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gokfar comments on 2012: Year in Review - Less Wrong
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Comments (34)
(Disclaimer: I am not very familiar with how Philosophy or Physics are usually taught.)
Physics students begin by studying Newtonian mechanics. Teaching has a form different from the original, but the mathematical formalisms remain. Philosophy students begin by studying Aristotelian logic (or whatever). If philosophy were taught without original work, would Luke's criticism not hold? Isn't that already largely the case?
Not that I disagree with the conclusion, but the argument can be turned around remarking that obsolete formalisms are useful toys in both disciplines.
Now I wonder if teaching NM is detrimental to Physics research...
Newtonian mechanics is not obsolete. It is just founded on assumptions that sometimes break down, but sometimes they don't break down. There's still plenty of stuff you can do with Newtonian mechanics, e.g. build bridges. And any future theory of physics is constrained by the fact that in certain limits it has to reduce to Newtonian mechanics, so it still serves to substantially control what future physics can look like.
This is not true of obsolete formalisms in philosophy, which might be founded on fundamental confusions about how words work or whatever.
Tangent to the discussion, this is interesting to me:
What is the reason for this? what limits?
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Egan%27s_law
Newtonian mechanics still correctly predicts the behavior of things that are big and slow, e.g. bowling balls. Therefore, in the limit as things become big and slow, any future theory of physics has to reduce to Newtonian mechanics.
Alternatively and more specifically, special relativity is constrained by the fact that it has to reduce to Newtonian mechanics in the limit as the speed of light tends to infinity, and quantum mechanics is constrained by the fact that it has to reduce to Newtonian mechanics in the limit as Planck's constant tends to zero. Physicists call this idea taking the classical limit.
Conceded, NM have applications beyond its use as a learning tool. But that should be considered relative to the discipline as whole.
The usefulness of ancient philosophy (very low) relative to modern philosophy (low) seems comparable to that of ancient physics (medium) to modern physics (high). The assessment I am least certain of here is that of modern philosophy.