Prime Junta
RPGCodex' Little BRO
- Joined
- October 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540
There's another reason, IMO. Philosophy, like most other "soft" sciences like sociology and what not, lacks the built-in reality check that "hard" sciences have. If a physicist says that his theory predicts that you can drive a car full-tilt into a reinforced-concrete wall and come out the other side with both the car and the wall intact, there's a very simple way to verify it -- put the physicist into a car and have him drive full-tilt into a reinforced concrete wall. That'll kill two birds with one stone -- a lousy theory and a lousy physicist.
With philosophy, however, it often appears to happen that (1) someone comes up with a new, genuinely useful, genuinely interesting idea; (2) he applies it to some domain and comes up with some new, genuinely interesting insights; (3) he attracts disciples, (4) the disciples start applying the idea all over the place, end up with any number of stupid, pernicious, flat-out wrong insights, and (5) defend both the theory and the insights to their last breath based on the beauty and influence of the original theory.
Take semiotics, for example. That genuinely revolutionized the way we think of communication. It's a really great conceptual model for what actually happens in each of our heads when I write this message, you and others read it, and then proceed to reply. Before semiotics, we had a pretty naive idea of how communication happens -- I have an idea, I encode it in some symbols, you decode the symbols, and end up with the same idea, minus static and errors in encoding and decoding. The semiotics framework, OTOH, explains a great deal more about how we communicate, why we so often miscommunicate, and what we can do about it.
But... semiotics got applied all over the place, gave birth to postmodernism, and ended up in a place where a paper called "The Social Construction Of Quantum Gravity," written as a complete joke and spoof, gets accepted and favorably reviewed in a leading peer-reviewed academic publication. The theory has entered domains where it's lost all explanatory power, but is still fiercely defended by people with much intelligence but very little sense.
(By the way, I just finished reading a fascinating book about the social construction of technology. It contained some brilliant insights, a solid conceptual framework, and a genuinely fresh way of examining how we create our technological artifacts. I'm quite sure it has since been applied to death in all kinds of places where it shouldn't be.)
With philosophy, however, it often appears to happen that (1) someone comes up with a new, genuinely useful, genuinely interesting idea; (2) he applies it to some domain and comes up with some new, genuinely interesting insights; (3) he attracts disciples, (4) the disciples start applying the idea all over the place, end up with any number of stupid, pernicious, flat-out wrong insights, and (5) defend both the theory and the insights to their last breath based on the beauty and influence of the original theory.
Take semiotics, for example. That genuinely revolutionized the way we think of communication. It's a really great conceptual model for what actually happens in each of our heads when I write this message, you and others read it, and then proceed to reply. Before semiotics, we had a pretty naive idea of how communication happens -- I have an idea, I encode it in some symbols, you decode the symbols, and end up with the same idea, minus static and errors in encoding and decoding. The semiotics framework, OTOH, explains a great deal more about how we communicate, why we so often miscommunicate, and what we can do about it.
But... semiotics got applied all over the place, gave birth to postmodernism, and ended up in a place where a paper called "The Social Construction Of Quantum Gravity," written as a complete joke and spoof, gets accepted and favorably reviewed in a leading peer-reviewed academic publication. The theory has entered domains where it's lost all explanatory power, but is still fiercely defended by people with much intelligence but very little sense.
(By the way, I just finished reading a fascinating book about the social construction of technology. It contained some brilliant insights, a solid conceptual framework, and a genuinely fresh way of examining how we create our technological artifacts. I'm quite sure it has since been applied to death in all kinds of places where it shouldn't be.)
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540
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