Starboy

Oh Clutch, the great and honest philosopher. Thank you for replying to my unworthy straw filled post. I do thank you for making yourself clear on your opinion regarding the existence of a “difference” between science and philosophy ( - Clutch says: “obvious straw man”). I will save you the trouble of having to label this statement as an “obvious straw man”. At the risk of making more hay, I will restate my position. I would appreciate if you could just this one time not respond to my “straw man statements” with straw man statements. I am sure it is a convincing argument in philosophical circles but it is not informative. So I will try again and I look forward to your brilliant reply ( - Clutch says: “obvious straw man”). Aw, heck – Clutch, to save you time and trouble, assume it is all straw. With that out of the way, perhaps you will find the time to say something informative ( - Clutch says: “Obvious straw man”).

What I present is not an argument for my position, but an explanation of my opinion. I would expect that a person as experienced in the ways of philosophical argument, as you would be able to quickly argue why I am wrong. I look forward to your informative response.

I will state:

Science – authority of nature

When I use the word authority I mean it as the “power to influence or command thought, opinion and behavior” and the influence or command would be over the specific endeavor for which it was the authority, such as science, philosophy, law, religion or whatever.

For science, nature is granted in all cases the “power to influence or command thought, opinion and behavior” in matters of science. Because of this, even if the initial scientific results do not appear to make much sense, the authority of the results will drive the effort to put them in a framework that can be at least manipulated if not understood. Also note that even though nature is not invoked in all scientific disputes, it is never questioned that if so invoked and the results went contrary to sentiment no matter how well justified, sentiment would loose.

I will also state that:

Philosophy does not grant nature IN ALL CASES the “power to influence or command thought, opinion and behavior”. I say this because it is an acceptable philosophical position to hold that that the mind and brain are not the same. That “thought” is not physical and may not require nature to exist. There are philosophers that do hold that mind and brain are the same, but the non-physical mind philosophers may challenge the arguments of any physical mind philosopher on legitimate philosophical grounds. In this case there is no final arbiter other than intuition.

This one issue is enough to distinguish philosophy from science.

Starboy

Clutch

*YAWN*

Yes, I demonstrated, with quotes and arguments, that you have systematically failed to address the actual content of my view. Maybe doing things differently instead of endlessly whining would be a better response on your part.

Nor an argument against mine. Yes, I've pointed this out all along.
Sorry, I don't understand this. If I'm being dense, I assure you it is not on purpose. Whatever you just stated, could you state it a little more clearly? Perhaps in the form of an actual sentence?

In all cases of what? For example, is choosing the simpler of two empirically adequate theories a way of deferring to nature? How about deciding what conception of simplicity is the most appropriate to making such a choice? Science often involves these sorts of questions.
Agreed. This happens in philosophy as well.
First, I have no idea what relevance "sentiment" has to any of this. Second, this looks quite confused. Sentiment is not something that is normally "justified"; it's an emotion. In neither philosophy nor science is sentiment thought to outweigh valid reasoning based on best evidence.

In a strained sense, there is something to say for this, though not the justification that you supply. Philosophy is certainly broader than science in more than one respect. For example, it is devoted to examining some of the very working assumptions of science itself (eg, the soundness of inductive argument), and hence is not itself circumscribed by those assumptions. But this does not mean that "philosophy does not grant nature IN ALL CASES the “power to influence or command thought, opinion and behavior”." It only means that philosophy's concern with nature extends to the examination of questions about how to understand notions like "nature" and "truth" themselves. It may be that philosophers do not always expect there to be specific scientific results available that rule in or rule out positions on absolutely every such question. But that is very different from saying that they deny the authority of such results when they come along.

These sorts of questions about meaning and interpretation are, moreover, as concerned with "nature" as anything is. Read Russell's arguments for his Theory of Descriptions, for example: he draws attention to the existence of scope ambiguities reflected in the different ways we actually use definite descriptions. These are familiar facts about how language is used and what sort of mistakes people make; Russell argues that his theory explains these phenomena and accounts for the inferences people strictly draw from utterances of the kind in question. Now, he does not do an empirical analysis of such language use. But he appeals to it, and his theory is explictly hostage to it. (If it was shown that literal utterances of "The F is G" are not normally taken to imply "There exists an F", then the ToD explanation of its logical form would be falsified). And language use is an aspect of nature.

