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[LINK] Why Talk to Philosophers: Physicist Sean Carroll Discusses "Common Misunderstandings" about Philosophy
Why Talk to Philosophers? Part I. by philosopher of science Wayne Myrvold.
See also Sean Carroll's own blog entry, Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy.
Sean classifies the disparaging comments physicists make about philosophy as follows: "Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing". Specifically:
- “Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”
- “Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.”
- “Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”
He counters each argument presented.
Personally, I am underwhelmed, since he does not address the point of view that philosophy is great at asking interesting questions but lousy at answering them. Typically, an interesting answer to a philosophical question requires first recasting it in a falsifiable form, so that is becomes a natural science question, be it physics, cognitive sciences, AI research or something else. This is locally known as hacking away at the edges. Philosophical questions don't have philosophical answers.
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Comments (59)
I feel like this is just making the negative case that some physicists are being unfair to some philosophers. I still want to see the positive case that people with the job title of "philosopher" are worth consulting about difficult philosophical issues. I think this case can be made, but with more difficulty and ambiguity.
There are philosophers who are unambiguously making useful contributions, but I worry that there are philosophers who seem good to consult, but merely happen to hold smart-sounding positions on the things you checked by something like chance - it's bound to happen, given the number of philosophers who happen to hold dumb-sounding positions by something like chance.
As a philosopher, I must admit that there is some truth to this claim. There is, unfortunately, no established philosophical methodology that is reliably truth-producing. Thus, the competence of the practitioner becomes far more relevant than it is in science. In science, mediocre practitioners may not be relied upon to produce ground-breaking results, but they can at least be relied upon to produce results that are more likely true than not (if they are at least competent enough to follow the conventions of the discipline). This is because a significant amount of the cognitive labor involved in producing truth is codified in the scientific method, which every practitioner can be trained to follow. Philosophy has developed no such innovation.
In so far as there is "philosophical methodology", its advantage is not so much that it helps get at the truth but that it helps explore logical space and clarify the structure of concepts and the relationships between them. So I think it might be worthwhile to consult philosophers in general for this purpose -- not to try and figure out the answer to some philosophical question, but to get a richer sense of the conceptual terrain associated with the question.
If you're going to consult a philosopher in order to get an idea of the correct answer to the question, however, then you need to proceed on the basis of trust in the particular philosopher, not philosophy in general. It might make sense to say, "I'll ask Dennett what he thinks about this because he says reliably insightful things about the mind and cognition", but unfortunately it does not make as much sense to say "I'll ask Dennett what he thinks about this because he's a philosopher working on this sort of question." Not if the purpose is to get an answer and not merely a richer understanding of the question.
Um... you do realize that PHILOSOPHERS developed the scientific method, right? That was not something scientists just came up with on their own. So, when you say that philosophy has developed no such innovation, you miss two things.
First, philosophy did come up with that exact innovation, for science.
Second, scientists have not come up with any such innovation, for themselves or others.
Who better than a philosopher to ask about philosophical questions?
Suppose we can draw a random person from a profession to answer our question. If you want to know "what is probability?" you'd probably have better luck with statisticians than with philosophers. If you want to know "what is free will?" you should decide to talk to someone who's involved in computer chess. If you want to know "why is the universe the way it is?" the best version of "I don't know, and maybe anthropics" you'll get is from a physicist. If you want to know "what is good in life?" it's better to talk to an experimental psychologist.
Not just because these people have domain knowledge that's relevant to the philosophical question - also because they might actually be better at doing this bit of philosophy than a similarly-sampled philosopher.
Oh, boy X-D
And why an experimental psychologist is an expert on what is good in life?
Because he lives in the real universe where "good in life" is a fact about people rather than about the Awesomon, the fundamental particle of goodness.
The correct term is Moron, the fundamental particle of morality. Ronald Dworkin's straw man of a straw man. Well, I liked it.
Well, suppose someone went out and asked a bunch of old people what they had done that they loved, and what they wished they'd changed. What journal would they publish their findings in?
And again, it's not just that knowing more about what people love and regret is useful, or that going out and doing science requires solving relevant harder-to-communicate issues - it's also that being interested enough to ask the question is a good sign. A person who actually goes out and collects data is someone who is trying to learn new things, push the boundaries of human knowledge. It makes me willing to bet on the average experimental psychologist over the average philosopher who's interested in well-being.
