Of course, I always dismiss his metaphor as pie-in-the-sky ridiculous. But I must concede that this phenomenon occurring on Wikipedia gives a lot of weight to his argument.
I wish there was a similar cautionary expression for those who are ignorant of or dismissive of philosophy.
Why is there such a vocal minority nowadays who claim that philosophy has had its day? Can you explain your reasoning please?
Maybe you could start with the two questions I gave in the post you are replying to.
Answer B: Kuhn's text uses the history of science to come to a philosophical (not a scientific) conclusion about scientific progress. Hence, Kuhn's text is philosophy of science and as such your question fails to make the point you think it is making.
Now, how about answering my two questions? :)
Quite the contrary - I am giving an example that is supportive of the view that, while philosophy was instrumental in the development of the scientific method, it is no longer playing that role, and has not for some time. The second question is another example in the same vein.
>Now, how about answering my two questions?
You haven't discharged your burden of proof - all you have done so far is to talk around it. In fact, that is all you have done with the two questions I posed, rather than answer them directly.
1st: For example, was science in a state of confusion until Popper corrected the errors of the logical positivists?
Ideas concerning the scientific method are less clear before Popper assuming you buy into Popper, that much is true, that much is true of any advancement in the philosophy of science. What is not true is that before an advancement lay confusion and after the removal of confusion. Progress wends its way slowly, incrementally, with ideas gaining clarity bit by bit. So it has gone and presumably so it will continue until someone presents an argument that the process of the improvement in our understanding of the scientific method is complete. That proof is for you or someone to provide, not I a proof of its counter-claim.
2nd: Did the development of plate tectonics have to wait until Kuhn explained the structure of scientific revolutions?
No. And you know the answer is no. But so what? If Kuhn is right about how scientific thought progresses it could have an impact on how scientific bodies organise themselves and how funding is allocated and so on, which would have an impact on science at a much larger level than individual hypotheses and theories. Which shows that philosophy of science is still relevant.
You have created a straw man in a weak attempt to transfer your burden of proof onto me. The claim of mine, that you are disputing, is that philosophy is not nearly as relevant to science now as it was in science's beginnings. That claim is not predicated in any way on the assumption that our understanding of the scientific method is complete.
In your last paragraph, you need to be able to replace all the 'coulds' and 'woulds' with 'dids' and 'does'. As it stands, you have now made three successive posts without putting up an actual argument in support of your position.
Furthermore, you would have to show a significance comparable to the achievements of science as a whole - if your claim is that the current contributions of philosophy to science are comparable in significance to an individual hypothesis or theory, then I rest my case.
Not intentionally, I assure you. I have repeatedly tried to understand your position and respond exactly to that position. I'm going to give it one more attempt, if this attempt also fails in your eyes then we'll have to agree to disagree, okay?
> (1) The claim of mine, that you are disputing, is that philosophy is not nearly as relevant to science now as it was in science's beginnings.
That's an odd sentence construction. It could mean either that this is the claim from my point of view I _think_ I am disputing (and it's not) or that this is the claim I _ought to_ be disputing (and I'm not).
Witness. A previous stating of the claim by you.
> (2) Quite the contrary - I am giving an example that is supportive of the view that, while philosophy was instrumental in the development of the scientific method, it is no longer playing that role, and has not for some time.
(By the way. You make claims about philosophy yet use examples from philosophy _of science_ (Popper and Kuhn). If you mean to say `philosophy of science' please say philosophy of science and do not use philosophy as a shorthand. Also, you seem to be using science and `the scientific method' interchangeably. Please don't.)
You'll see your claims don't square. I have addressed (2) and am not going to repeat myself.
> In your last paragraph, you need to be able to replace all the 'coulds' and 'woulds' with 'dids' and 'does'. As it stands, you have now made three successive posts without putting up an actual argument in support of your position.
No I do not. I stated it as a conditional (If Kuhn is right [...] could [...] would [...]) to allow for the position that someone may disagree with Kuhn specifically but it does not invalidate my point in general _if Kuhn is right_. If you keep claiming that I am not addressing the substance of your argument then I am going to have to conclude that you are arguing in bad faith. Hence, one more attempt, okay?
> Furthermore, you would have to show a significance comparable to the achievements of science as a whole - if your claim is that the current contributions of philosophy to science are comparable in significance to an individual hypothesis or theory, then I rest my case.
I do not have to show any such thing. And I am making no such claim. I am countering your claim, not attempting to make a novel claim of my own.
