I think it in general refers to a (seeming) lack of awareness/acknowledgement of non-stem topics like philosophy, theology, ethics, history, etc.
I'm not sure I would phrase it as STEM itself devaluing non-stem (I mean it's an acronym for subjects) but, rather society in general devaluing these, example, how hard is it go out, get a philosophy degree, and practice/write that and live comfortably with that occupation (no external sources of income). History/Literature seems to be much the same
This is not correct. This attitude was nurtured by science's most successful public mouthpieces. Stephen Hawking and Neal Degrasse Tyson have been running around for decades telling everyone that the humanities are worthless. Young students, unfortunately, listened to them on this subject. A real tragedy, I think.
Carl Sagan would have been a much better steward for science today, as he had a very healthy respect for the relationship between science and humanities and the latter's value for understanding our world.
This dangerous rift goes back even further. See C.P. Snow's lecture "The Two Cultures".(1)
EDIT: Not sure how this slipped my mind, but Sean Carroll is exactly the kind of representative of the syncretic relationship between sciences and humanities that ought to be the default, rather than the exception.
>Stephen Hawking and Neal Degrasse Tyson have been running around for decades telling everyone that the humanities are worthless. Young students, unfortunately, listened to them on this subject. A real tragedy, I think.
Neither of them has said anything like this. Hawking's "philosophy (metaphysics) is dead" is a narrow point about the relevance of philosophy to basic theorizing about nature. NDT said something along the lines of he doesn't have time for questions like "what is the meaning of meaning". Neither can be reasonably construed as denigrating humanities. There have been a lot of folks on the other side who have put words into the mouths of these two for the sake of self-promotion. It's created a very warped perspective on what Hawkings and NDT actually believe.
I looked at it. Randomly opened a couple of links, none of which really support the idea of NDT thinking humanities are worthless. All I see are a lot of overinterpreting and misrepresentations for the sake of using popular guys as a jumping-off point for one's own defensive screed. If you have a specific citation that you feel best represents the case against NDT or Hawking, I'm happy to consider it.
That post is really a case-in-point of overinterpreting and using a popular commentator as a jumping-off point for one's own screed. Pigliucci's response doesn't really engage with a charitable interpretation of what NDT actually said about philosophy, but extrapolates the actual claims to a broad derision which motivates Pigliucci's much wider defense. The two substantive claims NDT makes is that it's hard to move forward when you're endlessly debating the meaning of terms and that philosophy that purports to describe the natural world is obsolete. He concedes other humanistic areas like religion, politics and so on are fruitful philosophical areas.
What NDT is guilty of in the minds of so many of the commentators is not having what they consider due reverence and deference to philosophy. What none of the responses do is justify the supposed reverence scientists and popular culture more broadly should have. The points about philosophy being dead in the context of describing the physical world appear to be true. The point about philosophy not making progress (understood in the way that science makes progress) appears to be true. If the only claim to value one can make is for activity that happened centuries ago (being the forebearer to science), then philosophy truly is dead. While Pigliucci's points in defense of philosophy are true, they still don't tell us why anyone outside of philosophy should care about philosophy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a philosophy hater. I quite enjoy philosophy, I read an awful lot of it. But this is because I like puzzles and I like navigating conceptual spaces and gaining deep understanding. But this isn't all that relevant to most people's lives. You want people to care about philosophy, you need to be relevant to them. Philosophy is failing at being relevant.
I don't see how any of that negates the effect of one of science's pre-eminent public advocates bad mouthing philosophy and the humanities. People hear this and take it at face value. It informs their opinions. It shapes their lives. And it's his purpose to shape people lives. He is partially responsible for the proliferation of similar views throughout the intellectual ecosystem. On this point, he is being irresponsible and ignorant. He ought to have and communicate more nuanced views of the world.
I am having a lot of trouble understanding how their is anything but a tortured defense of his behavior on this front.
Man, if philosophy can't take (an admittedly popular) guy saying rather milquetoast things about philosophy (whether right or wrong), the discipline is in worse shape than I thought. Philosophy should be capable of defending itself, it shouldn't need to rely on deferential treatment and a widespread presumption of value.
Philosophy doesn't deserve deference or respect simply because it's an academic discipline. We've been far too deferential to questionable disciplines and their practitioners, and the academy is in bad shape because of it. Disciplines should be constantly challenged and expected to offer full throated defenses of their merits. If philosophy wants to be valued, it needs to actively demonstrate it's value. if the only thing it can do is get defensive when someone says something negative publicly about it, we might as well just shut it all down now because there's truly nothing left.
"Man, if philosophy can't take (an admittedly popular) guy saying rather milquetoast things about philosophy (whether right or wrong), the discipline is in worse shape than I thought."
Not what this discussions is about at all.
That is some straw man rhetoric.
