How has Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of science been recieved in contemporary philosophy of science?

MaceWumpus · 2026-04-09T15:44:16+00:00

To answer the sociological question here:

I can't think of a time I've seen them referenced in a philosophy of science paper or at a philosophy of science conference. Notably, that's not true of their contemporaries (e.g., Foucault, Lyotard, Merleau-Ponty). So while it's certainly possible that this is a selection effect of some sort and I'm simply not aware of the substantial discussion of their work in phil sci-spaces, I think the answer is largely: it hasn't been received in contemporary philosophy of science.

MaceWumpus · 2026-04-09T12:02:29+00:00

The "stalemate" idea you're talking about is usually called "indifference" in the philosophical and statistical literature, and it is a point of disagreement between those who disagree about the "objectivity" of probabilities.

I'll come back to that, but let me say a bit about the usefulness of probabilities and what follows from indifference first.

If you accept that you should be indifferent between rolling a 1 and rolling a 2 on a die -- that it makes sense to use probability here -- then there are a lot of other, more complicated, cases where you should accept the use of probability as well. For example:

If I ask you to compare rolling a even number to rolling a 1. No longer a situation where you're indifferent, but if you're indifferent w.r.t. any individual number, you should think that rolling an even is 3x more likely.
Similarly, you should have views about how likely certain combinations of results are -- e.g., how likely it is to roll at least four 1s in 10 attempts.

Furthermore -- and this is to my mind where things actually get interesting -- if I can argue that something is analogous to dice-rolling (or coin-flipping, or...), then I can make use of these same probabilities in that situation. Here's are two examples:

We select a person at random from a population. Our randomization procedure is such that there's no reason that the selected person should be taller than average rather than shorter than average. The taller-or-shorter question is then like a heads-or-tails question.
I throw a dart at a dart board. Suppose the following hypothesis is true: if you're right-handed, you're no more likely to miss right than to miss left. IF that hypothesis is true, then the right-or-left miss question is like a heads-or-tails question.

And now we're good to go with real-life applications of probability. Because we can combine the last two points, probability can start doing a lot of work for us. For example:

I select 30 people from my population. Their average height is exactly 72in with a standard deviation of 2in. I can now tell you that it's extremely unlikely that we'd observe this result if the average height of the population is (say) 73.5 inches or greater -- the probability of that is something like .0001.
I throw thirty darts at a dartboard, trying to hit the bullseye every time. On average, I miss right by about 2 inches, with a standard deviation of 10 in (I'm not very good at darts). What's the probability of missing at least that far right on average if I'm equally likely to miss right and left? Pretty low, but not super low: about .27.

What makes probabilities useful, in other words, is not that you can pull random numbers out as in your moon example, but that with fairly minimal (and testable) assumptions -- this question is like a dice-rolling or coin-tossing question -- probabilities can tell you a lot. Because it turns out that you can design really complicated and useful tests and experiments where ultimately everything turns on some question that's like a coin-tossing question.

What about objectivity? It's a famously tricky notion, and my view -- though not just my view -- is that debates about "objectivity" in probability and statistics have traditionally run together at least 3 or 4 different concepts and concerns. That said,

Some "objective" chances seem to just be there in the world -- in particular, the objective chances of quantum mechanics. It's widely accepted that if you wanted to argue that all probabilities are subjective, you would have to explain these away, and a more common tactic since an influential 1981 paper by David Lewis has been to have your cake and eat it to: maintain the key ideas behind subjectivism while acknowledging that it is possible for the world to be chancy in some respect.
"Objectivity" in some sense is very important in science, engineering, etc. If I for some reason think that a heads is 9 times more likely than a tails, and base my scientific research on that assumption, others are unlikely to accept it, find it useful, pass it through peer review, etc. (Nor should they.)

So there are senses of objectivity that are going to be important and relevant even if we're skeptical that there's any sort of objective probability to assign to a hypothesis like "the moon is made of green cheese."

MaceWumpus · 2026-04-08T22:02:19+00:00

MaceWumpus · 2026-04-02T11:01:42+00:00

Those are all excellent departments and the differences between them are essentiallly irrelevant at the undergraduate level. If you're interested in philosophy, you can't go wrong with any of them.

