Philosophy

The transformation of science from a method to a metaphysic? In a review of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, historian Jackson Lears writes (Commonweal): It is a platitude that we cannot defend the humanities without slipping into platitudes. Why is that? Part of the answer involves the corrosive impact of contemporary intellectual fashion. We are besieged by a resurgence of positivist scientism—the transformation of science from a method to a metaphysic, promising precise answers to age-old ultimate questions. Yet while pop-neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and other defenders of quantifiable certainty have beaten back postmodern philosophical critiques, the postmodern style of ironic detachment has flourished. The recoil from modernist high Read More ›

Interesting piece on John Searle by Frank Free man at Weekly Standard: Mistake Number One is the idea “that there is some special problem about the relation of the mind to the body, consciousness to the brain, and in their fixation on the illusion that there is a problem, philosophers have fastened onto different solutions to the problem.” Mistake Number Two “is the mistake of supposing that we never directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world, but directly perceive only our subjective experiences.” So that’s all right then. All the people who perceive a problem can just take a well-deserved break. A proponent of Direct Realism, Searle argues, Like Wittgenstein, but with less openness, he seems to Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s UD’s Helpful List of Materialist Dodges, I’ve been know to accuse science writers of waving pom poms and loudhailers. Two types of expressions come to mind that generally fit the description of boilerplate. 1. Claims that science is described as uniquely self-correcting. Rubbish. Business is self-correcting too (market discipline). So is religion (reformations and revivals, for example). In fact, all human endeavours that succeed for any length of time must be self-correcting. 2. Claims that science is about evidence, not belief or superstition Well, goodness, we would hope so. The trouble is, the current mess that peer review is in shows that science is about a bunch of other things as well. The idea that basing Read More ›

 Except in this case?: Philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci (defender of falsifiability*) offers a thoughtful review of The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time by by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin: Before we get to what the authors set out to accomplish, it is worth discussing a more basic premise of the book: they see it as an exercise in what they call (a revived form of) “natural philosophy.” Of course, natural philosophy was the name by which science went before it became a field of inquiry independent of philosophy itself. Descartes, Galileo, Newton and even Darwin thought of themselves as natural philosophers (the word scientist, in fact, was invented by Darwin’s mentor, William Whewell, in 1833 [2]). Read More ›

In his first inaugural address, President Obama pledged to “restore science to its rightful place.” But has the Obama Administration restored science or abused it? In this talk based on the expanded paperback edition of his book Darwin Day in America (ISI Books, 2015), political scientist John G. West will examine how the Obama Administration has illegitimately invoked “science” to curtail basic freedoms, undercut ethical protections, and circumvent democratic accountability. He also will explore how during the Obama years free speech is being increasingly restricted in the name of science and how science is being misused to attack religion, especially in educational institutions. West will argue that science has produced great blessings, but its current abuse is bad for both Read More ›

And remains fun! If you “didn’t get” a given sendup of a famous philosopher, produced by software guy Corey Mohler of Portland, Oregon (here too), you  get a brief explanation of the joke – but it works. See, for example, Turing Test Peter Singer investigates a basement flood Philosophy zombie The funniest one must be the dreadful fate of Fallacy Man, slayer of fallacies. Just when you think it couldn’t, it gets worse. Follow UD News at Twitter! Here’s the Turing Test:

In Everyone, Even Jenny McCarthy, Has the Right to Challenge “Scientific Experts,” science writer John Horgan challenges colleague Chris “war on science” Mooney: I had a similar reaction when I spotted the headline of a recent essay by journalist Chris Mooney: “This Is Why You Have No Business Challenging Scientific Experts.” Similar, that is, to his reaction to a naive student. He goes on, But the history of science suggests—and my own 32 years of experience reporting confirms—that even the most accomplished scientists at the most prestigious institutions often make claims that turn out to be erroneous or exaggerated. Scientists succumb to groupthink, political pressures and other pitfalls. More than a half century ago, Freudian psychoanalysis was a dominant theory of Read More ›

Here: Science is the use of observation to guide thinking about the world to understand it. This grand, idealistic, with-a-big-S Science is not broken. However, much of the actual, concrete with-a-small-s science, i.e. the activity of scientists today, is not good Science. Some aspects of how modern science works go against the principles of Science. For instance, one of the key theories of how Science ought to work is Karl Popper‘s notion of falsifiability. Popper argued that for a theory to be considered scientific, it had to be falsifiable. That is, a theory should make predictions that could be tested and, potentially, proven wrong. An unfalsifiable theory is just not science. A falsifiable theory might be right or wrong – Read More ›

It’s why we pay taxes for this stuff: I had occasion to read a rather lengthy essay this week by the Washington Post’s science reporter, Joel Achenbach, which left me feeling not only annoyed but somewhat insulted. Titled, “Why science is so hard to believe” the article didn’t spend much time talking about specific theories under debate, but rather chose to focus on all of you out there in the hoi polloi and why you have such a difficult time sitting down quietly and listening to your betters. I invite you to go through it yourself because there’s a lot of material to cover. But I would point out just one example of the overriding theme which is present throughout Read More ›

Jonathan Witt here: For instance, through much of the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus was that microscopic life was relatively simple, little more than microscopic sacks of Jell-O. The scientific community also accepted the idea of spontaneous generation—that creatures sprang to life spontaneously out of things like dew and rotting meat. Taken together, these pieces of conventional scientific wisdom suggested that the origin of the first living cell deep in the past was hardly worthy of the term mystery—a material explanation seemed obvious. But in 1861 Louis Pasteur conducted a series of experiments that discredited the notion of spontaneous generation. And in the next century, scientists began amassing evidence of just how complex even the simplest cell is. Today we Read More ›

Here at Science Friday: are excerpts from Brockman’s latest, This Idea Must Die : Seth Lloyd: Suppose that everything that could exist does exist. The multiverse is not a bug but a feature. We have to be careful: The set of everything that could exist belongs to the realm of metaphysics rather than physics. Tegmark and I have shown that with a minor restriction, however, we can pull back from the metaphysical edge. Suppose that the physical multiverse contains all things that are locally finite, in the sense that any finite piece of the thing can be described by a finite amount of information. The set of locally finite things is mathematically well defined: It consists of things whose behavior Read More ›

I rarely set foot in a bookstore, having long ago succumbed to the Amazon.com convenience. But Saturday my son had an urge to buy some comic books — and he had to have them now. He waited semi-patiently, with regular reminders throughout the day of his desire — nay, his urgent need — to go to Barnes & Noble. “Do you have any money?” “Yes. I have some money saved up, and a gift card from Christmas that I haven’t used yet.” So off we went. While he was browsing the comic book section, I wandered about. I love the atmosphere of bookstores and could spend hours walking through the stacks, occasionally picking up a tome to read the inside Read More ›