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Why do physicists hate philosophy?

Last updated on 16 May 2014

NotDead
Coming soon as a movie to a philosophy department near you.

Lately there has been a slew of physicists making claims like this:

Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. [Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design 2011, p5]

My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning? [Neil deGrasse Tyson]

… physics has encroached on philosophy. Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then “natural philosophy” became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there’s a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers. This sense that somehow physicists, because they can’t spell the word “philosophy,” aren’t justified in talking about these things, or haven’t thought deeply about them. … Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.” And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it’s fairly technical. And so it’s really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I’d say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t. [Lawrence Krauss]

Physicists do of course carry around with them a working philosophy. For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism, a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific theories. But this has been learned through the experience of scientific research and rarely from the teachings of philosophers. This is not to deny all value to philosophy, much of which has nothing to do with science. I do not even mean to deny all value to the philosophy of science, which at its best seems to me a pleasing gloss on the history and discoveries of science. But we should not expect it to provide today’s scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their work or about what they are likely to find. [Steve Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p167]

My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here’s this great Dutch philosopher, and we’re laughing at him. It’s because there’s no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza’s propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can’t tell which is right.” [Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, p195]

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. [Ascribed to Feynman, but probably from Weinberg]

What is all this? Physicists used to not only value philosophy but do it. Einstein is a case in point; his contributions to his Schillp volume in Library of Living Philosophers are straight-out philosophical discussions of his theories and their implication for epistemology. Heisenberg is another example. Schrödinger another. Sometime after the second world war, however, physicists shifted from philosophical reflections about physics to cant against philosophy.

We might see this as a shift in education. Physicists after the nuclear and quantum age had to specialise much earlier and do more math than before. The liberal education of older physicists was trimmed down so that philosophy had almost no place in their training.

Or we might see it as a case of the industrialisation of physics. As “big science” took root, physics became more technological and high cost, and the practical exigencies of running accelerators and colliders became important. Industrial activities are rarely reflective.

Or we might see it as the hegemony of American pragmatism, eschewing theoretical problems in favour of just getting the job done.

But I think that the main reason is what we might think of as disciplinary over-reach. The deeper physics gets to fundamental realities, the less inclined physicists are to think that anything is beyond their reach. Philosophical problems abound in physics, of course. Krauss’ claim that “something comes from nothing” turns out to be a standard reductionist account: so-called particles are nothing but quantum fields and energy. The causes of quantum fields are not addressed, so something still has to be (philosophically) accounted for. Likewise the often made claim that philosophy makes no progress is simply the result of not thinking that progress is anything but physics. Debates over metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics have definitely made progress. What the physicists want, however, are fixed and final answers. And the irony here is that they don’t seem to get there either. While we are sure enough about some (not all) of the properties of fundamental particles and fields, there are an indefinitely large number of possible theories about them (10500, at last count, and rising). What was that about progress, again?

Disciplines in academe tend to compete for a decreasing amount of funding and resources, both in terms of money and students, and physics is very big business. The notion that people might do work that is relevant to what they do who are not physicists is seriously objectionable to some physicists. An old joke (due to Asimov, I think) is that while physicists need instruments, mathematicians only need pencils, paper and erasers, and the philosophers don’t even need erasers. But this is a real caricature of philosophy. Three days ago, I attended a talk by a philosopher who started out by saying that he had been wrong on a philosophical claim and was now recanting, and this is not uncommon. Philosophy’s standards of error, however, are conceptual, not empirical (although even philosophers make empirical claims from time to time), and the criteria for error correction have to do with such things as conceptual coherence, consistency with premises (which might in fact be empirical or scientific), and the plausibility of the conclusion.

As to the quite silly claim by Hawking and Mlodinow that philosophy – especially of science and most especially of physics – hasn’t kept up with recent developments, take a browse through journals like Philosophy of Science, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis or Studies in History and Philosophy of Science and tell me that philosophy is not keeping up (and, what is more, relating it to history of these disciplines, something the physicists do not do very well themselves often). Yes, there is also a lot of philosophy in these journals – they are after all philosophical journals – but often the physics being discussed is very up to date, much more so than the physicists’ grasp of philosophy.

That being said, there are two reasons why physicists might dislike philosophy.

One is that for a very long time, up until the late 1960s, philosophers of science attempted not only to analyse the ways science came to know the world, and to discuss the implications of science, but to establish scientific method. Although some of these philosophers were themselves very au fait with modern science, mostly physics, they were rarely active physicists, and some of their strictures, in particular those of Karl Popper, were faintly absurd. Popper denied that science could use induction, for example, and that discovery was a matter of chance or taste or inspiration. This of course is quite contrary to the experience of many scientists who do their discovery the old fashioned way, by gathering data and generalising from that.

When some philosophers started to say things like “Science is as valid as creationism” (as Feyerabend did), this understandably got up scientists’ noses, although this particular comment occurred in a philosophical debate about authority. But in the 1970s, the so-called postmodernists became prominent, and eventually predominant, and some postmodernists took Kant too far and asserted that we create our own worlds.Scientists, who deal with a recalcitrant world (as Huxley said, nature whispers ‘yes’ but shouts ‘No!’), found this ridiculous.

But it isn’t even the postmodern challenge that soured philosophy for scientists. It is, instead, the worst cases of that kind of philosophy. The antiscience movement took root and began to attack the very idea of science for a variety of good and bad reasons. Some, such as Sokal and Bricmont, attacked it as “Fashionable Nonsense”. Of course, every discipline has good and bad examples, and one can get a totally skewed view of philosophy if you rely upon popularisations or self-appointed media stars. Let me tell you, philosophy looks very different within the discipline than it does in the media.

It seems to me that it is time to stop these silly pissing contests. Philosophy is philosophy and physics is physics, and each can equitably accommodate the other with a bit of good will and charity.

87 Comments

  1. PHILOSOPHY’S NOT DEAD could make a good movie theme. The antagonist science professor insists that everybody in all of her classes confess that philosophy is dead or else fail the course. She’s tough cookies and feared by all. The protagonist student stands up to her while an epic debate unfolds. It turns out the professor was jilted by a philosopher in her past and compensates her feelings by hating philosophy….

  2. Stephen Watson Stephen Watson

    Our last book club meeting was on Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex, which is very much about this topic (she uses Krauss as a bit of a figurehead for the opposition). I’m also (slowly) reading Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and it seems to me that, whether or not philosophy today makes progress, that book was a landmark in our understanding of how we understand the world. Give up on trying to justify everything deductively from first principles; accept that we believe things about the world because our brains are wired that way — and the way is opened for a naturalistic account of cognition.

