• Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪Leontiskos


    I will try to get to the big can of worms you opened later tonight.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    Sadly, I have lost my note of where I got this story. — Ludwig V

    Saint Anselm? I'll have to google now.

    Ambrose!
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    Why couldn't it be true that we need reference equally to talk to ourselves? I'm not even sure that your version would be true as a genetic account -- who knows which came first, private naming or public discourse, or whether they were simultaneous? — J

    It should be clear from other posts that I agree we do not know, and may not be able to know.

    But I am still a partisan of the communication first view, or, rather, shared intentionality and cognition first. A lot of that I get from Tomasello. I was playing with my granddaughter last year after watching one of his talks and it's shocking how obvious this is once you look for it: I roll the ball toward her and she glances up at me then back at the ball until she traps it in her pudgy little hands and immediately her face pops up to look at me. (Did I do it right? Is this how we do it?) Then she focuses on the ball so she can roll it toward me and as soon as she lets go, her face pops up again to see, again, if she's doing it right. It's constant. We start as early as possible learning to see the world through the eyes of our caretakers. I think talking builds on and elaborates this fundamental orientation of ours toward communal cognition.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    We really don't know. — frank

    I agree.

    I hope no one will take the forcefulness with which I'm expressing my view to indicate dogmatism. I could be entirely wrong.

    Honestly I think I'm inclined to push this sort of inside-out approach just because so much of our tradition presumes the opposite. I'm curious to see if other approaches might be enlightening.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    That's not what's private about private reference -- rather, I'm arguing that it's the independence from "triangulation" or the need to have a listener comprehend the speaker's reference. — J

    And I'm suggesting that this "independence" is to some degree illusory, in two senses: the sorts of things you think are the sorts of things you could express, whether you do or not; and secondly, they are that way because you learned how to think from other people.

    Roughly, I want to convince to feel, behind every thought you have and every word you utter, millions of years of evolution and hundreds of thousands of years (at least) of culture. The thoughts and words of countless ancestors echo through your thoughts of words. Everytime you choose as the starting point for analysis "What am I doing all by myself?" that's a mistake. It's the tail wagging the dog.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪frank


    What I'm saying is that we only have something we call "reference", the thing that we do with referring expressions like names and descriptions, so that we can talk about things with other people. More than that, our individual cognitive capacities are shaped by our interactions with other people, so the sorts of things we want to talk about are already the objects or potential objects of shared cognition.

    And I think our referring practices are shaped by the goal of achieving shared cognition. In conversation, both speaker and audience contribute: the speaker says what they believe will be enough to direct the audience's attention, expecting the audience to draw on whatever they can to "fill in the blanks" (context, shared history, reason).

    Why does any of this matter? Because words are a "just enough" technology that evolved for cooperative use; a word, even a name, is not something that carries its full meaning like a payload. Words are more like hints and nudges and suggestions. They are incomplete by nature.

    And so it is with using them to refer. We should expect that to be a partial, incomplete business.

    I think it's tempting here to think of this on the analogy of regular human finitude: in our minds we pick out objects to talk about and we do so perfectly, completely, but words are imperfect and ambiguous and are kind of a lousy tool for communicating our pure intentionality.

    I doubt that story, but about all I have in the way of argument is that our cognitive habits and capacities are shaped by just this sort of good enough exchange. My suspicion is that we largely think this way as well. And this makes a little more sense if you think of your cognition as overwhelmingly shared, not as the work of an isolated mind that occasionally ventures out to express itself.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    Surely Robinson Crusoe did some private referring! — J

    I know you're kidding, but that's clearly the wrong test case. He was taught to refer to things using first oral and then written language. Even gesturing at things is learned behavior.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    whatever it is I'm doing, privately, is not an example of referring. — J

    I just don't think that follows from anything.

    Everytime someone argues that blah is born out of social practices which continue to support and inform it, someone will say, "So if I privately blah, in my mind, you're saying it's not really blah?!"

    No, of course not. It's why I tried to make clear in that post that both views of language at least attempt to end up with both social and private uses.

    Here, consider reading. Famously, reading used to only be done aloud. To this day, children are overwhelmingly taught to read aloud: your teacher tells you, out loud, what sounds the letters make; the student demonstrates their ability by making those sounds out loud. It is how this knowledge is transferred to the next generation. It makes clear the relation between our use of oral and written language.