Ok. Lookslike "philosophers have no domain knowledge of anything" is another myth.
In all your specific examples, I amnot so much going to The answer, or even a good answer, but the answer someone is capable of comimg up with given their bacground.Your chess programmer might tell me that I have feeling of FW because I can't predict my own actions., and I might reply that I am talking about an ability,not a feeling.
Understanding the question is difficult.
In which case the people to talk to are the physicist and the biologist who will tell you that they aren't sure what ability you are talking about but that there's nothing approximating it that's consistent with how we know how humans empirically work.
Understanding when the question is ill-posed or is due to bad human intuitions is what is difficult here. Some philosophers recognize this. Others? Not so much.
Why shouldn't I talk to the philosopher, who does know what I am talking about?
Is that a fact?
No. It isn't.
I trained as a physicist before becoming interested in philosophy. I think you can approximate FW using physics. So I am already a cointerexample.
But that's only part of the problem. You think it's OK to have an opinion on questions you don't really understand, and that your imaginary physicist would think it is too. Many real physicists would refuse yourge answer, and the rest would give the kind of bad answer your imaginary physicist would give...bad because it is premature and not based on understanding the question. Bad rationality because good rationalits don't need the comfort factor of a meaningless, catechistic answer to a question they never understood.
Philosophy is only doing badly in a meaningful sense if someone else is doing better AT THE SAME PROBLEMS.
All LWs critics of philosophy are able to do is substitute worse philosophy...
Some philosophers don't recognise ill posed questions...some non philosophers don't either. What does that, In the absence of an qualitative data, add up to?
I'm not completely sure what your question is here, but it sounds like it may be begging.
Yes. There's no indication in the laws of physics or of biology of anything that resembles a genuine choice. If you think otherwise, show it.
I'm not sure what you think you are being a counterexample to here. No one has claimed that no one studying physics hasn't gotten some ideas in this regard. Heck, Roger Penrose, whose opinions I should take far more seriously than yours (or almost anyone on LW) has similar ideas. The question isn't "is there a minority who have studied physics and think there's room for free-will" but what the facts actually support. It isn't tough to find minority views of all sorts that aren't terribly justified- Jonathan Sarfati is an accomplished chemist and a staunch young earth creationist for example. One needs a lot more than simply saying "I've studied this and I disagree" (and frankly- given your posts here I've seen no indication that you have any substantial physics background at all).
Again, apparently begging the question. You claim that people here don't understand the questions. Arguing that a set of questions is ill-formed or has simple answers is not by itself a sign one doesn't understand the question.
I don't know what you mean by "refuse" an answer- and I fail to see why you think these are answers that would be given by an "imaginary physicist"- but it may be that you are actually falling into the common failure mode of a lot of bad philosophy where you think having a minority view of something makes it a genuine case in controversy. The rest of your paragraph is simply repeating what you've already claimed.
This does not follow. At best, this is a possible metric. And when there's a large number of people who are at work at something, noting that they are doing badly at what they are trying is highly relevant. But it is worth noting that many major aspects of what LW's approach are ideas supported by major, prominent philosophers, like Quine. And in fact, if one looks at actual data for what professional philosophers think, many attitudes of LW are decidedly mainstream. To a large extent, the problem isn't that philosophers haven't gotten the right answers, it is that many of them then spend inordinate amounts of time on the bad ones.
I'm not sure what you mean here, and suspect you may mean quantitative data. In that case, I suggest looking at the link I gave earlier which is a systematic survey of what professional philosophers believe.
Being blunt, I'm one of the people who more frequently than not is arguing that people on LW should read more philosophy and that there are substantial aspects of it that matter. But that doesn't change that philosophy as practiced today has deep-seated problems. And moreover, simply repeatedly asserting that professional philosophy is somehow in good shape is just like asserting that you believe in free-will, you may or may not have a choice about doing that, but either way, it isn't productive.
In the sense of "why shouldn't I take my toothache to the dentist"
It is a fact that naturalistic libertarianism has been advanced Robert Kane , Tony Dore and others.
