From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Wed Apr 10 2002 - 17:10:36 MDT
Spudboy100@aol.com wrote........
I've often heard scientists call philosophical attention to their field
irrelevant at best, and confusing and destructive at worst. Indeed, many
scientists advise that philosophy should be avoided altogether. Steven
Weinberg, for example, named a chapter in his book Dreams of a Final Theory
"Against the philosophers". Murray Gell-Mann, meanwhile, has remarked that
philosophy "muddies the waters and obscures [the theoretical physicist's]
principal task, which is to find a coherent structure that works". He then
added that having a philosophical bias may cause a physicist "to reject a
good idea".
I tend to agree that (academic) Philosophy is a form of intellectual
masturbation that scientists would do well to avoid. One philosopher
invents a word then the rest of them sit around arguing what it means.
Philosophical analysis is so sterile and long-winded that it sucks any
energy out of a new idea or concept.
On www.att.ac (academic reform) site I am starting a "Philosophers into the
Community" campaign to close Philosophy Dpts. and force their denizens into
the real world of pubs and shopping malls to give any "benefit" of their
knowledge to the public, ala Socrates. Plato was a traitor to real
Philosophical debate by ghettoising it and making the debate remote and
pointless to everyone except for professional philosophers.
==============================================
It was an interesting article. I confess a similar degree of frustration
with philosophical discussion in the area of consciousness studies. The
amount of verbiage is massive and almost always goes nowhere useful from a
practical standpoint. Quite often it ends up feeding on itself in a
categorisation quest of doubtful utility. Every now and then one will find a
reasonable set of thought experiments that are helpful. Eg: Chalmers' Qualia
paper. A nice reductio argument. Even then, however, the practical use is
hard to see, except in the overall 'big picture' of philosophical
categorisation, although it may support a practical position taken in
modelling.
The PhysicsWeb article author proposes: "Why philosophy shouldn't be
avoided". Physicists, apparently, have differences of 'calibration' in their
mind of what reality is. The argument goes that "Because physicists haven't
labelled/categorised every flavour of any one (1st person) view of reality,
therefore Philosophy is required". The logic says: alphabetical sorting by
colour of socks is necessary before you can wear them. Not very convincing.
At the end of the article if find I may be a "Hermeneutical realist". If I
cared enough to delineate myself into the various realist flavours...then
what? Will that change my approach to anything? I can now identify myself to
other philosophers, but that appears to be the only tangible outcome. Isn't
it more useful to realise that the great 'grounder' of all cognition: actual
reality (whatever you think it is), where all these people (physicists) do
their work, really what matters? Tangible, repoducable 'things' that predict
other things?
At the end of the article:
"By articulating the relationship between scientific practice to other kinds
of human activities, a fully articulated philosophical position would make
scientific judgements and decisions appear less abstract, strange and
arbitrary to outsiders"
_Less abstract_? Eh? Not from any reading of philosophy I've ever done. The
whole point of philosophy is abstraction.
To me this says:
Invent categories
Map reality into them
show it to J. Public
Ergo: all shall be clear for all Joe Publics
I'd have thought:
State plainly what you can really do.
explain plainly what may be possible as a result.
Let J. Public map it into their own internal truth buckets.
The existence of a set of calibrated buckets imposed by the first procedure
does not necessarily improve J. Public's position and assumes J.Public is
interested in the process. I say: Do something useful and explain it plainly
and you'll get listened to!
cheers,
Professor Bruce Hales, University of Woollongong Philosophy Dept (not).
Crack a tube.
* has got everyone snoring by now - see what happens? QED I rest my case,
whatever it may or may not have been *
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