Rex Kerr
3 min readDec 25, 2022

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I sort of agree, but I think you've failed to actually bring out the most cogent part of the criticism, and dismissed it by a backwards analogy.

Many of the results of physics we know extremely well. You want to know where you are on Earth to within a few meters, based on our understanding of physics (including weird stuff like QM and relativity)? Done. In fact, we have billions of devices that do this so inexpensively that we hardly even notice how they contribute to the cost of our smartphones.

The biggest complaint physicists have about philosophy is that too often it thinks that just musing about things gets one anywhere near to the level of reliability about non-intuitive phenomena as does the centuries-long cycle of experimentation, theorizing, prediction, and more experimentation (with a bunch of instrument creation mixed it as needed).

It's just as Wesley Salmon says, except not just with methods of science but also the results of some (generally the "hard") sciences.

When philosophers say things that contradict (or at least deeply interact with) well-understood, highly non-intuitive results from physics, it's profoundly frustrating. It's the same kind of frustrating as when you show up with multiple peer-reviewed studies showing the efficacy of vaccines in reducing Covid symptoms, and someone comes up and said, "My friend's dad was vaccinated and then got Covid and he went to the hospital. My dad wasn't vaccinated, and he didn't go the hospital. That proves vaccination makes Covid worse, and there's a huge pharmacoindustrial complex conspiring to control the world!"

This is the problem with panpsychism, for instance. If you're going to be positing new fundamental qualities of physical matter you probably ought to talk with the experts. In particular, if a philosopher supports panpsychism but doesn't grok Hossenfelder's challenge to it, they probably ought to stop talking about fundamental properties of things until they have a better handle on the fundamental properties of existing things.

This is not properly analogous to the Fuller case because the results of social sciences are generally very tenuous and tentative because of the extreme methodological difficulties of doing careful social science (and the general attitude that doing something is better than nothing). It's not just a matter of treading with ignorance in a different field, although that too is problematic (and Fuller's criticism may be apt there), but also a matter of the degree of certainty you have in the results from a field.

In particular, the Salmon challenge does not apply if physics, say, suggests that something in psychology is wrong. It's more likely, usually, that the physics is right, even if it's new, even if the psychology has tried to build a lot on the thing that seems to be wrong. Probably the physics is right, because the it's easier to get physics right than psychology.

Finally, I don't think that most of the physicists' objections to philosophy involve all philosophy ever, just contemporary philosophy: the idea is "we got the important stuff we need to from philosophy already, just step aside and let physics take over". This might be wrong, but I think your arguments tend to view the stance as "no philosophy was ever useful", which is not what "philosophy is dead" means to me. It used to be alive, but it lived its life and made its contributions, and now things have moved on. You charge that they don't cite any contemporary philosophers, but you, for example, also don't cite any contemporary philosophers as counterexamples.

That said, I think the "philosophy is useless/dead" stance is misguided. But as a physicist, one does need to be pretty philosophically sophisticated in order to get anything useful out of contemporary philosophy, because there's a lot of hay and not very many needles, and it's hard to tell which is which.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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