You’ve been playing low-stakes poker with a bunch of buddies for years. You might peek at someone’s cards now and then, but only as a joke. Suddenly your buddy accuses you of cheating. Shocked, you exclaim, What the hell! It’s just a game! Chill out! Something like that just happened in the field
  • Rottcodd@lemmy.ninjaEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Philosophy can’t have "a scientific basis.

    If an idea has a legitimate scientific basis, then it’s not philosophy - it’s science. Philosophy explicitly addresses ideas for which there is not, and in most cases there can’t be, a legitimate scientific basis.

    • Knusper@feddit.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      Right, that wording wasn’t necessarily the best. I meant “basis” there, as in it not having been fully explored by science.

      To take a recent example, the EU allowed the use of glyphosat for the next ten years. As a pesticide, there’s considerations to be made:

      • We’re committing genocide.
      • We might not be able to feed all humans, if we don’t.
      • We might be contributing to the extinction of animals we need for feeding future humans (e.g. bees).
      • We might need to commit genocide on certain species, if we want to continue our monocultural agriculture, as that causes those species to explode in numbers.

      Well, and for those topics, science provides a basis discussion frame:

      • How many humans do we need to feed?
      • Which species are being killed by glyphosat?
      • Which species are irreplaceable in our own food chain?
      • Are there more environmentally compatible methods that can potentially feed humanity?

      Science doesn’t have oppressive evidence to make one and only one strategy the logically correct approach, so we need philosophy. But philosophy shouldn’t be blathing nonsense either. It needs to be as close to reality as possible, which is where we need science.