Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Faustus5]

Excuse me, pussycat, but there is absolutely no evidence whatever in your conversation of any of this.

The following is a direct cut and paste from what you wrote on September 3 2020, time stamp 8:19 AM:

Analytic philosophy IS an implicit endorsement of scientific paradigms to address all questions. . .

This claim is a view no mainstream analytic philosopher has ever espoused, not even implicitly. So stop playing games.

Argue your case, bring in ideas, tell me what you think.

I think that when science was created by philosophers and broke off to become its own disciple, this was Western philosophy finally figuring out the right way to do foundational ontology. And since then, philosophy has had almost nothing worthwhile to say on the subject. Now, this is not the same thing as saying all philosophy related to science is worthless. Whether scientists admit it or not, philosophers still have valid contributions to make in biology, cosmology, and especially consciousness studies.

But I think it is extraordinarily unlikely, approaching the impossible, that any of those contributions is ever going to flow from works in phenomenology.

[Sculptor1]

In this case, the government are simply trying to justify their incompetence by claiming the backing of science in a scenario where science has no relevance. And we can also look at philosophy forums, where many contributors recommend science as the only means of investigating life, the universe and everything.

Pointless trying to argue with a strawman. Where's your evidence?

Subjects like metaphysics are ridiculed and dismissed because they are outside the purview of science.

Pointless trying to argue with a strawman. Where's your evidence?

In both cases, you have been here in this forum, and participated in enough discussions, to see that what I describe sometimes happens here. I'm not going trawling for specifics, when we both know well what is posted here.

All I see is one caricature heaped upon another.
Science, good science, is worthy of trust where most other disciplines rely on Persuasion and Guile. If that is what you mean, I see no problem. But what I do not see is general optimism in science, nor do I see any kind of hegemony.
On the contrary, in my life time I have seen science systematically denigrated and generally blamed for things that science, as such, as no responsibility to bear.
If Oppenheimer had been listened to the world would not be dangerously over burdened with nuclear weapons. Yet science gets blamed.
If the findings of science had been taken more seriously there might be no pandemic, the incidence of deaths due to malaria would be less; climate change would be under control; pollution less.
What I see is scientists shouting warnings and the rest of the world treating them like Casandra at the gates of Troy.

[Pattern-chaser]

In my life time I have seen science systematically denigrated and generally blamed for things that science, as such, as no responsibility to bear.
If Oppenheimer had been listened to the world would not be dangerously over burdened with nuclear weapons. Yet science gets blamed.
If the findings of science had been taken more seriously there might be no pandemic, the incidence of deaths due to malaria would be less; climate change would be under control; pollution less.
What I see is scientists shouting warnings and the rest of the world treating them like Casandra at the gates of Troy.

I don't quarrel with any of that.



Nevertheless, it is also the case that science is often misapplied, which is the "hegemony" we are discussing here. As I said:

I agree with you to the extent that sometimes my take on this is reversed: there are circumstances when science is the most useful and appropriate tool to address a particular issue, but it is not employed. But science is also, and often, misapplied, and this is the hegemony of science that the OP refers to. IMO, of course.

I have acknowledged and accepted the points you remade already. Do you not see that science is also often misapplied?

[Hereandnow]

Terrapin Station wrote
Another howler of tortured prose is "the quest for the being of beings in its difference from being." LOL

Here, TP, is another great howler:

Bosonic string theory, however, is not a realistic theory. It predicts states of negative mass called tachyons, which lead to the instability and decay of D-branes. More importantly, it does not contain fermions, which differ from bosons in that fermions are particles of half-integer spin while bosons have integer spin. LOL

Context is everything.

[GE Morton]

Professional philosophers?? Obviously. Read the post more carefully. But it's true, a person that doesn't have a kind of "Copernican Revolution" is not going to understand how this change in perspective works.

The Copernican Revolution was prompted by observational evidence. Phenomenology has yet to produce or cite an iota of that.

Serious philosophy is pragmatic? Or is it pragmatism? There is a difference. The latter is close to Heidegger, actually.

Pragmatism is a particular philosophical school. But the discipline as a whole is pragmatic in the vernacular sense --- it aims to improve our understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we live, in order that we may make better use of it and reduce the dangers it poses. Phenomenology offers nothing that advances those ends, as far as most Western philosophers can see.

