This is alot of fun. Would it be really difficult to be able to "blacklist" pages from the UI? I keep trying to come up with really disparate topics to find interesting connections, but everything is linked by "Knowledge".
Sadly, inputting 'Linguistics' >> "Science > Knowledge > Awareness > Conscious > Consciousness > Quality (philosophy) > Philosophy", rather than, for instance, >> "Philosophy of language > Meaning (philosophy of language) > Definition > Intensional definition > Logic > Philosophy".
Going by way of linguistics' own foundations routes a shorter path by one link and provides such a rich frame for understanding how we Humans found our way into philosophy.
EDIT: Ah.. below butterfinger explains, the "first link" basis.. Gah!! Unstructured text :)
Thanks. This is all client-side code, which was my entire goal. The visualization itself is built with the InfoVis toolkit (which I'm not sure is being maintained any longer.) If I were to do this today I'd look at D3 probably. The Wikipedia API is nice. It just requests an article by name and parses the result trying to get the first link. Getting that link can be a bit tricky though since there can be all sorts of metadata that needs to b ignored. Luckily Wikipedia seems to stick with some standard patterns. So basically it just recursively follows links until it either hit Philosophy or one that it has encountered before, in which case a branch is made.
It reminds me of how, if you ask why something is so, and then keep asking "why?" to every answer you get, you tend to end up asking philosophical questions.
A good friend of mine is a student of philosophy, and I often argue with him about the importance and usefulness of the discipline. His favorite metaphor on the matter goes like this: If each domain of science was a finger, philosophy would be the thumb. It's the one that the others should rest upon when being used.
Of course, I always dismiss his metaphor as pie-in-the-sky ridiculous. But I must concede that this phenomenon occurring on Wikipedia gives a lot of weight to his argument.
To believe that associating philosophy with science is pie-in-the-sky ridiculous is to profess ignorance of the foundations and history of science. Science is a descendant of philosophy and the decisions made on how we practice it and interpret its results are guided by different philosophies throughout the centuries. A book or course on the philosophy of science, which is offered by most major universities, is recommended.
Philosophy was, of course, the progenitor of science, but it is harder to find current relevance. For example, was science in a state of confusion until Popper corrected the errors of the logical positivists? Did the development of plate tectonics have to wait until Kuhn explained the structure of scientific revolutions?
Answer A: Are you assuming that the philosophy of science is a done thing? It would be wrong to look back from our vantage point and make that conclusion. It matters not which theoretical improvement or refinement of the scientific method you point to if you forget that.
Answer B: Kuhn's text uses the history of science to come to a philosophical (not a scientific) conclusion about scientific progress. Hence, Kuhn's text is philosophy of science and as such your question fails to make the point you think it is making.
>Are you assuming that the philosophy of science is a done thing?
Quite the contrary - I am giving an example that is supportive of the view that, while philosophy was instrumental in the development of the scientific method, it is no longer playing that role, and has not for some time. The second question is another example in the same vein.
>Now, how about answering my two questions?
You haven't discharged your burden of proof - all you have done so far is to talk around it. In fact, that is all you have done with the two questions I posed, rather than answer them directly.
> I am giving an example that is supportive of the view that, while philosophy was instrumental in the development of the scientific method, it is no longer playing that role, and has not for some time. The second question is another example in the same vein.
1st: For example, was science in a state of confusion until Popper corrected the errors of the logical positivists?
Ideas concerning the scientific method are less clear before Popper assuming you buy into Popper, that much is true, that much is true of any advancement in the philosophy of science. What is not true is that before an advancement lay confusion and after the removal of confusion. Progress wends its way slowly, incrementally, with ideas gaining clarity bit by bit. So it has gone and presumably so it will continue until someone presents an argument that the process of the improvement in our understanding of the scientific method is complete. That proof is for you or someone to provide, not I a proof of its counter-claim.
2nd: Did the development of plate tectonics have to wait until Kuhn explained the structure of scientific revolutions?
No. And you know the answer is no. But so what? If Kuhn is right about how scientific thought progresses it could have an impact on how scientific bodies organise themselves and how funding is allocated and so on, which would have an impact on science at a much larger level than individual hypotheses and theories. Which shows that philosophy of science is still relevant.