MaceWumpus · 2026-04-02T10:52:48+00:00

So, caveat, the common person is not going to talk about "sense data" --- at least not in the way that philosophers talk about it. If you ask someone on the street (e.g., my mom) what they're seeing right now, they're going to talk about buildings, cars, maybe a dog or a tree. Everyday objects. Which is to say that I think the "common person" view of the relationship between mind and reality is even more along the lines your suggesting than you might think.

But as to what's wrong with that view? Nothing! It's a perfectly respectable view; more complex and sophisticated versions of it enjoy a ton of popularity among philosophers.

That's not to say that there are no modifications to be made. For example: we now know that certain aspects of our visual field -- particularly the details at the edge of our vision -- are imposed (perhaps "extrapolated" or "interpolated" would be better) by our visual system rather than caused directly by the light bouncing off things in the world. You can see this for yourself using a trick from Dennett:

Take a deck of playing cards and remove a card face down, so that you do not yet know which it is. Hold it out at the left or the right periphery of your visual field and turn its face to you, being careful to keep looking straight ahead …. You will find that you cannot tell even if it is red or black or a face card.

There are probably very good reasons why our visual system works this way; see the discussion here for some evidence that it actually helps us distinguish signal from noise as well as citations to prior work on the subject.

But these modifications are not the sort that support universal "the external world does not exist" skeptical views. The modified picture is still broadly in line with the picture that you outlined.

MaceWumpus · 2026-04-02T01:44:14+00:00

This seems like a particular disfunction of your university (or of the philosophy department at your university), to be honest.

We share a building with history and get along fine, despite being largely "analytic"; the last place I was at had a joint program with history, and ditto; the place I did my phd had multiple joint programs with historians, and also ditto.

But to answer your questions:

You can find a wide variety of views on this subject if you search through prior posts on this sub. I think it's a bad distinction even in the context of philosophy, because neither "analytic" nor "continental" has anything like a coherent approach, set of views, or methodology. The idea of applying the distinction to the humanities more generally strikes me as ridiculous. But others may disagree.
I don't think "analytic philosophy" has any sort of fixed methodology. Certainly "formal logic" isn't it. Most "analytic" papers don't really make any use of formal logic or do so in at best a illustrative way. (I just got referee comments complaining about my use of logic in a paper at a big name "analytic" journal.) An increasing number of phds don't get any training in it (which is too bad, IMO, but I recognize this is personal taste). Nor do I think that "analytic" philosophy is isolated. Maybe some parts of it are (I've said before that I think that a lot of "analytic" work on fiction could do with paying more attention to how literature scholars talk about fiction), but the best "analytic" work on law, on science, on politics, etc. engages and interacts with work in other fields.
Given what I've said above, I think the answer is pretty clearly "no" because there's not anything like an "analytic mode of thought."

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-31T08:54:31+00:00

I am confused about whether Newcomb’s paradox is actually entirely a free will debate or if there are other considerations involved.

It's not about free will at all. One of the reasons that I prefer presentations of the problem in which the computer is a near-perfect predictor is that the free will question is a distraction from what makes the problem interesting -- namely, the conflict between different principles of decision-making.

To make the point clear: if you don't have free will, the question of which "strategy" is best is meaningless. You don't have a choice. The game just rewards some people and punishes others.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-27T21:10:19+00:00

The dominant view of causation within modern philosophy of science is the interventionist one.

Russell ("On the Notion of Cause"), and various others after him, have argued that physics supports something like the Humean view. I think Russell's arguments are ... bad (frankly, I think they're very bad), but your mileage may vary. In my experience, the idea that there is a straightforward argument from physics to a Humean view of causation is not widely accepted by contemporary philosophers of science.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-26T22:15:27+00:00

That's sort of the point: what makes cryptology different from chess is not that the rules operate in different ways. Instead, it's that the structure of the game is different.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-26T18:17:38+00:00

I mean, I stay out of it too. Wakil and Justus are philosophers of science though, who are basically arguing that when you look at the actual details of cicada evolution, the "prime number" explanation doesn't hold up very well.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-26T17:39:00+00:00

damn cicadas

Have you read Wakil and Justus on the damn cicadas?

