Bill Nye apparently thinks that philosophy is that meandering babble you do when you’re stoned out of your mind. It’s rather impressive, actually, that he can sit there giving advice about philosophy to a philosophy student and get everything about philosophy completely wrong.
Transcript – Mike: Hey Bill. Mike here. I’m a philosophy major in college right now and I’m looking for your opinion on a subject. Some of the scientists like Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson have brushed it off as a meaningless topic. I’m just wondering about your thoughts on the subject.
Bill Nye: Mike, Mike. This is a great question. I’m not sure that Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins, two guys I’m very well acquainted with have declared philosophy as irrelevant and blowing it off in you term. I think that they’re just concerned that it doesn’t always give an answer that’s surprising. It doesn’t always lead you someplace that is inconsistent with common sense. And it gets back – it often, often gets back to this question. What is the nature of consciousness? Can we know that we know? Are we aware that we are aware? Are we not aware that we are aware? Is reality real or is reality not real and we are all living on a ping pong ball as part of a giant interplanetary ping pong game and we cannot sense it. These are interesting questions. But the idea that reality is not real or what you sense and feel is not authentic is something I’m very skeptical of. I mean I think that your senses, the reality that you interact with with light, heat, sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing, absolutely hearing. These are real things.
And to make a philosophical argument that they may not be real because you can’t prove – like for example you can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow. Not really, right. You can’t prove it until it happens. But I’m pretty confident it will happen. That’s part of my reality. The sun will come up tomorrow. And so philosophy is important for a while but it’s also I get were Neil and Richard might be coming from but where you start arguing in a circle where I think therefore I am. What if you don’t think about it? Do you not exist anymore? You probably still exist even if you’re not thinking about existence. And so, you know, this gets into the old thing if you drop a hammer on your foot is it real or is it just your imagination? You can run that test, you know, a couple of times and I hope you come to agree that it’s probably real. It’s a cool question. It’s important I think for a lot of people to be aware of philosophy but just keep in mind if you’re spending all this money on college this also may be where Neil and Richard are coming from. A philosophy degree may not lead you to on a career path. It might but it may not. And keep in mind humans made up philosophy too. Humans discovered or invented the process of science. Humans invented language. Humans invented philosophy. So keep that in mind that when you go to seek an absolute truth you’re a human seeking the truth. So there’s going to be limits. But there’s also going to be things beyond which it doesn’t matter. Drop a hammer on your foot and see if you don’t notice it.
Some advice to engineers: when you’re asked about something totally outside your field, in a discipline you’ve never studied and have only misconceptions about, the correct answer is to say “I don’t know.”
Actually, that’s pretty good advice for all of us.
I knew it wouldn’t take long. A philosopher responds.
Not to mention that the student is asking about Tyson and Hawking, and Nye goes on about Tyson and Dawkins. I guess all British scientists just blur together after a while. Especially when you’re stoned out of your mind.
That was just pitiful.
Especially for politicians, but somehow it never happens. I’d have some respect for a politician who didn’t give in to the pressure of 24-hour rolling news when asked a question about something with which they had little or no knowledge, and replied, “I’m not familiar with that. Can you give me a couple of days to look into it and get back to you?” When instead they waffle and spout generalities all that does is tell me that they don’t recognise their own lack of capability or are ashamed to admit it. I don’t want to deal with people like that in my everyday life, so why would I trust such a person to govern my country?
I’m inclined to think that Dawkins / Hawking are similar enough to put that one down as a simple brainfart or mishear.
Dr. Jonson refutes Berkeley thus! [Kicks Internet.]
Speaking as as engineer: It is almost a point of principle that you try and work out out as you go along and only consult the manual/someone who actually knows how it works as a last resort.
Every single time I had to do with proponents of philosophy they came out as huge wankers.
This has little to do with the importance of the discipline itself, but has definitely a lot of impact on how it is perceived.
ie, given the pretentiousness and vacuity of too many of its supporters, it’s no surprise that many will brush it off as sophistry.
@7
Pretty much the case with me. Before I was dual majoring in Sociology and Philosophy, I was dualing with Soc and Statistics. I was on the fence and one of my friends introduced me to their philosophy major friend, whose first ever statement was about how Statistics and Sociology are philosophically dangerous because it promotes a worldview that things can be quantified.
While I did eventually get over that fence, the severe headache I had attempting to untangle that phrase definitely kept me on that fence for a while.
I wonder how it came to be that this sort of verbal masturbation became the public face and general impression of Philosophy then.
Must be “engineers” fault, somehow.
Wow, that was bad.
He could have just said that science is a sub-discipline of philosophy, and of course philosophy is useful. Argh.
Someday I wish some pundit would respond “You know, I really don’t know anything about that. I suppose I could do what lots of people would do – and research it on wikipedia – then act much more knowledgeable than I am, but I think it’s important to be honest than to appear to be smart. I will promise you this: I’ll go do some reading on that topic and if anyone ever asks me again, then maybe I can give them an informed answer.”
I wonder how it came to be that this sort of verbal masturbation became the public face and general impression of Philosophy then.
Largely due to skepticism, actually. Skeptics – since the time of the ancient Greeks and before – have frequently attacked other philosophers’ ability to make claims of knowledge. That’s a nice way of winning an argument if you’re a philosopher but it’s sort of a “nuclear option” that leads to everyone arguing first principles and the whole exercise resembles theologians arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin. It’s embarrassing.