> Progress wends its way slowly, incrementally, with ideas gaining clarity bit by bit. So it has gone and presumably so it will continue until someone presents an argument that the process of the improvement in our understanding of the scientific method is complete.
You have created a straw man in a weak attempt to transfer your burden of proof onto me. The claim of mine, that you are disputing, is that philosophy is not nearly as relevant to science now as it was in science's beginnings. That claim is not predicated in any way on the assumption that our understanding of the scientific method is complete.
In your last paragraph, you need to be able to replace all the 'coulds' and 'woulds' with 'dids' and 'does'. As it stands, you have now made three successive posts without putting up an actual argument in support of your position.
Furthermore, you would have to show a significance comparable to the achievements of science as a whole - if your claim is that the current contributions of philosophy to science are comparable in significance to an individual hypothesis or theory, then I rest my case.
Not intentionally, I assure you. I have repeatedly tried to understand your position and respond exactly to that position. I'm going to give it one more attempt, if this attempt also fails in your eyes then we'll have to agree to disagree, okay?
> (1) The claim of mine, that you are disputing, is that philosophy is not nearly as relevant to science now as it was in science's beginnings.
That's an odd sentence construction. It could mean either that this is the claim from my point of view I _think_ I am disputing (and it's not) or that this is the claim I _ought to_ be disputing (and I'm not).
Witness. A previous stating of the claim by you.
> (2) Quite the contrary - I am giving an example that is supportive of the view that, while philosophy was instrumental in the development of the scientific method, it is no longer playing that role, and has not for some time.
(By the way. You make claims about philosophy yet use examples from philosophy _of science_ (Popper and Kuhn). If you mean to say `philosophy of science' please say philosophy of science and do not use philosophy as a shorthand. Also, you seem to be using science and `the scientific method' interchangeably. Please don't.)
You'll see your claims don't square. I have addressed (2) and am not going to repeat myself.
> In your last paragraph, you need to be able to replace all the 'coulds' and 'woulds' with 'dids' and 'does'. As it stands, you have now made three successive posts without putting up an actual argument in support of your position.
No I do not. I stated it as a conditional (If Kuhn is right [...] could [...] would [...]) to allow for the position that someone may disagree with Kuhn specifically but it does not invalidate my point in general _if Kuhn is right_. If you keep claiming that I am not addressing the substance of your argument then I am going to have to conclude that you are arguing in bad faith. Hence, one more attempt, okay?
> Furthermore, you would have to show a significance comparable to the achievements of science as a whole - if your claim is that the current contributions of philosophy to science are comparable in significance to an individual hypothesis or theory, then I rest my case.
I do not have to show any such thing. And I am making no such claim. I am countering your claim, not attempting to make a novel claim of my own.
Here we see a rhetorical ploy that is commonly used by climate-change deniers and creationists: after spending some time talking around the issue, they switch to claiming they have already addressed it. They then say they are not going to go over it again, trying to cover up their inability to give an answer with the suggestion that they have made an irrefutable one.
Though it is hard to tell what you are thinking, I think there is a chance you did this unknowingly. If so, then there is a way for you to recover: go back in this thread to the first post of mine that you replied to, state your disagreement with it, and present an argument for your position. Be specific and to the point.
To avoid one opportunity for further confusion, the post in question is this:
"Philosophy was, of course, the progenitor of science, but it is harder to find current relevance. For example, was science in a state of confusion until Popper corrected the errors of the logical positivists? Did the development of plate tectonics have to wait until Kuhn explained the structure of scientific revolutions?"
You make a good point, but where did I say that I believe that associating philosophy with science is pie-in-the-sky ridiculous? What I did say is that the metaphor is weak without bringing precision to how it should be interpreted, and your particular interpretation is sensible but a bit forced. Does being the progenitor of science make philosophy the thumb of the hand?
No, there may have once been a time when that metaphor was applicable, but I wouldn't say that it's the case today. As for the idea that philosophy guides decisions on how we practice science, well... a book or course on the forces of economy, which is offered by most major universities, is recommended.
I don't think you can get far in determining what people "should" do with various facts without diving into normative ethics and in turn philosophy. The question of what should be done can hinge entirely on what kind of philosophy people adopt.
Ask him for contemporary examples of philosophy's usefulness to science. While on the subject, you might want to argue that philosophy has become too self-referential to be relevant.
