Scientism and the death of philosophy

Speaking with a biologist I encountered a kind of scientism I feel is very typical for scientists here and there. That philosophy, while in school was useful in shaping thought later in life, is useless for finding new knowledge and is dying if not dead. As a pure mathematician by education my feet are in both camps, and this view makes me uneasy. I hope to give a clear perspective on why the idea that philosophy is useless is not only not actually an opinion, but more so factually wrong.

A big part of especially modern philosophy is working out good ways of thinking. Evolutionary perspectives on anything (including on psychology), e.g., thinking about anything in terms of expanding ramifying graphs is a way of thinking which models evolution (albeit poorly), this particular model not being the issue, but ways of thinking in general are investigated in much of modern philosophy. An evolutionary perspective on psychology is by its very nature philosophical. Further it is only an aspect of psychology, an insight which is manifestly philosophical (more precisely it's an insight from epistemology and produces often ethically problematic teleology). If you end up studying mathematics for fun, you'll see hosts of examples where we only study aspects of a thing with very specialized tools.

If you are doing science correctly, then you are also doing philosophy. We have an analytic dissection of reality into parameters or concepts and their proposed interactions and produce a corresponding explanatory model. The insight that this is what we do is a product of philosophy, and producing either is essentially an act of philosophy.

We study the proposed interactions between proposed parameters of the model and make predictions, produce instruments to provide measurements that are supposed to correspond to the parameters we posit, and we adjust the model based on experiment to align observation and the analytical and explanatory models. The insight that this is what we do is a product of philosophy.

Producing or adjusting our analytical or explanatory model is essentially an act of philosophy, as is the insight that this is what should be done to hopefully converge at an understanding of the world. It happens that our analytical dissection or explanatory model is completely wrong, which leads to entire paradigm changes, and even the word paradigm is a philosophical albeit incredibly useful concept.

In psychology, to see that an evolutionary explanation would be incomplete you need only consider emotions. That is not to say that a study of emotions and evolutionary psychology cannot be made compatible (we could talk about interactions between evolutionary explanations and emotional explanations), but by and large they are independently interesting studies.

The insight that emotions is something to study at all is a product of philosophy; the insight that emotions has implications for interpretations, for action, a phenomenological description (they are experienced in a certain way, a study which falls under philosophy), is a further analytical dissection and they all hinge on philosophical insights and further analytical and explanatory dissection.

Little or no deep biological study of emotions is made because we don't know how, which is a philosophical insight (more precisely an epistemic insight), and it's interesting because there should also be good biological explanations and models. Most things regarding humans, society, politics, the way we live, how it feels, what worries us, how and what we should and can do about it, follow the same pattern.

Indeed, to suggest that a study is scientific is itself hypothetical. Surely Freudian psychoanalysis was considered science at the time of its conception but is no longer. This far from means that it was a useless endeavor, the influence of its fruits (both sweet and sour) are felt today in almost everything we see or say or do.

In summary to say that philosophy, the provider of the conditions of possibility for science, is dead, is to me like saying that the main currents of what could possibly be interestingly investigated have now been produced by human history, and that it's now simply a matter of working out the facts, seems to me deeply unscientific. Further, it sounds like a good philosophical foundation for a miserable existence.

Notes on part 2 of Bergson's introductory essay on metaphysics

This post is a continuation of the last entry.
http://hesterbestingenprotest.blogspot.com/2015/08/analysis-of-part-1-of-henri-bergsons.html
I will use terminology from the analysis of part 1. Comments and suggestions are much appreciated. We are here:
https://youtu.be/nXs_tIRrlVU?t=9m32s
There is also a text version here:
http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/int-meta.pdf

This part concerns phenomenology of perception as perceived by ourselves! It's a pretty long part but the points are simple enough: Analysis probes intuition, but assembling true intuition of, say, personality (or Paris) from sketches given by analysis is impossible though far from useless. He talks about personality. Aspects of our personality form clear, cohesive images. We can try to collate those images to form a unit. But the way we weigh each different part becomes arbitrary, and it's hard to know everything and how it interacts. So our analysis remains incomplete and changes our perception of what we try to understand. In this way, his phenomenological investigations arrive at an understanding of the epistemic limitations of inquiry. We now delve a bit deeper into the essay.

We have an intrinsic understanding of our own personality floating through time. Looking inside on our own self we see perceptions coming in from the outside world as if interacting with a surface. The perceptions are clear and distinct, and some cluster into object. These objects then trigger resembling memories to materialise from our inner self to adhere to these perceptions and interpret them. These memories appear as if detached from us, adhering to the surface through which we perceive. We are then stirred into "virtual" actions and habits by these impressions. Together this forms a kind of "surface" of perception turned toward the world.

As he focuses inward to our deeper self, our personality, he notices a continual flux of states, which naturally predict and flow into each other and build on each other. As an intrinsic whole in the first place (and presently), but they are also analytically (see part 1) disectable into states. This flux of states form a history of states. One can think of a snowball, rolling through the snow in one continuous motion, an object in space-time, only that past events, say through analysis, comes to the fro and changes the current intrinsic flux. The flux is always in a state of becoming. He states that consciousness means memory (of this flux), or the tracing out of this flux, but this is up to some interpretation. There are then no two identical moments being in consciousness.

