{"id":7203,"date":"2015-04-26T13:16:32","date_gmt":"2015-04-26T13:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/04\/26\/why-physics-needs-philosophy\/"},"modified":"2015-04-26T13:16:32","modified_gmt":"2015-04-26T13:16:32","slug":"why-physics-needs-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/04\/26\/why-physics-needs-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Physics Needs Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A short piece<\/a> by Tim Maudlin. Good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go deep enough.  Maudlin rightly opposes the "reigning attitude":<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The reigning attitude in physics has been \u201cshut up and calculate\u201d: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean.  But putting computation ahead of conceptual clarity can lead to confusion.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He has some other useful things to say about philosophy's role in conceptual clarification.  But there is no mention of what ought to strike one as a major task: an explanation of how recherch\u00e9 physical theories relate to the world we actually live in, the world in its human involvement, what Edmund Husserl called die Lebenswelt<\/em>, the life-world.  This is a task that falls to philosophy, but not to contemporary analytic philosophy with its woeful ignorance of the phenomenological tradition.  On the other hand, judging by the philosophical scribblings of physicists, they would make a mess of it too.<\/span><\/p>\n

A related task of philosophy is to debunk and expose the bad philosophy churned out by physicists in their spare time when they need to turn a buck and play the public intellectual.  Understandable: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy. Think Lawrence Krauss<\/a> for a recent prime offender.  And then there is the awful Hawking-Mlodinow book mentioned by Maudlin, entitled The Grand Design<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Five years ago I began a series on it.  But the first chapters were so bad, I didn't bother to proceed beyond my first entry<\/a>.  Having just re-read that post, it stands up well.   <\/span><\/p>\n

One more point about Maudlin. He (mis)uses 'mystical' as a pejorative, thereby betraying his ignorance of the subject of mysticism.  That's an Ayn Rand-y type of blunder.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A short piece by Tim Maudlin. Good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go deep enough.  Maudlin rightly opposes the "reigning attitude": The reigning attitude in physics has been \u201cshut up and calculate\u201d: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean.  But putting computation ahead of conceptual clarity can … Continue reading “Why Physics Needs Philosophy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[205,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-scientism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}