I thought what the philosophers were saying was quite cool, until I realized most of them said things that sounded nice without any link to the foundations of the hard physical sciences.
When I made that link on why we behave the way we do, I realized that philosophy is a little like theology, and the real truths are much darker.
>until I realized most of them said things that sounded nice without any link to the foundations of the hard physical sciences.
Part of philosophy's job is finding a solid epistemological basis for the "hard sciences", and what claims such sciences can legitimately make about the world.
>I realized that philosophy is a little like theology, and the real truths are much darker.
Philosophy has plenty of "dark truths". What are nihilism or moral skepticism, for instance, if not philosophical theories that negate the meaning of life and morality? Besides, to justifiably throw out philospohy because its claims are inconvenient to you (e.g. by "sounding nice") would require some philosophy to begin with.
> Part of philosophy's job is finding a solid epistemological basis for the "hard sciences", and what claims such sciences can legitimately make about the world.
Can you name a single positive result in all of philosophy that there is any consensus for across the field? Sure, philosophy provides a fair number of attempts at a solid epistemological basis for the hard sciences, but there are so many of them, and despite philosophers not really agreeing on one, physicists can somehow do their jobs perfectly well. Meaning that the philosophy part really doesn’t matter, at least not frequently.
In fact, many philosophers implicitly admit this through how they do philosophy. Lots of philosophical arguments are just intuition pumps, with the only real work being to develop some logical theory that stitches together these intuitions. But there’s still the implicit assumption that those intuitions were correct to begin with, and if you’re making that assumption, why do you need the philosophy if you already have intuition?
>and despite philosophers not really agreeing on one, physicists can somehow do their jobs perfectly well
Physics is an interesting example, because it has so many intersections with philosophy. The kind of claims physicists make may appear reasonable through intuition, and nobody would deny they are useful, but we must answer what it means to do a job well. Religion also does its job well, if considered to work as Feuerbach or Marx described. Many things are useful but undesirable. We separate science from pseudo-science, but there are still contentious areas. The notion that physics is useful but astrology is not on the basis of falsifiability, a theory popular a couple of decades ago, is no longer generally considered justified. It was philosophers who both proposed and refuted the idea that falsifiability is necessary and sufficient to declare something scientific.
>Lots of philosophical arguments are just intuition pumps, with the only real work being to develop some logical theory that stitches together these intuitions.
This answer to whether philosophers rely so heavily (or at all!) on intuition is pretty contentious, and some argue that intuitions are indispensable[0], and in some fields there's evidence against it. Moral nihilism or moral error theory deny the intuition of there being (even relative) moral authority, for example; some argue that a statement like "murder is morally wrong" merely expresses a negative opinion on murder, yet others argue that the statement cannot possibly be true or false. Feminist philosophy denies the intuition that the scientific method is independent of historical and current gender roles. Philosophers both defend and object to intuitions that pornography doesn't count as art based on more than intuition. The notion that we "have rights" in some sense is a common intuition, but several schools of thought dispute this. The intuition that capitalism is desirable has been taken to task by Marxists. The economist's intuition that price has no relation to labour-time has been debated by value-form theorists. The intuition that things get better as time goes on has been taken to task by Adorno (with examples such as the Holocaust).
The theory of contingent identity was one philosophy had nearly completely done away with: the notion that "all necessary truths can be known a priori", but Kripke showed that in cases such as the claim that H2O = water (which can't be known without experimental observation), this can't be true. But philosophers found problem with Kripke's answer[1]. That doesn't mean we're back where we started. Philosophers can't just make the same arguments again. The fact that people found a problem with Kripke's answer is surely a good thing. It would be an intellectual tragedy if we accepted a potentially wrong answer as a good answer. In that view, a "solved problem" in philosophy is actually suspicious, and not necessarily a good thing. Desirable, for sure, but we can't always have what we want.
If, hypothetically, philosophers could come to a consensus that physics has no good epistemological foundation, it would mean that physicsts doing their job well has no more meaning than to say astrologists do their job well.
In my own view, once you get past a certain point of making your work accord with intuitions about the world, a particular theory can be internally consistent, or internally inconsistent. Take logic, for example - the foundation of classical and formal logic that A != !A is purely an intuition. Some logics play with that rule, too. If the foundational rules of logic are decided by intuition, then mathematics as a whole is too. That doesn't mean I can say that d/dx x^2 = 3 - because it would be internally inconsistent. I'd first have to elaborate a system in which that statement makes sense.
The notion of philosophical progress is, itself, highly debated, with many positions on the matter. Sometimes philosophical problems become solved when evidence from the physical sciences is provided (such as Molyneux's Problem). Other times, we need to define what progress really means[2].
In short, whether or not philosophy does make progress, and at what rate, whether the "fact" it doesn't make progress now rules out that it may some day make progress, whether progress is desirable are all philosophical questions anyway. The attempt to answer the question may not be "useful" to daily life, but a lot of mathematics is practically useless too. For that matter, so is the existence of the Higgs Boson or dark matter. So what?
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/experimental-philosophy/#... "For instance, some philosophers argue that in order even to pick out the kind of interest, we need to rely on our intuitive sense of what belongs in the category (e.g., Goldman 2015). To determine the characteristics of knowledge, we need to have a way of picking out which items are genuine members of the kind, and for this we must rely on our intuitive understanding of knowledge."
