The philosophers I study under criticise the sciences for not being rigorous enough. The problem goes both ways. The sciences often do not understand the basic concepts from which they are functioning. A good scientist will also have a rudimentary understanding of philosophy, in order to fiddle with the background epistemology of their work.
You are correct in thinking that Continental philosophy is not continuous with the sciences, because it is the core of the humanities and as such being continuous with the sciences would be unnatural for it. I still think that asking questions about our connection to existence is interesting and important, although I personally do not find Continental philosophy as potentially fruitful as Analytic.
Intuitions are by no means accepted within the discipline as a whole, and are also an interesting topic of debate within it. Because philosophy is a highly speculative discipline it isn’t going to be following a normal scientific model, but instead will model constant discovery. If you want to see where science connects up with philosophy what you should look at is the disciplines that end up coming out of philosophy as questions that can be answered scientifically. This is what we produce with regard to science.
Philosophy is the core of the academic disciplines. It isn’t in the business of scientific inquiry and it should not be. Some philosophers are still looking for universal truths after all. Simply disagreeing with the idea of a priori does not make it go away.
It is good that you recognise there are problems in philosophy. Too many people take it as dogma and do not question the area they have explored. My advice is to take what you can from the discipline well keeping in mind that every piece you take comes with a centuries long dialogue.
The philosophers I study under criticise the sciences for not being rigorous enough.
Acid test 1: Are they complaining about experimenters using arbitrary subjective “statistical significance” measures instead of Bayesian likelihood functions?
Acid test 2: Are they chiding physicists for not decisively discarding single-world interpretations of quantum mechanics?
Acid test 3: Are all of their own journals open-access?
It may be ad hominem tu quoque, but any discipline that doesn’t pass the three acid tests has not impressed me with its superiority to our modern, massively flawed academic science.
(2) appears to reject any discipline that ignores quantum mechanics entirely, or which pays attention to quantum mechanics but whose practitioners consider themselves too confused about it to challenge the consensus position.
(3) appears to reject almost all of academia. In particular, it rejects disciplines stuck at the common equilibrium of closed-access journals combined with authors publishing the same articles on their own web pages.
I get the problem with (2), although mostly because I haven’t thought about quantum mechanics enough to have an opinion, but (1) is no more dogma than “DNA is transcribed to mRNA which is then translated as an amino acid sequence”. There are lots of good reasons to investigate the actual likelihood of the null and alternative hypotheses rather than just assuming it’s about 95% likely it’s all just a coincidence
Of course, until this becomes fairly standard doing so would mean turning your paper into a meta-analysis as well as the actual experiment, which is probably hard work and fairly boring.
Acid test 2: Are they chiding physicists for not decisively discarding single-world interpretations of quantum mechanics?
ETA: The following comment is mostly off-base due to the reason pointed out in JGWeissman’s reply. Mea culpa.
Ugh, it’s not like many worlds is even the most elegant interpretation: http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1066 . Talk of MWI is kind of misleading if people haven’t already thought about spatially infinite universes for more than 5 minutes, which they mostly haven’t.
I realize that world-eater supporters are almost definitely wrong, but I’m really suspicious of putting people into the irrational bin because they’ve failed according to a metric that is knowably fundamentally flawed. I doubt the utility lost via setting a precedent (even if you’re damn well sure they’re wrong in this case) of actually figuring out ways a person could have fundamentally correct epistemology is more than the utility lost by disregarding everyone and going all Only Sane Man. But my experience is with SIAI and not SL4. Maybe I’d think differently if I was Quirrell.
Ugh, it’s not like many worlds is even the most elegant interpretation:
The proposed theory does not seem to be an alternative to MW QM so much as a possible answer to “What adds up to MW QM?”. In this light, does pushing MW over Collapse really warrant an “ugh” response?
This doesn’t do much to convince me; for example in these bits you could substitute “philosophy” with “theology”, and it would sound the same:
Because philosophy is a highly speculative discipline it isn’t going to be following a normal scientific model, but instead will model constant discovery.
[...] It isn’t in the business of scientific inquiry and it should not be. Some philosophers are still looking for universal truths after all. Simply disagreeing with the idea of a priori does not make it go away.
