On The Philosophy of, well, Philosophy

Exactly. That's why you can't show me the rigor. The results. The results of the scientific method are indisputable and obvious. No reasonable person can deny that empiricism has been the most successful means of inquiry into the world around us that human beings have ever developed. And then what? They rebut the criticism, or they ignore it, but their status as a philosopher is unchanged; indeed, their cachet may very well increase as a result of the controversy they cause. Certainly people do not stop studying their work; rather, it becomes even more featured in the curricula as more and more people say its nonsense.Like I 've been saying. In science wrong models are discarded. In philosophy, they're enshrined. See Aristotle V. Plato. Plato, as it turns out, was entirely wrong. Yet all of philosophy is sometimes described as "footnotes to Plato." All that for being wrong?Come on. There's obviously no rigor in philosophy; you people can't even tell which of your guys are right or wrong. Not a problem we have often in the sciences. I cannot explain it philosophically, which is my entire point. Philosophy is not equipped to discern how these techniques actually work.It is sufficient that they do work. No reasonable person can deny this, surely. Not philosophically, no.Yet, reasonable people come to precisely the position you say they can't, which suggests to me what I've been saying all along, philosophers don't act like reasonable people. Reasonable people know that seeing, largely, is believing. That empiricism is verified empirically. It works because we observe that it works. And since we all agree that philosophy lacks the rigor to discern truth, that's a mug's game. That's why I'm not playing. So stick with observation. It's sufficient to observe that empiricism is better than theology (for instance), particularly since the why is apparently an unanswerable question with the tools that we have.

There's no consensus in philosophy. Similarly, theology and economics. In the sciences, consensus emerges because wrong models decrease in support as they fail observational and experimental tests.In philosophy, economics, and theology, the popularity of a model is determined not by its consistency with all observation or experiment, but rather by the degree to which it is consistent with the previously-held ideologies of its supporters. I agree. Aristotle V. Plato, unresolved after 2300 years, proves that philosophy lacks this fundamental characteristic. Similarly, the 100,000 different human religions, mutually inconsistent on every point of dogma, proves that theology lacks this fundamental characteristic. Similarly, the various schools of economics, whose support depends on the degree to which they stake positions most suitable to various political parties in democracies, prove that economics also lacks this fundamental characteristic.So, thank you, Subbie. You've just proven what I've been saying all along - philosophy, theology, and economics are fields with no rigor.

Would you agree that if a philosopher were to voluntarily abide by whatever criteria of truth you accept as rigorous, his philosophy would be rigorous? But how do you convince them that results make something better? Rational people will agree that empiricism is a good system for many things, but that there are also other means that are equally as good or better in other things. But their support may go down and their argument goes away. You know, this happens in science too. As in philosophy. Only as a historical point of note. The history of man's thinking is important in the same way as knowing the history of scientific thought is important. It gives necessary context for learning how philosophy got to where it is today. Footnotes don't have to agree with their subject, Crash. A lot of thought was advanced by the very act of criticising ancestral philosophers. Some people say that Darwin's theory is the most important theory ever - but the fact that most of Darwin's theory was wrong doesn't discredit science or the import of his theory on the theories that proceeded from it. I didn't ask you to explain it philosophically. Just explain it. I can say who I think was right here, and who was wrong there. Just like you have to with science. I can give reasons for it. As you can in science. Not only can philosophy not do it. But nothing can. It can do it philosophically, literarily, humanitarily, scientifically, logically, nothing at all can discern without any doubt as to what is a true or not. When I asked you stop bringing philosophy into this point I also meant to ask you to stop bringing derivative words as well.NOTHING CAN DO IT. What position is that? Philosophers don't act like normal people. Normal people are irrational. That's the problem that philosophers face when trying to make sense of the world - how possible is it for a being so enshrined in irrationality to understand something about the world?Would you consider the work of Dan Dennett to be lacking in rigour or as being unreasonable? Why do you value observation as a means to determining the truth about the world? What observation shows that empiricism is better than theology?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Ah, but now you are treating rigor as a binary entity. Either on or off. Of course, it doesn't work that way, even in science. A scientific idea can be generally accepted as true, but with some scientists not accepting it. A scientific idea can be regarded as having something accurate to say without nailing down all the details.Neither rigor nor consensus is an all or nothing proposition. Good thing for science that this is the case. I dare say there are few, if any, meaningful scientific theories that have been universally accepted in toto by the scientific community. The search for 100% consensus in any field is an exercise in futility. Really? Please name a single current philosopher who believes that the material world is not the real world but simply a shadow of the real world. Or, in the alternative, name the last one to so hold.You've made quite a number of broad, sweeping statements in this thread about a subject which, by your own admission, you've spent little or no time studying. Can you say Gish Gallop?

