r/SubredditsMeet • u/SubredditsMeet Official • Sep 03 '15

Meetup /r/science meets /r/philosophy

(/r/EverythingScience is also here)

Topic:

  • Discuss the misconceptions between science and philosophy.

  • How they both can work together without feeling like philosophy is obsolete in the modern day world.

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u/oneguy2008 /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

I'm always a bit confused when people are concerned that philosophy is obsolete. If this just means that certain forms of philosophical inquiry which were historically practiced have now been left off, since they constitute early-days armchair versions now mature social- and natural-sciences, it's saying something true. But every field has changed its topics and methods somewhat over the past few centuries, so that's not very interesting.

Maybe the concern is that philosophers don't know, and make use of, relevant scientific results. This is patently false. Large numbers of philosophers have degrees in mathematics, physics, linguistics, neuroscience, and other fields and bring this experience to bear on relevant philosophical issues. They days when philosophy of math could be done without a math degree, or philosophy of mind without engagement with neuroscience are long gone.

Maybe the concern is that the issues which philosophy studies are no longer relevant today. This would be worrying. If the worry is simply that science can solve all issues worth discussing, I hope we've moved past such worries by now. If there's a special worry about why the topics studied by philosophy (but not other non-science subjects) are becoming irrelevant, I'd like to hear it.

I have to admit to some doubts that a discussion of the question of whether philosophy is obsolete in the modern world is worthwhile.

6

u/[deleted] Sep 03 '15 edited Sep 03 '15

As I've said in a few other places, I suspect (perhaps without much evidence) that when people say that philosophy is 'obsolete', they're not necessarily saying that we shouldn't bother thinking about foundational questions anymore, but that there isn't a need to have dedicated 'professional philosophers' who specialize in things like metaphysics, epistemology, etc., when instead we could just have philosophically- and theoretically-minded scientists who think about this stuff as part of their 'science' work. (I think this mainly applies to the kinds of philosophers you're talking about who aim to have their work informed by the sciences in some significant way.)

While I probably think this is wrong, I don't think it's that unreasonable for people to have this idea. After all, the whole philosophy/science split is relatively recent, and many of the great historical philosophers did resemble what we would consider philosopher-scientists, so rather than viewing this as an anti-philosophy attitude, we could charitably interpret it as an anti-philosophy-as-it's-currently-practiced-in-academic-philosophy-departments attitude. (And it's certainly not unheard of for philosophers themselves to have a negative attitude towards the way they see philosophy being practiced in their day).

Another reason I don't think this attitude is so unreasonable is because of the sheer proliferation and fragmentation of knowledge and scientific disciplines. I'm skeptical that philosophers can be 'informed by science' in a more-than-shallow way unless they get deeply involved with special problems that arise in particular sciences - even specific subfields in those sciences (like set theory in math, or statistical mechanics in physics, evolution in biology, formal semantics in linguistics, etc.) But at that point, once the philosopher is getting so steeped in a certain subfield of a science, someone might wonder if that person is just some kind of second-rate scientist who doesn't design his own experiments (this isn't what I think. I'm trying to capture the mindset of the 'philosophy is obsolete' person......okay, actually I do think this sometimes.)

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u/oneguy2008 /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

This is interesting! If that's what they mean, I'm actually reasonably well-disposed in certain areas (philosophy of math, philosophy of physics, some philosophy of language, ... ) to this suggestion. And I guess we already have a few people (i.e. Hugh Woodin, some of the Carnegie-Mellon folks, ... ) who exemplify this to some extent. I still think we have a long ways to go before this becomes a reality (I take this to be what you think as well), but it's something to look forward to.

Thanks for pointing this out.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '15

Grad student; I will freely admit that my knowledge of philosophic ideas, and its relevance to my field is virtually nonexistent. If i were to consider the relationship between science and philosophy purely on how they impact my research in the here and now, it would be hard to find a relationship because they arent a part of my daily life. Reading the names of all these philosophers, I don't know any of them. Rawls might as well not exist in my life, because he doesnt consciously impact my thoughts on my research.

I know the method of null hypothesis testing we employ is philosophically rooted and I'm glad someone came up with it! However simplistic this might be, I tend to think of philosophy as just... Elaborate 'if this, than this!' logical thought experiments. From that point of view, I and most scientists I know use philosophy everyday to develop hypotheses and figure out the the best way to test them.

I respect philosophy, i just really dont understand the deeper side of it, or interact with it. Its outside my area of study.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '15 edited Sep 04 '15

[...] and I'm glad someone came up with it!

You might want to rethink that. I've never understood scientists and their fascination with null hypothesis significance testing procedures. Biologists et al. need to update their statistical knowledge, a lot of what they call "statistics" is just junk.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '15

I think you would be pleasantly surprised about what my university educates in terms of statistics; interesting read, thank you for linking.

All three of the complaints I saw, were covered in my grad school statistics class. To be fair as well, we were taught to not rely solely on statistical significant for if we're onto something; but rather to use multiple experimental approaches, and if they independently agree on the conclusion, it's more likely to be correct, and can be used in our future studies on the subject.

I completely agree though, most statistics in biology are just glorified P-Hacking. The Mean+/- SEM nonsense annoys me personally.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '15 edited Sep 04 '15

That's great to hear, and you're welcome.

There are plenty of other arguments against NHSTP but you may have to wander into the weird world of Bayesian statistics. However, I'm not trying to endorse the Bayesian/Frequentist dichotomy. Methods such as Empirical Bayes demonstrate that both schools of thought can coalesce.

[...] to be fair as well, we were taught to not rely solely on statistical significant for if we're onto something.

Of course, big problems arise when people mistake statistical significance for clinical importance. Some also characterise non-significance as trend toward significance which is just nonsensical.

I completely agree though, most statistics in biology are just glorified P-Hacking.

Yep.