[knightoffaith]

We were originally talking about how many people who weren't philosophers enjoyed philosophy---what happened to that?

But whatever, we can set that aside if you'd like, I'm kind of curious to hear - what do you think was lost in the last 100 years ago? I'm a bit surprised to hear that, I would have thought you would say that we got more rather than less rigorous post-Frege. What do you think of philosophers today who specialize in studying the history of philosophy today, or philosophers who specialize in specific periods of pre-20th century philosophy (ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, etc.)? Or specific pre-20th century philosophy?

And I have to ask, since you're a big fan of Popper---what do you think about Kuhn and Feyerabend? Quine (particularly the Duhem-Quine thesis)? Post-Popperian philosophy of science in general? All just nonsense?

(You don't have to address every question if you'd rather not take the time.)

[lisper]

> how many people who weren't philosophers enjoyed philosophy

No, we were talking about (or at least I was talking about) how many people get value out of philosophy who don't practice it, at least as amateurs. Is philosophy like music or is it like yoga? I'm on team yoga.

> what do you think was lost in the last 100 years ago?

It's not what was lost, it's what was gained. And what was gained is major breakthroughs in areas of science that allows science to answer questions that were traditionally the purview of philosophy. These include evolution, molecular biology, the theory of computation, quantum mechanics, and neuroscience.

> what do you think about Kuhn and Feyerabend?

I don't know much about Kuhn. I read "Against Method" a long time ago and it seemed like total nonsense to me at the time, one of the things that convinced me that philosophy as an area of intellectual inquiry was bankrupt.

> Duhem-Quine thesis

Yes, I think this is pretty self-evidently true. A finite amount of data, which is all we can ever have, will always be consistent with an infinite number of theories.

> (You don't have to address every question if you'd rather not take the time.)

I'm actually finding our exchange very interesting and worthwhile. You're keeping me on my toes.

[knightoffaith]

>No, we were talking about (or at least I was talking about) how many people get value out of philosophy who don't practice it, at least as amateurs. Is philosophy like music or is it like yoga? I'm on team yoga.

Well, I've said that there are plenty of people who don't practice philosophy who enjoy books of philosophy taken seriously by philosophers. You responded that these people enjoy discussing philosophy, the implication being that these people are practicing philosophy. And I responded in turn that these people are no more practicing philosophers than people humming tunes are practicing musicians---so it's not clear what the relevant distinction between music and philosophy is supposed to be with respect to its enjoyability beyond practitioners of the discipline.

>It's not what was lost, it's what was gained. And what was gained is major breakthroughs in areas of science that allows science to answer questions that were traditionally the purview of philosophy. These include evolution, molecular biology, the theory of computation, quantum mechanics, and neuroscience.

How much of Plato's dialogues do you think were about these things? I don't deny that what used to be called natural philosophy is now just science, but it's rather extreme to say that the sciences have conquered everything philosophers were in the business of doing. And Plato isn't just some random exceptional example; I'm sure you're familiar with Whitehead's "footnotes to Plato" quote.

>I read "Against Method" a long time ago and it seemed like total nonsense to me at the time, one of the things that convinced me that philosophy as an area of intellectual inquiry was bankrupt.

Feyerabend is rather extreme, but I'm curious why you think it was totally nonsense.

>Yes, I think this is pretty self-evidently true.

And do you see the problem this poses for Popperian falsificationism? More generally, philosophy of science, beyond just Popper, is a good example of meaningful work done in philosophy.

[lisper]

> it's not clear what the relevant distinction between music and philosophy is supposed to be

Music can be enjoyed by someone who never practices it at all, not even humming or singing in the shower. Yoga cannot. You have to do yoga to get any value out of it at all. No one gets any benefit out of simply watching people do yoga.

My claim (and it's an empirical claim -- I might be wrong, but you'd need actual evidence) is that philosophy is more like yoga than music. Almost no one gets value out of it without actually participating in some way. (I hedge with "almost" because you might be able to find a few weirdos out there who really do enjoy reading Wittgenstein for its own sake and never engaging in philosophical discussion, but I'd be surprised if there are more than, say, a few dozen such people on the entire planet.)

> it's rather extreme to say that the sciences have conquered everything philosophers were in the business of doing

I'm not saying that. I'm saying that science has conquered a lot of what philosophers were once in the business of doing, and many of those things were things that people used to believe (and some still believe) were inherently beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, with human consciousness and Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" being my poster children. I'm not saying this project is complete, I'm predicting that science will continue to make progress monotonically until all that is left for philosophers is the Philosophy of the ever-shrinking Gaps.

> Feyerabend is rather extreme, but I'm curious why you think it was totally nonsense.

I'd have to go back and re-read it. It has been many decades and I don't remember any of the details.

I can tell you two things though: First, I was turned on to Feyerabend by someone I deeply respect and so I was predisposed to like him. And second, looking over the Wikipedia article on him I can see right away why I don't:

"Feyerabend's most famous work is Against Method (1975), wherein he argued that there are no universally valid methodological rules for scientific inquiry."