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

No, I'm actually not - as my post makes abundantly clear - but please don't let the facts get in the way of misrepresenting me again. I'm sorry? To which specific admission are you referring to? Perhaps you could quote it.

Would you agree that a philosopher who did not specifically employ empiric verificationism (or whatever) but merely justified his argument by recourse to logic would find his arguments rejected by the entire philosophical community?I doubt very much that that would happen. Presumably I could find many examples of philosophers accepting philosophical arguments on a less-than-rigorous basis. That has not been my experience with the field of philosophy. Darwin is justly memorialized by the scientific community because of the correctness of his theory, not because it was wrong. It's things like Lamarkianism and Lysenkoism that were rejected for being largely wrong.But philosophers enshrine their Lamarks and their Lysenkos, competing schools of philosophers debate the merits of their points among themselves, and the debates are never settled because philosophy provides no way to know who is right and who is wrong - a case you're abundantly making for me, incidentally.To pretend like this doesn't happen is to betray a great ignorance of philosophy as a community. I realize that you, as a philosopher, think this. And I realize that philosophy gives you no reason to think otherwise.So stop thinking like a philosopher and start thinking like a scientist. Start using the evidence around you to arrive at conclusions. You don't need to be told how to do it. You don't need to be told how it works, or why it works. It's sufficient to observe that it does work, and if you think it doesn't, well, Mod, where do you think that computer you're using right now came from? It sure didn't come from philosophy. That they can come to good conclusions about what is true or not, not simply what is valid or not. That they can discern good models from bad, and reject the bad ones. You say it's impossible. I observe that people are doing it all the time.As a result, I don't believe you. I have one or two of his books, so I know he makes a good college try; but what he's doing is hopeless. He wants to inject some degree of rigor into a field that can't support it, into a community that doesn't want any.Well, I wish him luck on his uphill battle. If, in subsequent decades, he succeeds in reforming philosophy into his own image, I'll have cause to revisit my conclusions.But the fact that philosophers as a community aren't paying him much mind - that they're just throwing up their arms and saying "well, his argument is valid; so are the arguments of his opponents; who the hell knows?" - just continues to prove me right. Because it works, as any reasonable person knows. Only philosophers have a problem accepting that, but it's a mental problem endemic to their field, as I've explained. You're reading this message, aren't you? Was it engineers or priests who created your computer?

Well, for starters you could respond to the question I asked in the post you are responding to. How many more do you want?

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

We covered that more than 100 posts ago. I'm not even the one who brought up Aristotle v. Plato, remember? That was an example from your side of the aisle.I'm not going to keep repeating myself - and defending the claims of your side - simply because people like you are late to the party. Go back and read; don't ask me questions that I've answered in previous posts.

I asked one simple question, the name of a current or the latest philosopher who argues that the material world is not the real world. Are you maintaining that you provided the name of that person earlier in this thread? Or are you simply obtusely misunderstanding that simple question?

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin FranklinWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

Well, for instance, it's the current position of the Church of Christian Scientists that all reality is merely the thoughts of God; as "one single name", you might pick any one of their leading theologians.The philosophers of the Cambridge School embraced Plato's idealism as recently as 1700; Wikipedia can provide you with the specific names of any of those individuals. Cambridge continued to be a home for idealists with the publishing of Taggert's The Unreality of Time, in 1927. About ten years before, Josiah Royce was defending so-called "objective idealism" in his work. Lachelier did some work on it in the 1960's, and P.F. Strawson was perhaps the most notable figure to argue against realism, naturalism, and empiricism until his death in 2006.But, like I said, we covered this pages ago. The contention that Aristotle v. Plato was unsettled was certainly not my own, merely one that I accepted at face value from my opponents. Maybe you should take it up with them the next time you'd like to see your peers support their contentions. I'm busy enough handling the four of you without having to do your homework for you, too.