I would invite you to reflect on 3 things:
Why you think your own opinions are a bether approximation to facticity than a survey of expert opinion.
What you mean by Genuine Choice.
And...whether you are looking for Genuine Choice only in fundamental laws, or allowing it to be a mechanism allowed by, but not necessitated, by fundamental laws.
Naturalistic libertarianism is a genuine case, because it is backed by some professional philosophers. That may not be good enou.gh for you , but it is good enough for Wikipedia.
You are arguing as though scientists are the only relevant authorities, and as though thethe vast majority of them agree with you...as though you are on the evolution side of an evolution vs creation debate.
But you are not. You have presented no evidence for such a majority, nor does it exist.
Ie, the ones you don't like. But maybe the professionals are better able to judge what is good or bad.
That's the default hypothesis. The burden is in you.
Unsupported opinion. Provide evidence that someone else can do better.
I didn't assert that I believe in it. I asserted that I can see a way in which it could work that is compatible with physics. It is an empirically confirmable ,model, and I would only be glad if someone with access to a laboratory were to confirm or falsify it.
If I replaced dentist with back pain and chiropractor, or any disease and homeopath, would that logic work? What about a problem with the state of your soul and a priest? Taking apparent subject matter experts as genuine experts as a default is fraught with peril. That's before we deal with how that's worse in disciplines which lack easy metrics that they are succeeding.
That doesn't respond substantially to the point other than to say "hey, someone disagrees with you". But let's look at Robert Kane's ideas briefly. I'm curious if you've read Dennett or Clarke's criticism of Kane. From my standpoint, Kane is an excellent example of how often philosophers fail to pay attention to modern science, such as psychology. In this case, Kane's ideas are a variant of the two stage model of free will, where one first generates possibilities and then selects among them. But we know this isn't how humans make decisions- in fact, part of the Sequences summarizes one of the major problems with that. But this isn't terribly interesting by itself- the mere presence of individuals who think that they have found a solution to something isn't a strong reason to think they have.
I do not a priori think so- note that I'm the one who mentioned a survey of actual philosophers and how that showed that much of what LW thinks is in fact mainstream. About 70% of the philosophers surveyed are atheists, about 90% reject libertarian free will, and about three quarters are scientific realists. Heck, given how few accept any notion of libertarian free will, it might make more sense to ask the question to you. The questions where LW has developed opinions that are counter to common philosophical viewpoints are largely questions where there isn't any strong consensus- such as Newcomb's problem. However, if one looks at rather philosophers within their area of expertise things look different for some divisions- strikingly, the same survey shows that although most philosophers are atheists, 70% of philosophers of religion are theists! So any fully general argument for trusting experts needs to explain why one would be ok with trusting all philosophers as a group but only some of the subject matter experts.
I didn't capitalize that for a reason- it was a comment in the context of my earlier statement where I was talking about approximations of free will. As far as I can tell, most versions of it are either obviously false, or are intuitively appealing but logically incoherent.
I'm not sure what you mean by "good enough for Wikipedia"- but I think you may want to look at the project's criteria for inclusion- correctness is not what matters- Verifiability is what matters. Theism is also backed by some professional philosophers, and that includes a majority of phil religion people. Should I pay attention to theism?
On the contrary, philosophers are highly relevant. I've already mentioned Putnam and Quine. The best philosophy is done not by scientists, but by philosophers who pay attention to science. One doesn't need to be a neurologist to know that classical libertarianism fails for example, and one doesn't need to be a GR subject matter expert to know that it raises serious issues for many versions of A-time. This shouldn't be surprising- the best work in almost any field is informed by work in other fields. Philosophy is not an exception.
But it is worth noting that regarding your other claim- I don't need a consensus of physicists to make an argument about what physics implies in another field, and I especially don't need it when the central problem is that many in the other field are simply ignoring physics wholesale when discussing these issues. It isn't the job of physicists to think about free will. It is the job of philosophers to think about it, and part of that job is to actually pay attention to what implications physics has for free will.
You've been around LW long enough that I suspect you are familiar with a lot of the prior discussion here, such as this. I'd also point to Peter Unger's recent book. But I think the earlier cited 70% figure for theism should be sufficient. That 70% of a major discipline consistently get such a basic question wrong and the rest of the philosophers are taking them even remotely seriously as a discipline shows a major part of the problem.
