Obvious Leo wrote:The modern-day geeks have ontologised their tool-kit and regard their maps as synonymous with the territory. They wouldn't know what an ontology was if it jumped up and bit them on the arse.
Even the most recalcitrant physicists generally take a philosophical view, if only what Steve Weinberg, Noble Laureate and no friend of philosophy, describes as "a rough and ready realism".
Dubious wrote:It's (String Theory) given a probability status
Really? Who by and what is it?
Dubious wrote:There is a scientific reason for its existence which is not due to any philosophic speculation.
As it happens, there is no scientific justification for String Theory; it is a mathematical model for which there is zero empirical evidence.
uwot wrote:
As it happens, there is no scientific justification for String Theory; it is a mathematical model for which there is zero empirical evidence.
It's all but dead, uwot, and will not rear its ugly head again. All the stringies are now looking for various ways to claim they never really meant it. The new flavour of the month is quantum loop cosmology, there's a few tinkerers with causal set theory and of course quantum field theory has never gone away. However most of the big shots in theoretical physics are mostly just scratching their heads and asking What next? Needless to say only a tiny minority are willing to entertain the possibility that the entire spacetime paradigm might be bullshit. Canonical doctrines are hard to overturn.
Obvious Leo wrote:Needless to say only a tiny minority are willing to entertain the possibility that the entire spacetime paradigm might be bullshit.
Well, Einstein believed that spacetime was a real substance, but he couched it in terms of the aether. (He gave a lecture at the University of Leiden called Relativity and Ether, or something.) Alan Guth talks about the inflaton field, QED and QCD are Quantum Field theories that aren't going anywhere soon, nor in all probability is the Higgs Field. The closest thing to a consensus, as far as I can gather, is that if the universe is actually made of something it is probably something 'field' like, that has all the mechanical properties implied by the findings of physicists. Of course, it is an entirely philosophical opinion that the universe is 'real'.
Actually, anyone who is interested in this thread should read the article that someone has reposted (Is that you, Grant?): viewtopic.php?f=23&t=15577 Briefly: Newton set the agenda for physics by insisting that it is enough for physics to account for what happens. Why things happen is, for most practical purposes, irrelevent.
uwot wrote:Actually, anyone who is interested in this thread should read the article that someone has reposted (Is that you, Grant?): viewtopic.php?f=23&t=15577 Briefly: Newton set the agenda for physics by insisting that it is enough for physics to account for what happens. Why things happen is, for most practical purposes, irrelevent.
Quite so, and Bohr expressed this point quite explicitly. Physics is "what works" which was later expressed in the pithy mantra "shut up and calculate".
Obvious Leo wrote:...Physics is "what works" which was later expressed in the pithy mantra "shut up and calculate".
If only they would.
In fairness, when they are doing their day job, that's pretty much what physicists do.
I've had a few goes at reading The Philosophy of the Bloody Obvious. Lot's of stuff about why physics is bollocks. Could you give us your argument in a less cluttered form, alsjeblieft?
Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.
Found the above article recently. Yeah, it's an old one, so I'm late to the picnic. But I guess better late than never. So those who can't do science teach science and those who can't teach science teach philosophy of science? Is science the only truly noble pursuit? Are philosophers essentially just the "retards" who can't do science and so they teach "remedial" education or something?
Such scientism itself is a prescribed attitude or philosophical doctrine. When a scientist is asked to define science, his/her choice of accounts will have originated either directly or roundabout from one or more philosophers (including many scientists who doubled as such). Philosophy studies the horde of formal systems themselves which humans have invented over the centuries, as well as sometimes contributing to them and outright creating them. One might also expand that to "the rational investigation into the suppositions, principles and procedures that undergird all human endeavors".
It's natural for some members of a discipline or profession to get antsy about "intellectual endoscopy" being performed on the operating scheme, "preconditions for proceeding", conceptual structure or functional organization of their practice. Whether it's a scrutiny of published papers or an at-the-scene Ian Hacking "peering over my shoulder to examine / interpret what I'm doing." Thus the occasional backlash of disparagement toward philosophy. Sort of like a hothead patient who wasn't given general anaesthetic issuing snide remarks about the surgeon's probing of his bowels.
hammock wrote:Such scientism itself is a prescribed attitude or philosophical doctrine.
Another one? Fair enough, there is a definition of Scientism, the same is true of unicorn. Can anyone give an example of a practising scientist who is guilty of 'Scientism'?
hammock wrote:Such scientism itself is a prescribed attitude or philosophical doctrine. When a scientist is asked to define science, his/her choice of accounts will have originated either directly or roundabout from one or more philosophers (including many scientists who doubled as such). Philosophy studies the horde of formal systems themselves which humans have invented over the centuries, as well as sometimes contributing to them and outright creating them. One might also expand that to "the rational investigation into the suppositions, principles and procedures that undergird all human endeavors".