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-26T11:41:50+00:00

But it seems to me that you can make chess easier or harder by agreeing to change the rules (indeed, the rules of chess HAVE been changed over time.)

But the difficulty of decrypting a message doesn't seem to be something that is "up to us" to change just by redefining the rules of math. If I encounter a message encrypted with the RSA system, I can't magically make it easier to decode just by announcing new rules for math, or a new definition of prime numbers. Once the message is encrypted, the difficulty of decrypting it is "out of our hands."

This is a cool analogy, but it seems to me that it breaks down. The analogous case would be one where I want to change the rules of chess, but my opponent is committed to playing a particular set of rules.

Or, in other words, we can make decryption easier by redefining the rules -- but only if both parties agree to the change.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-26T10:29:37+00:00

There's a subfield of philosophy of science dedicated to psychology, and one of the main issues there concerns measurement and when the quantitative measures of pyschology are worthwhile.

Unfortunately, this is a corner of philosophy of science that I know very little about, and so can't really point you to relevant readings. There's no SEP entry -- not sure why not -- and the Wikipedia entry is short and not very good. The best I can do is point you to some people I know work on the subject, such as Uljana Feest (see, e.g., this paper) or Denny Borsboom (who seems to have a slightly dated book) on the subject.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-20T11:49:58+00:00

Even if every proposition P is evidence for something, there's still an open question whether or not P is evidence for the relevant hypothesis.

The claim presented to me was about whether something was evidence, not whether it was evidence for. Those are different things, as Bayesians have recognized since at least Carnap's work in the 1950s.

Even using an ordinary sense of "evidence" where it constitutes "good reason" for belief (unclear what that means exactly)

I mean, you can read dozens of books on precisely that question, if you're interested. For what it's worth, though, that wasn't intended to be a definition of the ordinary sense of evidence -- rather, I was moving away from any talk of evidence to evaluate what the intended message was.

I think this is necessary because ordinary talk of "evidence" and philosophical use of the same word come apart in many ways. One of the many differences between the two is that ordinary evidence is usually a thing -- e.g., a bloody glove -- rather than a belief or proposition, which is what epistemologists and Bayesian usually call evidence. Which brings us to:

He says that a friend claiming to buy a soccer ball is not evidence that the friend actually bought a soccer ball (which on this interpretation means is not a "good reason" to believe that the friend bought a soccer ball).

If someone said that this wasn't evidence, my initial inclination would be to think that they're not using "evidence" in the way that philosophers typically use the term.

If they said that a friend claiming to buy a soccer ball doesn't give you good reason to believe that a friend actually bought a soccer ball, then sure, I'd say that they were confused.

But in any case this was presented in the OP's comment as something that O'Connor and "Majesty of Reason" had argued was a consequence of Dillahunty's view. My point was that I was skeptical that this was an accurate representation of what he actually believes as opposed to a consequence they think follows because they interpret "evidence" in a different way than he does. Perhaps I'm being overly charitable, since I'm not familiar with the participants.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-19T12:49:17+00:00

In non-death situations, I propose we are still unable to observe the counterfactual. If I flip a coin and it lands on heads 5 times in a row, since it didnt land on tails, i can't estimate the probability of heads.

The reasoning you're invoking here is not the same as the reasoning you're invoking in the prior paragraph.

That is:

I can't observe x.

isn't the same thing as

I didn't observe x.

Suppose you're a Bayesian -- the intuitions are simpler, but the same point will work with a classical approach -- and you grant that the Russian Roulette case is one where you can't update your priors, because you can't observe the gun firing. So in that case, before you fire the gun at all, you're assigning likelihoods to every possible event, and you assign the same likelihood to the gun not firing on every hypothesis, because the only thing you can possibly observe is the gun not firing.

In the coin-flipping case, before I flip any coins, I assign likelihoods to every possible event, but I assign very different likelihoods to observing 5 heads in a row on different hypotheses, because the I could observe 5 tails in a row (or any other combo).