It was necessary, unfortunately, because the most egregious unsupported claims of knowledge come from religion – philosophy’s endless pinata/punching bag. What’s embarrassing is that philosophy has barely moved past the basic thrashing of religion — like a lot of skeptic dudebros, more or less.
That philosopher’s comeback was pretty darned good! Now we’ll see what Nye is made of: will he grab a shovel and Dawkins away? Or will he be honest enough to admit that he shot off his mouth, and it’s time to study a bit of philosophy?
I took one of those philosophy courses for non-majors, and I definitely remember addressing a few of those vapid philosophical conundrums. But I don’t think that’s what philosophy really is, they were just frustrating pedagogical exercises to teach us about possible worlds etc.
On the occasions I’ve had to learn about real 20th century philosophy, I’ve found it’s much better than that. Modal logic is very interesting, and I’m always suppressing an urge to tell people about prototype theory.
You could have called it “Tysonsplaining” a couple of years ago.
Or Hawkingsplaining. It seems to be a phase famous scientists go through.
The one part of his argument where I’ll giver him a little leeway, on the issue of class struggle, and inequality in America (though I’m sure that’s not how he meant it), is that I’ve seen his reply attacked on a few sites with regard to denigrating a liberal arts education, and suggesting that majoring in Italian or Sociology or English Lit or Anthropology is somehow a mistake, rather than a REAL discipline, with earning power. The standard epithet is: “he wants to turn college into a trade school”.
Well, that’s an easy conceit for middle classers who went to college before about 1992. My mother paid about $5K a year to send me to the country’s best in the late 70s, early 80s, less than the cost of her Ford Fiesta. But nowadays, if you’re emerging from college with $200,000 of student debt, that the GOP has declared is the one debt in all of society that cannot be forgiven or bankrupted out of, you actually DO need to think about the marketability of your education.
The philosopher’s final point in his rebuttal was good, that philosophy majors do jut fine, as liberal arts majors go…..though I suspect that’s because it attracts smart kids, rather than that it positions them better for the real world, so there’s a correlation/causation issue involved. But still, as a proud liberal arts major (Gnomes & Elves, ’83), I think it’s a mistake to pooh-pooh modern college kids who are much more concerned with turning their education into money. We’ve created a society that almost forces them to.
Oops, linky.
So is Dawkins going to have something to say about this?
Or ‘explaining badly’ because not everything needs a cutesy compound name :(
Humbug etc.
Count your blessings. I could have called it ‘Nyegate’.
I’m torn on this…
On the one hand, Philosophy holds, I think, an incredibly important place in basically all discourse, science included. You can’t really escape philosophy in any real sense. It is more than just some brain-wankery to say that I could just be a brain in a vat imagining this reality, including all of you.
The problem is when philosophers take that and then decide “you can’t know anything. Knowledge is merely opinion.” At that point, there is no discussion, because we’ve moved into Bullshit Territory, and your best bet is just to turn heel and run as far away from that territory as possible. I’ve watched scientific debates where a philosopher actually declares that all science is bullshit because there’s no such thing as knowledge (I’ll try and find one video that stands out in my mind right now).
It’s infuriating as all hell and I can understand why some scientists might decide that philosophy is useless crap because of that, even if that isn’t really representative of what Philosophy is as a whole (and maybe isn’t even legitimately called “Philosophy” nowadays).
That video I promised…
I actually blogged about it, though I wish I had done a better job on that blog post.
If you don’t want to be infuriated, pay attention to Professor David Papineau. He’s the only one who gets it. Everyone else, but especially Professor Ian Angell (who comes dangerously close to saying that he doesn’t believe in science at all), fails miserably.
Angell is the person I was thinking of when I wrote my paragraph about Bullshit Territory.
Unfortunately there is this tendency among scientists, especially but not exclusively STEM, to equate capital and lowercase Truth/truth, and then equate that result with empiricism. You might very well be able to use empiricism for everything under the sun if you had enough time and data, but those are finite things, and as we are finding out it works less and less well the more complex your system is. Setting up experiments involving human social situations is a very difficult enterprise, and its conclusions are never as specific as you’d like. We make progress, but it is slow. Even my field linguistics is rapidly moving toward a more neuro-centric lab based approach, where brain caps and crunching data in R is worth a lot more than people’s intuitions, because after all if you want your social sciences to be empirical, there is a very specific, very narrow route they need to take.
But that doesn’t encompass all truth. If it isn’t impossible it’s at least infeasible to make many claims about how humans should direct their lives using nothing but empiricism. Ethics, including the political sphere, are probably the main questions driving philosophical investigations today. Yes, inference is cheap and experimentation is hard, and yes, empiricism has a lot to contribute to questions of epistemology (where those brain caps will prove a lot more meaningful than a re-reading of Sein und Zeit will), and partially metaphysics, where a knowledge of the scope and nature of the universe simply and rightly shuts down a lot of work that’s gone before, but none of these things mean we should consider science more than one very powerful tool in an arsenal of logical reasoning.
NateHevens@#21:
The problem is when philosophers take that and then decide “you can’t know anything. Knowledge is merely opinion.” At that point, there is no discussion, because we’ve moved into Bullshit Territory, and your best bet is just to turn heel and run as far away from that territory as possible.