    Would anyone then conclude that reading silently is not "really" reading? No.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪Leontiskos


    Yeah that's quite interesting, and I think both (yours and mine) represent types of triangulation.

    A further curiosity is that parasitic reference has to be self-consciously contrastive, so it's the sort of thing a parent can engage in; on the other hand, children are said to be learning when they manage this sort of "playing along," "calling things what you call them," but they lack the distinction between the two ways of doing this.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪Banno


    I'll dig it out. I think I know what box it's in.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪J


    I think broadly you'd expect, and can find exemplars of, two ways to go on this, as usual:

    (T) Language is, first, a system for organizing your thoughts; secondarily we developed ways of verbalizing our linguistically structured thoughts to each other, for obvious reasons.

    (C) Language is, first, a system of communication, an elaboration of the sort of signaling systems many other species employ; secondarily we developed the ability to "internalize" an interlocutor (perhaps imaginary) and to use language to organize our thoughts.

    A whole lot flows from this fundamental difference of approach. I'm not sure there's a reasonable means for choosing between them, but I tend to think what evidence there is favors (C).
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    Can you recall a reference for this? — Banno

    It's on the first page:

    Say something that requires a missing presupposition, and straightway that presupposition springs into existence, making what you said acceptable after all. (Or at least, that is what happens if your conversational partners tacitly acquiesce - if no one says “But France has three kings! ” or ‘Whadda ya mean, ‘even George’? “)

    Complete text available at the David Lewis papers.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪frank


    There's actually a funny issue with non-response I've been thinking about, since
    ↪J
    's entreaty that I stick around. It's one of the things Lewis talks about in Scorekeeping, if I'm remembering correctly.

    Suppose you ask me who that guy is holding the glass of champagne, and I realize you mean Jim, but I happen to know Jim is holding a glass of sparkling cider. I could silently correct you and just answer "That's Jim," but in doing so I will have implicitly endorsed your claim that Jim is drinking champagne.

    We are again in the territory of farce.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    You got the reference to Quine, but Srap didn't. — frank

    Does this sentence strike anyone but frank as plausible?

    Sometimes @frank I just don't see the point in responding. I'm sure you understand.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪J


    I'll add one little note, relevant to the issues raised in the OP about essential properties.

    In the collected papers of Ruth Barcan Marcus, there is a transcript of a discussion between Marcus, Quine, and Kripke, who was (iirc) at the time maybe not yet 20, and I forget who else. Anyway, I remember a specific exchange where Quine said that Kripke's approach would require bringing back the distinction between essential and accidental properties, and Kripke agreed, but didn't consider that the fatal flaw Quine did.

    I think there was some bad blood later, Marcus or people on her behalf claiming that the causal theory of names was stolen from her.

    Anyway it's interesting to see Quine's star student (and then later Lewis) already plunging into waters he was deeply apprehensive about.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪J


    Right right. It's been years since I read this. I've got nothing to contribute on "what Kripke would say" so I'll mosey along.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    whether the statement-type designation -- "He is the person about whom I say . . ." -- is rigid. — J

    It just seems obviously not to be.

    1. It has an indexical in it. I think that rules it out from the jump.

    2. As phrased, it names a class of actual performance, without even a ceteris paribus clause. The obvious way to strengthen it is to shift to talk of dispositions. But c.p. clauses and dispositions have known issues.

    What you seem to want is really an in-between category of "rigid-for-you".
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    I think Srap Tasmaner is basically saying he doesn't think at all when he's not engaging another person. I think he's saying he's not even conscious of the world around him until he discusses it, at which point a sort of negotiated narrative comes into being. — frank

    In this case, even to the degree that I am engaging with another person, I am speechless.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪J


    I'm sure it's my fault. Of course it should be possible to provide an account of what makes names names, what makes them special, what their role in language is, what makes them different, and this is the sort of thing Kripke is up to. Sure.

    But we were also talking about reference as such, and it's clear to me that an account of names in terms of baptism, or words in terms of stipulation, can't also serve as an account of reference but presumes it. If you want to teach someone "blork" means that thing, you have to already be able to successfully refer to that thing. (I think Wittgenstein raises similar objections to theories of demonstrative teaching, as if pointing "just worked".)

