created by benjaminikuta on 15/02/2019 at 17:19 UTC
13 upvotes, 7 top-level comments (showing 7)
Comment by redmoray at 15/02/2019 at 20:23 UTC
23 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It’s not really a coherent idea, more like a kitschy slogan cooked up by a snarky blogger who never really engaged with philosophy to begin with. I assume he means that a problem is “worth debating” if we are capable of arriving at knowledge or otherwise making fruitful progress in understanding from the debate.
It’s not really clear what is meant by “experiment” in the original post. He’s clearly had something like modern scientific experimental procedures in mind, but then you have to take the fact that different scientific disciplines vary widely in their experimental standards. Some fields of inquiry, like paleontology, are not directly experimental and a “fact” in paleontology meets different conditions than a “fact” in theoretical physics.
Notions of what “experimentation” means, and why they provide reliable and trustworthy results come from reasoned discussion and deliberation on philosophical principles from epistemology and empiricism. And the history of science shows this. The standards and methods of physics research have substantially changed over the past 500 years, and a close reading of the works contributing to the discipline show this continuous development. It’s not like Newton invented empirical research and everything was different from that point on. (The man did dedicate most of his time to alchemy)
And this isn’t to say anything about a-priori disciplines like math or logic. Clearly they have “worth” and debate is how many of these fields progress. Just because there are clear right and wrong answers in mathematics doesn’t mean arriving at them is free of confusion.
In conclusion, not much.
Comment by willbell at 15/02/2019 at 17:41 UTC*
17 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This isn't an argument, but it is telling about how difficult it is to endorse this view that Newtonian physics includes a lot of metaphysical speculation that cannot be settled by experiment. So if Newton did say this then he's either hypocritical or meant it in a (edit: less) restrictive way than the sentence suggests.
Comment by oneguy2008 at 15/02/2019 at 22:44 UTC
12 upvotes, 0 direct replies
So this is a bit of a cheapshot, but it's a revealing one: Newton's Flaming Laser Sword, if true, implies that Newton's Flaming Laser Sword is not worth debating.
More seriously, there is a related philosophical position (verificationism) that has its home in a once-popular program called logical empiricism[1]. If you're attracted to these types of doctrines, a good place to start would be to read these authors and then some of the midcentury reactions against them (Quine; cognitive psychology; ...) to understand why many people thought they were too narrow.
1: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/
One advantage of this way of proceeding is that you might find a number of claims in the logical empiricist's toolbox that are worth saving. Unfortunately, you might not get to keep the laser sword despite the fact that laser swords are cool.
Comment by frege-peach at 15/02/2019 at 22:26 UTC
13 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Are mathematical claims settled by experiment? Proofs are not obviously experimental.
Comment by mrsamsa at 15/02/2019 at 23:52 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
What experiment settled the claim "what cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating"?
Comment by bunker_man at 16/02/2019 at 04:23 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Its dumb. Math is solved via logic rather than experiment. At the point you rule out math from being worth talking about you are spouting nonsense.
Comment by jessejamescagney at 15/02/2019 at 17:33 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Metaphysics has survived throughout such criticisms throughout the history of philosophy. The fall of verificationism comes to mind. Verificationism offered a way of determining nonsense from meaningful statements. A statement meant what verified it, and so statements which could not be verified literally did not mean anything. This creates a serious problem for verificationism itself, however, since we may ask what verified the verificationist theory of meaning. Those who disagree with that theory of meaning can agree with what verifies a statement, and thus what verifies statements can not determine the correct theory of meaning - and by verificationism’s own light it is nonsense.
A similar issue may arise from Newton’s flaming sword: he’s clearly put forth a position which he thinks is reasonable. But if he’s right, there’s no point in him offering this statement into any open discourse, since experiments surely do not determine whether he’s right or not.