Generally speaking, this is a poorly thought out reply, seeing that you have not given me any thoughts on some of the problems of Dr. Katz's notions that I mentioned, but sidestepped my whole point to give a digressing lecture.
Sorry about that. I guess that makes me a poor reader, or poor understander.
MattDavis wrote:I don't really understand the basic distinction between a "philosophical" and a "scientific" study that you are making.
One prioritizes commitment to reason and argument as a source of knowledge, while the other prioritizes systematic and organized inquiry into the natural world and its phenomena that gathers knowledge in the form of testable explanations.
I see now the distinction you want to point out.
I think that often reason and argument are also used in "scientific" fields.
(See any scientific debate in the last 400 years.)
I think that often paradigmatic reasoning is used in "philosophic" fields.
(See Wittgenstein. )
Are you claiming that philosophy should remain "untestable"?
I don't see the value in that, seems like an appeal to belief to me.
MattDavis wrote:I think I have mentioned before in this thread that "theory of mind" was once under the sole privy of philosophy. Then, along came psychology, which is now labeled "science".
Psychology has always been a science, albeit its foundation is rooted in biology and philosophy.
Would you classify the work of Freud and Jung as science?
Or are you dating psychology as starting after this?
MattDavis wrote:I don't take particular offense to science entering a philosophical discussion, nor to philosophy entering into a scientific one. There have always been, and may always be cross-pollinations of ideas.
Who said I did? Looking back, never did I mention that I took an offense at such an idea, and neither was it discussed in the first place.
Wasn't meant as an argument, but glad you agree.
MattDavis wrote:There is, I think, more danger in leaving ideas entrenched within "fields of study", than there is in allowing such ideas to permeate throughout fields of study.
But even if I didn't like it. I don't see much stopping of it. Pretty difficult to unlearn something.
Again irrelevant to my points I brought up. It's not a matter of liking it or not liking it. Science alone is blind; philosophy alone is empty. Both philosophers and scientists have to understand that they need each others. Philosophers have to pay more attention on scientific discoveries; scientist have to realize that they themselves participate in philosophy more than they would assume. But going onto say a philosophical study is a science is an inaccurate terminology, nor is it a honorable move to "justify" one's philosophical views. It is not science when you make a field that takes results from a different fields of science and then add in a lot of guessing based on the individual's own experiences. What is just described is a pseudoscience. There is nothing systematic nor reproducible about it.
"Value" is abstract and it is an arbitrary placement. And, regarding ethics, it is not an applied value science. Ethics is a description of what to do, it doesn't tell "how" to achieve that which is to be done. The problem with such endeavors, which eventually fail, is that science is adopted as a method where it is wholly unsuitable. Dressing up something as a scientific problem that cannot be answered by scientific method is just bound to come off as disreputable.
Don't disagree with most of this. Not really sure what we're fighting about....
I do think that the philosphy/science distinction is less than helpful, but if it makes for convenient categories in your mind go for it.
