poke comments on Where Philosophy Meets Science - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 April 2008 09:21PM

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Comment author: poke 13 April 2008 07:01:42PM 2 points [-]

It's an error to call "vague verbal arguments" philosophy. Vague verbal arguments are just that whereas philosophy is a clearly delineated academic discipline (it's actually easier to file works of philosophy on a single shelf than scientific treatise; even a modern work of philosophy is at most one or two degrees of separation from Aristotle whereas a modern physics paper is many citations removed from Galileo). We can make vague verbal arguments without doing philosophy or committing ourselves to answer to the philosophers' objections.

It's an historical error to suggest Galileo was following even a vague verbal argument though. Galileo began within the Aristotelian tradition (not as a philosopher; Aristotle was used by practically-oriented people working on mechanical problems at that time) and came to reject it completely through the process of getting his mechanics to work. Galileo was famously not a systematist and was derided then (and now) as a terrible philosopher. He hated the philosophers in turn. See Drake's Galileo at Work for a comprehensive overview of Galileo's development as a scientist.

So no, I don't think philosophy is important, even within science. What scientists do is chat informally about things, have insights, think up experiments and solve problems. This is not philosophy; it's just people exercising their mental faculties. It's no more philosophy than cooking or carpentry is philosophy. I've worked in a lab and I've studied philosophy and there's no overlap in style or method. It would be precisely as accurate to describe the "vague verbal arguments" of scientists as theology as it would philosophy.