GIThruster wrote:tomclarke wrote:Philosophers of science are not usually scientists and on this matter many of them talk rubbish. . .
Kuhn's BS, MS and PhD in physics and history of science were all from Harvard. To pretend he is not qualified on the subject of his remarkable work is pretty ridiculous. If you want to disagree with him, say what it is you disagree with and maybe we can discuss it.
There is enormous variety in institutions. You do not get a free choice of topic at any institution - somone has to be interested enough to supervise.
One of Sonny's doctoral advisors is a ZPF guy. Sonny was denied the opportunity to do his PhD on ZPF theory because it is considered crackpot and therefor unsuitable for a dissertation. How much more an example of academic bias and censorship can you ask for? People are denied dissertation topics, inclusion into academic programs, tenure and made victim of every other form of academic punishment possible, based upon their views and many other inappropriate criteria and this is NORMAL inside academia. There all all sorts of corruption in academia. You admit on the one hand professors sometimes try to get each other fired, and then on the other say there is no corruption where you work? I don't think you understand how batty some of what you're writing here sounds. You live and work in the world's only nirvana, where there exists no corruption? Do you have any idea what you sound like? All human institutions include some corruption, and the fact educational institutions have to have rules against the teachers shagging their students is adequate evidence of this.
Textual criticism is quite different from scientific criticism, and not capable of converging to objective truth.
Well you're here talking about stuff you don't understand, Tom. "Textual criticism" is one very specific and wholly unsuccessful school of theology. It is one of the two branches of the equally unsuccessful "Literary Criticism". As C. S. Lewis remarked, it was not even capable of getting at the meaning of his work written contemporaneously with the one doing the criticism. How much less then can it hope to come to grips with stuff that is 2-3,000 years old? In any event, modern exegetical methods are based upon inductive and deductive reasoning in manner very similar to science--it is the subject matter that differs. My point was and is that theology has much in common with science and its study is just as rigorous. Theology is often capable of deriving truth. Science never is. Science is the pursuit of fact, not truth. These are entirely different pursuits, hence the difference in focus I already noted. In short, science can't ever tell you that you should love your neighbor which is a matter of truth. Theology can't ever tell you why the sky is blue, which is a matter of fact.
It is clear that you cannot differentiate between science and theology. So you consider scientific views to be held in an identical manner to theological beliefs. But this is incorrect. It is in fact vastly reductionist.
Looks like we're at an impasse. I'm disappointed you have stooped to so mischaracterize my thoughts like this, Tom. I find it difficult to believe you are not capable of understanding what I wrote. You're here sounding guilty of the very stuff you say makes you angry.
But where I work we are not corrupt. Not one little bit.
I just cannot take you seriously on this issue. How can anyone possibly make such a claim? Are you omniscient? I'm sorry we couldn't have a more adult conversation than this but this is just seriously deluded nonsense. We are not ants. All human institutions include corruption.
As you say we've now reached an impasse. I'll summarise what I see to be the differences:
- You see corruption as a defining characteristic of scientific institutions. I'm not denying it exists. My personal experience where I work is that I have not come across it. Obviously there can be corruption, people are fallible. But it does not seem characteristic, or usual.
You see theology as being as rigorous (in the sense of capable of convergence to an objective truth) as science, but dealing with different matters. I don't. This is a major difference of perspective which explains entirely your negative view of the scientific process.
It is true that you have some philosophical support, particularly from Kuhn, but more generally from Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend.
I am firmly in David Stove's camp here, and more specifically a fan of E.T. Jaynes: "Probability theory as Extended Logic" which provides a solid mathematical basis for induction (not simple at all).
You might like his more popular, though unfinished:
logic of science
Jaynes's work is the mathematical missing link that takes scientific induction out of the realms of philosophy (arguing about words) and into the clearer and more bracing realm of maths. It is much misunderstood, because the mathematical issues are subtle and their application is not simple. But it provides proof in principle that scientific theories can be objectively compared in an absolute way.
That does not exist for theology, nor history.
Stove + Jaynes makes an unanswerable criticism of the post-modernist irrastionalists. But, as I say, it is material for another thread.
Few have heard of Stove, but he is very readable and I strongly recommend the book summarised here (confusingly it has been re-titled twice to encourage sales):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper_and_After
A Review of the book (and Stove):
by Dr. Scott Campbell, Philosophy Programme, School of Advanced Study, University of London
The late David Stove was one Australia's greatest ever intellectuals, writers, polemicists and wits, and one of the two or three best philosophers this country has ever produced. However, because of his distaste for self-promotion, he is not well-known outside a small circle of fans, and what's more, he is actively disliked by many of those in the intelligentsia who know of him. The re-release of this classic book by Sydney's Macleay Press may begin to change all that.
This book was originally released in 1982, when it was called Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists. It gained a small cult following amongst the more irreverent philosophers of science, but it was also roundly condemned by some of the more pompous for its disrespectful attitude towards twentieth-century philosophy of science, as well as for its polemical style.
What Stove did in the first part of this book (which he entitled 'Philosophy and the English Language: How Irrationalism About Science Is Made Credible'), was to brilliantly and hilariously analyse the means by which four of the most famous philosophers of science of the century, Sir Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, managed to sound convincing whilst putting forward doctrines that entailed that scientific knowledge was impossible.
Stove's analysis here is masterful, and is compulsory reading for any student of the philosophy of science. Using impeccable philosophical reasoning, he rescues common-sense from the depths of philosophical nonsense. His wit is breathtaking, quite literally so - during some passages I found myself holding my breath - and his bon mots are a constant delight.[6] You can see why Michael Levin wrote 'Reading Stove is like watching Fred Astaire dance. You don't wish you were Fred Astaire, you are just glad to have been around to see him in action'.
