No not really much disagreement at all. Apologies, that I tend to be long winded at times.
Sure, generally, however, papers get retracted. Published in even prestigious journals, then taken back. While I would have liked the 18,000 retracted paper database to have been more directly on point to direct contradictions, I didn't expect it. That's why I posted the other paper that said why papers generally get rejected (before publication) that was, at least, a bit more directly on point. People make mistakes, including contradicting themselves, even reviewers.
OK, guess you can be a bit long winded yourself. Do not contradictions in your own life and thinking matter to you? Sure they don't have broader more world reaching implications as such papers. Unless you're a scientist, those more personal contradictions and inconsistent information must matter more to you than inconsistent scientific papers
Well, "need" is a rather loaded word. It implies that you could not do it yourself. As I said before science is based on theories and scientists do tend to get bogged down in those theories. They drive what they do, experiments, observations even treatments or tests (for medical applications).
I gave multiple examples of direct current contributions (to specific aspects of sub-fields of biology), not asserted by the philosophers themselves, but by the researches' themselves. If you want I will relink them in a subsequent post. Let's just say somebody comes along, to work with you, and improves things for you. Might you have been able to do that yourself, who can say, if, or when. So by working with them **** in your field gets better. It's not necessarily a "need", it's just what did happen.
Now, as asserted before it wasn't just researches coming across some more general philosophical works and applying it to their field. Nor was it philosophers coming across some problem in science and saying, 'hey I can do something with that'. Instead, it was very closely collaborative works done by both. An explicate point of one of the articles I linked, that more of such closely collaborative works (between scientists and philosophers, of those particular fields of science ) can get stuff moving in new directions.
OK, well I read what I think is the main paper that you cited (just read it quite briefly ... ie; I am not intending to sit down with a pen and notepad going over published papers in detail and checking all the other papers used and listed in the references), ie this one -
https://elifesciences.org/articles/46563
… and I had the following impressions -
1.. It is not talking about their own research. Instead they are merely commenting on what other researchers have published in recent years. As far as I can see they don't really seem to be adding to that, except possibly by gathering together the findings from various previous papers, and concluding that stem cells can show different characteristics depending on various factors such as the bodily environment in which they are active … as far as I can see, those sort of conclusions had previously been been published by other biologists (eg this philosophy paper lists references to those earlier papers).
2 the philosophy part of this paper seems to be the act of comparing what stem cells do with some completely different things such as the atomic weight of an atom, which was their example but where atomic weights have nothing at all to do with stem cells. There was a second example like that which I forget for the moment, but a third example which looks bizarre and seriously unscientific (as if it should never be included in a published science paper), where they actually gave an example of what was shown in a commercial cinema film The Matrix.
3 certain important statements are made without any reference to where that fact comes from, eg in the last sentence of their short paragraph entitled Stemness in Cancer. The editor should have required the authors to give a clear reference when things are stated as fact like that.
4 in the following section called “Stemness encompasses distinct properties, depending on the tissue and context”, they are merely posing four questions, and where they are again relying for that on previous published work, but where they again often omit a reference for the work that they are using as their example.
5 their main conclusion is given under the heading “How stemness categorization may drive therapeutic choices”, where they summarise it in 4 bulleted points, namely -
If stemness is a categorical property, only strategies that target cancer stem cells will be efficient.
If stemness is a dispositional property, approaches that focus on both cancer stem cells and their niches may be used.
If stemness is a relational property, only niche-targeting strategies will be potentially useful.
If stemness is a systemic property, none of the therapeutic strategies aiming at eradicating cancer stem cells or their niche will be efficient, as the system (the cancer cell population) may instruct any tumour cell to become a cancer stem cell, without requiring any specific niche.
They call that the result of their philosophy, ie their philosophising about stem cells, but that looks to me like a set of tentative or provisional conclusions that anyone in this field of science might have reached without any use of formal philosophy at all, and from what the authors had described earlier in the paper with the refs that they had given to earlier papers in medicinal biology, I strongly suspect that all 4 of those points had been raised before in papers such as the ones they referenced … it does not look to me as if those 4 points/ideas are either new or especially the result only of “philosophy” (unless all constructive thinking/analysis is being called “philosophy”).
