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Does philosophy evolve?

JustGeoff said:
Well that's a grey area, as shown by the example of Blondlot and the non-existent N-Rays. They weren't on crack, but a whole bunch of them managed to convince themselves they were seeing something which was never there. It was science for a while, but the wider scientific community eventually rejected it, just as they would reject the "ether" in your example. If this is what defines science then scientists are under an obligation to be very careful that they are being as objective as possible at al ltimes, and not allowing themselves to be influenced by idealogical and metaphysical preferences of any sort, or their egos and career requirements. Usually they do quite a good job, but sometimes it does go wrong - at least for a while.
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I think, the point is, science is self-correcting. And what's science today, might be a humourous historical footnote tomorrow.
 
jay gw said:
So philosophy is self correcting too?
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Not nearly to the same extent. Dead scientific theories have a tendency to stay dead, beause they've been refuted by direct empirical and experimental evidence. Anyone trying to resurrect such a theory would have an extremely difficult time overcoming the mass of data that killed it in the first place.

Philosophical ideas, on the other hand, tend not to be subject to that sort of empirical disproof, so they don't stay dead nearly as well. This is why various bits of gaudy nonsense can keep getting shined up and trotted out despite the theories long ago having been exploded. For example, St. Anselm's ontological "proof" of the existence of God has some flaws that have been well-known for centuries (Descartes wrote extensively on some of these), but people keep trotting it out as though unaware of the flaws -- or less charitably, as though they hope their audience is unaware of the flaws.
 
Philosophical ideas, on the other hand, tend not to be subject to that sort of empirical disproof, so they don't stay dead nearly as well.
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Meaning any evolution of philosophy is going to be messy.
 
It's late and I don't have time to read all the responses as I have to take care of a sick kitten. I read your post at the beginning of this thread and it caught me eye, as you mentioned philosophical evolution and linear thinking.

Now this is purely my opinion. Nothing evolves linearly, species do not, and thought does not. Linear thinking is very limited. Look at this vast Universe, look at our Milky Way...is there a linear component in either? Is there a flat planet or square star or planet, or square solar system? Everything in our Universe is in spirals, or rounds if you will. In our little world, on Planet Earth, every plane that flies does not go from Point A to Point B. They follow the round curve of our planet to get from Point A to Point B. Even the linear phrase "as a crow flies" belies linear thinking as there are no true straight lines on our planet. Sure there are on maps, but they don't truly exist.

Just something to think about.
 
.....and if you do go in a straight line and head straight off into space, you will still be following a curved path!

BJ
 
Harvestmoon said:
Nothing evolves linearly, species do not, and thought does not. Linear thinking is very limited. Look at this vast Universe, look at our Milky Way...is there a linear component in either? Is there a flat planet or square star or planet, or square solar system? Everything in our Universe is in spirals, or rounds if you will. In our little world, on Planet Earth, every plane that flies does not go from Point A to Point B. They follow the round curve of our planet to get from Point A to Point B. Even the linear phrase "as a crow flies" belies linear thinking as there are no true straight lines on our planet. Sure there are on maps, but they don't truly exist.
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This paragraph would probably make more sense if you used the word "linear" in a consistent, or even meaningful, way.
 
Dead scientific theories have a tendency to stay dead, beause they've been refuted by direct empirical and experimental evidence. Anyone trying to resurrect such a theory would have an extremely difficult time overcoming the mass of data that killed it in the first place.

Philosophical ideas, on the other hand, tend not to be subject to that sort of empirical disproof, so they don't stay dead nearly as well....
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There's certainly a sense in which this is accurate - but I don't know that it's as clear or easy a difference as you make it sound. Certainly scientific theories which have been refuted clearly tend to stay dead - but I would point out that the same is true of philosophic theories (they too tend to stay dead unless someone can overcome the argument(s) that killed them in the first place). Philosophic ideas, however, tend towards a certain longevity - but this is different than theories. For example: there are plenty of platonic realists out there about numbers, or moral truths, or whatever - but I doubt any of them hold strictly to Plato's theory: rather they have their own, similar but not identical, views. In other words, if you want to talk about specific scientific theories or philosophic theories then I'm not sure your distinction works as well - but if you want to talk about more general philosophic ideas (in the way that someone might refer to themselves as a platonist or a humean or something) then there does seem to be a difference, but it's a rather poor comparison at that point.