It is good that you recognise there are problems in philosophy. Too many people take it as dogma and do not question the area they have explored. My advice is to take what you can from the discipline well keeping in mind that every piece you take comes with a centuries long dialogue.
The bit about “take what you can” and “every piece comes with a centuries long dialogue” especially could be said of a lot of things (law, for example) and it’s not clear why those are good things in themselves.
The philosophers I study under criticise the sciences for not being rigorous enough. The problem goes both ways. The sciences often do not understand the basic concepts from which they are functioning. A good scientist will also have a rudimentary understanding of philosophy, in order to fiddle with the background epistemology of their work.
You are correct in thinking that Continental philosophy is not continuous with the sciences, because it is the core of the humanities and as such being continuous with the sciences would be unnatural for it. I still think that asking questions about our connection to existence is interesting and important, although I personally do not find Continental philosophy as potentially fruitful as Analytic.
Intuitions are by no means accepted within the discipline as a whole, and are also an interesting topic of debate within it. Because philosophy is a highly speculative discipline it isn’t going to be following a normal scientific model, but instead will model constant discovery. If you want to see where science connects up with philosophy what you should look at is the disciplines that end up coming out of philosophy as questions that can be answered scientifically. This is what we produce with regard to science.
Philosophy is the core of the academic disciplines. It isn’t in the business of scientific inquiry and it should not be. Some philosophers are still looking for universal truths after all. Simply disagreeing with the idea of a priori does not make it go away.
It is good that you recognise there are problems in philosophy. Too many people take it as dogma and do not question the area they have explored. My advice is to take what you can from the discipline well keeping in mind that every piece you take comes with a centuries long dialogue.
Acid test 1: Are they complaining about experimenters using arbitrary subjective “statistical significance” measures instead of Bayesian likelihood functions?
Acid test 2: Are they chiding physicists for not decisively discarding single-world interpretations of quantum mechanics?
Acid test 3: Are all of their own journals open-access?
It may be ad hominem tu quoque, but any discipline that doesn’t pass the three acid tests has not impressed me with its superiority to our modern, massively flawed academic science.
(2) appears to reject any discipline that ignores quantum mechanics entirely, or which pays attention to quantum mechanics but whose practitioners consider themselves too confused about it to challenge the consensus position.
(3) appears to reject almost all of academia. In particular, it rejects disciplines stuck at the common equilibrium of closed-access journals combined with authors publishing the same articles on their own web pages.
Acid test (1) and (2): this is where dogma starts.
I get the problem with (2), although mostly because I haven’t thought about quantum mechanics enough to have an opinion, but (1) is no more dogma than “DNA is transcribed to mRNA which is then translated as an amino acid sequence”. There are lots of good reasons to investigate the actual likelihood of the null and alternative hypotheses rather than just assuming it’s about 95% likely it’s all just a coincidence Of course, until this becomes fairly standard doing so would mean turning your paper into a meta-analysis as well as the actual experiment, which is probably hard work and fairly boring.
ETA: The following comment is mostly off-base due to the reason pointed out in JGWeissman’s reply. Mea culpa.
Ugh, it’s not like many worlds is even the most elegant interpretation: http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1066 . Talk of MWI is kind of misleading if people haven’t already thought about spatially infinite universes for more than 5 minutes, which they mostly haven’t.
I realize that world-eater supporters are almost definitely wrong, but I’m really suspicious of putting people into the irrational bin because they’ve failed according to a metric that is knowably fundamentally flawed. I doubt the utility lost via setting a precedent (even if you’re damn well sure they’re wrong in this case) of actually figuring out ways a person could have fundamentally correct epistemology is more than the utility lost by disregarding everyone and going all Only Sane Man. But my experience is with SIAI and not SL4. Maybe I’d think differently if I was Quirrell.
The proposed theory does not seem to be an alternative to MW QM so much as a possible answer to “What adds up to MW QM?”. In this light, does pushing MW over Collapse really warrant an “ugh” response?
[insert pun about philosophers dropping acid]
This doesn’t do much to convince me; for example in these bits you could substitute “philosophy” with “theology”, and it would sound the same:
The bit about “take what you can” and “every piece comes with a centuries long dialogue” especially could be said of a lot of things (law, for example) and it’s not clear why those are good things in themselves.