So a lot of philosophical writing references a sort of general canon, at least as far as western thinking is concerned. Other traditions I'm sure have their own details but I can't speak intelligently to them. The field is enormous, and without more specific information regarding your goals it is difficult to pinpoint the classics in subfields that may interest you. That said, there are a few highlights I think you're bound to come across reference or allusion to in many, many other works that would benefit you to get some exposure to. I am strongly biased toward a western analytical…
As a working philosopher, I agree. More specifically, the following passage in the article seems inconclusive to me and based on a common misrepresentation of Kuhn's work (I've heard things like that many times): > At least since Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", historians and philosophers of science have been aware that the traditional methods of science—as described in “science as inquiry”—do not give a complete picture of how scientists develop, test, refine, and replace scientific theories. That ideologies, peer pressure, confirmation bias, and a host of other "biasing…
A long time ago I studied biochem in university. It took me until the third time memorizing the Krebs cycle (energy metabolism) to start asking "how the heck did Krebs et al figure this out?" And I had already read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I memorized Krebs for the SECOND time. I, personally, got stuck in received wisdom for too long. Science is a discipline for confronting mystery. It's about what we don't know. It's also big business, driven by money, prestige, and power (like most human endeavors). In that sense, it's a lot like religion. Religion, as…
Khun sounds reasonable to people who don't know mathematics, which is just about everyone in the humanities. The few who do know mathematics have very interesting things to say, but again, they are very few and they are very far from being popular in their own fields. If you can't do something as simple as expand or factor a polynomial then you can't understand science, in the same way that you can't understand Latin if you only speak English. The idea that we throw out old theories and start over looks like that to people who don't understand the language those theories are written in, to…
Believe me, I get it :) Caveat 1: I'm not entirely sure you're wrong wrt Kuhn. But there's no way I would have gotten even 50 pages in w/out going incredibly slow and thinking deeply about it -- my general algorithm now with books such as these is to read enough that I have a 'mind-full' of stuff, and then think about how it connects to other things I care about. That (wrt Kuhn) has made the difference between thinking of paradigms as "big-picture stuff that changes every so often in a manner more complicated than we normally consider", to seeing the tendrils everywhere, all the time, in…
> Where do you get this definitive statement from? Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962. For over half a century since then, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and political scientists have been studying how modern science works, both on a small scale (in the lab) and on a large scale (as a society). Most of the results seem to confirm the basic idea set out by Kuhn, although many details remain controversial. Rest assured, the boldness and tentativeness of scientific conjectures are not under any serious doubt. The part of Popper's model that later…
I think your division of things discussed into "true facts" and "opinion" is not particularly subtle, but let's run with it. Most of what is discussed falls into the latter category, opinion. That includes things very relevant to people's lives, like who enjoys equal protection under the law. Approaching a conversation about a topic of social justice as if it's as simple, clear, and verifiable as Newtonian mechanics is the wrong approach. XKCD lampooned that here: https://xkcd.com/793/ I'd add that even science isn't as clear as you make it out to be. Newtonian mechanics weren't really…
Software developers are especially well-positioned to understand some of the controversial claims of Kuhn: his 'paradigm shift' would be to us a 'refactor'. Not just adding statements or fixing bugs (accounting for 'anomalies' would be the scientific version), but coming up with new primitive terms through which higher-level program statements are made (conversely, new terms/entities comprising the foundation of a theory). My recollection when reading Structure of Scientific Revolutions was that toward the very end of the book he gets into some more traditional philosophy in relation to…
There are already suggestions in this thread that are better than mine, but I'll still throw my hat in the ring. That's great that she's interested in biology. I'd like to gently suggest that if she "isn't very enthusiastic about computers or technology", you should instead try to nurture her demonstrated interest in art, biology, and other science. I know absolutely nothing about art, except that I apparently have no taste. So I'll refrain from making any suggestions on art books. TL;DR: Skip down to the third section for the "technical book"…
I am sure that there are some people who exhibit the behaviors you're describing, but I really don't think the group as a whole is disinterested in prior work or discussion of philosophy in general: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/epistemology https://www.lesswrong.com/w/priors https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2x67s6u8oAitNKF73/ (a post noting that the foundational problems in mech interp are grounded in philosophical questions about representation ~150 years old) https://www.lesswrong.com/w/consciousness (the page on consciousness first citing the MIT and Stanford encyclopedias, then…