator pitch.

It may be hot to say people don't need to go to university, and further education is meaningless in the context of startups, but it's not meaningless if you actually want to understand the most advanced thought in areas of academic interest. It might not be the best avenue for most people for most career paths, but if you want to discuss philosophy and science (or as it used to be called Natural Philosophy) then it's probably best done with some kind of solid education in those fields.

dmfdmf• 14 years ago

Modern philosophy is largely ignored by science and scientists because it has nothing to offer but endless questions and debates, unresolveable paradoxes and pointless inquiry into the modern day equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Who needs it?

Unfortunately, science needs a rational philosophy now more than ever. Under the influence of Kant and his derivatives like Popper that dominate the modern universities, the fundamentals of science such as identity, causality, knowledge, logic and proof are being undercut and destroyed by the very sciences that use and need these concepts. Tragically, the scientists are distainful of modern philosophy (for good reason) but make the mistake of reject all philosophy, and are thus throwing the baby out with the bath water.

For anyone with a serious interest in these issues I recommend that you read Ayn Rand's "Philosophy: Who Needs It" and her "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology". In the former book, her answer is that everyone needs a philosophy because it is the science of fundamentals that apply to everyone and all sciences.

zenogais2• 14 years ago

Oh jesus. Someone who clearly hasn't read any modern philosophy but Ayn Rand.

nosse• 14 years ago

Could you at least point out some good modern philosophy? Otherwise your comment is not worth much.

b1daly• 14 years ago

This thread made me think of this New Yorker article on the "Decline Effect" which is describes a tendency for the results of scientific experiments (in particular those based on statistical methods) to weaken as experiments are repeated.

As a person with a generally skeptical/pro science bent it truly shocked me.

It highlights the need for understanding the sociology of science, which has huge impacts on its effectiveness.

stiff• 14 years ago

There are at least a few cases where philosophy influenced science in a major way, so while I understand some of the reasons scientists might get tired of philosophy, I don't think it's valid to dismiss its contributions entirely. For an example, here is Einstein in a letter on his discovery of relativity (http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2149/):

Your exposition is also quite right that positivism suggested relativity theory, without requiring it. Also you have correctly seen that this line of thought was of great influence on my efforts and indeed E. Mach and still much more Hume, whose treatise on understanding I studied with eagerness and admiration shortly before finding relativity theory.

Vlaix• 14 years ago

I doubt being well versed in philosophy is relevant to most scientists nowadays, at least from a practical standpoint. As I heard Michel Serres put it a couple years ago : « Today's society produces ignorant technicians and cultivated [put any word describing someone that can't count up to two] » (roughly translated from the original French). And they do fine by it, apparently. But it is damageable to ignore some fundamentals, from Pythagoras to Descartes (regarding science).

As I think about it, it comes to me that whether philosophy is or isn't necessary isn't relevant. Empirical necessity doesn't sums up human aspirations, and music or poetry play in the same field. Philosophy is a way or structuring certain angles of thinking, and that's pretty cool. As a developer I have absolutely no use of Heidegger or saint Thomas in my activity, but I'm glad they exist.

suprememoocow• 14 years ago

From the introduction to The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow: "Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge"

David_Colquhoun• 14 years ago

A lot of people must read Hacker News. My hit rate went up ten-fold and most seem to have come from here, so thanks derleth

I certainly didn't want to offend philosophers. I was merely pointing out that most scientists don't find their ideas very useful in practice. The piece arose as a postscript to a piece "In praise of randomisation". It was in the course of writing that that I discovered the a small (I hope) number of philosophers denied this idea. That does active harm. . A twitter user, @shanemuk, sent this today. Sums it up nicely.

"What you need to know about #Science, #Philosophy and #Sausages @david_colquhoun - answersingenes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/show-m…

Why philosophy is largely ignored by science

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