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botany posted:
Yeah, people seem to be forgetting the scenario. Time travel changes things. The physicist wants to be very careful because anything superfluous to proving their predecessor incorrect can only be used to weaken or invalidate their result. The philosopher on the other hand doesn't really have to worry about that when proving their predecessor incorrect, and if their predecessor can use anything to modify their work to the point where it is valid, well, they deserve it. Each acts like the other in normal circumstances. I'm phrasing things badly and I only had the notion while writing a very different post though, so it's a bit (a lot) undercooked, but I do find it interesting. I also fell asleep while writing this one and, uh, I've opened a bit of a can of worms here, haven't I? Oh dear.
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Sep 8, 2015 21:59
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Am I misreading that post or are both of you? I though Rotoru said specifically that physics is falsifiable and philosophy isn't, which is the opposite of what Jack and you seem to be reading.
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Discendo Vox posted:My undergrad degree is in philosophy and my graduate education is in social sciences. And a great deal of good it did you.
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Sep 9, 2015 01:20
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wiregrind posted:The hoax and book were poking fun at the use of fake scientific jargon in texts that by themselves had nothing to do with math or physics, or when the jargon was used in order to confuse or thrill readers who weren't trained in scientific fields and couldn't tell the real (broken) meaning. I don't see how it's not good criticism. Nope. Sokal's position is based on absolute, single meanings for words, which is only not laughable because he's implicitly only applying it to jargon. It's merely wrong, instead. Second of all, his statement that "postmodernism denies truth" is based on faulty understandings of epistemology and of contemporary philosophy. Third of all, the journal in question only accepted his paper because they were eager to have a physicist contributing because their entire goal was to foster interdisciplinary understanding, not because they considered it to be an especially meaningful paper.
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Sep 9, 2015 01:24
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Sokal's paper isn't actually gibberish--it just leaps from specialist meanings in physics to metaphorical senses that are explicitly political in a way not sensitive to the accuracy of the specialist claims, like saying that relativity in physics proved that moral relativism is justified. He was trying to curtail interdisciplinary jumps that he thought were sloppy or unjustified. So it is full of inaccurate claims and poor reasoning, but it's not incomprehensible or unable to be parsed. He said he did it because he was sensitive to hard-left thinking and didn't want people from that perspective getting sloppy, although plenty of hard-left thinkers thought of postmodernism as their enemy. I wonder what he thought of becoming the right's culture-war darling for like 10 years.
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Sep 9, 2015 01:37
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Effectronica posted:Nope. Sokal's position is based on absolute, single meanings for words, which is only not laughable because he's implicitly only applying it to jargon. It's merely wrong, instead. Second of all, his statement that "postmodernism denies truth" is based on faulty understandings of epistemology and of contemporary philosophy. Third of all, the journal in question only accepted his paper because they were eager to have a physicist contributing because their entire goal was to foster interdisciplinary understanding, not because they considered it to be an especially meaningful paper. Jack Gladney posted:I wonder what he thought of becoming the right's culture-war darling for like 10 years. wiregrind fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Sep 9, 2015 |
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Sep 9, 2015 02:24
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wiregrind posted:I'm sorry but you talk as if you skipped his book expaining what the hoax was about, where he was open to say (repeatedly) that he wasn't an expert on philosophy or psychology, that he didn't want to discuss or put down the authors themselves, and that his only argument was criticizing pseudo scientific uses and redefinitions of scientific jargon that were detrimental to those works, or at best useless. Okay, but again, this presumes that there's only one, or a few, possible meaning(s) for physics jargon, his primary point of criticism, and that's a faulty way to understand language. Like, it is quite simply wrong. You're also neglecting his statements at the time about why he felt that criticism was necessary, because they display a lack of understanding of post-structuralist philosophy and they ignore the social context of his paper.