  3. Jeremy Bowman Jeremy Bowman

    I agree that Popper is often faintly absurd — when he’s not being………………………….. completely absurd! Induction is indeed a part of some science.

    But I wonder which scientists you have in mind here: “who do their discovery the old fashioned way, by gathering data and generalising from that.”

    The only people I can think of who do that are psychologists and statisticians, who call themselves scientists at every opportunity, but who really aren’t.

  4. Jeffrey Shallit Jeffrey Shallit

    I don’t think believing that some published philosophy is trivial junk, or that certain philosophers (e.g., William Lane Craig, David Stove, Edward Feser, Thomas Nagel) have said some remarkably stupid things — yet still seem to garner respect among their peers — amounts to “hate”. Certainly there’s a lot of good intellectual work being done in academic philosophy, but the amount of dreck I’ve read is rather appalling.

    I’m thinking, in particular, of Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”, which seems to be famous all out of proportion to its trivial content, and Feser’s “The Last Superstition”, which is a risible paean to his far right-wing opinions.

    • Scientists are justified in dismissing philosophy. As a philosopher myself, I understand their position. Philosophy did it to itself. Philosophy has been useless for about a hundred years now. German Idealism is a collection of mostly impenetrable, completely untestable theories about Being which never benefited anyone (except possibly Nazis). French philosophies like structuralism, post structuralism, and deconstruction conclude that nothing is knowable, in which case the entire enterprise of philosophy is moot.

      It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning, Pythagoras coined the term “philosopher” and brought to light the revolutionary idea that the cosmos is quantifiable, and therefore intelligible. Aristotle developed the logic on which science relies as well as categorization which is the underpinning of biology, geology, meteorology, optics, harmonics, etc.

      When Galileo developed his method of empiricism, he held a university position in mathematics. He insisted on being called a “philosopher” because he was proposing a new way of knowing. Back then, philosopher meant something.

      So what went wrong? I blame Rousseau. The Romantics split from the Enlightenment era scientists so they could follow their bliss. They gave up on truth and ceded the field to science. Ever since then, phenomenology, existentialism, deconstruction and the rest have sunk deeper and deeper into subjectivism, making the field irrelevant.

      It’s a shame, really. Philosophy is the foundation of academia. It is the source and structure of all knowledge. But until its gets off the fainting couch and gets back to work- it will continue to be irrelevant.

      • Have you ever heard of analytic philosophy? Try it sometime and stop accusing all philosophers of being Spätromantik.

        • Analytic philosophy has indeed been a boon to information technology, but it makes no claims to ultimate truth. Of course, since Boole and his “existential fallacy,” analytic philosophy doesn’t even claim that anything exists, let alone is true.

        • Boole is about fifty years before the analytic/continental split, and I do not even begin to know what you mean by “analytic philosophy doesn’t even claim that anything exists, let alone is true”. You seem to have this construct in your head about what philosophy is, but not one based upon actually, you know, reading it.

        • What exactly is the contribution of the analytic philosophers that the physicists and I are failing to appreciate? You’ve done an excellent job of insulting me, but you’ve failed to offer evidence in support of your position.

        • Ernst Nagel on the structure of theories; Carnap on ontology and theoretical construction; David Hull on the evolution of science; Kitcher on scientific advancement; Laudan on demarcation; van Fraassen on antirealism; Putnam on referential theories; etc., etc. Each of these spawned a host of physics-aware philosophy research programmes. I cannot educate you about that which you have no interest in a single post, let alone comment. Besides, I am not interested in changing the mind of someone who has a prior investment in the stupidity of philosophy; that is a fool’s errand.

    • Part of the difficulty is that in philosophy we must take at face value any and all arguments offered, no matter how weird the conclusions. Of course, we do not need to continue to take these arguments seriously once we have analysed and responded, but you cannot rule out an argument tout court, when it raises some interesting issues in a vivid way, as Nagel’s bat and Fodor’s Searle’s Chinese Room did. In philosophy it is the skill of the argument the same way that a magic trick is well regarded when it is difficult and deceptive. As to Feser’s views, I had never heard of them until recently. It was never undergraduate fare so far as I know.

      • “Fodor’s Chinese Room” ?!

        • I wrote that while very sick (still not 100%). But I would fail a student who said that, so I will rap myself on my knuckles with a three foot ruler.

  5. DiscoveredJoys DiscoveredJoys

    Perhaps because physicists (and by extension other scientists) are simplifiers looking for the most straightforward elegant explanations. Falsified hypotheses are rejected (phlogiston, the aether, perpetual motion).

    Philosophers, collectively, are complicators and many hypotheses cannot be falsified and are often elaborated. For instance there are still Thomist philosophers around and at least half a dozen ‘schools’ of Thomist thought.

    Occam’s Razor vs Crabtree’s Bludgeon, as it were.

    • Of course, the criterion of falsifiability was put forward by a philosopher…

  6. Aaron Clausen Aaron Clausen

    I think Kuhn and Popper did an enormous amount of damage to the “hard” sciences appreciation of philosophy. I have to admit, if I was a physicist, or really a researcher in any of the “hard” sciences, and I was confronted with someone waving their variant of philosophy of science, I’d snort, turn on my heals and vow never to listen to another philosopher on the topic of science again.

    • A hard science archaeologist friend of mine used to sign his emails with a quote from Popper, (until he got to know us a little better!)

      In my experience most scientists explicitly buy into “testability” or falsifiability as a criterion for real science. Popper provides a nice simple slogan that captures a piece of method. Check out some of the undergrad textbooks for lurking popperianism.

      Its also one of the factors that shape the experimental sciences prejudices and views of the historical sciences as they can’t “test” or “falsify” historical claims.

  7. Did Popper really say that scientists cannot use induction in the scientific method or did he merely delineate limits of induction?

    • Indeed. His point wasn’t that what we call induction doesn’t take place. His point was that it has limited predictive value in the absence of falsification, and that many scientific advances weren’t rooted in conclusions drawn from observation but from speculation that was later tested. The falsifiable hypothesis remains the gold standard in the hard sciences, so their hostility to Popper is curious.

    • profpjm profpjm

      Thank you for concisely but effectively pointing out a correction regarding the Popper comment in the blog post. Alas, most people will ignore your comment. So many scholars cherry pick Popper’s work and insert these kinds of comments where they can (especially when they’re clearly unfamiliar with his work) that it’s almost fashionable. Popper’s contributions are nuanced and powerful. More people should explore his many publications as it would serve to improve their own scholarly work. They’re missing out. Popper would agree with practically everything in this blog post and would be able to improve upon its arguments.