    So talk about stipulation and teaching all you like, but it doesn't get you to that level of originary reference you're chasing, the intentionality you cannot be mistaken about. It relies on that; it doesn't explain it or even describe it.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    If I teach others that my shriek refers to Mr. Champagne, in what way could this reference fail for others, or be mistaken on my part? — J

    This question is a non-starter. You're presuming the entire system of conceptualization and language usage is at your disposal, and then all you're doing is in effect introducing a word by stipulation. It is interesting that we can do this, but it doesn't get anywhere near addressing the questions you're interested in.

    We're actually covering similar territory to the memory discussion. My position is that rather than the pure phenomenal experience we overlay with narrative, which we can then strip away, all we've got is narrative. The process you imagine of "stripping away" is real, but creative, it's making a new thought out of the thoughts that came to you not just enmeshed in context, but constituted by our systems of understanding and communicating. I don't think you really have the option to just set those aside and recover some original underlying experience ― you never had access to any such experience.

    The idea, as I conceive it, is similar to Sellars's argument in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind": he allows that there must be some sort of raw inputs to our thinking processes, but denies that they have any cognitive status whatsoever. In particular, they cannot serve the Janus-faced role thrust upon them, linking on the one side to purely causal processes of sensation, and on the other side to our conceptual apparatus of knowledge and reason. Nothing can fill that role.

    As it is vain to seek the primordial unconceptualized experience, it is vain to seek the originary act of referring within a mind that knows no other minds.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪J


    Well, I'm not even sure what we're talking about now, but it looks like you are trying to create one of Wittgenstein's private languages. You want to have in hand an association between an object and something, a name, a referring expression, or a bit of behavior, and for that association to be something you can't be wrong about.

    I think there are a couple layers to this. One is the apparent incorrigibility of attention: when I think of something, perceived or recalled or imagined, even if I am making important mistakes about the properties of that thing, even if I misidentify it, I cannot be wrong about it being the object of my thought (or intention). In my pitching example, the guy is remembering something someone did, even if it wasn't who he thinks it was or in the circumstances he thinks it was. There is, we want to say, a pure, original, and unimpeachable phenomenal experience underlying the stories we tell about it, even if those stories are all wrong. Even if it turns out the thing you're thinking about, that you think you remember, never happened, it's still what you are thinking about.

    It's a compelling vision, but I suspect it is fundamentally mistaken.

    When we come to language, the act of referring seems somehow to share in the unimpeachability of attention. The additional problem here is that "refer" is one of Ryle's "success words", so when we attempt to describe reference we describe successful reference. The downsides here are that (a) what is genuinely interesting, impressive, or mysterious is the element of "success" rather than something specific to referring; (b) our vocabulary blocks a proper comparison of successful and unsuccessful attempts at reference; (c) by being defined as successful, reference seems to take on the color of incorrigibility we associate (I think mistakenly) with attention.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪frank


    Referring is something done by fiat. — frank
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪J


    I'm a little unconvinced by the "about whom I say..." locution, precisely because we're lacking a guarantee that the sentence the speaker utters means what he thinks it means (or "what he intends it to mean" or "what he means by it").

    I know the tendency of this analysis is to brush off mistakes, but suppose you point out to the speaker -- for easy examples, imagine the speaker isn't quite fluent in the language he's using -- that the words used mean the person is a prostitute: you might end up with a speaker insisting that they wouldn't say that! You'll probably want to cover by changing your description to something like "about whom I mistakenly said ..." but that's no help. What, so you *thought* the person was a prostitute and now realize they aren't?! Doubt the speaker will agree to that. Keep trying. (See " A Plea for Excuses".)

    And in the meantime, the speaker has still failed to refer, because once words are in the mix, you're stuck with them; either you trust them to faithfully carry your meaning, as your ambassadors, so to speak, or you allow that there must be negotiation between you and the audience.

    "You know what I mean?" isn't always a rhetorical question, even when intended to be.

    It's as if, what we need to say is that when you attempt to refer, you "hope" the words you utter will do the trick -- you could also hope you're using the "right" words but I think that's secondary. Now what is the audience to do with your hope? How does that help them know what you mean?

    ((There's a reason sitcoms are full of this sort of stuff.))
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    Referring is something done by fiat. — frank

    Tell us what you mean by that, and why you think so.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    maybe a better way to understand this is "The man over there who I think has a glass of champagne in his hand." That way, the description is not wrong — J

    Unless it is. This is such a great example because the reference of the word "champagne" is regularly disputed. Are you using the word "champagne" "correctly"? Are you sure? Is there definitely a correct way?
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    Reference is set by the speaker. — frank

    I don't think it's that simple.