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Sep 9, 2015 02:30
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wiregrind posted:I'm sorry but you talk as if you skipped his book expaining what the hoax was about, where he was open to say (repeatedly) that he wasn't an expert on philosophy or psychology, that he didn't want to discuss or put down the authors themselves, and that his only argument was criticizing pseudo scientific uses and redefinitions of scientific jargon that were detrimental to those works, or at best useless. Which is reasonable and hard to argue with; decorating a philosophical text with unrelated words might not invalidate the text, but it won't help anyone either. What Sokal didn't fully understand was that the scientific jargon used was being repurposed for metaphoric, poetic, or luddic ends; this was understood by the audience but not by Sokal or the randos that read his book. Saying it's "unrelated" or "pseudo scientific" misses the point and is blind to the way the uses and meaning of a word depend on (as has been pointed out) context.
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Sep 9, 2015 02:41
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Well no, he got a bug up his rear end about science words being appropriated as metaphors or put into the service of arguments that used exaggeration or falsehood for rhetorical effect. It wasn't that he didn't understand what was going on, but he didn't like it at all.
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Sep 9, 2015 02:46
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Effectronica posted:Okay, but again, this presumes that there's only one, or a few, possible meaning(s) for physics jargon, his primary point of criticism, and that's a faulty way to understand language. Like, it is quite simply wrong. You're also neglecting his statements at the time about why he felt that criticism was necessary, because they display a lack of understanding of post-structuralist philosophy and they ignore the social context of his paper. wiregrind fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Sep 9, 2015 |
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Sep 9, 2015 02:46
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Jack Gladney posted:Well no, he got a bug up his rear end about science words being appropriated as metaphors or put into the service of arguments that used exaggeration or falsehood for rhetorical effect. It wasn't that he didn't understand what was going on, but he didn't like it at all. He spends time in his book about the hoax to complain about "see this word? that's not what this word means" so yeah, he didn't understand it.
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Sep 9, 2015 02:53
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Sharkie posted:He spends time in his book about the hoax to complain about "see this word? that's not what this word means" so yeah, he didn't understand it. wiregrind fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Sep 9, 2015 |
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Sep 9, 2015 03:07
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wiregrind posted:In any case the methaphors and poetry could have used anything else (something that the authors actually knew about maybe) instead of science. The choice of using fake physics was deliberate and meaningless. Again, it's not "fake physics." That criticism might make sense if the authors were trying to do physics but they weren't.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:11
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Dzhay posted:I have literally (heh) no idea in what sense modern literary analysis is "better" than that of 20 years ago. (Although it must be, because people keep doing it). It's not. People do it entirely because they enjoy it. It's the equivalent of getting really good at DotA 2, except people will rightly look at you funny if you ask for funding to spend eight years discovering all the secrets of how best to play Teemo, but they'll nod and respect you and agree that you should get paid a living wage if you spend eight years reading books because you like it and have some other dork vouch for you that you're really good at reading books. Is it any surprise that these fields, historically dominated by white males, focus on books written by white males? It's entirely based on the enjoyment of those who study such things. There is no progress. They make it look like work by forcing students to do a lot of it. Like, imagine if people tried to make DotA respectable by insisting that you had to get good at playing it sleep-deprived without eating for weeks at a time. And then imagine non-players were idiots who actually fell for it and started to respect DotA. It's exactly like that.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:11
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The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:12
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Squalid posted:The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. false
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Sep 9, 2015 03:15
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Squalid posted:The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. Where did you get this interpretation of science from?
