Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/23/physicists-should-stop-saying-silly-things-about-philosophy/

by seliopou • 12 years ago

95 85 12 years ago

preposterousuniverse.com

bdfh422• 12 years ago

3:0 to Physicists I think

bdfh422• 12 years ago

Ha ha ha ha ha

ISL• 12 years ago

Sean Carroll is a physicist, and a good one.

vijayboyapati• 12 years ago

The trouble, I feel, with the overlap between science and philosophy is that most modern practitioners of what we know as "science" only have exposure to one epistomological world view: positivism. Granted, this world view has created a great abundance of valuable and life improving knowledge for humanity - as Bacon would have described it, it is good for more than disputation (no offense, to Ol' Aristotle) - but it does not encompass the entire sphere of knowledge. There is authentic knowledge to be gained from disciplines which are entirely a priori - such as mathematics, or as some argue, economics.

inscrutablemike• 12 years ago

Mathematics is not a-priori. No form of knowledge is.

abruzzi9• 12 years ago

Care to elaborate? A-priori is generally used to mean that it does not rely on experience or observation. So while the words and symbols we use to explain 2+2=4 (i.e. Two, plus, four, equals) are leaned concepts, the truth and the ability to understand that truth is independent of that experience.

ambler0• 12 years ago

I have to agree with inscrutablemike here. Seems to me that all forms of human knowledge have both an empirical and a rational component.

drdeca• 12 years ago

I don't understand. If I say Define L to be a thing of type J. Where j is a J, define T j L to be j Define T L j to be the same as j. Where j is a J define W j to be a J. And where a and b are both J, define T a W b to be the same as T W a b Define a K to be a J and either be L or W L or where k can be determined to be a K, W k. I think these definitions are sufficient to show that if a and b are both a K then T a b can be shown to be the same as T b a. ( though this does not neccisarily make addition over the natural numbers because I did not include the requirement that if a and b are both a K and are not the same then W a must not be the same as W b)

And while I'm not totally sure about the definition of K ( specifically the whether something can be shown part), I think this would be based just on definitions, without really any axioms?

Although I suppose it is possible that I included an axiom and just wrote "Define" before it.

(tangent: I suppose one could say "define a system with the following axioms" and then make a proof about that system, and claim that it was a proof by definition?)

Maybe I don't really understand what a priori really means (this seems fairly likely) but I don't think definitions are considered a priori?

snowwrestler6• 12 years ago

A priori knowledge is supposedly independent of experience. I agree with you that we have no evidence of knowledge outside human experience.

But from a scientific perspective, both knowledge and experience arise from the physical properties of the universe; properties that predate humans and biological systems entirely. From that perspective, one could say that all knowledge is a priori.

But whether we say it's all priori or posteriori doesn't really matter. The point is that making the distinction privileges the human perspective in a way that we have no scientific evidence to support. The entire exercise begs the question by assuming that human experience is determinative, or distinct in any way from the rest of the universe.

leephillips2• 12 years ago

I really don't think so. Positivism is more a feature of how philosophers of science tried for a while to describe science than it is of actual science. And it seemed to fall out of favor decades ago. Actual science is marked by commonsense, naive realism. It has more in common with how a plumber looks for a leak than with most of the formalisms dreamed up by philosophers.

EDIT: And this is the big one that the article leaves out: the main complaint by scientists against philosophy is that it's so often wrong, especially about science. Many scientists who get curious about philosophy dip into some "philosophy of science" for obvious reasons, and don't recognize there any of the descriptions of the science that they're familiar with. And when philosophers try to apply their general principles to instruct is about how the universe works, they're even more wrong. Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy is a good introduction to this wrongness. He devotes a good deal of it to showing how Kant derived so many wrong conclusions about physics that he thought must be true because of general principles.

rudimental3• 12 years ago

I agree. In my experience scientific researchers were not interested in philosophy of science and meta- questions that interested me in philosophy. They would engage in conversation but I doubt they concerned themselves with the big philosophy of science, epistemology or metaphysics questions.

