I often view philosophy as complete rubbish. Mindless mental musing with no goal, direction, or pragmatic capacity.
However, upon expressing these views, I'm often immediately attacked with the claims that science cannot exist without philosophy. That we can know nothing without philosophy. The terms epistemology and solipsism are oft thrown around.
As someone who understands the power of the scientific method but knows little about "proper philosophy", I may be a tad biased and uninformed in my opinion. So I'd like to ask everyone on /sci/: What are your views on the field of philosophy?
Absolute bullshit for people that can't apply logic or thought to anything meaningful.
Le to be or not 2 be xDxDxD so quirky and liberal and smart
>>7733854
>science cannot exist without philosophy
I hate that fallacy. Basically this "argument" states "every act of thinking is philosophy". So then what is there to be pretentious about? You philosotards are seriously bragging about being able to think, i.e. something every child can do (better than you)?
>>7733854
No, but this is /sci/, where we believe that everything that is not science is stupid in order to make ourselves feel smarter.
If you have lurked for at least a day, you're either trolling, or asking here so people can confirm the opinion you already have.
well to me, philosophy is like a component to a grander scheme. it's about communication of various ideas, and by itself it is seen as a useless thing because as humans, we naturally have rational thinking skills. the problem with this idea is that, while we able to perform some tasks naturally such as walking, swimming, breathing and thinking, there have been individuals who have taken a path to refine the process for each of these skills, down to an art form or set of conditions.
philosophy has been about trying to refine one's approach to rational thinking, not to train you to think rationally. an extension of that has been a basis for things like empiricism or inductive/deductive reasoning propositions and their respective approaches, all coming from various ad absurdum tests of their opposing counterparts. statistics itself is built on various notions and fallacies that grew from various philosophical ideas touching on ergodics, games, and probability (although that delves into games.) you can't have one without the other because someone has to start off with an axiomatic framework which relies on some inkling of both mathematical and epistemic logic and the philosophical ramifications both entail.
>>7733881
>philosophy has been about trying to refine one's approach to rational thinking
No, that would be math.
>Basically this "argument" states "every act of thinking is philosophy"
No really. It states that every field's thinking occur within a certain scheme that cannot be justified by the field (circular argument) and often relies on premises that are taken to be of philosophical order.
Philosophy nowadays is in general a meta-theory of several disciplines.
>>7733890
math is the refinement of their applications to modelling various concepts in and outside of nature, be it geometry or quantification. they hinge on axioms that can't be broken further down while being consistent due to godel's incompleteness theorem.
>>7733925
Tell me, how does philosophy "justify" science.
Philosophy and science enable one another. Science handles society's rational aspects, while philosophy handles the less rational moral aspects. The scientist creates the nuke. The philosopher decides how it should be used.
The only problem I have with philosophy is that they give to much power to the human mind.
>>7733951
>Philosophy and science enable one another.
They are enemies.
>while philosophy handles the less rational moral aspects
Flinging shit about "muh opinion" and "muh feelings" is not exactly handling.
>>7733956
and you perusing a field as "flinging" isn't a valid counterclaim.
>>7733866
>Le to be or not 2 be
If you think a philosopher said this, I highly encourage you to reconsider living.
>>7733933
Defines and proves by means of logic the terms involved in science, argues why scientific claims are rightful claims and don't rest on a thinking logically flawed.
One could argue that there is no need to formalize scientific terms or its ways (Wittgenstein for example), while in general, philosophers of science (whom are most often scientists and philosophers) see it as simply sweeping the problem below the carpet.
>>7733956
>They are enemies.
Just for undergrads and pop scientists.
>>7733854
I'm feeling kind of braindead at the moment, but if you'll entertain my questions, you might begin to understand philosophy. I'll leave it to you to bridge, or compare it to science as you see fit.
What are some things you like?
What are some things you do?
What are some things you want?
What do you think will happen in the future?
What do you think should happen in the future?
As you answer, think about the underpinnings of those answers. Why they are your answers. Why you think it, and what ideas allow to form that belief or experience. What allows you to do, become, decide, or think, anything.
>>7733875
You're misunderstanding what they mean. The scientific method was born out of arguments for empiricism, which is in simple terms the epistemic claim that knowledge and truth come primarily (or solely, if you want to go more radical) from sensory experience, ie things that can be tested and observed. Saying that anyone who says anything is doing philosophy is more than a bit misleading, and they're definitely not doing formal philosophy, but science as we know it was very clearly developed in the greater context of a significant philosophical movement.
>>7733925
>Philosophy nowadays is in general a meta-theory of several disciplines
This pretty much. The time of significant philosophical discovery is for the most part pretty much over as most of the questions left are either unanswerable with its tools, irrelevant, or both. Still though, the reason it's not uncommon to see "philosophy of science/math/music/etc." is because the goal of philosophy has changed from trying to make those discoveries into formalizing notions of other fields.
Get fucked kid
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science/
>scientists themselves are quibbling whether string theory is science
>asks philosophers for help in sorting things out
Science itself is a philosophical construct. Many aspects of the scientific method are arbitrary boundaries designed to strike a balance between rigor and practicality.
