Yet again, people are asking why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? I have a different answer than you’ll find at that link. It’s because so many smart people are idiots about psychology. I deal with a lot of atheists, and one of the many flaws in that group that have been coming to the fore lately is the obliviousness they have to their own motivations.
Atheists are all about the scienceyness. Good people are rational, objective, and unemotional, which whether they are aware of it or not, is a value judgment built on emotion. There is a lot of self-esteem-building going on, centered around who is smarter than who, who can build the most logical argument, and who is best at being aloofly superior. It’s all very annoying.
But, unfortunately for the atheists, philosophers tend to be better at the logical argument dealio than most of them are. I can tell you that while I think I’m reasonably good at arguing, I’d rather not get into a one-on-one with either a Jesuit or a philosopher, because I fear I’d be twisted into knots, and I’m aware enough that I’d know it, which makes it all the more painful. So lately I’ve been witnessing a lot of bizarre deprecation of philosophical skills, and it’s been awkward because it’s all coming from scientists and atheists who actually value those skills a great deal…except when they’re labeled “philosophy.”
So there’s a bit of ego-boosting behind the dismissal of philosophy.
The other psychological gambit I’ve been seeing a great deal of is the herd mentality. Big name nerd disses philosophy; then swarms of followers agree, “Philosophy is a joke!”, and they all laugh and slap each others’ backs and cheer on more jeering at the stupid discipline. It turns into an ugly self-perpetuating cycle. It’s especially irritating when groups of atheists fall into this trap, because their usual mantra is “show me the evidence,” and most of the ones playing this game have never studied philosophy at all.
(Note: I do not pretend to be a philosopher, I’m a crummy philosopher, but I’ve simply read enough of it to respect the discipline and see where some of its strengths and weaknesses lie.)
I think part of it may be that many of us received worse education in philosophy than we did in science.
I got some schooling in it, but I never really got a clear idea of what purpose it served, so it seemed like a bunch of guys sitting around having witty arguments or “thinking about the world”. There was also a degree to which it was blended with religion/spirituality, so I think that probably interfered with my ability to appreciate it as a thing shortly after I gave up religion. People coming up with notions about how folks do or should behave without any clear supporting evidence seemed a bit too familiar.
I also think there’s a degree to which it can feel a bit like “armchair science” – people who don’t actually do any work to test their ideas making pronouncements about the world and about human thought.
I’ve since gained a better appreciation of philosophy, and a very slightly better understanding of what it is, but I can see how people who’ve focused on other areas would poo-poo it out of ignorance. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure I used to do that.
It’s not much of a stretch from there to feeling personally attacked when someone like Nye does the same.
PZ:
The on-going hunt for confirmation bias, with an authoritarian twist. It’s disheartening to see so many atheists pursue this, time after time after time. They don’t want to think, about anything.
I work with an organisation that wrestles with big issues in sustainable development. They are an NGO that is heavily involved in major multi-national research projects involving hundreds of researchers in over 70 different countries. These projects are all multi-disciplinary, with input from environmental biologists, epidemiologists, climatologists, chemists, geographers, social scientists and on and on. These projects have included detailed investigation of the direct and indirect causes of major natural disasters (such as 2015 Guatemalan landslides) and of major disease outbreaks (including the 2014-2015 Ebola crisis), and examination of the long term public health impacts of war (e.g. the mental health and social dislocation impacts of the US-led wars in Iraq). So, not small inconsequential problems, but big societal challenges. Every one of these projects aims to devise effective policy and practical solutions to prevent such events recurring. And every single one of those outputs depends heavily on input from philosophy.
Every single challenge we address, every single causative factor, and every potential solution, is mired in a mass of moral and ethical issues which science is not equipped to address on its own. This is particularly true when it comes to issues of social justice – especially when conflicting value judgements complicate research and make it impossible to find a single universally acceptable answer to a problem – or issues linked to culture and cultural diversity.
So, whenever I hear a ‘big name’ scientist trashing philosophy and deriding it as superfluous or unnecessary and somehow ‘less than’ science, I hear someone who is completely ignorant of the complexities of the major challenges facing the world in the 21st century, and the ability of ‘pure science’ to address them. And I am reminded that being a world-leading expert in one branch of science does not mean you are not also extremely narrow minded and uneducated about how some of the most important branches of science actually operate.
Science teaches what to think, but philosophy teaches how to think, something Nye doesn’t seem to understand.
Rote learning is a problem. It may seem like “reinventing the wheel” to re-teach and re-prove certain scientific concepts. But with some people, if they don’t understand how the science is done, they will reject it. Presenting facts as “things you must accept” only works with those willing to accept.
It should be obvious, but apparently is not, that science is completely dependent on philosophy. You can’t do science without a philosophy of knowledge. How do we decide what is true, or likely? It is true, in my view, that metaphysics is obsolete (it’s all just speculation), but apparently these “aphilosophers” have never thought to examine their epistemological assumptions.
And anyway, we need to think about what is good and right, as well as what is true.
But cervantes, don’t you know that metaphysics is the only actual philosophy left? All the good philosophy is called science and mathematics now.
Also, heavy sarcasm warning about that, since I’m pretty sure someone said the exact same thing on the Nye-splaining post and I don’t want to fall into poe’s law.
Vivec, I think the easiest way to knock some sense into these people is to have them enter “demarcation problem” into their favorite Internet search engine. They will quickly discover that matters are not nearly so simple as they think . . .
I find this funny because a prominent tool in the atheist/skeptic’s toolbox is Occam’s razor… which is pure philosophy.
Philosophy also has a tendency to ask uncomfortable questions, especially philosophy dealing with science. I think many scientists are more or less ok with having their data and conclusions challenged, but those nasty philosophers have the tendency to look at the implicit, unstated premises and give them a good poke.
I’ve always suspected there was some kind of relationship between most people’s principal exposure to “philosophy” being the vast, sprawling necropolis you’re continually whistling past in these posts of people doing it badly, mostly verbally masturbation and willfull misinterpretations of others’ statements in the service of
and that indeed
Soooo, No PZ versus Francis debate anytime soon?
(To be honest, I’d totally have bet on the Pope, exactly for the reasons invoked)
To be totally fair, though, there are some problems with some (only some) philosophy departments, and if that is your only exposure, you will probably hate philosophy.
As an Environmental Science doctorate, I was required to take two graduate level courses in Philosophy. If that were my only exposure to philosophy, I would be agreeing with those who dismiss it. They never met a Vandana Shiva or anti-science person they didn’t like, and they dismissed all of science as irrelevant and ugly. One of their idols actually went on for several minutes during a talk with us about how geese have shame after sex.
The students and professors in that department were incredibly smart and capable, but the ideas were in most cases a mix of New Age woo and religious woo. Very few scientists in my school had any respect for Philosophy at all, and there was a good reason. I like to read in many fields, so I’ve read enough Philosophy not to dismiss them based on this experience, but again, it would be easy to do, and many in my department did.
Are you sure about that? I would think that anyone even halfway informed in the scientific method would have some pretty decent critical thinking skills.
I wonder if a lot of the same people who are inclined to discount philosophy are also inclined to discount psychology. In any case, the hostility that people who study some fields show toward those who study other fields has always struck me as very counterproductive.
Pretty much all I know about philosophy I learned from reading Sophie’s World. It may not be a deep understanding, but at least it’s enough to not dismiss all of philosophy outright as a mere bagatelle.
