Part II: Explaining reason and science

We are supposed to be living in a scientific world. However, a large majority of people, while affected in their life by science and technology, are still ignorant of some of the main features of science.
Some features of science are widely known and/or can readily be found explained at many places (you can make a search...). However, I will present here some deeper aspects that are often ignored, especially by naive people, so as to resolve a number of widespread misunderstandings.

Some of the main characters of science

Let us sum up some of the main principles of science, that is the scientific approach to the truth and the search for the truth.

Accuracy : every concept involved should be as clear and well-defined as possible. The role of this criteria is to prevent risks for the reasoning to end up to false conclusions. To say this in other words, we can see this as the task of either being exact, or at least ensuring that the approximations made (not always quantitative, but also conceptual) will be small enough to not wrong the conclusion, as far as we are expecting this conclusion to be close to the truth on the issue being studied. If the issue in question is naturally clear and simple, the risk of wrong approximations may be low. However, on harder issues, it may become a major problem, thus requiring a lot of work and intelligence to be resolved. This may be because of the harder complexity of the issue, and/or because the right concepts by which a given aspect of reality would need to be analyzed for being properly understood, are not given in advance, and still need to be discovered, ifever it is indeed possible to discover any relevant concepts.

Logical Positivism : the truths that science normally searches for, can be roughly split into 2 kinds (though, in practice, many will be mixtures of them).
The conceptual reconstruction of reality : the means at our disposal (our senses) do not give us any direct perception of reality, but this sort of limitation is not a real limit to our understanding of reality. On the contrary, the very scientific research as we just specified (in terms of logical positivism), provides for an effective understanding of reality, or at least, of the aspects of reality that are of concern to us. This is operated by the work of formulating the logical expressions relating our perceptions (discovered as those which best distinguish the most probable series of perceptions, from the impossible or most unlikely ones), in their clearest, best understandable form. Indeed, such a clearest understanding (expression) of these logical structures requires to develop a number of key intermediate concepts. And these key intermediate concepts are what plays the role of the elements of reality as we can understand it. They are the image (translation, approximation), which we can form in our minds, of elements of reality which are outside it. (Example: when looking at the Titan pictures, there are many intermediate concepts involved in the interpretation of this perception, representing different elements of reality).

Non-essentialism : the way things behave, or the role they play, is not always a matter of what their deep nature is, or whether things indeed have a deeper nature or not. Indeed, consider a situation when something would have an essence or deep nature of a deeper level than what is being considered at a given step of understanding. Then, of two things one: either this deeper nature has observable effects on the behavior of this thing, in which case the observation of this external behavior can provide information on this deeper nature, so that, somehow, this deeper nature is observable (and the information from these observations can provide us with a scientific understanding of what it looks like, even if it is not a full understanding). Or it does not (getting rid of its consideration provides the best available approximations or predictions of its behavior). In this case, such considerations of a deeper nature, insofar as they could not help making more accurate expectations, are irrelevant to the understanding of these things, as if they were not an element of the reality of this world, but of another world disconnected from this one.
In other words, the understanding of something, is mainly not a matter of "what this thing is", but of how it behaves, what role it plays, which way it connects to other things around.

Pragmatism : scientists must adapt their research methods to the specific contexts of what they want to study, for which the most effective research methods are not always the same from a subject to another, because different aspects of reality cannot always connect in the same way to our means of investigation.
Also, naming some extensive list of guidelines for scientific research, would usually be irrelevant: scientificity is not about applying an exact list of principles fixed in advance, but about developing and training a more extensive form of commonsense. The work of the scientist cannot be replaced by machines. Machines can help the scientist by operating the repetitive application of some already well-established principles, but the work of scientists will always be necessary for providing a wider understanding of large conceptual systems, and leading research projects. This ability is highly dependent on the context of natural skills, personal training of intelligence and known facts. Most scientists did not (or not much) follow any course on the scientific method in the way philosophers imagine, but spend much more effort, either studying mathematics (proofs...) to train their thinking ability and gather some mathematical concepts that may be useful to them later, or gathering a wide range of specific information on their field of study.
For example, some fields of research have the possibility of making experiments, for observations to be more extensive and provide more complete information on the reality that is considered; while this is not (or less) possible in other fields like astronomy where stars and galaxies can only be observed and not be subjects of any experiment.

Plato's cave, rationality levels, and non-essentialism issues.

Many people already heard about the Allegory of the Cave, (as it is often taught in high school philosophy classes). Let us recall it in short [quotation from Wikipedia]

"Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners."

The story further explains how hard it is to try to free the prisoners, who considered the shadows they saw to be the reality, and first have a hard time adapting to the real things and getting familiar to them.

This allegory can be seen as an image of what science could finally accomplish, the way it could go beyond immediate experience and understand the deep structures underlying the things we can see, through the understanding of many other concepts far away from those naturally appearing and useful to everyday life.

Especially, Math and Physics are absolutely amazing, in how far deep they could reach in their respective domains of study. Unfortunately, and just as this allegory says, most of these subjects, and how wonderful they are, cannot be easily explained to the lay people.

Another solution, instead of trying to free someone from his chains, is to try to show him an image of the real things by projecting their shadow on the wall he can see. This is the work of science popularization: not a real presentation of things as they can really be understood, but sorts of metaphors roughly explaining how they look like in a way or another.
Some people in search of truth, when looking at these shadows of science that science popularization is, may complain that these shadows are not clear, will find inconsistencies there, and will want to criticize these images as not satisfying, not being the ultimate explanations. Somehow they are right that these shadows are not the ultimate explanation, but when complaining so, they are missing the fact that these popularized presentation are not the full account of the currently established scientific understanding either. Another usual wrong complaint is to make the mistake of essentialism (failing to understand the justification for the non-essentialism of science that we explained above). These misunderstandings can lead to dramatic consequences where some people may come to dedicate their life to trying to put forward alternative views in opposition to established science. This issue will be further developed later.

However, there is no absolute separation between teaching and popularization (between getting freed to understand the depth of things, or only seeing their shadow). No absolute separation, but still a difference (distance) between them, that can eventually be very big.
How can this be, you may ask, while all scientific understanding is operated by the same fundamental kind of rational ability of the human mind in its ordinary state, the same which is operated by lay people and lead them to so many mistakes ?

First, we can note that it does not matter how surprising or illogical this may sound: anyway it is a fact, so that denying it just based on its oddness, would lead nowhere.
Then, it can be understood as a non-essentialist truth: it does not matter what science is made of; what matters is the role it plays. The role played by science cannot be properly reduced to the question of what it is made of. It is the same kind of people in themselves, that can as well be prisoners only looking at shadows on the wall, or going out from the cave. Science plays the role of a way out of the cave, and this is all the best that ought to be expected from a vision of the truth on the world we live in.

So, how can it be, and what does its difference from the basic use of reason consist of ?
One of the main answers, is that it is a matter of complexity. Ordinary reason is enough to correctly solve simple problems of everyday life with sufficient accuracy or reliability for practical purposes, but it fails when faced with more complex or faraway problems, where the conceptual approximations made by an ordinary mind are not right, and inaccuracies are either too big or too numerous, so that they happen to add up into major mistakes in the conclusions. Also, some necessary key concepts for the understanding of some issues, may be completely missed by people who are not familiar with them. Some key concepts require a lot of work to be learned, going through a lot of preliminaries.

So, here again, the very concept of rationality needs to be understood in a non-essentialist sense: it makes no sense to qualify a person as either rational or irrational in the absolute, but only as a description of the role played by this mind relatively to the purpose of understanding a given problem or domain of reality.
The same person can happen to be rational towards some issues, and irrational towards other issues.

We previously saw another example how something's behavior can be very dissimilar with its deep nature: the case of spirituality with its essentialist conception of altruism, understood as an intrinsic quality of a person. Spiritual people are missing the fact that, in order to be really useful to others (rather than keeping one's altruism for oneself and then down to the grave), a real effective altruism needs to be understood as an extrinsic quality, made of the effective ways in which someone interacts with the rest of the world, and what consequences on others these actions finally produce.