Is there some fundamental law that says 5 sigma gives you ontological certainty? Is there some fundamental law that says once a paper has been peer reviewed by exactly 52 genius level scientist and no contradiction is found it becomes certified as fact?
>>7733854
Hello OP. Here are a few different ways to think about philosophy, and how the word is used today.
On the one hand, you can have a "general philosophy", or a "philosophy of life", and so on. In this sense, the word is usually just a synonym for what you, or some other entity, values or thinks is important, or how you propose to go through life. If you're a Christian, then your "philosophy of life" is probably going to be some flavor of the religion of Christianity. If a company publicly states its "core values", then these are simply principles which the leadership of the company communicates to the rest of its employees, and possibly to customers and other entities. In this sense, the company has an avowed "philosophy". If you are an edgy nihilist, then you might make statements along the lines of "nothing really matters", "nothing as intrinsic value", and so on, in which case you might have no "philosophy of life" at all, at least along the lines I've just suggested.
There's no getting around interacting with other humans, periodically. So human existence entails a certain social, or political aspect. A step up from the previous simple usage, is a "political philosophy". Once again, such can be held by individuals or groups of individuals, or abstract entities (political parties). An individual, perhaps based on personal temperament, family upbringing and life experience etc, develops a set of (again) values which give rise to a political outlook, an attitude for how society should operate. Notice this repetition of "should", "values", etc. We're still in simpler territory, but there is an /ethical/ component to these types of philosophy. Say you value "justice over mercy", then perhaps you would prefer society which is tough on crime, and support political candidates who match same. Or, maybe you've arrived at a simple statement like "We must get to Mars no matter what." (or its opposite). Each of these implies a political philosophy.
>>7734018
So those are two babby versions of what "philosophy" is. But they crop up often enough in daily life that we don't give much thought to them as "philosophies". Instead, when we read Hume, or Marx, or some indecipherable gibberish from Judith Butler etc, this is what is usually thought of as "philosophy". This is where you can have "autism" comparable with pure math. And this is a third type which you seem to dislike.
You could call this third type "academic philosophy", which is what people usually mean when they just say the word "philosophy" in an academic context (and not in private conversation, or in a business meeting etc, to my above points). Basically, any area of human history, knowledge etc can and usually does have a branch of philosophy associated with it:
Ethics: How should people behave toward one another, and in general? (the keyword is "should")
Political Philosophy: how should societies of humans be organized and managed?
Epistimology: (the philosophy of knowledge): What can we know? Are there certain things we can't know?
Aesthetics (Beauty): What is beauty? What makes something beautiful?
Logic (truth vs falsehood, language): When is a statement true/false?
Theology: religion.
Metaphysics: this is the really goofy one, and I myself can't give it a clear definition/flavor at the moment. Kant is a heavy hitter here, maybe Hegel, dunno. I think the tendency is to espouse a conception of the world which isn't political as-such, come up with (speculate?) certain phenomena/strange cases, and then autism the hell out of these in some exegesis. May or may not be closely related to theology.
It's because philosophy can be turned toward basically anything that humans can think about (including the above squishy categories), that it tends either to be taken for granted, or dismissed as wankery.
>>7733965
Shut the fuck up you moron. Are you saying the to be or not to be soliloquy was not philosophical at all? Retarded virgins shouldn't be allowed to post, filthy degenerates with their smart ass comments.
>>7734056
But if anyone should actually read these, this is what I'd like the reader (and possibly OP) to take away: there is also a philosophy of science. And like the above (sometimes un-scientific) categories of (academic) philosophy, there is usually a general thrust to come up with a comprehensive theory (not necessarily in the scientific sense, though having RL data is generally helpful to advancing any rhetoric), no matter what branch of philosophy you're talking about If someone has been thinking about something for long enough, they're going to want to communicate it to others. In this subset of activity (ac.philosophy), that usually entails writing book-length works (published or shitposted online :^) concerning whatever it is you've been thinking about.
The earlier, simpler senses of philosophy are basically simple articulations of human motivation, which get more abstract and autistic the higher up you go (into the academic stuff). If you are a scientist and you want grant money for a project (put a man on mars), you are going to have to convince somebody that your thing is interesting, or worth doing (because xyz are important, I hope you'll agree with me). This implicates a "philosophy", even though you might not refer to it or think of it as such, during your proposal. Whatever you think is right, good, beautiful, worthwhile, true, factually correct, and can be explained briefly or at length by you... these categories, (sometimes squishy, not always) whatever you think of them, will comprise your personal philosophy.
In other words, you didn't just wake up and decide to go to Mars FOR SCIENCE!!1. You went through a process of growing up, seeing space exploration on TV, getting educated. You developed a complex value system and way of thinking which gave rise to you making a grant proposal to put a man on mars, because you think it's important. Philosophy, in its simpler senses, is articulation of human motivation, but also has autistic offshoots.
>>7733854
There is one other thing involved here OP, and this >>7733965 >>7734076 exchange sums it up pretty well. It has to do with culture, and social class.
Basically, among the middle-class and up, especially upper-middle class, elites etc, it is CULTURALLY ACCEPTABLE to be completely ignorant of large chunks of science.