“Atheists are all about the scienceyness. Good people are rational, objective, and unemotional, which whether they are aware of it or not, is a value judgment built on emotion. There is a lot of self-esteem-building going on, centered around who is smarter than who, who can build the most logical argument, and who is best at being aloofly superior. It’s all very annoying.”
Not nearly as annoying as this false correlation. Atheists simply don’t have a belief in the whole “god” thing due to lack of convincing evidence. This has nothing to do with how emotional or not a person is or whether or not these people, who are also atheists, happen to find value in philosophy or not.
I see you repeatedly asserting that “atheists are this or that” when such a blanket statement is completely invalid. Atheists are a subset of people. Philosophers are a different subset. Those subsets may or may not overlap.
“It’s especially irritating when groups of atheists fall into this trap, because their usual mantra is “show me the evidence,” and most of the ones playing this game have never studied philosophy at all.”
Personally I have a strong preference towards evidence, this I’ll admit. But on the other hand, a good anime will, admittedly (and for example), get an emotional response from me even though the logical side knows they’re only animated characters and not real people.
Please, in the future consider not using the blanket “atheists are this or that” argument. It’s horrendously faulty.
Which apparently was handed down by god…
Really, why should anybody take people serious who don’t even know that the scientific method is a product of philosophy?
I have known philosophers with their heads up their asses; and I have heard scientists just giggling at the idea of people from other disciplines having opinions. Some from both camps have seriously twisted opinions on the practical application of ethics, some have a sensible appreciation of their own limitations. One might suggest that a reasonable commentary on our species is, “some people suck.” In my view, most don’t, but the exceptions tend to attract attention.
Now that I’m back… and glad that iknklast is making the same point, though it’s striking that it seems to be completely ignored, having been made over and over in these threads…
To put it another way, “Philosophy” enjoys the reputation biology would have – and deserve – if 99% of the time the average intelligent, intellectually-oriented non-biologist encountered “biological” ideas was Evo-Phrenologists babbling on about women liking pink berries in a forest.
What’s that? “People should educate themselves about philosophy?” Why? Why should they know to? Every other field is expected to own their failures of outreach and engagement.
cervantes, #5:
Maybe I don’t get what you’re referring to with “metaphysics.” Presumably, you don’t mean that there used to be things which exist but it’s no longer the case. Or claiming that there is something (a metaphysical claim) has somehow become obsolete because it’s been replaced with something else (no telling what that could be). Or that empiricists don’t make claims about the world. Any of that would be very silly.
Maybe it’s a sort of Kantian position, where you’re saying we can’t really know about reality itself, with the kind of certainty that I guess you were hoping for (or with the kinds of methods you wish you could use), because we only have access to something like our sense experiences of it. But why then wouldn’t anything empirical or scientific be rendered “obsolete” (at least it should be treated with a healthy amount of skepticism), if the claim is that the best you can do is to be on uncertain “speculative” ground about how the world is? Or if it is good enough that scientists understand and acknowledge certain limitations of science like this while making their conclusions about the world, then why assume metaphysicians (as a whole, just to carry out any of their work) can’t do the same thing?
That’s a bit much. There have been many people who are dismissive of philosophy and hold it low esteem, such as Hawking or Feynman, that you would be egregiously in error to not take seriously.
“Really, why should anybody take people serious who don’t even know that the scientific method is a product of philosophy?”
An understanding that the earth is ancient is a product of religious explorers looking for evidence of the Noachian flood.
I see we’re hitting all the philosophy tropes:
philosophy teaches you how to think
Without philosophy you can’t do science
to argue against philosophy you have to use philosophy.
All said with an unctuous air of superiority .
Azkyroth:
I realize you simply pulled that number out of your ass, but could you give something specific? Something that philosophy has produced (not Evo-pscyh, since we’re not talking about that) which is in some way representative of 99% of it. You should probably find an example of them making a string of ridiculous empirical claims, while few in the field itself even attempt to seriously dispute their veracity, and presenting them to the public as the findings of whichever philosophical sub-discipline it is.
I don’t think it does anything like that, definitely not usually, much less 99% of the time. Perhaps you’re actually aware of a particular specimen that makes you believe this garbage, but what makes you believe you’re working with a fair sample (especially if the bad taste of philosophy that you’ve gotten has just been some bullshit spewed by some religious apologists)? Maybe you won’t find any shit like that if you actually attempted to familiarize yourself with the actual philosophical literature to be found in academia (of course you will still find a lot of crap like in any other discipline), as you admit you haven’t, so you should start over and restate (or rethink) what the problem is supposed to be.
Philosophy is not tied to any real world referents, in this it is much like theology.
(Cue the “how do you know what is real? by semantic game players.)
Colin McGinn …. Disgust.
Funny (but sad) that you think this is true. The problem is that it’s false, not that you can’t have reliable ways of knowing what’s real. (Although you’re not using them in this case, like you should be.)
Cue the “but I assert that it’s true, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about” by ignorant bullshitters.
There are certainly good, even brilliant philosophers working today.
And we’ll know who they are in about a century when we can see them universally acknowledged with respect by scientists of the time.
(Two I ‘d bet to be on the list: Dan Dennett, Andy Clark)
Azkyroth @19:
Ooh, 99%? Where are you doing your encountering? Here’s a thought; try browsing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There’s some bloody good stuff there.
“Philosophy is not tied to any real world referents, in this it is much like theology.”
Pish tosh. You could say that about mathematics and you would be equally wrong. Mathematicians proceed by abstract reasoning about ideal objects, using logic — which is a branch of philosophy. Then we discover that mathematics has application to, yes, real world referents, and is in fact of foundational importance to science. Again, if you want to get sense knocked into you look at the demarcation problem. We are still groping for a compelling explanation of what distinguishes science from pseudo-science. If Hawking doesn’t think he uses philosophy, then you might want to ask him how he knows that he’s a scientist and not a mystic. And as for critical thinking, how do you define it? What are its essential components? How do you know that somebody is doing it well? Those are precisely and exclusively philosophical questions.
Sure, lots of people who call themselves philosophers are just bullshit artists. But lots of them aren’t.
It’s not pure philosophy. It’s got a lot of probability theory under the hood:
For each new object or thing you bring into the explanation, you multiply the previous parts probability by that probability of that object.
E.g.
1 object at 0.85 x 2nd object at 0.5 = 0.85×0.5
1 object at 0.85 x 2nd object at 0.5 x 3rd object at 0.9 = 0.85×0.5×0.9.
Obviously, all other things being equal the first, being more parsimonious is more probable. Or is more epistemically justified.
But, that’s not to dispute the point of this article that philosophy is useful.
*The ‘all other things being equal’ is the bit where you don’t simplify beyond what is necessary.
I suspect it is more to do with the fact that some philosophers are actually pretty awful at philosophy – and they end up getting into the popular media for much the same reason that some scientists who are actually pretty awful at science do.
By supporting the biases of the society that spawned them.
The major difference is that with science, we can point to stuff that it allowed engineers to make. With philosophy – it much harder to quantify what it means to be able to maintain consistency in your thought process.
I mean everything philosophy achieves seems awfully obvious – once the philosophers have achieved it. We sort of default into this thinking that we always thought that way – and we didn’t really.
