Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

> First, as the positive programme in x-phi shades into psychology and vice versa, some have asked: is experimental philosophy really philosophy?

Science is essentially a branch of philosophy ('Natural Philosophy), so in the broadest possible sense, yes. But I don't think what they are doing sounds like philosophy in the sense that most people would use it. It sounds like psychology. Which is fine! Psychology, after all, grew out of philosophy to begin with. I don't know why there should be a wall built up between the two fields.

Think about the dawn of computer science as another example. A lot of the foundational work was done by people who would have considered themselves philosophers, and most of the work firmly remained in philosophical and mathematical journals until people started physically realizing their work in the new machines, and then it became 'engineering' and 'science'. There's not a fine line where one guy was doing philosophy and another guy started doing 'computer science'. It was a gradual shift.

I think this particular shift is more reflective of academia at large - it's trendy, and has been for a long while, to "scientize" everything with more experimental data, empiricism and math equations thrown into papers. And analytic philosophy in particular is more adaptable to such a trend since it's often described as being "like science" in its attempts to accumulate tiny stepping stones of knowledge that build on each other.

Many established fields, on the other hand, retain a "philosophy of" subset that aims mostly to escape the technical aspects and continue probing basic assumptions. And I think that's a meatier discussion than the analytic approach, which can get very abstract without feeling profound - we have plenty of technical and social developments where ideological assumptions rule by default, because nobody's tried to champion even a slightly deeper approach.

Science departed from philosophy precisely when methodology about evidence and falsifiability of claims became involved. Without experiments to determine if a claim is false, a branch of study is really just one big session of just-so stories, where some authority explains what they think and why they think it, supposedly proving it if it's explained convincingly and eloquently enough.

Which is part of why I absolutely can't stand listening to philosophy. It's just not useful to hear people's opinions on things they can't possibly know for sure because of the very nature of the subject. What are you supposed to do with it? It feels like superstition with a veneer of academic legitimacy.

By the way, being able to spot one of these when you hear it is a useful skill in life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

Falsifiability, mh? Popper identified that in 1934. Before popper no scientist ever said "your claim is not falsifiable". So science before that was mere philosophy?

I don't think you can criticise Philosophy for not "determining if a claim is false" because it doesn't make claims in the same way science does.

I see Philosophy more as an exploration of the shape of our thoughts. It identifies particular vague ideas we have, defines them in more detail, and gives them names so we can discuss them. This gives people who study it exposure to a wider variety of ways of thinking, and often makes it easier to spot assumptions in other contexts.

Indeed, at the point where you're doing an experiment to determine if a claim is false, you've already made a bunch of philosophical assumptions, such as the existence of a consistent material universe, and the validity of empirical inference. Which is not to say those assumptions aren't reasonable, but it's important to recognise that we're making them, rather than asserting that the results of science are "something we know for sure" and dismissing anything else as "just so stories".

I guess you haven’t heard of logic? There’s two ways to gain knowledge.

Well, it's fine, except it wouldn't really fit the standards of what we call philosophy today. Doing psychology is fine, but why quit doing philosophy as well ?

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