    In cases where the speaker is mistaken, memory being what it is, it is possible for them to learn what they are trying to refer to.

    (Example:
    "When Maddux was pitching the last game of the World Series --"
    "Maddux didn't pitch the last game; Glavine did."
    "Okay then Glavine. No, wait, I know I was thinking of Maddux, so maybe it wasn't the last game I was thinking of ..."
    And this can go on. It might turn out the speaker was remembering yet another pitcher he had mixed up with Maddux. It might or might not have been a World Series game.)

    The other problem is that even if we say the reference is whatever the speaker intended, besides the problems already suggested above, intention not always being perfectly determined, we have the additional problem that words don't just mean whatever you want them to. The speaker has no choice but to engage in the grubby business of negotiating with the audience to achieve successful reference.

    Grice noted the complexity of our intentions when we speak to each other, even in the absence of confounding factors: not only do I intend you to understand that I mean X by saying Y, I also intend you to recognize that I so intend, and I also intend you to recognize that I intend you to recognize that I intend you to understand I mean X by saying Y, and on and on.

    So, no, I can't agree that it's just a matter of the speaker "setting" the reference, as if the audience were superfluous.
  • Some questions about Naming and Necessity
    ↪J


    I would only add that "the one holding a glass of champagne" is said for the audience's benefit. I can look at someone and silently think "asshole" and I know who I mean, no hoops jumped through. If I gesture, for you, at someone and say "asshole", you might need clarification about which of the people over there I disapprove of. Hence "the one holding ..." or even "the one holding - what is that? Is that champagne?"

    Point being it's not exactly a matter (de dicto) of what the speaker thinks, but really of what the speaker thinks the audience will think. "The guy holding what you would probably think is champagne, but I saw the bottles and ..."

    I can't remember if Kripke gets there, and I'm not looking at the book, sorry. But reference is a matter of triangulation, not just what pertains to the speaker or pertains to what she speaks of.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    the job of the human sciences is not to explain but to interpret and understand. — J

    Which is fine, I've just been avoiding committing to some major difference between the natural sciences and the human or social sciences, because I've been trying to clarify ― or insist upon or defend or something ― that there is some genuine continuity, that the political scientist is as much a scientist as the physicist. I'd like that point to come out similar to saying that a biologist is just as much a scientist as a physicist, which most people will agree to without a moment's thought, but I think it's obvious there are ways in which biology had a much harder time making progress than physics. We got the theory of evolution before genetics. We had the number of human chromosomes wrong ― even once we had a number ― until 1956.

    To your point, part of my point earlier was not to assume that what makes physics science was everything about physics, some of that may only apply to physics, or may only apply to the natural sciences. So I'd be open to saying even the expected results differ, that we want explanations from the natural sciences but interpretations from the human sciences. That may be. Where I've been hoping to link them is in the process enacted to produce whatever kind of knowledge they produce, all that business about careful procedures and communal self-correction. It wouldn't bother me if there were sciences about different things that produced different sorts of results, so long as they were producing those results using a process that would be recognizably science to a scientist in any field. That's awfully idealized, I know, but I think about even what a sociologist could tell a chemist about the care with which he collected his data and the statistical analysis he performed on it, and the chemist would recognize a brother scientist at work, even allowing for the great differences in their fields.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    I'd want to say that those tiny moments of musicality shouldn't be notated, even if they could be. — J

    Agreed. I suppose I shouldn't have put it this way because I was thinking of the musicologist not the musician, someone who is analysing a performance rather than creating one.

    I'm of two minds in this talk of "having enough data" I keep using, here in talking about music or above talking about the social sciences.

    There's a great forgotten book called The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes (iirc) in which he traces every image, very nearly every phrase and every word, in two poems of Coleridge (Xanadu and Ancient Mariner) to sources in Coleridge's library. It's not an "explanation" of the poems; I believe the point Lowes made (and I may misremember) was that in a way knowing all this only deepens the mystery of Coleridge's creativity in taking all this material to create these things. It's not like you could train an LLM on Coleridge's library and then say, "Write me an astonishing poem," and out they would pop.

