On the other hand, the hubris of physicists to call their trade a replacement for philosophy exposes the fatal flaw in scientism.
We've yet to see one example going the other way.
At best philosophers provide interesting questions. At worst they are just paperpushers categorizing the work others did into pointless and arbitrary categories and arguing about them :)
We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for. After all, it was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
> We don't know how wide that window happens to be and how much of reality we can see through it... We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for.
It is telling that these sentiments are not followed by something beginning "analytical philosophy, in contrast..."
> [Science] was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
It was doing de facto, though somewhat ad hoc, falsification long before Popper focused his attention it. The philosophy of science is much more descriptive than prescriptive.
Having said this, you may be surprised to learn that I spend a some of my free time reading and thinking about various aspects of philosophy. I must say, however, that I feel that western metaphysics lost its way in its attempt to address fundamental questions through the analysis of language.
No, it isn't. This is a very common myth, but it is in fact a myth. Science has no axioms.
> We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for.
That's true. But what we do know is that the scientific method is vastly more effective than anything else humans have come up with in helping us navigate our existence and exercise some degree of control over our destiny.
> After all, it was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
That is also true, and that is one of the reasons to believe that the scientific method is special and unlikely to be improved upon. It's not just an arbitrary choice. It is privileged, and there is actually reason to believe that this privileged status is a reflection of some underlying reality. But this is not an axiom, it's a result.
A physicists dismissing philosophy as out of date implies that we are already on the optimum path to discovering the remaining knowledge about the universe to be learned.
It implies they believe that. Which is ultimately a dogmatic ideology. That is why I call it scientism and not science. Obviously we cannot know if that is the case or not because of the nature of time (the future holds answers that the past cannot, yet remains inaccessible to beings such as us). There is no good reason to believe that our theories aren't missing some crucial aspects which were already understood and subsequently lost. The cultural narrative of progress is so strongly asserted, yet what we know of as "history" is such a narrow and skewed perspective.
I myself am a physicist. I once had the confidence to assert that physics is the One True Way to understand life, the universe, and everything and that progress is inevitable (Newton's "shoulders of giants"). I no longer believe this is the case because of my explorations through the traditions of thought present in philosophy. For sure I can cram the lines of discourse that most interest me into quasi-physics-based theories (post-structuralism is especially interesting as a systems person) but that's not to say that physics can represent everything there is to know. Physics is a language just like any other and there are some ideas that physics simply cannot express.
Note that the scientific method is self-correcting even in this regard: if someone can demonstrate a more productive method of inquiry, someone following the scientific method would accept that new method, just as they would accept any hypothesis that is demonstrably superior to the current state of the art.
Does not follow. It suffices that such a physicist thinks philosophy isn't going to improve on science (like it hasn't so far).
It might turn out alchemy will become useful, but it's unlikely. And bear in mind alchemy provided more results than philosophy so far.
There might be something else, even better than science, that's an independent question. But why people assume philosophy will necessarily be involved in any way?
This is the trick that philosophy and religion uses that frustrates me the most. They claim all the territory we don't know anything about as if their own it and shout "scientism" and "dogmatism" when people protest :)
Logical positivism tried to do this, and failed. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge pretty much killed logical positivism, because he showed that no scientist is in the fully objective position that was required to set up and evaluate the experiments.
No, you don't. This is a common mistake. Science is not about knowledge, it's about explanations. The whole idea of "knowledge" is just part of a vast web of explanations that turn out to be exceptionally good at accounting for the data.
> logical positivism
The mistake of logical positivism is the unjustified assumption that there exists such a thing as "truth", and that this thing is accessible to us by thinking. It isn't. It's a consequence of the empirical observation that the scientific method converges towards something. "Truth" is just a label that we attach to the thing that it's converging to (or at least appears to be converging to -- we won't know if that limit actually exists until we get there).
