Bill Nye has come out with a new video explaining why philosophy is useless. I haven't watched it yet, much as I don't stop and gawk at car wrecks on the freeway. But I did read this response to that video. I think all science nerds should be given a course in philosophy early in their schooling. It would help them understand the role assumptions and beliefs play in scientific theorizing and practice.
"The video, which made the entire U.S. philosophy community collectively choke on its morning espresso, is hard to watch, because most of Nye's statements are wrong. Not just kinda wrong, but deeply, ludicrously wrong. He merges together questions of consciousness and reality as though they're one and the same topic, and completely misconstrues Descartes' argument "I think, therefore I am" — to mention just two of many examples."-- [Quartz]
Nye fell into the same trap that Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking have been caught up in. Philosophy, these men of science opine, is largely useless, because it can't give us the sort of certain answers that science can, and amounts to little more than speculation...."
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry Wrote:One recent example is Bill Nye, the "Science Guy," who isn't actually a scientist....
Which isn't exactly the case. But let's say this was just a science spokesperson bashing supposed dragons rather than the real deal, so as to see where it goes. In that context, the essence of Gobry's title (ignorance of what philosophy is among some scientists) could tentatively be contended to have at least one foot in a strawman.
This particular "spokesperson" would just be another member of the population abroad. The latter ironically very much noted for needing a variety of "-isms", which may sometimes sport this or that messiah and bogeyman in their formulations. That some enthusiasts of science then likewise extract their own "savior of the world / humanity" conceptual statue-idol from their interest, an idea which wars with the "demons" of philosophy and "wrongs" of other traditional enterprises, is no surprise. Doubtless even fans of carpentry would spin an ultimate or master "-ism" off from that trade if the occupation had more pervasive arteries in knowledge institutions and technological progress.
But as for the scientists themselves...
Employees of the physical sciences[*] -- in the course of their "semi-personal" activities -- express their political, moral, economic, and other ideological affiliations, preferences, etc. Which should amply demonstrate their own inability to do without prescriptive agencies in everyday life. The latter being invented rather than found already existing under a rock or embedded in a geological feature. As well using arguments to support those prescriptions which may additionally appeal to what philosophical studies of those systems have outputted about them.
IOW, even everyday life for the scientist is still apparently not satisfactorily fulfilled by this supposed "science as the all-pervading proper source of oughts and formulated guidances" idea which the mutated intellectual descendents of positivism and the rogue, happenstance brand of "ciencia addicts" genuflect to [or so rumored in regard to that degree of zealotry, anyway].
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[*] The "soft" sciences can be set aside. What with the reproducibility crisis in psychological disciplines and the aura of skepticism that's long swirled around the social sciences that they are just a skewered application of philosophical scrutiny itself, which then waywardly tries to output interpretation-free specific discoveries about human affairs rather than general products / directional hypotheses.
Mar 10, 2016 08:59 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 10, 2016 09:05 PM by Magical Realist.)
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