  8. michaelfugate michaelfugate

    I blame it on bad training and arrogance. Many physicists think they are smarter than everyone else and if someone is not doing physics it is because he or she isn’t smart enough. It is all very circular. Not to mention the silliness of “hard” vs “soft” sciences – geez let’s not continue going down that road. Also we aren’t as broadly trained as we once were – philosophy is not only left out of doctor of philosophy degree programs (misnamed?), but actively avoided and discouraged. How about a bit more collegiality and collaboration?

  9. michaelfugate michaelfugate

    An interesting commentary on why we need to stop hanging out only with those who share our same interests:

    http://www.wageningenur.nl/en/newsarticle/Hanging-out-with-strangers-in-the-name-of-science.htm (see also PNAS article cited).

    I almost chose individuals as faculty mentors who never wanted to be wrong – am I ever glad I wised up and moved on. The problem is that research has become so expensive that we almost can’t afford to be wrong.

  10. I think you’re probably right about the main reasons why physicists often seem to dislike philosophy. Perhaps a further, related reason is that quality control in philosophy is spotty, to say the least. Part of this is the nature of the problems that philosophers sometimes try to take on – they’re messy, often not clearly defined. Part of it also is that philosophers don’t always receive sufficient education in the related areas of science, history, etc. that are relevant to their projects.

    Jeffrey Shallit’s view is perfectly reasonable, but I don’t see why it isn’t the view that more physicists and other scientists take. What is so hard about saying “some philosophy is bullshit, but other philosophy is fine?” (This is also the view of most philosophers, though they obviously disagree about which is which from time to time…) The trouble is, some scientists who criticize philosophy (such as Tyson) don’t seem very familiar with it. Why not just say “I’m not interested in the questions they address?” or “I’m not very familiar with contemporary philosophy of science, but the stuff I’ve read by Nagel and Feser is crap.” Etc.

    True, some papers (such as Nagel’s – I’ve never heard of Feser’s paper) become famous that don’t seem to say much. (But philosophers often cite his paper to criticize it. Once you’re famous, for whatever reason, people will often cite you and criticize your work, even if it isn’t really worth bothering with). But Nagel is often respected by philosophers for his other work – he became famous initially for his work in value theory and political philosophy. I don’t think most philosophers of mind think much of Nagel as a philosopher of mind. Certainly philosophers of science don’t think much of his recent attempts at philosophy of science. Sometimes people who write good or interesting work in one area also write crap in another.

    Speaking of which: Look at Newton’s work on alchemy and Biblical Interpretation! I’m sure Feynman would’ve laughed at that too if he had ever read it.

    • Stephen Watson Stephen Watson

      Perhaps a further, related reason is that quality control in philosophy is spotty, to say the least.

      That seems to be Larry Moran’s objection — that, as measured by publication and reputation, the culture of philosophy apparently tolerates crap of a level that the hard sciences would weed out in short order.

    • I suspect that simply saying “That doesn’t interest me” is not enough for some people, who seem to think they are the standard against which all people must be measured. If it interests them it must be intrinsically interesting to all, and if it doesn’t, there is something wrong with you.

      And one point often overlooked by scientists when they criticise philosophy is that philosophers cannot a priori rule out a seemingly absurd conclusion just because it is contrary to some interpretation of the data (if we did, then it would be science we were doing, not philosophy). Hence we must give initial credence to views like Nagel’s, or Fodor’s, in order to test the arguments as strongly as we can. This bugs many scientists.

  11. The physicists have nothing on the philosophers in calling for the death of philosophy. A great many philosophers have called for philosophy to end although they haven’t agreed as to how best to knock it off. Some propose to finally take possession of the wisdom they claim to love and thus end the comedy with a wedding. Others disavow the pursuit as meaningless or futile. You want to end philosophy? Take a number, but there are lots of philosophers in front of you.

    Meanwhile, one has to wonder just what capitalized abstractions like Science or Physics are supposed to stand for. If you look at things ethnographically, it sure seems that the immense social and economic process of scientific research has to do with, for example, initiation mechanisms of intergranular stress corrosion cracking in stainless steels or maybe polarization patterns in relic cosmic radiation, all sorts of things, but not the kind of generalities seemingly intimated by the spokesmen of Science. When scientific publicists talk about science and its history what they end up talking about always seems to be the pedagogy of science, the potted residue found in textbooks. What the living practice is about remains rather different and much harder to define, in part because the PR department insists that it’s such a grand operation. The Science that can be spoken about is not the eternal and unchanging science. Hell, it isn’t even the temporary and mutable science.

    • Could you give an example of recent (say, in the last 100 years) philosophers calling for the death of philosophy? I am unfamiliar with them.

      • Wittgenstein is the obvious example, although I guess you could say that he didn’t propose to destroy the fly bottle, just to let the fly escape. I think of deconstruction as another enterprise with a powerful aroma of euthanasia.

        • You mean the Tractatus Wittgenstein, not the one who then went on to formulate an entirely different philosophy. But even the Tratctarian W does not call for the death of philosophy but rather that we limit our philosophical inquiry to those domains where we can actually do useful work.

  12. I think some of the thoughts above a on the right track, and certainly contributing factors, but I do wonder a bit if they are assuming a unrealistic level of familiarity with modern academic philosophy.

    Don’t forget, most non-philosophy academics encounter philosophy at the under-graduate level, picking up a spare paper or two, which they do out of interest. Alternatively, they talk with other undergrads etc. So we should understand the exposure of scientists and so forth to philosophy at that kind of shallow undergraduate level.

    And what does the average undergrad course look like? We often teach philosophy as history of ideas. We often get no where near contemporary issues, and undergrads can find them selves bogged down writing essays on historical debates with little or more typically no relationship to contemporary debate. We get no where near modern issues, saving that for post-grad.

    The result is that I think undergrads engaging in a bit of academic tourism can come away from a pick-up philosophy paper pretty underwhelmed by a series of lectures outlining the thoughts of long dead people talking about a dated world view.

    And lets be honest, practitioners of sub-disciplines make entire careers on discussing that history, and lecture with a view to conversion.

    My experience of the (comparative) success of teaching philosophy of biology to students from the sciences is an additional data point towards the same conclusion. I didn’t teach it as historical, focused on contemporary examples, and addressed real issues in contemporary biology. On the whole, life science students were very positive about philosophy’s role, and saw the value and the need for philosophy.

    Philosophy of Cognitive science, (as opposed to philosophy of mind,) I think can have a similar reach and impact.

    • Like you I find biologists and cognitive scientists have a much more nuanced and positive view of philosophy, hence the over-reach thesis in the post.

      But I take your point: many scientists attack philosophy because of what they encountered in undergraduate study, not because they know much about the discipline. Even if they did a philosophy of science degree subject, it is easy to get sidetracked on the older, less sophisticated, stuff as if it were the Final Word.

