The only lasting source of enlightenment seems to come from science, and “The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” -Feynman
I would be very interested to know how much Feynman actually knew about the philosophy of science. My guess would be not very much at all.
Feynman, like some other famous scientists, gave in to the temptation of pontificating on subjects he knew very little about. Philosophy in general was something he seemed to have contempt for, without knowing much about it. I'd take his pronouncements on it with a huge grain of salt.
Feynman did have a body of work to lean on that implies he understood science very deeply, which leads me to wonder what secrets the "philosophy of science" could possibly hold that he didn't understand.
Edit: verb tenses that wishfully put forth we still had Feynman.
Feynman was pretty sophisticated philosophically when it came to scientific matters. I'm not sure he studied the philosophical literature much partly because a lot of it is kind of bad.
I've yet to see similar clarity from a philosopher of science. I think the philosophers annoyed him because they weren't very good but self important in spite of that.
On the "why questions" video from the first link, which I've seen before, Feynman's answer only shows that he's used to answering the kind of question asked of him, regarding why magnets repel, and similar questions involving physics.
Yes, he realizes that there are larger issues involved in such questions and their answers, but he steers all the answers and questions back to physics, which to him are the more interesting answers and questions.
Nowhere is there any evidence that his own answers are informed by any kind of reading of philosophical literature or familiarity with the world of philosophy.
Regarding the "Cargo Cult Science" essay. In it Feynman states "even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO’s, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new
types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world."
His interest in the question of what is and isn't science, and his answer to it are some of the central things that philosophy of science studies. No amount of physics experiments are going to give you any insight in to that question. To attempt to answer it, as Feynman did, is to practice philosophy of science, which Feynman himself in the original quote which started this thread decries as useless.
The whole essay is really an attempt to engage in philosophy of science, but without any evidence that Feynman is familiar with the field. The result is interesting both because Feynman is an entertaining and capable writer, and because of his obvious familiarity with the practice of science and its ideals. But it's not nearly as insightful as it could have been had he actually undertaken to study the subject academically. It's really an opinion piece aimed at explaining in very general ways some of the practices and ideals of science as Feynman sees them to laymen and other scientists, and almost a polemic on scientific integrity.
Also, it should be pointed out that the philosophy of science studies a lot more than just the questions addressed in this essay. They are important questions, but there's a lot more about science that is philosophically interesting.
Regarding your point about the clarity of Feynman's writing compared to those of philosophers: it's sadly all too true that way too many of them are very poor and obscure writers compared to Feynman. On the other hand, many others are very clear (if usually pretty dry).
When there is lack of clarity, some of it is due to lack of writing ability or interest in clarity (or even wilful obscurity), but in other cases it's due to the specialized knowledge or terminology that is required to understand it -- much like that which would be required to understand a paper in an academic physics journal. If you attempt to tackle such a paper without a great deal of academic physics under your belt, you are likely to be confused. So it is with philosophy, where you'd be a lot better off with some philosophy courses under your belt before you try to make sense of much of it.
>But it's not nearly as insightful as it could have been had he actually undertaken to study the subject academically.
I'm curious to how it could have been improved by insights from academic philosophy. I'm not expert but glanced at the Wikipedia entry on philosophy of science and find it hard to see what you'd go with.
It's been a while since I took a philosophy of science course myself, so I can't point you to any specific resources, except to encourage you to take a course in the subject yourself if you are interested.
Just to give you a taste of what to expect though: imagine a lot of very smart people considering the sorts of issues Feynman is raising, but devoting whole books to them, trying to cover these issues from every conceivable angle and taking in to account all of the other points of view on these issues (not just those of Feynman himself or some astrologers or psychics, as Feynman did). Then there are the books in response to those books, trying to be just as thorough in answering the questions the the first author wrote about, and seeing if there's something they missed or any other constructive way to think about them, and so on.
In short, there's an entire academic field that studies these questions and many other related ones, that isn't going to be covered by a little essay by any single scientist -- no matter how brilliant he was. He didn't have the final word, and not even much of a word in the first place, considering his lack of study of and engagement with the field.
Feynmann's own words in the essay on "Cargo Cult Science" are salient here:
"It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it"
It's telling that Feynmann does not apply this principle of integrity to the views he expresses in his own essay. He does not, even for a moment, write about what could possibly be wrong with his point of view. But such questioning is quite common in the philosophy of science. They don't stop with dogmas and ideals regarding what science ought to be, as Feynman does. They go further and question them, and much else besides.
In "Cargo Cult Science" Feynman showed a lot of insight into the current replication crisis decades before it blew up -- at least, that's how it looks to me as an outsider. Did any philosopher do better? (Ahead of time, again.) It wouldn't surprise me, and I'd like to check out their work, but from my own reading I can't think of anyone.