I already commented that "someone can do better than X" and "X is doing badly" are not the same thing, and you apparently ignored it. If you don't get that imagine someone saying "People working on cold fusion are doing a terrible job getting cold fusion to work" and someone relies saying "Yeah but show me someone who is doing better!" And again, there are professional philosophers doing good work, the trouble is that so many are doing bad work and are focusing on things which we know are just wrong. But if you want an example of good philosophy that's being done outside professional, academic philosophy, I'd be happy to point to the recent paper by Eliezer et. al. on modal agents and the prisoner's dilemma. See here. That paper, a careful mix of philosophy, decision theory, game theory and proof theory is what good philosophy looks like. It is the sort of thing one expects from people like Kripke, Quine and Lakatos, all of whom were mainstream philosophers.
I'm curious what your model is and how you intend to test it given the resources.
You have no evidence that philosophers are frauds. It's all (uninformed) opinion.
If you have put forward the fact that you, uninformed, can't see how it works as amounting to the fact that it cannot work, then the existence of Kanes work is significant....because, whilst his theory may just .be opinion, so therefore is yours.
Please expand
Please provide examples
But you made no attempt to steelman the contrary view by surveying the literature to find the best arguments for it. If you had, you would have heard of Kane.
Basically, you are making the Argument from Personal Incomprehension so notorious in Creationism
The creationists problem is that they are treating uninformed subjective grockage as the epistemic last word and it isn't...not for them, not for you.
What I have been saying us that none knows more about philosophy. I certainly didn't mean trust them to come up a definitive answer to everything.
You can't claim to know theism is false unless you can refute the best arguments for it. Where do you go for those? (Do you think of theists as some sort of Bad people that no one should associate with in case it's inferiors
What do you mean by classical libertarianism?
No different in content to the percent discussion
My epistemology is that ideas are true, when they are true for reason, and in offer to find out whether p or not p is true, you look at the best arguments on both sides. Therefore , you need arguments on both sides. Like a trial where the prosecution and defence put forward their best cases, even though one of them must be wrong.
You epistemology seems to be that there is a list of things that are Wrong for no Particular Reason, and that none should argue for thing that are Wrong...and that "knowing" what is right .or wrong is a a matterof reading them of the Lists.
You metaphysics may be the opposite of theism, but your epistemology is identical.
Not philosophy. Filed under .CS.
Counterexample: his theory of metaethics...the one no one understands.
The Less Wrong open thread? :)
Seriously? :-)
Maybe it's because he wanted to address misconceptions?
You seem to be assuming that a "philosophical answer" is fundamentally different in form from an answer in physics, cognitive science or AI research. But, as Carroll says in his post, "at its best, the practice of philosophy of physics is continuous with the practice of physics itself". There is no sharp distinction between the ways in which physicists and philosophers of physics approach foundational questions in physics. As an example, Carroll's recent paper on self-locating belief and MWI is based on ideas that are heavily pre-figured in the philosophical literature.
Many philosophers, especially philosophers of science, are currently engaged in precisely the sort of "hacking away at the edges" problem-solving you endorse. Perhaps you don't see this as a distinctively "philosophical" mode of problem-solving, but that's a semantic quibble. The fact is that plenty of people who self-identify as philosophers are engaged in it, and that is a reason to talk to certain people who self-identify as philosophers.
I am extremely skeptical about this topic, actually, because there is no way to test it out as I can see, without twisting the definition of testing beyond recognition. Carroll is all like "we derive the Born rule from these reasonable assumptions, therefore MWI", and "it's not an interpretation, it's a formulation", but until he can convince Bohmians or QBists that they are wrong and he is right, I will remain unimpressed.
Absolutely, I don't care how it is called, as long as it is done. I would appreciate a few links to papers which do that, just to understand what you are talking about.
Most of Dan Dennett's work adopts the methodology you endorse, and as a bonus, it is usually very readable. A good example is the pair of papers, True Believers and Real Patterns.