    (Coleridge being a particularly ripe case, as Eliot described him, a man visited by the muse for a while, and when she left, he was a haunted man. Coleridge himself didn't understand what had happened.)

    So, part of me does want to say that there can never be enough data to explain, much less predict, human action, and certainly not unlikely human action like creativity. The "human sciences" would then be marked either by arrogance or folly, as you like. I could be old school, I'm old enough.

    But I'm not convinced. That attitude strikes me unavoidably as a rearguard action, defending human nobility against a godless and disenchanting science, that sort of thing.

    Instead, I think it's simply a fact that the data needed, and the theory needed, are evidently beyond us, and so we must make do and aim a bit lower in our expectations, or at least be more circumspect in our claims. When it comes to scientifically informed debates over social policy, for instance, we sometimes know enough to do better, but still less than we think we do and so some caution is advisable.

    We know a lot of what was swirling around in Coleridge's head, but not all of it, and we know something about how his brain worked, because it worked like ours, but the specific historical process that took those inputs and yielded those outputs is unrecoverable.

    So it is with any musical performance. I'm inclined to say that one of the reasons the musician played this note this way is because of that time she wiped out on her bike when she was 8. That might be a big enough factor to make it into her biography ― if, say, she broke a finger that healed in a way relevant to her playing. It might be a kind of emotional turning point for her, if it nudged her attitude toward risk a certain way. It might be an infinitesimal factor, no more or less relevant than the peanut-butter sandwich she ate that day, but all of which went into making her the person who produced that performance.

    We're talking really about what God knows about her. When God hears that performance, does he smile slightly and connect it to that skid on her bike? God has all the data, so how does he understand the world and the people in it?

    It looks like that's the standard for science I have been indirectly endorsing, or if not "standard" then "ideal". Which is a little odd, certainly, but maybe that's fine. In practice, science is entirely a matter of making do, and being very clever about what you can learn and how despite not being gods. I guess.

    Therefore Bayes.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    ↪J


    Yeah I think there's a trick to that story, that it does mean it's too hard to sight-read.

    But then I also think about the difficulty of notating jazz correctly. And I think about Jimi Hendrix, who seems to add some tiny bend or flutter to almost every damn note -- how do you notate all those micro-decisions? And so it is with any great musician, there are all those millisecond decisions that go into the performance, all those tiny variations that distinguish a good performance from a great one.

    Now, should we say there is no hope of a scientific approach to great musicianship? I actually don't think so. I think the point is that vastly more data is needed than you might at first think, certainly more than you would think if you looked even at a complex score, which is great simplification of what a musician actually does.

    Any of that make sense to you?
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    So to be clear, are you saying that science has to do with knowing-that, and non-scientific strategies for learning have to do with knowing-how? Even though there is some minor overlap? — Leontiskos

    I'd say people quite often want to learn things that can be known, and when they reflect on how they're going about doing that, you have the beginnings of science. Recognizing that the first method that occurs to you, the natural or intuitive approach, might fail or produce unreliable results, and that taking some care up front, not just jumping in to slurp up facts as if they were just laying around, easily accessible to the laziest procedure, but planning an approach to learn what you want to know, that I would think of as the scientific impulse.

    That can happen anywhere anytime.

    For example, Ornette Coleman once said (I think this was in the liner notes to one of his early albums), it's when I found I could make mistakes that I knew I was onto something. We're talking here about how to play, and how to write, but it is also possible to have knowledge about what you play and what you write. Even if we, rightly, resist the philosopher's instinct to reduce knowing how to knowing that, we ought also resist excluding knowing that from knowing how.

    Further example, John Coltrane was a student of music theory. There are stories of him and Eric Dolphy with books spread out all over the living-room floor around them, discussing and analysing modes and scales for hours. Intense interest in knowing that. There's also a story that a young music student came to visit Trane once to interview him, and brought along a transcription she had made of one his solos. She asked him to play it, and after trying a couple times, he handed it back to her and said, "It's too hard." Knowing how is still its own thing, howsoever informed by knowing that.

