Starboy

Ummmm, it was my point, that philosophy, or at least your philosophy, had a mind centric bias. I have found that your bias is common among philosophers.

Starboy

Frotiw

"or at least your philosophy, had a mind centric bias."

This is a breakthrough. Yes DoubleDutchy might be mind-centric or not. This a a stance one might choose WITHIN philosophy -it is not philosophy as the entire branch of knowledge. This is cruzial. I don't want to comment whereither it is mind centric or not as this thread is conserned with the point of philosophy not metaphysics.
Still without judging the mind-centric stance. Yes this metaphysical claim might be common among philosophers and so what. I don't reject science because there are scientist who believe creationism(christian religious explanation of evoluton) is compatible with darwism. I have seen scientist(especially in the US) attempting to unite christian dogmatism with their scientifical stance. I reject their theories because there is good reason to do so but I obviosly do not reject science all together for that reason. I sure hope you can see the problem.

Starboy

Frotiw, for all I know all of philosophy is mind centric. Be that as it may it does point out something that I have claimed all along, that philosophy makes presumptions about reality and makes no reasonable attempts to identify and verity those presumptions. As such it makes it a questionalble enterprise at best.

Starboy

DoubleDutchy

The only presumption I made about reality as yet, is that it is produced by mind, as can be verified. You don't seem convinced so what is wrong with the argument ? Do you know of any reality that is not produced by a mind ? By what means did you come to know about it ?

Starboy

DoubleDutchy, I consider myself a scientist. Science is reality centric. The mind is a phenomenon embedded in reality. A scientist does not think that the bat disappears after it puts his lights out; at least the bat doesn't disappear unless some other part of reality destroyed it and even then it would leave a trace. I do not advocate that philosophy should or should not be mind centric, my point is that it is hard for me to take its comments on itself or other human endeavors such as science seriously when it is clueless to its own presumptions.

Starboy

Starboy

DoubleDutch, the funny thing is that I suspect you are serious. If you are right then I only exist in your mind and your mind is talking to itself. In that case you will not "mind" if your "mind" tells you that it thinks your "mind" is a moron.

Starboy

monkey mind

I really enjoyed this thread. For a while Starboy really had me going, I was being conviced of the uselessness of philosophy... but in the end I think the problem isn't so much "philosophy doesn't get science" as it is "Starboy doesn't get philosophy". His last reply demonstrating this point perfectly.

Starboy

mind, I could't agree with you more. I do not claim to get philosophy. That could be my deficiency or it could be because there is nothing to get.

Starboy

Hugo Holbling

Wrong. The demarcation currently used in science is the criterion of falsifiablility, based on the work of Popper (and subsequent critiques/refinements) wherein the philosophy of science specifies an experimental condition that must be met for a theory to be scientific, viz. the stating of potential falsifiers. That you fail to appreciate this is frankly staggering. Any discussion on whether or not a theory is scientific is predicated on falsifiability - a concept straight out of philosophy. You may suppose that this is an ignorant philosophical remark that pays no attention to scientific praxis, but i would have to assume you are deliberately missing the point.

Wrong. Let's go through a simple example to help you understand.

Suppose you hold to the theory that under certain conditions, etc, if i drop my mug of coffee it will fall to the floor. I oppose with the theory that it will float away, craving union with the divine. To test our theories we drop a mug of coffee under the specified conditions and it falls and breaks, wasting the nectar of the gods. What does the experiment mean?

Does it verify the statement "the mug will always fall under the specified conditions"? No. Does it falsify my theory? Not necessarily, but under naive falsification it does. Does it increase the probability of the statement "the mug will always fall under the specified conditions" being true? No, although some people suppose it does. Has your theory been shown to possess greater predictive power? Perhaps, under certain assumptions and based on further experiment. And so it goes.

The rather obvious point is that the question of what scientific experiment means is the domain of philosophy of science, whether you like it or not. The answer is not fixed but instead depends on which particular ideas in philosophy of science hold sway at any time; currently falsification is the flavour of the month, but a glance at the history of science will amply demonstrate that this has changed on many occasions. The notion that science has a unique methodology to which philosophy does not apply was destroyed by Feyerabend, Kuhn, Toulmin and Lakatos, but you couldn't be expected to know this (or else know that i'm mistaken in this assertion) because you steadfastly refuse to even consider their work based on your a priori straw-man dismissal.

This reminds me of Fine's comment on realism in science, and hence hardly has the force you suppose.

The point was not a difficult one; viz. that you would justly take issue with scientistic mischaracterizations (such as King's Indian refers to, not realizing that i will attack any subsequent usage of Sokal... *sinister laugh* ) and you can therefore expect little less from those you are straw-manning here.

Oh dear. Perhaps i've read you uncharitably, but i hardly think my suggestion deserved such a dismissal. I hope you realize how dogmatic this makes you appear, which would be doing a disservice to your efforts so far.

Lastly,

Yet you are more than happy to attack philosophy on such a flimsy base. What if the philosophers you read have the common trait that they have a poor understanding of science? This is hardly a scientific approach to learning about a subject - i could just as well learn about science by reading a few dozen authors with "scientific" degrees from certain universities in the US and who specialize in ID or creation "science" work, but i wouldn't expect a fair hearing as i subsequently berated science.

Perhaps what we need here is a recommended reading list (are you listening, Bill and Philosoft?) like some of the other forums have? If you suggest some works that will help us philosophers better understand your discipline, you could try some texts that may well have escaped your attention thus far that could help you appreciate what we see in all this bunkum, even if the only result is that you are better equipped to knock it down. What say you?

Thanks for sticking with the discussion.

Is that so? I thought it was thus:

I think i've succeeded admirably on both counts.

monkey mind

Hahah! That one I like.