[quote=""DrZoidberg""]One could argue that there's a value in establishing that a hypothesis is wrong. But most science is good ideas that turn out not to be. All the studies into phrenology. A complete waste of time. Or all those studies in neurology about what the various regions of the brain was for. Good solid science, until we learned that the brain was plastic. So that research was mostly a waste. Here's a concrete example. All those brain imaging studies on ADHD. So this region lights up if somebody has ADHD. Awesome. What does that mean? 15 years of study later... we have still no clue. All those studies a complete waste. Turned out they all asked the wrong questions. So we can scrap all that and start over. [/quote]
Ok, I take your point, but equally, it could be said that that's what so great about science, that getting it wrong is a valuable lesson and that it constantly makes progress (with the caveat that the word progress might need to be unpacked and defined of course).
Philosophy, it seems to me, isn't able to do that so well, because it doesn't do the testing so much.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]There's also loads of science that is duplicates of something already studied, but forgotten. There's also loads of studies made by people who are just too lazy to get a job. Yes, those exist. I used to do research, and those guys were easy to spot. All those guys do is study something preposterously specific that will never be useful. [/quote]
Sure.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]But I don't want to give an impression that most science is frivolous. I don't. Science is horrendously underfunded, and we should put more money into science. It's just that science is hard. And most often scientists are wrong. That's fine. Doing the research is better than not doing so. Once in a blue moon a study turns out to be actually useful. And then all that wasted research was worth it. [/quote]
I don't know what areas of study you are thinking of but once again, even if we just cited medical science......
I take your point about some of the shortfalls in science, but, in a nutshell, you would have to work pretty hard if you are trying to get me to agree that as much science is, eventually, a 'waste of time' as is the case for philosophy.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]I think you are going about this all wrong. Philosophical models of human thinking will always be wrong. They're models of what is going on. To create a useful model you remove information. You make the fuzziness more clear. What makes a philosophical model good is if it is useful. Does using it make human interaction better or worse? That's the best we can do.
If we use proper Socratic logic to evaluate philosophy... they're all wrong.
I agree that analytic philosophers are often the most useful. Because they allow us to negate a lot. But they are positivist. That means they will sometimes make statements that are too strong.
Postmodern literary analysis is sometimes more useful than analytic philosophy. I'm saying that as a guy who has a degree in logic. The analytics is my team. But I don't think it's always the best school of thought.
Different schools of philosophic thought are good at solving different problems. I think they're all right and useful, within their domain.
The problem with postmodernism isn't the method they use. But that they went a bit crazy and started to apply them outside of their domain. Then it just became silly. [/quote]
A conversation on postmodernism would be interesting. It's not something I know about in depth. To me, it's something to enjoy as an intellectual exercise, to hear interesting ideas, and deconstructing stuff is fun, but I tend to have a pinch of salt nearby because what I've read of it seems to stray into polemic, opinion and/or politics (with a small p). Which is good. I mean, I like reading Feminist stuff for this reason. But there's more subjectivity and less justification.
As to whether philosophy is good at solving domain-specific problems, that seems to need almost as much clarification as your saying that exciting things are happening in philosophy currently. I thought we'd more or less agreed that philosophy was good at asking questions and (ideally) giving us tools to answer questions, rather than answering questions. You're presenting a sort of all-singing, all-dancing philosophy sales brochure in which I'm having a bit of difficulty recognising the product itself.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]Memetics is unfalsifiable. So it's clearly not science. So it has to be philosophy. Still a worthwhile and useful concept IMHO. Just because something isn't science, doesn't make it worthless. [/quote]
Something not being science does not, surely, automatically make it philosophy either? Isn't that a false dichotomy?
Also, I think the idea that falsifiability defines the domain of science is open to question.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]Good artists are sensitive little flowers who pick up on the zeitgeist and it ends up in their work. Some have more depth than others. The deep thinking artists will be sharp as knives, and it's pretty damn obvious. Just walk around any modern art museum and look at the date a painting was created, and then google what famous philosophical works came out around that time.
BTW, I think artists and philosophers are doing similar work. They're both sensitive flowers who pick up on what is happening. It's not that philosophers are the geniuses, and this then spreads from them, as if from a prophet. Famous philosophers hang out with the best minds of their day. Any of their friends could have been the famous name.
