You've just repeated more historical facts, none of which have any bearing on the matter of whether science is necessarily dependant on philosophy. The question is not whether it just so happened to have emerged from it. — Isaac

That was never the question, to my knowledge. The question was: do philosophers influence scientists. The response is yes, they do. A lot.

Also, you are clearly a believer in God (or something like that), so when you attack secular thinkers it's all too tempting to read it as religious bias. Here's my bias: when believers barge in so aggressively, pejoratively labeling otherness in little bins, I find them less convincing. If I really and deeply believed in God, I expect that I'd be at peace. I'd be magnanimous, an insider with nothing to prove. — norm

Obviously. Everyone has a bias, that's part of the contingency of knowledge. You can't escape your culture, history, etc. when you are making claims or having views or positions.

The question remains: is Dharmi an evangelist? If someone is content with their god, why enter the realm of reason? Isn't philosophy essentially critical? So I'm guilty of using Dharmi as a foil just as he wants to cast me as a nihilist or obscurantist. — norm

For those people who care, I'm an "evangelist" for those people who don't, I'm not. Same as anyone.

But maybe old-fashioned believers should ignore more recent philosophy. Who needs philosophy if they have God? I do understand that theology can bleed into philosophy, since I made that transition myself, wrestling with religious absurdities many years ago. — norm

Recent philosophy is not something I ignore, but I still regard it as not being philosophy.

The irony here is that you suggest that I'm a philosophical suicide because I'm serving as your gadfly. Socrates stung people by making it clear to them that they were unclear, that they didn't know what they were talking about, not really, despite their pride. His wisdom was knowing that he didn't know. Meanwhile you are eager to argue that there is a god, and that anyone doubting that and your method is corrupt, craven, or indolent. I really don't hold it against you. This place only works because/when people get fired up. — norm

Uh, no. Socrates wasn't a sophist. Socrates questioned beliefs, which is correct, but he wasn't a skeptic for skepticism's sake. That's not Socratic, that's sophistry.

I don't know why theists think "God" will guarantee the validity of science. All he might do is interfere with scientific studies in any ways he wishes in order to produce "faith". All they are left with is the subjective, just as they say is the case with materialists — Gregory

I don't say that, science is methodological. It goes on without God, if you're interested in philosophy of science on the other hand, then yes, you need laws of nature at the very least, otherwise you're just a pragmatist/instrumentalist. When you start asking for justification of those laws themselves, then God comes into it.

That's linking one controversial word to an even more controversial word, — norm

If you want to do philosophy, you have to use concepts. A philosopher who thinks that "concept" is a controversial concept is like a plumber who is not quite sure about the advantages of tap water.

There's no question that we can use both words in practical life with no problem ... — norm

Thanks for saying that; I was afraid something awful would happen to me for daring to mention the concept of "concept" publicly on a philosophy board...

... but when we play the game of metaphysics and try to make some concept (whatever those are exactly supposed to be) absolute, [fizzle, endless confusion].

Who spoke of anything absolute, or of any game? I repeat: To ask what sort of entity is a number is not any more pernicious than to ask what sort of entity is a chair. Let's not get confused by numbers. Or by chairs. These are the simple stuff.

you need laws of nature at the very least, otherwise you're just a pragmatist/instrumentalist. When you start asking for justification of those laws themselves, then God comes into it. — Dharmi

Materialists consider it common sense to believe in science. A 'higher order" justification doesn't seem necessary

Any "ism" should have a strong foundation, regardless of whether the adherents think it necessary or not.

None do

Well, that's we're discussing: which "ism" has the strongest foundation?

Because materialists are philosophically unsophisticated.

Hegel says at the end of Philosophy of Mind:

1) you are the Holy Ghost

2) your reasoning powers (logos) is Jesus

3) you memory is that Father

so he was an atheist. But you said he was a good philosopher

I bet you don't know how to read Hegel. Yet you say he wasn't sophisticated, or would say so if you read him

Hegel was an Idealist. He was not a materialist. And I don't have his writings in my library. I have an introduction to Hegel book though.

