[ExI] Philosophy and philosophers

[Dan]

On Monday, October 6, 2014 7:11 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>> he's [Searle] is not a dualist
> 
> However I am a duelist, I think that a noun (like the brain) is not
> the same as the way a noun behaves (like the mind).

If you're not joking here, what exactly do you mean?

>> the Chinese Room, regardless of your view of it, don't you agree
>> that it's been influential in the AI field
> 
> I agree that the Chinese Room has been influential, but not in a
> good way. The Chinese Room thought experiment is not just wrong
> it is STUPID. I say this because it has 3 colossal flaws, just one
> would render it stupid and 3 render it stupidity cubed:
[big snip of discussion of faults with Searle's Chinese Room]
> 
> All Searle did was come up with a wildly impractical model (the
> Chinese Room) of a very very VERY slow intelligence in which a
> human being happens to play a trivial part.

My point in bringing him up was to show a philosopher who has influenced thinking in cognitive science and AI -- whether you agree with him or not. In other words, he's had a big impact outside philosophy. (And his name isn't Adler.:) He's also contributed to philosophy of language and philosophy of action.

Roderick Long, on another list mentioned Wilfred Sellars and Donald Davidson. His point was showing that this are big guys in modern philosophy and scientists haven't come up with philosophical ideas to rival theirs in their respective fields. (Well, during their lifetimes. This is also not to place a clear separation between these fields. Nothing inherent in them prevents someone from making contributions to one or the other. But the rule today seems to be many of the cutting edge ideas in any field come from people working in that field, usually steeped in that field's context. This isn't to say outside can never ever ever make a contribution, though let's just admit there are many bumblers who believe they're the next Einstein who really don't have a clue yet because they've managed to be an expert in something believe they're an expert in anything at all. As something outside this context, think of just about anyone who isn't a literary historian or Shakespeare scholar who tries their hand at figuring out if Shakespeare's play were written by Bacon, Vere, or someone else. It's almost too much fun to see a genius in some other field become a crank in Shakepeare studies.:)

>> Quine, Russell, and Frege all studied philosophy, and their major
>> work was as philosophers.
> 
> Quine was very witty writer and  logician and I'm a fan of logic,

If you're a fan of logic, and you're praising Quine, why aren't you praising Aristotle as well? Didn't he make some pretty fundamental contributions to logic -- even to modal logic?

>> but I always associate him with Douglas Hofstadter and his
>> book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", the
>> most brilliant book I ever read. In that book Hofstadter
>> coins a new verb "to quine" which involves the use /mention
>> distinction.

I thought Dennett coined that verb, but I see they both did. But all this is a side show. Are you disagree with Quine making important contributions to philosophy?

> Bertrand Russell's major work was the mathematical book
> Principia Mathematica;

A book on the foundations of mathematics that was putting a certain _philosophy_ of mathematics into practice, no?

And what did Russell study at university? Among other things, philosophy. His interest in mathematics was early on one of an interest in its foundations -- i.e., its philosophy. And early on, he was already interested in politics (since you mention it below). He also wrote many of his seminal works on philosophy before or during co-writing Principia.

> he said that besides himself and
> his coauthor Alfred North Whitehead only one other person
> read all 3 of the enormous volumes cover to cover, and that
> person was Kurt Godel; but that one reader was enough to
> change everything.

And Gödel studied what at university? Mathematics and... philosophy!

> This isn't a exact quote but he said
> that as he got older he got too stupid for mathematics so
> he switched to philosophy, and when he got even older and
> was too stupid for philosophy he switched to politics.