So the bad philosophers end up representing the group, because there isn’t that hard solid thing we can point to in order to say, “but hang one one minute, this actually kind of works”.
tsig:
It isn’t? So people aren’t real world, eh?
Reminds me of an argument I had many moons ago with someone who thought Hume was useless as a philosopher and philosophy by extension useless, because his arguments were obvious to people living in the 21st century. That they weren’t so obvious back in Hume’s day didn’t seem to count….
NOBODY asks seriously and more diligently “is this real” than physicists working on the bloody edge. “How do we tell if this is real?” is practically a mantra.
“Real” means able to make verifiable predictions. Some of them may be stochastic, but if it’s all you’ve got – and it works, then it works.
What exactly do philosophers offer as “real”, except words?
The problem with philosophy is that arguing about words doesn’t change or test the real world. And worse as a collective discipline there is no adherence to termniological standardization or means of establishing a standard consensus or of requiring those arguing outside of it to be explicit about doing so. Nor is there any abandonement of ideas that have been exhaustively demonstrated as unsustainable.
One cannot pick up a book by a modern philosopher and know whether the discussions therein are considered generally correct. One cannot even pick out a word that has been in use by philosophers for more than a decade and assume that there exists a standard common established (and somehow semantically determinable) meaning for it.
I’m thoroughly convinced at this point that a great many in academic philosophy are more heavily invested in protecting “turf” by making coherent discourse in commonly presumed “philosophical” areas impossible (e. g. by publishing papers using terminology which might otherwise have meaning that could be ascribed and discussed intelligibly in ways that radically alter its meaning. Just today in another forum, I was informed of a stellar example: Galen Strawson philosofuckulating the concept of phenomenology with his book “Cognitive Phenomenology”
— TWZ
The trouble, of course, is that philosophy is a mixed bag. Our esteemed host, PZ, rejects some philosophy — he’s told us about trying to get his head around what Alvin Plantinga calls philosophy (he’s a highly esteemed professor of philosophy, you know, not religion, and he, at least, considers his philosophy to be one of science).
It’s all part of that demarcation problem: what is science, what is pseudo-science, what is philosophy, what is art, what is literature… What is metaphysics? And what is pseudo-philosophical garbage?
So we’re all scientists here (or close enough?), and yes, we all say we like Occam’s Razor — most of the time. Which some would say can be reduced to Bayesian mathematics.. but can you do that without fooling yourself about your priors? And remember, you’re the easiest person in the world to fool. Was Feynman a philosopher, or merely a scientist? If he was being philosophical, did that mean he had to hold himself in low esteem? Who came up the the “Scientific Method”? And whoever that was, did they have to refrain from using it to keep their qualification as a philosopher and not a scientist? And is that method singular and unevolving?
OK, here’s my take on it. Trying to hash out exactly how we justify believing what we think we believe by dissecting it and assigning the pieces to either science or philosophy is not going to work (a fool’s errand, so to speak), because the categories aren’t going to sit still for it. Just labeling something as philosophy and then dismissing it because it now has that label doesn’t help much. “If we can find out what you’re afraid of, we can label it.” (Lucy Van Pelt — artists like Schultz can be philosophers too).
We can’t pretend that science is just the facts, while philosophy tells us how to think about the facts (see Jacob Bronowski, among others). Science is an ethical commitment to a social effort by fallible evolved hairless apes to understand the universe, and the philosophy that enables that effort must be an integral part of that ethical construct. The philosophical task is to trim away the garbage without destroying what’s essential to the continuance of the effort. (Of course Darwin had to use science to first come up with evolution before we could know that that was what we are and what we were doing, so it had to pre-exist itself, so a strict philosophical logician will dismiss all of this as circular anyway, so that’s why either all of science or all of philosophy and logic or both are garbage..)
We don’t understand the universe by assuming ( as, for example, Plantinga does) that the product of the human thought process, if it is not to be dismissed as utterly worthless, must be perfect and true and never self-contradictory (like math — see Godel), and hence must not be a part of the evolved natural world. Neither do we understand it by assuming that anyone who labels their thoughts as philosophical has nothing to contribute.
@Brian E
But both math and reasoning are philosophy. You found a connection between the two because math is just the subset of logic that deals with quantities and such, and all knowledge and reasoning is probabilistic.
People forget that atheism itself is not a conclusion found in the scientific literature, it is a conclusion in their philosophy.
So they do philosophy and recognize the value of their thinking, but they just don’t recognize that it really is philosophy.
Yes, probability theory is profoundly philosophical. What does it even mean to say there is a 50% probability of some event? How do you confirm that the estimate is correct? Either it happens or it doesn’t. If you flip 100 coins, the result will not be 50/50 most of the time. The guy on TV wearing a hairpiece molded from a single piece of plastic tells you there is a 50% chance of rain tomorrow. What information do you now have that you did not have before? How do we know that a sequence of numbers is random? (This is a very difficult problem.)
I think a big part of the problem is that the arguments of philosophers fall into one of two categories:
1. Stuff that everyone agrees on. As Bruce Gorton and Brian E describe above, there’s a tendency to assume that this is all obvious and doesn’t involve or require philosophy.
2. Stuff that people disagree on. In which case, the tendency is to assume that any philosopher who reaches a different conclusion that your own must be an idiot and certainly can’t be taken seriously as a thinker.
I understand the temptation with #2. I’ve succumbed to it myself when I hear supposedly capable philosophers say that William Lane Craig is brilliant, or that the ontological argument for God deserves to be taken seriously. I think a big part of the reason why atheists in particular are scornful of philosophy is that, although the vast majority of philosophers are atheists, the subfield of religious philosophy has basically been ceded to the apologists.
I recently saw exactly the same phenomenon in the field of law, when many people (including many people here) who have no particular knowledge or training in the law declared that they knew for an absolute fact that Antonin Scalia was not a brilliant legal mind. The attitude was: “I don’t care no matter what his fellow justices or experts in the field — even the liberal ones — say about him, Scalia reached a different conclusion from me on (abortion/guns/gay marriage/Obamacare/whatever) and I find his arguments unpersuasive, and therefore he’s an idiot who should not have been given a law degree.”
Gad, but the criticism of philosophy in this thread is weak. You know what it reminds me of?
The “common knowledge” that math is hard. It’s just difficult and horrible and only the biggest nerd and enthusiast in class can really get it. Because some teachers are bad at teaching children math. Because the standards for teaching math are not optimal for understanding math but for getting a high score on a test.
[rant interrupted]
Anyway, my point is that smart scientifically minded people here don’t buy this shit when it comes to math.
They are buying similar shit when it comes to philosophy. Suddenly, the bad teacher and philosophers = philosophy being bad, bad norms for introducing children to philosophy = philosophy being bad.
While I have seen some people in the field argue that he made some decisions without strong constitutional backing in favor of towing the party line, I pretty much consider the argument over how smart of a legal scholar he was to be irrelevant. It’s about as worthwhile as arguing how good of a painter Adolf Hitler was.
Thank you for proving my point.
The internet, popular culture, and life in general are stuffed to the fucking gills with people talking nonsense and claiming “philosophy” as a banner, and your only solution is “well, go make an effort to seek it out and study it…oh, and take my, maximally belittlingly phrased, word that this will be worth your time even though you’ll never find any evidence of that without first doing so.”
