Haven't read ought but hte OP - isn't this the standard philosophical view in science? No one claims to obtain any knowledge without experience, that I can see.

There’s an essay pinned to the OP. Recommend a read. Also check out the level of vituperation in the early replies. Obviously hit a button.

I don't have quite enough interest yet (most likely, I will in about 10 months time) in phil of science, but yes, quite a bit of ignorance in those early comments.

Adam Frank is one of the three authors of The Blind Spot of Science (the others being Evan Thompson and Marcello Gleiser.) I love what he has to say about quantum mechanics, Qbism and the centrality of the Born Rule.

An excerpt from p.14 ...

The notion of a "blind spot of science" is, at best, a worn-out, old romanticist caricature or otherwise, worse, akin to a polemical categorical mistake: science no more engages in (explicit) philosophy or mysticism / subjectivism than jack-hammers are used instead of chainsaws to cut down trees; in fact, it's the best tool(kit) humanity has ever devised insofar as natural science is the attempt to (abductively, fallibilistically) solve more-than-subjective problems, which is a feature, IME, and not a bug (i.e. "blind spot"). — 180 Proof

:100: As I have pointed out several times science performs a methodological epoché in the opposite direction to the epoché of phenomenology. But this falls on deaf ears. I have repeatedly asked @Wayfarer to explain how the idea of the subjective would be helpful in the pursuit of any of the hard sciences. He does not even attempt to answer, but rather just ignores the question.

Our account of the Blind Spot is based on the work of two major philosophers and mathematicians, Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead. Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.

Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic. That faith rests directly on our immediate experience. Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential.

Nowhere is the materialistic bias in science more apparent than quantum physics, the science of atoms and subatomic particles. Atoms, conceived as the building blocks of matter, have been with us since the Greeks. The discoveries of the past 100 years would seem to be a vindication for all those who have argued for an atomist, and reductionist, conception of nature. But what the Greeks, Isaac Newton and 19th-century scientists meant by the thing called an ‘atom’, and what we mean today, are very different. In fact, it’s the very notion of a ‘thing’ that quantum mechanics calls into question.

The classic model for bits of matter involves little billiard balls, clumping together and jostling around in various forms and states. In quantum mechanics, however, matter has the characteristics of both particles and waves. There are also limits to the precision with which measurements can be made, and measurements seem to disturb the reality that experimenters are trying to size up.

Today, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about what matter is, and what our role is with respect to it. These differences concern the so-called ‘measurement problem’: how the wave function of the electron reduces from a superposition of several states to a single state upon observation. For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it. — The Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience

:up: :up:

He does not even attempt to answer, but rather just ignores the question.

No doubt Woo-farer doesn't even understand the question. :smirk:

This is much the same point , in continuing @Wayfarer's story . Science proceeds not by ignoring first-person accounts but by looking for common grounds, by finding agreement.

If you said something relevant to the passage above - the actual argument - then I might respond.

:lol:

This critique of the article seems to me to be more a disagreement of definitions. "That's not true science, true science is methodology..."

No doubt, it's something worth pointing out. However, I don't think the problems related to the assumptions of smallism and reductionism, what the authors label "scientific materialism," are in any way illusory. This is certainly how "what science says the world is like" was presented to me throughout my education, and one sees this view invoked quite regularly in popular and scientific texts.

Actually, it's no surprise that one author here is a cosmologist because in popular cosmology and physics reductionism and smallism frequently come in for withering criticism. That seems to be more the norm. However, in the special sciences, particularly neuroscience, smallism and reductionism still seem quite dominant. I find that even scientists who pay lip service to rejecting them often slip back into them.

