Comment by mburney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mburney | Hacker News Reader

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> A scientific idea is "correct" if it can be successfully compared to reality.

But this is similar to saying what is real is what corresponds to reality. Do you see the circularity here?

The philosophers who engage in questioning the "real" are not doing it for the reasons scientists engage in discovering "correct" phenomena. The longing for a deeper meaning and clarity beyond scientific inquiry is a spiritual longing. These philosophers are trying to describe ways in which human beings fit in the world, how we can deal with the groundlessness of our existence, what choices we have in light of the anguish that comes from our mortality.

The problem is that many people view this as a competition against science or "exact" thinking. It is not.

I think this quote from Leo Strauss sums up my point:

"Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm. It is the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation. In spite of its highness or nobility, it could appear as Sisyphean or ugly, when one contrasts its achievement with its goal. Yet it is necessarily accompanied, sustained and elevated by eros. It is graced by nature's grace."

> But this is similar to saying what is real is what corresponds to reality. Do you see the circularity here?

The circularity is in your wording, not in the thing itself. A scientist has an idea, one expressed clearly enough that two or more similarly trained individuals can understand the claim. The idea is tested against reality, in a way (again) that similarly equipped observers can agree that the result means what it seems to mean.

The outcome is either that the original idea is supported by, or falsified by, the comparison to reality. And the distinction between the idea, and its test against reality, is nowhere confused -- not among scientists, anyway.

> The philosophers who engage in questioning the "real" are not doing it for the reasons scientists engage in discovering "correct" phenomena.

That's for sure -- philosophers much prefer arguing about the meaning of reality, to dealing with reality on its own terms. Many modern philosophers, following this trend, slide into deconstructive postmodernism without ever realizing that they've crossed the threshold of absurdity (by posing the argument that all experience is subjective and there is no objective reality as scientists claim, but without realizing that their argument justly applies first to the words they've just uttered).

Oh, come on. This is beneath you surely. Where are these "philosophers," this monolithic horde of abstraction-loving pinheads stuck in the 15th century, too benighted to see the Real Truth right under their noses, too stuck in debates over definitions to think practically about application and science??

You have a cartoon version of philosophy in your mind that is in sore need of remediation. These are precisely the kinds of questions that philosophers have been utterly preoccupied with for centuries. As if Bradley, Dewey, William James, never existed! As if the very idea of a pragmatic, "reality-based" science had not been proposed and debated rigorously for decade upon decade.

As if the subject-object problem wasn't at the core of the foundations of modern science!! Far from being some late, decadent conceit of a handful of disconnected postmoderns, the problem of objective knowledge is at the very core of modern science, at its very foundations, on to the present day.

Have you read a single volume of philosophy in the last decade? Are you not aware that the Grand Poo-Bah of modern philosophy of Science, Popper himself, redefines "Objective Knowledge" to deal with that very problem?

If you are content with a naive, self-contained scientism that remains dogmatically immune to philosophical critique, that's fine. You're certainly not alone. But let's dispense with the sweeping generalizations that have no bearing whatsoever on the reality of the history of philosophy, science or ideas in general.

> Have you read a single volume of philosophy in the last decade?

Do you have an opinion on the utility of suicide? But how can you, without having personally committing suicide? Am I getting thorough to you?

> You have a cartoon version of philosophy in your mind that is in sore need of remediation.

You mean the thesis that philosophers argue for centuries without ever resolving anything? That's hardly controversial.

> These are precisely the kinds of questions that philosophers have been utterly preoccupied with for centuries.

Q.E.D.

Yes, I think you've gotten through to me. You're willing to hold strong opinions regarding the core discipline of the Western Tradition in a state of abject ignorance, on the grounds that actually educating yourself on the topic before forming such an opinion is analogous to committing suicide in order to understand suicide.

That's as bizarre a rationale for willful illiteracy as I can think of. You seem content with it, and I wish you well.

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