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vivian maxine » December 18th, 2016, 9:35 am wrote:I have been pondering this for a long while. I would love to hear some thoughts on it. What is the relationship between philosophy and science in these modern times? How do they connect? I can't put a finger on anything. Can someone help? Thank you.
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serpent wrote:Where they diverged and should not have is in the field of ethics.
Lately, they have met - colluded and collided - in some unlikely arenas: cosmology, neuro-science, ethnology and memetics.
But the only business they really need to tackle as a team is the ethics of applied technology.
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vivian maxine » December 18th, 2016, 10:41 am wrote:serpent wrote:Where they diverged and should not have is in the field of ethics.
Lately, they have met - colluded and collided - in some unlikely arenas: cosmology, neuro-science, ethnology and memetics.
But the only business they really need to tackle as a team is the ethics of applied technology.
All right. When they "collude/collide" {:-)}, I think you are referring to such as a new medical technique or the wisdom of sending men to Mars. (Just two ideas that pop into my head at the moment.) Right?
Is, or as you say it should be, the connection generally based on the ethics of how a new discovery may be used?
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vivian maxine » December 18th, 2016, 9:35 am wrote:I have been pondering this for a long while. I would love to hear some thoughts on it. What is the relationship between philosophy and science in these modern times? How do they connect? I can't put a finger on anything. Can someone help? Thank you.
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doogles » December 18th, 2016, 4:38 pm wrote:The first time I walked through the doors of the Physics building for undergrad lectures in 1949, I was puzzled by the name above the door. It was 'Natural Philosophy'.
As Serpent said, they were once the same.
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wolfhnd » December 19th, 2016, 3:28 pm wrote:Philosophy should be grounded in some sort of evidence and not just internally consistency. Science is more likely to help philosophy than the other way around. You have to know what is true before you can discuss it's implications.
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doogles -- Sir Thomas Lyle (Head: 1889-1914), set about lobbying government for funding of new facilities for the Department of Natural Philosophy, then located in what is currently known as 'Old Physics'. He made notable contributions to electrical theory and instrumentation and is most likely to have been the first man in Australia to take an X-ray photograph, having made his own X-ray tube."
It seems from this particular short history that some sciences evolved from philosophy, and in line with other evolved things, each new branch began to manifest it's own characteristics.
I couldn't find any references to whether the old building still exists or not. The name 'Natural Philosophy" was either chiselled in stone or embossed as concrete letters. My recall is vague on that aspect, but it wasn't a painted sign.
My subjective impression is that the evolving Sciences had more of practical value to offer society and therefore attracted more funding than pure philosophical pursuits. Hence their better survival and proliferation in evolving world cultures.
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Braininvat » Mon Dec 19, 2016 4:46 pm wrote:Thomas Dolby would have really have some poetic meter problems writing "She Blinded Me With Science," if he'd had to say she blinded him with natural philosophy.
My take on this, which I've probably said before, is that philosophy provides the meta-level for considering how science is done. Much of it could be called meta-science and that would capture the flavor of what's going on.
To borrow from Wolfhound's remarks on what makes a valid question, I'd say that science provides procedures for answering the question, while philosophy seeks to determine if the question is indeed valid and coherent and epistemologically pursuable. Philosophy and its handy meta perspective is why we sense that the answers we get in chemistry are more reliable than the answers we get in sociology and political science.
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vivian maxine wrote:I like your reply, Biv, but it does sound to me (in part) as if you are saying philosophers decide whether what scientists want to do should be done.
vivian maxine wrote:Now, as a whole, do they (the professionals) work together on these ideas? Is there a cooperative exchange of ideas?
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wolfhnd wrote:It's a bit more generous to philosophy than I'm willing to concede but when I see Sam Harris's horrible take on freewill and Dennett's reply I can accept that a purely "scientific" perspective can be dangerous.
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Forest_Dump » Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:42 pm wrote:wolfhnd wrote:It's a bit more generous to philosophy than I'm willing to concede but when I see Sam Harris's horrible take on freewill and Dennett's reply I can accept that a purely "scientific" perspective can be dangerous.
I don't thin purely scientific perspectives are necessarily dangerous. The problem is I don't think very many (or any?) people are purely scientific. A drug like thalidomide is perfectly good (I have heard even still absolutely great) for preventing nausea and could still be of great value for chemotherapy patients. Whoda thunk what would have happened if perscribed for morning sickness? Germany was at the top of the world in science with their revolution(s) in chemistry at the end of the 19th century. Who figured some of those developments would be used they way they were in Poland in the 1940s. And that from the same people who figured out the link between smoking and cancer and basically made the big break throughs in nuclear physics. In fact, many of the big advances in chemistry, physics, the biology of viruses, etc., could be a big boon to solving our energy needs, curing diseases, growing more food, etc. So why are people so concerned if places like Iran, Iraq or North Korea delve into these areas?
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Serpent » December 18th, 2016, 9:18 am wrote:vivian maxine » December 18th, 2016, 9:35 am wrote:I have been pondering this for a long while. I would love to hear some thoughts on it. What is the relationship between philosophy and science in these modern times? How do they connect? I can't put a finger on anything. Can someone help? Thank you.