By "do better" I mean in an equivalent few pages to advise a new graduate about how to discover things that are true, as a focus sometimes at odds with advancing their career, because that's what Feynman's graduation speech was about.
"Did any philosopher do better? ... By "do better" I mean in an equivalent few pages to advise a new graduate about how to discover things that are true"
Philosophy of science is less about telling scientists how to behave than trying to understand what actually happens when scientists do what they do, what science accomplishes on a theoretical level, what the difference between science and non-science is, etc.
It's less of "here's how to get to the truth" and more of "can science get at the truth at all?" or "to what degree can science get at the truth?" or (much like Feynman's essay) "what makes these particular actions or beliefs 'scientific'?"
Karl Popper's criterion of "falsifiability"[1] was once a popular one, in regards to what makes something 'scientific'. But that's fallen out of fashion[2]:
"Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."
>Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers.
Let me ask you this, then: can the principle of falsifiability itself ever be falsified?
If it can't then by its own measure, it's not "scientific". Further, if one scorns anything "unscientific" as valueless, then the principle of falsifiability must also be valueless.
>Let me ask you this, then: can the principle of falsifiability itself ever be falsified?
In the relevant sense, yes. We switch out conceptual definitions when they fail to encompass the relevant empirical instances. If falsifiability turned out to allow, for example, theology to be considered a science, then we would have to throw out falsifiability. As it is, it's only a coarse-grained principle for demarcation, hence the arguments about string theory.
>Philosophy of science is less about telling scientists how to behave than trying to understand what actually happens when scientists do what they do, what science accomplishes on a theoretical level, what the difference between science and non-science is, etc.
I think that may have been Feynman's point.
Whether, or to what extent, Popper's falsifiability criterion is a good description of science is not a problem for scientists.
If a philosopher of science studied contemporary scientists and judged "these practices common to this field tend to produce more accurate far-reaching knowledge of the world, compared to these other practices accepted in this other field", and a few decades later we could judge that the philosopher was basically right, then I'd want more to read their work. They of course may have broader concerns.
Wikipedia entries on philosophy are uniformly bad. Unfortunately I've never read a phil sci introduction that I liked, but if you're interested here is a sampling of notable phil sci books that occurred to me now. Note that many people who write phil sci might have professorships in other departments than philosophy and typically have an advanced degree in the science they specialize in. They just have more of an interest in speculative issues that build off already existing results or second-order questions or broadly integrative work than most practicioners, as well as at least enough background in the broader philosophical tradition to avoid basic gaffes or self-inflation resulting from narrow vision.
Judea Pearl - Causality
John Earman - World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute vs. Relational Theories of Space and Time
James Woodward - Making Things Happen
Jeff Bub - Interpreting the Quantum World
Peter Godfrey-Smith - Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection
Jesse Prinz - The Conscious Brain
Kim Sterelny - Thought in a Hostile World
And some historically important works:
Carnap - The Logical Structure of the World (in a loose sense, the first attempt at an AI program)
Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (the philosophy of science practicing scientists now inherit and unquestionably assume)
Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (a ubiquitous work on scientific practice)
Readers of HN might also dig up Scott Aaronson's paper on how complexity theory might be applied to certain philosophical questions.
> Feynman, like some other famous scientists, gave in to the temptation of pontificating on subjects he knew very little about.
I suspect that is what some physicists think philosophy does in their field, but if so, I don't see that there is anything for them to get worked up about. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since Bergson annoyed Einstein.
It would be difficult to argue that science is the only lasting source of enlightenment. Science certainly helped to disentangle us from religious dogma and to provide a new, rational foundation for interpreting the world. It has led to an unprecedented advancement of technology and a deeper understanding of the universe. But in what way does science in the 21st century continue to advance and preserve human enlightenment? It isn't difficult to acknowledge the opposite effect -- that science has led to a certain disenchantment with the world and our place in it. It would also be difficult to argue that the philosophy of science is useless. Philosophy is more important to science than ever as it struggles to meaningfully interpret its data, especially in quantum mechanics and neurology. I know it upsets scientists to think about receiving help from a philosopher. That's why instead scientists are just becoming professional philosophers themselves!
What are you talking about fantasy? Why are you assuming that fantasy is the only recourse and that there aren't enlightened alternatives? I can't claim to hold some answer but certainly it's more enlightened to maintain a position of modest uncertainty than to exclaim "Everyone but me is living in a fantasy! Nobody else can handle the truth!"
>But in what way does science in the 21st century continue to advance and preserve human enlightenment? It isn't difficult to acknowledge the opposite effect -- that science has led to a certain disenchantment with the world and our place in it.