I hate to say this, but the problem of epistemology is a serious issue. The scientific method is one of humanity’s best ideas and it’s a response to the problem of knowledge.
When someone slags off philosophy because they encountered problem of induction in knowledge, they’re kind of like the person who is presented with a wonderful banquet of amazing food, who samples a plastic fruit from the center-piece, then storms out in disgust. If that person is a food critic or a restaurateur, they look incompetent. If they were there to enjoy a meal they look sad and ignorant.
By the way, a philosopher would never say “you can’t know anything” because that’s a dogmatic statement to make if you’re attacking claims of knowledge. The proper form would be “I remain unconvinced by your dogmatic assertions.” Or “it appears to me that making claims to knowledge is very difficult.”
The scientific method was invented because it’s hard to claim anything with certainty. If you’ve noticed real scientists’ tendency to appear to waffle – it’s exactly because of the problem of inductive knowledge. A scientist will realize that it’s sloppy to say that “A causes B” unless they have a great deal of trial and error to bolster their theory of why and how that happens. Science is concerned with not being wrong which is a crucial flip-side to knowing anything. The scientific method allows scientists to graduate from “it appears to me now that such-and-such is the case” to “it appears to me now that whenever this and that, such-and-such is the case.” And other scientists can chime in and say “hey it appears to us that way, too!” And you have something you can use – until and unless it appears to be wrong.
In other words, the scientific method is an epistemological tool designed to answer that question you smugly run away from.
Marcus,
Well, that statement itself would be a claim to knowledge, but then it refutes itself.
dick@#25 –
Exactly.
I wasn’t trying to play epistemology in my response; it would have been much more cautiously worded with lots of “it appears now to me that” and whatnot to keep the pyrhhonians at bay.
Richard Carrier’s talk on the subject should be required viewing:
Is Philosophy Stupid?
Marcus @ #23
I realize that. My point was where it’s taken to the other extreme. See Ian Angell in the video I posted.
There’s a reason that the highest level an idea can achieve scientifically is “theory”. Even evolution gets changed and updated as more information comes out, and who know… maybe one day we will find the fossil of a modern rabbit in the Pre-cambrian era.
But there are some (I’m not suggesting it’s a majority, but some) philosophers who take that to a point where, in short, they “don’t believe science”.
Another example is an argument I got into with someone over evolution. They didn’t “believe it” not for any religious reasons, but because “we can’t ‘know’ anything, so there’s no real evidence that evolution is true. It’s exactly as plausible as the Biblical claims.”
This was someone fresh out of a Philosophy PhD (who also, incidentally, looked up to Ian Angell).
I should be clearer… I allowed for the fact that maybe couldn’t even be seen as honest Philosophy nowadays, and I still hold to that. I don’t think that idea is a majority of Philosophy and I don’t think Philosophy is useless because of that. I’m an Anthropologist; Philosophy is rather important for my field.
I’m simply pointing out where I think the motives of scientists writing off Philosophy (like Tyson, Hawking, and apparently Nye) comes from.
@23, taraskan
What are you trying to say? I never get it when people do that capitalized VS non-capitalized thing.
Science is the most powerful tool below pure logic and mathematics.
I think what’s being interpreted as such a tendency is closer to a conclusion that, as the distinction is usually drawn, “capital Truth” is, generally speaking, impossible with regards to the real world and that “lowercase truth” is interesting and productive to pursue…so why are we still talking about “capital Truth?”
It’s kind of like the great scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” — Reg from the Judean People’s front is complaining:
Reg: “What did the PHILOSOPHERS ever do for us!?!”
Phil: “Well, there was logic”
Reg: “Faugh! LOGIC!?”
Bob: “The scientific method?”
Reg: “Ok, so, logic and the scientific method, anything else?”
Phil: “They debunked religion”
Reg: “ooh, THAT, well, anyone could do that.”
Bob: “Math”
Reg: “OK, ASIDE from math, debunking religion, logic, the scientific method … what did philosophy ever do for us?”
(together): “NOTHING!”
Jane: “Darwin?”
Reg: “SHH!”
Or ask someone who does know and get an answer from them. Nye should understand more than most the value of research. I hope he admits he got it wrong and not “double down” instead.
Linford’s rebuttal is a better argument than I could ever write, but even I could name the importance of logic in science and mathematics. I thought my CompSci college instructors were wasting our time talking about Wittgenstein, Popper and others, but it didn’t take long to get the point and understand their value. (See also: linguistics in programming languages.)
Let’s call terminology like Truth/truth part of philosophy’s bad image. In philosophy as in science you define your terms at the outset, but what for example “lowercase” truth means can change from one school to another by its very nature. I don’t think anyone currently uses lowercase truth exclusively for things we can know, only because the set of “knowable things” isn’t universally codified. But sure, if we want to say truth is the value of the subject and Truth is the value of the method to find the value of the subject, I think that would be consistent.
It does no good to think of philosophy in terms of science, because the consistency you’re looking for does not exist. Not every philosopher thinks truth (of either variety) is knowable (take Beauvoir’s “philosophy of ambiguity”) And some don’t even think its pursuit is desirable (take Derrida – who for the record is really responsible for most of this distrust in science we’re discussing, and I see him as sort of a massive troll…but that’s beside the point).