“People forget that atheism itself is not a conclusion found in the scientific literature, it is a conclusion in their philosophy.
So they do philosophy and recognize the value of their thinking, but they just don’t recognize that it really is philosophy.”
This isn’t passing the sniff test for me. I don’t see atheism as deriving from philosophy at all, instead it’s just the default position with regards to gods and the position maintained when philosophical or religious arguments fail to convince one otherwise due to the lack of actual evidence.
Azkyroth,
The internet, popular culture, and life in general are stuffed to the fucking gills with people misunderstanding a lot of things. Take feminism. Does that devalue feminism, or make it all the things ignorant people claim it to be?
Re #40:
WLC *IS* brilliant. He’s also a barefaced liar knowingly constructing arguments that are invalid but sound “logical” to the ill-tutored and more likely to be emotionally convincing and memorable than his opponents. He knows quite well that the arguments are logically unsustainable. For what it’s worth I think he genuinely believes he is morally justified in making such presentations in debate (ex command morality).
Put together genuine presentation skills, confidence in his moral righteousness, (genuinely) high intelligence and long practice and you have what you see. A genuinely brilliant debater who “wins” debates … even when his opponent has logically destroyed him. And he knows exactly that. His brilliance is not open to question.
Note however that I have genuinely higher regard for WLC than for most philosophers I’ve read. WLC, so much as I can tell genuinely believes his lies serve a higher power, a greater good. David Chalmers on the other hand is of geniius caliber intelligence, much outstripping WLC. His arguments present the appearance of being airtight …. You *REALLY* need to keep track of the arguments and the danglers to see that he is marshalling them in a way that hides their failings and then procedes as if his point is proven. And from the organization of the material, it is clear to me that he is intentionally structuring his arguments this way. He knows damned well he is presenting untruths as givens. Of course there is no single thing that one can point to and declaim as an example of intellectual dishonesty, but there is no doubt that the reader is supposed to miss (I had to go back three times to see it) the hidden failings. What, other than protecting “consciousness” as a party-club for philosophy is served hiding the limitations of his modal arguments against physicalism? I see no redeeming moral provenance. (I don’t consider WLC’s rationale “redeeming” … but I can acknowlege that many would). I really, really admire DC’s genuine intelligence but this is the norm of intellectual integrity in philosoply from what I see.
— TWZ
And again, I’ve been very fucking clear about this: my point is not that people are right to hold philosophy (broadly speaking) in contempt. My point here is that given that the face of “Philosophy” to the world is not the Richard Carriers but the Verbose Stoics and Aren’t-I-A-Clever-Freshmen, a situation philosophy’s practitioners and defenders have negligently allowed to develop, it is:
A) completely unsurprising that it IS held in contempt and
B) massively disingenuous for philosophy’s defenders to frantically blame everyone but themselves.
….wow, I hate being right.
Vivec@42, Fair enough. I don’t have an issue with that assessment. (And even if I did, it would be veering off-topic for this thread.)
colonelzen@46, I agree with your description of WLC. Rhetoric and debate are intelligence-based skills, even when they involve some “dark arts” of obfuscation. I haven’t read enough of Chalmers to agree or disagree with that part of your post. My assessment of the “consciousness” and “free will” debates are that they seem to be more about you define your terms than about any actual substance, so I have lost interest in any further exploration.
@parrothead
That is coming from your philosophy. You are doing philosophy either way. You’re just doing it better than some other people.
Also, a positive case can be made for atheism.
“That is coming from your philosophy. You are doing philosophy either way. You’re just doing it better than some other people.
Also, a positive case can be made for atheism.”
So philosophy is not believing in something when there’s no evidence or reason to do so? I have to admit, I didn’t know that. I’d also be curious as to the positive case for atheism. (By that I assume, possibly incorrectly, that you mean “active” as opposed to “passive”?)
I personally put as much effort into being an atheist as I do not believing in any of the other gods humans have made up as well as the infinite potential gods not yet made up, bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, etc.
@51
“Burden of proof” is an epistemic concept, which is a subfield of philosophy. When you’re determining whether or not theistic claims meet the burden of proof, you are engaging in philosophical reasoning.
“while I think I’m reasonably good at arguing”
I’d never, not even on internet, get into a discussion with IDiot Paul Nelson or madhatter Edward Feser. It’s simply about knowing my limits.
““Burden of proof” is an epistemic concept, which is a subfield of philosophy. When you’re determining whether or not theistic claims meet the burden of proof, you are engaging in philosophical reasoning.”
So philosophy is just a fancy word for thinking then. I thought it was deeper than that.
Philosophers sometimes in practice validate prejudice, but that is the opposite of what they are supposed to do.
Also, it is perfectly possible to be a scientist renowned through the ages and wrong, not just in details or accuracy but in your direction of thought.
parrothead @54: Thinking is hard. Making wisecracks about thinking is easy.
Philosophy is not tied to any real world referents,
It’s so weird when someone says that. Then you have to reply, “but a huge part of philosophy is about understanding how we experience the world and its affect on knowledge.”
I do agree that there are a lot of “thought experiments” ( <— hypothetical real world referents) rather than experiments, but if philosophers were doing experiments they'd be called 'cognitive science' or something like that. I can't imagine what could be more "real world" than trying to figure out what consciousness is and how consciousnesses experience the "real world" If humanity ever makes progress in figuring that out you can be sure it'll be thanks to differential analysis – studying how one person's experience of the "real world" is different from another's, and the cause/effect relationships of that difference.
PSA
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
It makes comments with quotes easier to read.
also FYI
<b>bold</b>
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Moreso that “thinking” is a reductionist word for philosophy, among other things. Epistemology is the study of what we believe, why we believe it, how we justify our beliefs, etc.
“philosophy is just a fancy word for thinking then. I thought it was deeper than that.”
Philosophy is to thinking as The Harlem Globetrotters are to a bunch of people in a parking lot throwing around a basketball.
“parrothead @54: Thinking is hard. Making wisecracks about thinking is easy.”
It seems the goalposts keep moving to encompass pretty much all thought as falling under the umbrella of philosophy. When it can be asserted that not believing in something that has no evidence presented for it you have to admit it’s become a pretty diluted word. Where does the border between thought and the study of thought exist then?
It seems the goalposts keep moving to encompass pretty much all thought as falling under the umbrella of philosophy.
No goalposts are being moved. Philosophy is a broad field, and that’s no more of a valid criticism than criticizing astronomy and physics for attempting to cover the entirety of the universe.
“Moreso that “thinking” is a reductionist word for philosophy, among other things. Epistemology is the study of what we believe, why we believe it, how we justify our beliefs, etc.”
Thank you for that. So then, does epistemology actually apply to an absence of a belief then? How would, for example, it apply to no one on earth believing in Grrbllgle, the Saturnian God of Gaseous Balloon Worms?
I have no idea why blockquotes failed me, weird.
I, sir, am in your debt. (If not a “sir”, please forgive.)
Re #50 et al.
I also hold philosophy in contempt for the same crime as those who name charity as “Christian” or numinous enchantment “spiritual”.
Claiming any kind of thinking “philosophical” is absconding undue grandizement in the name of philosophilia.
People were thinking long before the idea of philosophy was ever written down.
Thinking and thinking that leads to positive accomplishment are different things. I’ve pointed out before Philsopher Marx didn’t change the world. Lennin and Trotsky did with blood, not philosophy. People act due to desire and need. They may desire to act in accord with a philosophy, but they acted from desire, not philosophy.