I think that the regression of human enlightenment comes more from your insistence about how science destroys magic, which never actually existed, than from science itself. All science has done is politely explain that our ways of making sense and meaning out of our experiences have to conform to the way the world actually is.
>Philosophy is more important to science than ever as it struggles to meaningfully interpret its data, especially in quantum mechanics and neurology. I know it upsets scientists to think about receiving help from a philosopher.
Nobody is upset about seeking help from a relevant domain expert. However, we are continuing to try to politely explain that trying to make sense of the world in terms of ghosts or Platonic Forms does not work. Naturalistic philosophers hear no complaints from scientists, because their philosophizing fits inside reality.
The problem comes from the rather irritating philosophers who continue to insist that a world without ghosts or Forms is innately meaningless and has no place for human life in it.
This isn't true. The majority of contemporary philosophers do not believe in anything supernatural, but plenty of scientists still dismiss their work.
I say nothing supernatural, because the precise meaning of "naturalism" is contested in philosophy. For rather complex reasons, you can accept evolution, accept that modern physics is essentially accurate (only inaccurate so far as we're still discovering things and refining theory, etc), deny that there are immaterial souls or Cartesian dualism, yet not count as a naturalist. I am not sure if naturalism is necessarily a majority position.
>I say nothing supernatural, because the precise meaning of "naturalism" is contested in philosophy. For rather complex reasons, you can accept evolution, accept that modern physics is essentially accurate (only inaccurate so far as we're still discovering things and refining theory, etc), deny that there are immaterial souls or Cartesian dualism, yet not count as a naturalist. I am not sure if naturalism is necessarily a majority position.
As far as I can tell, it's not a majority position, and that's a damn shame upon philosophers. They still want to cling to their Platonic Forms, even while claiming not to be Cartesians.
Well, it doesn't work that way. We scientists are going to keep asking to see the Form of the Power-Set, the Form of the Good (oh boy does that one ever cause fights!), and of course the Form of "Materialism" (scare-quoted because the "materialism" so pilloried by philosophers tends to bear little resemblance to the content of any science post-Newton). If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles.
"If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles."
Most scientists believe in plenty of things they can't see, such as magnetism, viruses, gravity, etc.
What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them.
But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen nor (again, arguably) measured, like love, freedom, happiness, and even God.
I am reminded of this anecdote about a dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:
My dear.
I Have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed
interpreter of your behaviour. I think I have been able to identify
nearly every thought that has made you smile! My research has even
made such a progress that I no longer need to understand you IN THIS
WAY. I'm happy to say I'm now in a position, with the aid of an
apparatus which I shall promptly attach you, to assign to each body
movement you make a specific antecedent condition in your cortex.
In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight.
I trust you will not resist if I bring along this apparatus then to
help me determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological
idiosyncracies which obtain in your system.
>But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen nor (again, arguably) measured, like love, freedom, happiness, and even God.
If you claim to be unable to observe love, freedom, and happiness, and to believe there can be no possible observation of God (such as a revelation at Sinai, for example, and its archaeological after-effects), then you're just being plain silly.
>What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them.
Yes, we do see their effects. Science deals with latent properties and objects all the time. After all, scientifically speaking, everything beyond our sensory nerve-endings is latent and is inferred.
Nothing abnormal here.
(Never mind the philosophers who claim to know their perception is veridical because it's more intuitive that way rather than because they examined how it was working.)
>I am reminded of this anecdote about a dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:
I am once again reminded of how philosophers completely fail to understand science and scientists, and thus caricature us as blind idiots every chance they get.
You don't seem to understand. I wasn't making a philosophy-of-mind claim about philosophical sense-data. I was making a claim, a very basic claim, in neuroscience. In some theories, the nerves don't even pass unaltered signals up to the brain! Everything beyond the sensory nerve-ending itself may involve some amount of inference, inferences performed in the spinal cord and sensorimotor cortex themselves long before a percept enters conscious awareness.
You may not think you're talking about sense data, but you might as well be.
Science doesn't operate from the first person perspective. The data of science is not neural firings, it is public observations and measurements.
The sense in which a subatomic particle is inferred from its effects is completely different from the sense in which the brain "infers" things based on neural signals. The former is part of theorizing, the second is a bit of information processing that's prior to theorizing of any kind. The former is a fact about how science works. The latter is a scientific discovery which does not (directly[0]) affect how we do science.
[0] I say directly because there are contexts where we have to account for bias, optical illusions, and whatnot. It's the same sense in which astronomy is not directly about telescopes, though astronomers spend a lot of time worrying about telescopes.
> You may not think you're talking about sense data, but you might as well be.