I agree. But, this is the problem: I never said it wasn’t, and it really doesn’t matter if it is. What I said I find unfortunate is many people think it’s the only tool in the box. And it certainly isn’t the most used tool in the box. The best example for illustrating how far science can take you is, I think, ethics. We do not use the scientific method to determine a set of laws and ordinances. We use logical reasoning, precedent, inference, or sometimes we make shit up. These are other methods and sometimes it’s more realistic, or expedient, or conducive to the project to use them. Likewise there are some places in the law where science is preferable. A study on the effects of lead in the bloodstream during child development will influence laws about our water supply. But, for example, it has almost nothing to say about how we treat dead bodies. Why can’t I go dig up a corpse and use it as a coffeetable? The reason it is illegal for me to do so is not the health code violation it would incur. Or how bout a while back when can’t-remember-who (PZ mentioned him, possibly a philosopher!) suggested he should get to use his partner’s body while they aren’t using it when sleeping. It is fair to say our philosophy is what finds this offensive, and that we can immediately arrive at several logical reasons why without using experimentation, data, or peer review. Other tools in the box, that’s what I mean.
@34, taraskan
I still have no idea what you are trying to say with the big T little t thing. But it’s probably not important so I’ll move on.
Ok I kind of think I get what you are basically trying to say.
But I get the feeling you don’t realize the underlying connection in all such good tools and methods. It’s logic and evidence in all cases (also note that all memories and experiences and sensations are data, and all interactions are experimentation, just not usually rigorous or controlled). So, in a way, it’s all the same tool (or tools). I think this is what people mean when they call all of this “scientific thinking” even if they use it in your examples of things outside of peer reviewed academic science that you give.
But such people should recognize that in every case philosophy is being done, and what they call “scientific thinking” is just the best type of philosophical thinking that we’ve discovered.
He’s right though. We have words for philosophy that isn’t bullshit. We call it “science” or “math”.
And telling a philosophy student that philosophy is bullshit is no more outrageous than telling a homeopathy student that homeopathy is bullshit.
I’ve watched several “Hey Bill Nye” videos by the Big Think, and I have yet to come across one that’s been any good.
I think the problem is that the Big Think people love to pick up ridiculous questions, which have little to nothing to do with science, and so you end up with Nye having to talk about something which is not even close to his domain of knowledge. And it ends up being terrible without providing any useful information for the user.
Science doesnt assert there are clear proofs of these philosophical positions. Ot assumes the physical world us real nit because science can provide conclusive evidence of such, but because it assumes the world is real. Why are you teaching science otherwise?
What’s the difference in your argument between whether humans have free will or not? Surely it’s the human imperative to assume you do. Otherwise what’s the point in being alive? Questions like this do very little to inform the scientific method.
You might as well ask if the universe is really a quantum computer and we’re just entities on an aliens “sims” game. It’s an interesting question, but has literally nothing to do with our current physical reality and our ability to perceive and measure it.
@Marcus Ranum
As I said to a programmer who was dismissing philosophy, “you do know where that truth table you are using comes from?”
from the discussion here and the link in PZ’s post I am not sure I understand what is meant by philosophy or what philosophy is.
much of what has been said has to do with what the real world as we can verify it using the tools of science certainly the linked article.
Where I have problems is when someone be it a religious person or someone who professes to be doing philosophy starts going on about things that contradict observable reality. But like I said I guess I don’t know what philosophy is.
uncle frogy
Frankie:
It assumes because it assumes? What would the second step be doing that the first didn’t already accomplish?
I don’t even get what it would mean to have any evidence (however conclusive) that “the physical world is real.” Evidence isn’t the sort of thing we need for that. It wouldn’t help to give that idea some kind of logical footing, because as you seem to be endorsing enthusiastically (although I don’t know why), it would be circular to argue that way.
I’m not teaching science. But maybe they’re doing it because it’s a reliable paycheck. Or because they checked the wrong box during college admissions and never got around to fixing it. Who knows? People could teach it for lots of other reasons, not just the strange fallacious one that you’re insisting upon.
Either our actions are caused by other things, which would be consistent with what we know about the rest of the natural world (including conservation of energy and momentum, to name some very obvious sources of conflict), or else we are magical and our laws of physics are wrong. They wouldn’t just be wrong, but wrong about one of the most mundane and readily available objects of investigation we have to test physical theories, namely human beings themselves. Good luck finding a scientist who doesn’t have one of those to test. If we got that so wildly wrong, the one thing that’s our home turf if anything is, I guess you could fucking forget about us knowing shit about dark matter, black holes, etc., for a good long while. But there’s no reason to believe we have any such problem, just some people who irrationally cling to an old idea that appears to be thoroughly refuted. Seems like a pretty dramatic difference to me.
Alternatively, in moral/legal/political settings, that term gets thrown around to describe someone who wasn’t coerced: a person acted “of their own free will,” in the sense that they weren’t forced to do so at gunpoint (for a simplistic example), by some other agent who has no right to do that to them. It’s not meant to be a general characterization of all humans (or what’s supposed to be “imperative” for them somehow), because of course it’s possible to be in situations in which you are coerced, as well as ones in which you aren’t. And that is obviously not the same thing as what I described before, since not having a gun pointed at you is no more or less magical, nor is it more or less consistent with physics as we know it, than having a gun pointed at you.
Surely, this is false, because I’m one of the many humans who doesn’t. Even people who believe in libertarian free will don’t need to “assume” it, because they could certainly believe (correctly or not) that they have evidence supporting it. So it doesn’t sound like much of an imperative, if it’s completely unnecessary.