Let us give some more details on the non-essentialism of science, with the case of how it goes for physics.
There is are a diversity of sciences which study different aspects of reality. This is possible as these different aspects of reality can be considered and understood more or less independently from each other (each can be somehow neglected in the study of others), even though they are aspects of the same global reality, and therefore also have connections between them. Physics is one of them; but it is itself divided into several theories describing each a different aspect of the physical universe. These theories can be understood more or less independently from each other.

Among these theories, some describe deeper aspects of reality (a deeper essence of things) than others.
For example, quantum physics is deeper than classical physics and chemistry, as it provides a common foundation explaining both and how they can both describe aspects of the same reality. General relativity is deeper than Newton's law of gravitation. So, if we want to approach the understanding of the (relatively more) ultimate nature of the physical universe, then the deeper theories are those we should focus on. But if we want to understand some specific phenomena of concern to us, it often happens for less deep theories to be much more relevant, because they provide useful approximations that greatly simplify the problems and provide more direct and understandable solutions.

For example, the mass of the proton has been at last computed to a reasonable approximation, out of the known more fundamental laws (which had been understood well before already), by a supercomputer in year 2008. This hardness to obtain such a basic result as the mass of the proton out of the known more fundamental laws that determine it, suggests how desperate it may be to pretend that the understanding of any significant practical aspect of reality, should be best obtained by deducing it from any supposedly most ultimate first principles.
So, the point of the scientific approach is not to be for or against the research of more fundamental principles underlying given phenomena to better understand them: indeed, such a research of more fundamental principles has been successfully proceeded many times by science much better than by any other philosophy.
But it is about carefully adapting the orientation of the research on any subject, either towards deeper explanations or not, depending on what happens to be fruitful for the wanted purpose.

As a result of this non-essentialism, it is often said that science rejected metaphysics. In a way this is true, however it is not the whole story. What is true is that scientists rejected most of the works that philosophers had done on the issue, either because it was fuzzy (and generally irrational : we shall explain in further details what is irrationality), or because it was irrelevant to their work (because of the non-essentialism of science vs. the traditional essentialism of metaphysics). But this does not mean science would have no access to any metaphysical truth. The problem is that, usually, scientists focus on scientific truths, that is, accurate and verifiable truths, rather than fuzzy truths, so that they don't want to "waste their time" discussing on fuzzy ideas and explaining things in fuzzy terms. The result is that they kept their knowledge for themselves and hardly ever cared properly explaining it to philosophers and/or to the public. Also, as they are at ease with complex ideas, they don't see the point to try explaining them in simpler terms.

Science is knowledge, as opposed to faith

Another way to characterize science, is to define it as knowledge.
And, there are two opposites of knowledge, which are faith and ignorance.
But, this definition requires a clarification, to not mistake the meaning the word "faith" here, with some other meanings often given by religions. Indeed, religions usually define "faith" to mean either hope, trust in God, belief in afterlife, adhesion to some specific doctrine, or any mixture between these.
Here, for this definition of science, the involved meanings of the words are:
knowledge = justified belief = clarified belief
faith = unjustified belief = unclarified belief

Indeed, the very concept of unjustified belief is more or less based on its lack of clarification. This is because a belief normally consists in holding a claim as justified.
If someone fully understood the fact that his belief is not justified (including with his personal, unsharable experience), then this understanding "should" drive him to stop doing as if it was justified, thus stop believing in the claim and start considering it as a mere hypothesis waiting for future evidence for or against it later.
In other words, scientific inquiry can be described as being neither satisfied with an absence of belief (ignorance) nor with a presence of unclarified belief, but only with a work of examination of things which may lead to clarified beliefs. This may require to review a number of hypothesis without believing them at first, until, eventually, some may turn out to be justified.
This does not mean that a scientist has no faith or philosophy of life (indeed, there are too many issues in life, and it is not humanly possible to carefully check every belief that one needs to follow). But this means that the scientific work is a work that must care to be unaffected by one's possible faiths. This can be done because the scientific work is a specialized work, dealing every time with a precise question that can be solved independently from the rest of ideas that cannot be clarified yet.
Precisely, the point is not always to ensure that some given conclusion is free of assumption, but the point is to clarify which are the assumptions that a conclusion is based on. So, if a conclusion B depends on an assumption A while A is not well-proven yet, then the "real conclusion" of the work is that (A => B).
This makes it possible for other researchers, to either know that B is true in the case they first knew that A is true based on other justifications, or ignore the work as pointless (without "disagreeing with it") if they consider A to be false or unlikely.
Such a work of clarifying all the assumptions that a conclusion depends on (while only neglecting the mention of the assumptions that can't be subject to a "reasonable doubt"), can be a very hard work where mistakes may happen. But well, this is precisely why science is often a work to be reserved to professionals (another reason is the fact that each work may require many premises for drawing a conclusion, and only professionals may be familiar with the available body of knowledge which can supply for needed premises, and thus orient the kind of work that may be relevant).

There is not, or at least there should not be, such a thing as a "faith in reason".
Reason is the ability and efficiency of work towards a distinction of which belief is justified and which is not, as well as to develop works that have more chances to reach the point of providing clear, justified knowledge.
Whenever it succeeds to provide clear evidence for something, there is no point anymore to see there any "faith in reason", because it no more depends on any faith, but it presents full justifications for the conclusions. Of course, it depends on the assumption that one is not foolish enough to mistakenly see clear evidences where there would be none; but well, there has to be some limits to such a thing as Descartes' thought experiment of an "hyperbolic doubt", which leads nowhere (imagine if you started to doubt your ability to check how much is 2+2).

What about the time when a question has not been solved yet ? Indeed we can see a faith in the motivation to do the research: a hope, a belief, not yet fully justified, in the idea that the scientific search has a chance to succeed, that some verified knowledge can be obtained on the considered subject. This belief is not yet justified, because, well indeed, by definition of a discovery, it cannot be predicted. So, it is not always a knowledge, but it may also be a personal creed, which humanly stimulates the process of scientific research, but must not be mistaken as an axiom that could serve by itself to justify any claim in the scientific reasoning itself.

This can better be understood by presenting it the other way round: the opposite belief, claiming that the scientific research for a justified understanding on some specific issue would be hopeless, is usually not justified either.

Of course, there are exceptions: some knowledge could be obtained showing the (either absolute or most probable) impossibility to resolve some problems. It is for example absolutely impossibile to:
Other expectations of knowledge can be unreasonable too, such as
But, after all, we can now accept as empirically justified, the claim that reason is very powerful to discover many things in our universe, because we could observe and verify its success during the last centuries, and there is no reason to believe that this progress would suddenly stop now.

In fact, the character of logical positivism (describing the information on our perceptions), is very often the essential criteria (principle) after which to clarify whether a question, claim or theory is decidable by reason (or at least subject to scientific inquiry and possible progress of knowledge), and also whether it is of any importance (indeed this "frequent or approximate equivalence" between logical positivism, verifiability and effective importance, is itself a logical remark).

More empirical and other reliable justifications can be found (we shall present some in Part III), of some claims (and attitudes of many scientists) on the respective statuses of science and religion, and what an awful source of mistakes the religions most famous in the West often turn out to be.

Still, there are some unfortunate remaining forms of faith in the rationalist attitude of some scientists (which fortunately are not actually mistaken with scientific knowledge... at least not too much). Most of this can be understood as a reaction against religious claims (once observed how wrong on so many other issues, are the religions and other propagandists making such opposite claims):


Several parts of this texts have been moved to separate pages:

A section on metamathematics,

Some quotations on MBTI personality types.


On the nature of irrationality, and generalities about pseudo-science

An example I have worked on:

About Nottale's Scale Relativity "theory"

The academic institutions

So, we explained that the consensus among scientists in a field (especially in hard sciences) is generally the most reliable sign of truth (among all available means of inquiry in the same world at the same time) as concerns their research subjects. This is already interesting, but leaves many questions unanswered, because many important questions are not currently the subject of any serious scientific research.