I've long thought this was a consequence of the state of these respective fields (see below):

I am of the opinion that the heavy preferencing of reductionism in biology and particularly in neuroscience comes from the dearth of good "top down" explanations of phenomena. There is no good theory of conciousness, so of course the field looks to what is better understood to explain things. Whereas, it seems like reductionism is far less popular in the physical sciences, and this makes sense given they have very many good "top-down," explanations and because unifications—the explanation of disparate phenomena in terms of more general principles— seem to have been far more common over the last century than reductions. You can even see this in the goals of the fields. In physics, the goal is "grand unification," whereas in neuroscience the goal itself is generally seen as involving some sort of reduction. The idea of emergence is particularly hard to grapple with if you only understand parts relatively well, whereas if you understand the behavior of the whole better than the parts (certainly true in chemistry), the idea of emergence is not so unsettling.

Part of the problem here is perhaps that both analytic and continental philosophy of science has become so divorced from how scientists tend to think of their work that it has become largely irrelevant to scientific practices. The extreme skepticism and general anti-realism one finds in a lot of philosophy of science seems contained largely to the philosophers.

But you need a philosophy of science. It is all well and good to say science is a methodology, but this position needs to be justified. Which methodology? Why are these tools appropriate? This would seem to require giving some sort of metaphysical explanation of the sciences, else the proper methodology is "whatever we think works," in which case, one cannot complain if others takes the inability of science to explain consciousness as evidence that the current methodology is defective.

Plus, a focus on methodology doesn't really resolve these issues. Charges of "pseudoscience" are common, and they are often applied to research that ends up being extremely influential or even paradigm defining (e.g. pretty much the whole of quantum foundations up until the late 90s). These charges are normally made on methodological grounds though. Atoms, quarks, etc. were initially rejected by some precisely because they were considered "unfalsifiable" for instance.



I think that post really undersells the concerns of the advocates of the "view from nowhere." Their concerns don't tie in to difficulties in spacial perspective, but are rather related to how our entire perceptual and cognitive apparatus biases our understanding of the world. I'm certainly no advocate of this view, since I think it leads to the incoherence that "what the world is really like is the way it is conceived of without a mind,"but the problems of spatial perspective are sort of a trivial instances.

And if that is so, then perspective is not an attribute of the world, but of how we say things about the world. We can rephrase things in ways that do not depend on where we are standing...."

I don't see how you've shown this at all. In your example, perspective absolutely is an attribute of the world. "How we say things" is a consequence of how we experience them, and how we experience them says something about how the world is (else we need to write off empiricism). "How we say things" isn't something that is arbitrarily related to how the world is, nor do our practices of speech just happen to be what they are. Terms for perspective are universal across all languages because perspective is universal.

Part of the problem here is perhaps that both analytic and continental philosophy of science has become so divorced from how scientists tend to think of their work that it has become largely irrelevant to scientific practices. The extreme skepticism and general anti-realism one finds in a lot of philosophy of science seems contained largely to the philosophers — Count Timothy von Icarus

Scientists aren’t paid to think about their work, they’re paid to produce results. That’s why we need philosophers of science. When scientists do engage in metaphysical speculation, it rarely reaches the level of sophistication of someone like a Heisenberg or Bohm, which is why it may seem to many scientists that philosophy of science today is ‘divorced from how they think of their work’. But there is an important difference between a philosophical perspective being irrelevant to scientific practices and that perspective being treated as irrelevant by those who don’t have deep enough insight not the nature of their own practices. It wasnt that long ago that scientists were oblivious to concepts like Popperian falsificationism and paradigm shifts, which are now ingrained within the way many of they think about their practices.

Scientists aren’t paid to think about their work, they’re paid to produce results. — Joshs

:roll:

Hi @Wayfarer, can I join in on your Thread? Can I kindly request that you put me up to speed here? What is the "Main Thing" that you are currently discussing right now in this Thread, and how could I contribute, either constructively or "destructively" (de-constructively, if you will)? Forgive my fondness for plain and simple English, and for relying so heavily on intuition, valid sound reasoning, and good common sense.

Cheers.

Sure. It's a discussion of an essay published in Aeon in 2019, The Blind Spot, Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser and Evan Thompson, so reading that would be a good starting point.