Any given sensation is interpreted (via memory) with the entire personality (the flux). This means that any given sensation is always changing to us because we are in constant change, through remembering. He states that a consciousness that can experience two identical moments two different points in time would be one without memory, and die and be reborn continually. Make of that what you will.

He moves to a deeper analysis of unconsciousness as a continual spectrum, like a fibrous many-coloured cord developing through space through which a current of feeling flows changing with respect to and reflecting in the many colours of the spectrum (operadic in a sense, if you know what an operad is). The fibrous many-coloured cord has an intrinsic and several analytic interpretations in the form of juxtaposed states, internal forces, and of duration.

We can hope to get closer to at an intuition of the intrinsic understanding by a multitude of different conceptual imagery exhibiting parts of the behaviour of the unconscious. But these images will be symbols, mere substitutes for aspects of the object they are studying. Combining these different images produces only a superficial, analytic representation of the object.

He makes the point we observed in the previous post that analysis changes or shows "deformed" aspects of the object under study, which do not fit exactly. Further, if we start with a concept and try to reconstruct the object through patching together conceptual imagery, different and arbitrary weight is placed on the different concepts. This is an instance of the "choice of perspective" implicit in analysis.

He attributes to different choices of weight of the concepts, different schools of philosophy. The goal of metaphysics however, is to transcend the conglomeration of weighted concepts to reach full intuitive grasp. Psychology resolves the self by analysis, dissolving the self into sensations, feelings, ideas, etc., which are studied separately.

This is the kind of arbitrary weighing of concepts he talks about. Even still, concepts are important in achieving intuitive grasp, not to mention for the science of psychology. But in psychology, the specifics of personality must be ignored in order to form concepts sufficiently general for psychology. This is no less very analogous to the way an polynomial equation "cuts out" a space of solutions, which is only an aspect of the full space. The point about deformation above is that is that if you imagine your aspect to be a curve inscribed on a surface, the curve may not be inscribed in the surface exactly but be only in a neighbourhood of it. The concepts must be truly fluid and ready to be molded and changed to have any hope to "get at" intuition.

(It is certainly helpful to think of the non-reduced schemes of Grothendieck if you understand those.)

Given the intuition, it is possible to inscribe an analytic concept within the intuition, but to begin with, as he points out, a sketch of a building in Paris does not allow one ti assemble Paris, i.e., the other way around is not possible, and it is a common mistake of rationalism and empiricism to think that it is. While empiricism asserts there is nothing but the multiplicity of different impressions, rationalism purports to assemble concepts into an intuition of the thing itself.

This insight is treated in mathematics by saying that any given object presents a model for the object under study, and that the actual object may be seen as some kind of identification of all these models up to a notion of equivalence that preserves what we see as innate to the intuition. The homotopy type of a space is its equivalence class up to homotopy, or, with less jargon, two spaces are considered to denote the same homotopy type if they may be deformed into each other.

(He begins to distinguish ways of being as forms of concepts in themselves: unity and multiplicity. An object under study may be a synthesis of both unity and multiplicity, but analysis sees only parts at any one time.)

Notes on part 1 of Henri Bergson’s “An Introduction to Metaphysics (& the Absolute Reality)”

These are some notes and comments on the essay read in the following video. It is manifestly a phenomenological study that arrives at some epistemological considerations. Attempts has been made to turn the rather fleeting, droning, chanting arguments into clear English, some might benefit from that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXs_tIRrlVU

First he gives a phenomenological account of either empathising with an object in what it is in its essence, like being another person, versus looking at an object and observing its properties, like observing a person and their manners. Observing a person and their manners is analysis (discrete, formulaic), reducing the understanding of them to an aggregate understanding in terms of something else (like, a list of actions they perform, and a list of properties). The other is understanding the person fully and emphatically (intuitive, continuous). The first assumes a choice or vantage point, or different choices of vantage points for each observation, the other doesn’t. Like the difference between looking at a cup and being the cup.

This same distinction is very common in mathematics. It’s the difference between on the one hand working in a chosen coordinate system, where you, say, have your space embedded in another space and discover its properties that way, or use algebraic formulas expressing the space and study the space working with those (the algebraic formulas are often not unique); or on the other hand studying the space intrinsically, in a “coordinate free” manner. The first approach is common to physicists, because it’s a useful way to get numbers. The second is used by mathematicians because they want to understand intrinsic “invariants” of spaces.

“Positive science” studies objects from an analytical point of view, and thus sees organs and their workings, denotes this with signs, in contrast to empathising with the being. Metaphysics is the science that tries to fully empathise with something’s being without sign.

My friend notes a lecture by Judith Butler.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc

“she was talking about transgender people and androgynous people and sexually ambiguous people and how asking them about their gender pretty much serves the purpose of applying them a set of behaviors or expectations

“by gender i mean assigned at birth, you want to know this so you can judge them based on how they should behave”

This is essentially a short-coming of analysis. You impose signs, those signs have meanings that approximate a perspective on the object under study, but successive approximations of an “external” character does not eventually give the metaphysical perception. 

Foucault points out how analytical approaches to psychological disorders might be used as an instrument of power. An approach to understanding, say, being with anorexia by starting with a transcendental ideal of a body, and working out what it means to strive toward that ideal, etc., will only give a perspective and a partial picture, and may in fact impose structure, remove agency, and fail to grasp or help.