I've read Phenomogy of Mind twice and Philosophy of Mind 3 times. There wasn't a sentence I didn't understand

Okay. Many scholars disagree with you. Even people who know German and are translators get confused by Hegel.

But, I'll take your word for it.

What do you mean by philosophical sophistication? You said Aquinas was an atheist (yes) but give Essence and Existence are overview. It's sophisticated in a way

He's a crypto-atheist. So is Hegel really. Marx was a true Hegelian.

By sophistication, I mean the idea that what we see is roughly what exists. That's a huge lack of sophistication.

Name something that you know with 100 percent certainty

Nothing. Certainty is impossible.

That was never the question, to my knowledge. The question was: do philosophers influence scientists. — Olivier5

No, the question was whether scientists with Kant-like ideas were influenced by Kant. My point was that scientists are just as capable of arriving at ideas like those of Kant as Kant was, so there's no justification at all for assuming that, where we see similarities, the former must have been influenced by the latter, they're just as likely to have got there themselves.

By sophistication, I mean the idea that what we see is roughly what exists. That's a huge lack of sophistication.

Why? In my mind it takes an unsophisticated leap to believe some barrier or other exists between the seer and what is seen. What is it exactly that prohibits me from seeing what exists?

I think you have me confused with someone else. I've never read Hegel. Maybe someone quoted him here and I agreed?

I don't know. I saw an article on Hegel and Heraclitus by an Islamic scholar that was really good. I don't know how they connect their theology to his but there are a lot of moving pieces. I'm finishing up the Encyclopedia brief on Logic today

If you can show some general progress that philosophy has made you'd be in a very small minority. Even among its advocates, it's generally accepted that philosophy doesn't actually 'progress' in that way. — Isaac

As I started to say in the previous post, but want to expand upon now, I don’t think there is any stable way of defining the difference between a concept called ‘science’ and one called ‘philosophy’ , not in terms of methods, goals , the possibility of ,or rate of , progress.
I do want to say that I believe that we can talk of a progress in ideas over the course of cultural history, as long as we understand this not in the 19th century sense of a linear accumulation, but rather in pragmatic terms of periods of Kuhnian normal science and transformative revolutions. In fact, I view this progress as accelerative.
And unlike those who argue that human nature does not change , I believe that inter-personal
insight , the ability to adapt to and empathize with the alien other , and to predict others actions and ways of thinking , is at the core of this cultural progress.

Now , one particular view of science is that it offers a privileged access to truth through its methods in comparison to other cultural modalities , including philosophy. The thinking goes that the rigorous social process of hypothesis , definition , test , validation and replication (not to mention quantification) that developed during the Enlightenment led to a rapid acceleration of knowledge that would not have been possible without the use of its methods.

I started out a firm believer in this narrative , and in my grad school days in experiment psychology , as I was working out my own psychological perspective , I firmly believed that any the pricks innovation in the field
could , as. must, be demonstrable though construction of the right experimental design.

I had no interest in what I understood to be the role of philosophy , and I even wrote a piece in a student publication arguing that philosophy was essentially obsolete, given that all the old philosophical questions concerning memory, emotion, perception and cognition could now be submitted to empirical test.

It took a few years of restless, futile attempts to force my psychological model into the confines of the reigning cognitive science paradigm for me to begin reading original sources of philosophy, and I did so with great skepticism and suspicion. It told a few years for me to be won over to the view that the ‘introspective methods’ of continental philosophy allow them to make as much progress as the sciences, because it is this same introspection that causes scientific revolutions. You might say, sure , of course there are conceptual ‘introspectively originating’ leaps in science , but what gives it its advantage is that it submits such leaps to the communal processes of method I mentioned above.

My response is that those methods serve to define in a certain way , for a certain audience , a scientific paradigm. They bring its definitions into sharp focus and clarity , so that the community can agree on what it is testing. but this testing process mainly describes the period of normal science when there is more or less a consensus concerning the hypotheses involved.

During shifts from one paradigm to another , much of that painstaking detailed work of validation may be jettisoned. For instance , how useful are the decades of intricate research studies within the S-R paradigm today when almost no one is making use of that framework any more?