    I guess all I'm saying is that "know" is a verb, so we're always talking about a how, whether it's knowing that or knowing how. Those are different things people do, but I think we know they are, and have to be, braided together continually. In science, the intent is to get the hows right so that you can produce thats reliably; in jazz, the intent is to take the thats you can get your hands on to improve your ability to how.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    2. All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object. — Kafka, the Zurau aphorisms
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    I wonder if there are really no true ontological positions, only methodological ones. It's not what is real, it's where and how do we look. — T Clark

    I meant to say earlier, I quite like this idea.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    I think we have to actually grapple with the now-common belief that that the natural sciences are more scientific than the social sciences. — Leontiskos

    To the hoi polloi, "science" seems mostly to mean "medicine", which is no doubt an interesting story. For my purposes, medicine is a good example because the human body is complicated and difficult to study, and so progress in learning how it works has been noticeably dependent on developing new technologies. And here we're still talking about natural science.

    When you turn to the social sciences, there are additional impediments to a scientific approach. The sciences of the past (history and archaeology) face unavoidable limitations on what can be observed. If instead you're studying the present, there can be difficulties with observation ― political science has to rely on polling, which presents enormous challenges, and other sources like voting data, which can be difficult to link with other sources of data, and still other sources like economic surveys. No one in the social sciences ever has nearly as much data as they would like, and what they would like is informed by theorizing that is perforce based on the limited data they can get. It's hard. You can design some pretty clever experiments in fields like psychology and linguistics, but economics and sociology are generally forced to make do with "natural experiments" (and in this they are more like astronomy and cosmology).

    In short, I tend to think social scientists are doing the best they can, and if we are right to have less confidence in their results than in the results of physics or chemistry, it's not because their work is less scientific, but a basic issue, first, of statistical power (lack of data), and, second, of the enormous complexity of the phenomena they study.

    Consider the fact that a very common objection to science-pluralism is that it would be unable to distinguish true science from pseudoscience (and the proponents of science-pluralism really do struggle with this objection). A pseudoscience is basically just a "science" which produces uncertain and unreliable "knowledge." — Leontiskos

    I think honestly the similarities are only skin deep, and the processes of knowledge production in the two approaches differ dramatically.

    The pluralism I'm inclined to defend is twofold: one is Goodman's point about the sciences that are not physics getting full faith and credit; the other is the communal self-correction idea. The latter rests upon the simple fact that others are sometimes better positioned to see the flaws in your work than you are. That presents an opportunity: you can systematize and institutionalize scrutiny of your work by others. Two heads are better than one; two hundred or two thousand heads are better than two. There are some practical issues with this, well-known shortcomings in the existing peer-review process, for instance, but the idea is deeply embedded in the practice of science as I understand it, and I think it has proven its worth.

    Do you think there are non-scientific strategies for learning? — Leontiskos

    Surely. Given the distinction between knowing that and knowing how, it stands to reason there's a difference between learning that and learning how. Acquiring a skill is a kind of learning that might here and there overlap with a scientific approach ― experimenting is what I'm thinking of ― but we would expect plenty of differences too, and the intended "result" is quite different.

    I think I'm okay with restricting science to a strategy for learning what can be known, and I also want to say it is something like the distillation of everything we have learned about how to learn what can be known. Science itself is a how, not a what. And that also means that we can learn more about how to learn things, so there's no reason to think the methodology of science is fixed.

    We're kind of going in every direction at this point, and I didn't even try to get to the "essence of science".
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    science is not one method, nor is it a fundamentally different way of thinking from other forms of disciplined inquiry. — Tom Storm

    I tend to think what matters most is that the enterprise is self-correcting, and it achieves that by being plural. The replication crisis is a great example of the scientific community's capacity to discover and address its own shortcomings.

    you seem to be saying that the natural sciences check more of our "science" boxes than the social sciences — Leontiskos

    I was trying not to say that, in fact, because any such list, with the intent of creating a scale of "scientificity", would be tendentious. Maybe it's silly, but it seems to me in some ways physics is easier than biology, which is easier than sociology. There are all sorts of issues of complexity and scale and accessibility (comparative ability to observe and measure). The story of physics itself moves from easy-to-make observations and measurements and relatively simple theories to very-hard-to-make observations and theories that are so complex their interpretation is open to debate.

    Roughly, I'm trying to say that I think it's a mistake to identify science with the methods that worked for the low-hanging fruit.

    the reason we approach different things differently is because they are different things. The reason we approach physics differently than mathematics is because of the difference between physics and mathematics. — Leontiskos

    That's quite interesting. Mathematics is particularly troublesome, but I want to defend the view that there are approaches to the study of atoms and mountains and lungs and whale pods and nation states that are all recognizably scientific and scientific because of some genuine commonality, despite the differences which are unavoidable given the differences among these phenomena. That commonality might be more "family resemblance" than "necessary and sufficient conditions," but I lean strongly toward the mechanism of communal self-correction being required. I guess we could talk a lot more about all this.