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Sep 9, 2015 03:18
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Sharkie posted:Again, it's not "fake physics." That criticism might make sense if the authors were trying to do physics but they weren't. Misusing the physics terminology and frameworks devalues what they actually say and should be called out.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:20
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Squalid posted:The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. If this were true, overfitting would be seen as a virtue of a model, rather than as a problem. Overfitted models are rejected because they are not explanatory.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:21
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Bip Roberts posted:Misusing the physics terminology and frameworks devalues what they actually say and should be called out. Again, if they were trying to use the terminology to do physics and get it wrong, then it would be accurate to say they were misusing it. But they weren't trying to do physics, and there's nothing sacrosanct about physics jargon that prevents it from being repurposed.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:25
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Sharkie posted:Again, if they were trying to use the terminology to do physics and get it wrong, then it would be accurate to say they were misusing it. But they weren't trying to do physics, and there's nothing sacrosanct about physics jargon that prevents it from being repurposed. Except they misuse it and look foolish.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:26
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Also there are people like Luce Irigaray who were actually trying to do physics.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:28
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Sharkie posted:Again, it's not "fake physics." That criticism might make sense if the authors were trying to do physics but they weren't.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:29
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Bip Roberts posted:Also there are people like Luce Irigaray who were actually trying to do physics. Irigaray wasn't doing physics. Her paper was part of what could be called "scientography", that is, a field with the same relationship to the natural sciences as historiography has to history. It's also an argument that's far more credible than people like Dawkins would give credit for, even though it's relatively weak for physics as compared to chemistry and biology. (For example, it's not a huge leap to suggest that the reason that natural selection has historically been conceived in terms of a violent struggle between species has to do with the way that biologists conceived of the world).
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Sep 9, 2015 03:39
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Sharkie posted:Again, if they were trying to use the terminology to do physics and get it wrong, then it would be accurate to say they were misusing it. But they weren't trying to do physics, and there's nothing sacrosanct about physics jargon that prevents it from being repurposed. so why do they misuse physics jargon and not words like "doodoo", "peepee", and "caca"?
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Sep 9, 2015 03:47
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It's also worth noting that scientific realism isn't the only way to perform science- instrumentalism is a fairly consistent presence, and I suspect one that's, ironically, strongest in physics. Sokal never spoke for science as a whole, he spoke for scientific realism. An instrumental response to poststructuralism would look quite different.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:52
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Sokal's book, as far as I remember it, contained some amateurish philosophy of science that is pretty out of touch with modern philosophy of science. I don't know any of the stuff he comments on, but it's pretty much non-existent in philosophy in the English-speaking world (and elsewhere, but that's what I know so  ), and as far as I understand it most work done in the other humanities is not really filled with hoax-esque scientific/mathematical mangling or whatever the problem is. But even then, I'm still not sure why it matters that some people used scientific terminology, perhaps even more bad reasons, for talking about other things in a poetic or analogical or suggestive or ??? way. Hell, some of them might just be doing bad work.I mean, I know Sokal is a lightning rod for silly disciplinary pissing matches, but what's the problem with letting a thousand crazy flowers bloom? People might get something out of it.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:03
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:I mean, I know Sokal is a lightning rod for silly disciplinary pissing matches, but what's the problem with letting a thousand crazy flowers bloom? People might get something out of it.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:05
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:Sokal's book, as far as I remember it, contained some amateurish philosophy of science that is pretty out of touch with modern philosophy of science. I don't know any of the stuff he comments on, but it's pretty much non-existent in philosophy in the English-speaking world (and elsewhere, but that's what I know so Well, bear in mind that even Karl Popper's theory of science ends up denying that it's possible for science to determine what is true. Scientific realism is basically incoherent without an archaic philosophy of science to go along with it. This is like saying that Social Darwinism condemns the theory of evolution by natural selection.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:07
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Effectronica posted:Well, bear in mind that even Karl Popper's theory of science ends up denying that it's possible for science to determine what is true. Scientific realism is basically incoherent without an archaic philosophy of science to go along with it.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:11
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:Scientific realism is the orthodoxy within philosophy of science. But this is really a different question. Yes, but you still have to ignore the problem of induction, and ignore falsificationism too, in order to conclude that science is capable of making true statements about the world.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:17
