On The Philosophy of, well, Philosophy

Thank you, AO, for a virtuoso performance of the philosopher's art.**That art being, of course, disingenuous sophistry.

Ah, if only that were true. Sadly, there was nothing either logical or clear about your post - just disingenuous sophistry. You assert that certain questions are best handled by philosophy and philosophers, yet I can't find a single part of your post that actually defends that view with evidence.Why is that? Funny, then, that actual scientific progress didn't meaningfully begin until more than 2000 years after your fabled dialog actually took place.Leave it to a philosopher to take credit for the work of others, I suppose. The fact that the views of both Plato and Aristotle continued to be held by both of their followers - even for centuries after - seems completely lost on you. If philosophy holds the power to answer these questions, why couldn't Plato and Aristotle settle the issue in 300 BC?Because philosophy is a field with no rigor. No way to detect and reject the incorrect answers. Plato and Aristotle could not settle the issue because philosophy provided them with literally no way to discern which of them was right.In science, no one continues to hold geocentric models of the solar system, since such models have been amply demonstrated to be incorrect. Science, as a field with rigor, provides a basis to reject incorrect models. Yet, despite the success of Aristotlian inquiry, Plato's idealism continues to be advanced to this day. Why wouldn't it? From what basis in philosophy could it be rejected?Philosophy is a field with absolutely no rigor. It's nothing more than a dumpster for questions that sound interesting to sexy sophomore co-eds but cannot, in all likelihood, be answered in any confident fashion. And a dumpster, too, for wags who like the sound of their own voices far too well to muzzle them with the rigorous requirements of science.

How soon they forget. Quoth you:

quote:

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What is the nature of valid knowledge?
Which kind of knowledge is most useful?
What constitutes relevance?
What is most important to human beings?

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All of these questions are philosophical questions.

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I'm simply asking you to defend your assertion that these are questions for philosophy. For instance, why is "what is most important to human beings" a question of philosophy? It seems to me to be a question better suited to empirical methods, where one might present a survey asking "what is most important to you?" to as many human beings as possible.That would be sociology, or anthropology, not philosophy. Same thing. To say that a question is a question of a certain field is to say that that field is best suited to answer that question. For instance, if I say that something is a "medical question", I'm asserting that the science of medicine is best equipped to address that question. Similarly, you've stated that the questions you listed were the province of philosophy.I'm simply asking you why I should accept that to be the case, when it's obvious that philosophy has no ability to answer any questions whatsoever; thus, it cannot be best suited to answer anything. It can, at best, be equally suited to answer answerless questions.

I don't see why. Remaining completely (and blissfully) ignorant of epistemology was never any impediment to my learning about the world around me. From my experience working with actual scientists I can inform you that the concerns of so-called "philosophy of science" are remote irrelevancies to the day-to-day work of scientists. Indeed the number of scientists I've ever met who give any thought to philosophy of science are few and far between.Even a child, completely ignorant of all thought in the "field" of epistemology, is able to learn about the world around them simply by keeping an open mind and open eyes. So, obviously, tackling the sophistry of epistemology is not a prerequisite to learning about the natural world. That's exactly my point. A field which can't settle even the most basic, fundamental questions of its discipline clearly lacks rigor and cannot meaningfully inform us about anything.It's ridiculous. It would be like biologists being completely unable to arrive at any consensus about whether or not populations grow to the capacity of their environment. Physicists completely unable to determine whether or not objects had mass. Chemists completely unable to determine whether or not HCl was an acid or base.Philosophy has no rigor. As a result, no philosophical model can be verified. No philosophical assertion can be defended except circularly. ("If you accept unknowable X as true, then Y must follow.") Call it the Samuel Johnson proof ("I refute it - thus!"), which of course was no philosophy at all but simply the obvious, empirical observation that, indeed, the world around us is what's real.Of course, the fact that kicking rocks is what we're reduced to only confirms my view that philosophy can't provide answers to any questions. Johnson's "proof" not only refutes solipsism, it refutes philosophy altogether. There is no "philosophy as a whole." Philosophy, of course, was originally all forms of thinking about things - mathematics/logic, empirical science, etc. As the rigorous fields were spun off into disciplines of their own right, philosophy came to represent only those things that, with no rigor, were of no use to those seeking real knowledge. Those things that could not answer questions, in other words.Philosophy is a dumpster. If you think the be-all and -end-all of knowledge is to ask the question, then obviously philosophy has endless appeal to you. If you're someone who believes that answers are more useful, then you'll correctly see philosophy as a dumping ground for bullshit that sounds impressive until you stop and think about it.

If we're simply going to reduce to this back-and-forth - where every means of addressing a certain question gets absorbed into "philosophy" when I try to pose alternatives - then you're only making my point for me.If everything can be philosophy, then there's no such thing as philosophy.

