Of course, I always dismiss his metaphor as pie-in-the-sky ridiculous. But I must concede that this phenomenon occurring on Wikipedia gives a lot of weight to his argument.
No, there may have once been a time when that metaphor was applicable, but I wouldn't say that it's the case today. As for the idea that philosophy guides decisions on how we practice science, well... a book or course on the forces of economy, which is offered by most major universities, is recommended.
I don't think the Wikipedia phenomenon means a whole lot. Here's an alternative metaphor: philosophy is the pot we put all the loose ends in, until some advance in science allows us to work on them some more. That doesn't mean philosophy is making progress on them.
Kuhn says that this works well for a while, until there builds up a collection of anomalies that result in the second type of science: revolutionary science. For a short while, people start to question fundamental assumptions about their world and this results in a "paradigm shift". In this mode of science, philosophy has always been relevant. The philosopher Ernst Mach was relevant to Einstein, for example.
In our present age, we are at the stage of normal science started by Einstein and the quantum physicists. But anomalies have started building up. And when we enter into the new phase of revolutionary science, as happens every few hundred years, we'll see philosophy be relevant once more.
It should give no weight at all to this argument. Arguing from metaphor is flawed to begin with, because the correctness metric is not correspondence with reality, but the degree a human mind will readily pattern-match on the metaphor.
The empirical reason for this effect is that Wikipedia policy mandates that articles begin with a denotational definition of the subject, which moves up the hierarchy of abstraction. Were Wikipedia policy to begin pages with connotational definitions that move down the hierarchy of abstraction, we would not see this effect.
It's not perfect but I enjoyed working on it
Sadly, inputting 'Linguistics' >> "Science > Knowledge > Awareness > Conscious > Consciousness > Quality (philosophy) > Philosophy", rather than, for instance, >> "Philosophy of language > Meaning (philosophy of language) > Definition > Intensional definition > Logic > Philosophy".
Going by way of linguistics' own foundations routes a shorter path by one link and provides such a rich frame for understanding how we Humans found our way into philosophy.
EDIT: Ah.. below butterfinger explains, the "first link" basis.. Gah!! Unstructured text :)
Bloody brilliant. Care to explain how it works?
That is all. Tip of the cap to you sir.
PS Both Kevin Bacon and bacon are 20 steps away from philosophy. Interesting.
This applies to philosophy because articles tend to mention the general categories they fall under. The classification of knowledge generally falls under the purview of philosophy, so naturally following links upwards will lead to it eventually.
Not quite the same but fun nonetheless.
Philosophy -> Reality -> Existence -> Ontology -> Philosophy
Perhaps philosophy lets you add additional constraints (e.g. click the first link of a certain form) or obtain slightly lower numbers?
Historical figures have the advantage that you don't have to navigate up through layers of classification, you just have to get to a date link (there were better tricks -- date links were the "last resort").
One of the 'chunking' methods that Wikipedia uses is categories (you undoubtedly knew that) and here is the page that deals with that[1].
Indeed, there's entire category on Wikipedia Categorization[2].
There's the Category Tree page, dead useful, here's one for `semiotics' by way of example[3]
I'd be tickled pink if others could drop more pointers here! Without doubt, as Wikipedia continues to self-organize it is going reveal structural truths about the knowledge humanity is creating.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_categorizat...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategor...
There's an RDF/OWL export of the Wikidata taxonomy available at [2] as wikidata-taxonomy.nt.gz, which can be explored with Semantic Web browsers like Protege [3].
Another fundamental relation -- "part of" (P361) [4] -- expresses mereological relationships. For (oversimplified) example: "iris part of eye", "eye part of head", "head part of body", etc. Both "subclass of" and "part of" are transitive.
A separate comment of mine in this discussion [5] describes how to traverse the "subclass of" tree in the Wikidata UI and a third-party tool called Wikidata Generic Tree. The same principle applies to the "part of" tree. The latter gets less attention, but is also quite interesting.
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1. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P279
2. http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-exports/rdf/index.php?cont...
3. http://protege.stanford.edu/
The interesting thing is two fold: most articles end up in the philosophy case, and the loops that do exist tend to be small.
* Go to a Wikidata item, e.g. "sailboat" [1]
* Click on the "subclass of" (P279) value or, if no such value exists, the "instance of" (P31) value
* Follow the "subclass of" chain up to "entity" [2]
You can do the reverse -- i.e. go down the classification tree -- with tools like Wikidata Generic Tree [3].
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1. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1075310
2. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120
3. http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tree.html?q=Q35120&rp...
I feel like this may tell us something interesting about the relative "distance" from philosophy a given subject has, but it's also just as likely to not tell us anything.