Since you're a GR guy, you may enjoy the work of David Malament and John Earman, both of whom have written a lot of interesting stuff on foundational issues in GR. Try this paper by Malament. The first two sections are basically just survey, but in the third section he presents some of his original work, with references to papers where he discusses the issues in more detail.
Huw Price (one of the founders of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge) has done a lot of cool work on time, among other topics. Examples: this paper and this paper.
Philip Pettit is a political philosopher who uses social choice theory to address philosophical questions (in the tradition of Rawls, whose Theory of Justice is an excellent example of hacking at the edges). Many of his papers are worth reading. Here's an example.
Christopher Hitchcock does good work on causation. Here's an interesting paper he co-wrote with Joshua Knobe on how our judgments about causation are tied up with normative notions.
Thank you for giving links to papers.
You can't test interpretations. That's why they're called interpretations. It's not that anyone is rejecting empiricism, it is that empirical tests aren't available just because you want them to be.
I don't have a problem with philosophers doing philosophy of science when they bother to do it right. I've had a number of conversations with philosophers who utterly mangle the science. Usually, this has to do with quantum mechanics, but sometimes it has to do with relativity. Sometimes it has to do with combining the two.
Which philosophers do "philosophy of science" right?
Some names come to mind: Ernest Nagel, Ian Hacking, Peter Galison, Alex Rosenberg, Samir Okasha, Tim Maudlin, David Albert, David Wallace, Massimo Pigliucci.
Actually, I haven't really encountered famous but shoddy philosophers of science. The reputed people seem to understand the problems they're thinking about very deeply, have deep domain knowledge and also write very clearly.
As a side note, I highly recommend Samir Okasha's A Very Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. For philosophy of physics, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics has a great selection of topics.
I have a chapter in that handbook! Won't say which one, though.
I have to admit I wasn't very impressed by A Very Short Introduction. The author used "façon-de-parler" when they could have used "figure of speech." They didn't mention or use probabilistic reasoning at any point, except to point out how mysterious (wiggles fingers) probabilities are. And they closed a section on the debate between Newton and Leibniz over whether absolute motion exists with the phrase "the controversy rages on."
Thanks, will check out the last link.
Wayne Myrvold is a good example. Others: Huw Price, John Earman, Philip Kitcher, Christopher Hitchcock, David Wallace, David Albert, Clark Glymour.
Tim Maudlin, R.J. Deltete, Robin Collins , John Earman
Philosophy surely is not useless, but some of their arguments just do not make sense to me.
My experience is that philosophers often carelessly use words to avoid conveying a clear statement, that could be refutable.
To me, there seems to be a huge difference between "boring" scientific questions and "grandiose-sounding Why?-questions that ..] have no real answers" what Yudkowsky calls [wrong questions, e.g. "Why is there anything instead of nothing?" where it remains very unclear how an answer to that problem would look like.
As Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish state in The Western Intellectual Tradition, "our confidence in any science is roughly proportional to the amount of mathematics it employs - that is, to its ability to formulate its concepts with enough precision to allow them to be handled mathematically." In my experience, some philsophers sometimes confuse precision with difficult to read sentences, use of latin words etc. If they knew mathematics (or other formalisms) better, they'd probably produce less material that is of no use (in other scientific disciplines) due to lack of precision.
How do they expect an answer to the question of how the world really works to look like? More specifically, what would stop one from responding to any answer with: Yeah, but ... how does the world really, actually work?
If they do it with the purposes of not making a statement that's open to certain refutations I don't see how that's careless.
Oops... ;-)
pg 144 of Jaynes's PTTLOS: "Philosophers are free to do whatever they please, because they don't have to do anything right".
So your argument is philosophy doesn't provide real contributions and your criterion for a "real contribution" is falsifiability. You do realize that the person who identified falsifiability as the demarcation between science and non-science was Karl Popper - a philosopher, right? The sheer aggressive intellectual ignorance of this post amazes me.
Philosophers are good at posing and understanding questions, which is non trivial.
The typical failure mode of scientists doing philosophy is getting the question wrong. Show me a non philosopher who has "answered" a philosophical question, and I will show you one who has misunderstood it..
Physics isn't just done for pragmatic reasons. People look to science fir insight into free will, more Ity, consciousness and the origins of the universe. Philosophy can play a role in connecting the popular question to the scientists answers.