I'm against vague blanket criticism of some body of work called 'postmodernism'. — mcdoodle

What about vague blanket criticism of analytic philosophy?

You juxtaposed this to my remark that analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power. I'm not clear what point you're making. — mcdoodle

How would works like "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism" or "Naming and Necessity" be rewritten if their authors weren't blind in the way that you say?

following their own interests and those of their peers and their funders. — mcdoodle

This is true even of Mother Teresa. That scientists get special attention for this from post-modernists is very interesting.

You juxtaposed this to my remark that analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power. I'm not clear what point you're making. Philosophers aren't scientists and obviously shouldn't be mistaken for them. — mcdoodle

What sort of powers was Frege blind to in his work?

The linguistic view of philosophy is stupid. Questions about the ocean are not questions about the word 'ocean' – why anyone would think this about knowledge, truth, and so on is something we should diagnose as a historical error in reasoning, not as a philosophical position we take seriously. — The Great Whatever

Here's why he did it in his own words:
"What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."

Dolphins are better at it.

You might believe the best was achieved by Spinoza, but won't it always be possible that I could disagree with you, just as I might disagree with you that Mozart's music is greater than Bach's or Beethoven's, or Miles Davis'. — John

Better is not the word to use for things like philosophy and art. Mozart's music was created and appreciated by a civilization that had never heard of Miles Davis. Jazz was created and sustained by a civilization that appreciated Mozart.

Quine and Davidson are philosophers who inherited the legacy of Kant (and everything that Kant inherited), modern science and the logic of Frege. Kant did not live to see post-Newtonian physics or modern logic.

It is not exactly the same thing for science. As remarked by Bouveresse, there are Aristotelian philosophers today, but no Aristotelian physicists.

It beggars belief that this sort of thing is worth so much ink poured. People do what they do. Nature is the way it is. They have to intersect. Duh,,,,

f you need me to reiterate -- this does not effect the truth of said theories. Things are true or not true, regardless of interests. — Moliere

Thank you.

as the hard sciences go that usually means catering to either war or medicine in some fashion. — Moliere

What war funded Maxwell's research that got us his equations on electromagnetism?

Analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power, it is mostly conducted in an imagined world of equals engaging in unrhetorical dialectic. — mcdoodle

What about the world of mathematics and the hard sciences? The dialectic may be rhetorical but the physical world does what it wants.

governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. — SEP

There are also constraints imposed by the material world. In activities closely tied to the material world like counting, we find a lot less variation across cultures, and once asked, questions like "is multiplication commutative" admit only one answer.

Proofs can be scientific proofs, — Samuel Lacrampe

In the sense of things like paternity tests.

Scientific theories themselves are never proven. The greatest honours go to scientists who overthrow the most established theories.

No excuses for you free-thinking heathens now:

"Automating Godel’s Ontological Proof of God’s Existence ¨
with Higher-order Automated Theorem Provers"
http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/cbenzmueller/papers/C40.pdf

Feel free to attack the reductionism chapter in the 'Dreams" book too. I will defend both.

Yes, and I was reminding you that your take on "this debate" shouldn't motivate your dismissal of Ramberg's unrelated piece, — Pierre-Normand

Could you show me where I dismissed Ramberg's piece.

I am not optimistic about debating you given your tactics.

I picked the text. You fire the first salvo.

then maybe you can tell me what specific pro-reductionist argument Weinberg makes that strikes you as being very strong and/or generally ignored in the philosophical literature. — Pierre-Normand

Challenge accepted. I propose as reference his Reductionism Redux collected in Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries

But most of them had (or still have) an obfuscatory style of writing — jkop

You forgot the gratuitous name dropping.

I thought you might have been open to considering Rorty's own views regarding reductionism. — Pierre-Normand

From this sentence of yours alone, I am very sure you have no idea what they are.

There is no such thing as "this debate"... — Pierre-Normand

I was referring specifically to the Bouveresse v Rorty debate....

