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Mass oriented knowledge as the blinders of modernity

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jadeval
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Iavas_Saar wrote:
Do we really have students spending years on this stuff instead of doing some real science?
Um, yes. It's called the philosophy of science.... brought to you in its various forms by such humble intellects as Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, etc. etc. Just a few people who, oh I don't know, wanted to know just what the hell we're doing when we do science. We all know science gets us stuff like rockets and microchips. Good, I like stuff too. But the WAY in which we perceive the discipline of science in the context of the rest of our lives and in the context of the rest of the disciplines will influence how we live our lives. Hence, the issue is ethical in a general sense. It is also of relevance to the future of science.

In other words Iavas, do you know what knowledge is? We want to know what kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge. Why? Because only in thinking about this can we even begin to say what the criteria for valid communication or argument or understanding even is. You cannot dismiss this, for we all use the concept of validity everyday in argument. To say that we just shouldn't worry about it is admit irrationality.

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jadeval
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Oh, and I do think, contra Axordil, that other kinds of understanding are communicable and open to validation. This is the general problem of dialogue and reason. Science is not reason.

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jadeval
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Let's put it this way. Why do you say philosophical thinking is a waste of time? Why a mistake? In order to say that it is a waste of time, you must have some criteria in mind by which you judge it a "waste of time". Now what is this criteria which you have?

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Riverthalos
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Edit: okay I severely cross-posted with jadeval but I'm leaving this up anyway.

I think what Jny's getting at is science works from the ground up. You start with whatever is on hand, the data accessible through your senses (I know I'm using the wrong words, but these are the best words I know) and build your understanding of an event from there. You do not draw in anything beyond your five senses. But you can still arrive in the same place. And there is a limit built straight into science. Because you're limited to your senses, anything beyond that is non-detectable and therefore outside consideration. However, here is where a lot of people, scientists included, get hung up. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is why, if you can't detect something through your experiment, it's considered improper to say "This isn't happening." You say "This was not detectable." You can't interpret a negative result.

Now, as far as pesky fairies are concerned, the fact that we haven't seen them pushing planets around doesn't mean they don't exist. The laws of gravitation do an excellent job of explaining and predicting planetary behavior. They do not disprove the existence of pesky fairies. They simply render fairies unnecessary for our understanding of planetary motion. Now if someone managed to detect fairies through their five senses, and provide proof that convinced the rest of us that they weren't imbibing absinthe at the time, we'd have to change that understanding. Science is not a quest for Truth. Science is simply a means of understanding. I personally have no idea what consciousness is or whether or not science will explain it. Maybe scientists will fail. But even the most basic of researchers faces that prospect whenever they step up to their bench so I wouldn't call that a persuasive argument (then again, I'm always in favor of more experiments so take that for what it's worth).

Scientists aren't taught the philosophy of science. Up through undergrad, science training consists of lectures and hands-on lab experiments that are meant to teach the concepts. The scientific method is presented in a very bare bones manner. At the graduate level, scientific training is first and foremost an apprenticeship. Therefore, what I know of the philosophy of science is what I have gleaned from my own experience in doing and writing up research, from some scant reading (namely Kuhn's book on scientific revolutions and a couple random essays), and from this thread.

I think this is a pity, myself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a scientist understanding the thought process they are engaged in. I personally have found it very helpful in formulating scientific arguments. Any scientific argument, including those I have with my advisor.

Now here's a question: why are we all talking like consciousness is limited to humans? How do we know that? What if consciousness also exists in whales, elephants, and chimpanzees? What if it exists in octopi? In African grey parrots? Would we recognize a fellow conscious being if we saw it? Please don't just write me off. Scientists can go for decades not recognizing what they're looking at.

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Jnyusa
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Iavas wrote:
I'm pretty sure I could have got through a lifetime in astrophysical research without needing to know I was "deducting in the inductive direction".
Doubtless. And that's a really good argument why those who are interested should not be permitted to discuss it on the internet.

For a short while I edited engineering dissertations to pick up some cash. Comes a graduate student doing his research under a NASA grant, studying the heat resistance of the tiles on the belly of the space shuttle, the things that keep it from burning up during re-entry. (I'm sure I've talked about this here before, so apologies for the redundancy.)

I get to the middle of the report somewhere and this guy has generated a line showing time to failure of the tiles under stress as a function of the temperature to which they were subjected. It is presented in his text as a result obtained empirically and curve fitted using the least-squares method. Fine. It's statistics so it must be scientific, right?