@Wayfarer here's where the article gets it wrong, IMHO:

Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real.

Scientific materialism is not necessarily reductionist. Bunge's brand of Scientific materialism is emergentist, and literally so. An ordinary object such as a table is just as real as a quark. In fact, that very same table, is not identical to the plurality of elementary particles that compose it. It is a new thing, a new object, that emerges from them.

I note Mario Bunge is a compatriot of yours! I’d never heard of him prior to your mention of him, but insofar as he describes himself as materialist, then I’m duty bound to disagree with him, and reading his Wikipedia entry, I see he devoted his life to arguing against what this essay is arguing for. So I suppose it might make for an interesting clash of views, but perhaps read a bit more into that essay and bring up a few more points.

I note Mario Bunge is a compatriot of yours! — Wayfarer

Well he was, he died a few years ago. We share "argenticity", (if that's even a thing), not "canadianicity" (if that's even a thing).

but perhaps read a bit more into that essay and bring up a few more points. — Wayfarer

OK, fair enough. I don't agree with Bunge myself, on several key points.

@Wayfarer I've read the article. How can I contribute to this discussion, now? What would you need of me, in philosophical terms? Is it something specific? Like "tell me the list of points that the article gets wrong", or is it something general? Like, "tell me what you think of these issues".

. How can I contribute to this discussion, now? — Arcane Sandwich

Well, I noticed reading Mario Bunge's Wikipedia entry that he's critical of phenomenology. I have never read anything about him, but it might be a good starting point, as that article is grounded in phenomenology.

For example, here's a quotation from the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology about Husserl's criticism of naturalism:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense… but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one - one which… focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. — Source

How do you think a Mario Bunge would respond to that criticism?

Well, I noticed reading Mario Bunge's Wikipedia entry that he's critical of phenomenology. I have never read anything about him, but it might be a good starting point, as that article is grounded in phenomenology. — Wayfarer

Then I would direct you to the most controversial, scathing, irreverent piece of literature that he has ever written, which is something that I normally don't share with acquaintances, not even with fellow Bungeans. I'm of course referring to his infamous article, titled In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia. Disclaimer: I do not fully agree with Bunge in general, and that document that he wrote is the one I feel the most negative about. It's a very confrontational piece, and it gets a few things factually wrong. But if you're interested in "learning how his mind works", so to speak, that's the article to read.

How do you think a Mario Bunge would respond to that criticism? — Wayfarer

I'll quote him. Again, I don't share the following view, I'm just quoting Bunge's words for ease of reference. This is from the article that I just linked above. He says:

Example 2: Phenomenology. This school, the parent of existentialism, is characterized by opaqueness. Let the reader judge from this sample of its founder’s celebrated attack upon the exact and natural sciences: “I as primaeval I Ur-lch construct konstituire my horizon of transcendental others as cosubjects of the transcendental intersubjectivity that constructs the world.” Phenomenology is also a modern paragon of subjectivism. In fact, according to its founder the gist of phenomenology is that it is a “pure egology,” a “science of the concrete transcendental subjectivity.” As such, it is “in utmost opposition to the sciences as they have been conceived up until now, i.e., as objective sciences.” The very first move of the phenomenologist is the “phenomenological reduction” or “bracketing out” (époché) of the external world. “One must lose the world through époché in order to regain it through universal self-examination.” He must do this because his “universal task” is the discovery of himself as transcendental (i.e., nonempirical) ego.

↪180 Proof :100: As I have pointed out several times science performs a methodological epoché in the opposite direction to the epoché of phenomenology. But this falls on deaf ears. I have repeatedly asked Wayfarer to explain how the idea of the subjective would be helpful in the pursuit of any of the hard sciences. He does not even attempt to answer, but rather just ignores the question. — Janus

I can give you a very clear answer to this question by way of the tinted glass analogy. When looking at the world through a tinted glass, it is necessary to determine what the tinting of the glass "adds" to the observation, in order to derive a "true" interpretation of the observation.

