Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Philosophy of Science

Yesterday's post included the following quote...
Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
This saying is attributed to Richard Feynman (a scientist) and was apparently reasserted recently by Steven Weinberg (another scientist). If these men were simply identifying a problem with the way modern science has digressed, if they were in fact lamenting this situation, well, that would be all well and good. But instead, both scientists seemed to be approving of the fact that 'scientists have no need of understanding the philosophy of science.' Regular readers of this blog will recognize the problem with this statement--it's...

That's right! Self-refuting!

It's very similar to my saying... "This game has absolutely no rules. Now here's one..."

What these scientists are saying is,
We scientists don't bother with having a philosophy of science. And (oh, by the way), that happens to be mine--my personal philosophy of science.
Absurd. Silly. A (fatal) mistake in critical thinking. And yet not only are these two Nobel laureates guilty of this mistake, but the journalist quoting them also seems ignorant of the problem here.

Fortunately, the readers of this blog are more astute than that. That's what I like so much about sharing these posts with you.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for clear research and finding these wonderful quotes. You've got to love that self-refuting bug that always seems to fly around!

Rick Gerhardt said...

Yes, and the population of that bug seems to be increasing--you find one every time you turn around.

Thanks for reading!

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