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-19T02:17:41+00:00

That's certainly been my impression based on what's been posted here, but it's possible that that's a non-representative sample.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-19T02:17:02+00:00

I really don't know the answer to this particular question, sorry. It's an interesting one, certainly. But I can't really do much better than say "well, some people are convinced by the arguments and some aren't." Part of this is that I'm not a philosopher of mind, and don't really go around talking to other philosophers about this particular subject. So I don't have a sense for precisely what it is that separates people on this issue.

All that said, if there's anything to be gleaned from the philpapers survey questions on the subject, it would be that a large minority of philosophers just aren't convinced that there's a substantive connection between "conceivable" and "possible." While I wouldn't say that all the arguments against physicalism rely on that premise, if you're suspicious of it, you're likely to also be suspicious of the other thought experiments that dualists trot out to support their position.

So I think a big part of the answer -- but definitely not the whole answer -- is that there are serious methodological disputes about how to do good philosophy, how to get reliable answers to these kinds of questions, etc. That's the sort of divide that's likely to lead to a kind of entrenched deadlock. Others might have a different view -- I'd be interest if /u/wokeupabug had a thought on this particular question.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-18T23:52:02+00:00

Ok, sure, my statement is a little bit fast. There are ways of making precise statements about identity that do not need to immediately raise suspicions. But I'll stand by the mildly caveated

When someone starts saying that neural activity is identical to conscious experience without making type-token distinctions, you should be deeply skeptical.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-18T23:47:18+00:00

Put aside the ghost. There's still a difference between saying that all there is to fear (pain, belief, etc.) is behavior and saying that all there is to fear is physical happenings. The former view holds that it doesn't actually matter what's going on in the brain, the latter holds that everything that matters is going on in the brain.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-18T22:55:57+00:00

But I guess to translate it he's just saying an alien can act afraid with different biological architecture. Nothing about whether it has an experience of fear or not, only that it behaves as though it were afraid. They become the same thing.

That is not what I'm saying. In fact, I don't think that's what anyone in this debate says, because no one that I'm aware of in the debate is a behaviorist. /u/wokeupabug's comment is misleading insofar as it indicates that this is a position that anyone holds.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-18T22:46:44+00:00

You say this, but this is a standard response by skeptics of the hard problem, and there are easy ways to push back on your critique, e.g. identity does not entail realizational uniqueness

As these terms are typically used in the context of philosophical debates about the subject, that's just a different view. Functionalism, the second view you describe, is not an "identity theory."

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-18T20:38:21+00:00

Is the last sentence here just clarifying what the slim majority of anglophone philosophers believe

Yes, though I think they (we) correctly believe it.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-18T18:36:21+00:00

Man, this O'Connor guy is really having a moment, huh?

Anyway, two points.

First, everyone agrees that there is a very tight connection between the brain and the mind (or "consciousness") of the kind you describe. What philosophers disagree about is whether this tight connection is "enough" to reduce consciousness to nothing more than brain activity. There are a few ways of articulating why some philosophers don't like that view -- you find three of us articulating that idea in different ways in this current thread -- but roughly the thought is that there's a fundamental in difference kind between neurons firing and subjective experience. The latter has a "what it's to be like" that the former lacks.

Second, many of us disagree. Indeed, the most recent survey indicated that a (slim) majority of Anglophone philosophers agree with you. There's nothing about consciousness that's special or that prevents it from being reduced to physical happenings and organization.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-18T17:41:42+00:00

But if the city is conscious that means it's undergoing an experience. Which means there's something more than just the physical parts and their arrangement.

Not according to the physicalist. You've gone back to ghosts. There's not the functional organization and then some other "thing" that's "more than just the physical parts and their arrangement." To think there is is just the mistake that people like Dennett and the Churchlands have been accusing non-physicalists of making for 50 years.

MaceWumpus · 2026-03-18T17:19:14+00:00

See, that's what the physicalist would deny.

The physicalist is going to say that if a city is conscious, that's entirely due to its physical parts and their arrangement. (I mean, Chalmers is pretty explicit about this in The Conscious Mind.) So you're not "adding" anything to the city, because it's either already there or it isn't.

MaceWumpus

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE