Scientific Dishonesty

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Ironically, the latter (namely political science aka politology) has more influence on the modern world than some "serious" sciences, mathematics, for instance.

Yet since this enquiry is FOR human beings and only about the things humans CAN EXPERIENCE, it seems to be quite adequate for all purposes humans may have in mind.

Yes, Scientific Enquiry is eminently useful, as is logic. However, so is Newtonian Physics.

Newtonian Physics is also, technically, wrong.

I'm afraid this is all credit philosophy can claim. In 2500 years it is too little a harvest. So it is as good as extinct.

Philosophy is there to give you an answer late at night when you finally realise you can't prove that 1+1 =2.

Actual example.

Now, with my tongue entirely out of my cheekpad, I would say that the actual purpose of philosophy is to guard against the Socratic fallacy - the belief being an expert in something gives you the right or qualifications to speak on any and every topic.

[Montmorency]

Philosophy is there to give you an answer late at night when you finally realise you can't prove that 1+1 =2.

Moreover, you can't demonstrate the necessity of proof, or even the possibility of proof in itself.

Now, with my tongue entirely out of my cheekpad, I would say that the actual purpose of philosophy is to guard against the Socratic fallacy

Of course, to give a purpose for philosophy is to saddle down with a number of philosophical premises. For example, Ray Brassier takes a similar position to yours by determining that the purpose of philosophy is to "impede stupidity".

[Gilrandir]

Again, how much philosophy have you read?

I had philosophy at the University and studied it for a year after which had an exam. Plus I took an exam in philosophy manadatory as a part of post-graduate studies (the so-called candidate's minimum - since a person who gets his first post-graduate degree in Ukraine is called a candidate of sciences). So I have read some. Of course, it wasn't my major, nor my field of further studies (or interests), yet I may conclude that philosophers of yore posed some questions and then they (and all generations of others after them up till nowadays) tried to answer. They did offer the answers, but all of them were unproved (or indeed unprovable), so it is just chewing the same gum for two and a half millenia.

What distinguishes between science and pseudo-science?

I have given my vision of the difference, but I can reiterate: the absence of palpable results of the age-long studies which "the science" may offer urbi et orbi.

Is String Theory science? Is multi-verse theory?

Being unaware of either I would refrain from making any statement.

Philosophy is there to give you an answer late at night when you finally realise you can't prove that 1+1 =2.

The best proof of anything is practice. You don't have to wait until late at night to put one apple beside another and start counting them together. If one starts ruminating about it for so long, he must be drunk. A supposition: could the first philosophers have been toss pots?

Now, with my tongue entirely out of my cheekpad, I would say that the actual purpose of philosophy is to guard against the Socratic fallacy - the belief being an expert in something gives you the right or qualifications to speak on any and every topic.

If you mean me - well, could be an appropriate warning. But most people (including - or especially - the ones on these boards) indulge in doing what philosophy is so vehemently against. So it kind of becomes one more proof that it is a science (almost) no one has a use for.

If yours is a universal statement, then a sceptic would remark: "Ok, I will try to bear it in mind, but is this all philosophy is there for - to tell the people to mind their Ps and Qs? One doesn't need a whole science to teach others just a most general tenet."

[Montmorency]

I'll reprint part of a relevant piece that basically organizes the confusion of the various perspectives presented here:

The ‘Death of Philosophy’ is something that circulates through arterial underbelly of culture with quite some regularity, a theme periodically goosed whenever high-profile scientific figures bother to express their attitudes on the subject. Scholars in the humanities react the same way stakeholders in any institution react when their authority and privilege are called into question: they muster rationalizations, counterarguments, and pejoratives. They rally troops with whooping war-cries of “positivism” or “scientism,” list all the fields of inquiry where science holds no sway, and within short order the whole question of whether philosophy is dead begins to look very philosophical, and the debate itself becomes evidence that philosophy is alive and well—in some respects at least.

The problem with this pattern, of course, is that the terms like ‘philosophy’ or ‘science’ are so overdetermined that no one ends up talking about the same thing. For physicists like Stephen Hawking or Lawrence Krauss or Neil deGrasse Tyson, the death of philosophy is obvious insofar as the institution has become almost entirely irrelevant to their debates. There are other debates, they understand, debates where scientists are the hapless ones, but they see the process of science as an inexorable, and yes, imperialistic one. More and more debates fall within its purview as the technical capacities of science improve. They presume the institution of philosophy will become irrelevant to more and more debates as this process continues. For them, philosophy has always been something to chase away. Since the presence of philosophers in a given domain of inquiry reliably indicates scientific ignorance to important features of that domain, the relevance of philosophers is directly related to the maturity of a science.

They have history on their side.

There will always be speculation—science is our only reliable provender of theoretical cognition, after all. The question of the death of philosophy cannot be the question of the death of theoretical speculation. The death of philosophy as I see it is the death of a particular institution, a discourse anchored in the tradition of using intentional idioms and metacognitive deliverances to provide theoretical solutions. I think science is killing that philosophy as we speak.

[Fisherking]

Philosophy could be said to have reached a temporary impasse, much as medical science did up until germ theory and refinements in other fields.

Science, on the other hand, is playing fast and loose with ethics and strictest adherence to the philosophy of science. Without that philosophical grounding we only have charlatans working pretend science to defraud the public and their pretended infallibility.

[HopAlongBunny]

Philosophy, Science, Philosophy of Science.
Like everything in society there are interesting only so far as their relationship to power.
A tautology perhaps, insofar as everything has meaning in consequence of its relationship to the power dynamic within a society.
"Follow the Money!"; sure but that only gets you so far; what about the silence, what about the exclusions, what about the masks that say one thing and do another.
The term Science, like any puppet show, hides as much as it reveals...

[Gilrandir]

Philosophy could be said to have reached a temporary impasse, much as medical science did up until germ theory and refinements in other fields.

Philosophy never left that impasse.

Any science is developing by way of changing paradigms. A paradigm consists of a problem/question scientists confront, a hypothesis (a preliminary answer to this question) and the verification of the hypothesis (encompassing data and methods) which brings some results. The paradigm changes when either the question or the hypothesis changes. For example, in astronomy the first hypothesis was that the sun circles the earth, later it was changed into the modern one (the earth circles the sun).

Now philosophy from the very outset posed one question (what is primary - the mind or the matter) and offered two evident preliminary answers which have been in the state of verification ever since, yielding no results. Generations of philosophers joined this or that point of view being unable to prove it with their opponents being unable to prove the opposite. So it it is not a temporary impasse, it is embalmed lethargy or fossilization. Pick one to your liking.

[Husar]

Now philosophy from the very outset posed one question (what is primary - the mind or the matter) and offered two evident preliminary answers which have been in the state of verification ever since, yielding no results. Generations of philosophers joined this or that point of view being unable to prove it with their opponents being unable to prove the opposite. So it it is not a temporary impasse, it is embalmed lethargy or fossilization. Pick one to your liking.

Physics and medicine also still do not have answers to their founding questions of how does the world work and how to make people live forever (or how to make them healthy again).

Your view is overly simplistic and makes little sense. Most sciences were spawned by philosophical questions, how can you then say that sciences achieved a lot and philosophy is not yielding results?