Ah, isn't the imperialism of philosophers so likeable? Hey scientists, you're not talking about the stuff in your experiments, you're talking about this other thing we made up! Because we say so!
>The sense in which a subatomic particle is inferred from its effects is completely different from the sense in which the brain "infers" things based on neural signals. The former is part of theorizing, the second is a bit of information processing that's prior to theorizing of any kind. The former is a fact about how science works. The latter is a scientific discovery which does not (directly[0]) affect how we do science.
Actually, according to our most up-to-date paradigm, they're both instances of hierarchical Bayes inference, one of which is implemented in hardware, and the other of which is using said hardware as a primitive base to build higher-precision inferences.
For someone trying to stick up for philosophy, you should read more of it, since I'm getting many of the details from Andy Clark's recent book.
Please tell me you're using Platonic Form as a (stupid) way of mocking some idea (god knows what) rather than as a literal description of what modern philosophers believe.
For one, I think Feynman had a more complex perspective on the situation than what that single quote would indicate. He probably would not have written The Character of Physical Law otherwise. You can see, however, from how it's written that he's not working in the tradition of academic philosophy of science—but that's probably more an issue with their methods than with the validity/interest of their subject matter.
Also, it seems like there are increasingly many places in science where having a sort of self-awareness about what one's doing while practicing is useful. Formalization of observation and measurement in physics would be part—but what sticks out to me even more is the way competing theories are weighed against one another. We've generalized beyond particular theories to working in a framework capable of evaluating and comparing various competing theories using standard measures (and aesthetic judgement)—much like evaluating software architectures. This has occurred somewhat in parallel with philosophy of science increasingly pointing out that scientific formulations have a degree of arbitrariness to them (in a similar manner to how you can express a single algorithm many many different ways)—rather than being either truth or not truth.
Well, he's partially correct. You don't study the philosophy of science (or philosophy for that matter) because of some utility it has in relation to something else (here, empirical science). You study it for its own sake. That's what theoretical sciences (including philosophy, though ethics is also practical) are about, truth for its own sake. That philosophy may have a beneficial influence on the practice of science is not negated, but it's important to understand the primary aim.
As far as quotes are concerned, here's one from Feyerabend that explicitly names Feynman:
"The withdrawal of philosophy into a 'professional' shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth"
In other words, the ignorance of philosophy so prevalent among scientists has rendered them a class of boorish technicians. And it seems to be getting worse. Just look at Lawrence Krauss and friends.
This article has little to do with the clickbait title of philosophy being over. It's mostly just a review of a book of revisionist history of Enlightenment-era Western philosophy.
The book apparently attacks the popular idea that philosophy is over.
And that word "revisionist," used so frequently to dismiss what one thinks they already know -- how useful is that word in advancing anything but maintenance of the status quo?
It's an understandable mistake (if it was one), as Plato wrote most of his works as dialogues between Socrates and other Athenians (including Republic, where the Allegory of the Cave originates).
From another angle, the paragraph in reference is a summary of what the article's author believes the author of the book being reviewed alleges is the macro-narrative in regards to philosophy as presented today and understood by philosophy-averse intellectuals. As the article-author explicitly mentions Plato later in the article (in reference to an earlier work by the book-author extolling Ancient Greek philosophy) and distinguishes between the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, it seems impossible that either author doesn't realize the Cave isn't Socrates' idea. Although sloppy, it seems that the article-author is simply implying that there is so little familiarity with the full breadth and depth of philosophy that the average individual with passing knowledge of the ancients might know of the Allegory of the Cave/theory of the Forms/etc but would wrongly attribute it to Socrates as he is the mouthpiece in Republic.
Well, wait a minute. The Eleusinian mysteries were ancient by the time that Socrates was mentoring Plato. Plato was just the first to write this stuff down. How do we know that Plato wasn't reporting what Socrates taught him? And, if true, how can we be sure that Socrates didn't get the idea from someone else?
>How do we know that Plato wasn't reporting what Socrates taught him? And, if true, how can we be sure that Socrates didn't get the idea from someone else?
Quite plainly, we don't know. It seems irrelevant, however, as the line of inquiry was about whether the article-author mistakenly attributed the Allegory of the Cave to Socrates when the 'correct' attribution is to Plato (that is, the established/agreed-upon/canonical attribution), not whether or not the Allegory is a wholly original, purely inspired, spontaneously birthed thought from Plato.
In regards to the ideas truly being Socrates' or those of a precedent, I'm aware of nothing that indicates that being the case (other than the standard A influences B influences C, etc, nature of philosophy). I'm no expert, but it seemed clear to me in reading Plato's work after the death of Socrates (e.g., Republic) that he is radically departing from the views of his teacher. If the counterpoint is that Plato received all of this wisdom from Socrates, then attributed the introductory bits to his teacher and kept the juiciest for himself, we know that's not the case: many other contemporaries wrote about the views of Socrates and some even recorded Socratic dialogues.