Note that the trust expressed here towards the scientific consensus, is basically not a trust towards institutions, but a trust towards the global behavior of some community of people, based on how reason works, disregarding the administrative structure that currently hires them. Hopefully there are many cases when official institutional positions properly reflect serious scientific findings, but there can be exceptions too. This can either be because
  1. the established official community working on the subject is not made of really qualified people (or: their training and the conditions of academic recognition they must follow does not favor the right form of discernment), or 
  2. the issue (subject of claims by an institution) is not directly the research subject of any established scientific community, but an aspect of the political forces and paradigms which determine the behavior of these institutions.
Instances of 1. will be listed in the below section. Now let us present an important instance of 2, the question: how should education be organized and which knowledge or skills should be taught at every level, from the curriculum contents to the practical management (admission requirements, schedules, pedagogical tools, types of interaction between students and faculty, obligations, exams and the administrative roles of exams and diplomas for the working of the curriculum and the insertion in the rest of society).

The situation and its assessment may depend on countries, viewpoints, types of students, possible diversity among institutions of each country (with marginally some very different systems from the norm), and goals and criteria for comparison.
For example, the scientific teaching level has often been quite higher in the Soviet Union and some Asian countries, than in most of Western European and U.S. countries at the same years and ages of secondary and high school. A higher teaching level for some age may fit some of the best students, but be very hard to others, while a lower teaching level can be awfully boring to the most clever students.
Still, in average, the most frequent situation is quite awful, especially in a way that can roughly be described as a dire lack of freedom for pupils and students: the rules to follow are, for many pupils, far from the most favorable circumstance to their development and fulfillment of any kind (compared to alternatives with similar costs).

The situation in this field is quite paradoxical because the teaching and academic management activities, especially in higher education, are an essential component of the official duty of a large majority of scientists, and are so crucial to the life and career of the next generation of scientists, but they happen to be so wrongly done in some ways, because the full question of the global design of how academic institutions should work and what tasks should scientists be hired for, was not actually developed as a genuine research subject.

In fact, the academic system as a whole is not a decided well-thought conception of scientists (but only, if I don't mistake, a thought of the Enlightenment philosophers modeled after the practices of religious academies and finally fixed by decisions of states, with no significant design update since then), and its role has never been to properly share and show what science really is. Its main role was to be a democratically and administratively stable way of managing a population, the overwhelming majority of which has no chance to really understand science anyway; to provide them with diplomas, hopefully (but not always reasonably) likely to let them chances to find a job (especially among public institutions themselves, to reliably avoid any genuine connection to reality, such as a free market would provide). Only little hints of real science were reflected there. Scientists have been the servants of this system, mainly because they hardly had any other option to keep their jobs.

In this context, many individual scientists do notice the problem, sometimes speak and write about it (unless some obligation of political correctness linked with their job prevents it), and eventually try to do something about it, but overall they remain rather powerless against it. 
Examples:

"Dead Lectures" (how the practical form of teaching/learning by "live lectures" is made obsolete by technology)
 
"The Role of the Professor" (which would consist in renewing of the curriculum contents: cleaning, restructuring and updating it to existing knowledge, serving as an intermediate between teachers and researchers; this role is actually neglected by the institutions, in favor of the 2 disconnected activities of teaching an research)

Research and teaching, article and long discussion on what is going wrong in the academic system; for example "in almost every field there are way too many students per prof"
In the same blog, ("spaces" article):
"Over and over I have found people who reject the notion of mathematics being a universal language, and who discard it as insufficient for reality. They are dead wrong to do so of course, but since I've encountered this attitude over and over again, I want to dedicate some paragraphs to what I believe is the origin of this divide.
At the very beginning is, of course, school education. Unfortunately, what's called mathematics in school has little to do with mathematics. It should more aptly be called calculation."

Homeschooling physicist
"we are not using any US public-school textbooks in those areas: science textbooks below the high-school level are often factually wrong. Even at the high-school level, many are disasters (check out the reviews from the Textbook League). And history texts for US public schools tend to be utterly boring and bloodless: how they manage to transmute the reality of history – heroes and villains, nobility and murder most foul – into stunningly unappetizing pabulum is a great mystery."
"the most important point that is distinctive about our approach is the emphasis on teaching significant content about science and history as early and as fully as possible. This would be very hard in the public schools because of the “urge to test.”"
More texts on homeschooling
More texts on education
For example:
Teaching Science the Harry Potter Way

Changing education paradigms

François Taddei (French biologist, founder of wiser-u):
"When my son was 6, he went to class like all children, his teacher told me: "This child is charming, but... he asks questions." Since that day, I ask myself questions on the educational system".
"If your job looks like chess, prepare to change your job"

Albert Einstein (who was INTP, and quite a bad pupil):
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
On graduate school and teaching: "The unfortunate thing is that the lack of value assigned to teaching seems very systemic, to the point of being embedded in the culture" - "High school has managed to convince many students that physics is a dogmatic, memorization-centered subject. As a result, they don’t have the skills necessary to solve real physics problems, because all that they have learned to do is to pattern-match and to plug-and-chug"

A famous example was the French mathematician Evariste Galois. He made some pioneering work in group theory (fixing the name "group"), as well as a whole field of algebra now named after him: Galois theory (about algebraic equations). He died in 1832 at the age of 20 as a final result of his unsustainable troubles with the world and the academic system, which happened to make life quite hard to him as a genius (hard inadequate school work and troubles to be accepted and find recognition).

A possible way to describe the problem is in terms of MBTI typology.
We previously mentioned that types are correlated with profession, and in particular, that the types of Teachers are preferably EFJ, and a few more types around it. But a very Fequently Unasked Question, is what is the right personality type for a very peculiar job: the job of the Pupil ? Now you can take it as an exercise to check the MBTI test (or from any other testing or describing page) and figure out the right answers which the Pupil should give to each of the four questions: what is the right personality type a good Pupil should have.
 
Are you done ?
Of course, the right answers come to form a unique type quite straightforwardly. Then you can go and check the description of this type, which will confirm that this is indeed the correct type qualifying one to be a good Pupil.
 
Now, remember a big claim of the school system: that it does everything to provide fair chances for all young people to succeed in society, without any discrimination.
Traditionally (at least in France), this paranoid concern for absolute fairness and equality of chances for all people, has been focused towards the exclusive ideal of breaking social boundaries by trying to cancel all possible correlation between people's careers (social positions, incomes) and those of their parents. To try to reach this goal, a lot of money has been invested in education, together with a very big focus on the care to "treat all pupils equally" by putting them together in the same classrooms and providing them the same lessons.
So, teenagers are jailed in schools to protect them from all possible influence of their parents (their respective social ranks, their cultures that might contaminate them), so that none will be "unfairly" favored as compared to others.
But it remained a big failure, as the correlations ("social boundaries") remained.

Our education ministers failed to notice that, if cancelling the correlation between the careers of children and those of their parents was really the purpose, then a much cheaper and more reliable solution was available: to use a lottery system for distributing diplomas.

More seriously, the basic situation is that there are a diversity of needs, interests and abilities between people who are diversely fitted for the many possible jobs needed by the economy to properly function, so that not all pupils need to do the same thing and follow the same curriculum for preparing to the jobs that best fit them. In such conditions, treating them all the same induces a hidden discrimination according to "how normal" every pupil is.

More specifically, this norm that school requires pupils to conform to and after which they are selected to succeed, is not an average (middle way) between all types of people, but it is a specific end of the spectrum: the system discriminates people according to how good ISTJ (or secondarily ESTJ, INTJ) they can be. School makes these types, first feel much better than others, then succeed best.

Do you wonder why social boundaries remain ? Well, if MBTI types are given by nature (possibly genetically inherited, at least partially), it is no mystery. The same with intelligence, which school requires to stay just in the middle, as too intelligent people cannot fit with the low level curriculum in force. But even if the types are not natural but given by education, this is no better: making everybody ISTJ with a limited intelligence and a life spoiled by wasting the precious youth years doing stupid school work, is no good solution for a sane economy which requires a diversity of skills for a diversity of jobs.

For example, what's the point of forcing pupils to obey a time schedule ? Why should it be better for the ones to spend the first hour of the day learning this subject, and the next hour that other subject, while it should be different for those who have been put into another group of pupils at the beginning of the year ? Why should it be different from a day to the next ? Why is it so important to start lessons every day at the same time, rather than to learn any other time of the day, regardless of how tired they may be ? Why should a lesson be stopped after exactly the same amount of time fixed in advance to switch to the next lesson, regardless of whether the issue was completed or not ? Why should every pupil hear exactly the same lesson at the same rhythm as the next pupil, regardless of his troubles or easiness to understand it, and regardless of his curiosity to more closely examine a detail or ask any question ? Why should it be the same schedule from a week to the next ? How many jobs on Earth except school teachers, need to be structured in this precise way ? Okay, some do in a way, such as doctors; but even if some features can be seen as common, many other features are usually quite more different.

