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Comment by darkmighty | Hacker News Reader

That's modern philosophy for you. It's the guys who believe they're excluded from science and regurgitate unscientific discussions ad nauseam.

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These complaints are ridiculous. Of course philosophy is going to deal primarily with philosophical discussions, and not with scientific ones, that's the job of science!

If you're trying to claim that only scientific ideas are worth entertaining, then the problem is that that claim itself is not scientific.

The commenter you're responding to does not even understand the problem if he thinks science can solve it, as others have pointed out.

Have a look at some articles on philosophy of science. You might not like them, but contemporary philosophy is very much engaged with scientific practice: http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html.

Or, for that matter, look at Hillary Putnam. Notice that he was a rather accomplished mathematician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Putnam#Mathematics_and.... I believe he also had an extensive knowledge of physics, though I don't think he had any discoveries in the field.

(Edited to be a little nicer).

Without "modern philosophy" the idea of falsifiability would not be a major component of the modern science. Much of what is now considered to be standard scientific practice is the product of Karl Popper's philosophical work.

Far from being excluded, philosophers have defined a large chunk of what modern science is.

I think this vastly overstates Popper's influence. First, if you're trying to say that he's responsible for how science is done, I think that's flatly untrue. Popper's role is to describe and explain scientific practice, and understand how it is effective in producing understanding (assuming it does so--and most philosophers of science tend to agree).

If you mean that he's responsible for our understanding of science, that's debatable. Outside of philosophy, Popper is extraordinarily well known, and you can't avoid people speaking as if falsification is all there is to philosophy of science. Within philosophy, he is respected, but I don't think his particular views are particularly popular.

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