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What do philosophers talk about these days?
I asked this of B. Michael over on Tumblr, so I thought I ought to ask it of you all as well:
What do philosophers talk about these days, post-Wittgenstein and post-Kuhn? I've not kept up. (Not that I ever kept up.) Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" gets rid of the need for super-deep universal foundations for the scientific enterprise, and Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" does the same for pretty much everything. So what's left for philosophy? Not that I think philosophy departments should disband, but if I were in one I'd transform it into the Department Of Roving Troubleshooters Who Have More Fun Than Sociologists Seem To Have, or something.
EDIT: Er, perhaps I should elaborate slightly, though that could end up in a tangle, since my elaborations will need elaborations. But, e.g., if you're saying as I do that people's musical tastes tend to cluster by their social class, you then (if you're me) have to explore what you mean by social class (and keep exploring). Now, one could ask a philosopher instead, "Dear philosopher, What do I mean, or what should I mean, by 'social class'?" But it seems to me that what the philosopher says is of no more import than what anyone else says, that if s/he has something to say it isn't because s/he's a philosopher but because s/he's just another person trying to figure out in certain instances what we mean or should mean by "social class" in those and related instances. And as with "social class," so with "meaning" and "language" and so forth.
What do philosophers talk about these days, post-Wittgenstein and post-Kuhn? I've not kept up. (Not that I ever kept up.) Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" gets rid of the need for super-deep universal foundations for the scientific enterprise, and Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" does the same for pretty much everything. So what's left for philosophy? Not that I think philosophy departments should disband, but if I were in one I'd transform it into the Department Of Roving Troubleshooters Who Have More Fun Than Sociologists Seem To Have, or something.
EDIT: Er, perhaps I should elaborate slightly, though that could end up in a tangle, since my elaborations will need elaborations. But, e.g., if you're saying as I do that people's musical tastes tend to cluster by their social class, you then (if you're me) have to explore what you mean by social class (and keep exploring). Now, one could ask a philosopher instead, "Dear philosopher, What do I mean, or what should I mean, by 'social class'?" But it seems to me that what the philosopher says is of no more import than what anyone else says, that if s/he has something to say it isn't because s/he's a philosopher but because s/he's just another person trying to figure out in certain instances what we mean or should mean by "social class" in those and related instances. And as with "social class," so with "meaning" and "language" and so forth.
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i've asked my friend ally, who is an Actual Philosopher, to pop over here if she has a minute :)
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http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/current.dtl
does include review of a book called "Beyond Kuhn" though ;-)
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"Fending off sociologists" isn't what I have in mind. More like "jumping in and doing what the sociologists should be doing themselves." But my point would be that there isn't a specifically philosophical way of jumping in, and there wouldn't be a specifically philosophical way of jumping in and doing what psychologists and biologists ought to be doing either. But that doesn't mean a philosopher shouldn't jump in, especially if the philosopher is practiced at asking, "Well, what do you mean by that?"
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i'm pretty sure there's no actual answer to that question - sorry if i've still not grasped it quite right. but there are still distinct philosophical modes of discourse - there is still a strong analytical mode existent, which is largely characterised by familiarity of 'the state of things' wrt touchstones on the big ideas, like realism, meaning, intentionality, and so on. (i don't know how to characterise discourse outside the (broadly) analytic run of things.)
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~ Yours, a physics student who gets very irritated with relativists and especially so when hey talk about science in any way
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Kuhn didn't consider himself a relativist, and had very little to say about that topic, so he'd probably argue that it was discussion that was imposed on him - though of course, that depends on how one is using the term "relativism," since the term doesn't explain itself*: usage is all over the place. It may be that you're using the term differently from how Kuhn used it.
I've been calling the issue a "substitute issue" - calling it a "false issue" seems too strong, but in calling it a "substitute" I'm saying, "We've got a bunch of incipient concerns, and instead of working from there to what our concerns ought to be, we talk about this instead." In any event, off and on I've been running posts called "Relativism: So What?" Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four are probably the most crucial. You could potentially be of value to me here because (1) you're a physics student, and (2) you think relativism is a big deal, so perhaps you can challenge my contention that it isn't. (Kuhn, by the way, had been trained as a physicist, before he made the jump to history and philosophy. He had no problem with how physics was conducted.)
*Of course, neither does the word "philosophy," which is one reason I'm asking my question.
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Science is evidently special because it is evidently successful. Science gets things done, on a scale and with a reliability and a precision unrivalled by any other competing world-view.
(Argh this an nest of poorly defined terms but I shall PRESS ON).
Any position toward the philosophy of science which fails to give a good accounting of how science achieves "better" practical results than other ways of thinking about the universe is ultimately bankrupt.
Now, Kuhn in a sense isn't the real problem - the problem is more connected to what was done with him later - you're right to point out that he himself didn't consider himself a relativist.
The real reason relativism annoys me is the way in which it is used as a cheap way to claim legitimacy for their ideas by the credulous or actively deceitful.
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Does Kuhn ever suggest that his own scientific paradigms be compared to "non-science" paradigms, though? My limited understanding of Kuhn is that Kuhnian paradigms do not apply to non-scientific fields, which limits any discussion of a Kuhnian paradigm specifically to the fields of science in which one paradigm replaces another. And in that sense the idea that science is "better" than other ways of thinking is irrelevant to the discussion, since no other way of thinking is in the conversation in the first place.