I can answer it by gaining some evidence, and seeing if my knowledge is accordingly extended. Why is that question meaningful or relevant to the gaining of knowledge? Particularly if epistemology gives us no tools to actually answer it? But the scientists have access to tools that, eventually, will settle their dispute. Science provides a framework to settle questions and disputes.That's why the only modern proponents of geocentricism are the insane and the ignorant - science has settled the dispute.What disputes has philosophy ever settled? None, as far as we can tell. Philosophy does not provide a means of discerning true positions from false ones, because it has no rigor. The best it can seem to do is to tell us when conclusions come logically from premises - and therefore which arguments are well-formed - but that's largely an exercise of logic, which is properly considered mathematics and not philosophy, and that doesn't help us distinguish which arguments that come logically from their premises are based on true premises.In philosophy, that's always left as an exercise to the reader. If everything is philosophy then nothing is. You're just proving my point. Why are philosophers so intent on taking the credit for other people's work?How strange it must be to be a philosopher walking down the street, seeing people - the baker, the bricklayer, the typesetter - engaged in activities that philosophers have been told they made possible. What a sense of one's own importance one must have when one believes that the entire scope of human endeavor owes its existence to one's graduate thesis!How preening and arrogant. Not philosophically, no, which is my entire point. Philosophy simply can't even detect the obvious rightness of empiricism. It's so useless it can't even detect what everyone, even children, know - seeing is believing. I doubt the Dean is going to close the Philosophy department just because I don't see any intellectual merit in the field. For one thing, they'd have to close down Theology and Economics, next.And anyway, graduate students do need to get laid. The study of philosophy has always had merit in that application. So by all means, let people continue to dirty themselves in the Philosodumpster. I'm simply not willing to pretend that they're doing anything useful. Only what I've presented so far. As I gain more, I'll let you know.

I addressed this point. Can you respond to the rebuttal, please?

You can, though. Just about every scientist I've ever met is.Don't you find that significant? That the concerns of "philosophy of science", supposedly so crucial to scientific inquiry, are in practice completely ignored and dismissed by nearly every practicing scientist? If everything is philosophy, NJ, then nothing is. You're not proving anything except philosophy's own uselessness. I don't have anything to add to how ridiculous this is except to say that there's few things more amusing than to watch people who have no experience with the sciences explain how it works. Except this is trivially disproven, NJ. People all over the world are ignoring philosophy and yet proving the Pythagorean theorem or learning about swallows.They're called "schoolchildren." Think about it, NJ. Schoolkids prove the Pythagorean theorem in 9th grade (at least, at my school, although I might have been in accelerated math. I don't remember.) Yet almost nobody studies philosophy until they go off to college.So it's safe to say that the nation's ninth-graders are pretty ignorant of all epistemological arguments; nonetheless, they're able to do something you claim can't be done without the contributions of philosophers.It's the same old pattern. Philosophers salve their wounded pride by taking credit for the accomplishments of others. "Everything comes back to philosophy", they say, even though nothing does. If everything is philosophy, then nothing is. Obviously. You're not doing anything but proving my point the more you try to give philosophy the credit for my arguments.

Not everything can be. Not everything is. Not every statement is. Not everything is a skyscraper.On the other hand, I've been repeatedly informed that "everything is philosophy", which really means that nothing is philosophy. See, the limits are important. The limits are part of establishing rigor.But "everything is philosophy." Thus, there is no rigor in philosophy. There is no philosophy, it can answer no questions because it can't distinguish between truth and fiction - only between fallacy and tautology.

Well, I hope it's becoming abundantly obvious why some of us so disdain philosophers, particularly ones like AO who say much and mean little.Isn't it at least somewhat instructive that the only way it seems philosophy can be defended is for its defenders to act like complete assholes?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Yes. No rigor. In science, inaccurate models are rejected. In economics, they're enshrined.Economists still argue about whether economies are driven by supply or by demand. A field that cannot settle even the most fundamental of its questions is a field with no rigor.There's a very good reason that the so-called "Nobel Prize in Economics" is not actually awarded by the Nobel Prize committee, but by a Swedish bank in his name. That's mathematics. It was not an economist who discovered e, Ang. Um, no. You're thinking of anthropology, which is the study of human beings. The study of religion as a human phenomenon is anthropology, or possibly sociology. Theology is the study of God, and like economics and philosophy, is a field with no rigor. What, are we to accept as valid any field that appends an "ology" to its name? What are your feelings, then, about dragonology? Wizardology? Unicorn science?Are we to have no standards at all, or must we place every made-up "science" on an equal footing with physics and chemistry?Not being able to distinguish between fact and fantasy doesn't add to knowledge, Ang. Knowledge only comes when truth can be distinguished from fiction. Fields such as philosophy and theology - and, yes, economics - have absolutely no ability to do that. Thus, they're of no value for contributing to human knowledge. They may be fun, or they may be useful for generating deep-sounding bullshit to impress undergrads, but, lacking rigor, they contribute nothing to human knowledge.Fantasy is fun, don't get me wrong. A great deal of my life is wrapped up in fantasy and fiction. But I can also distinguish between the fiction and the reality. How did you come to lose that ability, Ang?