What’s the point of this rhetorical question? Seems like a non sequitur. Maybe there isn’t a point in being alive — but what would that have to do with whether or not there’s free will? Would you really not want to be alive, just because something like drinking a cup of coffee or a beer, or having had certain experiences earlier in your life, altered the kind of decisions you made now? What’s so fucking terrible about that?
Well, not nothing. That’s describing literally the entire thing, which clearly has something to do with it. And you, I suppose, think that’s a false description like basically everyone does, but certain people like to dance around that issue…. apparently because (for whatever reason) they think they’re supposed to talk about epistemology instead of simply describing reality. Keep it simple and don’t confuse them. You can just say outright that it’s not the case — you don’t have to try to deny that it’s about reality or talk about how it doesn’t matter that you can’t “prove” it.
uncle frogy,
Philosophy is at root rigorous, consistent thinking about stuff; what is being talked about here, though, is what is left of the broader field once its more useful parts have become their own disciplines. Metaphysics and theology*, basically.
Logic is an element of philosophy; now its own discipline.
Mathematics, ditto.
Ethics, ditto.
Epistemology, ditto.
Ontology, ditto.
Politics, ditto.
Jurisprudence, ditto.
Etc.
It’s been said here before (I think), but that none of the above are commonly seen as “philosophy” instead of separate (and contrasting) disciplines is a result of their success and subsequent speciation — but it doesn’t negate that they are actually applied philosophy.
(e.g. Science* is natural philosophy, with empiricism as its epistemology and physicalism as its ontology)
—
* Divine philosophy which ignores empiricism, in actual contrast to science.
Okay, first, since nobody else seems to have posted it: old physicists on SMBC.
Now then:
@#32, Marcus Ranum
No. The earliest mathematicians weren’t philosophers, and the greatest mathematicians weren’t philosophers. The Athenian philosophers appropriated mathematics in the form of geometry (mostly) but they created very little, if anything and they promoted the idea that math should be a “hands-off, pure logic only” pursuit. This attitude has persisted to the present day (particularly among formalists) but it actually gets in the way of teaching. Furthermore, the greatest mathematician of antiquity, Archimedes, definitely did not hold that view, although a lot of later philosophers held that he must have. After all, he was the greatest mathematician, and they “knew” that mathematics was purely intellectual, so therefore he must have been a purely intellectual guy, right? And, conveniently, there were no known works of his which discussed the point, so the “obvious” answer must be correct! In the 20th century (IIRC), though, a letter from Archimedes was discovered, in which he says (more or less): the way to make progress in mathematics is to observe patterns in natural phenomena and then try to derive a logical structure to support them. Just sitting down and thinking really hard is not how he did things.
Except that traditional philosophers were always miserably bad at logic. Go and look at Plato’s works: Socrates (as presented) is a terrible logician, his methods are wrong, he leaves undistributed middles all over the place. The famous conclusion, for example, that either you have to obey every single law of your state or else you should reject the entire state and go into exile, is pure foolishness. So is the whole thing with the slave and the square root of 2 being a justification for concluding that we all know everything about mathematics in advance. Actual reliable, valid logic didn’t get anywhere until the 18th century or so, when it was taken out of the hands of philosophers and (shudder) theologians (look up Duns Scotus for a good laugh).
@#40, unclefrogy
“Philosophy” is like “responsible gun ownership” in the U.S. Anyone who buys a gun is a Responsible Gun Owner until they do something really obviously stupid, at which point they are an Irresponsible Gun Owner, and always were an Irresponsible Gun Owner. A Responsible Gun Owner can tell the difference, people who don’t want to own guns cannot tell the difference with the same reliability that Responsible Gun Owners can. Any suggestion that there is no significant difference between Responsible and Irresponsible Gun Owners is met with an outcry — the difference is obvious! (To Responsible Gun Owners, at least!) And the suggestion that perhaps Irresponsible Gun Owners are a sufficient reason to be dubious about Gun Ownership in general is entirely wrong Because Reasons. And Responsible Gun Ownership is very, very important! The U.S. would not be the same without it! …Or, at least, the Responsible Gun Owners tell us so. We’ve never actually tried it, so there’s no proof.
The Vicar:
Exactly what I was speaking about, before.
(You’re unaware of that thing about mathematicians and Platonism? ;) )
Which is not a refutation that logic is a form of philosophy–it’s not whether one is good or bad at it, it’s whether one attempts it.
(Like art!)
Only if one values pragmatism over principle; the result might seem foolish to you, but the logic was not flawed, given the premises.
@#44, John Morales
I know about “that thing”. “That thing” is what Platonists foisted on mathematics after less-foolish people had invented it, in an attempt to stamp it with their ownership. Plato and Aristotle were not just disasters for everything related to science and math but also were directly involved in the coup which eventually brought down Athens (Critias was Plato’s cousin). The wonderful reputation of the Greeks on this subject is undeserved, and mathematics in the hands of pure philosophers stagnated.
Nope; as I said (and as you would know if you actually knew anything about logic) there is an undistributed middle there. In other words: those are not the only two options, and therefore rejecting one does not require that you accept the other. Plato’s writing is absolutely chock-full of bad logic.
The Vicar #45
Can you put Socrates stance on obeying a bad law into formal terms that demonstrates the undistributed middle fallacy?