Once, they were a single entity. Then Science split off, taking all the quantitative thinkers off in hot pursuit of ergs, germs, and quarks, thence to develop technology. The more introspective and fanciful of the bright boys became known as Philosophers and took on the long, slow, thankless task of perfecting mankind.
Where they diverged and should not have is in the field of ethics.
Lately, they have met - colluded and collided - in some unlikely arenas: cosmology, neuro-science, ethnology and memetics.
But the only business they really need to tackle as a team is the ethics of applied technology.
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Forest_Dump » December 19th, 2016, 4:42 pm wrote:wolfhnd wrote:It's a bit more generous to philosophy than I'm willing to concede but when I see Sam Harris's horrible take on freewill and Dennett's reply I can accept that a purely "scientific" perspective can be dangerous.
I don't thin purely scientific perspectives are necessarily dangerous. The problem is I don't think very many (or any?) people are purely scientific. A drug like thalidomide is perfectly good (I have heard even still absolutely great) for preventing nausea and could still be of great value for chemotherapy patients. Whoda thunk what would have happened if perscribed for morning sickness? Germany was at the top of the world in science with their revolution(s) in chemistry at the end of the 19th century. Who figured some of those developments would be used they way they were in Poland in the 1940s. And that from the same people who figured out the link between smoking and cancer and basically made the big break throughs in nuclear physics. In fact, many of the big advances in chemistry, physics, the biology of viruses, etc., could be a big boon to solving our energy needs, curing diseases, growing more food, etc. So why are people so concerned if places like Iran, Iraq or North Korea delve into these areas?
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wolfhnd said: What I have against philosophers is that they alone seem fine with ignoring empirical data. If they are philosophers of math and logic perhaps that is ok but science is not abstract.
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wolfhnd wrote:As you know I have a very broad definition of science. Any discipline that uses empirical data can fall under the heading of science. I even think that disciplines like sociology, and anthropology should be moved out of the humanities. Science however has always been a inductive process.
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Forest_Dump » Tue Dec 20, 2016 3:34 am wrote:wolfhnd wrote:As you know I have a very broad definition of science. Any discipline that uses empirical data can fall under the heading of science. I even think that disciplines like sociology, and anthropology should be moved out of the humanities. Science however has always been a inductive process.
To begin with, on science and induction vs. deduction, you might want to take a look at Hempel's work and various readings in "Logical Positivism" (that is actually the title of a book of readings I have somewhere that came out in the 1960s (?). I agree of course but in the archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s, when huge efforts were made to make archaeology more scientific, many papers in top line journals were criticised for being too inductive.
For myself, I definitely use a lot more math, especially stats, in quantification, exploratory data analysis, etc., than you might suspect. I am actually also very big on rigourous sampling technigues, gathering data on environment, geology, etc., etc., but it is all only a step along the way. For example, I am pretty big on what is known as cognitive archaeology which is getting at past patterns of thought but I know it is extremely dangerous (as noted by a philosopher of science who paid attention to archaeology named James Bell) and can lead to the temptation to indulge in "empathetic projections" or believing you can discover specific past thoughts (what another archaeologist called a bungee jump into fantasy land). So, IMHO, too rigid adherence to a scientific approach often leads to some pretty boring stuff (e.g., I can't tell you how many presentations I have had to sit through by people trying to study prehistoric stone tool production by dropping ball bearings on glass or musing on the best description and measure of "sharpness" to compare, for example, flint, glass, obsidian and copper - so much time I won't be getting back - and never really told me anything about stone tools or the past). On the other hand, I think there is value in starting down that slippery slope of relativism into phenomenology, etc., to start to get into the patterns of thought that might have been in the minds of prehistoric peoples without getting into the hyper-relativism and ultimately nihilism (sadly very popular today in the post modernism of the Colonialism critique, etc.) or the romantic schmaltz of a Jean Auel novel. It is a slippery slope with the tricky part being finding your footing in between.
So, I do agree with some of your definition but have some issues. The use of empirical data is not enough - it also depends on what kinds of questions you ask, how you choose empirical data and link it to your questions (i.e., find the causal connection in logic). So I try to draw a distinction between between, for example, science and other crafts such as engineering or technology that use science but are not science in and of themselves.
One example I sometimes still use is the link between smoking and cancer. Originally, the link was noted statistically by the Germans back in the 1930s. Would just discovering this correlation count as science? Is that any more scientific than noting that the rise in GNP in North American is positively correlated with the widening of the Atlantic by continental drift? Throughout the remainder of the 20th century, the correlations simply piled up with countless studies demonstrating a correlation between smoking tobacco and lung cancer. Was that really science? Or would the science have been trying to find out exactly what it is in tobacco that causes cancer (which, actually was a question that Bio answered for me several years ago on another thread - although I simply took and take his word on faith). As you might guess, despite all the empirical data generated by dudes with Ph.D.'s and white coats in fancy labs, I am not sure how much of that piling up of correlations was really science although I would certainly say it was politically and economically expedient and drumming up funds through all those emotional appeals by those multi-billion dollar Cancer Society donations did allow some science on the side, ultimately leading to the real scientific discovery of the causal connection and hopefully, therefore, maybe even finally getting to know whatcancer really is and thus how to cure it. (Yes, I am sure Bio and probably some others will jump on some of this.)
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