Popper reacted to Stove's criticisms by insisting that he is a defender of science. But while Popper himself may well believe in science, the problem is that his philosophy entails that science cannot produce knowledge. According to Popper's view, induction (the making of claims about the unobserved on the basis of what has so far been observed), which is ordinarily supposed to underpin science, is irrational. Popper holds that scientific knowledge can only proceed from logical deductions made on the basis of basic observation statements.
As Popper points out, though, no scientific laws, and no universal statements, such as 'All unimpeded objects above a certain weight fall to the ground', can be deductively derived from basic observation statements. And this is true: no amount of observation of unimpeded objects above a certain weight falling to the ground will logically entail the statement 'All unimpeded objects above a certain weight fall to the ground', because there's always the logical possibility that some day one such object won't fall down.
So all science can tell us, says Popper, is which scientific laws and theories have been shown to be false (because they have been refuted by at least one basic observation statement). Science provides us with no basis for taking any scientific laws or theories to be true, though. Nor is there any such thing, he thinks, as the evidence providing some support for a scientific theory, and there is certainly no such thing as one theory having more support from the evidence than another theory. Despite these claims, Popper nevertheless thought that we can still say that those scientific theories and claims that have not been refuted are in some sense 'better' than those which have.
However, critics have long pointed out that Popper's 'deductivist' view of science leads to absurdity. Among other fatal problems, it entails that the probability of any scientific statement being true is zero, the same as a self-contradictory statement. It also makes it impossible for scientists to justifiably make perfectly ordinary probability claims, such as that the probability of a new-born baby being female is 50%, claims which Popper admits are scientific. And his belief that his view allows that some scientific theories can be 'better' than others is simply not consistent with other implications of his theory. Popper spent decades trying to worm his way out of such contradictions and absurdities, and Stove is particularly devastating and hilarious in his discussion of the illegitimate methods Popper uses here.[1]
Many philosophers of science since the 1950's were schooled in Popperism. Many of them gradually became aware of the impossibility of scientific knowledge on the Popperian model. You'd think that this would have resulted in them simply throwing Popper out as a bad mistake.[2] What in fact happened, though, was that they either became some sort of relativist, like Kuhn, or they resorted to even more desperate methods to patch up Popper's views, like Lakatos, or they become 'epistemological anarchists' like Feyerabend, who claimed that science was just another myth among many.
Such views are still the orthodoxy in philosophy of science.[3] Part of the value of Stove's work in the first part of Anything Goes is that he identifies the linguistic devices which are used to disguise their absurdity. One of the simplest such devices was to place words like 'knowledge', 'discovery', 'fact', 'prove', 'explanation', 'confirm', 'objective', 'truth' in scare quotes. A Popperian, for example, might say that through science we have come to 'know' that the 'law' of gravity is a 'fact'. Popper's philosophy, though, entails that we do not and cannot possibly know any such thing. But the presence of the words 'know' and 'fact' (despite the fact that they are in scare quotes), deflects attention away from this fact.[4] Stove points out, though, that once the implications of Popper's views are presented non-evasively, no-one will take them seriously for a moment, as they are clearly ridiculous.
David Papineau, a leading philosopher of science, has written, 'Stove has got Sir Karl Popper exactly right... Popper and After will serve as an excellent antidote for the many philosophical innocents who are still in danger of being bewitched by Popper'.
In the second half of Anything Goes (which Stove entitled 'How Irrationalism About Science Began'), Stove traces the origins of such views back, through Popper, to Hume's famous argument to show that induction is circular. Stove closely analyzes this argument, and shows that it does not support the view that induction is circular and irrational.[5]
This part is aimed more at those who have some background in philosophy, but it's an extremely lucid piece of writing nonetheless, as well as being a sublime and important piece of philosophical analysis. Anyway, the book is worth buying for the first part alone, which can be read by any non-philosopher with a passing acquaintance of Popper et al.
Stove also has some other classic books that I highly recommend, and which are readable by non-philosophers. In The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), he sticks the boot into the persistent tendency of certain types of philosophers over the ages (especially those with religious leanings) to deny the reality of the external physical world. This is again done in his brilliantly witty and inimitable style, and in addition contains valuable and unique arguments against philosophical idealism. It also displays his vast knowledge of 19th century writings.
Darwinian Fairytales (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1995) is one of the few anti-Darwinian books that is worth reading. When I say 'anti-Darwinian', though, I should stress that Stove, who admired Darwin greatly, does not deny that natural selection is overwhelmingly likely to be the true explanation of our origins. What he mainly argues against in this book are the claims made about human behaviour by ultra-Darwinists (unfortunately one of the more famous contributors to the Skeptic, Richard Dawkins, gets the Stove treatment here). He also argues against simplistic Darwinian analyses of human populations (Julian Simon has made similar points in recent times), and he points out serious deficiencies in W. D. Hamilton's influential 'inclusive fitness' theory.
Cricket versus Republicanism and Other Essays (ed. J. Franklin & R. J. Stove, Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1995) is a collection of Stove's essays on various topics. Stove is very unusual amongst modern philosophers in that he can write well on non-philosophical topics. But to put it like this is to massively understate the case. Stove is one of the greatest essayists this country has ever produced, and perhaps one of the best essayists of the century. It is these essays, though, that have made him so unfashionable, especially in academic circles, because of his conservative political views, and his witty assault on all that the average modern academic holds dear. This is not a book that will be found on 'Recommended reading' lists in sociology departments.
Even an admirer like myself can find plenty to disagree with.