[kbrkbr]

I hold a master in philosophy and it was my first big love.

Over the years I came however to a conclusion opposite to yours.

> Also, philosophy underpins science. Whenever a hypothesis is tested, there is are philosophically-grounded assumptions being made. The epistemological implications for any given scientific finding depend on the underlying philosophical framework being assumed.

I think that is not true. Science does not get its merit from philosophical underpinnings, but from working in practice.

Methods that work to generate and test knowledge. Math is the precise language needed to speak about these methods and the knowledge. Also because it works. Look at the achievements of science. That is how you get convinced it gives us a grip on reality. Hic Rhodos, hic salta.

My working assumption at this time is that philosophy has no such methods. We are not further than when Kant said that no fighter ever won and could stand his ground in metaphysics on any topic.

The reason might be that philosophy is actually practically mostly irrelevant. I have not seen one undisputed statement of philosophy. And so it can neither test its statements, nor let others see their validity.

I concede it is practically relevant in another sense: world views have taken grip of groups and still do, and influence history one way or the other. But that seems at least to me more a social-anthropological phenomenon like support and resistance in trading.

[quus]

> The reason might be that philosophy is actually practically mostly irrelevant. I have not seen one undisputed statement of philosophy. And so it can neither test its statements, nor let others see their validity.

This is the core confusion I think. I find philosophy very relevant for the way I reason and solve problems and evaluate arguments, and in this sense philosophy is powerfully practical. But it’s true that for any given claim, there is always the possibility of taking the opposite position. This lack of final, case-closed consensus doesn’t mean that philosophers individually haven’t converged on true beliefs or haven’t made progress. It’s just that unlike mathematical truths, we can write out the proofs of our arguments, but there’s always someone who disagrees about one of the starting assumptions. So then civilians who haven’t heard of people like Parfit think to themselves, wow 2k years and you can’t tell me anything about ethics or logic or epistemology — it’s like bro just read the literature

[kbrkbr]

I can't say "been there, done that", because I know little about how you came to the position you hold. And I've had my share of burying hypotheses I've held for long times, so chances are I'm wrong.

But I held similar views. What moved me away from these views was the experience that in science you have methods that will let you see with high probability when your thesis is wrong.

Philosophy does not have such methods. You cannot only take the opposite claim for almost anything, but in my experience that claim has actually been taken by another philosopher for almost any topic.

The current consensus is in my experience lead by the people with the loudest megaphone. It's not the best theory given the things that really happen.

No philosophy (in the sense of actual writings of a philosopher) was causally involved in bringing the first astronaut to the moon; in building the first pacemaker - I would argue in none of anything where you could say: if you can do this with it, its probably on to something. Its methods seem to work.

As said, I cannot judge your thinking in any way, but this led me to question that philosophy is not practically relevant to me. How can I even judge if it works? And if I can't, is this not blind trust? Like an imaginary screwdriver for imaginary screws.

[kuhewa]

> I think that is not true. Science does not get its merit from philosophical underpinnings, but from working in practice.

In the day-to-day practice of science i.e. when empirical inquiry 'works', there certainly are underpinning philosophical assumptions, whether or not they are reconsidered or appreciated with every experiment. The implicit in the act of hypothesis testing, some variant of which most scientists in day-to-day practice, are assumptions about the nature of probabilities, inference etc. The NHST framework that is typically used came about after extensive battles over philosophical considerations that apply to significance/hypothesis testing between Neyman and Pearson vs Fisher. The fact that I never write that a hypothesis is (as a research biologist) is 'proven', but some variant that of it having withstood an attempt at falsification, is loaded with Popperian critical rationalism.

> Math is the precise language needed to speak about these methods and the knowledge.

Except math can't map directly onto reality, or data generating processes that are studied, unless you are presupposing some kind of logical positivism (and I doubt you are). We need probabilities, statistics, and frameworks to map all of this uncertainty, and they must be underpinned by some sort of philosophical assumptions that can't be derived from science itself.

> Look at the achievements of science. That is how you get convinced it gives us a grip on reality.

But that in and of itself is a philosophy of science, one of instrumentalism. However, it only extends to whether science can be useful, but not whether it is accurately describing reality or is true.

[kbrkbr]

Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

You have many good points.

Let me just say that Popper has been philosophically criticized to the point that some say it is a dead horse. Why are we still using this mixture of Fisherian and Neymar-Pearson hypothesis testing (that is if we don't use bayesian methods)? Because it practically works well, not because Popper was right or found a deep philosophical truth.

These methods just generate more often than not knowledge, as we can judge from the consequences.

I argue that nobody cares if the assumptions we put into the frameworks are philosophical true - they are possibilities, and we try some out. So far we seem to be doing pretty well, no matter what philosophers say about the truth of these assumptions.

I also think bending philosophy to apply to practical advice like "use the tool that works" will not leave much to the notion of philosophy.

But it's not that I have a fixed metaphysical position here. I really only use the tool that was most promising in the past for the task at hand. Never needed philosophy.

[kuhewa]

> I also think bending philosophy to apply to practical advice like "use the tool that works" will not leave much to the notion of philosophy.

I reckon maybe there's something to this. One thing that comes to mind though is: Granting the fact the NHST is now broadly used by practitioners without knowledge of its background simply because it works, I am not sure that necessarily indicates the background isn't important, as my ignorance of my monitor's inner workings does not mean that electricity is not important.

[RoyalHenOil]

My education and work history are in the biological sciences (although I have admittedly recently made a career change).

To my mind, science (formerly known known as natural philosophy) is a subset of philosophy. However, it is a subset that has grown to dwarf the other subsets and is given separate, special attention. You do not learn much, if any, science in a philosophy degree because philosophy degrees now focus on philosophies that have not been spun off into separate degrees/fields.

Within the sciences, you do learn philosophy (or at least it factored highly in my undergraduate degree), but it's not about Aristotle or Nietzsche. It's about the assumptions and logic underpinning the scientific method, statistical analysis, etc.

My introductory classes, at least, covered a number of arguments and assumptions that (to my ear) are very much questions of philosophy. For example, scientific inquiry is dependent on the assumption that the laws of the universe are consistent across time, meaning that experiments performed now can nonetheless offer insight into past and future phenomena.

[ethanbond]

Here’s one way it’s relevant: universities are structured according to a philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe (or at least the nature of knowledge about the universe). That set of decisions in turn steers, at a very fundamental level, the path and velocity of scientific inquiry.

[kbrkbr]

I fail to see what you mean exactly. Could you explain?

Specifically why the opinion is philosophical and not just some historic-pragmatic pattern matching and grouping?

[kuhewa]

Did you get much exposure to the philosophy of science during your masters? I imagine the answer would be yes, but I am surprised that concept doesn't ring a bell as it sounds quite similar to what Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, although not necessarily with universities as the institutions upholding scientific paradigms