[1] https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/11474 "People talk about the big problems and they propose positions on them, some of which are more convincing, some of which are less convincing. The problem is that you can't really call any of these positions definitive solutions because each position engenders other difficulties, and the solutions to those difficulties engender other problems. It's not that no progress is being made, in these cases. Rather, I think it's that philosophical problems are like fractals. We can delineate broad families of solutions to the big problems that seem reasonable."
I asked, “ Can you name a single positive result in all of philosophy that there is any consensus for across the field?“. I’ll take your answer as a no.
> The kind of claims physicists make may appear reasonable through intuition
No, not really. Often they’re extremely counterintuitive and difficult to communicate in any way except mathematically.
> If, hypothetically, philosophers could come to a consensus that physics has no good epistemological foundation, it would mean that physicsts doing their job well has no more meaning than to say astrologists do their job well.
No, it would probably mean that philosophers were all full of shit.
> I asked, “ Can you name a single positive result in all of philosophy that there is any consensus for across the field?“. I’ll take your answer as a no.
Molyneux's Problem. Even then, so what if the asnwer is "no"? What would that mean? Solving a problem is not an indicator of progress, anyway.
>Often they’re extremely counterintuitive and difficult to communicate in any way except mathematically.
You're talking about specific claims, not kinds of claims, which I was discussing. The claim that something has been observed to work in a certain way in one situation and therefore must work that way everywhere is a kind of claim. That's the universalist principle. Physics, like all sciences and possibly all knowledge, is victim to the Munchhousen trilemma[0].
>No, it would probably mean that philosophers were all full of shit.
So if results are inconvenient to you or against your intuition, they're invalid? "Gravity is inconvenient, so physicists are full of shit." On what basis can you argue that intuition is shaky, when you use it yourself for that result?
> The claim that something has been observed to work in a certain way in one situation and therefore must work that way everywhere is a kind of claim. That's the universalist principle. Physics, like all sciences and possibly all knowledge, is victim to the Munchhousen trilemma.
Sure. None of which has stopped physicists from being able to make some basic assumptions like universality, move on, and deliver results.
> So if results are inconvenient to you or against your intuition, they're invalid? "Gravity is inconvenient, so physicists are full of shit."
In the hard sciences, there are right and wrong answers that can be validated with experiment. Or at least there are better and worse answers. In mathematics there are right and wrong answers. This enforces a type of rigor on the field that makes it highly unlikely that the entire field is full of shit—the phonies and second-rate theorists typically have a hard time making it very far. So they all end up in the humanities, where nobody can really tell for sure who’s right and who’s wrong and intellectual fashionability can rule the day.
So far, some parts of philosophy have resisted this mediocritizing influence and maintain high standards of intellectual rigor compared to other humanities fields. But in the counterfactual circumstance where academic philosophers just write off physics as nonsense that’s no more valid than astrology, it’s far more likely that trolls and fools managed to drive the last reasonable people out of philosophy.
>None of which has stopped physicists from being able to make some basic assumptions like universality, move on, and deliver results.
Great! But just because you operate on an assumption, it doesn't mean the assumption is valid. Einstein, for instance, went to his grave believing quantum mechanics was false. This was in no small part due to his metaphysical commitments. The same applies today to the nature of time, dark matter and various QM interpretations.
>This enforces a type of rigor on the field that makes it highly unlikely that the entire field is full of shit—the phonies and second-rate theorists typically have a hard time making it very far.
We're discussing the field of philosophy and its goals in abstract here, though I will note that along with the hoaxes in some social sciences (which mostly aren't hoaxes in philosophy), there have been some in the harder sciences too. You need logic for mathematics. Given a logic system, mathematics is internally consistent. Philosphy works in much the same way with both logic and conceptual frameworks. Although it can be hard to prove, say, moral realism, it is possible to verify claims within moral realism to be logically consistent or not. Much the same goes for logic. I discussed this with my mathematical example a couple of posts to you previously. You don't get a free pass from logic or argumentation if you hold up a card that reads "philosopher".
My only point in this discussion was to pass along the idea that philosophy is (or at least in many cases is) about as consistent as mathematics in the sense that we procede from axioms, and given those axioms, we can verify the truth or falsity of a preposition. Philosophy produces results in a different way, like the Fibonacci sequence or a fractal. The only difference is that philosophy has no fear of challenging, replacing, or adding axioms. That's comparatively rare in mathematics today.
>it’s far more likely that trolls and fools managed to drive the last reasonable people out of philosophy.
That's one reading; another reading would be that a theory we've been working with for a long time has just been found not to hold up. Physics, like religion, can still maintain its usefulness in such a scenario. Popper's criteria for separating science from pseudo-science would have (apparetly unknowingly to him) included both physics and astrology as scientific.
> That part about what claims sciences can make - has been addressed in statistical significance. No need to invoke philosophy.
This is not what I meant, nor is it what the majority of philosophy of science concerns itself with. I specifically mentioned epistemological basis[4]. Questions such as what deliniates science from pseudoscience, and what empirical investigation tells us about how things really are, are questions in the domain of philosophy[0]. Even so, what rigorous justification deliniates a good statistical significance from a bad one?
>The dark truths are even darker than that. It is what will get you deplatformed.
Sure enough, philosophy studies those too[1][2][3].
>Paul has a very nice article on this somewhere on his blog.
It's hard to see why PG should be considered an authority on philosophy.
When I made that link on why we behave the way we do, I realized that philosophy is a little like theology, and the real truths are much darker.