And frankly I'm not sure this isn't also true to a certain extent of the sciences - though less so as science seems to move en masse to a greater extent than philosophy.
 
Eleatic Stranger said:
There's certainly a sense in which this is accurate - but I don't know that it's as clear or easy a difference as you make it sound. Certainly scientific theories which have been refuted clearly tend to stay dead - but I would point out that the same is true of philosophic theories (they too tend to stay dead unless someone can overcome the argument(s) that killed them in the first place).
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Actually, the real problem is that the notion of a "dead" theory is not especially well-defined.

In science it's easy. Scientists tend (especially in the last 300 years), by design, to focus on questions that are both empirically testable and falsifiable, and if someone proposes an interesting theory for which no testing is available, they will work hard to develop such tests. Such testing tends to produce clear-cut success or failure when you look at the experimental results. But the usual fate of a scientific theory is either quick experimental demonstration or a quick and merciful death at the hands of an ugly fact. It's rather rare (continental drift is an example) that an untestable theory will hang around long enough to, for example, fall in and out of fashion. The fields where it happens -- for example, psychology or economics -- are notable both for this behavior and also for being among the least "scientific" of the sciences.

Philosophical ideas, however, tend not to be testable, and as a result the "death" of a philosophic theory tends instead to occur when it falls out of fashion among the practitioners without necessarily having been formally killed by something as substantial as contrary data. Which leaves the door open for a change in fashion to return the theory to active life again.

Some of the counterexamples are quite illustrative of this. For example : the scientific discipline of "information theory" had quite a run in the late 50s and early 60s, especially in applications to linguistics, but then interest (and funding) petered out. All of the easy results seemed to have been found, and there was no practical way to do the tedious computations necessary to extend the theories and methods to the next logical level. Since no one could do any work in the field, no one did, and the field as a whole languished for about thirty years.

Of course, "tedious computations" are what computers do best, and starting in the late 80s and early 90s, it became possible, indeed a cottage industry, for people to do information-theoretic analysis of language; this is called "corpus linguistics." Now that computers cost less than $500, the tedious calculations are barely an issue. So this is an example of a theory dying without being refuted -- but it's also conspicuously an unusual example in the so-called "hard sciences" like mathematics.

On the other hand, stuff like this happens all the time in psychology or economics. For example, Marxism has never formally been refuted; it has simply fallen out of fashion (in the West) with the collapse of the Soviet Union. SImilarly, Freud or Jung have never formally been disproven (that would, in fact, be hard, since the theories have no testable consequences), but are not often taught or practiced any more. This allows for the possiblity that a newly articular disciple of Freud -- or the rise of a new and powerful "Marxist" state -- might bring them back as possible theories.


And frankly I'm not sure this isn't also true to a certain extent of the sciences - though less so as science seems to move en masse to a greater extent than philosophy.
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There is of course a continuum. But you're right that science seems to move more uniformly than philosophy. I submit that that's an effect of the process described above. Most scientists are willing to abandon long-held beliefs in the face of hard data, and the hard data is much more readily available when we're dealing with experimental, scientific, questions. It's hard to disbelieve in the possibility of atomic energy when you're looking at footage of a bomb test. It's hard to ignore the Big Bang when you're listening to it. And it's rather hard to state that parity is conserved when colleagues of yours just won the Nobel Prize for experimentally disproving it.

More recently, consider the mass of the neutrino. When I was in school, neutrinos were massless. Full stop, no questions asked. What the heck else could they be? It was only in 1998 that the SuperKamiokande actually found evidence to refute that. But today the idea of a massless neutrino is about as dead as a theory can be; no reputable physicist can hold onto that belief in the teeth of the evidence.
 
Philosophical ideas, however, tend not to be testable, and as a result the "death" of a philosophic theory tends instead to occur when it falls out of fashion among the practitioners without necessarily having been formally killed by something as substantial as contrary data.
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Why aren't philosophical ideas testable? They have to conform to common sense and logical rules. They have to conform to cultural norms.
 
