We discuss

• Problems with the current peer-review system and how to improve it
• The Mind-Body Problem
• How chaos theory relates to determinism
• The four functions of language
• Why you don't argue with thermometers
• Whether Popper thinks we can build AGI
• Why causality occurs at the level of ideas, not just of atoms

References

• Link to the essay, which you should most definitely read for yourself.
• Ben's call to abolish peer-review
• Discrete Analysis Math Journal
• Pachinko
• Karl Buhler's theory of language

Quotes

This, I think, solves the so-called problem of 'other minds'. If we talk to other people, and especially if we argue
with them, then we assume (sometimes mistakenly) that they also argue: that they speak intentionally about
things, seriously wishing to solve a problem, and not merely behaving as if they were doing so. It has often been seen
that language is a social affair and that solipsism, and doubts about the existence of other minds, become
selfcontradictory if formulated in a language. We can put this now more clearly. In arguing with other people (a thing
which we have learnt from other people), for example about other minds, we cannot but attribute to them intentions,
and this means, mental states. We do not argue with a thermometer.
- C&R, Chap 13

Once we understand the causal behaviour of the machine, we realize that its behaviour is purely expressive or
symptomatic. For amusement we may continue to ask the machine questions, but we shall not seriously argue with it--
unless we believe that it transmits the arguments, both from a person and back to a person.
- C&R, Chap 13

If the behaviour of such a machine becomes very much like that of a man, then we may mistakenly believe that
the machine describes and argues; just as a man"who does not know the working of a phonograph or radio may
mistakenly think that it describes and argues. Yet an analysis of its mechanism teaches us that nothing of this kind
happens. The radio does not argue, although it expresses and signals.
- C&R, Chap 13

It is true that the presence of Mike in my environment may be one of the physical 'causes' of my saying, 'Here is
Mike'. But if I say, 'Should this be your argument, then it is contradictory', because I have grasped or realized that it is
so, then there was no physical 'cause' analogous to Mike; I do not need to hear or see your words in order to realize
that a certain theory (it does not matter whose) is contradictory. The analogy is not to Mike, but rather to my
realization that Mike is here.
- C&R, Chap 13

The fear of obscurantism (or of being judged an obscurantist) has prevented most anti-obscurantists from saying
such things as these. But this fear has produced, in the end, only obscurantism of another kind.
- C&R, Chap 13

When's the last time you argued with your thermometer? Tell us over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Image Credit: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/modernlanguages/research/groups/linguistics/

Support Increments

• The conflict between Galileo and the church
• What is instrumentalism, and how did it become popular?
• How instrumentalism is still in vogue in many physics departments
• The Problem of Universals
• The essentialist approach to science
• Stars, air, cells, and lightning
• "What is" vs "How does" questions
• The relationship between essentialism and language, and its influence on politics.
• Viewing words as instruments

See More:

• Instrumentalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism
• Essentialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
• The problem of universals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals

Quotes:
Few if any of the physicists who have now accepted the instrumentalist view of Cardinal Bellarmino and Bishop Berkeley realize that they have accepted a philosophical theory. Nor do they realize that they have broken with the Galilean tradition. On the contrary, most of them think that they have kept clear of philosophy; and most of them no longer care anyway. What they now care about, as physicists, is (a) mastery of the mathematical formalism, i.e. of the instrument, and (b) its applications; and they care for nothing else.
-- C&R, Page 134

Thus my criticism of essentialism does not aim at establishing the non-existence of essences; it merely aims at showing the obscurantist character of the role played by the idea of essences in the Galilean philosophy of science (down to Maxwell, who was inclined to believe in them but whose work destroyed this belief). In other words my criticism tries to show that, whether essences exist or not, the belief in them does not help us in any way and indeed is likely to hamper us; so that there is no reason why the scientist should assume their existence.
-- C&R, Page 141.

But they are more than this, as can be seen from the fact that we submit them to severe tests by trying to deduce from them some of the regularities of the known world of common experience i.e. by trying to explain these regularities. And these attempts to explain the known by the unknown (as I have described them elsewhere) have immeasurably extended the realm of the known. They have added to the facts of our everyday world the invisible air, the antipodes, the circulation of the blood, the worlds of the telescope and the microscope, of electricity, and of tracer atoms showing us in detail the movements of matter within living bodies. All these things are far from being mere instruments: they are witness to the intellectual conquest of our world by our minds.

But there is another way of looking at these matters. For some, science is still nothing but glorified plumbing, glorified gadgetmaking—‘mechanics’; very useful, but a danger to true culture, threatening us with the domination of the near-illiterate (of Shakespeare’s ‘mechanicals’). It should never be mentioned in the same breath as literature or the arts or philosophy. Its professed discoveries are mere mechanical inventions, its theories are instruments—gadgets again, or perhaps super-gadgets. It cannot and does not reveal to us new worlds behind our everyday world of appearance; for the physical world is just surface: it has no depth. The world is just what it appears to be. Only the scientific theories are not what they appear to be. A scientific theory neither explains nor describes the world; it is nothing but an instrument.
-- C&R, Page 137-8.

What's the essential nature of this podcast? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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