There are a huge number of cases where philosophers got the 'right' answer to some degree before scientists got to it, just due to the sheer number positions philosophers have held on every subject. The problem is that we don't know which position is correct until after the science has been done.
Does anyone else find it as funny as I do that Einstein was able to disprove through evidence something that Kant said was universally known, independent of sensory experience?
Einstein didn't have any evidence, other than the Michaelson-Morley experiment (failure to find differences in the speed of light at different points in the Earth's orbit and rotation). People found evidence later.
Well not singlehandedly. My main point was about what scientists were able to do; I recognize that I did not specify who did it very accurately.
This result seems to have nothing to do with Kant. The logical explanation for this has to do with the fact that rats have evolved in three dimensional Euclidean space. Any result that Kant had in this regard is a lucky coincidence.
To be fair to Kant, it does have something to do with Kant. Kant's thesis of innate mental categories was pretty radical in its time, and certainly wasn't obvious. Now we know there are quite a few innate mental categories, due to our evolutionary history. But we didn't know Kant was right about a few particular cases until after the science had been done, and Kant was wrong about almost everything else. :)
Kant was wrong about almost everything else.
Kant was not even wrong about this and everything else. He did nothing but to crystalize his own confusion and pass it on to later generations. He failed to notice, for example, that it is not necessary that space have three dimensions, that those dimensions be unbounded, nor that the geometry be Euclidean. And in asking whether the concept is prior to experience, he failed to notice that the question is ambiguous until you specify whose experience you are talking about. Am I criticizing Kant for not knowing about evolution? Not exactly. I am criticizing him for trying to answer questions he was completely unequipped to answer. Questions which he knew he was unequipped to answer. But he just couldn't resist trying.
Like almost all philosophy, from the time of the Greeks until today, Kant's thinking was counterproductive - it did more harm than good. And the reason for the failure is easy enough to see for anyone who looks closely. Philosophers try to accomplish tasks that they and their tools are completely inadequate to accomplish. They are like blind artists who seek to execute ice sculpture armed with sledgehammers.
If philosophers limited themselves to generating and clarifying questions, they might do some good. If they also venture into listing some conceivable answers to those questions, they perhaps do little harm. But they are never content with that. They attempt to answer their own questions. Using a methodology which is completely incapable of answering questions. Even worse, sometimes they succeed in convincing each other that they have succeeded. And when they do, they congratulate each other and strike a question from their lists. And at that point they do real harm.
You (and really, the whole of Lesswrong) should Popper's paper "The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science". Here's a pdf.
The section about Kant (towards the end) does an excellent job of explaining how he arrived at his (far too strong) system. In essence, Kant was faced with a paradox: On the one hand, Hume had proven that it's impossible for us to attain certain knowledge about the natural world, and its spatiotemporal and causal structure. But on the other, Newton had apparently done just that! So Kant tries to resolve this by showing that concepts such as space, time and causation are preconditions for the possibility of being conscious at all. So ultimately Newton's system is merely 'unpacking' what's already implicit in the fact that we have minds, hence we can have certain knowledge of it after all.
Of course it's confused and wrong. But in its time it was brilliant and original.
You (and really, the whole of Lesswrong) should Popper's paper "The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science".
An excellent recommendation. Thank you.
Of course [Kant's "Critique" is] confused and wrong. But in its time it was brilliant and original.
I won't disagree that it was brilliant and original. My question was whether it was helpful. Or, if you prefer, whether it was fruitful.
I'm a big fan of David Hume. And I understand that Hume's writing on "the problem of induction" was fruitful to the extent that it stimulated Kant's work. My problem is that my distaste for Kant leads me to doubt that Hume's work here was fruitful. Or at least I have to doubt that it has yet borne fruit yet (though Laplace, Jaynes, and Solomonoff have certainly tried heroically to grow something digestible from that barren ground.)
Where's the evidence they do harm? Do we have something that shows that these attempts overall tend to stop further thought rather than start it? Personally I'd have thought that others coming across philosopher's conclusions are often sparked to either disagree or to attempt to prove it, and both of these can help knowledge grow. Alternatively, philosophers can suggest ways of thinking about things which can then be used productively.