But the same might be said about the more technical or cutting edge in any field. People have a hard time keeping up. The same is true of philosophy. Even people trained in a field who've long studied eventually will run into their limits. I studied mathematics in college and have tried to keep, but it's not easy and I'd never deign to weigh in the latest findings. (This isn't to say I was even up to the latest findings when I was in school. And this isn't too long ago. But I doubt anyone can weigh in authoritatively in a way that the people working in the field would sit up and be shocked on (save by the intellectual hubris;),  say, the cutting edge in surgery theory, blow-up algebras, stationary towers, category theory, and the work of the last three Fields medalists. I could be wrong, but I have yet to meet someone that's omnicompetent in that respect. The same goes for in philosophy -- and I do know a few professional philosophers who can chime in on many things, even teach classes in them, but not in all of them.)

> And as for Ferge...
> 
>> Frege pretty much single-handedly developing modern symbolic logic,
> 
> I couldn't have said it better myself.

So, what's your point? Here we have a philosophy who made major contributions to formal logic. Without his contributions, things would be much different or maybe much delayed. (Though hard to say... But another philosophy, when the term had a much wider meaning, was Leibniz: many reforms to symbolism that made our mathematical lives much easier, no? And I'm leaving out him independently inventing calculus.)

>> I'm not disagreeing with the value of Darwin's contributions, though it's
>> likely he did have a philosophy course in divinity school.
> 
> If it was in divinity school it was a anti philosophy course.

I doubt that. I don't know enough of his biography, but it seems to me he was exposed to philosophy, which would've been unavoidable anyhow, given the folks he palled around with and the discussions they had. If he hadn't been exposed to, e.g., materialist ideas, he might have come up with an entirely different theory -- maybe merely becoming a footnote to 19th century biology rather than the titan he is.

>> Also, he wasn't really a professional scientist -- not that there were
>> many at that time.
> 
> The word "scientist" hadn't even been invented, people like
> Darwin and Newton were called "Natural Philosophers",
> a charming term that I wish we still used. 
> But it's true that Darwin was not a professional
> in the sense that he was never payed for his
> scientific work but he didn't need to be,
> Darwin was rich.

I believe "natural philosophy" had fallen out of favor by Darwin's time (partly because of Boyle) and Darwin was called a "naturalist." But no matter. My point was he and most contributors to the field back then were not really professionals in the modern sense -- as in being paid (as you note) to do this after getting the right educational credentials via something like a PhD program.

>>> And what important new ideas did they come up with that
>>> Einstein, Dirac or Feynman hadn't discovered a half century  before?
>> 
>> The scientists you mention were steeped in philosophy,
> 
> As I said I love philosophy, it's philosophers I have a problem with.

Okay, you love philosophy. That's great. Again, what important philosophical ideas did Einstein, Dirac or Feynman come up with?

>> Einstein especially in the ideas of Ernst Mach.
> 
> Einstein was a fan of some of Mach's ideas but Mach was
> not a fan of Einstein,

Which matters not. I don't care if they were lovers who shacked up together for a whole year on Lake Lugano until Mach spurned him. Point is: Mach influenced Einstein. (And Mach was championing Relationalist ideas mostly originated by that "philosopher" Leibniz, no?)

> to the day he died he never accepted relativity, Special
> or General, nor even the atomic theory of matter.

Yes, but no matter. One person can influence another in a big way and yet not agree with that person, no? It can be argued, in the same fashion, that Priestley influence Lavoisier, yet they disagreed on phlogiston theory, no?

>> scientists don't tend to come up with great new philosophic ideas.
> 
> Scientists (and mathematicians) are the only ones who do come up
> with great new philosophic ideas,

Such as?

> after they do it takes card carrying philosophers a century or
> two to incorporate the discovery into their own work, but by then
> of course scientists have moved on. So philosophers fight the
> last war and are always 2 or 3 revolutions in thought behind.

What? I've already discussed philosophers of science who seem to be fairly up to date -- not a "war" or "2 or 3 revolutions in thought behind." Sure, if you're reading Mortimer Adler, who was never a cutting edge philosopher and who's main influence was on the people who aren't philosophers (mainly through his popular books; when's the last time you read a research paper by Adler? Have you read any research papers in philosophy that build on or cite Adler's ouvre?), yeah, sure, he's dated, but this is like citing my grandfather's high school chemistry teacher for his ignorance of nanotechnology. Who are these philosophers of science (or of mind or of psychology) that you know or have read who are way behind -- like by decades or more -- on the research in the sciences they cover? 