That is flat-earth kind of wrong. There is at least one obvious universal methodological rule for scientific inquiry, and that is the one voiced by Feynman: any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong.

> And do you see the problem [Duhem-Quine] poses for Popperian falsificationism?

No. I can see why someone might think it poses a problem, but I don't see any actual problem.

BTW, note that even if DQ poses an actual problem for Popper, all that would do is falsify Popper as a theory of why science is effective. It would have absolutely no impact on the manifest fact that science is effective. That fact alone casts some pretty serious doubt on DQ being a problem for Popper because the only way it could possibly be an actual problem for Popper is if Popper is correct :-)

[knightoffaith]

>music yoga

I would wager that most people who enjoy listening to music at some point have hummed some tune, sung in the shower, or something like this. If your point is that merely the act of listening itself is enjoyable, then that seems to apply to reading philosophy as well---there's enjoyment to be found in the mere pleasure of reading a philosophical work, and it's not like having a philosophical discussion is what "actualizes" this enjoyment or something strange like that.

(Though in any case I don't think this is the relevant criteria for whether an academic institution should be abolished or not, but.)

>I'm not saying this project is complete, I'm predicting that science will continue to make progress monotonically until all that is left for philosophers is the Philosophy of the ever-shrinking Gaps.

Suppose we accept the view that consciousness can be fully explained by science. Suddenly this means that actually all of philosophy will fall to science? And we should pre-emptively abolish the institution because of this prediction?

>That is flat-earth kind of wrong. There is at least one obvious universal methodological rule for scientific inquiry, and that is the one voiced by Feynman: any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong.

Usually when people express this kind of, "X idea is wrong, and anyone who argues for it is intellectually bankrupt" will refuse to take seriously any discussion on the matter, so I won't say too much on this topic. But if you're interested, you can read Feyerabend's arguments, including case studies in the history of science where traditionally well-respected scientists have violated, e.g., principles of falsifiability. Chalmers has a nice book, What is This Thing Called Science?, that includes this view, though the book is far more nuanced than Feyerabend. "Any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong" sounds plausible, but there are several issues, such as the theory-ladenness of observations and the inability to test any specific hypothesis in isolation, meaning it's difficult to know what particular theory or part of a theory an observation falsifies (Duhem-Quine).

>It would have absolutely no impact on the manifest fact that science is effective.

But nobody has suggested that the dichotomy is either a) Popper's falsificationism is correct or b) science isn't effective. None of Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, or really, any philosopher of science disagreeing with Popper is saying science isn't effective.

>That fact alone casts some pretty serious doubt on DQ being a problem for Popper because the only way it could possibly be an actual problem for Popper is if Popper is correct :-)

But it's hardly a unique view to Popperian falsificationism that things can shown to be wrong, the view that things can be shown to be wrong is something all the thinkers mentioned and any sane person agrees on.

[lisper]

> If your point is that merely the act of listening itself is enjoyable, then that seems to apply to reading philosophy as well

Sure. I'm just skeptical that the people reading philosophy for fun are reading Wittgenstein.

> Suppose we accept the view that consciousness can be fully explained by science. Suddenly this means that actually all of philosophy will fall to science?

Of course not. That's an obvious straw man. I'm just saying that the historical trend has been for science to solve philosophical problems at a much faster rate than new philosophical problems arise, and so the remaining pool of philosophical problems is shrinking monotonically, and I see no reason to believe that this trend will not continue.

I will also add that the current state of things seems to be that the extant pool of outstanding philosophical problems that science hasn't yet made a dent in is quite small.

> Usually when people express this kind of, "X idea is wrong, and anyone who argues for it is intellectually bankrupt" will refuse to take seriously any discussion on the matter, so I won't say too much on this topic.

I make it a point to engage with ideas that I vehemently disagree with. I put a lot of effort into studying young-earth creationism, to the point where I can channel their arguments pretty effectively. I even gave a public talk entitled "What I learned from young-earth creationists." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ohY9ALuEfw) So I am not quite so closed-minded as you think.

I also recognize that the actual practice of science in the real world often strays from the ideal. But that doesn't mean that an ideal does not exist. Judging science by what (some) scientists do is kind of like judging Christianity by what MAGA people do. (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess from your user name, as well as the arguments that you are advancing, that you're a Christian?)

> it's difficult to know what particular theory or part of a theory an observation falsifies

Difficult != impossible.

> None of Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, or really, any philosopher of science disagreeing with Popper is saying science isn't effective.

Happy to hear that. The impression I remember having when I read Feyerabend many decades ago is that his message was that the whole scientific enterprise was bankrupt and needed to be replaced with something radically different.

> But it's hardly a unique view to Popperian falsificationism that things can shown to be wrong, the view that things can be shown to be wrong is something all the thinkers and any sane person agrees on.

Yes, but you left out a crucial detail: it's not just that things can be shown to be wrong, it's that they can be shown to be wrong by experimental data. This is far from universally accepted. Many Christians, for example, believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and so cannot be shown to be wrong. Muslims believe the same about the Quran. If experimental data conflicts with the Bible or the Quran, it is the data (or the interpretation of the data) that must be wrong, not the Bible or the Quran.

