81–90 of 139 posts
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The answers that you'll receive won't be supported by rational thought or evidence. If they were, it'd be scientism.
How can something that is not supported by evidence be a valid answer to any legitimate question?
How about pizza? (no scientific evidence involved in this response)
For example the author concedes, in the first half of one paragraph, the existence of "genuinely scientific" evolutionary psychology. Then he spends the second half on the abundance of unserious -- not just philosophically unserious, but scientifically unserious -- material in the same field. And that's all he has to say about the actual content of evolutionary psychology.
But good science speaks for itself:
"""The left side of the [neanderthal] skull had a large dent, apparently from a ferocious blow, and the rib cage -- also on the left side -- had the head of a spear lodged in it.... [He] had died roughly 50,000 years ago, the earliest known homicide victim. His killer, judging from the damage to the skull and rib cage, bore the lethal weapon in his right hand.
The fossil record of injuries to bones reveals two strikingly common patterns (Jurmain et al, 2009; Trinkaus & Zimmerman, 1982; Walker, 1995). First, the skeletons of men contain far more fractures and dents than do the skeletons of women. Second, the injuries are located mainly on the left frontal sides of the skulls and skeletons, suggesting right-handed attackers. The bone record alone cannot tell us with certainty that combat among men was a central feature of human ancestral life. Nor can it tell us with certainty that men evolved to be the more physically aggressive sex..."""
...and even if they could, our ancestors habits offer limited guidance on how we should act today. Stabbing people with pointed sticks is now frowned upon. Do we need to be told this by a tenured philosophy professor?
But note how much clearer the prospects and limits of science become when you know something about what it has already told us in the here and now. When your knowledge is limited, all you can talk about is the limits of knowledge.
>What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
>Though physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. The claims of Hawking and Mlodinow, and many other writers, thus represent a striking departure from the traditional view.
It's weird that the author takes a non-scientific introduction to a pop-science book that is aimed to appeal to the layman's understanding of the world, and makes it out that Hawking and Mlodinow are departing from traditional views in their science.
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This might come as a surprise, but not every philosopher is a postmodernist. Postmodernists aren't even in the majority. They're a relatively small minority in an ocean of different philosophical outlooks. Even many so-called postmodernists deny the label applies to them. As for who alienated who in the Sokal affair, it should be remembered that Sokal was the original perpetrator of the hoax, and appeared to have ini…
No doubt about that; yet postmodernists seem to be the ones most engaged in what is perceived as a pursuit to discredit or trivialize science. Unfortunately, they are loud people so it's hard to hear other, more interesting views on the philosophy of science. I would be grateful if you could suggest some good books.
On the Continental side, the classic essay is Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology".
I'd also recommend Jacques Ellul's "Technological Society".
And, while not dealing directly with science, I think Foucault's critiques of power in discourse are very relevant.
Earlier in this thread I'd mentioned:
"Naturalism and the Human Condition: Against scientism" by Frederick A. Olafson, whose critique comes from a phenomenological perspective.
and
"Scientism" by Tom Sorell, who's a neo-Kantian.
None of the above are postmodernists.
The author believes scientific inquiry should not 'overreach' into subjects that have traditionally belonged to fields like philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and religion, because, he explains in painful detail, science can't have all the answers. Regardless of whether one agrees with him or not, his argument makes NO sense to me. The relevant question is not whether science can have all the answers, but whether…
We know that most published scientific research results are wrong.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...
Therefore flipping a coin and always guessing "heads" yields more accurate results than science.
Now what? Has this insight taught us anything?
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1) Should the US sterilize the mentally retarded? Quoting Wikipedia: "Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities, and received funding from many sources. Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States.[8] Lat…
> We now believe the negatives of the eugenics movement, justifying the genocide done by the Nazis, outweighs any social good which might be possible from the scientific principles behind eugenics. This is science and politics, and partially based on the science of modern genetics, which shows that a number of things we thought could be stopped using sterilization really cannot be ended in that fashion. Down Syndrome…
Politics is partially an applied philosophy. Many of the views of a political party are based in philosophical viewpoints. The idea that everyone has the "inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is a philosophical viewpoint, and not a scientific one. What is the scientific basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
The planks of the Republican platform, which include opposition to RU-486 and similar drugs because they "terminate innocent human life after conception" is a philosophical viewpoint, and not a scientific one. What is the scientific definition of "human"? Can we scientifically determine when a cell is 'human'? Are frozen blastocysts human? What about HeLa lines? and so on.
So when you say "science and politics", I respond with "yes, what's your point?" Science is a knife. We use it poorly, and we get hurt. We use it one way and we make art, and homes. We use it another way and we kill.