By the way, what are the jobs for ISTJ ? Their list of preferred jobs includes: Inspector, administrator, manager, accountant, school director, police officer and prison guard. ESTJ become managers and organizers. Things that can indeed be useful for society, but quite far from scientific research anyway, so that school does not properly reflect science (just as it hardly reflects the needed skills for any decent job in general). After being the ones feeling at school like at home and succeeding, they will work to ensure that everything remains the same.

Another problem with school, is the insane system of relationships between pupils induced by this common pot: why nerds are unpopular.
See also this analysis about autism (but autistic people and many other serious or uncommon people such as geniuses, are facing the same problem):
"As for blaming autistic people's difference for the cruelty we receive, that removes the accountability of the people who are being cruel to autistic people. It makes it sound as if autism is to blame for the harm done to autistic people by others, which makes no more sense than saying accent and skin color are to blame for racism. When a person is being discriminated against for a quality, it's not that quality that needs changing. Being bullied on the schoolyard is not the fault of the autistic person for "looking like an easy target", and being socially ostracized is not the fault of the social aspects or "quirks" of autism."

Let's go further: geniuses are generally accused of not properly adapting to the world.
Sorry, what are they required to adapt to ?
They are required to adapt to a system that has been artificially designed and built up by society for the service of the sort of pupils that is stupid and reluctant to learn. The very purpose why the school exist, is to force them to learn, through mental brute force methods destroying all possible freedom of thought, to get more knowledge than they would naturally do if their freedom of thought was respected.
The problem is that there are other types of pupils, (unfortunately a small minority, therefore with no chance to have their lives respected in a democracy), such that, if you let them just free, they would naturally learn much more than what school is teaching them. For them, school is an obstacle to their thirst of knowledge, so that they desperately look for the little free time it lets them, to start satisfying it.

How can this trouble be blamed on these intelligent pupils, how can they be blamed for their inadaptation to this system precisely designed, artificially built up and adapted for pretending that the best adapted pupils are this majority of dumb ones, who would naturally not learn (to adapt to a world of knowledge) and therefore need brute force obligations to reach an appearance of intellectual skills ?

In fact, for the true mentally sane pupils, serious enough to better learn in free time than at school, the best adaptation method would be to drop them out of this fools asylum as soon as possible. And either let them learn by themselves (with books, internet...) or in some specialized institution better suited to them.

Then, if you wish the question of how adapted to the real world they are, to start making sense, there would be, in principle, a rather more fair measure : to test them directly against the world of job market, rather than the world of bureaucratic standardized testing. But, there is one problem: many jobs, in particular scientific jobs, are provided by public administration and other quite bureaucratic organizations. As long as recruitments there will be a matter of diplomas that require to go through the mental torture of academic nonsense to be obtained, there is little hope for change.

But the domination of the cult of diplomas as a substitute for knowledge, is widespread. It is widespread among students, who usually prefer to dedicate all their work to diplomas without being really curious to anything or asking themselves any deeper question on the subjects studied, or any question on the sense of their life ; and if ever some rare student would dare to think out of the curriculum, they would be strongly criticized for this by their teachers, and coerced into changing their mind, as any intellectual interest away from the race for diplomas would be a "waste of time" leading to a failure of life (as it wastes the chance to get a good job whatsoever).

But diplomas are not the only problem. Indeed, imagine an education system ready to recruit self-taught as teachers. But, why would they even be interested to bother coming to work there ?
Why should the young anti-conformist geniuses, even bother to search for any means to have their skills recognized by this awful system ? Recognized for what ? For getting the right to work for the repetition of this standardized, awful way of teaching ? This would be rather pointless, and even unbearable for some, not the way to the intellectual fulfillment they are seeking.

Let us explain what forces lead school classes and curricula to remain so boring, devoid of intelligence and imagination, full of errors, light years away from the wonders of true science.

First, it is hard to figure out any possibility of improvement in the teaching system: if you take the whole curriculum as it is, and inside it, take a precise subject, and wonder how to best present this subject at this level for students who followed the rest of the curriculum as it is, then indeed, not much can be thought of as a better way to do it. Instead, most genuine improvements would require a serious research work for a global redesign of the curriculum, which is harder to imagine, undertake or experiment.

Other necessities must be respected: be understandable by most of the students as they come, with the precise knowledge they previously acquired ; follow the official curriculum so as to let students "speak the same language" as any other students of the world; to prepare them to exams, and make their diplomas equivalent to those of any other institutions.
In such conditions, freedom and innovations in curricula are rather hopeless.

Thus, even INTPs who reached academic positions, cannot easily bring their INTP souls in their teaching. Indeed, their margin of freedom is both restricted by the administrators their job depends on, and the backgrounds and expectations of the Pupils filling the classrooms, who cannot accept to be required anything else than to remain Pupils. Teachers falling under these obligations, focus all the energies on distributing as many diplomas as possible, rather than sharing the light of any meaningful and interesting science.

The intermediate process between this mass arrival of ISTJ Pupils in undergraduate level, and the final PhD success dominated by INTPs,  can be compared to the arrival of a high speed train without brakes, to a series of obstacles ending at a wall, where each obstacle is designed and installed by an independent agent made fully responsible of the damage made by his own obstacle.
It is thus a slow but desperate failure of most Pupils, spread among the years of study, where each teacher is hit by a part of the failure, but is pressed by the different forces, to minimize this part of the failure by emptying their lessons of any possibly meaningful and interesting content, therefore keeping their lessons so dull and boring, and forwarding a larger remaining part of the Pupils with their necessary imminent failure, to the teachers that will receive this population at the next level.

Apart from these obstacles, there is also a lack of incentive for scientists to rethink the teaching curriculum. First is a lack of institutional incentive, as scientists'career is determined by the specialized research work to the exclusive interest of other working scientists, not by the production of courses for students. Second, a lack of personal, intellectual interest.

Indeed, most mathematicians and physicists (I don't know about other fields) are usually not interested to think about the contents of undergraduate teaching in their field, because they see these subjects as "too simple" for them to think about, and quite boring in comparison with their own high-level research. Indeed it is boring and tedious, because it is so many hours just to present "simple" concepts and prove "simple" results. They went through this boring stuff as students, they had to accept it as such, and it was so tedious and boring for them that they don't want to think about it anymore. They just assume that this is the only way to do at this level, because this is the way everybody is doing.
They prefer to think about new subjects, and would not be interested to think again about what they already know, because they can't consider that the way they learned and to which they adapted, could have been far from the best possible way and deserved to be questioned. Anyway they don't expect it to be a chance for them to develop their creativity. It is not even a claim they are making, as they did not even start addressing the question (it would not be their job anyway).

We may consider that teaching institutions were necessary long ago, when there were very few places of knowledge, and poor communications methods, when there was no other practical way to access knowledge than being present at the same place with the professor who has this knowledge. Still, formal teaching is necessary for some parts of education, such as for most primary school pupils who need more the presence of adults for focusing on the lesson. The situation is more variable at higher levels, depending on the diversity of personalities among students, and specific aspects of their learning work.

The necessity of formal lessons already started being questionable long ago by the development of libraries, by which it would have been possible for many students to learn by themselves at negligible cost for society, making useless all the expensive fuss of organizing for them classrooms, schedules and teachers. A learning way restricted to such methods of negligible cost, would already have ended the justification to care about organizing all these exams that preselect who should be allowed as students (if ever they had a sense of self-responsibility), and therefore, the fuss of ensuring this selection to be fair.
As if tolerating a student to come and try learning something at no cost for society, while he is not officially known as being properly enough able to do it, was a wrong favor that should not be granted. Where is the value of freedom linked to a sense of self-responsibility here ?
What is this world of fools where some people should be forcefully denied for their own sake the right to satisfy their curiosity in some field of knowledge, just for fear they would later come back and make troubles because they mistook this right to satisfying their curiosity, with the "right" to later oblige some employer to hire them for the skill in this field they mistakenly thought they had ?
What is this world of fools where students are never supposed to be able to find clues by their own means on the question whether they are understanding something or not, so that they would all absolutely need someone else to judge them and forcefully decide in their place whether they do, and thus whether they should go on learning this or that ? Where nobody even considered to publish any self-assessment tool to help students take the responsibility of their own life, rather than have as now some teachers take the full decisions over it by some blind formal means ?