I'll take your response as a yes and ask a follow up. If philosophy can theoretically be rigorous, why do you criticize it all, rather than just the bits you find unrigorous (such as metaphysics and theology etc)? Do you think that nobody practices philosophy in this fashion? Are the actions of philosophers a reflection on the subject itself?I will answer with a yes, though 'entire' is a funny word. I wouldn't expect all people that called themselves a philosopher would reject all things - nor would I expect it to be instantaneous. I'd imagine people would examine the idea, students may cut their teeth on it by criticizing the work. Eventually the field will lose interest and move on somewhere else. Perhaps you could. But how many of those philosophers will be people who examine your own philosophy? Consider analytical philosophy or logical empiricism for example. These are the philosophies that abide by the rules of rigour you consider important. Consider Dan Dennett, who came 'out of the closet as a verificationist'. He did a fascinating philosophical lecture on consciousness. (That's part 3 of 6, which jumps straight into deja vu). Since you were unable to even read a philosophical definition that I included in one of my posts - I have to wonder about possible cognitive blind spots over the issue. This is the problem with pure empiricism - subjective experience is awful at getting to the truth of a matter. In my experience it has been one way, in yours it has been the other. I have since this debate has started, read a lot of philosophy sources. I have reason to suspect you haven't. Right now -I'm more confident in my point of view than yours. Can you provide me with some reading material that might help convince me otherwise? Of course it wasn't memorialized for being wrong, yet it was mostly wrong. No - like science, the enshrinement is as a history of thought. Feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.Here is a philosophy course I found:

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Platonic Philosophy as a Mathematical Enterprise
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Dmitri Nikulin
This course involves a discussion of Plato’s theoretical philosophy as a Pythagorean mathematical enterprise, its criticism in Aristotle, and a reconciliation of the two approaches in Proclus’ reading of Euclid.

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So there you go, Plato's ideas, their criticism and their resolution as part of the evolution of the thought of man. That's my own experience with Plato. Maybe. So show me otherwise. Don't try and argue or assert otherwise. Show me otherwise - give me some substance, something to chew on. I'm growing tired of rhetoric and crave some evidence. I'm not a philosopher by qualification or by trade. By qualification I'm an electronic engineer and by trade I'm in software testing. You really do like bringing philosophy into the equation. It's perfectly simple challenge. Without engaging in philosophy. Without mentioning anything philosophical can you discern what is true beyond any doubt. OK. As an interim scientist I accept the principle of fallibilism or tentativism (which you also do), I hereby state that I cannot know if something is true for definite beyond any doubt. So, are you saying that without any training whatsoever in how to think your average human will be able to engage in science and disregard superstition? I think I have an abundance of information to the contrary on that position, if you'd like me to discuss it. I don't say it is impossible, just that normal people without any training are terrible and reaching conclusions at the cutting edge of knowledge. That's why there are compulsory science classes - to teach kids the best way to think. OK, what about these Patricia Churchland? Bertrand Russell? I'm basically going through the Analytical philosophers (aka modern philosophers) here. I'm sure some of them have let their rigour drop here and there, but would you consider them basically unreasonable/unrigorous? Is it? I hadn't noticed. Sure there are criticisms, and eventually one way of thinking will gain primacy on the strength of the merits of each argument. I hadn't noticed any of the philosophers saying 'who the hell knows, everyone is equally valid.'. I've maybe heard 'He has a good argument there, but I can't help feeling compelled by her line of reasoning. Neither are refuted by facts, neither are logically unsound. Hmm, this needs further discussion - perhaps one of the consequences of one of the ideas leads to a logical impossibility or something that is shown to be contrary to the evidence' Engineers obviously. Why is a computer 'better' than understanding an eternal soul? That's the argument you have to win, I'm on your side, but others aren't. To convince them, you can't point at a computer and say 'look how great it is' because they have on this very board replied 'I don't doubt that science has its uses, but where theology and science clash, theology wins'. To argue them from that position requires a philosophical argument, and it is unfortunately an uphill battle not helped by the state of the education system in many parts of the world.