>> But if you want to look at a philosophy who seems to have some
>> direct impact on science, think Popper.
> 
> Science impacted Popper but Popper didn't impact science, no
> scientist would read Popper and become a better scientist
> because of it. Popper and all philosophers of science reminds
> me of movie critics, they keep telling movie makers how > they're doing it all wrong but couldn't make a movie
> themselves if their life depended on it.

The function of movie critics, at their best, is to evaluate film for the viewing public -- either to explain it or to call attention to what to watch or avoid. It's not really about competing with movie makers. And one can evaluate, say, a meal without being a master chef. (Of course, a master chef might make a better food critic than just anyone else. But a decent food critic need not be a master chef.)

Also, I believe Popper has had some influence. He brought Hume's ideas more to bear in modern philosophy of science (for good or ill; I'm not a Popperian). And I think falsification, though definitely implicitly practiced before him became much more explicitly accepted after he championed the idea. I don't recall any scientist championing it before Popper, but I do know working scientists now who cite him. Perhaps they're all wrong about where the idea originally came from, but then the path of influence still seems to be through Popper, no?

>> My hobby horse is against those making uninformed attacks
>> on Aristotle. I see that all too often coming from people
>> who haven't actually studied Aristotle,
> 
> I have't read much Aristotle, few have, unlike Plato he was
> not a good writer;

To be fair, we don't know how good of a writer he was as many of his extant works are thought to lecture notes, and they might not be his notes, but those of people in his circle (no different than, say, someone transcribing notes from a lecture by Boltzmann). Books he actually wrote haven't survived, to my knowledge -- at least, not as finished treatises with a few exceptions.

That said, I agree, these are tough going and Plato's surviving works are much easier to read. But this isn't the battle of the stylists here. If it were, we'd be in serious trouble because even many scientific works aren't easy reads. (There are exceptions, but think of what some of them are: Galileo's popularizations of his work. Great -- at least in English translation -- but the average paper in _Nature_ or _Science_ isn't about to enthrall the average person like Galileo's work. Should we stop at popularizers?)

> as for his ideas, about 5 minutes of study (he doesn't
> deserve more) is enough to convince me that Aristotle
> was the worst physicist who ever lived.

I don't disagree that Aristotle made many mistakes here, though the thrust of trying to systematize a body of existing knowledge is a model taken by all later science, even that of his detractors starting with people in his own time. It's only later people who idolized him to the point of missing the overall methods (not all of which are beyond reproach) for the details. The same applies in his biology and in other areas.

And you left out something I wrote that I feel is extremely relevant here:

"Aristotle developed logic and was really the first to attempt to systematize all the sciences he was interested in (and he seemed to be interested in everything)."

Note: I'm not talking about worshiping Aristotle or sheepishly hanging on to every utterance attributed to him, but just stating what I believe are his contributions here. And these seem laudable rather than something to be scorned or sneered at.

I also think you'd have to read more of him and study him to understand the context of what he said. Doesn't make him right, but if the goal is to judge him, don't you think it'd be by the standards of his context? (Don't get me wrong. Finding out he was better in his context -- or, at least, not the worst, doesn't mean you have to accept his ideas. For instance, I find his views on teleology interesting and they explain much about how he viewed the world -- and don't seem all that ridiculous for an Ancient Greek -- but that's no argument to believe teleology guides the Sun and Stars or anything for that matter.) Let me put this another way, to be the philosophy critic, you have to know the philosophy -- just like the movie critic who hasn't seen the movie isn't worth much for their criticism of it, are they?

Regards,

Dan
"Succession," a nanotech disaster story, can be previewed at:
http://www.amazon.com/Succession-ebook/dp/B00F02DLNG
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