They were naive realists and that's ok- it seemed helpful for getting data, interpreting results, keeping the wheels of science moving forward.

alexqgb• 12 years ago

Limiting themselves to the philosophy of science may be the problem. Far better to start with a history of philosophy in general. Not only does this provide a better introduction to philosophy qua philosophy, it also provides the necessary historical framework, which is essential in understanding how sciences can, and did, emerge from from the philosophic tradition.

Aside from being interesting in its own right, this keeps you from making the mistake that philosophy is simply a precursor to science, and that it can be reliably judged based on how much ended up in the realm of empiricism.

biomcgary• 12 years ago

I am a biologist with a love for philosophy of science and found that both Kuhn and Lakatos discussed science in ways that were at least intelligible. Lakatos in particular described a philosophy of science that seemed to match what I have observed in practice.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

If you want a word view where science is deeply rooted, it's pragmatism, not positivism. And creating value is what pragmatism does.

abruzzi9• 12 years ago

Most people have a very mistaken view of modern philosophy, and unfortunately this article does little to clarify. Today, analytic philosophy (as opposed to the continental philosophers) is fairly rigorous and usually narrow focused. It can be about modeling systems (for example Bayesian epistemology, various forms of modal logic). It can be about decision analysis (game theory) It can be about number theory (Frege, Gödel, etc.) and it can be about scientific theory (Popper, Kuhn, Quine, Ulian). Some of these things have been profoundly influential, and important to the modern world.

Locke1689• 12 years ago

I agree. I minored in philosophy, and the one overarching issue isn't the comments made about philosophy by scientists, it's the misunderstanding of what modern philosophy consists of.

The article states three example criticisms. I find the derision of the first two completely fair -- neither are very useful criticisms. The derision of the third is misguided. The criticism is completely fair -- which is why philosophy itself is the biggest voice of that criticism! Analytic philosophy is philosophy's answer to that entire criticism of (what is now called) continental philosophy.

The biggest problem with scientists is not their criticism, it's that their criticism is dated. Philosophy had this debate decades ago and has since changed as a result.

davorak3• 12 years ago

What divides these rigorous branches of philosophy form mathematics then? If it is because it is applied in some sense then they could fall under applied mathematics.

exelius2• 12 years ago

Very little; to be honest. But the convergence has happened from both sides over the last 150 years or so. Much of theoretical mathematics could probably land in the philosophy camp, but there's no clear delineation even from university to university. In some schools, symbolic logic is considered philosophy, in others it's mathematics, and in others it's computer science.

abruzzi9• 12 years ago

There are similarities, but in analytic philosophy you find a much greater focus on foundational issues. So Frege tries (and fails) to derive all mathematics from logic. Later Bertrand Russell tries to derive mathematics from set theory. (Leading to the most unintentionally funny line in all philosophy. Somewhere around page 300, he gets to the line: "From this proposition it will follow...that 1+1=2")

pervycreeper• 12 years ago

The criticism certainly goes both ways, with the understanding of many (most?) in philosophy and the humanities in general of what science actually is and has done is deeply depressing (see Soakl and Bricmont's "Intellectual Impostures"). My personal observation is that there is a lot of resentment, envy, and repressed inferiority complexes that humanist academics hold towards scientists.

hyperliner• 12 years ago

We need someone to tell us not just how things work, but why they work.

bambax• 12 years ago

While a physicist should be commended for defending philosophy, I'm still not convinced that "asking deep questions about what it all means" isn't a complete waste of time.

Regardless of whether anything "means" anything, I really don't get why it should.

Uncovering actionable (and often very surprising) laws of nature sound much more exciting to me than pondering about "meaning", especially when done by people who don't have a deep understanding of physics.

