[btilly]

Why does it bother you?

As Richard Feynman said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Sure, lots of what scientists do, including Feynman, involve an implied philosophy. It is easy to read https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm or https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm and extract a lot of important philosophical ideas from them. But I have yet to see any self-proclaimed philosopher successfully do so without totally losing the key points.

There was a time when I thought that philosophy must have something important to it, and philosophers must have something useful to say. So I wound up reading works by various philosophers that were recommended to me. Some works, like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, were invaluable. Most weren't. The ones that were invaluable to me inevitably were written by people whose primary profession was NOT philosopher. For example Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor.

After a time I learned that if an important philosophical point happens to be made by a philosopher, I'd prefer to hear it filtered through the brain of a non-philosopher. Every time I try setting this rule aside, I am reminded of why I adopted it in the first place. And so, even if I'm reading about something which is apparently philosophical, I skip past the philosophers.

Paul Graham offers an explanation of why this might be in http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html. I don't completely agree. But I also don't have a better explanation to offer.

And I'll happily laugh at anyone who tells me that I should think of myself as a philosopher because I happen to be interested in a bunch of philosophical-sounding subjects like "philosophy of math", "epistemology" and so on.

[tim333]

Feynman was actually quite sophisticated philosophically eg. “The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.” I think when there is a purpose to philosophy eg. understanding science, it works better. When there isn't really philosophers tend to in many cases just discuss what other philosophers have said about each other which tends to get a bit circular and pointless.

[btilly]

Indeed. Feynman was extremely good at getting to the heart of the matter with simple and precise language and no pretensions. This is why so many important ideas of a philosophical nature can be found in his works.

But conversely he had little patience with obfuscating the heart of the matter with unnecessary complications, overly complex or vague language, or pretension of any kind. But philosophers do all of those.

If you read Paul Graham's essay, which I linked to, his proposal for how to fix philosophy is to focus on usefulness. For exactly the reason you stated.

[pksebben]

I think perhaps there's a subtlety in that quote - "philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds".

Maybe part of the meaning, is that I'm the course of doing what scientists do, philosophy doesn't move their particular ball forward in the way they want so they can and sometimes do ignore it. Not necessarily that they should.

This guy helped create nuclear weapons, and then quoted the bagvad ghita and had a long time to think about it. I can't imagine it didn't occur to him.

[btilly]

Feynman attempted to make his speech simple, clear, and precise. It is almost certainly a mistake to read subtlety into his language.

Besides, he expressed his negative opinions on philosophy and philosophers in many ways, on many occasions. He very clearly was on the side of those saying that philosophers SHOULD be ignored by anyone who wished to learn science.

[archgoon]

> and then quoted the bagvad ghita and had a long time to think about it.

That was Oppenheimer, not Feynman.

[pksebben]

D'oh. You're totally right; I was having a different conversation apparently.

[yesenadam]

That, apart from the first line, seems like a pretty generic/off-topic "I don't get philosophy and it's stupid" rant that could equally well be pasted under any story involving philosophy.

I don't see how it relates at all to the comment you replied to, which I thought was a good one.

[btilly]

Let me explain how it relates.

The comment advocated that scientists should profess to be philosophers. Why? Presumably because they are engaged in a field of study that philosophers have claimed. Furthermore the author is bothered that they don't. Why? Likely because if scientists acknowledged their status as philosophers, that would raise the status of philosophers.

And so the meat of my comment was illustrating by anecdote that the fact that philosophers have claimed a field, does not mean that they contribute meaningfully to it. Nor that people interested in the field should pay attention to philosophers. Nor that they should call themselves philosophers. Therefore, despite the claim that philosophers lay to topics like "epistemology", scientists SHOULD NOT profess to be philosophers. And anyone who claims otherwise should be laughed at.

Now why did I make my comment?

It is because I saw the comment as being part of the genre of people who attempt to raise the status of their field by laying an unwarranted claim to the accomplishments of others. This offends me. Philosophy and philosophers do not deserve credit for the accomplishments of science. And should not demand that scientists give philosophy that credit by relabeling themselves as philosophers.

With all that said, hopefully you'll better see how I saw my response as responsive to the comment. And hopefully you'll understand why I did not find it a good comment.

[memling]

> The comment advocated that scientists should profess to be philosophers.

This context is helpful, thanks.

I didn't advocate anything. I said that it bothers me is that (some) scientists profess not to be philosophers. This is because, in fact, scientists, like all people, actually are philosophers.

> It is because I saw the comment as being part of the genre of people who attempt to raise the status of their field

My field is not philosophy.

> by laying an unwarranted claim to the accomplishments of others.

Neither did I make any claims in my original comment. You seem to have extrapolated quite a lot from a single sentence.

> Philosophy and philosophers do not deserve credit for the accomplishments of science.

The origin of science is obviously philosophical; indeed, Western science is theological in origin (and so is Eastern if you want to broaden your definition of theology a bit). It is equally obvious, if perhaps a bit ironic, that modern science has distanced itself from its earlier foundations.

[btilly]

To the extent that all people are considered philosophers, the claim that person X is a philosopher is meaningless, and therefore is a statement that is not worth making. Just as I do not constantly go around identifying myself with, "human, primate, born on planet Earth, circling the star Sol, in the Milky Way galaxy..." Those statements are true but provide no useful information to anyone distinguishing me from anyone else.

To the extent that "philosopher" is identified with the practice of philosophy as discussed and practiced in philosophy departments, it is a meaningful identifier. But also *SHOULD NOT* be applied to most scientists. For similar reasons, the historical theological roots of early scientists does not make modern fields like chemistry into branches of theology.

