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.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I suggest a Mad Max-style cage match between philosophers and scientists to settle this once and for all.

Boru

... and whose stand-off missiles are better?

[Fake Messiah]

When it comes to philosophy vs. science, the thing is that a philosopher in the past had the same role in the society that a scientist has today. For example, in Shakespeare's "King Lear," there is a line where Lear says: "First let me talk with this philosopher. What is the cause of thunder?"

Lear, inspired by the still rumbling storm, is asking the question concerning thunder, hoping that the philosopher has a scientific answer. They were kind of experts on everything.

But today, of course, he would ask a scientist that question. Or if you want to know about any topic and decide to read a book about it, you will rarely read a book by a philosopher, but you would likely take a book from an expert in the field you are interested in.

So I guess the question is, what role does a philosopher or philosophy have today?

[Sheldon]

I am skeptical that any standardized test can assign a number score to a person's intellectual humility or open-mindedness. These are things (as Aristotle points out) that are developed over a lifetime, and manifest themselves in ways that are individual and unpredictable.

To be clear, the researchers of this study didn't just rely on standardized tests assessing various forms of reasoning abilities, but also on two scales for measuring intellectual dispositions/virtues. Even if these scales may not be the best measures of what they were designed to capture, the researchers had limited options and could only go with what scales had been used among the sample of interest.

That said, you may still be right to be skeptical here. However, in such fields as experimental psychology, it is assumed that these (and other psychological constructs) can be somewhat captured by scales, provided these scales have been tested properly and shown to be both reliable and valid. As for predicting future states/outcomes, some of these measures may also be backed up by studies demonstrating their predictive powers.

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 would certainly hope that reading good books would help a person become aware of these virtues, and help think about how we can live them in the real world. This seems to work for some people, and not for others.

 It should come as no surprise then that majoring in philosophy helps boost one's logical and verbal reasoning AND various intellectual virtues.

"William Lane Craig holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Birmingham in England"

Citation

I've read his contemporary take on KCA, it would seem to be at odds with that assertion, unless you missed out a qualifying remark, for example "can sometimes help boost one's logical reasoning". It doesn't seem to have helped Craig's. His argument involves question begging and special pleading fallacies, and he has used argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacies in his apologetics. 

"Professor Craig claims that even if all the other arguments for God's existence were shown to be worthless, that would have absolutely zero impact on his belief that God exists. That's because his own religious experience tells him that he knows God exists, independently of any argument or evidence."

And rules out identical claims from other religions of course, special pleading...

[Alan V]

When it comes to philosophy vs. science, the thing is that a philosopher in the past had the same role in the society that a scientist has today. For example, in Shakespeare's "King Lear," there is a line where Lear says: "First let me talk with this philosopher. What is the cause of thunder?"

Lear, inspired by the still rumbling storm, is asking the question concerning thunder, hoping that the philosopher has a scientific answer. They were kind of experts on everything.

But today, of course, he would ask a scientist that question. Or if you want to know about any topic and decide to read a book about it, you will rarely read a book by a philosopher, but you would likely take a book from an expert in the field you are interested in.

So I guess the question is, what role does a philosopher or philosophy have today?

Just as you say, philosophers have much-reduced roles today because scientists have answered so many previous philosophical questions. That is the "versus" which some posters wish to deny.

Borders Bookstores may have hoped there was no competition between them and Amazon at one time, but we all know how that worked out.

[The Grand Nudger]

Likewise, philosophy can and has answered scientific puzzles by developing methodologies, critically assessing assumptions, and clarifying foundational principles and concepts. To the extent that conflict exists....and just how I read these convos - it's not necessary. It's the product of adhering to bad science, or to bad philosophy, and well past it's use-by date. We're not saying, for example, that science has replaced or supplanted classical or intuitionistic or paraconsistent logic. That we need to run a series of strictly controlled experiments to determine whether or not married bachelors are a thing. We're saying that the current crop of apologists and snake oil salesmen are idiotic grifters.