Where's the evidence they do harm? Do we have something that shows that these attempts overall tend to stop further thought rather than start it?
I'm going to follow my own advice to philosophers and refrain from attempting to definitively answer your excellent questions. Instead I will limit myself to adding to your list of possible answers. I will simply mention the standard hagiographies surrounding Galileo and Copernicus and the negative roles assigned to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers and geometers in those stories.
But even though I sidestepped your questions, it seems appropriate in context for me to add some questions of my own. Do you know of any cases in which someone came across a philosopher's conclusion, was sparked to disagree, and as a result generated something useful? Do you know of any cases in which philosophers suggested ways of thinking about things which then got used productively?
Even in cases where philosophers generated fruitful ideas, it seems to me that those ideas were usually inspired by work by people outside philosophy. Popper by Mach, for example. Or Martin-Lof by Curry and Gentzen. Cognitive philosophers by folks like Turing, Hebb, and Minsky.
Do you know of any cases in which philosophers suggested ways of thinking about things which then got used productively?
Sure. Roger Bacon. Sir Francis Bacon.
Both of whom, I note, greatly respected Aristotle while deriding the "Aristotelian" philosophers of their days, which suggests the problem in the Galileo and Copernicus cases was less defects of Aristotle and more defects of Scholasticism (during Roger's day) and Second Scholasticism (during Francis's day).
Good point about Aristotle: that was an area where a particular view was definitely seen as authoritative and that was a problem. Not sure if whether a lack of philsophy would have prevented another definitive solution being present, mind: the problem there was largely about a backwards-looking approach to truth, that saw the past as a Golden Age.
I don't have answers to these myself: I don't pretend to any more certainty than you. It partially depends on what you consider philosophy. I think Malthus is a good example of what I'd consider a (wrong) philosophical idea which assisted a great scientific advance. I thought that late nineteenth/early twentieth century physicists were often influenced by people like Kant, but I may be wrong, it's been awhile since I've read anything in these areas.
Come to that, I sometimes think that people are lumped into 'science' by their success or their association with more solid empirical science. To take your example of Copernicus, I don't think he really did much in the way of scientific experimentation etc: the main appeal of his theory was its mathematical/aesthetic elegance. It was Galileo who got into testing things.
Bee in bonnet time: I hate Kant's "categories", sitting in their neat 4 * 3 table. Why only four, why those four, why does each four have three, are each of the threes supposed to 'map onto' each other?
Being very vaguely analogous to some equally arbitrary, obsolete things that Aristotle did thousands of years previously doesn't seem to me very good reason for modern philosophers to take Kant's categories seriously.
Our "innate mental categories" and Kant's are by no means the same. He believed that the categories are innate because they refer to a meaning beyond ourselves (in other words, that we process Euclidean geometry because space is Euclidean, and we contain the seeds of something that Knows this without evidence). We, upon discovering an innate mental category, can file it among "things to exploit or fix".
That rats have a grid prior to experience is unsurprising. They derive more evolutionary benefit from such a heuristic than from having to lug aroudn an expanded brain capable of inventing geometry.
I thought Kant's position was the concept of space is necessarily prior to experience, not just that currently-existing life-forms have it prior to experience. So it would seem that it would not validate Kant to find one example of a life-form that happens to have space hard-coded before it has experiences.
@naysayers: It's entirely possible to move around in three-dimensional space without having a concept of three-dimensional space. As evidence I cite almost everything ever.
Anticipation, or a stopped clock? Kant didn't just think that we have a built-in idea of "space", but that we have a built-in idea of Euclidean geometry. We now know, however, that non-Euclidean geometry is easily imagined, and that space is non-Euclidean. You might think it not enough so to notice in everyday life, but Saul Steinberg suggested otherwise.
I have not read Kant, though. I googled /Kant Euclidean/ to see if my beliefs about Kant were accurate, but all I found was philosophologists[1] going to inordinate lengths to reconcile Kant's ideas about space with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry and general relativity. I suppose that if someone said, "look, Kant was just wrong about this", it would deprive Kantologists of a living.