How many tiles did he test? Four.

You can't do that, I said to him. <whine, whine> Why not, he asks. He got the SLS equation out of the textbook and his prof checked it and said it was correct. (God help us all, but they're engineers, after all, not astrophysicists. They just build our bridges and seawalls and stuff.) It took me about an hour to explain to him why he has to be able to build a confidence interval around his line, and how many data points he needs to do that -- these are all mathematical principles not reducible from the testing of the material but instructing us forcefully in the testing of the hypothesis. But rather than do correct research, which is, to be fair, very time-consuming and expensive, this guy took Bill's Razor with about the same glee that you and Ax have been wielding it, he took the chapter full of claims for a statistical relationship between heat and failure out of his report, tacked the graph onto the previous chapter and just said, "x,y, this is what we got."

Well, says Iavas' clone, that IS what he got. It's not like he said that Jesus makes it fly. THAT would be unscientific.

But you see, that is NOT what he got. There are so many potential relationships between temperature and tile failure as yet untested by sound methodology, that what he really must say to be truthful is that the probability of his line being correct is practically zero.

That's not the only NASA research I was given to evaluate and which put a couple white hairs on my head. NASA's file cabinets are, I fear, filled with methodologically suspect research findings. What a pain in the ass to have to learn methodology when you can just as easily plug any old thing into the equation in Chapter 1 of your statistics textbook. And as long as the damned thing doesn't fall out of the sky in a way that is traceable to you, who's gonna ever find out that you're a blinking moron, eh?

I say, go for it.

(cross-posed with Jadeval and River)
I'll have to get to those posts tomorrow ... you made me think of something, River, that I want to tell about, and I have to think about the connection between Rationalism and Empiricism, Jadeval, but I have to be up early tomorrow.)

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Iavas_Saar
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Quote:
How many tiles did he test? Four.
Strange, I know zero philosophy and yet I would have reacted exactly the same way as you to this guys research. Bad science is obvious. But does this mean that without any training in philosophy you would have thought his methodology was fine?


jadeval, I apologise but I do not see the use of answering your questions - I don't think a competent scientist needs philosophy (of the type you are preaching) to understand their profession, and that isn't going to change.

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Iavas_Saar
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There's absolutely nothing wrong with a scientist understanding the thought process they are engaged in.
I didn't say there was, but you don't need philosophy at the level being used here to understand it.

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Axordil
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They are beliefs that precede observation and attempt to organize observation into a coherent framework.
I would say the beliefs come in between observation--at least initial observation--and the organizational impulse, at least at the beginning of the iterations. And it is very much an iterative process. The problem is that the initial iteration predates anyone around by the time people stop to think about it. Myths, if you will, do not spring into existence on their own.
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But it is conceptually effective and clarifying to distinguish between the explanation, the observation, and the comparison of observation to explanation
It's certainly the case that I use the terms "empirical", "material," and such fast and loose. Feel free to blame it on my substandard education. :D There are definitely different parts to the system of the world under discussion, and using only one of them, as the Hopi discovered, can lead to unpredictable results.

But then, trying to predict the not easily predictable is, from an evolutionary standpoint, what our minds are all about.

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Axordil
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Would we recognize a fellow conscious being if we saw it?
This is a question currently under much discussion in the field. :) My personal feeling is that non-human consciousness exists in a form proportional to the complexity of language skill they have, but I'm way too tired of the discussion to bother defending it. :D
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other kinds of understanding are communicable and open to validation.
Once you establish that the referents are the same. That's the tough part when dealing with things that aren't, well, things. Purely logical constructions can be shared, but have limited applicability. Information about objects, or at least sensory data on them, can be shared with more applicability. Are there assumptions made in both cases? Yes. The pre-mythic phase, if I can keep stealing from jny, is long gone.

I believe I will leave the discussion at this point, not because I'm upset, but because the energy I've been tossing at it is better used doing other things. I figure I can come back in six months without missing much. ;)

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yovargas
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I'm pretty sure I could have got through a lifetime in astrophysical research without needing to know I was "deducting in the inductive direction".
True, Iavas, you don't need to study philosophy to do science. And you don't need to study science to do philosophy. Neither do you have to study history to write music, study music to become an accountant, or study accounting to do architecture. What's your point?


