From: lizi@ocf.berkeley.edu (Cosma R. Shalizi)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Report on Philosophies of Physicists
Date: 5 Sep 1992 06:30:40 GMT
Organization: Vampire Research Group at Berkeley :)
NNTP-Posting-Host: tempest.berkeley.edu

In article <5399@dove.nist.gov> gilligan@bldrdoc.gov (Jonathan M. Gilligan) writes:
>
>[Cuttig point about explaining non-relativistic QM briefly and clearly to
  the laity deleted, despite qualified agreement on my part.]

>I agree with Mitsu that it's hard to explain philosophical ideas to
>people who don't understand the context of what you are saying.  It's
>not so much that the ideas are inexplicable, but that you need to
>spend so much time giving context. Hume may be fairly easy to
>understand, but without Cartesian ideas to give context, you might
>well wonder why he goes on so. And how would you ever understand Kant
>without having read Aristotle, Descartes, and Hume? Or Hegel without
>Kant? or Marx without Hegel?
>The preface of Hegel's Phenomonology of Spirit contains a nice
>discussion of the dangers of trying to summarize philosophy as results
>separate from the process that gave them birth.
>In physics too, even book-length popularizations of physics too often
>leave lay readers with fundamental misunderstandings about the
>material.
>However, if you want concise, I can't beat Wittgenstein:
>     Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.
>Any questions?
>---Jon
>Disclaimer --- The government probably disagrees with my opinions.
   Well - not questions, exactly...

* In philosophy proper, the question is not "Why does philosopher X
  say Y?" but "Is X true?" I submit that one can form many judgements
  about even what Kant and Hegel (no one's models for clarity) can say
  - and that in the case of those two, at least, few of them are
  favorable. Of course, "Why does X believe Y" is a good and interesting
  question, particularly when Y appears to be false, but it properly be-
  longs to the history of philosophy. Even the most extreme believers in
  free will would, I think, admit that there are reasons why X believes
  Y, but that's not the point. X might believe a true Y for bad reasons
  (a voice induced by LSD), a false Y for good reasons (forgot to carry
  a 2), etc. None of this has any baring on whether Y is correct, which
  is the philosophically interesting question.
* Good explanations to the laity are both _accurate_ and _clear_. In
  fact, any good explanation is accurate and clear. The above-mentioned
  popularizations of science, which are clear without being accurate,
  are thus _not good explanations_. Some might feel that accuracy is
  enough. This is wrong, for two reasons:
  1. The explanation must be clear enough to be understood, or it does
     no good whatsoever.
  2. Previous experience indicates that inclarity (?) does not indicate
     profudnity of thought, but quite the reverse. Obscurity hides
     mistakes, omissions, lies and simple non-sense by making it in-
     distinguishable from anything else. Most of us are familiar with
     crank literature (e.g., the "proofs" of God from the fact that the
     Sun and the Moon have the same appearant diameter). These, as a
     rule are not clear. To provide more philosophic examples: Kant,
     Hegel, Husserl, Heiddeger and (if you really want to call the man
     a philosopher) Derrida.
* Notice that I have said nothing about brevity. Leaving aside the truly
  appalling (and even self-contradictory) quote from Wittgenstein,
  consider
				Hop(Psi)=Eop(Psi) 
  This is admirably brief, but it tells you very little unless you know
  what all the terms are - in which case it can tell you quite a bit
  indeed. This explanation, while it can be done clearly and accurately,
  may require a fairly large amount of time. So?
* I admit to a slight inconsistency. I claim that philosophers should
  be mainly concerned with the meaning of what is said. Nonetheless,
  I can fly into screaming rages about the way things are said. I confess
  freely to the fault, but point out, again, that inclarity is often
  a defense against _having nothing to say_. Take your favorite obscure
  philosopher and translate his writings, as much as possible, into 
  plain English (or German, or Swahili, or...). Now cross out everything
  that is obviously false, unsupported, trivially true or contradictory
  to another part of the work in question. You will find that this makes
  a marvellous compression algorithim. Karl Popper may be observed
  playing this game with great zest on Hegel in chapter 12 of his
  _The Open Society and Its Enemies_.

   Now, with that out if the way: If Mitsu doesn't feel that he can
provide us with a good explanation of the appropriate Eastern philosophy
(ies), could he at least provide us with the names of some people who
could?
	Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
	lizi@ocf.berkeley.edu to friends
	larval physicist & flaming neo-Positivist

P.S. This post probably has a fair number of spelling errors in it;
      blame 'em on stuidity and a TVI (=Satan) terminal
-- 
"Some savages are persuaded by the 'natural light' that it is their duty to
 eat people, and even Voltaire's savages, who are led by the voice of reason
 to hold that one should only eat Jesuits, are not wholly satisfactory."
-Bertrand Russell on Rousseau in _A History of Western Philosophy_, p. 694
From: ric@hpspdla.spd.HP.COM (Ric Peregrino)
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 18:40:38 GMT
Subject: Re: Rotating Bucket of Water in a Gravitation Field...Part #2
Organization: HP Stanford Park - Palo Alto, CA