In short, even meta-scientific philosophy about the interpretation of scientific terms and concepts is plausibly understood as adducing and trying to explain "facts of nature".
True. So what? This does not mean what you seem to think it means, namely,
Eh? Lots of people deny a straightforward identification of mind with brain because they hold a functionalist view of the relation. This may be describable as the view that "thought is not physical", in the sense that the relevant functional properties are not properties appealed to by physics. But on that interpretation, biology is full of "non-physical" things, since many biological predicates are unlikely to reduce to physical ones.

Or perhaps you have someone like Descartes in mind. Here too your characterization is mistaken; indeed, it entirely misses that Descartes is trying to give a conception of mind that squares with the best science of his day. He just has a bad scientific view, not rare for his day, about the explanatory role of the notion of substance. Armed with this bad idea, he sees room to reconcile three things: the manifest causal power of the mind; the mechanistic theory of cause (expressed in his plenism); and the apparent unobservability of thought. His solution is immaterial substance -- something having causal properties despite lacking extension. This, again, is a lousy idea... but it was a common constituent of descriptions of nature in Descartes' day. He certainly viewed himself as giving a science of the mind. It was a bad theory, though, a fact revealed by holding it responsible to empirical results at many levels. As frequently happens in philosophy.

Well, finally, here we are yet again at the bold assertion of the central claim that has not been argued.

After getting clear on what it means to be a "non-physical mind philosopher", please show that empirical evidence and theories have no evidential value in disputes between that view (whatever you think it is) and the view of "physical mind philosophers".

Well, thanks for the chuckle. Once again I am providing specifics -- names, examples, arguments -- while once again you give none of these.

[ October 17, 2002: Message edited by: Clutch ]</p>

Keith Russell

Clutch and Starboy:

Why can't you two agree to agree?

LOL...?

Keith.

Starboy

For the record clutch, I have never stated that what I offer is an “argument”. Why do you continue to refer to my posts as arguments? It does appear that what you desire is to turn this into an argument.


[quote]Originally posted by Starboy
<strong>I will state:
Science – authority of nature</strong>[/QTUOE]
Clutch, it is a shorthand way of expressing the idea. It was explained in the following sentence.

To answer your question, choosing the simpler of two empirically adequate theories is not deferring to nature. Such a choice as stated is not done in science. Can you give examples to support your claim?

Can you give examples of this?

Main Entry: sen•ti•ment
Pronunciation: 'sen-t&-m&nt
Function: noun
Etymology: French or Medieval Latin; French, from Medieval Latin sentimentum, from Latin sentire
Date: 1639
1 a : an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling : PREDILECTION b : a specific view or notion : OPINION
2 a : EMOTION b : refined feeling : delicate sensibility especially as expressed in a work of art c : emotional idealism d : a romantic or nostalgic feeling verging on sentimentality
3 a : an idea colored by emotion b : the emotional significance of a passage or expression as distinguished from its verbal context
synonym see FEELING, OPINION

My use of the word sentiment is as stated in 1b. It has a broad meaning, my intent was to indicate all other methods of selection, valid or otherwise, that did not make use of the results of experiment on nature.

All that is required to prove my statement is one case of a philosophy NOT granting science the authority to decide the outcome of a philosophical dispute. I can think of at least one case: idealism. Your response surprises me. Are you being honest?

The distinction that I posit is a way to distinguish the human endeavor of science from that of philosophy. Something else to note is that for the word philosopher the words realist and idealist are synonyms and antonyms, another indication that for what is the contradiction called philosophy nature may be used but is not required.

Starboy

[ October 17, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

Clutch

Oh, okay.

-- Lorentz contractions plus LE vs relativistic interpretation minus LE in 1905. Both predicted the same effects, both were consistent with the data at that time.

-- The theory of the instant propagation of light vs the theory that light is either propagated or moves with a velocity too fast to be measured, in 1670 (immediately pre-Roemer). Both theories predicted and explained the same phenomena; one required action at a distance through vacuum, the other required a universal incompressible medium. For decades -- even after Roemer -- the received scientific view was that the former was a less elegant explanation than the latter.