[1] Who stand in the same relation to philosophers as musicologists do to musicians. Robert Pirsig points out in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that philosophy students actually do philosophology, not philosophy, in contrast to music students, who actually do music.
Kant wasn't wrong about our innate sense of geometry. Our innate sense of geometry is Euclidean. At least, you can't say that it isn't - because the error of our innate representation is MUCH larger than the difference between Euclidean geometry and the Universe's geometry.
A mushy intuition that is equally consistent with a lot of geometries, including Euclid's, is not an intuition of Euclidean geometry. Beside, Euclid's 5th postulate was long considered problematic. How innate is that?
Kant's success rate was of course higher than "chance," with "chance" being "1 out of all concepts ever."
However he couldn't seem to beat "chance," with "chance" being "the chance Kant had to figure out the stuff he did on the evidence he had."
However he couldn't seem to beat "chance," with "chance" being "the chance Kant had to figure out the stuff he did on the evidence he had."
Anyone who did beat "chance" defined that way, would do so only by chance.
Democritus is sometimes given credit for anticipating atomic theory. And the quite a few Greeks did real work in mathematics back when the division between philosophy and math was not clear.
A newborn fawn gets up and starts walking around in a few hours. Either he learned in a short time that the universe is 3 rather than 199 dimensions, or he already had that knowledge essentially encoded at birth. Big deal Kant. Actually, big deal scientists (forgiving all the additional detail I'm sure is in those papers).
I find it curious that the writers would reference Kant on this. Surely it's a signalling explanation rather than as a true causal precedent of their research.
Big deal Kant.
It may seem obvious now, but someone still had to think of it, and the first person to do that was Kant. This seems analogous to complaining that Newton only did first-year stuff. And we still call it Newtonian mechanics, even if lots of 19th century mathematicians eventually did it better than Newton.
I'm a bit surprised at how little love Kant gets in these comments -- sure he didn't correctly solve the problem of how knowledge relates to experience, but he was the first one to make any useful progress on it at all.
"Both make the point that this validates Kant's claim that space is an innate concept prior to experience."
I think this misses the point of Kant's claim. Kant absolutely did not want to say that we are biologically ordered such as to represent geometry in three dimensional space. And Kant, given the results of this study, would deny that rats 'represent space' at all: rats can't 'represent' in the sense Kant thinks is relevant to rational beings. He (and I guess I also) would say that this is to anthropomorphize rats. Rats don't have concepts, representations, experiences, etc. in any sense comparable with rational beings.
Kant's point is that an a priori representation of space (from which we glean euclidian geometry) is a feature of finite rational beings such that it would be the same for any finite rational being that has any form of sensibility whatsoever. So it's a claim that's totally independent of biology. Our a priori access to space is just what it means to have an outer world. Kant would have considered the biological point irrelevant because it concerns our empirical experience of space via our brains and sense organs. But the our a priori understanding of space is (logically, not temporally) prior even to the empirical claims that we have brains and sense organs, and its by having such an a priori concept that a natural, biological science can be meaningful. The synthetic a priori propositions which forest geometry are grounded on pure reason. This doesn't mean that experience is irrelevant to them, just that any particular experiences of space are.
So the study doesn't support or harm Kant, it's just irrelevant to his claims. He wasn't really interested in anything like the biological or psychological aspects of our capacity to experience the outside world. Cognitive science, Kant might say, just studies a different subject matter entirely. Lastly:
"I've often wished for a list of cases where philosophy has proven useful"
Why do you think philosophy is supposed to be useful?
I've often wished for a list of cases where philosophy has proven useful, or has at least anticipated science in drawing correct conclusions. Here's one for the list:
The June 18 2010 Science has two very similar articles on how rat brains represent space. Both conclude that the brain already represents space as a grid before rat pups take their first steps into the world. Both make the point that this validates Kant's claim that space is an innate concept prior to experience.
(The next task is to make a corresponding list of cases where philosophers made incorrect conclusions; and estimate whether the number of correct conclusions is greater than chance.)