So it is quite possible to have a number of psychological research communities operating in the same era on the basis of mutually incompatible paradigms. One of them will likely to ultimately be determined as more useful than the others , resulting in the discarding of all of the detailed research results belonging to the rival approaches. This parallels the progression of philosophical positions over cultural history( from Greek to Medieval to Enlightenment to Idealist to postmodern philosophy, we have a direct parallel to the progress of science. ).

I think the main difference between your thinking about scientific ideas ( or ideas in general) and mine is that I view any particular fact as belonging to a holistic gestalt ( what you would call a theory ). All the terms of a theory are interlocked in such a way that each term is mutually defined by its relation to all the other terms and no term can be removed from the whole.

When a paradigm is replaced by another , every concept within the old paradigm, no mater how insignificant or subordinate , is transformed along with the whole. And what is the relation between this gestalt and the world which it is attempting to predict? The shift in paradigm is
also a shift in world , because the paradigm isn’t a template designed to match itself to the world , it is a remaking of the world. Science ,( as well as all
other cultural modalities ) is in a sense the world coming to know itself through its becoming, and our inquiries are a part of that becoming.

The most difficult implication of this gestalt view for most empirically oriented types is that one can translate from one field of culture to another and recognize them as variations on a shared theme. For instance, it would mean that Einstein’s relativity is just a variation of Kant’s
idealism, translated into an operationalized language of physics. This implies the even more outrageous supposition that there are a range of post-Kantian philosophies that imply a post -Einsteinian view of physics that needs to be ‘ filled in’ by the next generation of physicists. ( for a preview of what this may look like , check out Lee Smolin or Ilya Prigogine).

I don’t expect you to buy this , but it should at least look a bit familiar ,because you’re seeing more and more argumentation of this sort coming from the Left concerning the ideological underpinnings of science.

Anyone can do what Kant did. I could write something similar tomorrow. His insights were gained entirely by introspection using his mind, and we all have one of those. Even the authors he may or may not have read (Wittgenstein had famously read very little philosophy) he has simply chosen to agree or disagree with using nothing but introspection.

Even the most trivial scientific theory, by contrast, is based on a set of empirical findings which a non-scientists would be usually prevented from replicating or testing, simply for pragmatic reasons - the sample size is too large or the equipment too technical. There is a body of such empirical knowledge which, if you haven't read it, you will be unable, no matter how hard you try, to replicate it. — Isaac

‘Introspection’ in philosophy and in science will not lead to a revolution in thinking unless it takes as its starting point the most advanced forms of thinking of its era, so not everyone can do what Kant did. The most innovative philosophers were extremely knowledgeable about the mathematics and science of their day, which is why so many contributed new forms of mathematics or participated in the loftiest debates about the field (Descartes, Leibniz, Husserl, Wittgenstein ). So when they introspect, they are connecting the cutting edge of ideas of their era with something new., and it becomes irrelevant which specific empirical facts
they may be missing , be user those facts are just variations within the larger frame that they are turning on its head The ‘intro’ of introspect implies something sealed up inside a subject , but it should instead be seen as the subject’s encountering something new in the world. If what they create is validated by a community then that person will have a lucrative career ahead of them , it will not likely have ventured very far from conventional thinking. But didnt Einstein venture significantly from the conventional thinking in physics? Maybe in physics but not in philosophy. There was already a ready intellectual home for his ideas thanks to the prior work of philosophers, artists, psychologists and biologists( remember now , I’m sticking with my outrageous notion of different modalities
of culture as variations on shared intellectual
themes ).

The most cutting edge thinking in philosophy as well as psychology sits out in the wilderness with no community able to understand it well enough to validate it( James, Dewey , Meade, Kelly).

