Questioning the conventional wisdom
I have just noticed this comment at another site:
Mildly interestingly, when I typed “average size of a woman” into Google I got height and weight answers. When I typed “average size of a man” I got penis size data.
I have not attempted to experimentally confirm that. But I did think it was amusing.
Further to my earlier post, there was a recent discussion of this topic at Blogging Heads TV, between Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State Univ.) and Massimo Pigluicci (CUNY) on this topic (h/t Brian Leiter at his blog).
It was a pretty good discussion, and worth the 57 minutes it took to watch and listen. Or you could just listen, as the watching is of talking heads.
At around 4:40, Pigliucci says (as transcribed by me):
Philosophy of science, in particular, is a way to look at the doings
of science from the outside, specifically from the epistemic warrant
perspective. So we want to know, as philosophers, how science
works logically, what is it that scientists take to be sufficient
evidence for their theories, how they construct their theories.
My own criticism of philosophy of science, is that I see them as doing poorly what is mentioned in the second sentence of that quote.
Overall, I agree with these two philosophers on many of the points that they brought up. I do recommend taking the time to listen.
This will be a brief review of Schaeffer’s recent book:
Full disclosure — I “purchased” the Kindle edition of this book when the price was right (i.e. it was free).
I follow Schaeffer’s blog: “Why I Still Talk to Jesus — In Spite of Everything“. I at least skim most of the posts, but only read a few in detail. Schaeffer is a relentless self-marketer. Some of his posts are of broad interest, and some are just selling himself or his latest book.
I had already purchased (for real money), his previous book “And God said Billy”, but I stopped reading that about halfway through. So I had decided not to buy his latest book. Even when Schaeffer announced that it would be free for two days, I continued with my decision to not “buy”.
Then I read Benjamin Corey’s post “When Two Formerly Fundies Chat: My Video Interview With Frank Schaeffer (and get his new book FREE)!” It was a great interview. I recommend that you watch it. For me, it was Corey, rather than Schaeffer, who was the star of that interview. In any case, that’s when I changed my mind and picked up the Kindle book while it was still free.
In my previous post, I wrote
When I read John’s statement (either version), as quoted above, I see John mentioning the nature of knowledge as an important topic. I’ve read a lot of epistmology (the subfield of philosophy that deals with knowledge). In all honesty, I have not learned anything at all about the nature of knowledge from that reading.
Here, I want to talk informally about what I take to be the nature of knowledge.
To me, knowledge is closely connected with learning. I see knowledge is the result of learning. I guess that makes me an empiricist, at least in the broad sense of the term.
At around 10 years of age, while walking home from elementary school, I wondered about knowledge. In particular, I wondered if knowledge could be just those natural language statements such as we learn in school. But, as I pondered that, it seemed impossible. It seemed to me that there was nothing in those sentences that said how our language sentences connect with the world.
From time to time, scientists criticize philosophy. And philosophers react. For an example of this, see the relatively recent post by John Wilkins:
In that post, John quotes some physicists, and wonders why they criticize philosophy. I am going to suggest that a lot of this is miscommunication.
To see the problem, let’s look at what John said in a comment to that post:
Philosophy, which is about the nature of knowledge at least in part, must attend to actual knowledge. Hence it cannot ignore science and just pull epistemic strictures out of its rear end. Hence, [good] philosophy must attend to science.
The Heretical Philosopher 