It remains a pitiful truth that very few students are really interested in knowledge, nor willing to take any responsibility on their own life. All what most of them want is diplomas. So, academic institutions are there to provide them diplomas disregarding whether the curriculum makes any scientific sense or not.

The pitiful situation is that every student's social struggle for exterior signs and administrative acknowledgement of one's knowledge (intellectual skills), has become for everybody (first for administration itself, then forcing this on students) a sort of exclusive concern and values system, serving as a substitute for the reality of knowledge. The administration manufactured, then forced on all the ideology according to which the hardest a student socially struggles for the recognition of his skills, the more knowledge this struggle will create in him. In other words, all possibility of a natural intelligence is banned and repressed, while only an artificial form of intelligence, defined as manufactured by an administrative dictatorship over all details of students'minds and lives, is tolerated by society as an acceptable form of intelligence.

In such conditions, the minority of gifted young people (naturally inclined for knowledge), for whom learning should have been easy and natural, are often confronted to a system that makes life artificially harder to them: their natural skills are repressed and mistaken for a form of hubris, and they are labelled as "ambitious". Against them, a fighting field is opposed where they are challenged to waste years of absurd efforts (absurd school classes and homework) as a precondition to conquer the right to officially become what they already were from the start. By pretending to provide for the development of the skills, the school system is (at least for some students) damaging and endangering it. It is both damaging for the life (by being hard, time-consuming and stressing), and for the intelligence (by being of a lower level than could be done in a free time, to conform to the lower average level of other students); and without a happy life, intellectual productivity may be damaged. This may be seen as a caricatural form of logical positivism where no intelligence has the right to exist unless it is administratively measured.

Geniuses are accused of being ambitious, and of being personally responsible (especially in the eyes of spiritual people) for choosing the hassle that is put over them. But it may not really be their choice: it is not their "fault" if they are naturally clever and more thirsty of knowledge than others. Their real need, at least for some of them, is not as much a special expensive treatment, exhausting training and hard competitions, but to be let free to be what they are (which may have zero cost for society); but it may be beyond the mental ability of the System, to understand this need of freedom and tolerate geniuses for what they are. The System "needs" to be the official creator of every good thing that happens; and to be respected as such, it needs to first destroy any positive thing that previously existed in nature, and for which the System cannot be granted the merit. So it will divert the natural aspiration of geniuses into a fabricated ambition, requiring a hard artificial work, to conquer the right to be accepted into a higher meaningless social class whose role will replace the one of natural intelligence. This will require a harder artificial work for the ambition to conquer the right to enter the next grade, and so on. But this endless strive can turn out to be destructive of the very creativity and knowledge that it pretends to create.

Finally, while the System officially praises the geniuses it trains as an elite (and may have positive effects on some of them), some of these geniuses not at ease with the System, happen to suffer this treatment as a sort of mental slavery, nonsense that destroys their time, life and creativity. It is a known fact that intellectual creativity erodes with age. Any harm or obstacle that limits the time and opportunity for young geniuses to find fulfillment and develop knowledge, is a terrible waste.

This situation has been recalled here:

"the human brain has it's best time in the early to mid twenties. Why do we waste these best years?"

A fabric of crackpots

As we said, the most disgusting thing for (at least some) clever people, is intellectual mediocrity.
This is both true for young geniuses as for tenured scientists. These are two artificially separated sides of a population that would otherwise have naturally been one brotherhood, but whose chances to connect to each other are severely limited by this wall of administrative rule of intellectual mediocrity that is the school and undergraduate teaching system, separating both sides, and which repels each member of a side away from the other side.

Why are there no more serious attempts at communication and direct unions between networks or organizations supporting gifted people in desperate need of opportunities to fulfill their curiosity and develop their skills, and scientists that feel desperate at the statistics of the decreasing popularity of scientific studies in official institutions ? Or is there ? Of course some efforts are made at popularizing science in the media, in conferences, expositions, or science museums. But this is usually not done in a serious manner: this is not the full depth of science that is usually shared in these ways, but rather some oversimplified accounts or anecdotal aspects of science. The separation between scientists and those who wish to learn science, may seem to be reduced through such popularization works, but no real decent bridge seems to be currently in place.
Core theories that could be really more interesting, such as the main foundations of mathematics (set theory, model theory), linear or abstract algebra, tensors, electromagnetism, non-euclidean geometries, topology, classical mechanics, gravitation, special and general relativity, quantum physics, are hardly ever fully shared in such environments. (I am personally interested to contribute in communicating these subjects to gifted people who wish to learn them outside formal academic contexts, so please contact me if you know about any math&physics education network, either local or online, for skilled free students at undergraduate level).

Such an absence explains both the lack of popularity of scientific studies that many scientists officially deplore, and the proliferation of cranks that worsen the separation between scientists and the public. How can students be expected to seek scientific studies, if the academic system welcomes them there with the spines of a hard, tedious and boring work ? How can young geniuses not be tempted to mistake the scientific community with the mediocre appearance of it given by the academic system, which somehow really looks like crackpot ? This deprives them of the means to trust the intelligence of scientists, and thus leads them to believe that their own thought, just because it goes a little higher than the lessons they are attending, would be higher than mainstream science too. This is what is leading some of the young geniuses, who otherwise may have become good scientists, to become paranoid cranks instead.

A change is needed

The opposition of political forces is so naturally flawed between
  1. The ITP, introverted independent thinkers interested in things and ideas rather than in other people, who prefer to flee political conflicts
  2. The EJ (extroverted organizers) who like to rule the lives of other people and find it right to do so
Thus, while they are usually a free and reliable reference of knowledge inside their precise subject of research, geniuses and scientists may remain a sort of sheep in the hands of businesses and administration (and sometimes thoughtless intellectual fashions among their peers, as professional recognition is dictated by peer-review processes), as for the conception and orientation of the work they are employed for.
This is where the natural need of scientists to take refuge in the ivory tower of their specialized knowledge (while many pseudo-scientists are much more eager to share their crackpot ideas to the public) to avoid the hassles of mental nonsense and political conflicts that reign in the rest of the world, reaches its weaknesses. This lack of political consciousness among those who may have been best able to understand society's troubles and invent possible solutions, is both damaging to many of their own possible intellectual peers, and to society as a whole.

Since long, hardly any justification remained for such a lack of liberty to the whole students population, especially the top fraction of them. But now the obsolescence of the system is even clearer with the development of the Internet, which gives everyone virtually all the best knowledge of the world at home for free. But this new field of opportunities still has to be further developed.

Scientists already started to revolt against publishers of scientific journals (whose main remaining role in the Internet age is to take as a direct profit most of the public funding of scientific libraries, with no real service in return), by developing alternative online peer-reviewed journals with free online access for all.

It may be time to make a similar revolution with education, to provide free or cheaper online higher education. Indeed, the methods of sharing knowledge are currently quite wasteful with this way of having to repeat the same lessons at precise schedules each year, while it is the same performance that thousands of professors are supposed to repeat worldwide from a university to another, with hardly any innovation effort actually done: this is far from any optimized use of the creative scientific abilities of professors, while a simple video broadcast of the best lesson of the world on each subject (just to be translated in each different language, and eventually to adapt once for all to a list of different skills and profiles of students), would sometimes do better and cheaper. Thus we need to consider

Other mismanagement of intellectual resources

Some research subjects in mathematics that initially developed with no purpose of practical applications, finally produced unexpected important ones (such as number theory that led to cryptography). However this is not a general case; and, while most fields of mathematics (as listed by the Mathematics Subject Classification) seem connected with possibilities of applications, some active research subjects (as I could see) can't be reasonably expected to be useful to mankind in the near future.