Though it is hard to tell what you are thinking, I think there is a chance you did this unknowingly. If so, then there is a way for you to recover: go back in this thread to the first post of mine that you replied to, state your disagreement with it, and present an argument for your position. Be specific and to the point.
To avoid one opportunity for further confusion, the post in question is this:
"Philosophy was, of course, the progenitor of science, but it is harder to find current relevance. For example, was science in a state of confusion until Popper corrected the errors of the logical positivists? Did the development of plate tectonics have to wait until Kuhn explained the structure of scientific revolutions?"
No, there may have once been a time when that metaphor was applicable, but I wouldn't say that it's the case today. As for the idea that philosophy guides decisions on how we practice science, well... a book or course on the forces of economy, which is offered by most major universities, is recommended.
I don't think the Wikipedia phenomenon means a whole lot. Here's an alternative metaphor: philosophy is the pot we put all the loose ends in, until some advance in science allows us to work on them some more. That doesn't mean philosophy is making progress on them.
So is science.
Please don't tell me we're going to play that tedious game where we give you lots of examples of philosophy's relevance and your response is just "oh but I didn't mean that kind of philosophy".
Kuhn says that this works well for a while, until there builds up a collection of anomalies that result in the second type of science: revolutionary science. For a short while, people start to question fundamental assumptions about their world and this results in a "paradigm shift". In this mode of science, philosophy has always been relevant. The philosopher Ernst Mach was relevant to Einstein, for example.
In our present age, we are at the stage of normal science started by Einstein and the quantum physicists. But anomalies have started building up. And when we enter into the new phase of revolutionary science, as happens every few hundred years, we'll see philosophy be relevant once more.
The philosophy of science did not precede the development of science; in fact, it was the other way around.
I am at a loss as to how to be any clearer, but perhaps that's because I am looking at the whole sentence in the context of the thread. Could you be more specific about what problem you are having with it?
There was a time when people doing science were considered philosophers; at the same time, some of them were considered astrologers or alchemists - Newton was active in both of these fields, and that was not, as it seems to some people now, an aberration or contradiction. These philosophers / astrologers / alchemists synthesized the scientific method, but the modern philosophy of science is descriptive, not prescriptive: philosophers like Popper and Kuhn were describing the scientific method as it had already been developed by practicing scientists, without being led there by academic philosophy. The historical role of people, who now are or were then regarded as philosophers, in the early development of science does not imply that current science is behoven to current academic philosophy.
Your attempt to conflate philosophy and science raises the question of why a university would need an independent philosophy department, and I think you would find its members to be the ones most strongly defending its existence. If you were to go to the top of this thread, you would find that the distinction between science and philosophy is being made by pierrec’s philosopher-student friend. If you want to argue that there is no meaningful difference, perhaps you should first persuade the people who identify themselves as philosophers.
Then there's the fact that you have ended up agreeing with me that scientists can do it themselves.
Logic has traditionally (at least since Aristotle) been considered a critical branch of philosophy.
You apparently practice the passive-aggressive school of philosophy - the one where you write as if you are disagreeing with someone, but you neither offer any specific rebuttals of the other's arguments, nor do you make any specific, refutable statements about your own position.
But none of this matters anyway. If you want to argue that science needs philosophy, and regardless of what metaphor you are trying to pass off as an actual argument, the one thing you have to do is to show one or more significant examples where contemporary science has depended on contemporary philosophy. Without that, anything else is just talking around the issue. Of all the people who have replied to this thread, only shabda seems to understand this.
I get your point that scientists sometimes do things that can be described as philosophy in the broad sense, but generally, I do not think they would be able to do that if they had been educated in academic philosophy. I believe Bohr himself falls into this category. It would be more accurate to say that philosophy is dependent on science in these matters.
I also get the point that scientists use the scientific method that was developed by people who can be called philosophers, but they developed science through doing it, and that is not a dependent relationship even if you call what they did philosophy.
With regard to examples, I am sticking with my position that they are the only argument that really counts (which is why I suggested it to pierrec), but I don’t think there are none: for example, I think Daniel Dennett has made many valuable contributions to cognitive science, and made a number of trenchant observations with regard to the expectations of computational neurologists.
It should give no weight at all to this argument. Arguing from metaphor is flawed to begin with, because the correctness metric is not correspondence with reality, but the degree a human mind will readily pattern-match on the metaphor.
The empirical reason for this effect is that Wikipedia policy mandates that articles begin with a denotational definition of the subject, which moves up the hierarchy of abstraction. Were Wikipedia policy to begin pages with connotational definitions that move down the hierarchy of abstraction, we would not see this effect.
(And next time I'll think twice before introducing a classic flamewar topic once again...)