      • benjeffares benjeffares

        Too many people are teaching philosophy as the history of ideas. We should do it the way that the sciences do it, get the history of the topic out of the way in the first chapter, and then get stuck into the modern stuff.

        • Except for in history of ideas classes, where the modern stuff is a distraction 😉

  13. And, note to Feynman — Newton was also into astrology and casting of horoscopes at that time.

  14. Off topic.

    Your post, and presumably your new theme, looks horrible on konqueror (a major linux browser). The post title looks as if it is white text on a white background, or perhaps a white background is overlaying the text. And the first few comments are also blanked out in a similar way.

    This is with konqueror 4.11.5 using the KDE 4.11.5 desktop under opensuse 13.1. It looks similarly bad with “rekonq”, but appears to be okay in the other browsers that I have tried.

    Perhaps this is a konqueror bug, which your theme happens to trigger.

    • The theme developers responded thus:

      “… we typically do not support the Konqueror web browser. We build themes for the general public, and while we want our products to look and function correctly there is a limit to what we can support (an example is that we no longer support IE8 or below, or the lesser known web browsers). As of January 2014 the Konqueror browser is used by less than 0.96% of internet users (http://www.w3resource.com/browsers/browsers-statistics.php).”

      • Thanks.

        That’s about the kind of response I would expect from developers.

        Personally, I would prefer them to support international standards, instead of trying to support individual browsers.

  15. Perhaps there is also collateral backlash against anti-science creationists/IDers?

  16. Richard Peachey Richard Peachey

    Creationists are not anti-science in general, as I’ve mentioned before.
    http://www.creationbc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=148&Itemid=62

    Anyway, John, your opening logo, purloined from the movie, with the word “God” replaced by “Philosophy,” is nicely ironic. When scientists like Hawking, deGrasse Tyson, Krauss, Weinberg and others write off God as dead (or nonexistent), many philosophers are there to cheer them on. But now that they’ve turned their guns on you, you’re less enthusiastic. Of course!

    I smiled when I noted your desire for physics and philosophy to accommodate each other. When you wrote on whether “religion” could accommodate “science,” you were very strict about making that accommodation one direction only. With the measure you use it will be measured to you?

    You mentioned some of the soft spots of physics, including “something comes from nothing” and the 10^500 [possible universes in the multiverse]. These sorts of wishful concepts are often attempts to evade the reality of God; some physicists have honestly and explicitly recognized this.

    Apart from those things . . . nice column, with some memorable quotes and turns of phrase.

    • Philosophy, which is about the nature of knowledge at least in part, must attend to actual knowledge. Hence it cannot ignore science and just pull epistemic strictures out of its rear end. Hence, [good] philosophy must attend to science.

      Science, which is knowledge and reasoning, must attend to the best standards of evidence and reasoning, and this is a philosophical question. Hence, science must attend (NB: Not bend) to philosophy.

      And I do not think that religion must bend to either science or religion except when it makes factual or philosophical claims.

      • Richard Peachey Richard Peachey

        When some factual or philosophical “claim” is made, why must religion “bend”? What does this actually mean? (You’ve indicated it goes beyond “attending.”)

        And whose claims? Anyone’s? The majority of those practicing some particular discipline?

        As I’ve written before:

        “But what is ‘science’? [sensu something that must be bent to] The current majority view of self-designated ‘scientists’ on a given topic — which is subject to change and often has changed? Why should anyone have to accommodate that sort of thing holus-bolus?”

        ”I’m glad that in a free society we are free to think critically and decide, as individuals, for or against competing claims, including those thrust upon us in the name of ‘science.'” [or philosophy!]
        https://evolvingthoughts.net/2014/02/can-religion-accommodate-science/comment-page-1/#comment-50995

        • Religion must bend to science because science is how we know the facts and religion should not state falsities as truths (if you need that demonstrated, all discussion between us is hopeless). This does not imply every factual claim made by a scientist is true, of course. But there are some things that are so contrary to the state of a science that to assert them is to deny the entirety of that science and a good many other sciences. It is for this reason that we know, to a high degree of certainty, that claims the world is only a few thousand years old are false, and any religion which asserts this is therefore asserting falsehood as truths. [Likewise, any religion that asserts the eternity of this earth is equally unfactual.]

          Religion must bend to philosophy when it asserts as philosophical positions ideas that are not the ideas asserted by holders of those positions. If you say, for example, that an empiricist is defined as someone who doesn’t believe in God, then that is factually false. I have heard just this asserted by some religious folk. This does not mean that a consensus philosophical view must be adopted by the religious, only that if a religious person asserts that a particular position that has been well explored implies something that nobody who holds that view would adopt, that is a kind of lying.

          Now, if they argued in a philosophical fashion for that claim (e.g., that Epicureanism necessitated atheism, contrary to what many Epicureans have held to be the truth), then those arguments could be evaluated in a philosophical manner, and the results adjudged to be good or bad philosophy or argument, but then the religious person already has acceded to the standards of philosophy.

          As to what “science” asserts, you are correct in one way: science is not an agent and asserts nothing. However, when most of those who are competent in a discipline accept a subject in their discipline to be thus and so, and there is no viable alternative position in that field (i.e., objectors are cranks), then the rest of us should give them their epistemic authority, for there is no better standard than what the experts have found to be true. You simply are not epistemically free to say that we are not causing global warming, for instance, nor that the world is younger than several billion years old. Nothing can trump the methods and results of the relevant sciences.

        • Richard Peachey Richard Peachey

          OK, so now at last we have a clear answer regarding what is this ‘science’ to which ‘religion’ must accommodate itself. It is the “position” of a majority (“most”) of those who (by some standard) are “competent in a discipline” — a majority that considers objectors to be “cranks.”

          And you write that we “should” (morally or logically?) “give them their epistemic authority, for there is no better standard than what the experts have found to be true.” This is plainly an argument from authority, but at least you’re not beating around the bush about it.

          Using this criterion, anyone who in the past objected to epicycles, phlogiston, caloric, cosmic ether, etc., etc., when those concepts represented the majority view was a “crank.” But now, they’re not, of course. This long-term perspective ought to help any current dogmatic scientist exercise a little humility, I would think. And to reduce his inclination to call others “cranks.”

          The precariousness of believing in scientists as authorities has been nicely stated by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin:

          “As to assertion without adequate evidence, the literature of science is filled with them. Carl Sagan’s list of the ‘best contemporary science-popularizers’ includes E. O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas, and Richard Dawkins, each of whom has put unsubstantiated assertions or counterfactual claims at the very center of the stories they have retailed in the market.” (The New York Review of Books 44(1):30, Jan. 9, 1997).