You might consider that the reason you have so little appreciation for such thinking is that relative to empirical science, you have had precious little exposure to it. This is true for everyone, for science begins in grammar school, phenomenology begins, well, it doesn't, really, for anyone, nearly.

That is true. Neither have many students been exposed to, say, animism, witchcraft, astrology, scientology, etc., at least in common schools. For the same reason.

Phenomenologists are the only ones who know how to take the world up AS the world.

All philosophers, and scientists, "take up" the world "as a world." What else would they take it up as? But once taken up it must be broken down, the distinguishable parts/aspects isolated and broken down further. That is what analysis means.

Not sure what there is to object to here. Who is talking about key points? "Can ...capture ...to induce": why yes, that's what I said, one can, but one has to be motivated. ???

Motivation follows stimulus, not the other way around. No one makes an investment in a venture that exhibits no prospects for a return.

[GE Morton]

Terrapin Station wrote
Another howler of tortured prose is "the quest for the being of beings in its difference from being." LOL

Here, TP, is another great howler:

Bosonic string theory, however, is not a realistic theory. It predicts states of negative mass called tachyons, which lead to the instability and decay of D-branes. More importantly, it does not contain fermions, which differ from bosons in that fermions are particles of half-integer spin while bosons have integer spin. LOL

Context is everything.

All of the terms in your quote are well-defined in the theories in which they are used. There are many problems with that theory, but it is at least coherent. The sentence TP quoted is meaningless. "Being" seems to be used with three different senses, none of them the everyday sense, and none of them are defined. It is gobbledygook.

[Terrapin Station]

Terrapin Station wrote
Another howler of tortured prose is "the quest for the being of beings in its difference from being." LOL

Here, TP, is another great howler:

Bosonic string theory, however, is not a realistic theory. It predicts states of negative mass called tachyons, which lead to the instability and decay of D-branes. More importantly, it does not contain fermions, which differ from bosons in that fermions are particles of half-integer spin while bosons have integer spin. LOL

Context is everything.

Good thing that I'm not endorsing whoever wrote that.

[Sculptor1]

In my life time I have seen science systematically denigrated and generally blamed for things that science, as such, as no responsibility to bear.
If Oppenheimer had been listened to the world would not be dangerously over burdened with nuclear weapons. Yet science gets blamed.
If the findings of science had been taken more seriously there might be no pandemic, the incidence of deaths due to malaria would be less; climate change would be under control; pollution less.
What I see is scientists shouting warnings and the rest of the world treating them like Casandra at the gates of Troy.

I don't quarrel with any of that.



Nevertheless, it is also the case that science is often misapplied, which is the "hegemony" we are discussing here. As I said:

I agree with you to the extent that sometimes my take on this is reversed: there are circumstances when science is the most useful and appropriate tool to address a particular issue, but it is not employed. But science is also, and often, misapplied, and this is the hegemony of science that the OP refers to. IMO, of course.

I have acknowledged and accepted the points you remade already. Do you not see that science is also often misapplied?

"Science misapplied" is not Science.

It's not a "hegemony OF science." But just the usual hegemony of twits, corporations, the rich, the idle and the greedy.

[Hereandnow]

Faustus5 wrote

This claim is a view no mainstream analytic philosopher has ever espoused, not even implicitly. So stop playing games.

Yes, they have. It's just that the empirical premise is simply implied. I]ll tell you what, you name any analytic phislopher, of your choosing, and I will shoe how this philosopher's conception of the world at the level of basic assumptions is empirical. I mean, there is a reason why Dennett tries to reduce consciousness to "layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain" and when Mackie discusses ethics his argument from queerness goes to standards of intelligible thought produced by empirical science; there is a reason why Quine and many analytic philosophers' have been described as defending a kind of behaviorism.

Just name him/her, and I will do a bit of reading and explain (but frankly, I think the point should be clear by now. You should be looking for a philosopher to proclaim: I begin my thoughts on the matter with an explicit endorsement of empirical science! Robert Hanna says the post-Quinean (after his two Dogmas paper) analytic world is in awful shape, and "good riddance" because

.....of the dogmatic obsession of post-Quinean, post-classical Analytic
philosophy with scientific naturalism since 1950, and above all

[Terrapin Station]

For one, how is "the empirical premise" the same thing as "the scientific paradigm"?