In Republic, Plato advocates things like an elite intellectual class that actively deceives the hoi polloi and prevents them from accessing philosophy, yet Socrates was put to death for his repeated attempts at engaging all Athenians who would listen in philosophical debates. Socrates warned against the youth of Athens losing their ability to think critically, while Plato advocates a utopian system predicated on the vast majority of its citizens not questioning things at all. In fact, it's frequently suggested that Plato's dramatic departure from the Socratic notion of "I know nothing" and the near-totalitarian features of his Republic are direct results of the Athenians turning on and executing Socrates. The entire idea of a Philosopher King and an enlightened ruling class micromanaging the lives of the producer/worker and guardian/soldier classes seems like a plan to ensure that no great thinker ever suffers the same fate as Socrates. With the rebellious and reactionary nature of the Republic established, it seems clear he didn't get the ideas contained within from Socrates. This seems especially true because Plato does not discuss them until ~380 BC, almost two decades after the death of Socrates. If he inherited or stole the ideas, why wait so long to talk about it? And why didn't anyone else know about it (Plato was one of several students who followed Socrates)?
I've glanced, very lightly, over the Wikipedia page for the Eleusinian Mysteries, and there's nothing specific leaping out at me as inspiration for the Allegory of the Cave (other than the idea of a layered underworld, but that's not unique to the Mysteries or particularly reflective of the Cave). I'm unfamiliar with these ideas; can you expound upon the connection, or is the argument just that because the Mysteries were ancient and once orally disseminated, there's a chance that the Allegory was too and merely reported by Plato as original?
There is a lot of work that traces developments in Plato's ideas, and a rough consensus that some dialogues are more Socratic and others reflect Plato more (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/#HisSocEarMidLatDia). There's a mixture of stylometrics, contemporary accounts, and other arguments that are used to try and assign responsibility. It's an inherently imprecise project, and I didn't do much ancient philosophy so I can't tell you much about it, but it seemed sensible when I took courses on Plato.
Depends whether you think the Republic is a depiction of Socrates views or Platos. I think (?) most people think Plato (as with most of the late texts) but not unreasonable to say Socrates as he is the interlocutor who puts it forward.
I read the original book about 8 years ago (which is still 6 years after it was published). Highly recommend it as a very readable but still fairly deep introduction to philosophy in antiquity.
Bit blown away that he's finally published the second part.
Very clickbaity. I agree, of course, that philosophy isn't dead, though people may have become dead to it, and that's the problem. Philosophical questions always surface, regardless of whether the person who forms the question or makes a claim in that regard is aware that he is treading on philosophical ground. Of course, without the awareness and without the education, his philosophy is bound to be mediocre and, if it isn't blatant bullshit, a rehash of something previously explored. Those who do not study philosophy are bound to repeat its mistakes.
I haven't read these books, but if the article is correct, then I find the grandiose claims that everyone's gotten all of these major philosophers wrong over the lat 2500 years (not just one or two) and that Gottlieb has properly comprehended all of them is suspect, at the very least. Worth noting is that people debate over what a given philosopher means by X all the time. While it's fine to say that a philosopher has been misunderstood in some way for centuries (and here, Aquinas stands as an example; the existential Thomists of the early 20th century made just that claim about the so-called principle of existence), the kind of broad claims being made here raise eyebrows. To understand just one philosopher thoroughly (not counting the research that goes into expanding their theories) can occupy a philosopher for a lifetime. There was one quite well known philosopher who said that he only truly "got" Aristotle in his 50s.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadFeynman, like some other famous scientists, gave in to the temptation of pontificating on subjects he knew very little about. Philosophy in general was something he seemed to have contempt for, without knowing much about it. I'd take his pronouncements on it with a huge grain of salt.
Edit: verb tenses that wishfully put forth we still had Feynman.
See him on why questions for example - http://lesswrong.com/lw/99c/transcript_richard_feynman_on_wh...
Or his talk on cargo cult science - http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
Or the discussion of quantum mechanics in QED.
I've yet to see similar clarity from a philosopher of science. I think the philosophers annoyed him because they weren't very good but self important in spite of that.
On the "why questions" video from the first link, which I've seen before, Feynman's answer only shows that he's used to answering the kind of question asked of him, regarding why magnets repel, and similar questions involving physics.
Yes, he realizes that there are larger issues involved in such questions and their answers, but he steers all the answers and questions back to physics, which to him are the more interesting answers and questions.