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Wolfgangbos
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Jnyusa
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Jadeval wrote:
Related to this, we could ask “what does ‘material’ mean?”
River wrote:
You do not draw in anything beyond your five senses.
If the data available to empiricism are what we are discussing, then I would adopt River’s definition. That’s a working definition, not necessarily exhaustive.
River wrote:
Scientists aren't taught the philosophy of science. Up through undergrad, science training consists of lectures and hands-on lab experiments that are meant to teach the concepts .... At the graduate level, scientific training is first and foremost an apprenticeship. Therefore, what I know of the philosophy of science is what I have gleaned from my own experience in doing and writing up research ...
For about ten years we did require a course like this of our Ph.D. students, but it disappeared when its main proponent retired. I suspect that the emphasis on methodology, and how deeply one wishes to explore its implications, depends on the inclinations of the people in a department at any given time, and not so much on the discipline.
River wrote:
Now here's a question: why are we all talking like consciousness is limited to humans?
I personally do not think it is limited to humans.
Jadeval wrote:
Modern physics, for example, is a combination of Descartes’ rationalism and Bacon’s empiricism since there is the idea that abstract conceptual-mathematical models can represent physical phenomena. There is the a priori rationalism of Descartes saying that we might as well assume that the res extensa can be mapped to a rational-mathematical model. Without rationalism, empiricism would be nothing more than tabulations of data. I kept thinking of this while reading your posts and I wonder what the connection is.
(my bold)

I do agree with the bolded sentence. But I will have to give more thought to the nature of the connection.

My first inclination is to say that it is a marriage and not an identity. I think we may have to move outside Western civilization to understand the terms of such marriage, where the functionality of the scaffolding may be the same (if I may persist with my anology) but the structure of the scaffolding looks completely different.

It is my opinion that math is language ... that is, it sorts the world in the same way that language does. And so one’s perception of how the relationship between concept and thing should be formed in goal-directed behaviors like science may depend on how one’s language has been structured and has evolved.

This is an armchair hypothesis, OK? I haven’t made a study of this.

In that same vein ...
Jadeval wrote:
What he had not really done extensively until perhaps the Renaissance is to try and find some abstract conceptual models to pair up with these observations (e.g. the Cartesian plane as a principle for describing position). It’s these abstract models and systems of principles which allow science to really build on previous developments. Our naked empirical abilities alone are simply too feeble.
I’m not sure I agree that this kind of abstraction, as a human faculty, is a Renaissance development, though certainly the scaffold that we are using right now in Wester Civ can be traced to the Renaissance ... and a whole big chunk of it to the resurrection of Aristotle by the Scholastics.
Jadeval wrote:
When someone says “but empiricism alone is effective in explanation” we must say “well, it depends on what you mean by ‘effective’”.
Yes, that is a better way of putting it. And, after disagreeing with Ax so vehemently about the razor, I have to say that I accept his assertion that our evaluation of effectiveness proceeds backwards from the goal and not forwards from the methodology. The argument in favor of science is that it works, it gets us to the place where we were trying to go for a very large realm of endeavors. And it has been pretty good, on the whole, at staying away from realms where it is not useful.
Iavas wrote:
Strange, I know zero philosophy and yet I would have reacted exactly the same way as you to this guys research. Bad science is obvious. But does this mean that without any training in philosophy you would have thought his methodology was fine?
Without philosophy I would not have been able to explain to him why he was doing it wrong ... not beyond a certain point at least. I could say to him that he needs so many data points to run the test he has run, and point him to a better textbook for confirmation of that. Perhaps that would have been enough for him. But if he had been the sort of person who then asks, but why does hypothesis testing have that requirement, then I start needing philosophy to explain further.

And it’s not exactly that he was doing bad science. His test method was OK, his measurements were accurate (let’s say so). The problem was that because he did not understand how his own work fit into to the larger picture, he presented his findings in a way that muddled their relevance and misled the funding agency. If ten other engineers could replicate his work with four tiles each, then we could have performed a meta-test on the results. But he has to know this himself, so that when he presents ‘results and conclusions’ he can instruct the funding agency how to use his work appropriately.
Iavas wrote:
you don't need philosophy at the level being used here to understand it.
No, I don’t think you need a degree in philosophy to be a good scientist. But I think you need to have internalized those philosophical conclusions, and to have done so correctly.

Someone wrote (can’t remember who) that economics students no longer have to read Adam Smith in order to understand what he said because his thought has so suffused modern theory that understanding of modern theory is sufficient for understanding Smith.

I agree up to a point, but then I see economic advisors to the President .... or someone like Ken Lay, who had a Ph.D. in economics ... talking such nonsense out their ears about free market theory ... and I think to myself that we REALLY do have to spend more time teaching methodology.