What thoughts say in the last fifty years have there been from philosophers that – in the thought itself, in knowledge and guidance it directly provided made a material change in the world. That’s the difference between science and philosophy. Even when it is of no practical value a genuine science thought tells us how to think in a way that gives us an option in changing the world … even if its only as the result of a lab experiment. Sure, as with philosophy people apply it out of desire, not the thought itself, but the thought *IS* the prediction of how the world will be under the contingent circumstances.
So claiming that any given thought about the world is philosophy is akin to counting the money in the Church offerings box and Salvation Army kettle and announcing that “Christians” gave x and secularists nothing.
— TWZ
I’m not sure what you mean by epistemology “applying to things”, but whenever you determine that a claim hasnt met its burden of proof, you are judging it epistemically. It doesnt matter whether the claim is YHWH or cthulhu.
What thoughts say in the last fifty years have there been from philosophers that – in the thought itself, in knowledge and guidance it directly provided made a material change in the world.
Rawls’ “Law of Peoples” has ideas that are currently applied in structure of governments. His work on fairness informs lawmakers and justices.
All of philosophy is not just a footnote to Plato.
That’s the difference between science and philosophy.
Considering that science is a subset of epistemology, that’s a rather odd assertion.
It seems to me that you’re looking for some kind of “applied philosophy” in the way that better understanding of physics gives us better materials which give us shinier iPhones. But better understanding of fairness, politics, and how to have a meaningful discourse about fair government gives us the occasional better legislator as well as useful tools for identifying bad ones.
When you ask “what has philosophy done for me lately?” as you did, you appear to be ignoring the worldwide increase in secularism in societies. Well, there’s one concrete way that epistemology has affected societies worldwide.
Sounds suspiciously like Buddhist teaching to me. And you are of course referring to political philosophy (that little word a is doing work), which is a different discipline than natural philosophy, itself of course different than, though not unrelated to, logic.
Philosophy is a perfectly respectable discipline, and of course some of its practitioners are cranks and some who aren’t give that impression to the laity. It drove me nuts for various reasons, including failures (at times) to acknowledge point of view as relevant. Set theory and the like I was pretty competent at, but I once looked at Russell & Whitehead’s Principia and backed away in awe. Even Russell said it broke his brain. Was it worth it? I am not competent to tell. But those who are seem to think so, even when they disagree. I’ll take their word for it.
@51, parrothead
Not quite. Your philosophy makes you evaluate the evidence a certain way, and conclude that there is no reason to believe something.
A positive case for atheism would be looking at the facts and showing that they make atheism more likely than if the facts were different. For instance, evolution is the only way we could be here if atheism were true, but a god would have other options. If you do the math, that means evolution adds to the probability that there is no god. The same could be said for the way the entire universe looks, it seemingly didn’t have any thought put into it. All a theist can do is make excuses, that a god decided to take a hands-off approach for some reason.
You could make many more arguments if you learn how to compare hypotheses, and here’s a video that teaches that general skill (and it points out why making excuses won’t help theists).
Not sure what you mean by active or passive.
@parrothead
Well, thinking can go pretty deep :P
the positive case for atheism
1) Hypothesize a universe that was created and controlled by god(s) with certain properties.
2) Observe that the existing universe fails to show any sign of those properties.
3) Conclude that the hypothetical god either doesn’t exist or chooses not to demonstrate those properties.
Note that this argues against a certain hypothetical god with certain properties. You can eliminate whole clusters of gods if they share similar properties. E.g.:
1) Hypothesize that god(s) listen for “prayers” from their worshippers
2) Hypothesize that god(s) occasionally “heed” those prayers and alter events to make the “prayers” come true
3) Las Vegas is profitable
Ok, so now you have to hypothesize god(s) that answer prayers but only if they don’t come from gamblers. Etc.
Eventually you are left with a hypothetical god that is the size of a pinpoint, that does nothing except hide. Then you ask yourself “do I worship that?” or “why do I believe it does exist at all?” Note that you’ve defined a god that can exist but doesn’t.
Pretty much everything a god did would violate some conservation law or another. We observe that there appear to be lots of conservation laws. Do you now want to define god(s) as “those things which do not affect the universe at all, except by violating conservation laws”? Wow. I’d actually be pretty impressed by such a god.
Re #68 & #69
I can go online for any of the major sciences, find books by authors associated with major universities specifically regarding that topic, read a few reviews of said books by their peers and pretty much know that if I read the book, what I read will be reasonably close to the consensus of science in that subject (or of course otherwise if it explicitly says of the book or of sections of it are speculative).
Can I do that for philosophy? What does philosophy think? About anything? Where is the consensus that will help me have a better understanding of my world? (I’ve said explicitly it’s good to know a fair bit about philosophy historically … and no doubt philosophers in the past were as fractious as now … but the good ideas got taken up and filtered through time). What I don’t see (again there are exceptions I’ve mentioned) is any coherence or discipline as a subject.
Modern philosophy is a clown parade. There are good ones, and sometimes you will pick them up as referenced from sciences and find that they’re good and interesting and have valuable things to say … as I found Dennett (though I have significant disagreements about qualia) . But then you see things like McGinn considered a leading philosopher who admits to having had one undergrad course in physics but goes into diatribes about how “space” must have consciousness enabling properties. (I tag him “Space Cadet” McGinn).
As stated before, the only acid test of today’s philosophers is to wait a century and see who is still mentioned with regard.
— TWZ
@#73:
for any of the major sciences, find books by authors associated with major universities specifically regarding that topic ,… Can I do that for philosophy?
Well, you neatly sub-divided the sciences into “major” (whatever that is) but lumped philosophy into a great big whole.
There are books on general science, that offer an overview of the current state of thinking in the sciences and there are books on general philosophy that offer an overview of the current (and past) state(s) of thinking in various branches of philosophy. As I mentioned earlier, you could find texts that compare Rawls’ view of fairness in society with Rousseau’s, and Rousseau’s with Plato’s. And yes they are published by universities and have big-named authors behind them if you’ve got a love for authority regarding that sort of thing.
Modern philosophy is a clown parade.
Ah, which clowns specifically are you referring to? Go ahead and list them.
And what do you mean by “modern” philosophy? Compared to Epicurus, Hume is “modern” … Or are you going to say John Stewart Mill is not “modern” so you can write him off as a clown? Or perhaps Rawls is not “modern”? What about Dewey? Surely you don’t think Bertrand Russell is a clown? I’m only naming those few because they’re a fine parade of non-clowns.
You can point at McGinn and laugh. Go ahead. Or Flew, maybe.
What I don’t see (again there are exceptions I’ve mentioned) is any coherence or discipline as a subject.
Well, you must be shockingly ignorant. I could recommend a few books that might demonstrate that coherence and discipline. I’d start with Popkin’s “history of skepticism, from Savanarola to Bayle” which is quite a good read as well as being very instructive. What you’d learn is that in philosophy there are deep-running problems that generations of philosophers have thought hard about. And as far as “coherence” or “discipline” – uh, bullshit. Philosophy, like the sciences, builds upon the past – that’s your coherence and discipline for you. A philosopher who came out and announced that they had this cool dilemma (“if god is good, why does evil exist?”) would be gently laughed at, as I am gently laughing at you now. Philosophy is not a priesthood that expects everyone to memorize the liturgies of the great Plato – it’s a constructive enterprise in which you’re assumed to know the basics enough that you’re not going to offer some point that Plato conclusively smashed thousands of years ago. That’s discipline and coherence. A physicist doesn’t just walk in and ignore the body of knowledge about prior physics any more than a philosopher does. And if they do they get laughed at for exactly the same reason.