This uselessness is a general phenomenon that can take different forms. What was the usefulness of sending men on the Moon ? Some technical usefulness of the Apollo program exists (technological development, some scientific research...), but this alone would not have justified its huge cost (such new technologies could have been developed at a lower cost). The main "usefulness" was to make people dream (and to bring a bright reputation to the US worldwide). Hopes of clearer kinds of usefulness such as making it profitable to colonize the Moon in the short term, have been disappointed.
What is the usefulness of astronomy, except to warn us whether an asteroid threatens to hit the Earth and kill many of us ? To bring a knowledge of our place in the cosmos, to feed the imagination of an educated public curious enough to look after it. The advantage of astronomy is that it can be popularized in a way that preserves much of its wonder (and it is cheaper than the Apollo program). In terms of strict usefulness, just enough space research to send the useful satellites to observe, localize and communicate everything on Earth would have sufficed.
What is the usefulness of particle physics ? Progress in fundamental physics in the first half the 20th century has been tremendously useful. This usefulness was expectable because the physics underlying ordinary matter (to specify exactly what can be done with matter for practical purposes by affordable means) had not been fully understood before. However, this time has passed, as the laws of physics for ordinary matter are rather fully understood; what is not understood yet of fundamental physics and that is being researched in particle accelerators, clearly won't be technologically useful in a foreseeable future (as it can only bring information about the mess of particles produced in particle collisions from over-expensive, energetically wasteful particle accelerators; about the Big Bang and cosmology; and some pointless details on how cosmic rays can damage spacecrafts and the health of astronauts). Now, further discoveries in particle physics can only be useful to feed the dreams of... the small minority of particle physics that can understand such discoveries (as this field can't be popularized in a similarly meaningful way as astronomy).
Some mathematical research subjects are just as useless, only good to feed the dreams of a few specialists, where the news of any discovery can eventually not be popularized at all.

The mismanagement of intellectual resources is particularly striking in the case of string theory, to which a huge lot of work was dedicated with hardly any effective result (testable predictions), which led some to dismiss this theory as not even wrong (though interesting from a purely abstract mathematical viewpoint).

This does not exactly make it a pseudo-science like other pseudo-sciences. Unfortunately the debate has been polluted with some cranky claims of opponents to string theory (especially Lee Smolin), but I guess that a sort of agreement between most physicists would remain on the following points: that string theory is a somehow self-consistent mathematical theory (though this may not be so clear), that it has a chance to fit the real world but we cannot know. It is merely speculative with no practical prediction as it lets a much too wide range of possibilities that can't even be reasonably computed to compare them with the standard model, so that it largely fails in practice (under the limitations of our human deductive abilities...) to reach the status it initially promised, that is of a scientific theory for physics.

On the other hand, other possibly more useful research subjects for scientists are neglected, such as

Some references of criticism of the institutions

In this article:
"The assumptions and procedures of science in the West have long been shaped by military and commercial imperatives. The scientific establishment has accepted these shaping constraints, reluctantly or enthusiastically, but they have had little choice in the matter."
and in the New Scientist article Time to democratize science, linked from there:

"In the words of Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz:
"If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern."I am not sure economics even qualifies as a science any more. It is as though physicists spent hours pushing an elephant up the stairs of their department and then expressed surprise at what happened when they heaved it off the roof.
As a source of world-changing knowledge, the social sciences are as nothing when compared with the natural sciences.
...
The pharmaceutical sector, for example, has spent billions on copycat drugs and treatments for depression and anxiety that have few clear benefits.
....
There is no good reason I can see why science funding could not be made subject to democratic decision-making. Yes, it will hand power to non-experts, but so does the present system: non-experts in the state and private sector often have a decisive say in what scientists study.
"
Science and Democracy parts I, II, III.

List of false or low quality sciences

Let us now review a number of disciplines (communities of people with some sort of peer recognition) claiming to study a field of knowledge (focusing on matters of truth - unlike arts which are explicitly more a matter of taste than of truth), and assess their scientific value according to the previously explained criteria.

Philosophy

It had its time of glory in the past. In ancient Greece, philosophy was not yet distinguished from the science of that time, thus we might say both were comparable in quality. Then they faced many centuries of near-absence during the dark ages of Christian domination, before resurrecting together and having their glory period in the time of Enlightenment.
Enlightenment philosophy signed its good new insights of truth, by some valuable practical accomplishments (usefulness for mankind, that can be compared with the technical usefulness of science):
However, the situation is now very different, as science made a tremendous lot of progress since that time, leaving philosophy far behind. Philosophy didn't make any comparable progress of methods or knowledge, and thus became a sterile discipline.

Some attempts of reform to remodel philosophy after science have been made, such as the development of analytic philosophy by Bertrand Russel who also contributed to the new foundations of mathematics (set theory). It may be acknowledged that analytic philosophy is a bit less irrational than continental philosophy.
But, apart from a few interesting clues such as his celestial teapot and other remarks on religion, much of the length of Russel's philosophy (such as his theory of the mind) remained of poor value (long developments on pointless details that cannot contribute to the progress of knowledge in any effective way).

For example, after the good fruits of democracy produced by the Enlightenment philosophy, what further political revolution did philosophy bring to mankind ? Well, it brought the Marxist revolution.
Despite its claims, Marxism is not rational. Most philosophers did not notice the problem, and thus welcomed Marxism in their field. Only Karl Popper developed famous writings showing the discrepancy between Marxism and science, by observing the difference between the Marxist and the scientific way of testing a theory against experience (falsifiability), for example the way Einstein's general relativity made precise predictions to be tested.

Despite this, the community of so-called "intellectuals" (of humanities, not scientists) kept holding Marxism as a rational theory and valid philosophy. Of course if you measure a philosophy by its convincing power to the masses, then, Marxism is among the best, just in the same way religions previously were. In fact Marxism is itself a modern religion exploiting the newly fashionable claim of scientificity. But the success of a convincing power to the people (even to be taken as "scientific" by an unscientific class of self-proclaimed "intellectuals") hardly has anything to do with truth and rationality. 
Now you don't need anymore to study and examine it in much details to find evidence for its lack of rationality: just look at its fruits (the Soviet Union). The combination of its convincing power with its utter falsity, just means it is at the antipodes of reason: it is powerfully misleading. We shall discuss this more closely in Part IV.

The irrational character of philosophy, can be inferred from its inability to naturally converge to a consensus on given questions: many philosophers keep presenting opposite views on fixed issues, that remain unresolved for a very long time.

Paul Graham's criticism of philosophy
"When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet. There's no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from placebos.
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. "
(and many other arguments worth reading too)

Richard Feynman (physics Nobel laureate) made harsh criticisms of philosophy:

"After some discussion as to what "essential object" meant, the professor leading the seminar said (...) "Mr. Feynman, would you say an electron is an 'essential object'?"(...). So I began by asking, "Is a brick an essential object?"
Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, "A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential object."
Another man said, "No, it isn't the individual brick that is an essential object; it's the general character that all bricks have in common - their 'brickiness' - that is the essential object."
Another guy got up and said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves. 'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks."
Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos."

"philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds"
(forgetting that, in fact, ornithology has been useful to birds in some ways...)

People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m not… If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it — that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers… then that’s the way it is. But either way there’s Nature and she’s going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t predecide what it is we’re looking for only to find out more about it. Now you ask: “Why do you try to find out more about it?” If you began your investigation to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question just by finding out more about the character of Nature. But that’s not my interest in science; my interest in science is to simply find out about the world and the more I find out the better it is, I like to find out…
(The Pleasure of Finding Things Out p. 23)

From this Feynman's text on science:

"...what science is, is not what the philosophers have said it is, and certainly not what the teacher editions say it is. What it is, is a problem which I set for myself after I said I would give this talk.
After some time, I was reminded of a little poem:
A centipede was happy quite, until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg comes after which?"
This raised his doubts to such a pitch
He fell distracted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
All my life, I have been doing science and known what it was, but what I have come to tell you--which foot comes after which--I am unable to do, and furthermore, I am worried by the analogy in the
poem that when I go home I will no longer be able to do any research."

