I.CanImmanuel Can wrote:Seriously?...that summarizes my complaint with those who label themselves philosophers. They invent irrelevant notions to discuss. How, then, can they be relevant to whatever forms reality takes?
Okay, I'll give a serious answer, even if I find the question...well, I suppose the phrase I want is "unbelievably naïve." Sorry...that's how I see it.
I don't want to be mean, but what you say is like saying "Theoretical physics is useless, because it doesn't build bridges." Or like saying, "Economic theory is useless because it doesn't make my business successful." It just looks like a lack of understanding of the whole enterprise.
Okay, enough metaphors. What philosophers argue in theory has huge, huge potential payoffs in the real world. I don't mean endless caviling and gratuitous contradiction do that, but that the careful working through of ideas in the hypothetical, the conceptual solving of problems, eliminating of irrationalities and grounding of intentions gives us huge gains in terms of the clarity of our thoughts and plans, and costs us not a cent, no tears, and not a drop of human blood. Working controversies out in real life costs plenty of all three sometimes.
If that line of thought doesn't impress you, okay. And if you don't like philosophers, then I suppose you can go and do whatever else you find useful to do. You're not obliged to participate in an activity you think is useless, of course. But I find it a staggeringly naïve perspective, honestly.
Your theoretical physics analogy is silly. I've done both the theoretical and the engineering aspects of physics and find them essential to one another's grasp on reality. The most powerful contributions to our civilizations have come from theoretical physics-- yet that stuff would be irrelevant without implementers.
Economic theory is a better example of my perspective than of yours. I'm a practical man who lives in a simple mortgage-free cabin and has no debts. I live w/o economic worries thanks to my forays into exotic economics decades earlier, from which I learned that conservative use of money works well for those of us who do not have access to the right astrologer. I watched the U.S. fall into economic and political decline when our greedy politicians eschewed Friedman's economic theories in favor of the more expedient opinions of J.M. (We can borrow it from ourselves!!) Keynes.
If I recall rightly, the official U.S. national debt ticked past 18 x 10exp9 just recently. That bullshit will collapse.
Comparing physics to economics is a weak comparison. A new physical theory is like a new dance move, learned with the assistance of an instructor who mostly back-leads the patterns of movement. One can go out to a dance hall that evening and try out the move with dancers unfamiliar with it. Can one lead a non-instructor through a complex move, or does the pattern collapse in real life? Collapse means that the move ignores the rules of partnership dancing, the dance-floor equivalent of functionality.
That's one of the things I like about theoretical physics. A theory can be validated because there are agreed-upon standards for its success or failure. This is not the case with economics. Politicians pick and choose their economic theory of the day according to their personal needs, not for long-term objective results. Today we see the results of Keynesian economics, and listen to nitwits in government deny that those results will have consequences.
Personally, I think that those consequences are within a few years of coming home to roost. We'll know them when the rest of the world decides that oil will be priced in Yuan.
One of the other things I like about theoretical physics is that its hypotheses can be tested non-destructively.
Moving on, you wrote, "...the careful working through of ideas in the hypothetical, the conceptual solving of problems, eliminating of irrationalities and grounding of intentions gives us huge gains in terms of the clarity of our thoughts and plans, and costs us not a cent, no tears, and not a drop of human blood."
Last I heard, Karl Marx was regarded as, guess what? A philosopher! Yep, no blood lost there, not under the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin's regime, or the Cuban revolution, or Mao's purge of Chinese intellectuals, etc. Tell me once again how naive I am, if you can get your head out of your ass long enough to explain.
When you are finished with that, kindly refer me to a source of the ideas that have been worked through, irrationalities and grounding, clarity of thoughts etc. Before you do so, spend a day watching Fox News. You'll probably need a glass navel in order to view it properly, and earbuds to listen.
I have regular conversations with a philosopher who is also well versed in physics and theoretical mathematics, and have read some philosophers who I greatly admire. So I'm not down on philosophers in general. But I am seriously disappointed in the modern genre, the general irrelevance of which you seem to exemplify as well as any.
Greylorn
