An Article on Philosophy written by a non-Philosopher.


BaalChatzaf

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I found this article on philosophy as viewed by a scientist very fair minded and rather insightful.

Please see:

http://philosophynow.org/issues/46/Newtons_Flaming_Laser_Sword

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Interesting article and not just by the fact it was written by a math guy.

Being neither a math guy or a philosopher , I think I understand where he sees a divide. I'm just not sure if there really is one. I share his disdain of thinkers who try and find truth, correspondence with reality, by way of stolen concepts and floating abstractions. I think I understand what he means by newtonians and reliance on hard reality, but when he speaks of pure thought it seems he forgets what may be the hard reality behind that thinking. Correspondence can be found through pure thought as long as logic ties it to reality. It's not so much either or as much as the proper mix of both and as long as both are of hard reality.

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We have a Sunday night study group here. In the past, we have read ITOE and Logical Leap. Right now we are working our way through Peikoff's summary, Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Just because some people who claim to be philosophers are inept does not condemn the entire study.

Moreover, Alder is wrong about what an "axiom" was to the ancients and what it is to a modern philosopher. Literally, to the Greeks of 300 BCE, an axiom was only "a common notion." It was not more technical than that. True, axioms were the foundation, that below which no other truths did or could lie. But, again, as Platonists, they believed that we all perceive these common notions.

Axioms were regarded as ‘self-evident truths’, dredged by pure thought from reality, and the philosophers didn’t believe the axioms could be other than they were.

It is true that metaphysical facts cannot be other than what they are.

A more conservative man might have concluded that there were mathematical truths which could be derived from just about any set of rules, and observational truths about reality, and that the two were not in general the same.

He falls into the error of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. But then, he did endorse Popperian positivism. While that can have a defensible assertion, the negative of it is clearly absurd. I mean that just because "pure logic can prove anything" does not mean that we expect to discover empirical facts that are supported by bad logic, illogic, or no logic.

I also deny that "you can prove anything with logic if you start from the premises you want." It is not logic if an argument follows from false assumptions, or proceeds by contradictions. The famous and trivial proof that 1=0 (by dividing by zero) should be an easy buoy marker in the channels of scientific investigation.

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All of modern science (physics, chemistry, biology and even geology) emerges from the "analytic-synthetic dichotomy". Every last bit of it. The philosophical failure of modern science in its squalor and misery has produced every last bit of technology you enjoy, including using MSK's Forum.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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No, Ba'al, that is not true. Objectivism offers a fundamental explanation of truth that clears away subjectivist misconceptions like that. As you know, before Newton, the best explanations for motion - especially against gravity, as for projectiles - was "impetus." Now, a simple disproof of impetus theory is that by that model, when you shoot an arrow, it would go along its path until it ran out of impetus and it would just fall straight down. A counter-argument is that impetus is gradually used up. How that happens is not clear, but furthermore does not explain the motions of planets. So, that theory was - to use a harsh word - wrong. But people studied it, claimed to understand it, and based on their knowledge, they built projectile weapons and all manner of moving machines, including those wonderful clocks in towers that hallmark the high middle ages. Those all worked, not because of impetus theory, but because they conformed to objective reality.

So, too, a modern industrial chemist could ponder Ernst Mach or even Paul Feyerabend on the philosophy of science, but to be science, her work would have to follow an implicit Objectivism, i.e, the scientific method of rational-empiricism.

That little hyphen is important: it ties rationalism to empiricism. No dichotomy exists.

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No, Ba'al, that is not true. Objectivism offers a fundamental explanation of truth that clears away subjectivist misconceptions like that. As you know, before Newton, the best explanations for motion - especially against gravity, as for projectiles - was "impetus." Now, a simple disproof of impetus theory is that by that model, when you shoot an arrow, it would go along its path until it ran out of impetus and it would just fall straight down. A counter-argument is that impetus is gradually used up. How that happens is not clear, but furthermore does not explain the motions of planets. So, that theory was - to use a harsh word - wrong. But people studied it, claimed to understand it, and based on their knowledge, they built projectile weapons and all manner of moving machines, including those wonderful clocks in towers that hallmark the high middle ages. Those all worked, not because of impetus theory, but because they conformed to objective reality.

So, too, a modern industrial chemist could ponder Ernst Mach or even Paul Feyerabend on the philosophy of science, but to be science, her work would have to follow an implicit Objectivism, i.e, the scientific method of rational-empiricism.

That little hyphen is important: it ties rationalism to empiricism. No dichotomy exists.

Impetus was the first imperfect attempt to define momentum which is a conserved quantity. Philosophers such as Phillip the Grammarian were trying to get away from Aristotle's nonsense. They were not entirely successful.

Even Kepler was groping for a notion of gravitational force when he came up with his theory of planetary orbits. But he did not quite make it. Newton did because he finally nail inertia correctly.

Objectivism tells us bupkis, nada, zilch, zero about the nature of the Cosmos.

Ba'al Chats

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All of modern science (physics, chemistry, biology and even geology) emerges from the "analytic-synthetic dichotomy". Every last bit of it. The philosophical failure of modern science in its squalor and misery has produced every last bit of technology you enjoy, including using MSK's Forum.

Ba'al Chatzaf

You are not going to weasel out of this. I am going to make you say "uncle." Ayn Rand's capital-O Objectivism is a specific school of lower-case-o objectivism which is commonly defined as "rational-empiricism' the Enlightenment philosophical system called "the scientific method."