We have to decide how we want to use science. Eugenics does work for crops. It does work for livestock. It should work for people. If we sterilize the ~2.5 million Americans (and any new immigrants) who carry the sickle cell trait, then sickle cell disease - which is definitely inherited - will be effectively eradicated in the US within 60 years.
Why don't we do that? Does science tell us why not?
Well, it does in a fashion. We can say that it's an emergent behavior of free actors who are the descendants of a species of primates, talk about population dynamics, and so on. But that emergent behavior is a round-about way of describing philosophy, ethics, and religion.
If we were an absolute dictatorship, then our Glorious Leader (praise be the Leader) could require sterilization of anyone with poor genetics, and it would happen.
Science just doesn't care. We are the ones who care, and have have to decide what it is we want to become.
It is dangerous to go against science. We should not do so lightly. But the scientific input is only one of many inputs. Yes, Orion is estimated to increase mortality by approximately one lifetime per launch, averaged out over the world. What is the increase in mortality caused by burning coal? By building cars? It's much higher. Yet we decided to kill Orion and still promote (and subsidize!) the auto industry. What is your scientific explanation for that?
A reply under the title of "The folly of 'The folly of scientism'" by Professor Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, who frequently reads and comments on issues related to the philosophy of science: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/the-folly... ". . . . Hughes is an evolutionary biologist with wide-ranging interests, and I’ve really liked some of his papers." . . . . "The big problem with Hughe…
Yeah, he goes too far. There are areas involving qualia that could probably be handled by science eventually but the tools at our disposal are too crude for the moment so the humanities get them. There are also ought-questions in ethics and aesthetics that science isn't built to answer. They ought to stay in humanities too, chiefly because humanists are good at poking holes in arguments for certitude.
Most importanly, /we don't want/ the kinds of Big Why questions Hughes is laying on us. Humanities academics are busy toiling away on little subspecialties and trying to be as methodologically rigorous as possible given the limitations of the subject matter.
We do not want the responsibility of answering why people exist or proving that someone's religious fantasies are true. We can give you a historical tour of thinkers who tried to do so, or point out weird side-effects of some of their arguments, or point out some major religious traditions that don't actually care very much about those two questions - we can do all that and more, and I'd argue that's valuable stuff, but we are not going to be errand boys for crypto-creationists.
So, one demerit to Coyne for being a little too dismissive humanities. Infinity demerits to Hughes for trying to make humanities something it doesn't want to be and shouldn't be.
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The Hughes article is very strange, but the theme of the sentiment is remarkably (perhaps alarmingly) common among the university students I know who are not scientists, engineers, or mathematicians. This is enormously condescending to write, but I think this is born of frustration at not being able to make progress in discovery without the tools of mathematics and science. If you have not picked up and mastered thes…
> To give one ridiculous example, I had a graduate student in anthropology suggest to me that science needs to be democratized and taken away from the scientists and verified and decided upon by the common man. I asked by what method the common man could do such verification and make any such decisions, as the obvious answer to both is Science The irony here is that your argument against the anthropologist is very si…
This simply is not true. If this sort of a priori judgement occurs, it occurs because Hawking is a famously intelligent and thoughtful person. Of course people take what he says seriously. However, he is also continually engaged in debates with other scientists, often publicly, and is in no way walled off from questioning by either the institution of science or his own fame.
Additionally, I have heard the exact opposite of the sentiment you stated claimed. His biographer, Kitty Ferguson, ludicrously criticized Hawking's atheism as him going beyond his field. As if because one is not a theologian, one cannot discuss religion. What tripe.
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What does that mean? I intuit that your program has bugs, therefore it has bugs? I intuit that there is an alien race living on Mars that is able to disguise itself as red rocks? I do not see how intuition gives you anything other than -- maybe, and only maybe -- a smaller set of hypotheses to test scientifically.
My intuition says you have angry feelings.
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> I receive strong cues from my intuition about other people's feelings. Those are your mirror neurons, I think. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mirror-neurons.html Or maybe not. We'll find out using science.
In the midst of beating so mercilessly on that drum, you're missing the more interesting question being asked here: will science ever include emotions and intuition (and other neurologically explainable phenomena such as dreams) as a means to collect valid and objectively true experimental data? For the longest time we've had only our five primary senses, with an overwhelming focus on our sense of sight.
It is not clear, at least to me, how an astronomer looking at Saturn and saying "Gee, how pretty" is going to lead him to a better measurement of Saturn's gravity. It is not a matter of what big brother Science wants. It is a matter of what is useful in answering the question being asked. Draw a line between beauty and gravity measurements and show a reliable connection and you have done all you need to do to convince people to apply this data.