Testing Philosophy

[steve_bank]

We rake Christina over the coals on what they offer as evidence and proof of claims. Should philosophy be any different?

Or is philosophy similar to theology? Is philosophy in general as subjective as religion?

On the never ending debate on free will is there an experiment that proves or disproves it?

There is experimental psychology.

 

[pood]

Science was once called natural philosophy, and Einstein was steeped in philosophy. So is all of science. Many scientists just don’t know it.

 

[pood]

David Hume refuted intelligent design creationism long before Darwin. Einstein credited Hume and Mach with inspiring special relativity.

 

[steve_bank]

Everything except law, religion, and medicine was under the collective category of philosophy, mea nag 'love of knowledge'.

There was doctor of law, doctor of medicine, and doctor of philosophy aka PHD.

Science is not philosophy no matter how much one wants it it to be. Popper's definition of objective science is that which can be experimentally tested.


How would you experimentally test a definition of free will such that it is conclusively shown true or false?

 

[Jarhyn]

Well, science is fundamentally about the study of the universe as it is; science says if a book of man disagrees with the evidence of repeated study, it is the book of man that needs revision, and no book is free of this.

Philosophy is about the study of attempts at knowing or understanding what is true of the world, and western philosophy in particular goes into the applications of logic and reasoning by which that truth seems to be bound.

As long as we have some concepts of same/different/true/false with some identifiable formal rules that are proven out by reality in every way that matters for the context, then philosophy is simply the result of accepting the axioms that can't be reduced, and accepting thr result of what they say.

I would even expect that the majority of well founded philosophical positions are just restatements of mathematical principles in ways that make the connection not seem apparent.

 

[pood]

Everything except law, religion, and medicine was under the collective category of philosophy, mea nag 'love of knowledge'.

There was doctor of law, doctor of medicine, and doctor of philosophy aka PHD.

Science is not philosophy no matter how much one wants it it to be. Popper's definition of objective science is that which can be experimentally tested.

It’s not that anyone “wants” science to be philosophy. It’s that it is marinated in philosophical assumptions and ideas.

As to Popper, his thing was falsification. It is no longer widely considered a benchmark for science.

 

[pood]

And, in fact, falsificationism is … well … a philosophical idea.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
― Richard Feynman

 

[Politesse]

“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
― Richard Feynman

His chosen field of ignorance was showing. Ornithologists do a lot of good for birds, even if birds themselves never realize it; the difference is that a bird can't choose to study itself, whereas any scientist can and should be capable of examining their assumptions and biases.

 

[pood]

“Philosophy is dead.” Steven Hawking, on the first page of one of his books. He then, quite innocently it seems, went on to write an entire book devoted to philosophy, including his idea that there is a version of reality in which the moon is literally made of Roquefort cheese.

 

[Bronzeage]

Our modern view of philosophy is it is the study of mysteries such as "What should I do?" and "Why should I do it? There was a time when the what and why questions weren't separated into those with answers, those with many answers, and those with no answers.

The early philosophers who tried to figure out how the universe was constructed using nothing but earth, wind, water, and fire, labored under the same restriction we face with our "What should I do?" problem, which is lack of information.

Now that we better understand the atomic and chemical reactions and interactions which define the four elements, we come to the question:

Should I set this thing on fire?
Are you cold?
Yes
Are you so cold you may die or suffer permanent injury?
Well, no. It's just a little chilly.
Is relief of your fleeting moment of mild discomfort of greater value than the eventual and inevitable harm done to all people by excessive burning of stuff?
Okay, it's really cold and my toes are numb.

This is the problem of What should I do? philosophy. While we can measure anything, and if you do a really good job at it, we'll name a number after you, we cannot weigh another person's justifications.

 

[pood]

Of course there are different branches of philosophy that science does not cover, such as ethics, logic, language, politics, aesthetics, etc. Science is not going to give you “objective” answers about those things — science can’t tell me who to marry or what job to take — but more, even the hard philosophical areas like metaphysics, ontology and epistemology, where there is overlap with science, are totally valid disciplines of thought. Science can inform metaphysics, which in turn can inform science in a reciprocal relationship. Science isn’t going to give you any “objectively true” answers about anything, because as is so often noted, science does not deal in proofs. At best it deals in probability proofs and, what’s more, it doesn’t claim even so much as to tell you whether, for example, a mind-independent reality exists. Science deals in explanatory and defeasible models of the world. That’s a narrow discipline. Philosophy is much broader. But it would be a mistake to conclude that science and philosophy are in some kind of “competition” to provide “answers” about reality. Philosophy is fundamentally about asking questions, not finding answers, and proffering interpretational frameworks. And the answers that science finds, as noted above, are also subject to revision and even being discarded entirely.

 

[rousseau]

It's a bit of a strange question as the entire history of philosophy was about testing and debating claims.

Philosophy before the modern era was, in practice, science without robust scientific instruments. But now that we can do harder science, testing claims is quite a bit easier. So philosophy is science that has been and should be tested.

Philosophers will try to claim that philosophy has some kind of special status in 2024, but they obviously have some skin in the game. Material science is philosophy, just more robust and effective than philosophers with a pencil and notepad.

 

[Politesse]

Of course there are different branches of philosophy that science does not cover, such as ethics, logic, language, politics, aesthetics, etc.

Language and politics are both subjects of scientific disciplines.