While you are right about science, I still think you're not quite right about Philosophy - and I think as above it has something to do with the way you're treating philosophic positions. Another way of putting what I take to be the problem is that there isn't an easy parallel between scientific theories and philosophic positions - for one, philosophic positions are considered conclusions. But they're considered very general conclusions ("stuff is made from other stuff", for example) - and not necessarily particularly specific ones. This is no more than a matter of nomenclature, though - the positions philosophers hold are specific, but it's hard to specify them but by reference to the sum total of their arguments. So we use things like "realism about such and such", or "prescriptivism" or that sort of thing.

And arguments, of course, can (and are) often challenged, disproven, or what have you. Positions - along the above lines - are far less likely to be disproven, of course, but that's not in their nature anyway. This isn't a substantial difference from science, necessarily (there are substantial differences, of course, but this need not be one), though - merely a place where what looks like an easy analogy is in fact not one at all.
 
jay gw said:
Why aren't philosophical ideas testable? They have to conform to common sense and logical rules.
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Because "common sense" isn't.
 
Eleatic Stranger said:

And arguments, of course, can (and are) often challenged, disproven, or what have you. Positions - along the above lines - are far less likely to be disproven, of course, but that's not in their nature anyway.
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Actually, you've more or less just proven my point in two independent ways, as I read it.

First, although arguments are often "challenged," they're extremely rarely "disproven" in the sense that a scientist or mathematician would use. One philosopher will "challenge" another by offering a counterargument that he holds is more logical, convincing, or consistent with common sense, and the onlookers get to pick whom they find the more convincing. But because there's so little uniformity of opinion about the nature of logic or common sense, you will (relatively) rarely see a uniformity of opinion that the first argument has been "disproven."

Basically, evidence gets treated differently. You can see that for yourself by simply asking Popper's question "what would falsify your theory?" Most scientists have no problem describing a fact or experimental finding that would entirely destroy their current theory and invalidate their current experiment. Such facts are usually fairly straightforward and data-driven. When such a fact comes along, it's usually obvious to all involved, including the people who just got their theory destroyed. (The experiment with neutrino mass are a good example of this.)

On the other hand, it's usually difficult for a philosopher to articulate what it would take to invalidate "realism about such and such" or "utilitarianism" or "prescriptivism." Usually they would be convinced by a more persuasive argument -- but the idea of persuasive isn't well-defined and reasonable people can disagree on this.

But this, of course, is exactly what you said, and this gets to my second point. "Positions - along the above lines - are far less likely to be disproven, of course, but that's not in their nature anyway." Contrary to your claim, this is a substantive difference between philosophy and science; science deals for the most part with the empirically testable. More than that, science deals seriously with the notion of "predictive." If a scientific theory is not predictive, it's arguably (in the opinions of most scientists and most philosophers of science) not science at all -- this is one of main complaints leveled at both Intelligent Design and at the Theory of Evolution. If a (scientific) theory makes a prediction [as it must] and the prediction fails, the theory is falsified and must be modified or abandoned. Philosophical positions, on the other hand, are rarely predictive.


It's not a hard and fast division; many scientists will deal with questions that are not easily testable, and some philosophers will take questions of validation and disproof extremely seriously. But there's still a strong distributional difference between the two fields.

It's perhaps illustrative that one of the strongest complaints that can be leveled by practicing scientists against a line of reasoning is "that's philosophy, not science!" (Google it for yourself.) What's meant by this? What is usually meant is that the theory being proposed has no observable or testable consequences.

I submit that most of the traditional philosophical fields, questions, and "positions" are in exactly that situation. Having no testable consequences, they cannot be falsified. If they cannot be falsified, they cannot be "disproven."
 
new drkitten said:
Actually, you've more or less just proven my point in two independent ways, as I read it.

First, although arguments are often "challenged," they're extremely rarely "disproven" in the sense that a scientist or mathematician would use. One philosopher will "challenge" another by offering a counterargument that he holds is more logical, convincing, or consistent with common sense, and the onlookers get to pick whom they find the more convincing. But because there's so little uniformity of opinion about the nature of logic or common sense, you will (relatively) rarely see a uniformity of opinion that the first argument has been "disproven."
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Except this is in fact quite incorrect - firstly because often "proven" is quite close (or in some areas identical) to the sense in which mathematicians use it. Moreso because you fail to distinguish neatly between a counterargument to a position (which does make sense along those lines) and a counter argument to an argument (which does not). Finally, frankly, I'm not sure how one couldn't say the exact same thing, again, about science - if only be replacing "uniformity of opinion about the nature of logic or common sense" with "uniformity of opinion about the nature of evidence".