          Add to that all the current fusses about science fraud, experiment irreproducibility, distrust of peer review, etc., and I’m not hurrying to unthinkingly “bend” to your all-encompassing statement that “Nothing can trump the methods and results of the relevant sciences.”

          (As for “global warming,” how many of their vaunted ‘models’ predicted the current ongoing warming hiatus? So much for their “methods” of that “relevant science.”)

        • As one who finds argument from authority distasteful, I find myself here in the odd position of agreeing with a “creationist” – but fortunately with regards to something other than creationism per se.

          Indeed, the predictions of science are *not* appropriately defined as the “position” of any kind of “majority” of any kind of “competent” individuals, but rather as the outcome of any *teachable* method of making successful testable predictions.

          A religion, or anything else, that contradicts science must therefore contradict a successfully testable prediction – which I think we may take as the practical definition of being false. So although I would never go so far as to say religion “must” accommodate science, it seems that any religion which does not so accommodate must risk being false.

        • Richard Peachey Richard Peachey

          Hey, I appreciate your (qualified) support!

          But to contradict a mere “testable prediction” is not equivalent to being “false.”

          Even a claimed “successfully testable prediction” (assuming you mean a prediction that has been tested and has received support) is not guaranteed to be the truth. As you know, lots of experiments have been found to be irreproducible, lots of fraudulent claims have been made, lots of experiments have been incorrectly planned, or riddled with confirmation bias, or later overturned by better research.

          And back of all experimentation is the issue that scientific questions are chosen, formulated and investigated from within some specific philosophical framework that excludes other possible questions and data collection.

          So to “risk” being “found” false, in view of all the things that can go wrong with human-directed experimentation, is a manageable thing for those of us who allow for the possibility of genuine revelation.

  17. astoltzfus astoltzfus

    I’m an evolutionary biologist and I read philosophers of science. I would say that my thinking is very clearly influenced by philosophers, e.g., Sober’s presentation of causal explanations that are possible under the situation of multiple causation with indeterminacy (e.g., nature vs. nurture explanations). In some cases philosophers have clarified how to go about defining and resolving scientific squabbles by separating semantic and other issues from empirical or theoretical issues– think of group selection and altruism. In other cases philosophers actually have introduced ideas that are properly evolutionary ideas, e.g., Mills & Beatty’s propensity interpretation of fitness.

    • michaelfugate michaelfugate

      I agree. The debate over cladistics is another important chapter.

    • Could you give a reference for some papers that give philosophers’ insights into group-selection and altruism? I work in the field, and — in my limited reading so far — I have not come across any great philosophy on the topic and would like to see some.

  18. Yes,”one can get a totally skewed view of philosophy if you rely upon popularisations or self-appointed media stars.” And apparently the same is true of physics!!

    Most physicists don’t “hate” philosophy any more than philosophers hate physics, but many physicists find *some* philosophers annoying and *some* physicists only notice those philosophers who annoy them.

  19. “The causes of quantum fields are not addressed, so something still has to be (philosophically) accounted for.”

    Speaking as a physicist, this line of the article bothered me the most. The only really accurate answer to “What causes quantum fields?” is “We don’t know yet”. (Leaving aside the actual details of QFT that make the question itself ill-formed)

    Centuries ago, we had the atoms as fundamental building blocks that made up the elements, and the philosophers asked “What causes atoms?”. Decades ago, we had protons, neutrons and electrons as the fundamental building blocks of atoms, and philosophers asked “What causes protons, neutrons and electrons?”. Then “What causes quarks?” Now we’re at “What causes quantum fields?”

    In much the same way that Creationists like to point at any gap in the fossil record and ask “Why isn’t there a transitional form?” and when biologists discover a new fossil that fits neatly into an existing gap in the fossil record, the Creationist replies “There are two gaps now, why aren’t there transitional forms?”, philosophers are shrinking into the gaps with this line of questioning.

    Questions like “What causes quantum fields?” are entirely the domain of Physics, and can only ever truly be answered through experiment. As physics (and the rest of the sciences) have advanced, many questions that were formerly unanswerable (and speculated upon by philosophers) were answered. Many more questions are still unanswerable at present, but now we’ve realized that we probably just need to dig deeper to render them answerable. Most of the physicists I know are perfectly content to look at a question, decide it’s not answerable or answered at present, and say “We don’t know (yet)”. We already know that quantum field theory is (at least) incomplete, so we might as well put off this question until we’re even confident that “quantum fields” are something fundamental…

    PS. This isn’t to say that philosophy offers nothing of value, just to offer some insight as to one thing that irks one physicist about philosophy.

    • Of course for any scientific explanation of some phenomenon there will be a finer grain description of things that explains that coarser grain phenomenon. This is, rather, the point of doing science [some people call this “reductionism” and spit when they say it – I think it is a Good Thing and to be commended].

      That was not my point, though. No matter how fine grained we go, unless you get some causal process that is self-instantiating by its nature, then you have not shown something from nothing. The philosophical question of why there is something and not nothing is left more or less untouched (that is, the question may have to be refined in the light of the new science, but the core issue, why there is not nothing, remains). If anyone thinks that because they have explained, say, baryonic matter, they have answered that question (as Krauss appears to), they are simply making a category error.

    • Richard Peachey Richard Peachey

      Interesting to see Creationists and philosophers being likened to one another. Not sure we Creationists are ecstatic about the comparison. The philosophers can speak for themselves.

      But — being finite and often misguided — don’t we all have “gaps” in our understanding that others with opposing views may be quite eager to point out?

      • I was being unkind to the philosophers with that comparison. The fact that you couldn’t see that speaks volumes about your thinking skills. (But I suppose the fact that you retain a creationist worldview in spite of all the evidence to the contrary already tells us that)

        • Richard Peachey Richard Peachey

          Hey, Devin. Don’t be supposing that I actually missed the concept that you were twitting philosophers by comparing them to the ever-odious creationists.

          But I’m curious: How is the creationist worldview inferior to the magical worldview of evolutionists? (Especially evolutionist physicists!)

          You believe in sub-proton-size things that, for no known reason, repeatedly expand much faster than light-speed to become (up to) 10^500 universes, self-annihilating all but a billionth or so of their contents in the process! (Etc., etc.)

          Is that the sort of thing you call “evidence to the contrary”?

        • As far as how the creationist worldview is inferior to the scientific one: The theory of evolution has actually been used to make predictions about future discoveries, and those predictions have been accurate. Not a single piece of evidence has come along to contradict the theory of evolution, compared to the piles and piles of evidence from virtually every scientific discipline contradicting creationism.

