That is confused. What I asked for was evidence that having philosophical conversations improves the science being produced by those having the conversations. The *history* project of showing the evolution of philosophical ideas into scientific ideas is straightforward. But that's not what needs to be demonstrated.
A controlled experiment might be to take a standardized data set [†] from 2 labs, perhaps chemistry labs. One lab will be subjected to weekly "salons" and the other one won't. Then after the intervention, both labs will be measured again. If there's a significant difference in the measures, then the weekly discussions had an impact. Of course, you might have to control for social team building... so maybe there are 3 arms, one group holds salons, one group does nothing, and one group plays poker. I don't know. But *that* was my challenge... to demonstrate that conversations like yours and Dave's lead to better science. [†] Of course, which measures to choose is a hard problem. You'd have to define "better science". But a standard one might be publication targets' impact factor, ratio of rejections to acceptances, citations of the publications, etc. On 3/12/20 9:22 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote: > ... produce any EVIDENCE that philosophy has EVER helped science. I think > part of the problem with that is that when a philosophical insight gets > incorporated into science it begins to look like method, rather than like > philosophy. Think how Peirce's philosophy seems to be embodied in > statistics. But then, one could argue, it ws Poincare's (?) statistics > that got embodied in Peirce's philosophy. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