  1. Make observations.
  2. Propose a hypothesis.
  3. Design and perform an experiment to test the hypothesis.
  4. Analyze your data to determine whether to accept or reject the hypothesis.
  5. If necessary, propose and test a new hypothesis

http://chemistry.about.com/od/lecturenotesl3/a/sciencemethod.htm

Or if you prefer, it can be 14 steps, the last of which include intuition and insight:

http://www.scientificmethod.com/index2.html

especially here (Step 10 - Suspend Judgment):

http://www.scientificmethod.com/bklet/i_10.htm

And Step 11 - Take Action

http://www.scientificmethod.com/bklet/i_11.htm

... which includes more than publication, though publication of your results is mission-critical ...

The fact (fact) remains. You can _claim_ mystical insight or Copenhagen indeterminancy or whatever you want, but if it _works_, then it must have followed (lower case) objectivism = rational-empiricism.

Ayn Rand's special capital-O formulation of that method does offer much that was not previously considered or not previously resolved. We can discuss that if you wish.

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All of modern science (physics, chemistry, biology and even geology) emerges from the "analytic-synthetic dichotomy". Every last bit of it. The philosophical failure of modern science in its squalor and misery has produced every last bit of technology you enjoy, including using MSK's Forum.

Ba'al Chatzaf

You are not going to weasel out of this. I am going to make you say "uncle." Ayn Rand's capital-O Objectivism is a specific school of lower-case-o objectivism which is commonly defined as "rational-empiricism' the Enlightenment philosophical system called "the scientific method."

  1. Make observations.
  2. Propose a hypothesis.
  3. Design and perform an experiment to test the hypothesis.
  4. Analyze your data to determine whether to accept or reject the hypothesis.
  5. If necessary, propose and test a new hypothesis

http://chemistry.about.com/od/lecturenotesl3/a/sciencemethod.htm

Or if you prefer, it can be 14 steps, the last of which include intuition and insight:

http://www.scientificmethod.com/index2.html

especially here (Step 10 - Suspend Judgment):

http://www.scientificmethod.com/bklet/i_10.htm

And Step 11 - Take Action

http://www.scientificmethod.com/bklet/i_11.htm

... which includes more than publication, though publication of your results is mission-critical ...

The fact (fact) remains. You can _claim_ mystical insight or Copenhagen indeterminancy or whatever you want, but if it _works_, then it must have followed (lower case) objectivism = rational-empiricism.

Ayn Rand's special capital-O formulation of that method does offer much that was not previously considered or not previously resolved. We can discuss that if you wish.

Horsefeathers. Non objectivists have been doing all that for hundreds of years.

How many top of the line Objectivist physicists are there?

Ba'al Chatzaf

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How many top of the line Objectivist physicists are there?

Ba'al Chatzaf

That depends on what you call Objectivist. Probably all of them accept Objectivist metaphysics (A is A) and Objectivist epistemology (reason is our only means of knowledge) even if they never heard of Ayn Rand.

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How many top of the line Objectivist physicists are there?

Ba'al Chatzaf

That depends on what you call Objectivist. Probably all of them accept Objectivist metaphysics (A is A) and Objectivist epistemology (reason is our only means of knowledge) even if they never heard of Ayn Rand.

Exactly!!! There was objectivism long before Ayn Rand.

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Bob, you are hilarious. You think that no one noticed my Post #7 above; and everyone accepts your #10 as a brilliant insight. You remind me of the "Presidential Press Conference Polka": sidestep, sidestep, sidestep; and never face the music.



You said in your Post #4 above:



All of modern science (physics, chemistry, biology and even geology) emerges from the "analytic-synthetic dichotomy". Every last bit of it. The philosophical failure of modern science in its squalor and misery has produced every last bit of technology you enjoy, including using MSK's Forum.






You have played that card often; and each time someone points out the fallacy. This time it was jts in #9 who nicely underscored my #7:



You can _claim_ mystical insight or Copenhagen indeterminancy or whatever you want, but if it _works_, then it must have followed (lower case) objectivism = rational-empiricism.






Again, you claimed that as your own opinion in #10, as if you were disagreeing. The success of modern technology is not evidence of an impassible barrier between applied and theoretical physics, but validation for the unity of truth. It can be no other way. A is A.

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Bob, you are hilarious. You think that no one noticed my Post #7 above; and everyone accepts your #10 as a brilliant insight. You remind me of the "Presidential Press Conference Polka": sidestep, sidestep, sidestep; and never face the music.

You said in your Post #4 above:

All of modern science (physics, chemistry, biology and even geology) emerges from the "analytic-synthetic dichotomy". Every last bit of it. The philosophical failure of modern science in its squalor and misery has produced every last bit of technology you enjoy, including using MSK's Forum.

You have played that card often; and each time someone points out the fallacy. This time it was jts in #9 who nicely underscored my #7:

You can _claim_ mystical insight or Copenhagen indeterminancy or whatever you want, but if it _works_, then it must have followed (lower case) objectivism = rational-empiricism.

Again, you claimed that as your own opinion in #10, as if you were disagreeing. The success of modern technology is not evidence of an impassible barrier between applied and theoretical physics, but validation for the unity of truth. It can be no other way. A is A.

Real physicists shut up and calculate. They do not diddle around with Bohr's ruminations. They use the equations that have been show to work. Richard Feynman never bothered his head over what Bohr said in the philosophical realm. In fact Feynman despised philosophy. Read the tart remarks he makes in his famous three volume set.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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