          With everything after the word “evolutionists”, you seem to be confusing evolutionary theory with some also-confused combination of the big bang theory and either the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or the multiple-universe aspects of some formulations of string theory. The results is that what you are typing is nonsense.

        • Richard Peachey Richard Peachey

          “The theory of evolution has actually been used to make predictions about future discoveries, and those predictions have been accurate.”

          Really? From the late Francis Crick, a leading molecular biologist (and evolutionist): “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is difficult enough to study what is happening now. To try to figure out exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary arguments can usefully be used as hints to suggest possible lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much. It is all too easy to make mistaken inferences unless the process involved is already very well understood.” (What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books, 1988, pp. 138f.).

          “Not a single piece of evidence has come along to contradict the theory of evolution”

          Really? From Richard Dawkins, a leading zoologist (and evolutionist): “”Echo-sounding by bats is just one of the thousands of examples that I could have chosen to make the point about good design. Animals give the appearance of having been designed by a theoretically sophisticated and practically ingenious physicist or engineer. . . .” (The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987, p. 36) Dawkins of course thinks this “appearance” is just illusion — but don’t assume it doesn’t constitute evidence against evolution! It’s one of the things Darwin struggled a great deal against.

          Furthermore, what substantive content is there to “the theory of evolution”? Just a bare assertion of common ancestry? Or that natural selection (a lot of early deaths) is the most important factor? How could it be that Cambridge’s Simon Conway Morris would make a statement like this as recently as the year 2000? “When discussing organic evolution, the only point of agreement seems to be: ‘It happened.'” (“Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold.” Cell 100:1 [Jan. 7, 2000]).

          “you seem to be confusing evolutionary theory with some also-confused combination of the big bang theory and either the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or the multiple-universe aspects of some formulations of string theory. The results is that what you are typing is nonsense.”

          As you must know, the word “evolution” is used very broadly outside biology, for example in the terms “cosmic evolution” and “chemical evolution.” All of it goes together into the current secular “scientific” worldview.

          Are you saying that you don’t accept the inflationary Big Bang and/or multiverse ideas held by many leading theoretical physicists?

        • You’ve now taken to quote mining famous scientists and taken their words out of context. This is a common and dishonest debate tactic used by creationists. If you cannot debate honestly, there’s really no point in my continuing this discussion.

          “Are you saying that you don’t accept the inflationary Big Bang and/or multiverse ideas held by many leading theoretical physicists?”

          I’m saying that your misunderstandings of modern physics run far too deep to be addressed in blog comments. Take a few physics courses and come back when you can actually understand modern physics, instead of just regurgitating talking points from the last creationist speaker you heard on the subject.

          I’m also saying that you are deliberately trying to confuse matters by substituting in and out “all of science” and “evolution”. Your first two quote-mines are very specifically talking about biological evolution, but then in your next paragraph you try to claim that “evolution” can refer to basically anything in science. Moving the goalposts is another dishonest and common debate tactic used by creationists. If you cannot debate honestly, there’s really no point in my continuing this discussion.

          I will not be replying to you again, unless:
          1. You publicly withdraw your dishonest statements.
          2. You post some evidence that you actually understand the material you’re trying to debate.

          Until both of those things happen, nothing can be served by continuing this discussion.

          To respond specifically to your two points, so you can’t also accuse me of running from them:
          Predictions made using the theory of evolution:
          http://answersinscience.org/evo_science.html
          This website offers a number of examples of things predicted using the theory of evolution. Any one of the examples could have turned out to be wrong, but they didn’t. It also, unfortunately, omits my favorite example:
          Tiktaalik. Using knowledge of existing fossils, scientists knew that there must have been a transitional form between fish and tetrapods. Based on the age of the earliest tetrapod fossils, they estimated that the transitional species must have lived approximately 375 million years ago. So the scientists began to search for the appropriate types of rocks of the appropriate age, and found them in northern Canada. When they went to investigate these rocks, they found Tiktaalik, just as they had predicted based on the theory of evolution.

          “Contradictory” evidence:
          The appearance of design does not mean that something is inconsistent with the theory of evolution. Quite the opposite, the theory of evolution tells us that the organisms which will survive to reproduce are those which are better adapted to their environment. If an organism is well adapted for its environment it appears (to the uneducated and willfully ignorant) as if it were designed for that environment.

          I will not be replying to you again, until you address numbers 1 and 2 above.

        • Richard Peachey Richard Peachey

          Much of your comment consists of ad hominem remarks, to which I will mostly not reply.

          “You’ve now taken to quote mining famous scientists and taken their words out of context.”

          No need for me to refute this unsupported assertion unless you choose to detail exactly how you think I’m ignoring the context for some specific quote. (I’m not denying you may possibly be right in a particular example; none of us is perfect.)

          “Take a few physics courses…”

          I’ve taken several university level physics courses.

          “Your first two quote-mines are very specifically talking about biological evolution, but then in your next paragraph you try to claim that ‘evolution’ can refer to basically anything in science.”

          As you must know, the word “evolution” has a broad semantic range and is used in various ways. I am not attempting to bait and switch on this word. (If anyone can be accused of abusing the flexibility of that word, it would seem to be those evolutionists who offer examples of microevolution and then argue as if macroevolution has been supported.)

          “Predictions made using the theory of evolution: http://answersinscience.org/evo_science.html
          This website offers a number of examples of things predicted using the theory of evolution.”

          OK, I clicked on your link. The very first claim there was this: “Darwin predicted that precursors to the trilobite would be found in pre-Silurian rocks. He was correct: they were subsequently found.”

          This was news to me, since trilobites are very complex multicellular organisms which have been found in the “lower Cambrian” rocks. (They are part of the “Cambrian explosion” of animal body plans.)

          I began my investigation of this claim by looking at the Wikipedia article, “Trilobite.” The paragraph under the heading “Origins” reads as follows:

          “Early trilobites show all the features of the trilobite group as a whole; there do not seem to be any transitional or ancestral forms showing or combining the features of trilobites with other groups (e.g. early arthropods).[13] Morphological similarities between trilobites and early arthropod-like creatures such as Spriggina, Parvancorina, and other “trilobitomorphs” of the Ediacaran period of the Precambrian are ambiguous enough to make detailed analysis of their ancestry far from compelling.[10][14] Morphological similarities between early trilobites and other Cambrian arthropods (e.g. the Burgess Shale fauna and the Maotianshan shales fauna) make analysis of ancestral relationships difficult.[15] However, it is still reasonable to assume that the trilobites share a common ancestor with other arthropods before the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary. Evidence suggests that significant diversification had already occurred before trilobites were preserved in the fossil record, easily allowing for the “sudden” appearance of diverse trilobite groups with complex derived characteristics (e.g. eyes).[6][16]
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite#Origins

          Based on that information, it seems far from clear to me that trilobite precursors have been “found.” It appears they have only been “assumed.” I didn’t bother looking at any further claims made by your website article.

