Troll post imo.

I know how it works: I started out as a chemist.

I HAVE asked them this...they don't have a good answer. They don't realize that philosophers are so used to the technical use that they forget that nearly no one uses it that way. For example, in epistemology, it's just standard that knowledge requires truth. You can't know something that's false. My colleague, standing in front of an intro class giving a lecture, realized that many of the students thought that you could know something that's false (the context was science). This means that the choice of vignette usually means we've fixed the game from the start.

Furthermore, on the issue of robustness and avoiding confounds, they're TERRIBLE! This was another problem I brought up. I asked why they didn't add another question to avoid a really obvious confound. "Well, I didn't think that it would really matter." WRONG answer.

Not at all trolling. It is an extension of what you said.

The parts about 'is/was a humble seeker of truth' is salient.

I very much agree with Gump here. Madnaks statement is sort of like saying the ZF axioms are the only reason why we can tell a true statement in math. But that totally misses the reality that Euclid proved that there were an infinite number of primes without knowing what ZF even was and if that proof had been contradicted by ZF mathematicians would have got rid of ZF rather than thinking there is a greatest prime. ZF and the philosophy of science are important in that it lets mathematicians and scientists look in the mirror and analyze what math and science actually are, but they are not the be all end all.

(And I should add that ZF and mathematicians "looking in the mirror" is way, way more important than philosophy of science because of things like Godel's theorems, independence of AC and CH and even P<>NP which are all really in a sense meta-mathematical statements. Philosophy of science has not produced these kind of deep results, which is why philosophers are the main people interested in it. If philosophy of science actually helped in creating science, it would be scientists at the forefront of it)

Bertrand Russell debunks this nasty little delusion very well in his book, The History of Western Philosophy. There is very little we can know about the world, even with all of the scientific knowledge in existence, and the dogma of theology is unsatisfying. Between that lies philosophy. Those who subscribe to the revelations of science so strongly that they forget this have "become insensitive to many things of very great importance".

The argument isn't "has philosophy been useful" , of course it has, it gave us science and a good understanding of ethics, etc.
The argument is "what have you done for me lately.". Of late, it's back to angels and pinheads.

Philosophy of science has determined how scientists do what they do. This is like saying that "if advertising had any effect on consumers, then consumers would be the ones making the advertisements."

I don't really think this is a valid analogy. Advertisers ARE consumers, and it doesn't make sense to say that consumers who are not advertisers are somehow better at consuming than advertisers. Philosophers of science are not as good at science as scientists and it is not clear that they are better than scientists (or even just smart laymen) at philosophy of science.

I pretty much agree with everything Lestat said. Lolz at the "Is Witten a mathematician" side argument. In the early 90s it was already accepted that Witten was a mathematician (and a great one at that) by the luminaries (Atiyah, Yau etc) but some competent mathematicians still held out. Seiberg Witten theory converted them all. Saying in 2010 that Witten is not a mathematician because he is a physicist would be like saying Terry Tao isn't a mathematician because he drives a car to work and is thus a chauffer.

This is the direction of argument that is more difficult to argue against, which is that being a mathematician is defined by acceptance by the community of mathematicians as a member*. This concept of a mathematician is more like being members of a club, and not a designation as a profession.

I think of Witten as being a physicist, but not because I don't think that he is incapable of doing high caliber mathematics. Rather, it's because those are the positions that he has had throughout his career.

* As a point of fact, Atiyah wrote of Witten: "Although he is definitely a physicist (as his list of publications clearly shows), his command of mathematics is rivaled by few mathematicians..." This form of designation is not uncommon and not intended to be a sleight against Witten.

I wasn't implying that he is not a physicist, he certainly is. Just that it makes more sense to say he is both. This shouldn't be that radical of a notion since the stock answer among experts for who the greatest mathematician ever and who the greatest physicist ever is probably the same person.

A great mathematician is someone who mathemeticians find to be a hero of their field.

A great physicist is someone who physicists hold to be a hero of their field.

A great philosopher is someone who philosophers hold to be a hero of their field.

I am not sure where the argument you all are having lies. Some sort of turf war?

It's a definition game.

Basically, I think that things like job title and degree (and Atiyah adds publications) make much neater categories than the other ideas that have been put forth, which now includes yours.

Who?

Can you be an intrinsicly great physicist or philosopher who isn't a hero? You may be very talented. But unless you can perform in such a way guaranteed to win acclaim, maybe not. Of course you could be uncelebrated in your time. It seems it would be easier to be an unheroic (uncelebrated) yet still great philosopher, than mathematician.

