[FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

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
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2020 10:52 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
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, thompnickson2 at gmail.com 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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