On the other hand, it's usually difficult for a philosopher to articulate what it would take to invalidate "realism about such and such" or "utilitarianism" or "prescriptivism." Usually they would be convinced by a more persuasive argument -- but the idea of persuasive isn't well-defined and reasonable people can disagree on this.

But this, of course, is exactly what you said, and this gets to my second point. "Positions - along the above lines - are far less likely to be disproven, of course, but that's not in their nature anyway." Contrary to your claim, this is a substantive difference between philosophy and science; science deals for the most part with the empirically testable. More than that, science deals seriously with the notion of "predictive." If a scientific theory is not predictive, it's arguably (in the opinions of most scientists and most philosophers of science) not science at all -- this is one of main complaints leveled at both Intelligent Design and at the Theory of Evolution. If a (scientific) theory makes a prediction [as it must] and the prediction fails, the theory is falsified and must be modified or abandoned. Philosophical positions, on the other hand, are rarely predictive.
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And here you've accurately hit on my point, but missed the point of my point. "positions" along the lines that I was using are less likely to be disproven because they're not really things people hold in the first place - they're just useful catagories in which to slot actual bits of philosophy. You used the example of utilitarianism earlier, which is a good one. It would be very, very dificult to conclusively disprove utilitarianism - or even to imagine what such a disproof would look like. However this is not for the reasons you seem to think it is - it is because "utilitarianism" is a general term and not a theory (one might similarly attempt to ask a scientist what might falsify astrophysics, though as with the above parallel this one to is strained). We might imagine someone disproving the utilitarianism Mill sets out in Utilitarianism, or perhaps Bentham's version, or Singer's, or any number of other variations on the general theme (and even in this case disproving Mill's Utilitarianism would amount to little more than a shorthand way of saying "disproving Mill's arguments for utilitarianism")- but the general theme itself?

Finally I'll note that there have been philosophical theories that could be scientifically tested (and at times were) - and either proven or disproven on those grounds.
 
It would be very, very dificult to conclusively disprove utilitarianism
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If philosophical theories can't be disproven and can't pass the tests for validity scientific theories do, then that means they're inferior as far as explanantion. Why would anyone rely on them?

And what's the saying about "if it covers everything, it covers nothing"?
 
If philosophical theories can't be disproven and can't pass the tests for validity scientific theories do, then that means they're inferior as far as explanantion. Why would anyone rely on them?
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Holy christ man, did you even read the post or did you just scan through it looking for something to quote out of context? I'm not even going to bother going into the fact that your comment here is completely unmotivated (If something can't pass the scientific test for validity then it's inferior as far as explanation (of?)? Unless you have some pretty impressive argument hiding up your sleeve that's just sheer nonsense as far as an inference goes (and if you do, please show it to me so I can write it up and have a prestigious publication on my CV, hm?).

The reason it's dificult to disprove it is because it isn't a single theory but rather a general catagory of theories which resemble each other covering a possibly infinite range of positions which share certain loosely defined characteristics. And this is how most "philosophical theories" are - the actual straight up positions, in fact, are usually highly complicated collections of arguments and as such are regularly disproven, altered, disproven again, altered, tested, etc. That's what philosophers do. My point, again, is that the parallel between the two is mistaken because it's treating scientific theories and things like "utilitarianism" as playing a similar role in science and philosophy and that's just not the case.
 
Holy christ man, did you even read the post or did you just scan through it looking for something to quote out of context?
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Why don't you just state your argument instead of ranting?

You're not really expecting anyone to believe that philosophical theories have the same status as scientific theories?

Philosophers aren't trying to explain anything? Funny, it seemed like they were explaining ideas, maybe not though.
 
The second paragraph? The one starting out:

"The reason it's dificult to disprove it is because it isn't a single theory but rather a general catagory of theories which resemble each other covering a possibly infinite range of positions which share certain loosely defined characteristics."


What is "it"? Philosophical theories?

What general category of theories are they?

Positions in philosophy are infinite? How do you know? That would mean I can make up any ideas I want to like flat earthers, and attain the status of John Locke.

What loosely defined characteristics do they share? Is there any particular reason why you're denying that philosophy is in fact a discipline?
 
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