🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3227@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> rjf@ukc.ac.uk (Robin Faichney) writes:
>In article <825@klipper.cs.vu.nl> I wrote:
>>Now I would wish more people dug into the philosophical basis
>>of that methodology, so that they would become a little less confident in
>>yelling "it's scientifically proven!".

>Does this mean 'significantly less confident in a significant number of
>cases'? If so, it seems to me obviously false.

I don't know what "significantly less confident" means. Do you have a
confidence metric? Anyway, I did mean the significant number of cases,
and I did mean "clearly less confident, I would be happy with every bit".
Can you explain what you think is false and why you think so? Generally,
Bob Myers catched what I meant, I got the impression.

>If not, why say it?

I didn't say it. I said what I said, and I didn't say what *you* said.
Or didn't you mean "it" to refer to your paraphrase? If it refers to
my original statement, it reduces to:

I: <something>
you: Do you mean <something else>? If not, why say <something>?

In short: I think I don't grasp you here.

>>reflecting (is that the right word?)

>I hope that is not the right word.

OK, then it is not the right word. Let me try to explain (something to which
I start feeling utterly incapable):

In an "ideal" world, where methodology for every science is complete,
scientific work is just applying the rules of the methodology for that
realm of science: which experiments to perform, which hypotheses to
consider, all is prescribed by the rules. I called this "when philosophy
is ready" (as far as methodology is considered, that is...). So,
ultimately, scientific work is not creative (I hope I now have found the
word..). Of course at the moment it is, since philosophers aren't ready
yet constructing methodologies, and aren't even sure some "final" methodology
is possible at all (it may very well not be).

Philosophy, however, must be creative, since it has to *find* the very rules
by which to abide when thinking and doing.

>>there is no philosophical methodology (there can't be: how would
>>that methodology be justified? By itself?)..
>
>Your assumption here is that philosophy is some sort of monolithic precursor
>to everything else.

Nothing monolithic, but in my first article I restricted myself, when saying
"philosophy", to purely those parts of it that formed the fundament of
science. (Remember: I listed: (1) Does anything at all (God?) exist; (2) Do
I exist; (3) Does an "outside" exist, etc., and made some remarks about
changing the order of the first two.) So by definition philosophy became
a precursor to science. Remember also that my first note was directed to
some people having trouble with the word "science", not to philosophers.

And if I say philosophy has no methodology: a scientist cannot challenge the
methodology of his discipline without leaving science (not just his disci-
pline) and becoming a philosopher. A scientist can (and has to) take the
dictate of his methodology as the last word. A philosopher may have rules
he obeys in his work, but he cannot take them for granted, he has to
support them (if only by saying "aren't they convincing?"). A scientist may
take an empirical fact, apply some mathematical theorem on it, and say
"well, that theorem is *proven*". A mathematician has to challenge the
proof, to look for the presuppositions, and to convince himself, to
persuade himself (no rules) it is true (or not). For a mathematician
nothing is ever proven, the proofs can only become more convincing.
Of course a mathematician can consider the axioms of (some) logic
very convincing (I don't really, by the way, but that's another problem),
but he cannot use the fact that logicians have proven something as an
absolute (most do, however, even if they say they shouldn't.
The same way as most mathematical theorems aren't ever proven, only
convincing outlines of proofs are given. A proof in the logical sense
would be too long, dull and fatiguing).
[I guess I should have put quotation marks around "proof" in the above.]

Then again, whenever I say "a philosopher should(n't)", some philosopher
will come and say "I don't think so".

If I say philosophy has no methodology, I mean that in the sense mathematics
has no methodology. Of course there are methods and rules, but as Goedel
showed for mathematics) a philosophical field may "turn over itself", in a
sense (I don't know how to say this), and show itself wrong. Compare this
with the way physics showed the deterministic world view wrong with QM.

>Some things are essentially practical. (I'd say one of these is
>science, but I'm not going to argue that here.)

We could start a discussion on what "practical" means (to a philosopher),
but I propose that in that case we should start it under another header,
and completely separated from this one. (Might be interesting, by the way.)

>The fact that that methodology cannot be completely and precisely defined,
>(and more to the point: is not familiar to the layman) does not mean it
>does not exist.

Then what is your definition of methodology? To me, if a methodology cannot
be stated, it is none. Indeed, most (I suspect all) sciences only have
partial methodologies, but in as far as they exist they can be stated
precisely.

>I repeat: make sure you know about something before attempting to enlighten
>us all about it.

What exactly did I misdo you, that you fell so heavily over me? :-)
What was triggering you in my first two messages? That I attributed
methodology (and mathematics) to philosophy, and not to science?
That I showed otherwise paradoxes like the Occams razor one would occur?
That I admitted (I don't know to whom any more) that philosophy was more
prone to paradoxes than science? That I said this was because philosophers
were working "below the line"?

I think long point-by-point rebuttals of long point-by-point rebuttals
of ... will only bore the readers of s.p.t., and detract from whatever
it was that caused you to react in the first place. I propose that if
we decide to continue on that, we'll do it by email, and that an explication
on the original point of disagreement (whatever it was) can be done
in this newsgroup. Our rebuttals move too fast, there is no static topic.

BTW, where I just skipped some of your points, unless I missed the intent
I agreed.
-- 
						Biep.  (biep@cs.vu.nl via mcvax)
	    General-purpose hardware is great! Now I can
	      change my mind without changing my brain!