NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9486974" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Do you really think anyone in this conversation thinks philosophy is a hard science?Just because it isn't a hard science doesn't mean 99.99999% of what it talks about is somehow pure dismissable subjectivity. Likewise, just because physics IS a hard science doesn't mean absolutely everything in it is pure objective fact! Believe me, I would know...I've written multiple papers on critically important conditioned, social elements of physics research. Consider, for example, the "pentaquark" debacle. At the time I wrote the paper, it was a semi-recent issue (within the previous decade), where some labs had reported that they'd discovered a pentaquark (a subatomic particle made up of five quarks, generally four matter quarks and two antimatter quarks), followed by other papers claiming similar things, only to then have later papers cast doubt on these observations because their statistical analysis had been dubious--and then rejected entirely. This cast a pall over pentaquark research for nearly a full decade after the fallout had completely settled. Basically nobody was willing to touch pentaquark searches, because the social stigma could ruin your career and mean nobody would publish what you worked on--and "publish or perish" is itself a social issue.Philosophy deals with all sorts of things, for good reason. Some of what it touches on is objective. Some isn't. You have to actually say why it's not objective--and, even if you establish that, why subjectivity is actually a problem. Just writing stuff off as "philosophy and therefore subjective...and tacitly, therefore completely dismissable!" is not an acceptable argument.</blockquote>

Verification