It's the same with good art. Any famous painting. Just look at the art their friends did in the same period. Basically the same painting. Profound thinking and great art is not done in a vacuum. Any great work is always a group effort. [/quote]
I'd broadly go along with that, with the caveat that you are, of course, defining 'philosophy' in a very broad sense.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]Could you give an example of applied philosophy? Isn't it always kind of useless? Philosophy is, and should be, IMHO, only about the joy of pure thinking. It shouldn't be applied. Once it is, we call it something else... like science. [/quote]
By and large, my opinion is that pretty much all science is applied philosophy, for example.
As to philosophers who, imo, are making good/useful contributions without becoming themselves purely scientific, I'd cite Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. I think the cognitive science area is one where applied and unapplied philosophy can get together, sometimes as a hybrid.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]Thomas Kuhn introduced the term paradigm shift. One of the biggest debates in the 19'th century was the germ theory of disease. The big debate was whether you could catch germs and viruses from another person, or if disease was only something that arose spontaneously.
Kuhn pointed out that if scientists were purely rational it should have been an open and shut case after Ignaz Semmelweis came with his famous 1848 study. It wasn't. Instead Semmelweis was laughed at and made fun of, and died a bitter, disgraced and lonely man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
Germ theory finally managed to win the day. But it took almost 50 years. In that time millions died from preventable diseases.
My favorite anecdote from this period is when Lister experimented with Carbolic acid in an operation, and created a thick foggy mist of the stuff in the operating theater. They could barely see what they were doing. They got great results. It took them years to figure out that they didn't need to use that mist. They could just as well just use it on their tools and in the wound directly. That made the whole thing a hell of a lot simpler to do.[/quote]
You're probably not going to like me saying this, but as great as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was, it was basically history and commentary. As a contributor to science, I think it's over-rated by philosophers. Ditto Popper I'm afraid. I would go back to the Biology professor I previously cited in regard to making the point that science doesn't seem to need philosophy half as much as philosophers tend to think.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]But that's always been the case. It's usually more than a hundred years between any two unique ideas. There's a lot of wasted effort. We need to get away from today's demand on instant gratification. It's not helpful. It's ok if it'll take another hundred years to come up with something useful. That doesn't make it worthless. Money is not a good way to evaluate how valuable something is.[/quote]
Sure. I'm not for shutting down Philosophy Departments.
What I might be gearing up towards saying though, following on from my post where I suggested that Toolkit Philosophy might be a great candidate for being a compulsory school subject (even at primary school, in some form, I mean the sooner the better) is that I think a case could be made that philosophy could do with reinventing itself for the modern era and the future (without, I must add, losing any of its historical strengths) and being a bit less backward-looking in terms of ancient or just historical sources (aka dead guys), because I think it's in danger of falling further and further into obscurity. Which is a great pity, because in principle, it could have pride of place as the queen/king of human intellectual endeavour.
In a way, this goes straight to the OP, because it's arguably what the writers (of the book being reviewed in the linked article) were trying to suggest, at least in a specific sense related to metaphysics (what a lovely, semi-redundant term that is).
I can't say for sure what I think of their specific ideas for 'reforming metaphysics' because I've only read the linked review and the first chapter of the book (which is where the critique ends and the proposals emerge) but it seems to me it's essentially a transformational/rehabilitating sort of enterprise. With a bit of luck, it'd be more than fodder for internal consumption by other philosophers but I suspect that might be a limitation of it because I'm not sure who else is listening. As such, Modern Philosophy could also do with a new 'Big Gun' too, perhaps, its Richard Attenborough or its Carl Sagan, dare I say. And/or maybe even the services of a whiz PR Company.
Alain de Botton is doing his best, but he's not really cutting the mustard and arguably needs assistance. Plus, he's not as much of a babe magnet as Dr Brian Cox.
I'm not being entirely whimsical. There's an 'ivory tower' feel about a lot of philosophy that sometimes has a dusty whiff of emperor's
new old clothes about it.
[quote=""DrZoidberg""]Yes. There's got to be something. I'm less convinced that answer is God. Pretty sure it's not God. But it has to be something. Based on current research in physics, the answer is likely to be something mind blowingly weird that nobody sober would ever have considered. There's also the possibility that we can never know. Like what there was before the Big Bang. The Big Bang destroyed the evidence. So we most likely can never know.
But there still has to be something.[/quote]
Ok well your outlook and mine on that particular issue would diverge there because I ain't looking for or expecting to find 'something more' in the form of whys. I eschew teleology too, as far as possible. I think the two are often linked. You know, purpose and all that.