As stated before, the only acid test of today’s philosophers is to wait a century and see who is still mentioned with regard.
Yet you appear to prize “modern”ity. Clearly you’re a man of many contradictions. Or you’re just bullshitting. Don’t bother trying to tell me, I know which.
@74, Marcus Ranum
Well, there is Mario Bunge’s criticism of academic philosophy in Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction.
To cervantes
Meh, I know you will think that I’m a simpleton, but I still don’t really understand the problem of Popper’s solution of falsifiability as the solution of the demarcation problem. I suppose there might be some minor quibbles and minor problems left over, but they should be solvable.
I do agree with the other obvious point: Science is philosophy. I would be even more provocative and rightly claim that science is a presuppositional value system. Conforming your beliefs to the evidence – that’s a value. Seeking logically consistent beliefs – that’s a value. Etc.
And preemptively to consciousness razor: I know that you are likely to post something in response to the things that I’ve said here. Get bent. I don’t give a fuck about your whiny-ass, belittling, and non-constructive replies.
…
The way that the term “burden of proof” is used in common parlance, that is not correct. The burden of proof is a particular rule of interpersonal relations that has developed inside of our culture in order to promote fairness in discussions. Particularly, when someone makes a claim, it is said that the burden of proof is on the speaker. No rational agent would choose to forgo prior knowledge simply because a speaker chooses to speak or not speak on topics that they already know about. The burden of proof is simply a cultural rule to ensure that one person cannot place an onus on a second person to do their research for them.
Of course, people ought to conform their beliefs to the evidence that is available to themself, but we do not generally use the term “burden of proof” to refer to that specific concept. IMHO.
…
<3
Completely agreed.
Brian Pansky:
Well, there is Mario Bunge’s criticism of academic philosophy in Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction.
And there’s Lee Smolin’s: The Problem with Physics.
I think the underlying point is that science and philosophy are both concerned with knowledge and how you can constructively build more knowledge on past knowledge. Cizko: Without Miracles is a good argument along that line (from a physicist, I believe, who gets that “science is philosophy”) trying to take on the problem of knowledge induction (he argues that the scientific method is basically evolution applied to observation)
I side-tracked myself in my response @#74 :( where I started off meaning to go was to point out that philosophy like “science” (per #73) can be subdivided into “major” specialities – epistemology, political philosophy, moral philosophy, etc. And that each of those subdivisions has as rich a body of writing as the major scientific specialties such as math, physics, etc. The reason philosophers specialize is because each of the major fields has different concerns but uses the same methods – again, just like other scientists do.
I tend to completely lose my shit when someone makes the mistake of thinking philosophers operate differently from other scientists, somehow. Why, because they sit in armchairs and smoke pipes like Niels Bohr? Of course there are always going to be people on the fringes of any science – the physicists have the steady state guys and philosophers have nietscheans and sartreans and whatnot. Even the fringes are valuable because the fringes of a field help demonstrate where the strong fabric of a field is.
Criticism of the academe is always good. It keeps their more wild flights of fancy in check – whether we’re talking about physicists or epistemologists.
@73: Bertie Russell’s History of Western Philosophy remains controversial but it’s still (I think) a fairly good place to start. Just know that some folks deeply disagree with his judgments, and others don’t.
@74: Ah, Plato. A very good reason to learn Ancient Greek. (All translations are to some extent value-laden.) Trouble is, Ancient Greek is hard, because getting good at it involves internalizing a thoroughly alien mindset that is, however, very much at the root of western thought. It’s not that Plato is right or wrong, the terms don’t really apply, it’s more that he was fundamental; and trying to figure him out, while impossible, remains a thoroughly worthwhile intellectual exercise.
There’s a difference in asserting that a claim hasn’t met a burden of proof and never accepting a claim simply because of the lack of evidence. The first is passive, the second more active.
Azkyroth:
How are philosophers supposed to not allow it to develop that you think a random commenter on the internet is the face of a discipline that’s existed for thousands of years? They could trying telling you “hey, read some of our work — there’s lots to pick from about anything that might interest you — since that would give you an idea of what professional philosophers actually do.” And I don’t think they’ve been at all negligent about communicating their work (or what it means or how it’s relevant), to people who are willing to listen. But when you respond, “fuck it, not worth my time, and look I’ve just proven myself right again,” how the hell are they supposed to change the situation? Shoving your head even farther up your ass isn’t their fucking problem to begin with, but even if that sort of response should’ve been predictable, what should they have done differently?
@70 Brian
I should clarify quickly that this is also Parrothead. For some reason security at work messes with what accounts I can use. I prefer this one.
Now, you claim that my philosophy is what makes me evaluate evidence a certain way… I have difficulty accepting this because evidence, actual evidence, can only be evaluated one way correctly. A certain piece of evidence is evidence for “X”. Anyone claiming it is evidence of “not X” is simply incorrect. It is via the scientific method, i.e. analysis, evidence, hypothesizing, testing, falsification, etc. that we determine what a bit of evidence is evident of, and philosophy be damned.
This example isn’t convincing. While the initial statement itself is true it doesn’t stand as evidence against, for example, an indifferent god that got drunk, kicked off evolution then forgot where he left the planet.
This also, I wouldn’t consider this evidence for atheism but rather it would not be evidence that there is/are god(s).
Apologies for not being clear. Not sure if I can be, but I’ll try. By passive I mean atheism is simply not having a belief in a god/gods. You put no effort into not believing, you simply don’t. It takes no effort or thought, for example, to believe that the moon isn’t a giant egg waiting to hatch and surprise the hell out of us.
Azkyroth @47:
Fucking hilarious. Carrier is FtB’s own poster boy for the Dunning–Kruger effect. With no formal training in physics that I’m aware of, he’s come to the earth-shattering conclusions that
1) Relativity and quantum mechanics imply determinism
2) Spacetime is discrete because of a plausibility argument for a minimum resolvable time.
His ‘arguments’ for these would be pathetic to an undergraduate, and are based, as far as I can tell, on a naive reading of pop science. Since coming across these examples, I’ve found a few others. Anyone with a physics background is invited to read, and laugh or cry at, this thread.
Bad example, sunshine.
Grumpy Santa:
This is a philosophical claim. Whether or not it is correct, it is a claim of and about and in epistemology.
Jebus, philosophy itself isn’t opposed to empiricism. Empiricism is a fucking example of philosophy. That’s what you were responding to, and that’s the simple point you don’t seem to get.
Grumpy Santa #82
Uh, I need to second consciousness razor here. Though he said what I wanted to say, I still feel I need to say it.
You are literally describing some of your philosophical positions and then saying “philosophy be damned” – it’s frankly incoherent and kind of absurd.
doesn’t stand as evidence against, for example, an indifferent god that got drunk, kicked off evolution then forgot where he left the planet.
Sorry but Epicurus nailed that one for you ~300BC: for all intents and purposes such a god does not exist.