You haven't answered my question, I notice. "Can be rigorous" is irrelevant if there's no requirement to actually be rigorous, as is true in philosophy. Voluntary rigor is no rigor at all if non-rigorous conclusions are accepted right alongside rigorous ones, as they are in philosophy.This is such a head-strikingly obvious point that I wonder why I have to explain it to an adult. Gosh, Mod, I wouldn't expect you to argue from a position you thought was wrong.Nonetheless, you have remained unable to show me the rigor. Nonsense. Look up "schools of philosophy" on Wikipedia, there's a whole list of them, and you'll see that nearly every school has its origins sometime in either the medieval West or in ancient Greece, and has or has had proponents right up to the 20th century.Plato v. Aristotle, of course, is the great debate between two schools of philosophy that can't both be right; while Aristotelean logic may seem obvious to you and to me, Plato's idealism has a whole host of 20th century defenders - not just people studying the thought, but people defending the position - a few of whom I named in another post. I did, in a previous post. Look, Mod, you're going to have to read everything I'm posting on this thread. I'm arguing with too many of you to answer the same questions over and over again. Subbie already asked me to substantiate my claims about the philosophical community, and I have given examples that have done so. Maybe you didn't notice but it is, after all, the subject of this thread. I think they have to be taught superstition by philosophers, yes. Children don't believe in Santa Claus because they observe evidence that leads them, each independently, to that conclusion. They believe in Santa because their parents teach them to do so. It's the field that lacks rigor, not individual philosophers, Mod. Sure, Russel and Dennet and other analytic philosophers may very well be operating from a position of rigor. More power to them if they are.But the problem is the field that accepts their rigorous conclusions right along side the non-rigorous conclusions of someone else, that treats both conclusions as essentially the same and equally valid.It would be like telling scientists "you can cleave to the scientific method and the rigorous peer-review process; or you can not. You don't have to. We're going to treat the results of both processes the same."It would be the end of rigor in the sciences, just as it was the end of rigor in philosophy (before it had even begun.)Optional rigor is not any kind of rigor, Mod. A field that accepts rigorous conclusions right alongside non-rigorous ones has no rigor at all. Not that I can observe, and not that any of you have been able to provide examples of. Plato V. Aristotle is defended on both sides right up here to the present day, 2300 years later. That's not indicative of right ideas gaining primacy over wrong ones, as is what happens in the sciences. That's indicative of slow fragmentation along ideological lines, like in economics, theology, and religion. In rigorous fields, right ideas come to dominate. In non-rigorous ones, schools fracture into sub-schools with mutually inconsistent, competing ideas - because there's no way to reject the wrong ideas.And that's precisely what has happened in philosophy. Just look at Wikipedia's list of philosophical schools if you don't believe me.

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I will answer with a yes, though 'entire' is a funny word. I wouldn't expect all people that called themselves a philosopher would reject all things - nor would I expect it to be instantaneous. I'd imagine people would examine the idea, students may cut their teeth on it by criticizing the work. Eventually the field will lose interest and move on somewhere else.

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Great - my point is that the very notion of rigorousness was argued for by philosophers. I have been saying from the beginning that your problem isn't with all of philosophy but with certain parts of philosophy. I realize your argument is that philosophy doesn't require this rigour, so let me get to that.When someone says to me 'philosophy' I think of a field where humans think about reality and what it is, what true things can be said about it and so on. We cannot require a human being to have rigorous thought. If they postulate about the nature of reality they are a philosopher. Since we cannot control thought, if someone was to engage in unrigorous philosophy it would still be philosophy. Thus - there is no way to 'require' rigorousness in philosophy - but one can demand it.That's just the way the word is defined, if you would like we can describe two types of philosophy. Rigourous and unrigourous. The latter I agree is useless and vapid full of meaningless nonsense. The former is not.Let me redefine my terms, erroneously, for the sake of simplicity. Let us say that analytical philosophy is the only rigorous philosophy (since we both agree that it may well be). Analytical philosophy states that philosophy should be a field of rigour. They cannot make it so, there is no way to make human thinking rigorous, but we can try and convince people to think rigorously. We applaud analytical philosophy for its efforts in trying to rigourise a field that has for too long been unrigorous, and its successes in doing so. Since analytical philosophy is a subset of philosophy, it would be untrue if one was to argue that the universal set of philosophy was an unrigorous pursuit.If you can agree with that, we are basically in agreement.

I agree, side, except that the observation assumes a different character for me.I don't view the 'rulings of science' as 'subsuming' philosophy in any new way. Philosophy has always sought to address established facts. Scientific inquiry has just multiplied the number of facts to consider.[AbE:] (Of course, as Modulous is explaining, science and empiricism are themselves objects of interest when the subject turns to epistomology.)Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.

It seems that some folk here are forgetting that the notion that 'truth' can be obtained through observation of the 'natural world' is itself a philosophy”one used by Aristotle himself, in fact.To those 'some folk' (and they know who they are), I would like to ask how it is they have discerned several things:1) that 'truth' is derived from 'reality'
2) that 'reality' is knowable
3) what 'reality' is...that should do for now. I'd also like to wonder what on Earth it is they do with all that 'reality' they have heaped up around them. I mean, so the Earth goes around the Sun... now what? What do we do with all of this 'truthful reality' that we suddenly 'know'?I asked this question before, and it didn't get answered. If it goes unanswered this time, I think we can consider the position of those 'some folk' to be null, and we can all throw a big philosophy parade.Jon

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In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist... might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. - Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species
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En el mundo hay multitud de idiomas, y cada uno tiene su propio significado. - I Corintios 14:10
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A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise. - Colin Wells Sailing from Byzantium