/r/askphilosophy aims to provide serious, well-researched answers to philosophical questions.
Questions are at the bottom. The rest here is some background that led me to asking these.
A couple of years ago I went to a seminar where I had a lengthy discussion with two philosophy students (1st or 2nd year assumably). They argued very convincingly that physics never can accurately describe the universe due to Gödels incompleteness theorem.
I had never heard of that before, their arguments seemed valid and they were very convinced. A short skim of wikipedia told me that their characterization was basically correct.
So I believed them.
It took me several years and many math courses to understand that their arguments were only valid on first glance.
This year I attended a masters course in philosophy as I visited a friend that studies something related. It was about the philosophy of neural nets/AI.´
After ~30m I stopped paying attention. The lecture left the realm of reality. Ideas were discussed that could have been interesting. But as the arguments relied on misunderstandings of the underlying math they were moot.
From time to time I skim the philosophy subreddit. I mostly read stuff that is in my area of interest i.e. physics and comp sci.
But as soon as the word quantum appears the post immediately enters a parallel universe where all knowledge about physics goes haywire.
Recently I had a discussion with a professor of philosophy about large language models. As I do not wish to have a reddit post backfire on my professional life I can’t go into too much detail. But to put it friendly: It became quickly apparent that there were some … misconceptions about how LLMs work. Subsequent ideas and reasoning suffered under those misconceptions.
The amount of dubious experiences I’ve had has gone beyond what I could explain as coincidences. Especially those in an approximately graduate level context left me a bit shocked.
So now I have questions. They are a lot but I think they are connected. Anyway I am happy about answers to any of these.
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Is my observation coincidence or is there really a problem with scientific understanding in the teaching of philosophy?
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How much value is placed on the scientific method, statistics, scientific language etc. in a philosophy major?
E.g. I had to take course work from the humanities as an undergrad. That was not true vice versa. Which, today, I see with those example, critically.
So phrased alternatively I would also be interested how this was for you. Did you attend classes from e.g. physics or math either willingly or voluntarily? And if so did you think this was beneficial? -
Especially for something like e.g. quantum mechanics all ideas hinge on a solid grasp of the concept. And to obtain that can take a long time. Sometimes even years.
How are such complex problems handled and teached?
How is the average student enabled to critically think on a subject that he or she has no possibility to properly learn? -
Do you see any implications? E.g. on how the field is viewed or relevance of it.
Both if my assessment is true or false. In the latter case the appearance alone might be an issue. -
And finally philosophizing on my part. Could a reason for my observation be that philosophy started as a discipline that argues from first principle? And that it predates a world where most knowledge could never be deducted by a single human?