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
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
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.
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...."
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
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.
I note Mario Bunge is a compatriot of yours! — Wayfarer
but perhaps read a bit more into that essay and bring up a few more points. — Wayfarer
. How can I contribute to this discussion, now? — Arcane Sandwich
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
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
How do you think a Mario Bunge would respond to that criticism? — Wayfarer
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
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
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 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
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
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