All P is Z
All Q is Z
Therefore all P is Q
Filling in his premises and conclusions, for example?
If a Science Guy falls in the forest and there’s no one around, does it “BILL! BILL! BILL! BILL!”?
I think someone up above mentioned that most people’s exposure to philosophy is when some douchey troll uses it to be annoying. Sometimes as a childish “Freak the mundanes” sort of way, but mostly to move their own position to a place where it’s a lot more secure because you have to argue the methodology instead of the content.
An example I saw a couple of times runs along the lines of “If they truly love each other then how can you claim the sexual relationship between a 12 year old girl and a 46 year old man is immoral?”
The first year philosophy teacher at my university infamously used it for the introduction class each year. He was trolling a bit but he used it to illustrate how to think things through. Buuut… I’ve also seen that argument used in expat circles by guys who really shouldn’t be allowed around women of any age. (You get them a lot in East Asia) When anyone attempts to address the power imbalance and other issues with that situation goal posts get moved via you’re arguing wrong. (Arguing the right way is starting with the idea that the premise is true, it seems)
Tangentally: I’m finding the new philosophy series on Crash Course boring.
/ morning brain dump.
I think it’s testimony to the cult of the infallibility of Dawkins that he gets vigorously defended even though nobody was talking about him…
Man, some of the people in this thread seem to have a real axe to grind with philosophy. That topics like solipsism or induction intuitively seem like non-issues doesn’t make someone a crank for wanting to figure things out.
This thread makes me think that Nye’s answer wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been.
Modern mathematics is indebted to philosophers such as Godel and Russell. Modern linguistics is indebted to philosophers such as Saussure and Chomsky. Upthread I mentioned prototype theory–cognitive science developed in the 1970s, inspired directly by philosopher Wittgenstein.
If your prototypical (!) example of philosophy is external world skepticism, then of course you’re not going to think philosophy has much value. But if I remind you, we have an internet to learn about these things.
The arguments against philosophy that I see here in this comment section can be applied to science:
1) Many scientists are wrong about stuff and bad at logic. Even many things that pass peer review have been shown to fallaciously use statistics to claim things that do not follow from the data.
2) Many fields of “science” are specialized, so we don’t have to call them “science” anymore: biology, astrophysics, chemistry, virology, geophysics, the list goes on and on.
Again, everyone should be required to view the video I posted earlier in this comment section.
@The Vicar
You’ve got a lot of red herrings there.
Brian Pansky @51:
After seeing Carrier’s complete butchery of physics in “The Ontology of Time”, and his vague prickly defensiveness in response to criticism, I wouldn’t waste my time on anything he wrote or said.
Someone being wrong about something at one point is a silly reason to shitlist someone’s entire body of work.
Most of this discussion is a waste because there is no cladistic agreement about what philosophy is. Is it paraphyletic because science has been carved out from philosophy? Is it polyphyletic because philosophy has incorporated mathematics, which has a different origin? Is it simply some ancient grab-bag of subjects without real relationship? Or is it some ghastly commensal organism like the eucaryotic cell?
What we do know for sure is that ancient definitions of philosophy such as “love of wisdom” are no more valid than contemporaneous theories of earth, air, fire and water. People who refer to those are being stupid or disingenuous.
People who look for what philosophy IS are ignoring the question of the original student, which was about the SUBJECT. That means how it is academically taught and practiced. There, Bill Nye is in part correct, and badly treated by Dan Linford’s response, which is partially a “no true Scottsman” fallacy. “I do not know any professional philosopher who would take seriously the arguments or concerns that you attributed to us.” Bullshit.
I have a small page at my wiki titled Disgust With Philosophy. I should probably update it to mention that I admire a few philosophers, notably Daniel Dennet. But if you REALLY want to read about why so much philosophy is worthless, please read What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo by philosopher David Stove. It’s short and funny as hell. “But let us never forget, either, as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what the ‘great thinkers’ really are: proper objects, indeed, of pity, but even more, of horror.”
Vivec @54: Making seemingly authoritative statements which are horribly wrong, and responding to polite criticism with content-free dismissiveness and no desire to even discuss/engage? Yeah, that’s enough for me. Life’s too short, etc.
Well, I can definitely point to my experience with Philosophy education not being terrible. So far it’s been a class on formal logic, a class about historical islamic philosophy, a class about various stances on solipsism and skepticism, a class about theories of language, and a class about philosophy in science.
As of yet, none of them have tried to argue hard solipsism or that science is useless, just that epistemology and induction do have importance as issues of discussion. Semiotics is of multidisciplinary interest, but a lot of the big names in the field are philosophers.
That you can point to crank philosophers to condemn philosophy seems about as silly and knee-jerk as writing off engineering because there are crank engineers.
Also, trying to steer kids away from studying philosophy would be really ill-advised over here. It’s a prerequisite for our Law program, and plenty of philosophy classes are cross-listed prerequisites for linguistics and various sciences.
@56
You do what you want, but that still seems a silly reason to write off someone’s work. There are plenty of people that I think are douches or that have been wrong in the past that I don’t dismiss offhand.
I think that the people complaining about philosophy in this thread should pay some heed to Sturgeon’s revelation: “90% of everything is crap. That is true, whether you are talking about physics, chemistry, evolutionary psychology, sociology, medicine—you name it—rock music, country western. 90% of everything is crap. (D. Dennett)” The fact that you had a few bad encounters with philosophers does not mean that all philosophy is worthless. I studied philosophy at university and I disliked most of my required reading. But the remaining ten percent made the rest of it more than worthwhile.