Nowhere is there any evidence that his own answers are informed by any kind of reading of philosophical literature or familiarity with the world of philosophy.
Regarding the "Cargo Cult Science" essay. In it Feynman states "even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO’s, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world."
His interest in the question of what is and isn't science, and his answer to it are some of the central things that philosophy of science studies. No amount of physics experiments are going to give you any insight in to that question. To attempt to answer it, as Feynman did, is to practice philosophy of science, which Feynman himself in the original quote which started this thread decries as useless.
The whole essay is really an attempt to engage in philosophy of science, but without any evidence that Feynman is familiar with the field. The result is interesting both because Feynman is an entertaining and capable writer, and because of his obvious familiarity with the practice of science and its ideals. But it's not nearly as insightful as it could have been had he actually undertaken to study the subject academically. It's really an opinion piece aimed at explaining in very general ways some of the practices and ideals of science as Feynman sees them to laymen and other scientists, and almost a polemic on scientific integrity.
Also, it should be pointed out that the philosophy of science studies a lot more than just the questions addressed in this essay. They are important questions, but there's a lot more about science that is philosophically interesting.
Regarding your point about the clarity of Feynman's writing compared to those of philosophers: it's sadly all too true that way too many of them are very poor and obscure writers compared to Feynman. On the other hand, many others are very clear (if usually pretty dry).
When there is lack of clarity, some of it is due to lack of writing ability or interest in clarity (or even wilful obscurity), but in other cases it's due to the specialized knowledge or terminology that is required to understand it -- much like that which would be required to understand a paper in an academic physics journal. If you attempt to tackle such a paper without a great deal of academic physics under your belt, you are likely to be confused. So it is with philosophy, where you'd be a lot better off with some philosophy courses under your belt before you try to make sense of much of it.
I'm curious to how it could have been improved by insights from academic philosophy. I'm not expert but glanced at the Wikipedia entry on philosophy of science and find it hard to see what you'd go with.
Just to give you a taste of what to expect though: imagine a lot of very smart people considering the sorts of issues Feynman is raising, but devoting whole books to them, trying to cover these issues from every conceivable angle and taking in to account all of the other points of view on these issues (not just those of Feynman himself or some astrologers or psychics, as Feynman did). Then there are the books in response to those books, trying to be just as thorough in answering the questions the the first author wrote about, and seeing if there's something they missed or any other constructive way to think about them, and so on.
In short, there's an entire academic field that studies these questions and many other related ones, that isn't going to be covered by a little essay by any single scientist -- no matter how brilliant he was. He didn't have the final word, and not even much of a word in the first place, considering his lack of study of and engagement with the field.
Feynmann's own words in the essay on "Cargo Cult Science" are salient here:
"It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it"
It's telling that Feynmann does not apply this principle of integrity to the views he expresses in his own essay. He does not, even for a moment, write about what could possibly be wrong with his point of view. But such questioning is quite common in the philosophy of science. They don't stop with dogmas and ideals regarding what science ought to be, as Feynman does. They go further and question them, and much else besides.
By "do better" I mean in an equivalent few pages to advise a new graduate about how to discover things that are true, as a focus sometimes at odds with advancing their career, because that's what Feynman's graduation speech was about.
Philosophy of science is less about telling scientists how to behave than trying to understand what actually happens when scientists do what they do, what science accomplishes on a theoretical level, what the difference between science and non-science is, etc.
It's less of "here's how to get to the truth" and more of "can science get at the truth at all?" or "to what degree can science get at the truth?" or (much like Feynman's essay) "what makes these particular actions or beliefs 'scientific'?"
Karl Popper's criterion of "falsifiability"[1] was once a popular one, in regards to what makes something 'scientific'. But that's fallen out of fashion[2]:
"Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."
And so the debate continues...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Criticisms
That doesn't really mean Popper is wrong.
If it can't then by its own measure, it's not "scientific". Further, if one scorns anything "unscientific" as valueless, then the principle of falsifiability must also be valueless.
In the relevant sense, yes. We switch out conceptual definitions when they fail to encompass the relevant empirical instances. If falsifiability turned out to allow, for example, theology to be considered a science, then we would have to throw out falsifiability. As it is, it's only a coarse-grained principle for demarcation, hence the arguments about string theory.
I think that may have been Feynman's point.
Whether, or to what extent, Popper's falsifiability criterion is a good description of science is not a problem for scientists.