However, there is also another possibility, and that is that the word "knowledge" is being used in two different ways. "Knowledge" in science is often used as a shorthand for "The best explanation we currently have in hand, one which has so far withstood all attempts to falsify it." This is different from the kind of knowledge studied by epistemology, but it is a not-entirely-unreasonable use of the word.
That's an unusual claim. It's typically attributed to the criticisms of Popper and Quine, after which the foundations were undermined.
Seriously, philosophy is a personal endeavor. You derive your own, make your own deductions, and you believe in them. That makes it valid for you.
But ... if your philosophy is about how the world works, about some aspects of reality, and you want to ensure that both your philosophy and reality agree, then you can choose to do science:
1. From your philosophy, derive some hypothesis.
2. Check you hypothesis with some experiment.
More important, following this thread upward we see:
1. The urge of some scientists to offer science as a replacement for philosophy was scored as a fatal flaw
2. The question was asked, "Why is this a fatal flaw?"
3. That question was answered with the claim that something called "epistemology" is needed in order to make decisions based on experiences. Evidently, "epistemology" is an essential ingredient to human decisions which would be lost if we tried to replace philosophy with science.
4. But I said, no, I personally don't need "epistemology"--whatever that is--to make decisions.
5. Then it was claimed that whatever I'm doing to make decisions is inherently "philosophy." Yet, I'm not doing anything special, so if I'm doing philosophy then I guess everyone is doing philosophy, even scientists.
6. If that's true then what happened to "epistemology" and the fatal flaw of omitting it in the vain attempt to substitute science for philosophy?
This really isn't adding up.
Professional philosophers do essentially the same thing we do, they derive a set of personal beliefs that they see as trustworthy. The difference is that they go out and try to sell their philosophies to the public as if they were universal, but they aren't, so they almost always fail. Their books and publications tend to be filed under the heading "OPINIONS".
The second topic you mention is about the role of epistemology, in theory the study of knowledge but in practice an amalgam of (once again) opinions from different philosophers. It's difficult to explain epistemology without referring to those opinions, and those may be wrong anyway. Several pieces of the puzzle are still missing.
On the topic of philosophy, if there's two kinds, the kind which comprises opinions sold by professional philosophers to the public as if they're universal but aren't, and the kind which comprises the activities we all do in life, then I'm pretty sure the former is the one being held up to scrutiny as Bergson and Canales try to elbow onto the podium alongside science.
On the topic of epistemology, I don't know a thing about it and I don't think I need to in order to believe the results of experiments or go about life, which pretty much is what also was claimed further up the thread.
I mean yes, of course, the undergraduate Physics student is being handed a packet of metaphysics when they get the Einstein lectures on SR and GR. And it's very seductive, if you can crack through enough of the math to hear the music in it. The idea that Einstein is a "continuator of Descartes" just means you can learn all that stuff, get A's in every single class at Cal Tech or someplace else, and in the end you are still left with the exact same Dualism.
That might be a valid critique of Science in general, but I don't see how it attacks Einstein. There is also a more subtle point about the history of measurement. We started to depend on accurate measurement of time when we needed it to circumnavigate the planet. Even without Einstein we still needed the Lorentz and Fitzgerald corrections to the classic Newton equations. It would have happened without Einstein, and maybe we'd have different metaphysics in that case. That idea is more interesting to me than what Bergson seems to be offering.
More here:
That said I can’t imagine having a good faith discussion about it; there’s nobody to defend the idea, because obviously nobody believes that they have a blinkered, over-confident belief in anything. They just think the domain of problems that their method can address is larger than the domain you think it has, I guess.
I guess I can’t imagine the mindset that would “see how the sausage is made” in science, and think that method was going to solve the universe. Everyone is aware that we’re becoming increasingly over-focused on tiny little niches.
Tbh I'm suspicious of your inability to find them yourself or your quest for examples.
It's a bit sealiony.
It's very basic stuff.
If you are unable to work it out from the original link and description I gave or the previous reply, I think any more effort on my part will be a pointless time sink.