There's a detectable physiological response when the brain learns a new skill, or new information. Why on Earth would that be the case? Except that philosophy doesn't settle any disputes. It never has; it can't. As mentioned - Plato vs. Aristotle, Round one. Still unsettled after 2300 years. That philosophy was completely unable to settle even the first major philosophical dispute is a pretty large mark against it's dispute-settling ability. There you go again, giving philosophers credit for the works of others.No, the work of astronomers like Galileo, Kepler, and Brahe settled geocentrisim by providing evidence that geocentrism was not an accurate description of the solar system. The philosophers - in the modern sense of the word - did nothing but tell Galileo he was wrong because he was employing empiricism instead of Plato's idealistic deductions. Logic may have originated with philosophers, but it was useless until refined and rigor-ized by mathematicians. Except empircially. Empiricism has held up to every empirical test.That this is epistemologically insufficient as verification is a problem with epistemology, not with empiricism. It is obvious that empiricism is valid. That philosophy cannot even detect what is obviously valid is indicative of the lack of rigor in the field. Yes, exactly. The fact that 2300 years of philosophy have been completely unable to justify something everyone knows is true - "I refute it thus!" - is philosophy's greatest failure.How could it be otherwise? We're sitting here, living lives of technological wonder in an age unmatched in terms of knowledge about the world around us, and philosophy still can't tell if empiricism is valid or not? What a colossal failure of philosophy! As I've successfully defended all my evidence against your ham-handed attacks, it looks like the opposite is true. You continue to act like what I'm doing is philosophy. That, more than anything else, is what refutes your own argument.

Hell, why wouldn't it be? Everything else is! Sure. Hell, we do that all the time. "I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it." Or SETI's search for extraterrestrial intelligence. What is intelligence? SETI doesn't know, but they pretend like it's "the ability to build a radio telescope" in order to do their jobs.It's not necessary to know what knowledge is to know that you have some. If epistemology was a prerequisite for learning - and we're not born with master's degrees in epistemology - how could anyone ever learn anything? We'd remain as ignorant as babes our whole lives, unable even to learn about epistemology simply because we didn't already know epistemology.Obviously, learning happens completely divorced from any epistemological concerns. Epistemology is an irrelevancy. Not accurate ones, though. That's the basis on which is it rejected.On the other hand, there's no basis on which to reject an argument of philosophy, assuming that the argument is correctly formed. Philosophical arguments are either fallacious or tautological. Every single one.That's what it's like in a field with no rigor. I've been explaining what rigor is, throughout. It's the ability to discern between truth and fiction, reliably. It's the ability to detect wronginess, if you will.Philosophy doesn't provide that. Now, it does provide the ability, borrowed from mathematics, to distinguish between arguments that are well-formed - that is, are based on applying to premises a series of valid transformations - and those that are not, but that's not at all the same thing. Indeed it's known to be impossible for them to be the same thing. At least that's better than what theology provides but it's not sufficient to establish rigor. Every time empiricism is used, it validates empiricism. I don't know what you mean by "verificationism", it was empiricism about which we were speaking. There are none. The religious of which you speak may consider reality to be illusion, but certainly none of them act like this conclusion is at all obvious, or anything but the result of years of meditation, learning, and enlightenment. You're simply misrepresenting religious thought, here. That philosophers have a hard time seeing what is obvious to everybody else is not a mark in their favor, Mod. Perhaps you could speak to your cohorts about that? What they're telling me is that, not only can philosophy lead to learning, only philosophy leads to learning. To listen to NJ and AO, one cannot learn even the simplest thing until one has finished a master's program in philosophy. Never mind, of course, the legions of learned people who have done exactly that. Given, but which position is right? If your answer is "there's no way to know", that's exactly what I've been saying all along. If the whole of philosophy consists of debates that can't ever be resolved, confidently, in one direction or another - what the fuck use is it? How is my characterization of philosophy as a dumpster for unanswerable, impressive-sounding questions wrong if that's exactly what you admit philosophy to be?

Except that they're not at all easy, Java. Somehow you've managed to get it completely fucking backwards, probably based on something some self-important philosopher told you, once.Nothing in the world is easier than asking a question that can't be answered and acting like you did something wise. Finding actual answers to questions takes time, inquiry, and rigor.You want hard? Prove that P = NP. (Or that it doesn't.) It's an answerable question. And you think it's "too easy" to be bothered? Stop acting like a jackass.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Philosophers and theologists have jobs, too. Bullshit artists that can't get people to pay for their bullshit don't last very long. It's a kind of natural selection. That's was settled pretty quickly, actually, within about 30 years of the emergence of the problem due to the observations of Kirchhoff, Boltzmann, and Planck. Only a few decades after particle behavior of photons came to be observed, we had reconciled the particle and wave behaviors of light.Contrast that with Aristotle V. Plato, still raging on after 23 centuries. "Abiogenesis" isn't really a "basic principle" of anything, it's a field of study. By reading the writings that you're talking about - which is anthropology, the study of humanity.Maybe I just don't understand what you're trying to say. The study of human beings and human civilization through their writings and other artifacts is anthropology, it's not philosophy, theology, or economics. If a given field can't distinguish between reality and fiction - between what is true and what is false - what can it possibly contribute to human knowledge? Answer the question that I asked, then. What are your feelings on dragonology? Unicorn science? Are we supposed to accept anything at all as a science simply because its proponents say that it is?