From this Feynman's interview:

"Philosophers, incidentally, say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive and probably wrong. . . 
My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza--and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these Attributes and Substances, all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now, how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there was no excuse for it! In that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions and look at the world--and you can't tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn't do any good to have the courage if you can't get anywhere with the question. 
It isn't the philosophy that gets me, it's the pomposity. If they'd just laugh at themselves! If they'd just say, "I think it's like this, but Von Leipzig thought it was like that, and he had a good shot at it too." If they'd explain that this is their best guess.... But so few of them do; instead, they seize on the possibility that there may not be any ultimate fundamental particle and say that you should stop work and ponder with great profundity. "You haven't thought deeply enough; first let me define the world for you." Well, I'm going to investigate it without defining it! "

Another Physics Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg, wrote (Chapter "Against Philosophy" of his book "Dreams of a final theory"):

"The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers.(...) without some guidance from our preconceptions one could do nothing at all. It is just that philosophical principles have not generally provided us with the right preconceptions.

Physicists do of course carry around with them a working philosophy. For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism, a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific theories. But this has been learned through the experience of scientific research and rarely from the teachings of philosophers.

This is not to deny all value to philosophy(...). But we should not expect [the philosophy of science] to provide today's scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their work or about what they are likely to find.

After a few years' infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate I became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied seemed murky and inconsequential compared with the dazzling successes of physics and mathematics. From time to time since then I have tried to read current work on the philosophy of science. Some of it I found to be written in a jargon so impenetrable that I can only think that it aimed at impressing those who confound obscurity with profundity. (...) But only rarely did it seem to me to have anything to do with the work of science as I knew it. (...)
I am not alone in this; I know of no one who has participated actively in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers. I raised in the previous chapter the problem of what Wigner calls the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics; here I want to take up another equally puzzling phenomenon, the unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy.
Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than ever they were of use.(...)
Mechanism had also been propagated beyond the boundaries of science and survived there to give later trouble to scientists. In the nineteenth century the heroic tradition of mechanism was incorporated, unhappily, into the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels and their followers (...) and for a while dialectical materialism stood in the way of the acceptance of general relativity in the Soviet Union
(...) We are not likely to know the right questions until we are close to knowing the answers.(...)
The quark theory was only one step in a continuing process of reformulation of physical theory in terms that are more and more fundamental and at the same time farther and farther from everyday experience.

homeschooling physicist

"But… many introductory books on philosophy take the tack that “philosophy is not so much a set of answers as a way of asking questions: the important thing about philosophy is not specific answers, but rather the philosophical way of thinking”
Yeah – that is because the answers that philosophers have come up with over the centuries have been almost uniformly bad!
(...)
Ethics is too important to be left to the philosophers.
(...)
children should also be taught not to think “philosophically,” in the manner of current and recent academic and professional philosophers. On the contrary, they should be explicitly told that, for at least the last two centuries, the philosophical enterprise as carried out by professional philosophers has been an obvious failure and that the vast increase in our knowledge of reality during the last several centuries has been due not to philosophy but to natural science."

In the same site: Is philosophy futile - more texts on philosophy
Physicists dissing philosophy:
"Science, philosophy, and religion all make claims to have a broad, integrated view of reality. But, the views of reality they arrive at differ dramatically.
It would be quite surprising if three such radically different approaches to confronting reality were to give compatible pictures of reality.
Of course, they do not.
...in some ways, both the creationists and the postmodernists deserve credit for seeing something that more sensible, moderate folks try to evade: in the long-term, science, philosophy, and religion cannot co-exist."

One philosopher acknowledges and sums up the importance and relevance of top scientists'harsch criticism of philosophy, so as to take lessons how to consequently reform the academic practice of philosophy.But other philosophers prefer to reject such criticism and keep justifying their flaws anyway.

More debates if you wish :
Weinberg's "Against Philosophy"
Why philosophize
Does philosophy make you a better scientist
Another discussion
Very long discussion which then diverts from the subject

Other philosophers try to justify philosophy's flaws through empty arguments:

How pitiful it is to observe how philosophers are not even able to give a decent answer to a simple question. 

They try to justify their inability of finding decent answers by claims such as : the value of philosophy would be to focus on asking the right questions (or eliminating the wrong questions) and eliminating some wrong answers (a sort of intellectual garbage collecting). But these are just blind unjustified beliefs, as the real effect of their work is just the opposite: to multiply and preciously accumulate wrong questions and wrong answers (intellectual garbage collectioning).
This reminds me the joke "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. They just define darkness as an industry standard." and other "It's not a bug, it's a feature".

Talk:Foundations_of_mathematics

"Anyone, a mathematician especially, who appreciates the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” and the “unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy" to scientific endeavors must recognize the dangers of letting "philosophy of math" ride roughshod over "foundations of math" and as a last line of defense, of letting "philosophy and foundations of math" ride roughshod over proper pure and applied maths.

Just look at the talk page for "philosophy of math"! What a mess. Note that some of these people actually believe the destiny of science can be mastered thru verbose semantics, concepts, schema, arguments, etc. The last time I looked, the language of science was still written in mathematics. Fortunately, bullshit had not yet taken over in the math journals.

Specialists in foundations and/or philosophy of math often over-estimate the importance of their work to those in other specialties."

Consider for example how philosophers of maths play the role of garbage collectioners of the failed/crackpot mathematical inspirations such as "Intuitionism" (= possibly interesting hints not properly clarified) or meaningless conceptual divisions that can be made obsolete by mathematical work (see about the completeness theorem in Part III) that they raise as highly philosophical just because it failed to be mathematically meaningful and thus does not interest any reasonable mathematician.

In reply to the criticism that philosophy lost its usefulness since the Enlightenment time, philosophers often react by glorifying themselves of their uselessness, by the straw man argument that, well, optimized financial productivity is not the right ultimate value, and thus should not be the exclusive purpose of public school curricula. 
But, while I agree that numerical measure of the short-term financial profit should not be the final and exclusive criteria of value for an intellectual discipline, the trouble is that philosophers seem to have no other evidently meaningful alternative criteria of value either, except the very negation of the usefulness criteria (together with their intimate but unjustified conviction). Namely, they seem to be raising wastefulness (uselessness) as their ultimate value, as if the very fact something brings no fruit, could serve as an evidence that it must surely be very spiritual. This reminds me the Shadoks' insights :

"I pump, therefore I am
It is better to pump even if nothing happens, than risk that something is going worse by not pumping...
their rocket was not highly developed, but they had calculated that it still had 1 chance over 1 million to work. And they hurried to fail the 999 999 first tests to ensure that the millionth works."

With wastefulness as their ultimate value, their work turns out to be universally wasteful, for whatever purpose including the development of the mind and critical thinking itself. The belief they must be good for the spirit or whatever undefinable ideal just based on the observation of their worthlessness for financial profit, is but a superstition among others. They may of course reject this criticism as straw man too, as this description is not exactly their claim, But it does not matter what they exactly claim: this is what they are doing in practice anyway.

How to explain the failure of philosophy ? Well, apart from the crankiness of its members, an important cause is its traditional obsession for essentialism (focusing on the ultimate nature of everything - well, by the way, this is precisely a usual character of cranks), to be contrasted with science's non-essentialism that we described. Science has its own care for essences when needed; it is just not an obsession. Philosophy just failed to follow this model.
We might also describe the difference between science and philosophy in this way:
Science is the practice of rationality, while philosophy has theories of rationality. And these theories are usually disconnected from this practice, because, in fact, there is no better way to understand rationality, that by practicing it.
 
But... is this really awful if philosophy is dominated by cranks ? Well, not necessarily. After all, in order for cranks to stop bothering scientists, they need to go somewhere else and find another public. So, philosophy can be considered useful for its social role of a huge intellectual bin where cranks can gather, while science on its own side can stay clean.

OK, philosophy is so diverse that it is also possible to find there a minority of decent approaches: example.

Remarks on logical positivism and falsificationism

As philosophers can easily notice, there is a flaw in the way Weinberg takes the example of logical positivism and its unfortunate consequences for criticizing philosophy. Indeed, logical positivism was rather made by scientists themselves, precisely as a movement against philosophy, and was popular among scientists but not among philosophers, who quickly rejected it. Thus, philosophers cannot be responsible for these troubles.
Let's explain this issue in more details.