The only people who should be philosophizing are the physicists, but they'd rather do physics instead, and I think that's a good thing.

squozzer• 12 years ago

Some of the problem, as Locke1689 said, lies in how non-philosophers perceive philosophy. I'm betting most of the laity were exposed to philosophy through low-level survey courses where notions such as substrata and monads were thrown about. While interesting and entertaining, to the typical physics major, it seems akin to teaching chemistry using alchemy and cosmology using geocentrism.

Young physicists also seem unusually biased towards mathematical forms of expression, as opposed to "mere" human language.

jimbokun• 12 years ago

"I'm betting most of the laity were exposed to philosophy through low-level survey courses where notions such as substrata and monads were thrown about."

But at least it was a good grounding for becoming a functional programmer!

davorak3• 12 years ago

(Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.)

The impression that most physicists I know is that the percentage of bad philosophers or bad philosophy papers is much high then in chemistry, physics, biology and several others.

I could not take the arguments here and convince those friends/peers otherwise.

Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be to a model-building phenomenologist.

The problem is that philosophers have so little data to work with. The problems they are pointed at often need tremendous amounts of data or very hard to collect data. Instead of making an incremental improvement on collecting that data or analyzing existing data it seems to often be the case that philosophers decided to work with guess work instead.

The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time.

A theoretical paper that examines the various quantum calculation techniques through the lens of information theory and attempts to make rigorous claims on which methods or fundamentally more simple(form an information theory definition) sounds like solid science and an interesting read. "trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality" - does not sound like something I would want to fund or read.

And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things.

I would want an example of an issue where calculation plays no role. Being able to communicate the ideas to fellow humans might be thought to involve not calculation, I would argue that starting with the simplest mathematical models then isomorphically(or at least minimize information lose) tweaking for human understanding would be the non-practical ideal method and use considerable calculation.

guygurari5• 12 years ago

I found the article vague and unconvincing. If philosophy is useful for physics research, where is the evidence? What new thing did philosophy contribute to physics in the last 100 years?

I am a physicist who cares deeply about the foundational issues mentioned in the article. And yet I honestly don't see any meaningful input about these issues coming from philosophers.

rudimental3• 12 years ago

From a blog comment- is it convicing?

"One central question in the philosophy of physics is how we should understand quantum mechanics (QM). We may want to know what we should take QM to be about. It’s worth noting that, in some (but not all) cases, this is no longer an empirical question: for instance, the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of QM is empirically equivalent to the Everett "many worlds" interpretation of QM. So, if we can’t do an experiment to settle the issue, we need to resort to some other method, which is where philosophers of physics come in."

AnimalMuppet• 12 years ago

If we can't do an experiment to settle the issue, then maybe the two are equivalent, and Occam's Razor says don't get all theoretical about many universes without good reason?

On the other hand, sooner or later, someone may figure out how to do an experiment that can tell the difference (unless it's provable that the two interpretations always give the same physical results).

vacri13• 12 years ago

If it weren't for philosophy, you wouldn't have the scientific method in the first place. I'd consider that to be astoundingly useful for physics research. A simple example: ever make a hypothesis? Congratulations, you've just done some philosophy. Tested for or against that hypothesis? Now you're using methods developed by philosophy.

The whole idea of what is robust investigation and what is weak is philosophy. It doesn't come naturally - quite the opposite. Doing science 'right' is hard and counter-intuitive, but it was philosophy that figured out how to do it in a robust fashion.

If you don't see how philosophy is entwined with physics (or other sciences), then the fault is your misunderstanding of philosophy, not philosophy itself (philosophy is not another name for religion or the supernatural). And any time someone says "Before we test for X, we have to first define what we mean by X" is doing the fundamental function of philosophy. Given that physics has done a lot of defining and solidifying of terms over the last century, philosophy has definitely had a hand.

snowwrestler6• 12 years ago

I find this argument to be condescending and wholly unconvincing. Scientists know what the scientific method is; they don't need philosophers to tell them. And certainly no living philosopher can claim to have defined or invented the scientific method.

