Within the more practical sorts of philosophy, like logic, epistemology, and morality, there are potentially huge gains to society for getting it right. But these can only be “tested” (in the sense of creating a society that revolves around certain philosophical ideas) on a multi-decade time scale with a huge investment of resources and possible human suffering if you’re wrong, and all experiments are necessarily imperfect (communists still argue their principles would have worked if the situation had been different).
That means there are practical gains from having good philosophy, but not in a way that means it can be decided by experiment.
Sure, maybe we’d see huge pragmatic gains after everyone was (for example) an atheist for a century but there just aren’t smaller gains to be realized from atheism at smaller scales.
My inclination is to distrust anyone who claims that the theory they advocate can only be tested by an apparatus too impractical to build, and is necessarily untestable on any scale small enough to actually test… but I concede that it’s possible.
And agreed that my examples aren’t good analogies for that sort of situation.
Within the more practical sorts of philosophy, like logic, epistemology, and morality, there are potentially huge gains to society for getting it right. But these can only be “tested” (in the sense of creating a society that revolves around certain philosophical ideas) on a multi-decade time scale with a huge investment of resources and possible human suffering if you’re wrong, and all experiments are necessarily imperfect (communists still argue their principles would have worked if the situation had been different).
That means there are practical gains from having good philosophy, but not in a way that means it can be decided by experiment.
Sure, maybe we’d see huge pragmatic gains after everyone was (for example) an atheist for a century but there just aren’t smaller gains to be realized from atheism at smaller scales.
My inclination is to distrust anyone who claims that the theory they advocate can only be tested by an apparatus too impractical to build, and is necessarily untestable on any scale small enough to actually test… but I concede that it’s possible.
And agreed that my examples aren’t good analogies for that sort of situation.