What do philosophers believe?

[metacristi]

But I heard that philosophy was just a bunch of "claptrap" made up by religious people because they hate science!

And the truth is of course that even the outspoken academic critics of Philosophy are philosophers of some sort Scientists themselves engage in philosophy at all times (although some are not aware of that).

Physicists Are Philosophers, Too

Now there is the more modest claim that professional philosophy is sterile and do not help advances in Science. Well first one can successfully argue that philosophy does actually make progress, albeit not in the same manner as Science (understandable given the fact that the 'conceptual space' it examines is much broader than that of science's and some questions may have more good answers). Secondly the first goal of professional philosophy is not to make advances in Science but to examine which of our 'certitudes' are really so. And to describe how Science work (instead of being prescriptive, how it should work).

Finally although there are actually some professional philosophers engaged on the front of scientific quest it is unreasonable for scientists to wait for professional Philosophy to solve their own problems (too much complexity involved very often I'm afraid), instead they should act as real philosophers themselves and do their own job. To be sure professional Philosophy can be rightfully criticized for some excesses no doubt but there is absolutely no good reason to denigrate the whole field as 'useless' as some do.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Did this silliness have a point? It sure as hell had nothing to do with analytic philosophy, which was the primary topic here.

It also involved someone in a fictitious academic department. CMU -- which is not known for post-modern nonsense -- has no sociology department. The closest department is Social and Decision Sciences.

If this was meant to be a broad mockery of philosophy, it failed. If it was meant to be a mockery of Continental philosophy, then I suppose the subject appears mockable enough, but you forgot to make a point.

Easy to mock Continental philosophy but has produced a lot of great thought. Heidegger has sparked more personal interest than any other philosopher I have explored.

I think that text is out of one of the PoMo generators.

 

[phiwum]

Easy to mock Continental philosophy but has produced a lot of great thought. Heidegger has sparked more personal interest than any other philosopher I have explored.

I think that text is out of one of the PoMo generators.

I don't really know much Continental philosophy, so I admit my somewhat negative opinion is not well-informed. I tried to hedge my comments by saying that it appears mockable enough.

Analytic is clearly more my taste, from what little I've seen.

 

[ynot]

Philosophers believe that all beliefs can be believed differently.

 

[deaman]

That they're right!

 

[angrysoba]

That they're right!

That's somewhat tautologous though, isn't it? I don't think people believe in things and simultaneously believe that they are wrong, do they?

 

[angrysoba]

As it happens, philosophers are not particularly good at guessing which theories are popular among philosophers. For instance, the mean estimate for the percentage of those who believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction was 50%, which is 20.6% lower than the actual results.

Personally, I would have put it at lower than 50%. I thought that the distinction had been largely discredited, although I tend to use it myself. One thing I learned from this paper is that my own judgments about philosophical consensus are just off the mark. I'll try to be a little more circumspect when reporting the consensus hereafter.

I probably would have guessed that most philosophers agree with the analytic/synthetic distinction, and I think that it is a useful distinction even if people like Quine showed that it is at least blurry.

I'm certainly not surprised that most philosophers are atheists. I think that it was through conceptual analysis that ideas about God were shown to be nonsensical before scientific challenges to religious tenets such as the age of the Earth, the nature of disease, famine, electrical storms, psychological disorders, hallucinations and the supposed immutability of species showed religious explanations to be false.

 

[Phaedrus74]

The deflationary theory. I was surprised, too, so I've been reading on the deflationary theory at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

It is roughly that the word "true" is eliminable through the axiom

'P' is true iff P.

I don't quite get it yet, since we still need to know the conditions that entail P. You still have the same semantic issues, I think. But I'm still working through the article.

It is not so much a matter of eliminating truth as it is of identifying the meaning of the concept "true in language L", i.e. the set of true statements in language L.