Judea Pearl - Causality
John Earman - World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute vs. Relational Theories of Space and Time
James Woodward - Making Things Happen
Jeff Bub - Interpreting the Quantum World
Peter Godfrey-Smith - Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection
Jesse Prinz - The Conscious Brain
Kim Sterelny - Thought in a Hostile World
And some historically important works:
Carnap - The Logical Structure of the World (in a loose sense, the first attempt at an AI program)
Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (the philosophy of science practicing scientists now inherit and unquestionably assume)
Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (a ubiquitous work on scientific practice)
Readers of HN might also dig up Scott Aaronson's paper on how complexity theory might be applied to certain philosophical questions.
I suspect that is what some physicists think philosophy does in their field, but if so, I don't see that there is anything for them to get worked up about. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since Bergson annoyed Einstein.
I think that the regression of human enlightenment comes more from your insistence about how science destroys magic, which never actually existed, than from science itself. All science has done is politely explain that our ways of making sense and meaning out of our experiences have to conform to the way the world actually is.
>Philosophy is more important to science than ever as it struggles to meaningfully interpret its data, especially in quantum mechanics and neurology. I know it upsets scientists to think about receiving help from a philosopher.
Nobody is upset about seeking help from a relevant domain expert. However, we are continuing to try to politely explain that trying to make sense of the world in terms of ghosts or Platonic Forms does not work. Naturalistic philosophers hear no complaints from scientists, because their philosophizing fits inside reality.
The problem comes from the rather irritating philosophers who continue to insist that a world without ghosts or Forms is innately meaningless and has no place for human life in it.
I say nothing supernatural, because the precise meaning of "naturalism" is contested in philosophy. For rather complex reasons, you can accept evolution, accept that modern physics is essentially accurate (only inaccurate so far as we're still discovering things and refining theory, etc), deny that there are immaterial souls or Cartesian dualism, yet not count as a naturalist. I am not sure if naturalism is necessarily a majority position.
As far as I can tell, it's not a majority position, and that's a damn shame upon philosophers. They still want to cling to their Platonic Forms, even while claiming not to be Cartesians.
Well, it doesn't work that way. We scientists are going to keep asking to see the Form of the Power-Set, the Form of the Good (oh boy does that one ever cause fights!), and of course the Form of "Materialism" (scare-quoted because the "materialism" so pilloried by philosophers tends to bear little resemblance to the content of any science post-Newton). If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles.
Most scientists believe in plenty of things they can't see, such as magnetism, viruses, gravity, etc.
What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them.
But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen nor (again, arguably) measured, like love, freedom, happiness, and even God.
I am reminded of this anecdote about a dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:
If you claim to be unable to observe love, freedom, and happiness, and to believe there can be no possible observation of God (such as a revelation at Sinai, for example, and its archaeological after-effects), then you're just being plain silly.
>What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them.
Yes, we do see their effects. Science deals with latent properties and objects all the time. After all, scientifically speaking, everything beyond our sensory nerve-endings is latent and is inferred.
Nothing abnormal here.
(Never mind the philosophers who claim to know their perception is veridical because it's more intuitive that way rather than because they examined how it was working.)
>I am reminded of this anecdote about a dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:
I am once again reminded of how philosophers completely fail to understand science and scientists, and thus caricature us as blind idiots every chance they get.
This is not a scientific claim, it is a philosophical one, and a dubious one at that (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/).
Science doesn't operate from the first person perspective. The data of science is not neural firings, it is public observations and measurements.
The sense in which a subatomic particle is inferred from its effects is completely different from the sense in which the brain "infers" things based on neural signals. The former is part of theorizing, the second is a bit of information processing that's prior to theorizing of any kind. The former is a fact about how science works. The latter is a scientific discovery which does not (directly[0]) affect how we do science.
[0] I say directly because there are contexts where we have to account for bias, optical illusions, and whatnot. It's the same sense in which astronomy is not directly about telescopes, though astronomers spend a lot of time worrying about telescopes.
Ah, isn't the imperialism of philosophers so likeable? Hey scientists, you're not talking about the stuff in your experiments, you're talking about this other thing we made up! Because we say so!
>The sense in which a subatomic particle is inferred from its effects is completely different from the sense in which the brain "infers" things based on neural signals. The former is part of theorizing, the second is a bit of information processing that's prior to theorizing of any kind. The former is a fact about how science works. The latter is a scientific discovery which does not (directly[0]) affect how we do science.
Actually, according to our most up-to-date paradigm, they're both instances of hierarchical Bayes inference, one of which is implemented in hardware, and the other of which is using said hardware as a primitive base to build higher-precision inferences.
For someone trying to stick up for philosophy, you should read more of it, since I'm getting many of the details from Andy Clark's recent book.
