this post was submitted on
55 points (89% like it)
62 up votes 7 down votes

reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. vote on links that you like or dislike and help decide what's popular, or submit your own!

all 11 comments

[–]BurntCarousel 12 points13 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I am consistently fascinated by seemingly-intelligent people's ability to reject evolution.

[–]fburnaby 8 points9 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

Seriously. And philosophers even got to have a great case study on evolution back when Karl Popper reversed his position on evolution. It seems Fodor has a lot of the same misunderstandings about the science that Popper did.

Surprise, surprise, once Popper actually learned evolutionary theory, it all started to make sense. Maybe these guys should try the same.

[–]jkh77 2 points3 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I don't know, perhaps we should allow them the benefit of the doubt.

snicker

[–]adamwho 6 points7 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

Much of philosophy is stuck in the 19th century (and earlier). It is my belief that if philosophy departments cannot integrate scientific discoveries into their curriculum and discard failed (but cherished) philosophical concepts they will become little more than a branch of the history department.

[–]notasaon 10 points11 points ago* 

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

This only cements in my mind that most philosophers are full of it and don't even know much about philosophy. Science is predicated on the idea that the only thing we can do is describe what we observe in the world. Everything beyond this is speculation. So we create physical and mathematical models to predict what will happen in the future. And then we check if our predictions are correct to within a known range of uncertainty in measurement. Every time we observe and measure such an event we are becoming more confident that our explanation is correct as far as our frame of reference is concerned. We try to duplicate experiments to confirm that bias of the people involved is eliminated.

Science does not reject the notion of a god or of direction in any way. But without a way to measure and observe such an entity in a single frame of reference no statements can be made about its nature with any manner of veracity. Similarly, science is well aware that its models are exactly that: models. The model can never be known to be true or not, but the probability of its accuracy can be, and that's what's useful.

[–]ungoogleable 3 points4 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I think there is some value in speculating beyond what we know from current observations. It's a necessary part of determining what to observe next. It's just that the further you venture out past where you have an empirical guide, the more likely you are to be going in the wrong direction. And when science finally catches up, many people would sooner doubt the ugly fact than give up their beautiful theory.

[–]daemin 0 points1 point ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

This only cements in my mind that most philosophers are full of it and don't even know much about philosophy.

People who generalize are generally wrong.

How does an article about 4 or 5 philosophers doubting the coherence of one scientific theory lead you to the conclusion that most philosophers don't know anything about philosophy?

Do you know anything about philosophy, and its many sub-fields? There is a basic cleave between the analytic philosophers and the continental philosophers. The analytic philosophers are ones derived from the natural philosophy of England and Germany who developed the scientific method, where as the continental philosophers are the ones who speak word salad and are generally full of shit.

What it comes down to with both Fodor and Naegal is that, being primarily philosophers of mind, they have strong positions about the nature of mind, which they have written about and defended for decades. They are working from their theories about the mind as a starting point, and judging evolutionary theory in light of it. In order to be consistent with their existing positions, they have to undermine some of the current foundations of evolutionary theory. This doesn't imply that they are creationists, as the article keeps skirting, but rather that they want to, at a minimum, reformulate evolutionary theory from a set of assumptions more consistent with their theories of mind. I.e., they want to get to the same place, but by a different road.

Frankly, both are very intelligent people, who have written very interesting articles on the philosophy of mind. Nagel most famous article is What is it like to be a bat?, the thrust of which is that it is not possible to imagine what it is like to be a form of life that experiences the world in a fundamentally different way, and explores the implications of this on the subjective feeling of experience. Fodor is well known for his "language of thought" arguments, which is a highly specific form of functionalism.

Given all that, however, it is a little frustrating when the philosophers barge into a new field, ignore large portions of it, and start pontificating what it all means. But that doesn't mean that all philosophers, or even most, are full of it, or that philosophy has nothing to offer.

[–]notasaon 0 points1 point ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

You're demonstrating exactly the problem I have with philosophers. Fodor's ideas are not novel, complex, or interesting. They are at best obvious. I got high as balls last night with a friend and discussed pure subjectivity of the human mind and its limits on experience and the fundamental limits of 'knowing' or 'understanding' things. Neither of us have PhD's in philosophy, and it seems that having one doesn't particularly improve your quality of thought.

[–]daemin 0 points1 point ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

They aren't nove, complex or intersting because they've been published and talked about for years. Having a PhD in philosophy makes you familiar with the history of these ideas, and the rigorous and thorough arguments that have gone over the minutia of them.

And your post shows exactly whats wrong with a laymans idea of philosophy: you got stupidly high and had thoughts like "huhuhuhuh its like all subjective and stuff."

[–]sourkeys -1 points0 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I can't read that much. I predict the outcome because my brain rejects attention to pointless crap wrapped around key points.

[–]cowgod42 0 points1 point ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

Your post is tl;dr.