#48
But… no one is defending Dawkins, let alone ‘vigorously’.
@Rob Grigjanis
You are missing out on some really awesome writing and videos.
Based on past experience, I have a lot of doubt that your account is accurate.
In my experience (I read tons of his blog posts and the comment sections), Richard Carrier tends to either prove people wrong (including me) many times, or publicly correct himself whenever he is the one who is wrong.
Continuing my axe to grind against philosphers…
My first philosphy professor belonged to Comunione e Liberazione, rich-catholic lobby. She showed us a small, blurry, black and white pic of the Pope leaving Hitler and asked us loud “Does this look like someone who compromised!?”
The second philosophy professor was staunchly anti-evolution, he said that all lie forms popping into existence as they are was just as probable as Darwinian evolution.
The Vicar @45:
I didn’t refer to platonism itself, but to the fact that mathematical platonism is the mainstream metaphysical position of mathematicians.
Regarding Socrates’ purported fallacy, tkreacher basically ninjaed me, but here is the source, if you want to substantiate your claim.
(BTW Your parenthetical barb amuses me, because it’s itself fallacious)
F.O.:
Philosophers are not philosophy.
It’s fascinating how some fields, which are riddled with people talking out their asses but also have a great deal of redeeming value, are called upon to clean house and police their own, and others, which are riddled with people talking out their asses but also have a great deal of redeeming value, are not called upon, but rather those observing them are called upon to ignore the ass-talking and focus exclusively on the redeeming value.
Has anyone found any pattern in which field is approached in which way? Because I’m fucking mystified.
…as some commentators including the host, taken at face value, do constantly.
@John Morales
Per my first post, it’s my point entirely.
@Brian Pansky
Yes, the whole argument can be applied to science: scientists give science a bad name.
It’s true. Richard Dawkins anyone?
But unlike philosphers, there is a lot of movement within scientists to come down from the ivory tower and try and better connect with non-scientists.
F.O.:
So we are in agreement that dissing philosophers doesn’t address the actual merits of philosophy, but rather that of some of its practicioners.
(Excellent!)
Ya I probably should have listed some of the points in the video I wanted people to watch.
First of all is the crucial distinction between 1) the current broken state of the academic field of philosophy, and 2) what philosophy is meant to be (and sometimes is). It defines philosophy (literally translated) as the love of wisdom. Also goes over many aspects of the distinction (but also commonality and connection) between science and philosophy.
The video lists many correct criticisms of academic philosophy, such as lousy peer review, failure to form coherent worldviews, failure to separate pseudo philosophy from philosophy (which is as bad as it would be to have pseudoscience mixed in with science), and various other problems. There’s definitely a lot of system-wide problems to criticize, so criticizing academic philosophy doesn’t require cherry picking. But it is fallacious to use examples of philosophy being done poorly to dismiss the possibility of doing philosophy well.
He mentions various topics that are important in our daily life that aren’t things we get from “just science”: figuring out our relationships, our character, basically our life. Related to this is the “gaps” in science. Instead of using a “god of the gaps” to fill the gaps in science, we should use the best reasoning we can in line with the established facts (“philosophy of the gaps”).
There are also examples of progress made in philosophy (both in the past and more recently). Atheism is correctly mentioned as a philosophical conclusion, as well as various things in morality and politics (democracy!), math, and he gives some more specific examples.
F.O.:
I’ve read numerous articles by philosophers, talking about how they should do more to interpret and popularize their work for a lay audience. Indeed, that’s basically all The Stone at the NYT does (for a widely read example), along with millions of philosophy blogs, popular philosophy books, and so forth. Maybe the only sense in which it’s unlike philosophers is that is there is any sort of recent movement in that direction, something which wasn’t already happening to a high degree, because that’s what many of them have been doing for a very long time. Maybe you just don’t know about it, or you didn’t recognize it when you saw it.
Brian Pansky:
You see those same kinds of criticism within the sciences. And you see it in my own field of music, although of course the risks of crankery and other bad behavior aren’t as significant (as they are in medicine, for instance). I’m sure that goes for the rest of the arts in academia, but I’m less acquainted with them personally.
Indeed, they often turn around philosophical problems, such that you don’t merely need knowledge specific to that domain (like music or whatever it may be) but also some philosophical background to understand the nature of the problem or simply to see that it is a problem. There may be epistemic or metaphysical or logical or ethical problems with a certain approach, which might have come up again and again in other contexts throughout history, so that the philosophical literature has already touched on it. And of course, you don’t have to reinvent the fucking wheel. Sometimes, it’s offering a nice solid foundation to build upon. Sometimes, the way they’ve addressed an idea is inadequate for your very specific issue, or it’s even part of the problem that others were influenced by that line of thought (meaning that resolving it in a new way, if you’re taking it seriously and not dismissing philosophy itself as a load of garbage, could be useful to them as well). But even when they’re causing some trouble for other disciplines, it’s helpful that their work forces people to think hard (and very differently than they might have otherwise) about what they’re doing, why, how, etc.
