Bad Philosophy

TBoF : A Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy

p. 309

"For decades, various versions of [the Copenhagen Interpretation] were taught as fact--vagueness, anthropocentrism, instrumentalism and all--in university physics courses."

Including at Clarkson University! I wonder, if one were to adopt the Everetiian multiverse interpretation (as I think we must, unless a better explanation comes along) how this would affect QM pedagogy. Based simply on mathematical capabilities, one still must start with the wave equations.

p. 310

"Here was an eminent physicist [ES] joking that he might be considered mad. Why? For claiming that his own equation--the very one he had one a Nobel prize for--might be true."

p. 311

"Error is the normal state of knowledge, and is no discrace,"

"When the enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress... But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse."

... p. 325 "... with the decent from empericism (merely false) to positivism, logical positivism, instrumentalism, Witthenstein, linguistic philosophy, and the 'post-modernist' and related movements."

p. 314

"...these charges are true of postmodernism itself: it is a narrative that resists rational criticism or improvement, precisely because it rejects all criticism as mere narrative. Creating a successful postmodernist theory is indeed purely a matter of meeting teh criteria of the postmodernist community--which have eveolved to be complex, exclusive and authority based."

p. 317

"In genuine science, one can claim to have measured a quantity only when one has an explanatory theory of how and why the measurement procedure should reveal its value, and with what accuracy."

p. 323

"The substance of scientific theories is explanation, and explanation of errors constitutes most of the content of the design of any non-trivial scientific experiment."

p. 324

"If progress cannot continue indefinitely, bad philosophy will inevitably come again into ascendency--for it will be true."