That actual point was "Hey STEM people, you are talking in circles yourselves, and re-inventing the wheel, maybe checkout what some other fields have already studied"
The issue of NDT and Hawking dismissing philosophy is a mostly separate issue from the original topic and ryanklee turned this branch into that narrow issue. My reply is specifically addressing that subtopic.
Richard Feynman also did not see value in philosophy, and he was right. The submitted article is a good illustration why.
There are two hypotheses: one is that consciousness is essentially a computation, the other that it is an unknowable stuff. Philosophers spend time talking how one or the other hypothesis "feels right" to them. Scientists try to see what results can be obtained through computation.
Now we got to the point where we have automaton talking. Still very very far from understanding how brain works, but an interesting discovery on the way to it. Meanwhile, what philosophers have to say is still as uninteresting and irrelevant as it was in 1879...
You’re talking about metaphysics. Epistemology will be one of the most important issues with AI. And let’s not ignore ethics. You seem to speak as someone who hasn’t read any philosophy. Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer, and plenty of other physicists would disagree with your sentiment.
> Richard Feynman also did not see value in philosophy, and he was right.
Do you realize that physics requires the adoption of a philosophy? Physics addresses problems that are effectively easy. Physicists have tools, such as mathematics, at their disposal and can make wildly simplifying assumptions.
Philosophers are often trying to address what the questions even are and then try to develop new tools to both explore the questions and their answers. Physics is downstream of philosophy.
Unfortunately it is not possible to find out new questions or develop new tools by just thinking about stuff. You need to also do something concrete, at which point you cease to be just a philosopher and become also a mathematician, physicist, historian, economist etc.
In the example of question of consciousness, the point of view presented by William James here was obvious to people long before him. Scientific observation have shown the possibility of the alternative theory: that we are automata. We still do not have a definitive answer which one is correct, but philosophy have not contributed anything towards finding the correct answer. And the only progress we had in last 2500 years was due to science.
> You need to also do something concrete, at which point you cease to be just a philosopher and become also a mathematician, physicist, historian, economist etc.
That's the point. And the converse is true as well.
Has NDT been saying that? I wouldn't know, since I mostly consume him as small segments of larger appearances, but it seems half the time he's conversing with someone he's spouting philosophy as he sees it, so it would be surprising to me that he denigrates it.
1. Tyson dismissed the intellectual value of philosophy in a podcast, which led to criticism from those within the discipline[1].
2. He has been quoted saying, "What they teach in the humanities is not 'skepticism' or 'critical thinking.' It's mental masturbation disguised as critical thinking"[5].
3. Tyson warned that philosophy "can really mess you up" and has implied that philosophy does not progress in the way science does[5].
4. His attitude towards philosophy has been characterized as science-defeating by some, as it dismisses the role of philosophy in addressing moral and aesthetic questions that science cannot answer[6].
5. Tyson's comments have sparked discussions and defenses of the humanities and philosophy, with critics arguing that his views are overly simplistic and do not represent the true value and diversity of philosophical inquiry[1][4][5][6].
Back to the concept rather than an individual, isn't part of the problem that STEM fields feed back into actionable ways, but perhaps philosophy doesn't?
For example, if a new exo-planet were found to have a certain chemical make up that our current understanding didn't agree with, that would go back to theoretical physics and mathematics, where they might discover a way to better describe the discovery. That then becomes a new model that allows us to recognize a new pattern of solar system formation, etc etc.
There's a practical application to STEM work. In what way is there a practical application in philosophy? Is it isolated to educating people on broader more complex thought?
I think this is the point. You are discrediting Philosophy, but that is where science and math came from. You don't go back and say "man Plato was such a waste, lets toss out western civilization".
The point is someone has to start somewhere, and frequently philosophy is the field that tackled open ended questions. Once the questions get 'solved', it gets spun off into another branch of science.
Philosophy is the startup of science, the leading edge. Once it become a 'common' ordinary science, it gets re-named, re-packaged as 'the accepted way'.
It is happening a lot right now, because so many STEM people building AI are suddenly arm-chair philosophers coming up with 'new' questions, that are really 'old'. So the whole field is re-discovering philosophy.
So, when your boss is asking you to design a better way of hiding the waste products from your industrial projects that you know could hurt folks-- that's a good place where having some ethical principles might help.
Without those principles, people are often left with "I am just doing my job" and "this is what any person would do, right"?
Whereas a lot of us won't do certain things because, say, if everybody did them they'd be self contradictory (Kant) or when we look at the overall utility of dumping toxic waste into a river we might it has some larger negative consequences for society (Mill).
I'm not sure I would phrase it as STEM itself devaluing non-stem (I mean it's an acronym for subjects) but, rather society in general devaluing these, example, how hard is it go out, get a philosophy degree, and practice/write that and live comfortably with that occupation (no external sources of income). History/Literature seems to be much the same