I don't think the Wikipedia phenomenon means a whole lot. Here's an alternative metaphor: philosophy is the pot we put all the loose ends in, until some advance in science allows us to work on them some more. That doesn't mean philosophy is making progress on them.
> Philosophy is something of a grab bag of disparate disciplines
So is science.
Please don't tell me we're going to play that tedious game where we give you lots of examples of philosophy's relevance and your response is just "oh but I didn't mean that kind of philosophy".
No, I am actually agreeing that this is a valid example, though it is not really a matter of science. As for all the other examples that you allude to, I will consider them case-by-case.
"Science" is not one enterprise. Read Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." He divides science into two categories. The first is normal science, which is a period where the basic assumptions have been set, and scientists work within defined parameters to understand nature. In this period philosophy of not very relevant.
Kuhn says that this works well for a while, until there builds up a collection of anomalies that result in the second type of science: revolutionary science. For a short while, people start to question fundamental assumptions about their world and this results in a "paradigm shift". In this mode of science, philosophy has always been relevant. The philosopher Ernst Mach was relevant to Einstein, for example.
In our present age, we are at the stage of normal science started by Einstein and the quantum physicists. But anomalies have started building up. And when we enter into the new phase of revolutionary science, as happens every few hundred years, we'll see philosophy be relevant once more.
Most of the time it is the scientists themselves who are questioning the current paradigms (Mach himself was a physicist). You might argue that they are working in philosopher-mode at that time, but they didn't usually get to be in a position to constructively question the paradigms through a study of academic philosophy.
There are still plenty of open questions. No one has just "figured out" confirmation and dealing with evidence. In fact, the way a lot science is done is incorrect and journals could learn a lot from Bayesian Epistemologists.
"without having to ask a philosopher"? What does that even mean? The distinction between scientist and philosophers is pretty recent. Clearly Aristotle was also a scientist even though we call him a philosopher, and clearly Bohr was also a philosopher even though we know him best as a scientist. Science and the philosophy of science have developed together, and often by the same people.
>"without having to ask a philosopher"? What does that even mean?
I am at a loss as to how to be any clearer, but perhaps that's because I am looking at the whole sentence in the context of the thread. Could you be more specific about what problem you are having with it?
There was a time when people doing science were considered philosophers; at the same time, some of them were considered astrologers or alchemists - Newton was active in both of these fields, and that was not, as it seems to some people now, an aberration or contradiction. These philosophers / astrologers / alchemists synthesized the scientific method, but the modern philosophy of science is descriptive, not prescriptive: philosophers like Popper and Kuhn were describing the scientific method as it had already been developed by practicing scientists, without being led there by academic philosophy. The historical role of people, who now are or were then regarded as philosophers, in the early development of science does not imply that current science is behoven to current academic philosophy.
Your attempt to conflate philosophy and science raises the question of why a university would need an independent philosophy department, and I think you would find its members to be the ones most strongly defending its existence. If you were to go to the top of this thread, you would find that the distinction between science and philosophy is being made by pierrec’s philosopher-student friend. If you want to argue that there is no meaningful difference, perhaps you should first persuade the people who identify themselves as philosophers.
My point is that figuring out what constitutes science is philosophy, regardless of who does the figuring out. It's not like it is science if a scientist does the thinking but philosophy if someone from the philosophy department does the same.
The problem with this line of argument is that one could just as well say that logic is philosophy, so anyone who reasons about anything is a philosopher... it is not so much a wrong argument as it is a pointless one, leading to a trite and unhelpful conclusion that strips the word 'philosopher' of any useful meaning. In the context established by pierrec's original post, a more meaningful question is 'what contributions are academic philosophers currently making to the sciences?'
Then there's the fact that you have ended up agreeing with me that scientists can do it themselves.
Of course scientists can do philosophy, that was my point in mentioning Bohr as an example. And before modern specialization there was no clear distinction between philosophy and science, and for example Kant also did natural science even though he is most well known as a philosopher
Logic has traditionally (at least since Aristotle) been considered a critical branch of philosophy.
Neither of these facts refute any of the points I have made in this thread. Perhaps it would help if you were to state clearly what point you think you are making here, and why that point belongs in this thread.
Here I get to say, with reason in this case, what does that even mean?