But most of them had (or still have) an obfuscatory style of writing — jkop

I feel your pain. They will say something like

There is no self-sufficient and uninterpreted use of the formalism of quantum theory that can be of any use in making predictions of empirical observations. — Pierre-Normand

to make the same point as

doing washing machine settings based on what the manual says — Frederick KOH

His defense of reductionism, though, is fairly naive, philosophically uninformed, and sharply contradicts the pluralistic/pragmatist viewpoints that I have defended here and that you claim to be "banal". — Pierre-Normand

My eyes glaze over when I see claims like this, these critiques, when unpacked and compared with the exact words actually said by the target, usually show themselves to be talking about something else from what philosophically mature scientists mean.

Rorty and His Critics, Brandom ed. — Pierre-Normand

Actually I brought up Bouveresse v Rorty earlier in the thread - also in the volume. This debate is more "classical" in terms what you would expect in a realist v postmodernist fight.

So you have real targets instead of carricatures.

But I am dissapointed Steven Weinberg is not on your list.

I suggest you fight him instead of shadow boxing. He is good on reductionism. You want a real fight, fight him.

Wrong.

It is a sign of a successful discipline when expansion and specialization occur. Some shut up and calculate, others work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, others do philosophically tinged popularizations and some do combinations of the three.

You seem to need a caricature for banal arguments to be effective against.

Scientists are people too, they... — Pierre-Normand

They? Most don't care.

You also still are dodging the main point regarding the inevitability of an at least tacitly understood background of conceptual practice and shared concerns and interests for sustaining claims of scientific objectivity. — Pierre-Normand

Banalities don't need to be dodged.

Yes, and you didn't contradict it, whereas mine was contradicting yours. — Pierre-Normand

then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer — Pierre-Normand

In the generation that included Bohr and Heisenberg and many more. You are contradicting reality.

What is true to the point of banality is a fortiori true. — Pierre-Normand

When something is banal , its the banal and not the a fortiori that people notice.

I was responding to your claim that "The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm." — Pierre-Normand

And I was responding to your claim that

When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer. — Pierre-Normand

I am rather arguing that such material sciences aren't any different from other sciences in point of reliance on (often merely tacit and uncritical) interpretation of the scope of their claims (e.g. the interpretation of their "laws", and of what would constitute falsification of then, or admissible auxiliary hypotheses, or genuine boundaries of the domain of the specific science, — Pierre-Normand

Put in such general terms, it is true to the point of banality.

I am also questioning the reductionist assumption that material composition of the ordinary objects of the human and natural worlds are any more fundamental or determinative than other equally significant (in point both of definition and behavioral determination) formal and relational features of them. — Pierre-Normand

Why should reductionists bother entomologists more than - say - nudists?

I am also questioning the reductionist assumption that material composition of the ordinary objects of the human and natural worlds are any more fundamental or determinative than other equally significant (in point both of definition and behavioral determination) formal and relational features of them. — Pierre-Normand

It doesn't bother entomologists. It is possible for some of them to never utter or write the word "quark" throughout their entire professional life. Or even proton for that matter.

It's mostly the young folks with open... — Pierre-Normand

When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer. — Pierre-Normand

So, some scientists do this and others do that. Those who do this tend to be older than those who do that. Got it.

So, this allegedly broad agreement among different sorts of scientists, regarding ultimate material composition, would be agreement about very little that is of significance to the understanding of the empirical world (unless one is a rather naive and uncritical reductionist). — Pierre-Normand

What was this broad agreement (if there was one) like in 1000AD (or 1000CE if you like)?
Significance indeed.

When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer. — Pierre-Normand

The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm.

In that case, when they specialize in the science of hammers, they are happy to proclaim that the whole world is made up of nails and nothing else. — Pierre-Normand

I am very sure ornithologists agree with chemists and physicists about what birds are made out of.

Scientist sometimes tend to be dogmatic and philistine, especially when they are faithful to the religions of scientism and reductionism. — Pierre-Normand

It would be more accurate to say that most are apathetic to philosophy and too indifferent to care about whether what they do is scientism or reductionism. Those who care slightly more can always call their "ism" methodological and leave the debate to philosophers.

The indispensability of human interpretation in the cognitive apprehension of empirical objets turns out to apply across the board, — Pierre-Normand

As long as we don't call all of it (the interpretation) "philosophy", which was my original point.