🚀 go-pugleaf

"Watson & Parisi" <niche@rcn.com> wrote in message news:<bouirn$q95$1@bob.news.rcn.net>...

>Plumbing is not a method for gaining knowledge; philosophy is.<

COMMENT

I would argue with both propositions. You don't have to do very much
plumbing until you gain all kinds of practical pieces of knowledge,
such as what flows downhill, and why properly vented water traps
between you and the sewer mains are quite useful. You might argue that
if you discover these things heuristically (and *somebody* had to
discover them, though who it was, is lost to history), then you're not
doing plumbing, but really philosophy. However, I see no reason to
separate out the philosophy part. It's not as if there's some method
which is known to philosophers (and ignored by other disciplines at
their peril), which involves an algorithm by which you feed raw
observations of nature into one end, and derive hypotheses, theories,
or revealed inductive truths out of the other end. Yes, I know that
modern philosophers like to pretend this.

Now, we are in possession of certain useful rules of thumb for how to
frame scientific theories and how to test them to see if they are bad
(ie, not useful or predictive) or good (i.e., useful and predictive).
But these rules do not tell us how to make the theories. That remains
a mystery. And the rules on how to test theories did not in general
come from the people who today call themselves philosophers. Rather,
they mostly came from people who were working in various fields (like
physics and chemistry and plumbing) trying to solve problems and
predict the future using mathematics. Go back far enough, and they
might have been called "natural philosophers" but those folks are what
we call scientists and civil design engineers today. They usually
discovered things like the behavior of sewage without any help from
academic philosophy departments. Really. Although considering the
products of modern academic philosophy departments, it possibly would
have saved some time to ask them about that particular subject...

> The empirical method of gaining knowledge by testing hypotheses through observation was an approach that developed over time, and that gained dominance because of its self correcting nature.<

COMMENT:

Sorry, but there is no such general method. There are a lot of rules
of thumb for various disciplines, and to the extent that these overlap
disciplines, the overlap and resemblance is due to surveys after the
fact of development, not before. And it's not very useful to the
disciplines. It's sort of like comparative art history and the idea
that it's a guide to the innovative artist. Sorry, but although
comparative lit or art departments might teach this, actual innovators
laugh at it.

COMMENT:

> Surely the development of the approach itself is a more fundamental insight than its particular applications, and that development falls into the realm of epistemology, like it or not.<

COMMENT:

Again, the "realm" of epistemology is like the "realm" of comparative
English literature. The stuff from comparative lit that working
writers need, they generally already have, or else can more easily
learn from other places. And the stuff from it that writers don't
need, they don't need. The same goes for working scientists and
philosophers.

I've seen real working scientists take bunches of data through office
doors that say "Department of Statistics." But I've never seen a
Department of Epistemology consult. The very idea is worthy of a
cartoon. Philosophers study the works of scientists to learn about
epistemology, not the other way around.

SBH





> 
> Plumbing is not a method for gaining knowledge; philosophy is. The empirical
> method of gaining knowledge by testing hypotheses through observation was an
> approach that developed over time, and that gained dominance because of its
> self correcting nature. Surely the development of the approach itself is a
> more fundamental insight than its particular applications, and that
> development falls into the realm of epistemology, like it or not.
> 
> Robert.