It's natural for some members of a discipline or profession to get antsy about "intellectual endoscopy" being performed on the operating scheme, "preconditions for proceeding", conceptual structure or functional organization of their practice. Whether it's a scrutiny of published papers or an at-the-scene Ian Hacking "peering over my shoulder to examine / interpret what I'm doing." Thus the occasional backlash of disparagement toward philosophy. Sort of like a hothead patient who wasn't given general anaesthetic issuing snide remarks about the surgeon's probing of his bowels.
This is pure nonsense and babble, you have no clue what you are talking about.
This would suggest that scientists make no new discoveries, and only philosophers have made all the discoveries. Ask you self why so many big business will hire very expensive scientists and not philosophers.
HexHammer wrote:This is pure nonsense and babble, you have no clue what you are talking about. This would suggest that scientists make no new discoveries, and only philosophers have made all the discoveries. Ask you self why so many big business will hire very expensive scientists and not philosophers.
Hex, do you ever understand what you are responding to? Do you have the capacity to make distinctions or is all just conflation? Or am I really, REALLY, supposed to sit here and accept from the adolescent barking above that you believe the physical sciences should be studying the abstract, artificial territory of formal schemes which assorted human enterprises operate under? Rather than investigating the stratums of the natural world? Your conclusion that "This would suggest that scientists make no new discoveries, and only philosophers have made all the discoveries" is about as arse-backwards a feat as I've witnessed anyone output in some time. You've got to increase your reading comprehension, lad, or someday one of those oversize turds will burst something that requires stitches.
HexHammer wrote:This is pure nonsense and babble, you have no clue what you are talking about. This would suggest that scientists make no new discoveries, and only philosophers have made all the discoveries. Ask you self why so many big business will hire very expensive scientists and not philosophers.
Hex, do you ever understand what you are responding to? Do you have the capacity to make distinctions or is all just conflation? Or am I really, REALLY, supposed to sit here and accept from the adolescent barking above that you believe the physical sciences should be studying the abstract, artificial territory of formal schemes which assorted human enterprises operate under? Rather than investigating the stratums of the natural world? Your conclusion that "This would suggest that scientists make no new discoveries, and only philosophers have made all the discoveries" is about as arse-backwards a feat as I've witnessed anyone output in some time. You've got to increase your reading comprehension, lad, or someday one of those oversize turds will burst something that requires stitches.
Fancy wording, but it's only circular argumentation, nothing else..
HexHammer wrote:Fancy wording, but it's only circular argumentation, nothing else..
It wasn't an argument, Hex. I was just a flat out bitch-slapping your addled personality. It was an observation that you can't maintain the separation of item _M_ from item _N_ in your thought processes, leading to some pretty asinine responses to other peoples' posts. It was my earnest hope that this might satisfy the masochistic need you had when soliciting my help with your "This is pure nonsense and babble, you have no clue what you are talking about". But apparently not. There was either an overhead sonic boom disrupting the bartering or you crave the addition of your reproductive abilities being severely compromised, in order to close the deal. Unfortunately, due to the staid standards of a magazine ownership, I can only recommend that you visit a forum with far less decorum. Where the unrestrained locals can more fully accommodate your BDSM.
HexHammer wrote:Fancy wording, but it's only circular argumentation, nothing else..
It wasn't an argument, Hex. I was just a flat out bitch-slapping your addled personality. It was an observation that you can't maintain the separation of item _M_ from item _N_ in your thought processes, leading to some pretty asinine responses to other peoples' posts. It was my earnest hope that this might satisfy the masochistic need you had when soliciting my help with your "This is pure nonsense and babble, you have no clue what you are talking about". But apparently not. There was either an overhead sonic boom disrupting the bartering or you crave the addition of your reproductive abilities being severely compromised, in order to close the deal. Unfortunately, due to the staid standards of a magazine ownership, I can only recommend that you visit a forum with far less decorum. Where the unrestrained locals can more fully accommodate your BDSM.
You have indeed a high lix count, but all that fancy wording won't make you smarter, in the end you are only a well spoken village fool.
HexHammer wrote:You have indeed a high lix count, but all that fancy wording won't make you smarter, in the end you are only a well spoken village fool.
You conflated the distinct interests of philosophy and science expressed in that post, Hex. Don't pretend you're a drunken frat boy so abysmally piss-poor in reading comprehension that even that sentence is like the pasture tracks of cattle to your cognitive capacities. The error occurred because you're a hasty, emotionally-driven dickhead so consumed with a fear of constipation that the regularity of such bowel movements must be maintained at all costs, even if that means just figuratively defecating on any opportunistic possibility which presents itself in cyberspace.
