G

Ah!  When you say that the benefit of philosophy to science is 
"straightforward", what do you have in mind? 

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[email protected]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2020 10:52 AM
To: FriAM <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

That is confused. What I asked for was evidence that having philosophical 
conversations improves the science being produced by those having the 
conversations. The *history* project of showing the evolution of philosophical 
ideas into scientific ideas is straightforward. But that's not what needs to be 
demonstrated.

A controlled experiment might be to take a standardized data set [†] from 2 
labs, perhaps chemistry labs. One lab will be subjected to weekly "salons" and 
the other one won't. Then after the intervention, both labs will be measured 
again. If there's a significant difference in the measures, then the weekly 
discussions had an impact. Of course, you might have to control for social team 
building... so maybe there are 3 arms, one group holds salons, one group does 
nothing, and one group plays poker. I don't know. But *that* was my 
challenge... to demonstrate that conversations like yours and Dave's lead to 
better science.


[†] Of course, which measures to choose is a hard problem. You'd have to define 
"better science". But a standard one might be publication targets' impact 
factor, ratio of rejections to acceptances, citations of the publications, etc.

On 3/12/20 9:22 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> ... produce any EVIDENCE that philosophy has EVER helped science.  I think 
> part of the problem with that is that when a philosophical insight gets 
> incorporated into science it begins to look like method, rather than like 
> philosophy.  Think how Peirce's philosophy seems to be embodied in 
> statistics.    But then, one could argue, it ws Poincare's (?) statistics 
> that got embodied in Peirce's philosophy.  

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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