The Philosophy Corner

[Jo498]

The interesting experience I have had is that scientists are often helpless when challenged.
Although they should/could have been alerted to epistemological problems because of the almost 100 years of debate around the interpretation of quantum mechanics, physicists often tend to oscillate between a trite and defensive "instrumentalist" stance: it works in practice, don't care for deeper questions (despite otherwise sporting rhetorics about answering the deepest questions about the structure of the universe etc.) And some kind of pythagoraeanism: it's all maths, as long as we control the maths and have mathematical descriptions, everything is fine.

One of the worst offenders was Hawking when in "A brief history of time" he used a mathematical trick (changing between an "imaginary" and a real variable for the representation of time in Relativity theory) to argue for some kind of unreality of time. The really bad thing about such stuff is that an educated layman has hardly any chance to spot what was wrong here because he is not familiar with the maths and simply must follow the eminent scientist, if he understands anything at all about that suggestion and is not simply awed by the strange maths etc.

Some cognitive scientists seem not to be aware of a distinction between genesis and justification. And neither of the status of their own theories (because they usually implicitly claim to "step outside" the cognitive processes they describe in them). Such confusions are probably behind most brands of "constructivism".

Admittedly, these are often still fairly interesting mistakes and rather complex matters. It gets worse when people do not understand the difference between historical genesis and justification in ethics.

Of course one can *attack* such distinction or claim that all justification is only post-hoc bullshitting to mask the raw power or historical development or ressentiment or whatever is really behind it, as Nietzsche basically did (Genealogy of morals). But his arguments are hardly conclusive. And note that this is also a claim about what really is the case. If the story about historical power structures giving rise to ethics is just another construction by some historian why should I not rather go for a construction that takes ethics as a field where independent rational justification is possible. I am back to rational evaluation about what really is the case in some field, only on a meta-level.

But many do not even seem to be aware of such distinctions to be made and what has to be argued for. People can me amazingly inconsistent, like being convinced of the historical contingency (or social construction) of all ethics and at the same time stamping everyone who does not completely agree with the 2016 time slice of such a contingent development a bigot...