In their concluding section they take those four bulleted questions raised above, and describe them as “our four stemness properties”! That last concluding section really just gives a summary of their general thoughts about the characteristics of stem cells, and what they think they can say about them with those four questions above. They actually say there that
“While experimental biology will hardly answer these questions, ...”; but I have no idea why they are stating that as as “fact” … afaik experimental biology (or in fact science in general) is perfectly likely to provide answers to questions such as the four they identified in this paper (afaik, they are not new identifications … they are questions that I expect most biologists in this field are well aware of).
So, in summary – I don't really see the value of this paper. And that being the case, I don't know why the editors thought it was worth publishing.
I'm currently reading Scott Aaronson's Quantum Computing Since Democritus, and there's a quote in there that
Quote:
Personally I'm interested in results - in finding solutions to nontrivial, well-defined open problems. So, what's the role of philosophy in that? I want to suggest a more exalted role than intellectual janitor: philosophy can be a*scout. It can be an explorer - mapping out intellectual terrain for science to*later*move in on, and build condominiums on or whatever. Not every branch of science was scouted out ahead of time by philosophy, but some were. And in recent history, I think quantum computing is really the poster child here. It's fine to tell people to "Shut up and calculate," but the question is,*what*should they calculate? At least in quantum computing, which is my field, the sorts of things that we like to calculate - capacities of quantum channels, error probabilities of quantum algorithms - are things people would never have*thought*to calculate if not for the philosophy.
I think might be of some relevance to the thread, and particularly the usefulness of philosophy:
At brief first glance, this reminds me of the paper discussed above, in the sense that it is just saying that philosophy, and I assume he means philosoph
ers, can suggest things that need to be researched, but which apparently to quote the above
“ are things people would never have *thought* to calculate if not for the philosophy.” … that statement does not sound credible to me at all, because in science (I always mean core science. And really quantum computing and stem cell research are not quite central within that core of fundamental science … ie fundamental answers to the nature of the universe around us) scientists themselves have been the people who have thought of “all” the possible important questions, the possible problems, the possible mistakes & errors and pitfalls, and all the possible solutions and experiments and possible answers etc. etc. for virtually everything that anyone can think of as discovered in core science, and that's probably a billion or more different things (most of which actually impact our lives directly every day), and they did not need any philosophers to advise & direct them on any of that … and yet here we have the above quote and the above linked paper, which are actually claiming that it would be impossible for scientists to think of the vital ideas that philosophers have presented … even though, as I say (and afaik this is obviously true, but maybe not??) the record of science and scientists doing that for themselves is vastly in excess of anything that philosophers may have contributed by a million-to-one.
But in a way, it seems we are again almost going back to claiming that all constructive thought is philosophy. Because what is being suggested in the quote and the link above, and in similar links to philosophical contributions, is as far as I can see on the surface of things, just a case anyone thinking deeply about any specific problem in science (or perhaps in any other field), and coming up with ideas about the best ways to study such things … but that does not make such constructive thought the sole domain of academic philosophy … if it did, then we'd have to claim that all scientists were practicing philosophy in everything they ever do … or as a more specific example, you'd be claiming that theoretical physicists and other mathematical scientists are really just philosophizing all day when they try to think of mathematical approaches to describing and understanding all sorts of properties of nature, such as quantum fields and relativistic effects.
I don't mean to totally dismiss the ideas of all people working in philosophy, as if to say they could never have good suggestions or ideas. Or as if to say they could never think of things that in some areas the active scientists had perhaps not thought of. Any of us might suggest such ideas that could be useful in science and which may be things which some of the scientists had not thought about, or not not thought so clearly about. That might happen in any field of study. It probably does happen quite often in any fields of study. Because those areas of study are complex and involve countless possible different factors …
… so any philosopher might quite easily point out useful ideas or raise useful questions. But that is surely not enough to make philosophy a complete branch of academic study in the role of it being important to scientific progress. That progress of science is 99.9% dues to what scientists themselves are doing.