I find this puzzling. You agree with his implication that on foundational questions like "What is justice and how might we implement it socially?", "How should we conceive of and reason about ethical systems?", and "What are the conceptual foundations of [aesthetic theories of art, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, various logics, etc.]", philosophers who specialize in these topics, who study the pertinent body of analysis done on such questions in past philosophy, who are open to positioning contemporary scientific findings and discipline-specific work in the appropriate slots of their conceptual framework -- as methods, insight, empirical data, and standard models that inform their larger philosophical project -- these philosophers are doing something obsolete, or irrelevant, or reproducible by any untrained, intelligent layperson in a given non-philosophical discipline?

Sounds wrong on its face to me.

And that's leaving aside the deeper fact that intelligent laypersons who pronounce on such topics from within their scientific or other empirically-grounded disciplines are doing philosophy. It's just that their philosophical training is whatever they've absorbed from floating, culturally current concepts and accepted ideas that previous philosophers once innovated. Except that rather than delving into the history, source-texts, and explicitly philosophical work done around these now-prevalent concepts, the intelligent layperson takes them more or less as they are and goes from there. So they do a kind of unself-critical type of philosophizing -- while deriding philosophy itself as dead or obsolete -- that leaves a lot of deeper questions and issues unexamined.

This is just nonsense.

lagdonk, bravo to the second part. There are many people in this thread who are so unaware of the implications of philosophy that they no longer even ask questions that can't be shoehorned into a scientific answer. It's rather sad.

Having said that, modern humanities departments (sociology, philosophy, literature, etc) are a blight on humanity who produce little to nothing of worth, so luckyme is right in the sense that modern philosophers produce little of relevance.

But philosophy is far more powerful than science. Anyone who disagrees with this is an idiot.

My categorization schematic was meant in jest.

You all are just being human and looking for patterns and categories. It is fun to watch. Kind of like going to the zoo and watching the monkeys act like monkeys.

It seems I misphrased that. I meant that the philosophizing layperson who deems the discipline of philosophy to be useless in this day and age tends to conduct his reflections on foundational topics without consulting that discipline's extensive resources. This hugely impoverishes the layperson's project insofar as he ends up doing things like (badly) reinventing the wheel, repeating arguments and positions that have been astutely critiqued by specialists he hasn't read and hence doesn't even think to counter, missing subtle implications, challenges, and conceptual difficulties that it took many minds and years of philosophical debate to illuminate and address, and so on.

I used "unself-critical" as shorthand for the above because I was envisioning someone proceeding along philosophically with a kind of arrogant and foolish disregard for an entire field that has spent hundreds of years grappling with issues that he's now pondering. But I'm willing to concede that the adjective is both too broad and off-target. How about this:

Ugh, the phrasing still sucks. Please pretend that either "kind of" or "type of" are absent in the sentence I amended; having both is obviously redundant.

"Excessively self-critical" comes to mind... Not sure why

Here's the only issue I have with your argument: Every great philosopher reinvented the wheel to a large extent. When we rely on prior understanding, we can only stand on the shoulders of giants (not a bad thing). However, there is nothing wrong with starting a new sprout of thought that could not be conceived of whilst standing upon high.

Basically, they take as given what shouldn't be taken as given.

People who diss philosophy soak up the prevailing philosophy of the age without understanding why it matters and what its limitations are. And are very poor thinkers (and scientists and teachers and citizens) as a result.

While I agree that philosophy itself is useful, you have to admit that the much of post Greek philosophy until Hume is junk, and people learn little by reading it.

Watching Aquinas stumbling over his God delusions, Kant's convoluted writing and inability to express himself, Confucius' unreasoned pronouncements for nepotism, Nietzsche's inability to understand his own feelings and how they affected him, and then feminist and postmodern horse **** of the 20th century is frankly painful reading. It's not hard to understand why smart people dismiss it all as useless in the modern age.

I'm definitely not implying that scientists who are not philosophers of science are somehow better at science than those who are. And some philosophers of science are scientists, so I don't see how this invalidates the analogy.

I think most of the underlying concepts of scientific methodology were generated by philosophers of science. I don't think this is "clear" to everyone. Regardless, I'd say anyone who is good at philosophy of science is a philosopher of science by definition, so this seems trivial.

I suppose you hate the Mona Lisa because she's not pretty enough.