You apparently practice the passive-aggressive school of philosophy - the one where you write as if you are disagreeing with someone, but you neither offer any specific rebuttals of the other's arguments, nor do you make any specific, refutable statements about your own position.
But none of this matters anyway. If you want to argue that science needs philosophy, and regardless of what metaphor you are trying to pass off as an actual argument, the one thing you have to do is to show one or more significant examples where contemporary science has depended on contemporary philosophy. Without that, anything else is just talking around the issue. Of all the people who have replied to this thread, only shabda seems to understand this.
I came back to edit this (but I am too late) because I think I am being unnecessarily confrontational. Here is how I would reply today:
I get your point that scientists sometimes do things that can be described as philosophy in the broad sense, but generally, I do not think they would be able to do that if they had been educated in academic philosophy. I believe Bohr himself falls into this category. It would be more accurate to say that philosophy is dependent on science in these matters.
I also get the point that scientists use the scientific method that was developed by people who can be called philosophers, but they developed science through doing it, and that is not a dependent relationship even if you call what they did philosophy.
With regard to examples, I am sticking with my position that they are the only argument that really counts (which is why I suggested it to pierrec), but I don’t think there are none: for example, I think Daniel Dennett has made many valuable contributions to cognitive science, and made a number of trenchant observations with regard to the expectations of computational neurologists.
>But I must concede that this phenomenon occurring on Wikipedia gives a lot of weight to his argument.
It should give no weight at all to this argument. Arguing from metaphor is flawed to begin with, because the correctness metric is not correspondence with reality, but the degree a human mind will readily pattern-match on the metaphor.
The empirical reason for this effect is that Wikipedia policy mandates that articles begin with a denotational definition of the subject, which moves up the hierarchy of abstraction. Were Wikipedia policy to begin pages with connotational definitions that move down the hierarchy of abstraction, we would not see this effect.
If you don't regard the question as important, you should probably stop arguing about it. But if you do then the argument is over, of course, since it is a philosophical one :)
It does not apply to just anything, since links are one-directional.
This applies to philosophy because articles tend to mention the general categories they fall under. The classification of knowledge generally falls under the purview of philosophy, so naturally following links upwards will lead to it eventually.
It's funny you should ask because last night my son and I were looking at the periodic table of elements. He said "boy, I bet you just by clicking on links we could get to pumpkin"; and we did.
I've tried it, but it doesn't seem to register me. I'll join a game, it will keep a count of my clicks, I'll find the goal, and then it will say "no win". Then the game will time out and I'll see "no winners in the last game". What's going on here?
Edit: Ah, apparently to win you have to get it in exactly 6 clicks.
Yeah, of course you can substitute anything :) 7 or 8 years ago in high school we had a "degrees of separation to Hitler" wikipedia game.
Perhaps philosophy lets you add additional constraints (e.g. click the first link of a certain form) or obtain slightly lower numbers?
Historical figures have the advantage that you don't have to navigate up through layers of classification, you just have to get to a date link (there were better tricks -- date links were the "last resort").
It's not simply that you can find Philosophy from any page. It's that if you blindly click the first link on the page repeatedly, you nearly always reach Philoshophy at some point.
Hmm. For a machine-centric view there's the intriguing DBPedia[0].
One of the 'chunking' methods that Wikipedia uses is categories (you undoubtedly knew that) and here is the page that deals with that[1].
Indeed, there's entire category on Wikipedia Categorization[2].
There's the Category Tree page, dead useful, here's one for `semiotics' by way of example[3]
I'd be tickled pink if others could drop more pointers here! Without doubt, as Wikipedia continues to self-organize it is going reveal structural truths about the knowledge humanity is creating.
The Wikidata taxonomy is basically the successor to Wikipedia's category tree. It not only irons out language-based differences (e.g. the category tree being different among Chinese, Spanish, English, etc. Wikipedias), but also captures the idea of generalization through a more semantically meaningful relation. This Wikidata concept tree is constructed with "subclass of" (P279) [1], a property that expresses the proposition "all instances of these items are also instances of those items". The goal is to have a subsumption hierarchy that classifies all human knowledge.
There's an RDF/OWL export of the Wikidata taxonomy available at [2] as wikidata-taxonomy.nt.gz, which can be explored with Semantic Web browsers like Protege [3].