And there are different levels, of course ... you don’t have to be schooled in every moment of economic history to talk about free market theory accurately, but there are some developments that you do have to know and have to be able to place in historical context.

I guess we arrive at the optimal mix through trial and error.
Ax wrote:
I would say the beliefs come in between observation--at least initial observation--and the organizational impulse, at least at the beginning of the iterations. And it is very much an iterative process.
Yes, I agree that this is a responsive process.
Ax wrote:
The problem is that the initial iteration predates anyone around by the time people stop to think about it. Myths, if you will, do not spring into existence on their own.
Well, we can’t go ALL the way back ... but some contributors are more important than others. There isn’t an empiricist walking around today who could make the first word come out of his mouth without Aristotle, whether he knows it or not. Personally, I think it is worthwhile to know what Aristotle said, and why he said it. YMMV.
Ax wrote:
I figure I can come back in six months without missing much.
I find it very comforting that I can come back after thirty years and the discussion is still going on. :D

Wolfie, :D

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jadeval
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Iavas_Saar wrote:
jadeval, I apologise but I do not see the use of answering your questions - I don't think a competent scientist needs philosophy (of the type you are preaching) to understand their profession, and that isn't going to change.
All I want to know is why you think philosophy of this kind is a waste of time. If your reason is that it is not needed to do science, well, as yovargas said, no one ever said it was needed to do the vast majority of science today. But what is your reason in general?

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jadeval
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River wrote:
You do not draw in anything beyond your five senses. But you can still arrive in the same place. And there is a limit built straight into science. Because you're limited to your senses, anything beyond that is non-detectable and therefore outside consideration.
I’m not understanding why Jnyusa agreed with this. I would have thought she would have disagreed as per her discussion on principles. Science draws many things beyond the five senses for the formulation of its “knowledge” or theories. For instance, mathematical models are not sensory in nature (well, depending on what philosophy of mathematics you have!).
River wrote:
However, here is where a lot of people, scientists included, get hung up. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is why, if you can't detect something through your experiment, it's considered improper to say "This isn't happening." You say "This was not detectable." You can't interpret a negative result.

Now, as far as pesky fairies are concerned, the fact that we haven't seen them pushing planets around doesn't mean they don't exist. The laws of gravitation do an excellent job of explaining and predicting planetary behavior. They do not disprove the existence of pesky fairies. They simply render fairies unnecessary for our understanding of planetary motion.
I agree, but just for the record, I don’t think this is what we’re talking about precisely here. I think it’s more linguistic and semantical (meaning-oriented) than “supernatural”. We aren’t talking about non-empirical/non-physical causes which would substitute for efficient and material causes (or explain anomalous gaps in such “empirical” causation).
River wrote:
Now here's a question: why are we all talking like consciousness is limited to humans? How do we know that? What if consciousness also exists in whales, elephants, and chimpanzees? What if it exists in octopi? In African grey parrots? Would we recognize a fellow conscious being if we saw it? Please don't just write me off. Scientists can go for decades not recognizing what they're looking at.
I don’t think we’re necessarily limiting it to human beings. If anything, we’re just taking that as the most immediate example of consciousness in history. Plus, phenomenology sorta prevents us from speaking the same way about whales since WE aren’t whales and don’t know “whale phenomena”.
Jnyusa wrote:
And, after disagreeing with Ax so vehemently about the razor, I have to say that I accept his assertion that our evaluation of effectiveness proceeds backwards from the goal and not forwards from the methodology.
Well, ok, but I would think that goal and methodology are inextricably tangled into a kind of identity or at least intimate dialectic. So I can start with something that seems like a “methodology” without having a clear idea of “goal” in mind and still find everything perfectly effective insofar as existence goes, so to speak. For example, when I sit down to write poetry, is there really a goal? Well, several goals perhaps, most of them probably immediate rather than true end-points of a comprehensive “understanding”. Nevertheless, we can probably say that my poetry goes toward something that could be called “understanding”. But this term is so general as to have virtually no explicit content for me when I start doing my methodology. It’s just a placeholder for something that ultimately ends up being valuable to me from out of this activity, what I do not really know now. Now we could say that, since either I or others have done poetry before, that I must have some notion of a goal, something that tells me what I am going to get out of this. Perhaps in a sense, but I’m not sure this is a universal or completely general thing. Particularly when it comes to an understanding of our self, that which Socrates said was first and foremost before the ethical life, I’m not sure there is any ready-goal apart from its co-creation with method.