I used to think that nothing could match the precision of quantitative measurement within the sciences, so it was a shock to me when I was forced to reverse that view and consider the most powerful continental
philosophies to embody a more intricate and profound precision than that of empirical styles of theorization .
This is because precision cannot simply be a function of measured variables with an empirical system. It has to include everything f that allows us to define the terms of the system , what its fundamental propositions mean and how they are grounded. For the purposes of designing tools, machines, medical treatments, a less comprehensively defined precision is appropriate , since , like a commercial commodity , by definition technology or scientific products must be accessible to a wider range of people( In fact, can there be something like science’ without a conventional community defining what counts as empirical and what doesn’t? If a scientist co struts their model outside of what is defined as properly empirical by the. irma of that community they willbe derided as a crank, a mystic or worse yet , a philosopher). This to me describes the philosophy-empirical-technological-commercial spectrum of ideation as ranging from the most comprehensively defined to the most generic and operationalized( Nietzche to Freud to Friston).

My belief is that those who prefer to work within empirical communities rather than philosophical communities do so because their style of ideation is better suited for a more generic operationalized language than the
comprehensive language of continental
philosophy( the same
reason one prefers to work in applied sciences like engineering rather than in theoretical sciences). This is true even though they may tell themselves that only science advances , because only science validates itself effectively in relation to the real world.

It is true that embracing a very rich style
of ideation of like that of continental philosophers encourages mediocre thinkers to confuse vagueness and vacuity with profundity. Most of the academic output is of this sort. At the other end of the spectrum, less talented empirically oriented researchers an clog up
the research pipeline with hyper-detailed studies on trivial
themes. So we have the dangers of vacuous in coherence at one end and mind-numbing conformity at the other.

It's just personal bias to suggest that there's a direction of thought that they should be moving toward but aren't (or are doing so too slowly). It's not as if all the philosophers in the philosophy of science have all agreed on anything, there's no "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists" on any issue at all. — Isaac

It certainly is a personal bias. . But that’s all we have to rely on in the end , even with all our empirical proofs.
You’ll never find any issue in which all the psychologist agree either, but that shouldn’t stop them from saying ‘ "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists". And they do that all the time. ( extended mind and enactivism vs pp). Again, I shouldn’t have put this as a rivalry between empiricism and philosophy. I think i the leading edge of psychology is close to the same page as the leading edge of philosophy ( phenomenology).

That we're not not programmed with the means to do so? Why would assume we are? We're just animals evolved to behave in a certain way. Why would you assume our programming just maps 1-to-1 onto the way the world "is"?

That we're not not programmed with the means to do so? Why would assume we are? We're just animals evolved to behave in a certain way. Why would you assume our programming just maps 1-to-1 onto the way the world "is"?

Did you mean for there to be a period there?

Who spoke of anything absolute, or of any game? I repeat: To ask what sort of entity is a number is not any more pernicious than to ask what sort of entity is a chair. Let's not get confused by numbers. Or by chairs. These are the simple stuff. — Olivier5

Numbers are simple stuff? I disagree. The philosophy of math is rich. How do numbers exist? But philosophers can't even decide if they see a chair or the image of a chair. Etc.

Obviously. Everyone has a bias, that's part of the contingency of knowledge. You can't escape your culture, history, etc. when you are making claims or having views or positions. — Dharmi

That's something a 'sophist' or 'pomo' 'obscurantist' would say.

Despite our little ideological clash, I do hope you are enjoying the forum, and it's good that not everyone here sees things the same way.

I ultimately agree with Popper about metaphysics. Also, please take what I write with a grain of salt. I'm joking and not joking, pushing buttons, trying to loosen up fixed ways of thinking. I'll probably stop bothering those ultimately enjoy wriggling in this particular spiderweb. I will sum up my view though: a crude materialism and a crude idealism are two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

The problem or comedy is that philosophical realizations (breakthroughs, revolutions) don't necessarily provide wonder-working technical power.
— norm

The philosophical realisation that underlies our world began with Descartes’ algebraic geometry combined with Newton’s and Galileo’s science. That philosophical revolution certainly provided wonder-working technical power. You’re looking at it. — Wayfarer

Norm is referring to a different philosophical breakthrough than that of enlightenment era science( the later Wittgenstein , and I would add to that a boat of other post Hegelian philosophies that have yet to be translated into wonder-working technical power). I anticipate that these more recent philosophical realizations will produce a new generation of technologies. They are already being translated into artificial intelligence platforms.