Anyway, the reason I brought it up is that these kinds of conflicts and criticisms aren’t at all unique to philosophy. Not that you’re arguing otherwise, Brian, but it could give some helpful perspective to people who think philosophy is somehow especially pernicious or problematic or incapable of correcting itself. I also don’t think these people have any standing to complain — if for whatever reason you’re opposed to some philosophical view or another, that means you have a philosophical view of your own. Maybe you don’t like that label, but nobody cares what you call it. Rejecting it all out of hand, other than your own very narrow and half-cocked version of philosophy, looks just like dogmatism. And when it’s based on your ignorant impression that philosophers are going around believing reality isn’t real, or some such nonsense, you’re just being an obtuse fucking asshole.
Steve Martin, the comedian-philosophy undergraduate is a good example of what Bill Nye and others miss about both comedy and philosophy: they both are far more about writing than thinking. Philosophy is all about critical thinking and clear concise explication, skills I have found very valuable as a scientist. Philosophy also demands that the disparate ideas in your head about politics, science and morality have to be integrated and not wander about disconnected so your actions can be consistent and mean something, and by which you can convince and persuade others that your point of view is valid.
Even aside from epistemology, you need philosophy if only for ethics. Science and engineering are good for obtaining knowledge and tools to achieve your goals but cannot dictate what your goals are (beyond goals that exist to further other goals). Relying solely on intuition is incredibly inconsistent both between people and internally, so you need philosophy to get an at least somewhat more coherent system of right and wrong.
Brian @61: Here‘s the thread in which I ‘engaged’ with Carrier. I hadn’t been back since my last comment, and now I see he’s added something, telling me what I don’t understand.
I’ve been well acquainted with the physics he misuses for forty years or so, including the argument for a minimum resolvable distance. But Carrier is too busy telling me what I don’t understand to engage in an actual discussion. Hilarious.
He goes on to Carriersplain that M-theory, as well as loop quantum gravity*, entails the discreteness of spacetime. Maybe he’s heard something I haven’t, but
*In which spacetime is assumed to be discrete.
@Rob Grigjanis
I think he could have held your hand more (for instance pointing out that, logically, the future must be determined for a photon to simultaneously touch both the particle it originates from and the particle it “later” impacts), and there may have been a miscommunication or two, but it looks to me like you were unwilling to examine the case Carrier had for his claim about Planck time. I can’t fault Carrier for that.
Brian @74:
Oh, thanks for the larf.
You and Carrier talk about a photon as though it has a frame of reference that can be related to inertial frames. It doesn’t!
You can’t translate the Δt=0 of a photon’s path into any notion of simultaneity in or between inertial frames of reference, because there is no such translation.
The ‘future’ of you or me is the spacetime volume contained inside, but excluding our future light cone starting at a particular time. In other words, all spacetime points accessible by subluminal travel from the original point. So, the interior of a sphere expanding at the speed of light from the (x=0, t=0) origin, for all positive t.
Now, suppose a photon is emitted from the same spacetime point. So, it’s right on the surface of the expanding sphere. It then hits an atom, bumping it into an excited state. That can certainly affect stuff that happens inside the future light cone of the absorption, but what the fuck does that have to do with determinism? It’s just Chopraesque gobbledygook based on ignorance and very slack use of ‘simultaneity’.
What case? I didn’t see one. If he thinks a minimum measurable time interval necessarily implies discrete time, he hasn’t explained how. Some physicists may believe spacetime is discrete, but most simply say “we don’t know”, because we don’t. Some discussion among physicists here and here.
“If he thinks a minimum
measurableresolvable time…”Better word.
I guess many people mistake “philosophy” for “metaphysics”.
@Rob Grigjanis
Well, I hope you kind of at least get what he was saying about determinism now, even if you disagree. I won’t be discussing the physics with you, though.
As for his case for discreet time, he said:
Which you completely ignored.
And so then he said:
Again, I won’t be discussing the details of a science topic that I don’t know much about.
Brian @78:
Nothing coherent in the context of special relativity. That was clear from the beginning.
Why you can’t measure smaller units of time, or distance, has no bearing on whether spacetime is discrete. And it’s interesting that Carrier never fills in the ‘why’. It’s not that complicated. A photon energetic enough to probe a (roughly) Planck length sized object would have (roughly) the energy of a Planck length sized black hole, and would be swallowed up, so you couldn’t get any info from it*. Of course, at this scale, neither QM nor general relativity provide a reliable description of events, and a theory of quantum gravity is required. But there’s nothing in there that entails discreteness.
The problem is that Carrier doesn’t know much about it either.
*There’s nothing special about exactly one Planck length, time, etc. They’re just constructed using five physical constants, and there’s more than one way to do that.
“The problem is that Carrier doesn’t know much about it either.”
It looks like he knows all the same data that you do (probably more than you do actually), you just disagree about what they entail or mean.
*ok maybe not more, since you could know a lot of specialized stuff, but he seems to know a lot of data that is relevant to what he says.
Brian @80: Yeah, if I’d known beforehand that the years of study working toward a PhD in theoretical physics was just about collecting data, I wouldn’t have bothered. I mean, anyone can come along and get the same data, right?
Anyway, I just poked myself with a fork, and see that as far as discussing this topic with you (or Carrier) is concerned, I’m done. Paint is drying, and it’s not going to watch itself.
Another philosopher (this time with a PhD) has said nie to Nye about his faux pas.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/logical-take/201602/friendly-open-letter-bill-nye-about-philosophy