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Jnyusa
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Jadeval wrote:
River wrote:
You do not draw in anything beyond your five senses.
I’m not understanding why Jnyusa agreed with this.
Because I was responding to the question, "what do we mean by 'material'?" I would accept a five-senses definition of the word 'material,' if what we are talking about is the 'material obervation' available to the empiricist. But what come to us through our senses are only data. Framework comes otherwise, imo.

Sensory info is not necessarily an exhaustive definition of the word 'material,' either, though I personally cannot think of anything that I would call 'material' whose existence is not known to me this way ... including, of course, the amplification of the senses made possible by technology.
Jadeval wrote:
I would think that goal and methodology are inextricably tangled into a kind of identity or at least intimate dialectic.
Mmmm ... intimate dialectic ... yes, maybe. However ... not all activities are properly called methodologies, and when we refer to a choice of actions as methodical or methodological I think there is an implicit assumption of goal-directed behavior.

To use your poetry example, lots of people scratch verse into notebooks as a matter of self-indulgence, but we don't call it poetry (unless we are particularly kind-hearted) if it does not conform to the traditional goal of poetry, which is to produce a particular kind of effect, an effect requiring a rather precise method. If I sit down to write something that other poets will accept as poetry, then there are areas of conformity to which I must adhere. If I am just writing for my own amusement, then I can fashion whatever I like, but I will probably be the only person who calls it poetry.

In the case of modern English-language poetry one might argue that the formal requirements are quite loose, but one can also argue that the looser the formal requirements become, the stricter the informal requirements become. Ezra Pound could wrench meter to his heart's content because he did so in a way that actually proved the importance of meter, and his metaphors were so parsimonious and elegant that they satisfied the deeper and more difficult literary requirement of poetry that it convey all the catharsis of literature but do so in a much fewer words.

"When the mind swings by a grass blade
"An ant's forefoot shall save thee

It would be hard to argue, I think, that Pound had no goal when he wrote those words while imprisoned in a POW camp.

From the opposite perspective, it would be awfully hard for me to write in rhyming couplets by accident. What I write might be crummy poetry, but it would be intentional poetry ... that is, I wouldn't choose rhyming couplets as a means of expression unless a poem were what I intended to write. The acceptability of the poem would then be judged by the elegance with which I had employed the method.

In the case of science, I would not agree that we collected observations for a long time before having a framework in which to put them. We had a framework but it was rudimentary, and it has since been supplanted by a more spectacular framework whose centrality is more difficult to overlook because it takes years of training to use it properly.

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jadeval
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Ok, fair enough for poetry I suppose. I guess I should have asked you to explain your view a bit first.

I am also thinking of self-knowledge in the most general sense, and how an interpretation of our existence and of being generally may be seen to hinge on an understanding of that whose structure is determinative for this being and hence its understanding/interpretation. In this case, it doesn't seem so clear to me that "self-understanding" or "self-interpretation" or "the meaning of being" quite constitutes a "goal". If we think deconstructively, for instance, what's to say that all ultimate "goals" of this type aren't already given somehow in "method"? For science perhaps there is a goal, or for poetry or for any specific discipline for that matter. But what about for our most basic or underlying interpretative horizon?

I think this is relevant to this discussion because, for one, when Iavas keeps saying things like "I don't see the relevance" or "it's a waste of time" or "there is no effect of this kind of thinking", I can't help but think about how anyone could really say they know this. Even further, lest someone complain that the burden of proof rests with you or me insofar as a demonstration of the validity of philosophizing is concerned, I don't see how one could even know for certain that a burden of "proof" rests necessarily with anyone since the various criteria for what constitutes a valid "goal" or "truth" are already embedded within and around the various specific methodologies, themselves embedded within successively larger interpretative horizons.

So yes, we get methods for goals. But is this the way the "method" and "goal" of philosophizing about our being or life actually works? Is this the way philosophy works? Sure even Heidegger starts with a question (a goal?), the question. But is a question like "what is the meaning of being?" really any more a goal than its already situated context is a method? I guess what I'm trying to say is, when we talk about the generalized form of understanding as such, maybe there is no goal any more than there is a method. If so, then philosophizing (about science for instance) as such may not be able to admit a priority of one over the other.

I mean, what is the "goal" of philosophy (or philosophy of science) anyway? (It seems to me that Iavas et al should already be required to know this in order to evaluate it and hence reject it on the basis of this evaluation) To make science better? Perhaps. But there are other things too, not the least of which is to understand as such. But what does that mean?