Another fundamental relation -- "part of" (P361) [4] -- expresses mereological relationships. For (oversimplified) example: "iris part of eye", "eye part of head", "head part of body", etc. Both "subclass of" and "part of" are transitive.
A separate comment of mine in this discussion [5] describes how to traverse the "subclass of" tree in the Wikidata UI and a third-party tool called Wikidata Generic Tree. The same principle applies to the "part of" tree. The latter gets less attention, but is also quite interesting.
I am very excited about the potential knowledge engineering possibilities opened up by this large structured datasets.
I believe that at the very least we're going to have within a generation a machine-generated ontology to rival Kant and Aristotle. Then we'll have to figure out if this tells us more about how we've digitally organized the knowledge we have or whether it does in fact reveal something about reality and being.
Besides 'subclass of' and 'part of' are there any other taxonomic ways for concepts to relate to other concepts? There are parallels here of course with object-oriented-programming. It's funny, I only within the last year or so started reading up on mereology[0] but as soon as one starts thinking about concepts and there relationships one ends up there eventually. 'part of' is like encapsulation. 'subclass of' is like inheritance. Is there more?
'Instance of' and 'subclass of' provide Wikidata with a way to express the basic philosophical notion of type-token distinction [3]. For things that are a subclass of something like 'material entity', all instances are physical objects that have a unique location in space and time.
Not all instances are spatiotemporal particulars, though. For example, one might say "Homo sapiens instance of taxon", where taxon is a metaclass, i.e. a class in which the instances are classes. (Here 'taxon' would not be a subclass of 'material entity' -- i.e. taxa are information artifacts, not physical objects.) Support for this kind of "punning" via metamodeling is a major feature of OWL 2 DL [4].
If this sort of thing interests you, definitely take a look into Wikidata [5]. The project will be a sea change for several key features in Wikipedia (e.g. infoboxes), and will likely be a main hub of the Semantic Web.
Fantastic, I've read through your entire comment history :)
I'm familiar with OWL and RDF. I've been using Sparql and DBPedia, I'll switch to Sparql and Wikidata if you think that's the way to go. How do you see the overlap between DBPedia and Wikidata?
I'm concerned that there's going to be knowledge-grab by corporations and (perhaps) government entities. I fear that the knowledge graphs inside the big G and FB and Yandex and Apple and MS and so on to power their search engines and personal assistants will be orders of magnitude more sophisticated and complex and comprehensive that what will be available to open access research. Witness Freebase. Are my fears misplaced would you say?
I've read that SEP article, I've also read a good bit of Peirce's original journal article. As it says in SEP "It should be mentioned that for Peirce there is actually a trichotomy among types, tokens and tones,[...]" - I think it's amusing that basically everybody ignores the triadic distinction that Peirce claimed to be the case for a dualistic type/term distinction.
I'm looking forward to going through your tutorial quill in hand and pot of ink at the ready.
Regarding Wikidata and DBpedia: to my understanding the latter gets much of its content by scraping Wikipedia infoboxes. Wikidata will increasingly provide data for those infoboxes, and thus DBpedia.
Regarding your fears: I don't share them. Wikidata will greatly enhance the accessibility of knowledge for open access research.
Choosing the first link is more or less arbitrary for the purposes of this test. Knowing as we do that nearly all articles lead to Philosophy, I'd be interested in knowing the minimum and maximum distances to Philosophy via traversal of all links in an article.
I feel like this may tell us something interesting about the relative "distance" from philosophy a given subject has, but it's also just as likely to not tell us anything.
It would be interesting to repeat the analysis for other languages. Do other languages have other attractors? Trying it for Spanish, I seem to get stuck in short loop more often, or in Psicología. I got to Filosofía once, but even that takes me to Psicología. Psicología links you back to itself: Psicología -> Profesión -> Especialización -> Actividad -> Psicología loop.
On the contrary, it's a tautology. There are only a finite number of articles, so either your chain reaches philosophy, it ends because there are no links/broken links, or it gets stuck in a loop. The other possibility is that it never ends but never reaches philosophy, but that means it must loop since there are only finite number of articles.
The interesting thing is two fold: most articles end up in the philosophy case, and the loops that do exist tend to be small.
http://xefer.com/wikipedia
It's not perfect but I enjoyed working on it