That’s a nicer way of saying “what a stupid question.” Basically you’re asking why atheism can’t disprove some random pointless bullshit. Well, your ability to come up with random pointless bullshit is certainly impressive, why should I waste any time disproving it all? Instead, you should prove it’s true – that’s easier and it’s your bullshit not mine. That’s a shorter form of “the burden of proof is on the proposition” and “don’t ask me to prove a negative.” But this is meat and potatoes philosophy – the whole question of epistemology is “why do you believe…” So, if you thought there was an indifferent god that got drunk, kicked off evolution then forgot where he left the planet where would you have even gotten such a crazy idea in the first place? You’ve just admitted that there’s no evidence for it and it could be a completely different god than the one the ancient jews made up. You’ve got zero ability to make any claim of any sort of knowledge at all about such a god.
@Grumpy Santa/Parrothead
Mathematically, the example works as I said it does. Just because it doesn’t count as evidence against the subset of god concepts that have a hands-off approach (for whatever reason) that doesn’t mean it isn’t evidence against god and in favor of atheism. (And even aside from this, it’s useful to have evidence against the gods that you want to debunk. The gods that people actually believe in.)
Here’s another video explaining how to use Bayes Theorem for this sort of thing that might address your particular concern better than the previous video I posted:
Theism, Atheism and Bayesiansim – Part 1 (John Hawthorne)
My short analogy for you to get the idea:
Having evidence against some concepts of god is like removing some black cards from a full deck. You now know that pulling a card randomly from that deck is less likely to be black than it was previously. Because we have eliminated some of them.
If that sounds like a fishy analogy, and you want to see that this is actually how evidence works, I recommend the video.
[Of course I don’t have too much time to answer all of this, but you could ask “how many gods (or black cards) have we eliminated”? That’s going to require some thinking about the hypothesis, what it means for something to be a “god” rather than merely a “person”, and how many different gods there are, and all sorts of things]
*Actually I’m not sure the video really proves that evidence works that way, but it’s another person telling you that it works that way.
Hopefully I don’t need to prove that evidence and belief is all about probability, never 100% or 0% (except for logical impossibilities, like a “four sided triangle” or stuff like that). And note that the videos use basic proven probability math equations. So hopefully I don’t have to work too hard to convince you that this is legit. Though being suspicious is still understandable enough, even Richard Carrier initially thought he could disprove this probability method, but instead he became convinced it was correct.
Grumpy Santa @82
You’re conflating the veridicality of the datum (“certain piece of evidence”) with the congruence of the datum to some hypothesis, and ignoring that the datum may well also be congruent with at least one alternate hypothesis.
Heh.
(Such erudition!)
This way of thinking is IMHO is fundamentally wrong. Stop thinking about things in terms of active belief and passive disbelief in that sense. That’s the wrong way to think about epistemology and knowledge.
Offhand, the most important thing that I learned from Richard Carrier is that every action is a gamble. We are always operating on imperfect information. Every bit of knowledge and belief that we have is not absolutely certain. Every bit of knowledge and belief is held to varying degrees of confidence.
Part of what it means to be a rational agent is to do proper examination of all scenarios, do contingency planning, and do cost-benefit analysis, in order to decide what actions to take (or inaction – because inaction is just another kind of action in this framework).
(Tangent: Obviously, we must all employ certain heuristics to avoid analysis-paralysis. This doesn’t change the fundamental assertion which is that our herustic analysis must take into account all scenarios. Simply, some of the scenarios with extremely low odds are often discarded at a very early phase in the heuristic. Other times we act on route, on habbit, instead of pursuing a more thorough rational analysis, and again that’s a heuristic which often does well. The heuristics themselves can be examined.)
In order to do this kind of cost benefit analysis, one must have estimations of the likelihood, or probability, of everything. There is simply no avoiding this. One can stick one’s head in the sand as much as one wants, but it is is conceivable that you will one day be placed in a situation where your choice of actions will depend on your estimated odds of obscure scenarios, and if you are placed into that scenario, you need to be able to develop odds, as rough and as haphazard as they may be.
Generally, starting at 50% is a good place. 50% means “I don’t know” aka “it’s as likely to be true as it is to be false”. For many, accepting this fact is very hard, but it might be the most important thing that you can do!
To be a little more formal, and to be complete, one also needs something like Occam’s Razor to inform our starting estimates. Something along the lines of information-theoretic starting points. Loosely, complex propositions are inherently less likely to be true than simpler propositions.
Finally, in this framework, it is important that one uses all of the available information, including information specific to the case, and general background information. Excluding information from the analysis for no good reason can and will lead to absurd results.
For example, if someone asks you if the number of gumballs in a jar is even or odd, ignoring the problems of “half a gumball”, one should have a 50% estimate for even, and a 50% estimate for odd. If they ask “do you believe that there are an even number?”, then you answer “I do not believe that”, which is simply shorthand for something like “my estimation is not greater than 90%”, or whatever number you deem appropriate to represent the difference between imprecise English like “I believe that it is true” and “I suspect that it is true”, etc. It is not reasonable nor rational to state that you have no beliefs on the topic. You do have beliefs on the topic. You should have formed an estimate of 50%, and that is a belief!
And that is Bayesian epistemology 101, without the math.
And damn, I rewrote this several times, but I couldn’t make it any shorter.
Not ignoring any posts, actually appreciate them greatly. Digesting information. Also working on a video Brian Pansky linked. Not all of it makes sense… the concept of Ur Prior for example seems… illogical to me… but I’m curious to see how the speaker transitions into the fine-tuning argument (which in my opinion is a horrible and easily debunked argument).
Having no real exposure to philosophy (surprised?), to me it’s been the proverbial angel dancing on the head of a pin at the corner of Woo and WTF blvd. Still seems detached from reality, but… interesting.
@Grumpy Santa
Sorry about that video with the “Ur Prior”. I decided to re-watch it, and the guy takes forever to say simple things, and he uses all kinds of technical words. I thought he only took 10-15 minutes to teach the stuff that was relevant to the point I was trying to make.
It occurs that both sides here have fallen for something of a false dichotomy.
The question is not whether or not I am emotionally invested in despising philosophy I’ll readily admit that to some extent, I am. But then again, I’m emotionally invested in the need to pay my mortgage every month and the the notion of gravity. Emotional investment is not, per se, an intellectual disqualifier.
The question is whether my spite of philosophy is a reasonable evolution in terms of my experience, and whether its influence over my actions harms or is advantageous to my interests generally.
I’ve already qualified my disdain with a statement that knowledge of the history of philosophical thought is a good thing. My contempt is almost wholly reserved for those writing after the great split of logic from philosophy into mathematics (note that modal logics are still considered philosophy … for good reason. They may be symbolically rigorous as mathematics …. but semantically they are an unholy mess) . I grew up with some significant respect for philosophy as a discipline. My spite came in recent years as I dug into the mind body problem …. and saw the naked malrepresentation and outright libel of Dennett, masses of nonsense (McGinn as maybe the worst of many), and the subtle but distinct intellectual dishonesty of Chalmers (which really, really hurts because he is unquestionalbly brilliant and would be worth deep attention … if I could trust him, which I can’t). Occasionally I will look at philosophy in other topics, political philosophy for example …. and while not deeply read it becomes readily apparent that the same kinds of dissimulation and pettifoggery are rife.