          “I will not be replying to you again, unless…”

          That’s your choice, my friend, although I would have preferred some substantive discussion.

  20. According to current scientific understanding, the answer to the question “Why is there something and not nothing?” is “Because the equations allow it”. This may, in fact, be the complete and final answer, with modifications to which particular equations we’re discussing. That is, even this question has now been shrunk from “Why is there something and not nothing?” to “Why do the equations hold?”. We’ve gone from bulk materials to elements to atoms to protons to quarks to fields (maybe to strings or to membranes?) to equations. All in the last few hundred years. The substance of the question has been shrinking consistently for as long as it’s been asked, and there’s no reason to expect that trend to change any time soon.

    Given the changing and ever-diminishing substance addressed by that question, I think (and many physicists agree with me) that the only reasonable (read: productive) course of action is to say “We don’t know. Given the current state of affairs, we can’t find out.” and focus on things that are, at present, potentially knowable. Though I’m open to being convinced otherwise…

    • That is a nice and subtle way to phrase it, and I agree. But as I keep saying, philosophy is what you discuss when the facts do not fix the solution, so if the scientists say “we can’t find out”, then the philosophical debates commence, and no amount of refinement or discovery in science will preclude that. It may be that we refine the scope of viable alternatives right down, but there will still be Platonist and Nominalist positions consistent with that, and so the questions remain open and philosophical. Moreover, there will always be physicists who insist upon making these philosophical arguments, unless the ruling bodies, like the French Academy, prohibits such discussions altogether.

      • You seem to have missed the qualifier on “we can’t find out”: ”Given the current state of affairs, we can’t find out.” Alternatively: “We can’t find out *yet*”.

        This qualifier will always be there. It will be less pronounced when we have a “theory of everything” that explains every observation, as that may itself be fundamental. Even in that case, there is the possibility that in the future a new observation contradicts the theory, changing what is thought of as fundamental.

        • No, I didn’t miss it. Perhaps you missed my qualifier “unless you get some causal process that is self-instantiating by its nature” earlier on. No matter how fundamental you go, there will be a question why that something is.

        • TomS TomS

          “Something is.”

          Or,

          “Something is the case.”

          These may be logically necessary.

        • Only if expressed. If they are not expressed, such sentences have no modal force.

        • To physicists (and I’m generalizing here, getting tired of using the qualifiers “many”, “most”, “some” etc. Just assume these qualifiers are there for both physicists and philosophers for the remainder of my posts), the rational approach is to wait and see. The gaps in our knowledge get smaller and smaller all the time. Every time we’ve thought of something as fundamental, we’ve had to go back and change it later. There may come a time when we hit a wall and the question becomes truly unanswerable, or there may come a time when our work is done and the question is answered conclusively. Either way, (most) philosophers don’t even understand what is fundamental in physics at any given time, and are viewed (by physicists at least) as asking the wrong questions and unqualified to answer them in any case.

          “Why ‘this’ and not ‘not this’?” We don’t even know for sure what the ‘this’ is that we need to ask the question about yet. Speculating about why ‘quantum fields’ is no more useful than speculating about why ‘electrons’. Further, to the best of my knowledge, no actual progress has been made on any of these questions in the centuries they’ve been asked. I freely admit I’m speaking outside my field and this may be my own ignorance rather than a true lack of progress, but I think this is a view shared by many physicists.

          Which, I suppose, brings us back to why “physicists hate philosophy”: Because physicists view philosophers as asking the wrong questions, unfamiliar with the current ‘state of the art’ and making no progress. Given the time and effort required to actually understand quantum field theory, general relativity, etc. I don’t think we’re wrong in assuming that philosophers don’t have a sufficient understanding of the theory to even know what is the ‘fundamental’ assumption that they should be asking the question about.

          It’s reminiscent (again) of biologists vs. creationists. “We’ve never seen life come from non-life, therefore someone external must have caused the first life.” Here we are, 154 years, 5 months and 25 days since Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species” and we have several competing theories about how life may have started. Who knows where we’ll be in another 154 years? Maybe we’ll have figured out what gives rise to the laws of physics, and this question, too, will be solved?

        • With a presumed existential quantifier, statements are vacuous.

  21. jeb jeb

    I found Richard P. Feynman’s remarks interesting particularly his question. “Now how could we do that? Here’s this great Dutch philosopher, and we’re laughing at him.”

    I would suggest its because its a well worn cultural strategy long used in attacks on natural history and science.

    Richard P. Feynman’s a product of his culture and its one that seems very conservative in the way it communicates to the public. Populist and patronizing

    Beniot de Maillet was resurrected from the dead to ridicule natural history most notable the ideas of Buffon and Lord Monboddo was used in exactly the same manner to demonstrate that Darwin was a fool.

    Its not the most convincing strategy and in terms of education and teaching I would describe it is a car crash.

    I also note that the writer seems as bad at asking historical questions as I would be at asking ones about physics. Seems to say something about our modern education system as such blindness and ignorance with regard to other disciplines is certainly not a traditional feature of science or the arts.

    • It’s worth noting that Feynman marks the beginning of antiphilosophy among physicists. Up until that point, physicists thought philosophy was something like mathematics: a useful tool that educated men must take seriously (I say “men”, because at that time, that is how they would have said it).

      • jeb jeb

        “marks the beginning”

        I wondered if the story telling element is effectively a foundation legend. If memory serves me correct Hawkins ends his statement with the light bringer myth and ‘the torch of knowledge’ being past on (speculate the statement was made because he either has something to sell or is about to announce he is changing his name by deed poll to Obi Wan Kinobi).

        I wonder if its an attempt to infer that the natural order of intellectual life is hierarchical and someone must stand at the head of the great chain of being. Philosophy would be an obvious and attractive target simply from a story- telling perspective given its traditional placement in tales about the order of knowledge.

        • michaelfugate michaelfugate

          It would seem that the myths goes – once there were philosophers and now there are scientists….
          It is almost like the creationist canard about if humans evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys…
          Both missing the point.

        • jeb jeb

          Could be worse, as an older creationist canard was certainly to accept a relationship between humanity and lesser hybrids as a form of moral instruction demonstrating the sinful nature of out -groups.

          Tales told primarily for entertainment and moral instruction.

          “It would seem that the myths goes – once there were philosophers and now there are scientists….”

          I have only read one example but that was certainly the pattern. If its replicated, with a slight historical back-story praising philosophy’s then its certainly a functioning and live migratory foundation legend.