Since the method applied by the hard sciences, as "the scientific method" is carried out by human subjects, it is necessary to understand what the subject "adds" to the scientific method, as the subjective aspect of science, in the very same way that it is necessary to understand what the tinting of the glass "adds" to the observation.

When the existence of the subjective element is known about, and respected as a true feature, and a deficiency of the scientific method, we naturally account for the reality of this "blind spot", and there is no great problem, just a healthy scientific skepticism and a respect for the fallibility of science. But when the reality of the blind spot is denied, and the relevant deficiencies of the scientific method are ignored, that is an attitudinal illness which is a problem.

Your answer doesn't address the question at all. There is a science of perception. The point is that the hard sciences, including the science of perception, obviously deal with how things appear to us, and i doubt anyone who has thought about the matter at any length would deny that. My question was as to how including considerations of the subject (however that might be conceived) would improve the methods and results in sciences such as chemistry, geology, ecology or biology.

And?

And what? What would you need of me, philosophically, at this point in the conversation?

Well, mere indignation does not an argument make. Bunge only conveys that he finds phenomenological literature ‘opaque’ - which it often is - but offers no argument against it in that passage, other than the implication that it’s obviously wrong. So, what’s wrong with it?

Fair enough, then I'll quote the next paragraph of the same document, on the example of phenomenology. He says:

Having feigned that real things such as chairs and colleagues do not exist, the phenomenologist proceeds to uncover their essences. To this end he makes use of a special intuition called “vision of essences” (Wesensschau), the nature of which is not explained, and for which no evidence at all is offered. The result is an a priori and intuitive science. This “science” proves to be nothing but transcendental idealism. This subjectivism is not only epistemological but also ontological: “the world itself is an infinite idea.” — Mario Bunge

What do you make of that? Should I continue quoting, or would you like to argue something?

I think it conveys a superficial grasp of what he’s intending to criticise. But it’s really the tone rather than the substance of the comments. ‘It proves to be nothing but transcendental idealism’ as if that itself provides sufficient condemnation. Whereas, it is my view that transcendental idealism stands the test of time, and that it is not for nothing that the Critique of Pure Reason is regarded as one of the seminal philosophical books of the modern period. Basically, Bunge is simply appealing to the like-minded.

Go back to the passage I quoted:

For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense… but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one. — Source

I find that neither obscure or opaque. What do you think is wrong with it?

I think it conveys a superficial grasp of what he’s intending to criticise. But it’s really the tone rather than the substance of the comments. ‘It proves to be nothing but transcendental idealism’ as if that itself provides sufficient condemnation. Whereas, it is my view that transcendental idealism stands the test of time, and that it is not for nothing that the Critique of Pure Reason is regarded as one of the seminal philosophical books of the modern period. Basically, Bunge is simply appealing to the like-minded. — Wayfarer

I agree. I don't agree with Bunge on that point, I agree with you, actually. Mate, it's not that I don't understand ya, it's just that you asked me to explain Bunge's POV, and that's wha' I'm doin', ey. Don't get ya knickas up in'a bunch ey.

As for the passage that you quoted, which you find neither obscure nor opaque (and I agree with you there), I'll just quote the next paragraph from Bunge's relevant text:

How could anyone think that this wild fantasy could shed any light on anything except the decadence of German philosophy? This extravagance can only have at least one of two negative effects on social studies. One is to focus on individual behavior and deny the real existence of social systems and macrosocial facts; these would be the products of such intellectual procedures as aggregation and “interpretation” (guessing). The other possible negative effect is to alienate students from empirical research, thus turning the clock back to the times of armchair (“humanistic”) social studies. The effect of the former move is that social science is impossible; that of the second is that social science is impossible. Either or both of these effects are apparent in the two schools to be examined next. — Mario Bunge

Again, does that answer your question, or not? If not, then what can I do for you, philosophically, mate?