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This position has two parts: (1) science is a world view, and (2) no world view is any better than any other. The second is incoherent (if no world view is any better than any other, then the statement "no world view is any better than any other" is no better than the statement "some world views are better than others"). Also, I wouldn't affix the word "relativist" to it because it's an absolutist position. It feeds off the either/or assumption that goes, "EITHER there is an overarching framework for everything, OR no framework is better than any other." It's of the same form as "either there is an all-powerful God, or we can do whatever we want" and "either the universe has a center, or there is no up or down." And so on. I'd think that a real relativist would oppose this dichotomy. But I also think that most people who think that "relativism" is a big deal, pro or con, associate "relativism" with some variation on the idea that nothing is better than anything else, though they'd probably write it in a more confusing way so as not to come across to themselves as saying nothing is better than anything else. In any event, the problem here isn't people being "relativist" (which at this point is almost an unusable word), but people being thoughtless.
One reason that Kuhn developed the notion "paradigm" was to explain how it is that the hard sciences come up with better practical results, "better" here meaning that - this list is not exhaustive - the scientific disciplines get their practitioners on the same page, using similar words in similar ways, agreeing what the problems are and when they've been solved, achieving coherence and eliminating contradictions, explaining a lot of material that had previously been unexplained, discovering new phenomena that had not previously been known and - crucially, owing to their general precision and coherence, etc. - highlighting anomalies, ongoing problems, contradictions that won't resolve, all of which can, if the problems prove intractable, lead to the overthrow of old paradigms and their replacement by new ones. Kuhn considered scientific revolutions - paradigm shifts - to be among the achievements of the sciences, believed that the sciences regularly overthrew basic assumptions that had previously been unquestioned.
Notice that in the previous paragraph I spoke of the sciences in the plural. And this may suggest why I wonder what there is for philosophy of science to do after Kuhn. If Kuhn is right, you don't have a scientific paradigm, you have multiple scientific disciplines and subdisciplines with their own paradigms. There isn't one overarching activity - Science - from which all these disciplines and subdisciplines partake. Sure there's plenty that all scientists have in common, and the phrase "scientific method" is often trotted out in explanation. But plenty of nonscientists can try to apply scientific method too. I too can frame hypotheses, try to test them, and notice contradictions and counter-evidence, but that doesn't make what I say about t.A.T.u. or the Veronicas science. I'm not missing some skill that if only I had would make my music criticism science. Rather, what I - we - are missing is a framework, a set of assumptions and common commitments and models and understandings that get music critics on the same page. Not that I necessarily think such frameworks, assumptions, etc. are desirable in music criticism. But my point is that - if Kuhn is right - what makes someone a scientist isn't having a method that allows him or her to walk around doing things scientifically, but rather a paradigm in which to do it.
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This whole thread has been mostly handwaving, partly because I didn't explain my question when I asked it.
And speaking of my question, what do philosophers talk about these days, post-Wittgenstein and post-Kuhn? What's left for philosophy?
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That surely depends on your meta-world view!
Perhaps I may surprise you now, but I don;t actually believe in scientific realism. My own position is pretty close to what I've heard described as pragmatism or instrumentalism - scientific (paradigmatic, if you insist) concepts like "atoms" and "photons" are merely useful congitive tools to help scientists make predictions, and the question of whether or not they really exist is one I consider essentially empty.
I think my lack of philosophical interest in the actual concepts within science beyond their instrumental value is what leads me to view Kuhnian paradigms with distaste - they focus on the wrong thing. The paradigm isn;t the point - predictions are the point.
(More later, sleep now, limited time argh)
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I think my lack of philosophical interest in the actual concepts within science beyond their instrumental value is what leads me to view Kuhnian paradigms with distaste
I have no clue what the relationship between the conclusion of this sentence and the beginning of the sentence is.
Surely if you and another physicist have different concepts of motion, then its instrumental value will be different for the two of you as well. Conversely, if its instrumental value is the same, you're not likely to have different concepts.
If I predict that there's a giraffe in the closet, and you and I don't agree on what a giraffe is or what it means for it to be in or not in a closet, we may well disagree as to whether my prediction is correct.
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You'll probably object that all observation is inherently theory laden, but I'd argue that nearly all human beings (the exceptions being mostly those exhibit high levels of psychosis) have a broad consensus on at least, the idea of perceptible phenomena arrange in a perceptual space and time.
i.e. while maybe we don;t agree on the nature of giraffeness - I will in 99.9% of cases be able to get consensus that there is or isn't giraffe-qualia perceivable "within" the closet-qualia.
If we can't agree that 99.9% of people will agree on the content of their sensory perceptions then we do inevitably fall into relativism, yes. But are we?
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Obviously, I'm using "paradigm" as something of a buzzword or black box in that last comment. I've written a hunk about it and here's a Cliff's Notes summary of the hunk. But the question atop this thread can be restated in regard to science as, "What is there specifically philosophical left to explain about science in general, and how it achieves what it achieves?" Is there any great mystery still to be explored that only some meta-conversation like philosophy can undertake?
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(Anonymous) 2010-02-26 09:29 am (UTC)(link)no subject
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http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2010/03/further-ruminations-on-if-somethings.html
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https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3699020&postID=3389950088545256402&isPopup=true
which for some reason you can't see if you click through on the link above, which just takes you to the provocation