But that is neither here nor there. What matters is that we agree that science is effective, and so we can apply the scientific method to itself and ask why it is effective. And the answer is (I claim) because it uses experiment rather than intuition or divine revelation as its ultimate arbiter of truth. That still leaves a lot to argue about, but another empirical observation one can make is that scientific arguments tend to converge. The atomic theory was wildly controversial in the 19th century. Today not even the most radical flat-earther denies the existence of atoms. Entanglement was controversial, but that argument was settled by Alain Aspect's experiments. Plat tectonics. Helicobacter pylori. Heliocentrism. All of these were once considered flat-earth-kind-of-wrong.

BTW, the problem with flat-eartherism is not that it's wrong. There is nothing wrong with being wrong. Everyone is wrong about something at one time or another. The problem with flat-earthers is that they cherry-pick the data and advance conspiracy theories to explain the parts they don't like.

[knightoffaith]

>Sure. I'm just skeptical that the people reading philosophy for fun are reading Wittgenstein.

I'm sure a lot of them are.

>I'm just saying that the historical trend has been for science to solve philosophical problems at a much faster rate than new philosophical problems arise, and so the remaining pool of philosophical problems is shrinking monotonically, and I see no reason to believe that this trend will not continue.

Surely a large part of why this is is because what is now science used to be natural philosophy.

And I think there are many philosophical issues today that can be traced back to Plato that science hasn't resolved, and moreover, cannot resolve alone.

(Though, if you think trying to hash out definitions and the meanings of words is science, a lot of what is going on in Plato's dialogues is science, and the continued discussion of these issues in philosophy departments is also science.)

>I make it a point to engage with ideas that I vehemently disagree with. I put a lot of effort into studying young-earth creationism, to the point where I can channel their arguments pretty effectively. I even gave a public talk entitled "What I learned from young-earth creationists." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ohY9ALuEfw) So I am not quite so closed-minded as you think.

I'm happy to hear that!

>I also recognize that the actual practice of science in the real world often strays from the ideal. But that doesn't mean that an ideal does not exist.

I think that the practice of science strays from the ideal so much is evidence that we shouldn't be too concerned about meeting this ideal, precisely because the practice of science has worked out so marvelously.

>I'm going to go out on a limb and guess from your user name, as well as the arguments that you are advancing, that you're a Christian?

Somehow I feel like I shouldn't give a response to this question here; I'll just say that the viewpoints that I'm defending---that there are domains of discourse over which philosophy rather than science must be our primary tool to adjudicate disputes and there aren't good grounds to abolish philosophy as an academic institution any more there are grounds to abolish, say, the literature department or the music department (and I guess, now, that Popperian falsificationism is not the best characterization of science or its ideal.)---aren't religious commitments and don't require religious commitments, as I'd think you'd agree.

>Happy to hear that. The impression I remember having when I read Feyerabend many decades ago is that his message was that the whole scientific enterprise was bankrupt and needed to be replaced with something radically different.

Oh no, far from it. What Feyerabend thinks is that the scientific enterprise shouldn't be constrained by methodological rules. His hero is Galileo, who in his eyes, is an archetypal methodological rule-breaker, who was originally thought to be advancing views that didn't explain the data any better than former views but still turns out to be right. If there's any radical change Feyerabend thinks should be made to the scientific enterprise, it would be something like being more open-minded to theories even if they don't seem satisfactory based on methodological rules---which isn't really that much of a radical departure from the practice of science anyways, as he argues.

>Yes, but you left out a crucial detail: it's not just that things can be shown to be wrong, it's that they can be shown to be wrong by experimental data. This is far from universally accepted. Many Christians, for example, believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and so cannot be shown to be wrong. Muslims believe the same about the Quran. If experimental data conflicts with the Bible or the Quran, it is the data (or the interpretation of the data) that must be wrong, not the Bible or the Quran.

Well, for the conversation about philosophers of science, I think it's universally accepted by philosophers of science (most of which wouldn't subscribe to Popperian falsificationism) that things can be shown to be wrong by experimental data. Like, sure, if we see a black swan, we can show that "all swans are white" is false, nobody's disagreeing with this kind of reasoning.

>Many Christians, for example, believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and so cannot be shown to be wrong. Muslims believe the same about the Quran. If experimental data conflicts with the Bible or the Quran, it is the data (or the interpretation of the data) that must be wrong, not the Bible or the Quran.

Well, one thing is that these people would probably actually agree that things can be shown to be wrong by experimental data---it's just that the Bible or the Quran or what have you cannot be shown to be wrong. For what it's worth, serious Christian or Muslim thinkers will agree that there are interpretations of these texts that can be shown to be incorrect through data---those just are not the right interpretations of these texts.

>What matters is that we agree that science is effective, and so we can apply the scientific method to itself and ask why it is effective.

I don't see how the latter follows from the former.

>And the answer is (I claim) because it uses experiment rather than intuition or divine revelation as its ultimate arbiter of truth.

That seems right.

And I would agree that science makes progress; I don't think many (sensible) people dispute that.