Philosophy Versus Science

[Belacqua]

And honestly, we do have pretty good measures for such things as open-mindedness anyway. In fact, open-mindedness is one of the five main factors in the OCEAN model of measuring personality.

I don't know about the OCEAN model at all, so I look forward to looking that up. No doubt there are some very smart researchers involved, who can anticipate problems better than I can. 

Fuzzily-defined attributes pose a danger to researchers, as I'm sure you know. Long ago on the Amazon forums certain people were excited about a study which claimed to show that religious people are less rational than non-religious people. It was (the forum members thought) objective confirmation for a belief they had anyway. The study consisted of two parts: first the respondents self-reported how religious they were. Then there was a long series of statements, and they had to rate each one on its degree of rationality. 

The trouble was that the only criterion for the rationality or irrationality of the statements was whether the researchers thought they were rational. Statements the researchers agreed with were considered rational, and statements they disagreed with were considered irrational. 

So the only thing the study really tested was the degree to which religious people agreed with the researchers. 

(A number of the statements were clearly silly, but quite a few of them were also ambiguous to the point that, depending on context, it could go either way. And of course it's begging the question just to assume that any Christian or Jewish statement is inherently irrational.) 

So that was kind of a wake-up call for me. 

Well, as you know, philosophy students don't just read books, they are taught how to critically analyze arguments and justify their views in a systematic manner. They are also trained to write really well and advised to think about HOW and WHY they think what they think. It should come as no surprise then that majoring in philosophy helps boost one's logical and verbal reasoning AND various intellectual virtues.

Yes, that's certainly so. 

A number of the philosophers I named earlier write a lot about how ideology shapes current beliefs, and I think that careful reading of these people's works would be very valuable in determining where one's own ideology comes from, and how it affects our own beliefs. 

As to the rest of what you said, I think I made my stance clear on this pages ago and not really sure what else I can say on the matter. For me, philosophy is the parent of all sciences and continues to be a guiding parent. Parents don't just rear their children until these children become adults, and then they are let go. Parents may continue to lend support to their children even when these children are working and living independent lives and financially supporting their parents. It's sort of like this with philosophy and science. There is constant interaction between philosophy and science, so that philosophy has it uses for science and science has its uses for philosophy. There is no versus going on here.

You have been clear, and I agree with you. 

There is no "versus" going on between science and philosophy. My experience has been that people who think there is such a battle aren't well informed about what philosophy is and does.