Also, it seems like there are increasingly many places in science where having a sort of self-awareness about what one's doing while practicing is useful. Formalization of observation and measurement in physics would be part—but what sticks out to me even more is the way competing theories are weighed against one another. We've generalized beyond particular theories to working in a framework capable of evaluating and comparing various competing theories using standard measures (and aesthetic judgement)—much like evaluating software architectures. This has occurred somewhat in parallel with philosophy of science increasingly pointing out that scientific formulations have a degree of arbitrariness to them (in a similar manner to how you can express a single algorithm many many different ways)—rather than being either truth or not truth.
As far as quotes are concerned, here's one from Feyerabend that explicitly names Feynman:
"The withdrawal of philosophy into a 'professional' shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth"
In other words, the ignorance of philosophy so prevalent among scientists has rendered them a class of boorish technicians. And it seems to be getting worse. Just look at Lawrence Krauss and friends.
And that word "revisionist," used so frequently to dismiss what one thinks they already know -- how useful is that word in advancing anything but maintenance of the status quo?
From another angle, the paragraph in reference is a summary of what the article's author believes the author of the book being reviewed alleges is the macro-narrative in regards to philosophy as presented today and understood by philosophy-averse intellectuals. As the article-author explicitly mentions Plato later in the article (in reference to an earlier work by the book-author extolling Ancient Greek philosophy) and distinguishes between the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, it seems impossible that either author doesn't realize the Cave isn't Socrates' idea. Although sloppy, it seems that the article-author is simply implying that there is so little familiarity with the full breadth and depth of philosophy that the average individual with passing knowledge of the ancients might know of the Allegory of the Cave/theory of the Forms/etc but would wrongly attribute it to Socrates as he is the mouthpiece in Republic.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries
Quite plainly, we don't know. It seems irrelevant, however, as the line of inquiry was about whether the article-author mistakenly attributed the Allegory of the Cave to Socrates when the 'correct' attribution is to Plato (that is, the established/agreed-upon/canonical attribution), not whether or not the Allegory is a wholly original, purely inspired, spontaneously birthed thought from Plato.
In regards to the ideas truly being Socrates' or those of a precedent, I'm aware of nothing that indicates that being the case (other than the standard A influences B influences C, etc, nature of philosophy). I'm no expert, but it seemed clear to me in reading Plato's work after the death of Socrates (e.g., Republic) that he is radically departing from the views of his teacher. If the counterpoint is that Plato received all of this wisdom from Socrates, then attributed the introductory bits to his teacher and kept the juiciest for himself, we know that's not the case: many other contemporaries wrote about the views of Socrates and some even recorded Socratic dialogues.
In Republic, Plato advocates things like an elite intellectual class that actively deceives the hoi polloi and prevents them from accessing philosophy, yet Socrates was put to death for his repeated attempts at engaging all Athenians who would listen in philosophical debates. Socrates warned against the youth of Athens losing their ability to think critically, while Plato advocates a utopian system predicated on the vast majority of its citizens not questioning things at all. In fact, it's frequently suggested that Plato's dramatic departure from the Socratic notion of "I know nothing" and the near-totalitarian features of his Republic are direct results of the Athenians turning on and executing Socrates. The entire idea of a Philosopher King and an enlightened ruling class micromanaging the lives of the producer/worker and guardian/soldier classes seems like a plan to ensure that no great thinker ever suffers the same fate as Socrates. With the rebellious and reactionary nature of the Republic established, it seems clear he didn't get the ideas contained within from Socrates. This seems especially true because Plato does not discuss them until ~380 BC, almost two decades after the death of Socrates. If he inherited or stole the ideas, why wait so long to talk about it? And why didn't anyone else know about it (Plato was one of several students who followed Socrates)?
I've glanced, very lightly, over the Wikipedia page for the Eleusinian Mysteries, and there's nothing specific leaping out at me as inspiration for the Allegory of the Cave (other than the idea of a layered underworld, but that's not unique to the Mysteries or particularly reflective of the Cave). I'm unfamiliar with these ideas; can you expound upon the connection, or is the argument just that because the Mysteries were ancient and once orally disseminated, there's a chance that the Allegory was too and merely reported by Plato as original?
Bit blown away that he's finally published the second part.
I haven't read these books, but if the article is correct, then I find the grandiose claims that everyone's gotten all of these major philosophers wrong over the lat 2500 years (not just one or two) and that Gottlieb has properly comprehended all of them is suspect, at the very least. Worth noting is that people debate over what a given philosopher means by X all the time. While it's fine to say that a philosopher has been misunderstood in some way for centuries (and here, Aquinas stands as an example; the existential Thomists of the early 20th century made just that claim about the so-called principle of existence), the kind of broad claims being made here raise eyebrows. To understand just one philosopher thoroughly (not counting the research that goes into expanding their theories) can occupy a philosopher for a lifetime. There was one quite well known philosopher who said that he only truly "got" Aristotle in his 50s.