THE STATES OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
(very important ideas in here for serious philosophy students)
If we define ‘science’ as ‘the invention of instruments by which we produce measurements, with which to reduce the imperceptible and incomparable to the perceptible and comparable, such that it is accessible to reason’ and that ‘the scientific method’ is the process by which we do that, then ‘science’ succeeds in applied science, (chemistry, biology, engineering, programming, mathematics) and is stalled in physics, and has been an utter failure in the social pseudo-sciences, and was an utter failure in ( the pseudoscience of ) psychology – although, in the past two decades, thanks to advances in imaging, have attempted to rectify psychology to some degree.
So the problem is better stated as “science does well in the use of instruments’ and not so well in the use of reason.
Philosophy has faced a worse decline than science, if for the simple reason that separating truth, goodness, preference, utility, and possibility in the discipline of philosophy in the same way that physics, chemistry, biology, and cognitive science has been separated in the sciences, has been almost impossible.
Worse, the continental tradition continues to practice Abrahamic (religious) invention of conflating both point of view (experience, intention, action, observation) as well as the utility (true, good, preferable, useful, and possible), and even worse, the existential dimensions (real, hyperbolic, ideal-platonic, and supernatural-impossible). So the entire continental program is engaged in secular theology and nothing more.
Worse, despite the (wasted century) culminating in Frege/Kripke, and the knowledge that set operations cannot result in meaningful truth propositions and that ‘all logic is but a test of tautology’ the discipline of philosophy still relies on language and set membership rather than operations and existential possibility (and if necessary, external correspondence).
Worse, philosophy continues (to talk nonsense) to practice the long tradition of ignoring costs, or full accounting. And while, via negativa, this made sense in the ancient world, where all virtues require little more than refraining from imposing costs upon others – in the modern world, where we can use the vote as a proxy for violence by which to impose costs upon others, this is far less “honest and truthful” a tactic -and instead, is a means of self, and other-deception.
If your discipline cannot fully account for all dimensions of reality in its propositions ABOUT reality. Particularly in the Possible, GOOD and the TRUE, then the entire purpose of the discipline is nothing more than evading reality (religion) and a means by which to produce falsehoods for the purpose of justifying parasitism on the left, and predation on the right.
I am one of the harshest anti-philosophy philosophers, precisely because I do not practice ‘cherry picking’ of what I account for, nor do I tolerate conflations in any of the common dimensions.
The excuse that philosophy is philosophizing is about as honest as religion’s claims – including the entirely falsifiable claim that philosophy ‘does good’.
Either philosophy is the means by which we develop methods of decidability in possibility, utility, preference, good, and true, where the ‘true’ is that which is decidable independent of goodness, preference, utility, and possibility, or it is, like religion, a method by which – at best – dilettantes produce witticisms with which to deceive honest and moral people, and – at worst – the means by which the crimes of marketers, frauds, priests, academics, politicians, prey upon others for fun and profit.
So, I don’t see much serious philosophy going on in this world outside of a few individuals who work in the sciences. What I see instead, is a vast number of dilettantes virtue signalling their cunning, while advocating their preferred version of self-rewarding immorality over that preferred vision of self-rewarding immorality of others.
And that’s probably the most accurate description of philosophy today you will find.
Source date (UTC): 2017-06-17 18:34:00 UTC