This is a rather complex and technical matter and Davidson himself "solved" it only after thinking on it really hard for several decades

The solution (Spoilers!) is that the "knowing of the conditions that entail P" i.e. knowing when it is appropriate to apply the judgement "is true" to statement P is taken care of in the process of acquiring our first language.

See: D. Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge”, (1991), in: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (New York, 2001)

 

[phiwum]

It is not so much a matter of eliminating truth as it is of identifying the meaning of the concept "true in language L", i.e. the set of true statements in language L.

Well, that's fairly standard in logic, no doubt.

My comment about eliminability was a bit off. A predicate in a language is eliminable if it is equivalent to a sentence not involving the predicate. But the defining statements "P is true iff P" form a scheme and cannot be gathered into a single universal statement, so true isn't exactly eliminable in the sense above, if I have followed the SEP article.

This is a rather complex and technical matter and Davidson himself "solved" it only after thinking on it really hard for several decades

The solution (Spoilers!) is that the "knowing of the conditions that entail P" i.e. knowing when it is appropriate to apply the judgement "is true" to statement P is taken care of in the process of acquiring our first language.

See: D. Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge”, (1991), in: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (New York, 2001)

I'll look into that. Davidson's "The Structure and Content of Truth" was cited in the SEP article on deflationism.

 

[Sideroxylon]

It is not so much a matter of eliminating truth as it is of identifying the meaning of the concept "true in language L", i.e. the set of true statements in language L.

This is a rather complex and technical matter and Davidson himself "solved" it only after thinking on it really hard for several decades
The solution (Spoilers!) is that the "knowing of the conditions that entail P" i.e. knowing when it is appropriate to apply the judgement "is true" to statement P is taken care of in the process of acquiring our first language.

See: D. Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge”, (1991), in: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (New York, 2001)

Sounds rather Heideggarian.

 

[John Jones]

Did this silliness have a point? It sure as hell had nothing to do with analytic philosophy, which was the primary topic here.

It also involved someone in a fictitious academic department. CMU -- which is not known for post-modern nonsense -- has no sociology department. The closest department is Social and Decision Sciences.

If this was meant to be a broad mockery of philosophy, it failed. If it was meant to be a mockery of Continental philosophy, then I suppose the subject appears mockable enough, but you forgot to make a point.

It was from The Post-Modernism Generator (q.v). The fact that you researched it and offered such an agitated response was all the point I wanted to make.

You did better than many pompous philosophers. At least you didn't try to defend the gibberish.

 

[phiwum]

It was from The Post-Modernism Generator (q.v). The fact that you researched it and offered such an agitated response was all the point I wanted to make.

You did better than many pompous philosophers. At least you didn't try to defend the gibberish.

I didn't research it much. I happen to know CMU and I couldn't remember a sociology department, so I searched for one.

 

[angrysoba]

It was from The Post-Modernism Generator (q.v). The fact that you researched it and offered such an agitated response was all the point I wanted to make.

You did better than many pompous philosophers. At least you didn't try to defend the gibberish.

Generally speaking, if analytical philosophers see names like Lacan, Lyotard or Derrida, they will stop reading. I have tried to read Derrida in the past and found the post-modern generator usually makes more sense.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Generally speaking, if analytical philosophers see names like Lacan, Lyotard or Derrida, they will stop reading. I have tried to read Derrida in the past and found the post-modern generator usually makes more sense.

There does seem to be sense made from Derrida given academic time is given to teaching his ideas. All fields have their own jargon to be learnt and philosophy is divided along lines of people with separate discourse. Further, in philosophy you have historic dialogue and questions that you need to understand in order to make sense of what you are reading. Continental philosophy is a different approach to anylyitc or pragmatic with its own set of concepts and questions. I have not yet read Derrida directly but I think it may be worth the effort. Even "trolls" like Paul Feyerbend are worth the effort as they sparked interesting debate.

The POMo generators are just noise. People are quite good at seeing things in noise of course.