-- Any choice between regarding a local geometry as non-Euclidean and interpreting the measurements as distorted (by, eg, a force that diverts light rays from the geodesics.)

-- To be more prosaic: any example of the underdetermination of theory by a given set of data.

Hmm, yet again you have not engaged any of the many specific examples, arguments, cases I have offered, and here you are requesting more. And here I am, giving them. Now, yet again:

No, I am disinclined to give any further examples while you ignore the ones I have given in every post so far. To take just one case: what about your post where you harped on about experiments being the essence of science, on and on and on... I believe I raised people like Smolin and Penrose and asked you to explain how your comments about philosophers did not apply to them. Faced with counterexamples and a specific question, Vanderstarboy, you ignored it, changed the topic, and tried something new. After I gave still more specifics in my last post, I now find you ignoring them, and switching to the Argument from College Dictionary Definitions. (A freshman and fundy classic, that one: The dictionary says that "atheist" means "immoral". It's a measure of your desperation.)
To prove what case? Christ, are you arguing or not? It changes from paragraph to paragraph. Whatever statement you think would be proved here: why? How would it count against the view that I have defended? Oh, wait -- you're not arguing, so you don't have to answer these questions, or any questions, or explain anything, or reply to refutations. You're just trying to prove (unspecified) things.

What makes you think that no scientific reasoning applies to idealism? Berkeley was motivated by the scientific incoherence -- the practical defects of immeasurability and unconfirmability -- of the notion of substance. And responses to idealism often hinge on the practice of inference to the best explanation, an exercise in naturalistic modelling.

Your claims about philosophy are always these sweeping one-liners that show little familiarity with what you raise, and make no attempt to show how it might support your non-argument, nor weigh against mine -- which it also couldn't do, since that would make it a counter-argument. But you're not arguing.

This has just become a venue for you to display your ignorance about science and philosophy, and your pathological antipathy towards philosophy. Did you get a lousy mark in that sole first-year philosophy class? Still smarting from it? Doesn't matter. I'm sick of seeing you leap freely to a new claim every time I debunk the old one.

Screw it. The similarities to dealing with Vanderzyden make this decision straightforward.

Starboy

Hmmmm, “predicted the same effects”? I don’t recall that famous equation known almost all over the world (except to clutch), E=mc^2 to be predicted by Lorentz + LE.

STRIKE 1.

That controversy was finally decided by results from experiment on nature by Roemer. I never claimed that a question between two theories could not stay open for some time. My claim was that it would be the results of experiments on nature that will decide it not sentiment. Your example only confirms my point.

STRIKE 2.

That question is still open. When it finally is decided it will be by experiment on nature. The continuing negative results of gravity wave experiments seem to me like history repeating your first example all over again. Showing examples of open questions in science only reaffirms my contention that in science such questions are not resolved in any other manner than by the results of experiment on nature.

STRIKE 3.

YOU’RE OUT!

Clutch I am beginning to think that you have mild comprehension problems.

Ahhhh, clutch, you also said that the theorists themselves did not perform the experiments, but never the less the experiments had to be performed to affirm their theories, essentially in agreement with my stated distinction. My point regarding reality challenged philosophers was that almost NO philosophers perform experiments, something I find fascinating. So many people obsessed with reality and yet so few actually exploring it.

Do I detect straw in this last post? No matter, the more with which to make hay. As for the definition of philosopher, it is spot on, because it points out the obvious state of philosophy. A human endeavor divided into two camps, those that think nature is all there is and those that do not (realists vs. idealists), with only intuition to guide those that would choose between the two.

You got me clutch. I did try my hand at proving this one point. It is such a simple argument that I thought I would give it a go. I am surprised that such a learned philosopher as you had so much trouble with it.

Yet again you miss my point entirely. Philosophy can use appeal to nature but it is NOT REQUIRED to do so. Thus in those cases where it DOESN’T use appeal to nature it is NOT granting nature the authority to decide the outcome. Only science has the requirement and thus the difference between science and philosophy.

Now that you mention it, vander does have a habit of stomping off like a pouting child vowing to avoid contact with the offending party. The similarities between you and vander are striking. If I am lucky, you will put me on your ignore list just as vander has.

Starboy

[ October 17, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>