As for science distancing itself from its earlier foundations, there is nothing ironic about it. In fact that act is essential to how science as a field operates. The purpose of a scientific education is to indoctrinate the student with the norms, values and knowledge of current scientific paradigms that will allow the student to operate within, extend, challenge, and hopefully improve those paradigms. Exposing the student to the details of outdated approaches only to explain why they became outdated is an activity of limited use, and therefore we strictly limit how many such examples students must learn. And even for those we do not explain previous ideas in detail. What purpose is there in explaining to students who must learn inertia, Aristotle's ideas that all things naturally come to rest? Why would we bother explaining the history of attempts to find mechanisms for and explanations of Noah's Flood to students who are about to learn about the Ice Ages and that Noah's Flood didn't happen?

The first clear description that I know of for this process comes from Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. At the time he was a physicist who had developed an interest in the history of science. He implicitly assumed a shared context with the reader. People who have mastered a hard science generally have that context. I have that context, and found the book delightful.

Unfortunately after writing that book, he spent a lot of time responding to creative misunderstandings of his work from philosophers who lacked that context. I found little value in those criticisms, or in his responses. Yet another example of how I've found a lack of value in philosophy as practiced by philosophers.

[memling]

> To the extent that all people are considered philosophers, the claim that person X is a philosopher is meaningless

If ideas had no consequences, this might be true; but since ideas do have consequences, this is probably not true.

> For similar reasons, the historical theological roots of early scientists does not make modern fields like chemistry into branches of theology.

A theologian might disagree with you about this. How would you go about demonstrating that this opinion is incorrect?

> As for science distancing itself from its earlier foundations, there is nothing ironic about it. In fact that act is essential to how science as a field operates.

Scientific progress suggests that we produce more theoretically plausible interpretations of phenomena. As we do that, we often undercut or discard the axioms that produce these new theories: that is what is ironic.

[btilly]

> If ideas had no consequences, this might be true; but since ideas do have consequences, this is probably not true.

Let's start with the idea, "If all A's are B's, then there is no information contained in 'x is a B' that is not also contained in 'x is an A'."

It's a pretty important idea. It goes back to Aristotle. Anyone who professes to think that philosophy is important should be familiar with it.

Its consequence is that if all humans are philosophers, then there is no information we can extract from the label "philosopher" that is not already contained in the label "human". And therefore calling individual humans philosophers would therefore convey no useful information.

But attempting to apply generic labels IS useful for a well-known fallacy - the fallacy of equivocation. This is where the same term is used with two different meanings in different parts of the same argument. For example an ontological argument can produce a generic definition of God, then argue for its existence. And then proceeds to argue for a Christian God on the basis of characteristics we implicitly associate with the idea of God, DESPITE those characteristics not being part of the definition just used.

Therefore the attempt to apply unnecessary labels can lead us into logical fallacies. Such as arguing that everyone should be called a philosopher, then arguing about how philosophers should behave, then arguing that everyone should behave that way. And failing to note that the definition of "philosopher" changed between the first and second parts of the argument.

Given that the most likely consequence of calling everyone a philosopher is falling into logical fallacies, we should not assert a trivial definition of philosopher such that everyone is a philosopher.

> A theologian might disagree with you about this. How would you go about demonstrating that this opinion is incorrect?

I would argue from the meaning of the words used.

Theology is the study of the nature of the divine. To the extent that a scientist believes that they are revealing the nature of the divine from their study of the natural world, they are engaged in theology. However to the extent that the scientist makes no attempt to draw conclusions of the nature of the divine from their studies of the natural world, they are NOT engaged in theology.

Modern chemists seldom try to draw any conclusions either way about the nature of the divine from their work. Therefore the study of modern chemistry is not a branch of theology.

To the extent that theologians attempt to draw conclusions of the nature of the divine from chemistry, those theologians must be engaged in theology. But modern chemists will generally agree that those attempts are not part of the field of chemistry. And so, again, modern chemistry and theology are separated.

> Scientific progress suggests that we produce more theoretically plausible interpretations of phenomena. As we do that, we often undercut or discard the axioms that produce these new theories: that is what is ironic.

And what axioms would those be?

Science did not begin to become science until it threw away a lot of Aristotle's bad ideas. Other ideas of his were not thrown out, but have generally proven to be irrelevant. The logic used in practice by science owes rather more to people like George Boole, Thomas Bayes and Ronald Fisher than Aristotle. And students are more likely to encounter said logic in a mathematics course than a philosophy one.

That said, it is trivially true that the way that science is carried out demonstrates that they have adopted an implicit philosophy. But that philosophy was mostly developed by scientists themselves, and I've never seen it accurately described by philosophers.

This is not to say that philosophers have not tried. For example Karl Popper attempted to opine on how science must be done, and came up with his famous falsifiability criterion. This theory is laughably wrong. Scientists have known for many decades that one or both of currently accepted theories about general relativity and quantum mechanics must be false. And yet neither has been thrown out.

Nor is this merely a comment about how scientists fail to operate as Popper would like. POPPER HIMSELF attempted to do scientific work, and POPPER failed to behave as Popper claimed that scientists should. Very specifically, Popper to the end of his life refused to accept evidence that quantum mechanical particles do not have a precise position or momentum. And contributed decades of papers about experiments that he hoped would prove quantum mechanics wrong, and his ideas right. Eventually the experiments were done and, as was generally expected, Popper was wrong.

This was no surprise. By this point mainstream physics had long accepted not just uncertain position and momentum, but were happily using Feynman diagrams to organize calculations that included virtual particles with possible (but uncertain) temporary existence.

Even today, philosophers continue to opine on falsification despite the fact that falsification has long been falsified as a description of science. They are not alone. Some scientists like to muse on this and related topics. But when they return to their real work, they mostly ignore the giant contradictions between the theory and practice of science. So the best thing that I can say about it is that little harm is done.