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+--- Thread: When scientists read philosophy, are they reading the "Wrong Philosophers"? (/thread-5630.html)
When scientists read philosophy, are they reading the "Wrong Philosophers"? - C C - Jun 30, 2018
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/bayes-arrows/
EXCERPT - Clark Glymour's [...] current research applies previous work on causal Bayes nets and formal learning theory to a variety of topics. Here he discusses different kinds of uses of probabilities in science, causality, Hume and Bayes, why thinking causality is a fiction isn’t even wrong, causal Bayes nets, social sciences poor record of making inferences, free will, why Aristotle’s approach to philosophy bests Plato’s and why there’s not enough of that approach in contemporary philosophy at the moment, Laplacian demons, why in general scientists are right to criticise contemporary philosophy on the grounds that it doesn’t do anything, and the threats that Bayesians will avert. This’ll wake you up (interview)…
3:AM: Several prominent scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, ask: if philosophical questions are so vague or general that we don’t know how to conduct experiments or systematic observations to find their answers, what does philosophy do that can be of any value? Maybe in the past it was creative and was the basis of science, but that was then: why do philosophy now? How do you answer them?
CG: The trouble with physicists who denigrate philosophy is that they read the wrong philosophers, which sad to say is most philosophers. Had they read Peter Spirtes (CMU), or Jiji Zhang (Lingnan, Hong Kong) or Frederick Eberhardt (Cal Tech) or Oliver Schulte (Simon Fraser) or Teddy Seidenfeld (CMU) or Scott Weinstein (Penn), they might have had a different opinion. Looking back to the last century, philosophers (e.g., Bertrand Russell) made major advances in logic, created the basics of behavioral decision theory (Ramsey), co-created computational learning theory (Putnam), and created the causal interpretation of Bayes nets and the first correct search algorithms for them (Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines). (Yes, I know, some of your readers may say that Judea Pearl did this last bit, but no he didn’t. Like Simon Peter, he thrice denied that directed acyclic graphs have a causal interpretation, and only seems to have changed his mind on learning of Peter Spirtes’ discoveries. Not that Pearl did not do wonderful, crucial work. He did, and continues to.) One of my colleagues, Steve Awoody, made a central contribution to the creation of a new branch of mathematics, homotopic type theory.
The reason a handful of philosophers were able to make these contributions is relatively simple: they were well-prepared and in academic or financial circumstances that enabled them to think outside of disciplinary boxes and develop novel ideas in sufficient detail to make an impact, or in Ramsey’s case, lucky enough to have a later figure really develop the fundamental idea. It is a rare university department that allows for such thinkers.
Statistically, the physicist critics are pretty near correct. Philosophy of science is a deadletter subject filled with commentary book reports on real scientific work, banal methodological remarks (e.g.,scientists of a time don’t always think of true alternatives to the theories they do think of; scientists sometimes have to think at multiple “levels”), and “mathematical philosophy” some of which is very interesting but none or which is of practical scientific relevance. I once was interviewed for a job at UCLA. Pearl was invited to dinner with me and with some of my potential colleagues. Pearl managed to compliment me and insult the others with one question: “Why don’t the rest of you guys do anything?” In the context of your question, Pearl’s was a very good question.
Here is my answer to Pearl’s question: Demographics and history have killed philosophy of science. The Logical Empiricists, European émigrés just before and after World War II, had almost no interest in methodology, did not engage much in the developments in statistics or computation, and basically gave philosophy of science a reconstructive turn–the heritage of their neo-Kantianism. They educated two generations of American philosophers interested in science. By the 1980s computer science and statistics increasingly took over methodology, and (at least in computer science) began to address some of the issues that motivated me a generation earlier to study history and philosophy of science. After that, someone with my interests would have to be either very ambitious or foolhardy or not really smart to study philosophy rather than statistics and machine learning. Born too early, I was....
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