 

[rousseau]

Of course there are different branches of philosophy that science does not cover, such as ethics, logic, language, politics, aesthetics, etc. Science is not going to give you “objective” answers about those things — science can’t tell me who to marry or what job to take — but more, even the hard philosophical areas like metaphysics, ontology and epistemology, where there is overlap with science, are totally valid disciplines of thought. Science can inform metaphysics, which in turn can inform science in a reciprocal relationship. Science isn’t going to give you any “objectively true” answers about anything, because as is so often noted, science does not deal in proofs. At best it deals in probability proofs and, what’s more, it doesn’t claim even so much as to tell you whether, for example, a mind-independent reality exists. Science deals in explanatory and defeasible models of the world. That’s a narrow discipline. Philosophy is much broader. But it would be a mistake to conclude that science and philosophy are in some kind of “competition” to provide “answers” about reality. Philosophy is fundamentally about asking questions, not finding answers, and proffering interpretational frameworks. And the answers that science finds, as noted above, are also subject to revision and even being discarded entirely.

I keep hearing people make claims like this, but where is all the important philosophy being made in the 21st century? What are these important theories?

If you sweep Sociology into Philosophy you at least get some affect, but a lot of Sociologists still didn't really know what they were talking about, and weren't informed by material science.

 

[Jarhyn]

Of course there are different branches of philosophy that science does not cover, such as ethics, logic, language, politics, aesthetics, etc. Science is not going to give you “objective” answers about those things — science can’t tell me who to marry or what job to take — but more, even the hard philosophical areas like metaphysics, ontology and epistemology, where there is overlap with science, are totally valid disciplines of thought. Science can inform metaphysics, which in turn can inform science in a reciprocal relationship. Science isn’t going to give you any “objectively true” answers about anything, because as is so often noted, science does not deal in proofs. At best it deals in probability proofs and, what’s more, it doesn’t claim even so much as to tell you whether, for example, a mind-independent reality exists. Science deals in explanatory and defeasible models of the world. That’s a narrow discipline. Philosophy is much broader. But it would be a mistake to conclude that science and philosophy are in some kind of “competition” to provide “answers” about reality. Philosophy is fundamentally about asking questions, not finding answers, and proffering interpretational frameworks. And the answers that science finds, as noted above, are also subject to revision and even being discarded entirely.

I keep hearing people make claims like this, but where is all the important philosophy being made in the 21st century? What are these important theories?

If you sweep Sociology into Philosophy you at least get some affect, but a lot of Sociologists still didn't really know what they were talking about, and weren't informed by material science.

I think largely the advancement of philosophy is to ever move things more solidly under the domain of math from other places.

At first, it was "how do we know anything" and then it was "this logic thing seems to work" and then "well, what are the limits and applications for logic; what constitutes what is and isn't logical? Are there exceptions?"

And so on. These days we have a very robust field of mathematics, wherein once something is acknowledged as instantiating some sort of relationship, we can use the logic around that relationship to say what other things are true of the observed system, and of what other forms the system may emulate.

To me, this strikes me as an important and perhaps "special" offshoot of philosophy and science: "computer science".

At the end of it all, I find that philosophy, when done the way I do it at any rate, seems largely concerned with finding out the relationship between common and sloppy usages of language, and the sterner stuff linked to ZFC.

I think the one thing that I add philosophically to ZFC beyond math is "the universe exists and I exist as an object constructed within it"?

Still, I think Goedel Incompleteness means that philosophy and math cannot actually 'prove itself complete'. At best we can take the axioms we can't seem to dispose of and make of those what we will.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Of course there are different branches of philosophy that science does not cover, such as ethics, logic, language, politics, aesthetics, etc. Science is not going to give you “objective” answers about those things — science can’t tell me who to marry or what job to take — but more, even the hard philosophical areas like metaphysics, ontology and epistemology, where there is overlap with science, are totally valid disciplines of thought. Science can inform metaphysics, which in turn can inform science in a reciprocal relationship. Science isn’t going to give you any “objectively true” answers about anything, because as is so often noted, science does not deal in proofs. At best it deals in probability proofs and, what’s more, it doesn’t claim even so much as to tell you whether, for example, a mind-independent reality exists. Science deals in explanatory and defeasible models of the world. That’s a narrow discipline. Philosophy is much broader. But it would be a mistake to conclude that science and philosophy are in some kind of “competition” to provide “answers” about reality. Philosophy is fundamentally about asking questions, not finding answers, and proffering interpretational frameworks. And the answers that science finds, as noted above, are also subject to revision and even being discarded entirely.

Science relies heavily on mathematics. And mathematics leans heavily on logic. For that, we have Russell and Whitehead, Peano, Cantor, Kripke, Frege and many others studying the logic of Mathematics.

 

[bilby]

The early philosophers who tried to figure out how the universe was constructed using nothing but earth, wind, water, and fire,

...were not in substantive disagreement with modern physicists, who recognise and use the terms solid, gas, liquid, and plasma, for the exact same observable phenomena.

The early philosophers were unaware of the Bose-Einstein condensate state of matter, but I don't think we can really hold that against them - most modern observers of reality are also unaware of that material state.

 

[pood]

And, of course, was it not Democritus who posited the atomic state of matter? And Aristarchus, some 1,500 years before Copernicus, the heliocentric model? Wise old owls, the ancient Greeks.

 

[pood]

Initially wrote “Potelmy” above instead of Copernicus, error corrected.