    I'm going to hold off talking about pedagogy, but I'm glad you brought it up, because I think "learning" (as a concept at least) should be far more central to philosophy. This is my 30,000-foot view of science, and why I mentioned the importance of specifiable plans for further investigation above: science is a strategy for learning. That's the core of it, in my view, and everything else serves that, and anything that contributes to or refines or improves the process is welcome.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    us working hard to make sense — Tom Storm

    That's a lovely point.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    I'm just asking if you think some disciplines are more paradigmatically scientific than other disciplines — Leontiskos

    What if we left out "paradigmatically" in your question: are some disciplines "more scientific" than others? If you take "discipline" reasonably broadly, the obvious answer is "yes": writing poetry, for instance, is a discipline that, for the most part, does not even aspire to be scientific. Are you asking if some sciences are "more scientific" than others? Is physics more scientific than biology? Is biology more scientific than sociology?

    I'm having trouble imagining a reason to ask. It's clearly possible to make up an answer, to make a long list of characteristics of "science" and then count how many boxes each discipline checks. I think most of the natural sciences check whatever boxes you might come up with, and it wouldn't be surprising if the social sciences checked fewer, but it doesn't seem like a helpful exercise. It suggests that there is a difference due to the domain, when it's the approach that matters.

    Will one discipline provide a better starting point than another discipline, or not? — Leontiskos

    I think not in principle ― not on account of something "especially scientific" about any given field ― but for pedagogical reasons, probably so. What would the students already have some familiarity with? What would most engage their attention? What would give them opportunities to participate and see for themselves ― to, in a fundamental sense, do science themselves?

    Maybe this is a variation on your question: isn't it the case that some domains are simply less suited to scientific study than others? Suppose you wanted to teach science and chose to begin with "the science of beauty", for instance ― how far would you get? I expect most of us would agree, not very far, but I don't think we have to dismiss the idea out-of-hand: why not explore and see if the process itself reveals the limits of what we can do here? ― Maybe this is the right point to mention that Goodman, in particular, insists that literature and the arts are not competing with the sciences and are not failing to meet a standard that is set by the natural sciences, but offer alternative frameworks for knowledge. (The word "knowledge" looks slightly odd there, but he would probably be fine with it.)

    I don't know ― is any of this in the ballpark of what your were looking for?
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    Do you think it is appropriate to treat certain disciplines as paradigmatic sciences, such as physics or geometry? — Leontiskos

    I don't really understand the question. "Appropriate" in what sense?

    Along the same lines, would the pedagogue be equally justified in starting with any discipline they like, if they wish to teach their pupil about scientific reasoning? — Leontiskos

    I don't understand this question either. "Justified" in what sense?

    Truly don't know what you're getting at here.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    multiple realities, each intelligible through particular conceptual frameworks or perspectives — Tom Storm

    It's the view Nelson Goodman defends in Ways of Worldmaking, and one consequence I found particularly appealing is that it puts you in a position to take seriously sciences which are not physics. Goodman argues that "reduction" is basically a myth, with no known exemplars. (It is true that physics constrains chemistry, which constrains biology, which constrains ethology, which constrains anthropology, but no one really thinks ― and there's no reason to think ― you could "explain" traditional religious practices in West Africa in terms of physics.) There is, on the contrary, no real reason for treating other sciences as "second class citizens" that might someday qualify as the real deal if you can show how they are consequences of physics.

    The alternative is to believe that there is only ever one thing to say, and anyone not saying that is wrong. But rather than see divergence as disagreement, it's possible in many cases to realize that it's only another perspective being offered. "But look at it this way ..." doesn't have to imply disagreement. Knowledge production is a communal enterprise.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    The former reflects a pragmatic stance, informed by an awareness of the limits of what can be known — Tom Storm

    Agreed, but I would have thought "the limits of what we know how to investigate". At least that's how I think of naturalism; it's a program for further investigation that can actually be carried out. It may not get you everything that could be known -- how could anyone know that? -- but at least it's a definable plan for encroaching on the unknown.
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