If you want to play epistemological parent trap, then before philosophy there were other attempts to understand things. Should we argue that all philosophy is actually just a subset of whatever that was? Does philosophy get priority just because we happen to have a word for it today?

guygurari5• 12 years ago

It used to be that philosophers/scientists/mathematicians etc. had a lot of overlap. That is why I constrained my question to the last 100 years. I agree with you that philosophy had useful input for scientific research in the distant past. Can you offer more recent examples? It seems to me philosophy has not been relevant for a long time.

skizm• 12 years ago

I might misunderstand philosophy, but I think about it like this: scientists gather data, run experiments, etc. while philosophers draw conclusions. Sure most/maybe all scientists draw their own conclusions (it is pretty much the only way to get published) but sometimes the conclusions are not so obvious.

Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle mean we have free will? Can free will exist? What sort of (theoretical) evidence would we need to disprove free will?

Is that line of questioning philosophy or science? I'm really not sure. I think you take a headlong leap into science when you start running tests, but I'm not sure at what point talk turns from philosophy to science.

In the end, everyone is just trying to make a more accurate map, right?

Amezarak• 12 years ago

You don't need to go all the way to physics for free will - you need look no farther than psychology to determine whether free will exists or not. Actually, you don't need to look any farther than a serious philosophical treatment of what you mean by "free will" to see that the question itself is a confused one based on untenable (or even more confused) assumptions.

Nevertheless the belief in free will is very important for human happiness; or at least, happy and/or successful people tend to believe in free will, or just that their will is free and they're the master of their fates and the captain of their souls.

That is often the motive behind free will arguments, which generally have a very powerful smell of rationalization about them, but a thing is not necessarily true because human happiness (or even life) requires believing it is true or leads to the feeling it must be true.

vacri13• 12 years ago

In the end, everyone is just trying to make a more accurate map, right?

Pretty much... which is why philosophy and science are not mutually exclusive. If they were, there wouldn't be an area of philosophy called the 'philosophy of science', which concerns itself with the best ways to acquire knowledge. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

rudimental3• 12 years ago

Best quote:

"Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes."

Philosophers interests overlap at times with mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, physicists. Sometimes they have valuable things to say to each other. E.g. Experimental philosophy is a trend in philosophy, and people who have never done scientific experiments before could learn how to do them better from scientists who have that experience and knowledge. I support people that find common ground and work together to help each other tackle the puzzles they're working on.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

Reminds me of an anecdote: for a long time, when faced with the non-intuitiveness that is quantum theory, physicists had one simple rule shut up and do the math.

jgallag8• 12 years ago

The author seems to be saying that the main reason physicists should pay attention to philosophers is that philosophy can be useful in the study of physics.

I think he could have made his point better by noting that pretty much any thinking about why we study physics leads directly to philosophy. What is the point of doing science? What is knowledge, and why should we be interested in it? These are just the sort of questions philosophy as a discipline is intended to answer.

Any physicist who is interested in any 'meta' questions about his/her work is necessarily interested in philosophy. One can disagree with the particular methodologies of modern academic philosophy, but it is hard to see how any intellectually curious person can dismiss the field entirely.

It seems to me that this is a stronger argument for the relevance of philosophy to science.

michaelsbradley• 12 years ago

As I read Dr. Carroll's blog post, I was reminded encouragingly of how a famous philosopher and Parisian professor[1] – the student of a great medieval experimentalist[2] – in 1265 began his opus magnum with a critique aimed at those who argued that philosophy was the pinnacle of human intellectual pursuit, encompassing all else. See Article One, Question One of the First Part[3] in the Summa Theologica[4]:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Great

[3] http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Theologica

imurray• 12 years ago

Somewhat related: I'm currently enjoying Scott Aaronson's "Quantum computing since Democritus". A snippet:

Not every branch of science was scouted out ahead of time by philosophy, but some were. And in recent history, I think quantum computing is really the poster child here. It's fine to tell people to "Shut up and calculate," but the question is, what should they calculate? At least in quantum computing, which is my field, the sorts of things that we like to calculate — capacities of quantum channels, error probabilities of quantum algorithms — are things people would never have thought to calculate if not for philosophy.

