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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

I'm being kind of harsh, so let me restate: my experience with Philosophy of Science has been very sub-par. I took a class on the Philosophy of Time and a lot of it dealt with relativity. Now, I don't think you need to understand Einstein to understand the gist of relativity, but if you're studying it for 10-weeks in a formal environment then, yeah, you probably need to have a grasp not only on Minkowski spaces, but on the metric tensor as well -- and the accompanying math. These topics were merely brushed over (with the kind of brevity you would see in a Netflix documentary) and it left a bad taste in my mouth. At the graduate level, a few (Philosophy of Science) grad students didn't have a grasp on Bayesian inference -- but were attempting to use it in their arguments freely.

Maybe I'm being unfair, but I just think science should be left to the scientists.

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I do think you are being harsh here, or at least too particular to your own experience. My experience differs.

As a practicing scientist who also did a thesis on the concept of Causality, with projects on Time, I did in fact have to interact with and learn significant physics to make a dent in my projects. My professors were themselves extraordinarily capable with respect to (at least theoretical) science. My graduate-level philosophy of science classes were significantly harder than my theoretical physics classes, in some regards. The insight with respect to what is 'experimentable', and to be able to trace logical consequences of scientific assumptions through to experimental effects, and then to challenge those most basic of scientific assumptions by designing and using an experiment made powerful by its relation to an underlying philosophically-derived framework was extraordinarily empowering. And that's on the philosophy side.

I'd also argue that the framework instilled by my philosophy of science education has made my work as a scientist significantly more generalizable, and thus more influential to my fields.

Fair enough, my experience was very wishy-washy and hand-wavy. Maybe I just got unlucky. Philosophy of Science isn't UCLA's strength, after all.

I hope one day I'll get a chance one day to take a class on Philosophy of Science I'll enjoy.

Though I don't know much about philosophy of science, I'm studying for a doctoral degree in philosophy and study foundations of math and related topics in philosophy of mathematics and logic (i.e., an allied subfield of philosophy). There are a couple of things to say about your experience with philosophy of physics. I.e., that philosophy of physics is not sufficiently well-informed by the details of the physics it is supposed to be about.

There are definitely philosophers, both in philosophy of physics and in philosophy of mathematics, who are far better thought of as just studying philosophy simpliciter. These philosophers tend to use relatively trivial examples from science and mathematics in a pretty flat-footed way in order to make philosophical arguments. For example, arguing in favor of Platonism on the basis of purported facts about mathematical objects rarely takes into account mathematical reasoning beyond what is accessible to an average 7 year old.

But there are also many philosophers who study the exact sciences (i.e., math and physics) that actually take the details extremely seriously. Take a look at graduates and faculty at the Pitt HPS department or the UC Irvine's LPS department (for just two examples). There are quite a few people who even get doctoral degrees in both philosophy and physics. And, at my not-at-all-HPS (but technical-leaning) department, one of my colleagues who is just finishing with philosophy already has a doctoral degree in math.

Now, obviously just bc one has a doctoral degree in the exact sciences does not thereby make them cautious in assessing what philosophical content there is to be found in studying the exact sciences. The point is just that there are plenty of philosophers who, in contrast with the experience you had (at UCLA?) in philosophy of physics, know the details well enough to have contributed original research in the exact sciences.

Two very legit philosophers of physics to check out are David Malament and Howard Stein.

I am not as awed by philosophers as you are, but I think this is rather unfair on philosophy by extrapolating from a bad example, that isn't even what is generally meant by the philosophy of science. From your description, your example looks like a group of philosophers (or at least philosophically-minded people) trying to take on a scientific topic without first learning the science (of course, some physicists have been accused of doing the same with regard to philosophy.)

Henri Bergson, who had put a lifetime's study into a philosophical rumination on time, vigorously rejected special relativity, to the point that it is said that Einstein's Nobel award citation did not mention special relativity on account of Bergson's criticism. Nevertheless, Einstein was in no doubt about what was his most important work, and gave an acceptance speech that was all about relativity.

If Bergson had been more aware of what had been going in in physics, over the previous two decades, to come to terms with the (meta?)physical implications of Maxwell's equations, he might not have been blindsided by special relativity.

As the above is rather critical of Bergson, I will end by noting that near the end of his life, he stood up to the Vichy regime's persecution of Jews, even though he was not Jewish himself and could have remained aloof.

The central question in philosophy of science is a meta-scientific question, as would be expected, and it's the Demarcation Problem. You know this, but I'm restating it for observers: What is the difference between science and pseudoscience, and how can it be realized as a repeatable procedure?

Science should be left to scientists, but the interpretation of science is still an individual responsibility.

I do like the joke that career philosophers know no maths aside from arithmetic and about half of Bayes' Theorem.

So you are OK with the works of Karl Popper? Because as an outside observer, that's what I consider the phenotype of the philosophy of science.

Yeah, Popper is obviously a genius. I know he's regarded as a philosopher of science, but I think that's a bit of a misnomer. I think he's probably somewhere between logic and metaphysics. Carnap, too, is also more of a logician. But, alas, they're both labeled philosophers of science.

Hmm, I think you are mistaken here. Popper was as much a philosopher of science as anyone. Here's the intro to his Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper):

He is generally regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers of science.[11][12][13] Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favour of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments.

> Maybe I'm being unfair, but I just think science should be left to the scientists.

There is a world of difference between science and philosophy of science. Karl Popper wasn't a scientist but that doesn't mean he can't inquire about the philosophy of science. Philosophers in "philosophy of science" aren't doing any science. You do realize that don't you?

In your top-level comment, you crow about how smart philosophers are and now you are just deriding philosophers as incapable of understanding science and basic mathematics?

"Always warms my heart to see philosophy on top of HN. Philosophy is hard -- much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison."

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