Last edited by jadeval on Wed 02 Apr , 2008 10:23 pm, edited 5 times in total.

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Iavas_Saar
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yovargas wrote:
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I'm pretty sure I could have got through a lifetime in astrophysical research without needing to know I was "deducting in the inductive direction".
True, Iavas, you don't need to study philosophy to do science. And you don't need to study science to do philosophy. Neither do you have to study history to write music, study music to become an accountant, or study accounting to do architecture. What's your point?
It seemed that some people were implying the opposite -

"Look, I’m just not very interested in having a discussion with someone who doesn’t acknowledge the relevance of the entire course of the history of philosophy to our contemporary situation."

or

"We are saying that empiricism as such does not constitute the scaffold, and if you want to know what goes and what doesn't go within empiricism you have to examine the scaffold."

I fully admit I could have been wrong, but it doesn't matter now if we all actually agree that scientists don't need this level of philosophy.

Going back to this:
Quote:
Mankind has tabulated phenomenal occurrences since the dawn of time, whether it’s writing down astronomical positions or simply a mental note that “the sun goes in such-and-such a kind of path each day”. That’s empirical. What he had not really done extensively until perhaps the Renaissance is to try and find some abstract conceptual models to pair up with these observations (e.g. the Cartesian plane as a principle for describing position). It’s these abstract models and systems of principles which allow science to really build on previous developments. Our naked empirical abilities alone are simply too feeble.
Perhaps I need some elaboration, but the Cartesian plane does not strike me as an example of "philosophy at work", but merely an example of ever-expanding awareness in human thinking.

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Riverthalos
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Philosophy roughly translates as the "love of wisdom". When you seek knowledge, you are practicing philosophy. Science is philosophy's offspring. So are ethics. So the Cartesian plane is very much philosophy at work. Especially since Descartes himself was a philosopher. ;)

You know, you can fix a car without knowing the thermodynamic principles behind an internal combustion engine. You can splint a broken wrist without knowing how bone itself is constructed. You can even climb mountains without understanding the geologic forces that brought those peaks into being. But that does not make such knowledge useless.

jadeval, I am very much aware that there is more to empiricism than one's five senses. I was going to screw that one up no matter what, so I chose to err on the side of over-simplification. If I can't win, I can at least pick the way I'm going to lose.

That said, a good mathematical model is based on what is observed in nature. A really good mathematical model can even reliably predict what will happen in nature, or reveal events that are otherwise inaccessible to other methods of observation. But there's always a huge caveat with such models - they are only as good as the observations they were based on (something all theorists must keep in mind).

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Jnyusa
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Jadeval wrote:
I don't see how one could even know for certain that a burden of "proof" rests necessarily with anyone since the various criteria for what constitutes a valid "goal" or "truth" are already embedded within and around the various specific methodologies, themselves embedded within successively larger interpretative horizons.
Yes, well ... I think the short answer to that is that this is the internet. ;)
Quote:
For science perhaps there is a goal, or for poetry or for any specific discipline for that matter. But what about for our most basic or underlying interpretative horizon? <snip> So yes, we get methods for goals. But is this the way the "method" and "goal" of philosophizing about our being or life actually works? Is this the way philosophy works?
If we are talking about our understanding of ourselves, then I agree that the distinction between goal and method must blur where origins are concerned.

But for analytical purposes, it remains useful to retain the distinction, imo. If the method were completely inseparable from the goal, we would still be doing philosophy as Heraclitus did it. There is at least one central question that has not changed since his time and for which we have a wealth of theories but still no definitive answer.

Sorry that I can't say more on this topic right now, but my term started this week so I'm having to allocate time pretty carefully as well.

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Iavas_Saar
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Posted: Thu 03 Apr , 2008 7:44 am
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Riverthalos wrote:
Philosophy roughly translates as the "love of wisdom". When you seek knowledge, you are practicing philosophy. Science is philosophy's offspring. So are ethics. So the Cartesian plane is very much philosophy at work. Especially since Descartes himself was a philosopher. ;)

You know, you can fix a car without knowing the thermodynamic principles behind an internal combustion engine. You can splint a broken wrist without knowing how bone itself is constructed. You can even climb mountains without understanding the geologic forces that brought those peaks into being. But that does not make such knowledge useless.
Well yes, everything would have philosophical foundations of some sort. I was careful to talk about "the level of philosophy being used here". The very basic philosophy behind science comes with the education. But the content of a typical post by jadeval? Not needed.

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