Rex Kerr
2 min readAug 23, 2022

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Well, maybe.

One (scientistic) stance is: all ideas must be tested scientifically. This is a problem, because, for instance, we haven't tested and confirmed that testing all ideas scientifically is the best way to do things. (Indeed, the hypothesis seems falsified by mathematics.)

Another (not scientistic) stance is: we are bad at ideas, in that lots of people have lots of ideas that are wrong and discussing them does not very effectively lead to the bad ones being discarded; therefore, we should weight much more highly those ideas that have rigorous support (mathematical, scientific, simple direct perception of common stimuli, etc.); in particular, most philosophical ideas do not fall into this category, as even if they are argued with rigorous logic (though often they're not), the premises cannot be taken as axiomatic like in mathematics and aren't made reliable in other ways. Therefore, we should be highly suspicious that philosophical ideas are wrong. As a corollary, if you have a philosophical idea and it seems to be contrary to what you've determined scientifically, it is probably the philosophical idea that is faulty somehow. If the idea is not just un-examined but un-examinable (even in terms of how effectively it can be used to build mental models), it has the same status as divinity and Russel's teapot: indistinguishable from fantasy.

In practice, I think scientists tend intuitively to hold the latter position, not the former.

So there is a way in which scientists intuit that philosophers are missing the big picture because they are too focused on the details of doing-philosophy-as-philosophy. (I don't think most scientists can make this intuition explicit. I could also be wrong. But in talking to scientists about philosophy--those who care enough to say anything about it--this is the sense that I get.)

Looking forward to the article!

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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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