My last blog entry here dealt with philosophers and their "science envy". A few weeks later, I posted an article by Lawrence Krauss - "A universe without purpose" - on my facebook page, commenting on my discomfort with Krauss's casual treatment of "nothingness", and also about how his title and opening line promise far more than what the content offers (which is very little, by way of clarity).
Today, I came across a more systematic critique of Lawrence Krauss and his views, by a more learned gentleman and a certified philosopher to boot (he's a professor at CUNY). His en passant swipe at Richard Dawkins is particularly amusing, and confirms what I'd suspected back then, when I posted Krauss's article on facebook - Krauss and Dawkins are mutual shills. Hawking is not spared either. If philosophers suffer from penis envy, there's another Freudian metaphor for what scientists suffer from, according to the author:
Okay, others can play the same game too, so I’m going to put forth the hypothesis that the reason physicists such as Weinberg, Hawking and Krauss keep bashing philosophy is because they suffer from an intellectual version of the Oedipus Complex (you know, philosophy was the mother of science and all that... you can work out the details of the inherent sexual frustrations from there)
Interesting side story: my last blog entry post referred to a popular saying about ducks, and a comment by a reader here says:
Accept that the philosophy of science is as much use to a scientist as ornithology is to a duck. Ornithologists do know a lot about ducks, but ducks know nothing at all about ornithologists
Indeed.
Reinforces a view I've often voiced - that scientists would do well to either completely stay away from philosophy, or embrace it without prejudice and understand it fully. Unfortunately, may of them wander into philosophy's wide open pastures, and, encouraged by their success as scientists, display their ignorance with hubris. Which is all very well, as long as they don't make gross errors in methodology. For example, concluding that all swans are white simply because the global scientific community has heaps and heaps of evidence to that effect and none to the contrary. And therefore elevating the status of that hypothesis to a "fact".
