So explain why the provocative headline from someone who also does not provoke?
Did you bother to click on the link he provided?
At a guess, the answer to that question is no.
Had you bothered to click on the link, you would have found that he was quoting the title of the article itself "
Why so many scientists are so ignorant"..
The article is an opinion piece, about the role of philosophy in scientific endeavour, nay, in life in general. As Mr Gobry points out in the article, the discussion or belief in science is based on a philosophical belief. Which begs the question as to why Bill Nye opted to make fun of philosophy in general, while ignoring the fact that his words and thought processes on the subject matter were philosophical.
There mere postulation of theories is philosophical.
As Goldhill notes on Nye's fumbling of the question he received from a student..
Nye’s skepticism is an empty response to the question of whether we can trust our senses. “If you drop a hammer on your foot, is it real?” he asks. “Or is it just your imagination?” Then he goes on to suggest that the young philosophy student explore the question by dropping a hammer on his own foot. But such a painful experiment would not actually address the underlying question, and this approach—simply mocking the argument rather than addressing it—is so infamous that, as CUNY philosophy professor Kaikhosrov Irani points out on his blog, it has its own name: argumentum ad lapidem—”appeal to a stone.”
Nye’s confidence that what we sense and feel is “authentic” is particularly strange coming from a scientist, given that several advanced scientific discoveries do in fact contradict information we receive from our senses. Einstein discovered that there’s no such thing as absolute simultaneity, for example, while quantum physics shows that an object can be in two places at the same time. Several philosophers have long argued that our senses are not a reliable means of evaluating reality, and such scientific discoveries support the idea that we should treat sensory information with a little skepticism.
Goldhill has a point.
You should read Olivia Goldhill's article. You might learn something. For example:
And then there’s the development of formal logic, which was devised by philosophers a little over 100 years ago and is the foundation of coding and computer science—in other words, the grounding for all modern technology.
The fact that the very
notion and basis of the scientific method stems
from philosophy seems to have escaped everyone's notice. Frankly, Nye's comments were astonishingly unscientific.
So explain why you keep rehashing the same nonsense again and again and again and again, on a science forum no less: Yes I know, not to be provocative...
But we have forums [ I think] on the supernatural, and UFO's and ghosts and goblins out there some where.
That would seem to suggest you do come here to provoke, but of course that isn't true of our friend MR, who does not do that sort of thing.
And we have sub-forums that are dedicated specifically with these subjects on this site. Perhaps you and others can explain why you all felt you just had to troll and flame this thread, rehashing things that have nothing to do with this thread?
So now that we have cleared all that up and shown you to not being a vindictive provoking and get even individual that some may suggest, let's get back to the nitty gritty as to why most of your beliefs are just that...your beliefs.
No, it just doesn't hold up against the real evidence. And dodgy faded ill focused photographs do not count.
* Why do these supposed Alien origin UFO's just flitter in and flitter out again.
* Why is there never ever any physical evidence, real physical evidence ever left
* Why do they come so far and yet never officially announce themselves, other than to a few gullible individuals, stuck out in the middle of nowhere
*And finally while so many other possibilities exist to explain some of these sightings, UFO's remain just that...UFO's;
For someone who repeatedly complains about discussions on UFO's and the like, you certainly have a need to pursue these discussions on sub-forums not dedicated to those subjects.
And oh yeah:
Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.
Richard Feynman
Can you please provide the context in which this quote was taken?
The reason I ask is because you do not quite seem to grasp what Feynman actually meant by it because of how you have decided to use that quote here in this thread. What Richard Feynman meant by that is that there is a crossover in thought between philosophy and science. The relationship is "symbiotic". As much as the relationship between physics and mathematics is symbiotic.
Or put simply and this was the best article I could find to explain it and it deals with, amazingly enough, with the scientific method.
It is written by Donald E. Simanek, a Professor of Physics:
Students and laypersons seldom grasp the difference between mathematics and physics. Since math is the preferred modeling analogy for physics, any physics textbook is richly embellished with equations and mathematical reasoning. Yet to understand physics we must realize that math is not a science, and science is not merely mathematics.
In the early history of science, mathematics was considered a "science of measurement", and was supported because of its practical applications in land measurement, commerce, navigation, etc. But those who did math discovered that mathematics was a branch of logic, and certain important results (such as the Pythagorean theorem of right triangles) could be arrived at by purely logical means without recourse to experiment. Slowly there emerged a body of knowledge called "pure" mathematics—theorems that were derived by strictly logical means from a small set of axioms. Euclid's geometry was of this form.
Today science and mathematics are separate and independent disciplines. The physicist must learn a lot of mathematics, but the mathematician (unless working in an applied field) need not know science. In fact, most pure mathematicians seldom interact with scientists, and have no need to. Likewise, physicists generally are capable of doing mathematics without interaction with mathematicians, and have on a number of occasions, developed new mathematics to solve particularly knotty problems. One theoretical physicist I knew spent a lot of time reading the mathematics literature, saying "Those mathematicians are doing some stuff that might be really useful to us. I only wish they spoke our language." His point was that the language with which each discipline speaks of its own field has diverged to the point where special effort must be made to "cross over" into the technical literature of the other field. A similar situation exists today in philosophy, where the language of philosophy of science has become so specialized and technical that most scientists find great difficulty reading it. But as one philosopher put it, "Philosophers of science observe scientists from outside, trying to figure out what they are doing, how they are doing it, and what it all means. In this process we have no need to talk to them. It's like watching a game where you don't know the rules when you come in, but try to figure out the rules by watching what the players do. For philosophers, science is a spectator sport."
In that sense, an explorer can be a tourist as much as a tourist can be an explorer. They may be two distinct differences between what constitutes a tourist and an explorer. The two can and do overlap. Think about when you went on holidays somewhere new, as a tourist. Did you stay in your hotel room and not leave it to explore the local sites? Or did you leave your hotel room and visit the local landmarks and sites.. ie, did you explore where you went on holidays as a tourist? Did you make the effort to become the explorer? Understand now? The scientists explore, but the philsophers are the tourists who watch them explore and determine what it is they are doing and how they are doing it. Just as a scientist will become the tourist in determining how and why they are exploring and they will have to utilise philosophy to come to their answer.