And, at the same time, it is CULTURALLY UNACCEPTABLE to be completely ignorant of certain key chunks of what I will clumsily refer to as "humanities culture".
I have a theory on why this is so. It's much easier for pretty much anyone who /can/ read, to pick up a book-length work in their language, read it, and form some sort of opinion. The opinion might be totally off-base or not have a good understand of who the author was (which is always helpful), but it can still be formed. You can actually read the Communist Manifesto or selections from The Bible without any trouble, learn the details of the argument, and be conversant. Shakespeare is more specialized, but it can be learned. And you had better damn well at least know that there was an old playwright from a few hundred years ago named Shakespeare who wrote a bunch of plays and had a big influence on language.
If you're a Fields Medal winning mathematician fluent in English, and you're at a dinner party somewhere in the English-speaking world and someone mentions Shakespeare, if you say "who?", someone somewhere is going to be mortified.
But if you start cold talking about Euler or Gauss, even in a light-chit-chat non-autistic kind of way (if possible), and nobody knows who the hell you're talking about, this is acceptable. Why? Because, I suspect, because of what I've written above.
>>7733881
This guy is right-on. Popper was a philosopher, not a scientist, but he basically revolutionized the way that we approach science and how experiments work.
Philosophy is like mayonnaise. It works well in conjunction with other stuff, but it's not worth using it by itself.
>>7734076
Nice response. Clearly I've struck a chord. I'll spell it out a little bit more clearly so that perhaps you can understand it: Shakespeare was a literary figure, not a philosopher. Are we on the same page now?
>>7734154
Pretty much every philosopher of science is a scientist, or has some scientific background. People need to know science and philosophy before doing philosophy of science.
>>7733854
The only philosophy that matters is empiricism. All other philosophy boils down to can't prove muffin. Empiricism states that only things you percieve to be true cna be taken as true. Fite me faggots
>>7734273
I fited you lul xxxxxddd :)
>>7734248
You aren't a scientist unless you do science. Karl Popper never did science.
>>7733854
I could not help but notice your png was not optimized anon.
I have optimized your png.
Your png is now optimized.
>>7733854
You ever be with a group of people watching a tv show/movie and there's a subtle joke that everybody understood; except there's one person who just barely gets it and feels like explaining it to everybody else? That's like philosophy majors to me. Everybody in science fields understands basic logic without a problem. But philosophy majors are so proud that they grasped the concept that they turned their basic understanding into an entire field. It's kinda sad really. It's like watching somebody major in arithmetic.
Also on a different note, has there ever been a problem solved definitively with philosophy? or has every single question posed simply been boiled down to "well it depends on how you define that word"?
>>7734587
There isn't a respectable philosopher that has ever said that philosophy is meant to solve problems. What philosophy tends to do is narrow down the field of potential questions to asks oneself on whatever topic you're contemplating. Believe it or not, the method used to narrow down this field is logic.
Also, what you said can be applied to any major.
>>7734459
uldlnd elp but s se urpgn was nt optsmat an.
I af opesimt ur pgn.
Uyrs pnga si now opstmit
>>7734587
Refer to:
>>7733978
Philosophy is largely your guide, regardless of what you decide to call it. Your logical framework(s) either are, are based on, or give rise to philosophical concepts. Philosophy is a consequence of your attempts to understand your world, yourself, and what things are. Whether in an objective sense, or relative to you.
Worth noting is philosophers, both eastern and western, had the basic idea of particles figured out and even somewhat formalized before science was even a thing.
Though I agree with:
>>7733982
The human mind is finite, as is the number of unique contexts we can come in contact with, and experiences we can have. I think a lot of the base work, and higher structural aspects are more or less... thought of. Which is why everything can be readily shoveled into some ism or ist without incurring error that's too significant, but doing so is probably negative. I have little interest in philosophy as a field. It's more personal, to me.
My own attempts to figure out what things "are", and why, hit a wall at the question of if the means for the universe to be what it is, is or is not self contained. If it isn't, the universe is driven by some sort of "external" machinery the nature of which we can't even guess at and might not even be able to understand. If it is, there are a number of ways it can do so, and I'm apt to think this leans towards probabilistic behavior not actually being the case. And I'll probably never know. As others have said, science and philosophy have a great deal of overlap.
Feynman said it quite well in a number of his lectures. When asked if he thought space was quantized, he said it might be, and it might not be. That people have tried to work out a viable model in various ways, and it ultimately turned into a hole that they gradually dug themselves into. Becoming hung up on investigating a specific idea about the nature of something can inhibit your endeavors.
>>7734611
teawye ayynouwn!
However I could not help but notice your png was not optimized ayynouwn.
I have optimized your png.
Your png is now optimized.
>>7733854
No It's not. Science is based on philosophical principles. The scientific method is a philosophical invention.
>hurr durr, we do it cause it works
If you truly believe this is a legitimate criticism to philosophy, you need to go back and sit at the kids table.
>>7733854
Doesn't have to be, some faggots just get too caught up in it, and end up being depressing fucks, or fucks who ask stupid questions because muh philosophy.