[Hereandnow]

GE Morton wrote
All of the terms in your quote are well-defined in the theories in which they are used. There are many problems with that theory, but it is at least coherent. The sentence TP quoted is meaningless. "Being" seems to be used with three different senses, none of them the everyday sense, and none of them are defined. It is gobbledygook.

"The quest for the being of beings in its difference from being": "from being" takes the quoate out of context and I would have to read the fuller text. His question is about being in the most foundational sense, not particular beings, as a chair or an eidtic entity like a set of numbers, but the question of being as such, when the predicative designations is put aside. Entities come replete predicatively bundled, so to speak, and there is no sense in the ideas of it being otherwise. But since philosophy's purpose is to provide an analytic at themost foundational level possible, and Being as such is this level, he begins here, but it is not with an eye to elucidate Being, the eternal essence of all things (why is there something rather than nothing, sort of thing), but rather to use this term to establish how far down the rabbit hole analysis can go and what this terminal place is.

So the quote SOUNDS absurd to anyone who has read nothing. It is always like this. Rorty calls those who talk like this (he thought Heidegger was among the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century) know nothings.

[Hereandnow]

Terrapin Station wrote
For one, how is "the empirical premise" the same thing as "the scientific paradigm"?

How is it not? Ask yourself, What is a premise? What is a paradigm? What is a theory? What is a proposition?

this is elementary

[Hereandnow]

Sculptor1 wrote

It's such a shame that science has no hegemony in modern society.
There is so much fakery out there.
Misused statistics.
False claims
Flat earthers
Ignored scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer; Lovelock and Semel Weiss throughout history.
Anti vaxers.
Religion.
On and on it goes

For crying out loud Sculptor 1, the issue on the table is not at all about how science is being discredited by right wing propaganda. It is a much broader issue. It is about how science is unfit for a foundational philosophical ontology.

I mean, seriously??

[Faustus5]

Faustus5 wrote

This claim is a view no mainstream analytic philosopher has ever espoused, not even implicitly. So stop playing games.

Yes, they have. It's just that the empirical premise is simply implied. I]ll tell you what, you name any analytic phislopher, of your choosing, and I will shoe how this philosopher's conception of the world at the level of basic assumptions is empirical.

That would not be enough to back up your utterly goofy claim. You need to find an analytic philosopher declaring, in his or her own words, that science can be used to literally solve all questions. Nothing short of this will do.

I mean, there is a reason why Dennett tries to reduce consciousness to "layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain". . .

Well, I know Dennett's work more than any philosopher on earth, probably better than anyone you've ever met, and his theory of consciousness is explicitly anti-reductionist, so you're kind of getting things backwards right from the start. But I suppose if you've only encountered his ideas third or fourth hand, that sound bite is what a person might come away with.

At any rate, you get the details wrong, but your larger point remains correct in this particular case: Dennett's approach to consciousness is scientific and empirical to the core. Hell, the bibliography for Consciousness Explained cites scientists far more than philosophers.

Now, can you please articulate why treating consciousness as a evolved biological phenomena is somehow wrong? This should be rich.

And can you please articulate why the other philosophers you mention are misguided in using empirical methods?

Let me stress again that I do think some scientists and some philosophers can be found guilty of scientific over-reach (and I should add that their peers tend to be pretty good at slapping them down for it), but you have to take it case by case and examine the particular merits of the arguments they make instead of making unfounded generalizations about the entire field. I just deny that there is some sort of over-arching problem where science is constantly and routinely abused and used to solve problems where it is an inappropriate tool.

[Terrapin Station]

but the question of being as such, when the predicative designations is put aside. Entities come replete predicatively bundled, so to speak, and there is no sense in the ideas of it being otherwise.

That doesn't help, because the idea of that is nonsensical. You can't have existents of any sort without properties.

But since philosophy's purpose is to provide an analytic at themost foundational level possible, and Being as such is this level, he begins here, but it is not with an eye to elucidate Being, the eternal essence of all things (why is there something rather than nothing, sort of thing),

"Essences" only exist as rigid requirements in an individual's concepts. No essence as such would be "eternal." "Why is there something" is a rather silly question. There's no reason there should be nothing instead, so that it would be a mystery that there is something, and the question usually has a connotation almost of there being an intelligent reason behind the brute fact that things exist, which is also nonsense.