For more: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ — it's been posted here a bunch of times, although without any comments.

mathattack• 12 years ago

Something I think Philosophers should also stop saying silly things about Physics.

oso2k• 12 years ago

I've heard many research scientists say, "Science is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

sigmaml• 12 years ago

I heard a variant thereof. ``Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. Science is what I'm doing once I figure that out!"

hackuser• 12 years ago

HN naturally attracts people with expertise in STEM. Is it really meaningful or interesting that they think their own field is more valuable and important than others?

asgard1024• 12 years ago

I found the following, I think apt, quote from Dan Dennett:

"In a review of Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, in New York Review of Books, the British geneticist Steve Jones had the following comment to make: "To most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex. It is cheaper, easier and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it." Now that view is all too common, and I understand it from the depths of my soul. I appreciate why people think this, but I think it is also important to combat this stereotype in a friendly and constructive spirit, and no place better than in a center for research in cognitive science. What philosophers can be good at – there aren't many things we can be good at – is helping people figure out what the right questions are. When people ask me whether there's been any progress in philosophy I say, "Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."

bladedtoys• 12 years ago

"Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."

To this I might add a rhetorical question: how would science have gone about discovering the scientific method? Indeed, in which discipline would that question fall even today?

abruzzi9• 12 years ago

An the answer to a rhetorical question in case anyone is interested: Philosophy of Science. Specifically read Hume (Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding) who demonstrated that inductive reasoning to universal laws (empiricism) was fundamentally based on circular reasoning. Then Karl Popper developed the idea of falsification to show that while Hume is correct--you cannot prove natural laws as true, you can prove them false. He essentially codified the idea that scientific laws have to be testable, and falsifiable. So scientific laws are contingent. They are they closest we have to the truth, until someone devises a test that proves them wrong.

seanewest• 12 years ago

There is a whole other sector of philosophy that is almost completely divorced from science that is often called "Continental Philosophy". It deals with all of the classic problems -- meaning, love, truth, etc. The U.S. tends to not hear a lot about it, but it's huge in the non-english speaking world. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

abruzzi9• 12 years ago

Yup. Modern philosophy is usually divided into Analytic and Continental. Analytic is by far the most common in England (its birthplace) and the US. Continental (as the name implies) is most common in France and Germany. It can be much more abstract. Phenomenology and Existentialism are two strains of Continental philosophy (Husserl for the first, and Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard for the other.)

robotresearcher• 12 years ago

It's also frequently pretty silly.

For the science-trained reader it can be painful to read. For example a popular rhetorical technique in this area is to take a well-defined scientific idea and use it as if it was a metaphor, then use the metaphor to imply some claim, then claim that the scientific idea entailed the claim.

Also, explaining things in an elliptical and opaque way is often considered OK, since it provides a certain kind of experience for the reader. In the Anglo-American tradition, clarity is an objective, rather than giving off a vibe where you kind of get the idea.

These guys point out some howling examples where technical terms are abused to the point of meaninglessness:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861971249/o/qid=97...

aidenn0• 12 years ago

I think a big part of why many physicists reject philosophy as a useful endeavor is that a lot of popularly-known philosophy places inductive reasoning below deductive reasoning.

goldenkey• 12 years ago

Philosophy is more concerned with consciousness being a black-box and thus physical measurements not being able to be fully trusted. Science assumes a physical world that does not lie above untrusted surface. However, philosophy takes nothing for granted. It's possible that you are the only real conscious person, and everyone else is just merely 'reactive.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

There is not a divide between Philosophy and Physics. Their axioms are merely different. Physics has axioms. Philosophy is about life, and therefore examines it with NO precepts. In order to discover the truth about the universe, one must make no assumptions. One must simply understand the level of truth each thought holds. This is the 'golden key.'

Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy

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