Comment by guygurari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guygurari | Hacker News Reader

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Great, I think I now understand your biases, and I think you understand mine, and currently I do not spot any disagreement between us. So please allow me to refocus the discussion to the context of the original article. The article said:

> To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.

So in the context of the original article, 'philosophers' are clearly those individuals who hold philosophy degrees, have offices in the philosophy department, etc. You know, those individuals that people usually think about as philosophers. This is the context I was answering in.

You argue that a good scientist should think about philosophical questions that have to do with the nature of his research, and not just about concrete scientific problems. I completely agree. I also agree that when a scientist engages in this activity he is doing philosophy and not science. Therefore, I agree that doing philosophy is important (and in fact necessary) for doing good science.

I do not think that science and philosophy are competing in any way, and I apologize if I gave this impression. My question of "what have philosophers given physicists" is entirely in the context of the original article, which tried to claim that it is a good idea for physicists to talk to philosophers (the official ones, yes?). I am simply asking for evidence that it is indeed a good idea for these two groups of people to communicate.

I hope these comments put us on common ground. We both agree that good things happen when scientists engage in philosophy, today. My question is what good comes of philosophers engaging in philosophy, today. If you like, we can broaden this question well beyond science, and ask -- what concrete positive things have philosophers (the official ones!) contributed to humanity in the last 100 years?

To be fair, the 'competing' angle was mostly from my interaction with snowwrestler below, but there's elements of it wherever philosophy is given a stigma. I've seen similar positions from other scientists. The odd thing is that if there's a scientist who's of the opinion that their science is the only one that's important or true, it's usually a physicist. I haven't seen a biologist or chemist or the like take this position. Strangely, I have seen it from a psychologist.

I found the context of the article to be more talking about philosophy the field with occasional mentions of philosopher the occupation. In any case, I haven't read a lot of stuff from 20th C occupational philosophers - but it was talking to a philosopher that opened my eyes to the seeds of questioning my own stigma of the field. That lead me to more investigation of the methods and histories and reasoning of why we do science the way we do, and realising that understanding the process means you know why you're doing it that way, and where you can appropriately modify your methods

For example, I've butted heads here on HN before with people who think that the only way to 'do science' is with a null hypothesis and a double-blind trial. For some cases in medicine, this isn't possible (usually due to both low n and ethics), so case studies are used. Case studies are recognised as not being as robust and subject to a number of caveats, but they still give us knowledge that can be used to make predictions and repeatable actions. Keep in mind the caveats, and you're drawing from a valuable pool of knowledge. The difference here is understanding what you're trying to get (robust, repeatable data, preferably published), rather than having a golden method that is the One True Thing and any departure from it is straying from the right path.

But back to the question of what occupational philosophers have given to society recently, I don't know. But philosophy has given us astounding amounts, including most of the egalitarian and civil rights advances we've seen. I get the impression that occupational philosophers 'keep the flame alive', and that their work infiltrates other fields via philosophy fans in those fields. Certainly for physics and science in general, most of the philosophical problems have been solved, though there are still some hanging about, like how do we define consciousness? In order to study it, we need good definitions, and this one eludes us with great agility - philosophical discussions on this at least help nail down what it isn't.

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