[ExI] Why Physics Needs Philosophy

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 9:54 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hey! What about psychologists??  What do philosophers know about the mind
> other than what they can dream up?

I believe Anders was getting at what philosophers would know about things
like thinking more broadly and systematically. It wasn't that they would
know more about some narrow subject.

Also, have you studied philosophy of mind? And I don't mean reading a book
by Adler. I mean the more informed works by, say, Paul Thagard, John
Searle, or Jaegwon Kim? Or are you just going by what dreamed up about
philosophers? :)

> Experimental philosophy, my jackass.
> That's called psychology!!

There's a difference between the new field of experimental philosophy and
the idea of getting philosophers to input into experimental design. (Also,
one can distinguish between the new field [of experimental philosophy] and
between having a philosophy -- i.e., broad ideas that guide -- experimental
design.) This is little different than with any complicated project wanting
to have someone else give some overall feedback to make sure the effort
isn't stymied by, say, some fundamental inconsistency or even just plain
confusion. In many fields, too, there's a benefit to having someone
somewhat aloof from the team giving feedback. Doing this systematically --
i.e., having someone on the team itself -- is done on many projects. It's
kind of like having a high level QA [quality assurance], one starting
earlier in the project -- rather than spending much time, effort, and money
to figure out what happened and if anything went wrong.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/
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