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Discendo Vox posted:Where did you get this interpretation of science from? It's a direct quote/honeypot from von Neumann's Method in the Physical Sciences lol
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Sep 9, 2015 04:27
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To lay out the cards on the table, let's consider the classic black-swan problem. First of all, let's establish the premises that reality is objective, and that true statements are those that accurately describe reality, and false statements are those that fail to accurately describe reality. So, then, the statement "all swans are white" was always false, even before black swans were known to exist by Europeans. Otherwise, we would have a subjective reality. So given that, under falsificationism, the conjecture "all swans are white" was never true. It only existed in the states "not yet shown to be false" and "false." The most we can ever say about anything scientifically is that a conjecture or theory has failed to be proven false so far. Science, then, cannot ever actually make true statements without a non-scientific confirmation of their truth! Given that scientific realism is generally understood to operate on the belief that scientific statements are ones that are either true or false, falsificationism is incompatible with it. That's leaving aside the basic issue that falsificationism offers rear end-backward descriptions of praxis (how, one might ask, are we to classify Galileo's discovery of the four largest moons of Jupiter, or van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of microbes, under Popper's view of science?), and the similar issue that scientific realism needs to bend gigantically in order to incorporate quasiparticles, and thus condensed matter physics, into its theoretical understanding of science.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:30
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Effectronica posted:This is like saying that Social Darwinism condemns the theory of evolution by natural selection.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:30
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Strudel Man posted:It seems a bit more apropos to say that it condemns snatching up the language of evolution by natural selection to use in a poetic or analogical or suggestive or ??? way. You're making the implicit comparison between someone using "gravity" figuratively and Roger Penrose quacking about quantum consciousness. You're also taking the argument that we can either have anything-goes and no misuse is possible, or an inflexible set of meanings that are unchangeable. I'm actually being quite generous.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:33
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Effectronica posted:You're making the implicit comparison between someone using "gravity" figuratively and Roger Penrose quacking about quantum consciousness. You're also taking the argument that we can either have anything-goes and no misuse is possible, or an inflexible set of meanings that are unchangeable. I'm actually being quite generous.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:35
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Bip Roberts posted:Also there are people like Luce Irigaray who were actually trying to do physics. Oh yeah, where? Cause if you think that's what Is the Subject of Science Sexed? is about then I don't think you understood it. Do you think Popper was trying to do physics too?
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Sep 9, 2015 04:50
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Effectronica posted:Science, then, cannot ever actually make true statements Yes. Correct- or at least cannot prove them correct. Effectronica posted:That's leaving aside the basic issue that falsificationism offers rear end-backward descriptions of praxis (how, one might ask, are we to classify Galileo's discovery of the four largest moons of Jupiter, or van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of microbes, under Popper's view of science?), and the similar issue that scientific realism needs to bend gigantically in order to incorporate quasiparticles, and thus condensed matter physics, into its theoretical understanding of science. Science does not offer guaranteed progression of true statements, or even of false statements. Are the events you mention intended to illustrate something? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Sep 9, 2015 |
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Sep 9, 2015 06:49
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Discendo Vox posted:Science does not offer guaranteed progression of true statements, or even of false statements. Are the events you mention intended to illustrate something?
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Sep 9, 2015 09:10
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Discendo Vox posted:Current defects in scientific practice, including phenomena of theory conflict as expressed by Kuhn as well as more mundane system failures such as the advent of impact factors, reproducibility problems, and the very issues the social sciences struggle with are arising because these sciences are insufficiently scientific. A great deal of scientific practice is insufficiently rigorous in the allocation of uncertainty and claim structures in individual hypothesis tests. quote:Popper doesn't exclusively define scientific practice in terms of universal quantifier statements- you need to reread the last, well, from the sound of it anything past part 1 of the LoSD. You're describing a bad caricature of his work, which seems to be the depressing standard in philosophy these days. I have the book next to me, tell me what you're referring to and I'll go read it. To make this fair, I am talking especially about chapter three, in which he states very explicitly that he considers a scientific theory to be a universal quantifier statement. This is also logically necessary for his understanding of basic statements to work, by the way. But if he changes his mind somewhere down the line, I'd be interested to learn more.
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Sep 9, 2015 09:25
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Discendo Vox posted:Yes. Correct- or at least cannot prove them correct. Those discoveries happened in the way Popper claims to be a myth- an observation was made, and then theory developed afterward. Quasiparticles are unobservables that explicitly do not exist- they are abstractions to better model certain behaviors. There are no real phonons or holes. This conflicts significantly with the scientific realist position on unobservables.
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Sep 9, 2015 11:42
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