[ExI] Why Physics Needs Philosophy

Fri Apr 1 22:38:57 UTC 2016

*Feynman (by John)  *
*Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such
ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it
should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In
all their previous discussions they hadn't even asked themselves whether
such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron, is an "essential
object"."*

An argument in ancient Greece, which I remember well, Spike, about what a
human was, ended with a definition that man was a featherless biped.  At
the next meeting a guy threw a plucked chicken on the table.

Once you start arguing definitions, it will always end up in chaos.  In
psych we used the term 'operational definition'.  I don't know what terms
other areas like physics use, but it have to be something similar.  So,
say, 'intelligence for the purposes of this study is defined as scores on
the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC)".  Since what
intelligence 'really is' has never been settled, we have to use such
operational definitions.  Of course, many will say that that test doesn't
really measure intelligence, and so we day, OK, go do your own research.

And so they do.  Multiple intelligences were popular at one time and still
are in places, but the scores seemed to correlate so highly with the
conventional tests that a separate definition of intelligence seems
unnecessary.  This has been the fate of quite a number of different
definitions and tests of intelligence.

What John seems to be arguing, and I fully agree, is that philosophers keep
on arguing about the same old things and never get off the pot and do
something.  Maybe these new 'experimental philosophers' will.

Then some wag like me will come along and say:  you don't understand.  Any
concept - any word - is no more and no less that what you define it as.  It
has no separate existence..
It's an abstraction.  And then you can be the one to go refute that by
kicking a rock.

bill w

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 2:34 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 2:06 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
>> >
>> >…  Issue:  how many teeth does a horse have?  Some wag suggested they
>> get a horse and he was kicked out of the meeting:  only rationalism can
>> decide truth - ….bill w
>>
>> BillW, the question is less absurd than it sounds.  Any empiricist can
>> count.  The philosopher’s job is to define the term “teeth.”
>>
>
> When he was a student at Princeton Richard Feynman had an encounter with
> philosophers, years later this is what he had to say about it and why he
> developed a contempt not for philosophy but for philosophers
> :
>
> *"In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit
> with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought:
> It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit
> for a week or two in each of the other groups.*
> *  *
> *When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very
> seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using
> words in a funny way, and I couldn't quite understand what they were
> saying. Now I didn't want to interrupt them in their own conversation and
> keep asking them to explain something, and on the few occasions that I did,
> they'd try to explain it to me, but I still didn't get it. Finally they
> invited me to come to their seminar.*
>
> *They had a seminar that was like, a class. It had been meeting once a
> week to discuss a new chapter out of Process and Reality - some guy would
> give a report on it and then there would be a discussion. I went to this
> seminar promising myself to keep my mouth shut, reminding myself that I
> didn't know anything about the subject, and I was going there just to
> watch.*
>
> *What happened there was typical - so typical that it was unbelievable,
> but true. First of all, I sat there without saying anything, which is
> almost unbelievable, but also true. A student gave a report on the chapter
> to be studied that week. In it Whitehead kept using the words "essential
> object" in a particular technical way that presumably he had defined, but
> that I didn't understand.*
>
> *After some discussion as to what "essential object" meant, the professor
> leading the seminar said something meant to clarify things and drew
> something that looked like lightning bolts on the blackboard. "Mr.
> Feynman," he said, "would you say an electron is an 'essential object'?"*
>
> *Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn't read the book, so I
> had no idea of what Whitehead meant by the phrase; I had only come to
> watch. "But," I said, "I'll try to answer the professor's question if you
> will first answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of what
> 'essential object' means.*
>
> *What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought
> theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory
> that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we
> can almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by
> analogy. In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, "What
> about the inside of the brick?" - and I would then point out that no one
> has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you
> only see the surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which
> helps us understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So
> I began by asking, "Is a brick an essential object?"*
>
> *Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, "A brick as an
> individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential
> object."*
>
> *Another man said, "No, it isn't the individual brick that is an essential
> object; it's the general character that all bricks have in common - their
> 'brickiness' - that is the essential object."*
>
> *Another guy got up and said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves.
> 'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you think
> of bricks."*
>
> **
> *Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such
> ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it
> should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In
> all their previous discussions they hadn't even asked themselves whether
> such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron, is an "essential
> object"."*
>
>   John K Clark
>
>
>
>
>
>
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