 

[angrysoba]

There does seem to be sense made from Derrida given academic time is given to teaching his ideas. All fields have their own jargon to be learnt and philosophy is divided along lines of people with separate discourse. Further, in philosophy you have historic dialogue and questions that you need to understand in order to make sense of what you are reading. I have not yet read Derrida directly but I think it may be worth the effort. Even "trolls" like Paul Feyerbend are worth the effort as they sparked interesting debate.

The POMo generators are just noise. People are quite good at seeing things in noise of course.

This may well be true, but analytic philosophers are, nonetheless, particularly antipathetic towards Derrida.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Criticism_from_analytic_philosophers

And I find some of the ludicrous remarks that PoMo writers have made when they start trying to "deconstruct" science to be damaging to philosophy in general because of the associations that laypeople make.

On this forum we often have people with no clue about philosophy opining that philosophers think they can do science better than scientists. To the extent that I have ever heard any philosopher make such grand claims it has usually turned out to be some postmodernist writing gobbledywank about scientific theories.

 

[Sideroxylon]

This may well be true, but analytic philosophers are, nonetheless, particularly antipathetic towards Derrida.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Criticism_from_analytic_philosophers

And I find some of the ludicrous remarks that PoMo writers have made when they start trying to "deconstruct" science to be damaging to philosophy in general because of the associations that laypeople make.

On this forum we often have people with no clue about philosophy opining that philosophers think they can do science better than scientists. To the extent that I have ever heard any philosopher make such grand claims it has usually turned out to be some postmodernist writing gobbledywank about scientific theories.

A lot of the worst anti science stuff seems to be from sociologists. Paul Feyerbend is the biggest science polemicist that I can think of among recognised philosophers (though he disclaimed the title). He had interesting things to say even when it could be argued he didn't believe them himself. Also on my to read list after having experienced his ideas through the commentaries of others regarding philosophy of science.

 

[phiwum]

A lot of the worst anti science stuff seems to be from sociologists. Paul Feyerbend is the biggest science polemicist that I can think of among recognised philosophers (though he disclaimed the title). He had interesting things to say even when it could be argued he didn't believe them himself. Also on my to read list after having experienced his ideas through the commentaries of others regarding philosophy of science.

Well, by all means, study what interests you.

But I'm happy in the analytic tradition and just don't get the Continental stuff myself. Looks, frankly, like nonsense to me.

Nonetheless, I don't see any reason to discourage your interests, because it really is no skin off my nose. Somehow, a number of so-called skeptics are rather more perturbed that some folk like learning philosophy of whatever ilk.

I don't get it.

 

[Phaedrus74]

Well, that's fairly standard in logic, no doubt.

Pretty much yeah, which is what make Tarski so bloody elegant

I'll look into that. Davidson's "The Structure and Content of Truth" was cited in the SEP article on deflationism.

As I said in my first respons I'm biased when it comes to Davidson. I'm a bit of a fanboi. Wrote my thesis about him (amongst others) and everything. But that's over 10 years ago...

Sounds rather Heideggarian.

Truth as aletheia in Heidegger's Being and Time compared to Davidsons notion of truth? Sounds like a nice subject for an Masters' thesis (or even a Ph.D.). Maybe sprinkle in a bit of Wittgenstein (On Certainty) a tad of Kuhn's later work and Bob's you uncle...

 

[abaddon]

Philosophers are the Schroedinger's Cat of human thought. They simultaneously believe everything and nothing all the while teetering on the brink of the abyss that is solipsism.

IMHO, 90% of modern philosophy is functionally as useful as navel fluff serving no useful purpose whatsoever.

 

[tsig]

Philosophers are the Schroedinger's Cat of human thought. They simultaneously believe everything and nothing all the while teetering on the brink of the abyss that is solipsism.

IMHO, 90% of modern philosophy is functionally as useful as navel fluff serving no useful purpose whatsoever.

You're being generous.