          You would expect creationist to use the same narrative strategies, you don’t need any knowledge of science to engage in a highly effective manner here, this is a manipulative strategy where the same emotions can be replicated and shared and shared goals can be reached within groups ( e.g Feynman and his son developing identical emotional responses) and it does seem to be the manner in which extreme ideas gain wider social currency.

        • michaelfugate michaelfugate

          Why let the facts get in the way of a good story or a good moral?

        • jeb jeb

          I would answer that with a medieval tale on a not dissimilar reception of texts issue.

          “God First”

          “William de Braose was a rich and powerful man. As such he had to send letters all over the place; and it was his habit to overload them, or perhaps I should say to honor them, with words which asked the favor of Gods indulgence in this way, to the point where it became quite boring not only to his scribes but also to the recipients when they had the letters to read aloud to them.”

  22. Jeb Jeb

    I forgot to add the positive point. I suspect this type of activity may be an indication you are dealing with very creative people. To be successful and go down in history requires a strong social component, its a seriously high sell activity and this type of behavior is not universal but certainly not uncommon across a range of creative professions.

    In an educational setting it is a disaster as i think it can stifle individual creativity as you are expected to conform to the perspective of the large social constructed elephant that leads the class.

  23. Docteur Lariviere Docteur Lariviere

    It is really quite simple: the physicists cannot explain what they are doing or why by the principles of their physics (whether by wave mechanics, particle physics, or relativity). The investigating being escapes their mechanisms by its failure “to follow its natural laws”, becoming confused from devising all kinds of great absurdities to live by. Without an understanding of our own ignorance, modern science teaches we can know everything, but that we are nothing. Pascal shows us the two abysses which should terrify the physicists, but they think take can take refuge in particles, waves, and functions. We must rest satisfied with understanding their ignorance, which is also to understand why they are necessarily incorrigible.

  24. Bart Bart

    There is also the individual moral element in which the physicist has difficulty recognizing the observation that modern science has allowed for the massive exploitation of nature and the degradation of the human condition.

  25. Jordan Jordan

    My father is a Theoretical Physicist of some repute (Daniel Gogny), and in all my dealings with him (which as you might guess, have been lifelong) and his colleagues, nothing could be further from the truth.

    The difficulty I see is one of translation. A historic “drift” in directions over the past century or so has torn the two apart-One having it’s origins in the other. So much so, that the silos they have erected around their respective institutions, has lead to lexical deviations, distinguishing the fields frameworks.

    Simply put, when prompted on philosophy, the physicist who goes to speak will utter one phrase, only to pause mid sentence-for judging by the look of puzzled bewilderment on the philosophers face, the physicist’s misuse of terms is so foreign, so egregious even, that the two couldn’t possible have common ground to stand on.

    So the scientist defers to the “safe” resort- differing one to someone with expertise, or by denying the existence of philosophy altogether.

    There is nothing to bridge the two together, other that in the philosophy of physics, which is still principled guided by those coming from a background in philosophy primarily, and whose mission is to interpret theory, not tackle the dichotomy by opening a dialogue to two entirely different departments by now. That is, science and the humanities.

  26. Trim Trim

    As a lover of philosophy , I must admit it is dead . The word dead meaning lacking in activity . Philosophy has not been answering anything . Feynman statement is perhaps one of the best . Philosophy has failed because of its “anything goes ” philosophy .

    • Sergey Fox Sergey Fox

      Feyman doesn’t understand that “anything goes” may be the point of philosophy; Feyman must know that physics changes and its axioms evolve. Philosophy shows me that Mr. Feyman is dogmatic and needs to think more.

    • SMGRC SMGRC

      Philosophy is not dead at all! In one branch that I’ve studied, the philosophy of language, we are constantly learning linguistics and engaging with linguistics questions. The three big picture areas of Linguistics are: Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics and the Phil of language engages with Semantics and Pragmatics and even some syntax. This post is to show the deep relationship between Phil of Language and Language science. Other deep relationships between Phil and Sci are: Phil of Physics( see David Albert, Tim Maudlin) , Logic and math, Phil and Psyc, Political science and political philosophy are basically the same thing, Phil and computer science, Phil and AI, the list could go on…Philosophy is a massive field, and engaging with science is only one part.

  27. Sergey Fox Sergey Fox

    Physicists like kraus or hawking who criticize philosophy don’t understand that philosophers didn’t necessarily claim truths but examined ideas and propositions to weed out bumps in the logic Of ideas.

    Spinoza, though difficult to read, was simply writing out ideas to expose contradiction, emotional bate beliefs; he was simply talking out like most philosophers the popular ideas of his time NOT telling people the truth; rather, he wanted to see if the truth would up to scrutiny of analysis and synthesis.

    More specifically, he wrote out to the world what thinking looks like on paper.

  28. Omar Pérez Omar Pérez

    https://youtu.be/EYPapE-3FRw in this vídeo Feyman use popperian falsificstion. It is so disappointing to see how physicians neglect phyloshophy. I used to think that phylosophy of science was encouraged by physicians. It seems that today academy compettiveness make scientist wish have it all easy, in order to make their claims.

  29. Obviously I’m coming late to this conversation but I was wandering around & came upon this blog entry. I decided to comment as much as a way of developing my own thinking irrespective of the possibility of anyone else ever reading it.

    Some background; I dropped out of a graduate physics program, partly because I was more interested in fundamental questions of philosophy than I was in the mundanity of doing the types of problems expected of 1st year graduate students. I consider myself reasonably bright (GRE at 95/96 percentile in 1982) if slightly narcissistic 😉 but my strength in physics (physics GRE at 10th percentile) is admittedly & obviously not as strong as it could be. However, I’ve maintained a lifelong interest in physics, metaphysics & philosophy while not being well indoctrinated in to the academia of any of the above.

    Physicists might be biased against philosophy primarily because philosophical concepts are not amenable to measurement. Philosophy deals with primary assumptions about the nature of experience. Physics deals with measurement of experience. In order to measure experiential phenomena, one cannot readily question one’s ability to measure. If it cannot be measured, it cannot be readily contemplated using the tools of physics. I’m not going to say that physicists aren’t comfortable discussing what cannot be measured but they are uncomfortable discussing them in terms of physics, which after all, is primarily concerned with measurement & the determination of relationships between that which is measured. Philosophy primarily deals with the nature of consciousness, a phenomena which we all acknowledge to exist but that we have yet to be able to develop a means of making an objective measurement.

    My personal opinion is that the wave function(s) that constitute the fundamental particles that constitute reality is/are essentially a product of consciousness & not the other way around. Is it possible that the prime movement that initiated the “Big Bang” was a thought phenomena prior to being a physical phenomena?

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