The upshot is that no I will not invest my time, and I will not credence an argument because a “respected philosopher” says it. For anything. If a respected scientists or someone I have reason to regard as intellectually capable and trustworthy recommends a particular philosopher’s work … I’ll, as occasion permits, spend some time checking him/her out … with a large caveat that I’ll bolt early on the whiff of nonsense. Occasionally I’ll become “captive” by the quality of argument and presentation and decide he’s worth paying attention to and reading more of his opinons on wider issues.
In sum then with just a little more negative bias than for most disciplines, my spite of philosophy reads: “philosopher” per-se doesn’t make someone worth my time. It does make my suspicious up front … .but on reccomendation occasionally a philosopher demonstrates worthiness (but nobody, ever – save that I’m human and can’t check everything, and am as prone to bias and prejudice as anyone else – gets a free pass that I’ll take their writings as unbiased truth.
Hows is this wrong? What makes the books and writings of contemporary philosophers (in general) worth more respect than I’m willling to allocate. (Hmm I really do want to read more Andy Clarke … but I have Dehane’s book (neuroscience) and an ARM architecture book on my kindle … and a longer promise to myself to learn functional languages) Why should philosophy be higher on my respect and worthiness of time and attention queue?
(And no those conclusions and questions aren’t “philosophy”. I am not a philosopher. If they must be categorized as belonging to a discipline …. I’m computer programmmer … pardon senior software engineer …. those thoughts are to be tagged and archived as “computer science” or “circular file”, buit never,never, never as “philosophy”).
— TWZ
Except they totally are, and claiming otherwise doesn’t make it so.
I think this thread could use a working definition of philosophy. It seems to be all over the place.
Re #95
Yes. And a declaration of whether the author of words has moral righte to declare their provenance and venue.
Now personally I think ontologies are ad-hoc and of merit only in their utility (quite real, it’s a cottage industry in my baliwick). There is no universal ontology for things of the world, much less that can decisively and declaratively be asserted for abstract representational pronouncements.
I aslo believe that to whatever extent reasonable those who originate a stream of words have moral rights over them including within bounds of sanity and reason who gets to declare in support of their causes.
It’s part of what I call philosofuckulation that words I explicitly declared off limits to supporting the merits of philosophy are here explictily asserted as being in support of the value of philosophy. It’s also demonstrative of the quality of thought I see the norm in philosophy that they did not see a naked trap left right out in the middle of the floor with no attempt at camoflauge.
— TWZ
If I write 2+2=4 on a chalkboard and then claim it isn’t actually math because I say so, my right to say so doesn’t make that really the case. It’s still math, and that’s still philosophy.
Re #97.
Calcium carbonate dust. “math” is an interpretation YOU explicitly made.
Granted it’s a conventional interpretation. But my trap contained the very explicit declaration that it was ok to treat it as wholly lacking merit.
— TWZ
Alright, if we’re being obtuse douches and laying ~logical traps~ for each other, I’m out. Enjoy your unproductive discourse and weird dislike for a valid field of study :^)
@97
Still, without a working definition of what you for example understand philosophy is it’s difficult to know where you’re coming from. If colonzen understands it to be something different than you do then the conversation is doomed from the start. A quick definition I googled up states: “the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.”
Definitions matter.
So “using philosophy” as a term is confusing. Is using the scientific method, for example, a part of the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence (what is reality?) from the same perspective as a philosopher and a scientist? A philosopher may decree it is, whereas a scientist may say “No, I’m studying the natural world, not “reality” in a meta-physical sense. A phrase like, for example, the aforementioned “fundamental nature of knowledge” could mean something significant to a philosopher while it’s just four random words stuck together in a scarcely interesting way to a biologist who’s studying the biochemical nature of intelligence. You can tell the biologist he’s using philosophy (or demonstrating a particular branch of it) while he looks at you funny and kicks you out of the lab.
That’s a list of topics, not a definition. The definition is more like:
Also from wikipedia:
As a method, philosophy is often distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its questioning, critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument.[10] As a noun, the term “philosophy” can refer to any body of knowledge.[11] Historically, these bodies of knowledge were commonly divided into natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysical philosophy.[9]
@Grumpt Santa
So that method mentioned by wikipedia would be what “using philosophy” would basically mean.
Very old now, but …. BP:
Do you really think Hawking, Krauss, Weinberg et al are emotionally invested in despising a “love of knowledge?”
Do you think I a thirty plus year standing “software engineer” would stand long if I were emotionally invested in despising critical (the machines tell me I’m wrong in little ways a hundred times a day!) systematic, and rational ways of thinking?
I tried upstream to point out that the lines of hostility are very VERY much a false dichotomy.
I despise a claimed love of “knowledge” that tells you nothing that can mean something in the real world. I despise claims of “sysetmatic” and “rational” that forclose any feassible means of objectiely verifying their merits. And I would suspect that the cited scientists’ contempt for “philosophy” is much on the same lines.
And you cannot tell me that such does not properly describe a great deal of philosophical jabber. McGinn gets published with at Yale press with imprimature of “leading philosopher”. Chalmers, still dancing with zombies and “property dualism” and now best buddies with Stuart Hameroff, is spoken of with awe by philosopers.
And my deepest, bile raised contempt for various philosophers who engage in such noxious effusion and subsequently declaim such works of merit, value, and consideration equal to that of science. And then turn and support attacks on science. Don’t believe this is a real or significant phenomenon? Try some google-fu on “Second Order Science” … and oh, note that this bit of dreck comes straight off of Wall Street. But hey, it’s philosophy so it must be OK.
— TWZ
Dropping by to plug my response to this thread.
Some people are asking for a definition of philosophy. I can’t come up with an ultimate definition, but here’s a practical definition: if the thing you’re doing could be better informed by reading up on philosophy, then you’re doing philosophy.
For example, Vivec @ 97 claims that 2+2=4 is philosophy. Say you wanted to have a deeper understanding of 2+2=4. I think you’d look up math, not philosophy. So sorry, I disagree.
However, there is definitely philosophy in this thread. For instance, Brian Pansky @101 said
This argument could be informed by reading about “extension” vs “intension”. The extension of “philosophy” is the list of topics that count as philosophy. The intension of “philosophy” is the rule which produces the extension. The more you know!
@104 colonelzen
I personally haven’t accused anyone of being “emotionally invested” in anything. And if you look at post 75 you’ll see I actually pointed out to others that I suspect there are currently problems in academic philosophy. I think that book even some of the same problems you and others are complaining about. I haven’t read it but I was told about it in the video of the talk Is Philosophy Stupid? which is a great video that outlines what philosophy is and addresses the controversy about whether it is useful or makes progress etc. and it quotes Hawking and Krauss.
How did you come to the conclusion that I would think something is “ok” just because it calls itself philosophy? Jesus.
That’s another thing the video talks about: distinguishing philosophy from pseudophilosophy in the same way we do for science.
Also, since Sean Carroll is pretty cool (go watch his videos!) and I was wondering what he’d have to say about the recent LHC data, I was checking his twitter and he just happened to post an article that is very relevant here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/philosophys-true-home/
Though the video I posted before is more critical of academic philosophy.
@105
I never claimed 2+2=4 is philosophy. I said it was math.
The “that” in that post was referring to colonelzen claiming their philosophical beliefs weren’t philosophy because reasons, not to the equation. Sorry if that was confusing.