Once understood well, the statement of the principles of science we made at the start of this Part II, including the "logical positivism" principle, is not affected by Weinberg's criticism of logical positivism: the troubles only come from a caricatural form of logical positivism not balanced by the other principles we stated (conceptual reconstruction of reality).

The difference made by philosophers between verificationism (as stated by logical positivists) and Popper's falsificationism (that was later widely taken as a reference of scientificity) has to be dismissed.
Once analyzed well, these are more or less two ways of popularizing the same logical concept. Well, the details of the formulation of logical positivism can have been imperfect and deserve a few corrections. But the main difference is not about what they really mean, which is the same, but a difference of "how they feel", how they might be misinterpreted by irrational people.
To the eyes of a large public as well as many philosophers, Marxism and Psychoanalysis made an impression of being "verified", thus scientific. But this impression of "verification" was a mere illusion, obtained by emptying of meaning the concept of "verification". Then, Karl Popper discovered that another phrasing, "falsificationism", was better suited and efficient to explain how Marxism and Psychoanalysis are false sciences, as they do not stand to the practice of verification used in real science. This was okay, but then he went to wrong conclusions by mistaking this difference of usefulness (for irrational people to more easily notice the lack of scientificity of some ideologies) for a deep conceptual difference. The result is that he replaced the initial misinterpretation of the nature of science, by another misinterpretation, that does not carry the same risks of misuse but can carry some too.

As Weinberg said, the main possible value of philosophy is to refute some errors of other philosophers. So, Popper was good for warning against Psychoanalysis and Marxism as pseudo-sciences, while David Stove was good for warning against the irrationality of Popper and other science philosophers (Feyerabend, Kuhn...).

About clarifying scientific concepts

An example of a "philosophical subject"  is about noticing that modern theories such as relativity and quantum physics, failed to go through a work of cleaning up their fundamental concepts and vocabulary to a comparable extent as classical physics had succeeded before. So they are still often presented inside the language, intuition and even mathematical parameters of classical physics. This conflict between the modern intended theories and the classical intuitions and language still used to expressed them, brings these theories an unfortunate reputation of being counter-intuitive.

That's right, but: what's the use of making a philosophy about it ? This is not a genuine subject for philosophy. This is just a task for science professors to clean up existing knowledge. And this is an administrative problem to pay attention to this question, and provide incentives to:
- publish better courses cleaning up each possible subject, once for all in the world (or several times, of course, but each time caring to do better again than previously);
- For each subject where such a work was already done by someone in the world, take the new view and reform teaching after it.
 
Unfortunately, while such works exist (as I'm caring myself to do some), the education system is so conservative that the necessary changes are not done (because professors are usually so busy repeating over and over again the same old teachings in boring old ways, and are so "the best in their fields", that they have no time to seriously care whether a better way might already have been produced by somebody else).

But hopefully, in a future time when the cleaning up will have been done, what will remain of the philosophy whose thesis was to claim that the cleaning up is not done yet ? Rather do the cleaning up, than philosophize on its lack.

Postmodernism and "science studies"

A community of ideological flaws can be seen between Marxism, which dismisses its opposing theories (economic liberalism) as a mere matter of social forces rather than of truth (so as to use ad hominem as an excuse to not bother arguing rationally), and the postmodernist "science studies".

Everyone should know about the Sokal affair, an episode of the Science Wars:
"The physicist Alan Sokal submitted the article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” proposing that quantum gravity is a linguistic and social construct and that quantum physics supports postmodernist criticisms of scientific objectivity. Social Text published the article in the Spring/Summer “Science Wars” issue in May 1996. Later, in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies”, Prof. Sokal exposed his parody-article, “Transgressing the Boundaries” as an experiment testing the intellectual rigor of an academic journal that would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”

However Sokal's hoax should not be overestimated, as it was only directed to a precise movement (postmodernism) that should not be confused with the whole of philosophy or social sciences: in this interview, Alan Sokal said:

"I should make clear that I don’t think my parody article settles anything. It doesn’t by itself prove much – that one journal was sloppy. So it wasn’t the parody itself that proved it, it was the things that I and other people wrote afterward which I believe showed the sloppiness of the philosophy that a lot of postmodernist literary theory types were writing. But again, I wasn’t the first person to make those criticisms. It was only after the fact that I went back into the literature and found philosophers had made many of these criticisms long before me. All I did in a certain sense was to find a better public relations method than they did."

But he also expresses his skepticism on the possibility for philosophy of science to fulfill its goal of understanding the scientific method:

"So I guess you’re right that I’m skeptical that there can ever be a complete over-arching theory simply because science is about rationality; rationality is always adaptation to unforeseen circumstances – how can you possibly codify that? But that doesn’t mean philosophy of science is useless, because all of these attempts that have failed as final codifications of scientific method nevertheless contributed something. "

Anti-Science Phenomenon
"Practitioners of the social sciences have not learned, in their own disciplines, much that is operationally indisputable, readily reproducible, and internationally agreed to; so they cannot easily conceive such a thing to be possible in any field. Knowing in their own discipline that ideology governs "knowledge" as well as theory, they presume that must be so in all fields."

Also, the end of the above quoted Weinberg's chapter "against philosophy" tells about the relations between science and "science studies" by sociologists.
Some interesting observations are without problem:

"For instance, Sharon Traweek has spent years with elementary particle experimentalists at both the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the KEK Laboratory in Japan and has described what she had seen from the perspective of an anthropologist. This kind of big science is a natural topic for anthropologists and sociologists, because scientists belong to an anarchic tradition that prizes individual initiative, and yet they find in today's experiments that they have to work together in teams of hundreds. As a theorist I have not worked in such a team, but many of her observations seem to me to have the ring of truth, as for instance: The physicists see themselves as an elite whose membership is determined solely by scientific merit. The assumption is that everyone has a fair start. This is underscored by the rigorously informal dress code, the similarity of their offices, and the "first naming" practices in the community. Competitive individualism is considered both just and effective: the hierarchy is seen as a meritocracy which produces fine physics. American physicists, however, emphasize that science is not democratic: decisions about scientific purposes should not be made by majority rule within the community, nor should there be equal access to a lab's resources. On both these issues, most Japanese physicists assume the opposite."

But other aspects present a strong opposition:

"It is simply a logical fallacy to go from the observation that science is a social process to the conclusion that the final product, our scientific theories, is what it is because of the social and historical forces acting in this process. A party of mountain climbers may argue over the best path to the peak, and these arguments may be conditioned by the history and social structure of the expedition, but in the end either they find a good path to the peak or they do not, and when they get there they know it. (No one would give a book about mountain climbing the title Constructing Everest.) I cannot prove that science is like this, but everything in my experience as a scientist convinces me that it is. The "negotiations" over changes in scientific theory go on and on, with scientists changing their minds again and again in response to calculations and experiments, until finally one view or another bears an unmistakable mark of objective success. It certainly feels to me that we are discovering something real in physics, something that is what it is without any regard to the social or historical conditions that allowed us to discover it.

Where then does this radical attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge come from? One source I think is the old bugbear of positivism, this time applied to the study of science itself. If one refuses to talk about anything that is not directly observed, then quantum field theories or principles of symmetry or more generally laws of nature cannot be taken seriously. What philosophers and sociologists and anthropologists can study is the actual behavior of real scientists, and this behavior never follows any simple description in terms of rules of inference. But scientists have the direct experience of scientific theories as desired yet elusive goals, and they become convinced of the reality of these theories.

There may be another motivation for the attack on the realism and objectivity of science, one that is less high-minded. Imagine if you will an anthropologist who studies the cargo cult on a Pacific island. The islanders believe that they can bring back the cargo aircraft that made them prosperous during World War II by building wooden structures that imitate radar and radio antennas. It is only human nature that this anthropologist and other sociologists and anthropologists in similar circumstances would feel a frisson of superiority, because they know as their subjects do not that there is no objective reality to these beliefs—no cargo-laden C-47 will ever be attracted by the wooden radars. Would it be surprising if, when anthropologists and sociologists turned their attention to studying the work of scientists, they tried to recapture that delicious sense of superiority by denying the objective reality of the scientists' discoveries?
Relativism is only one aspect of a wider, radical, attack on science itself. (...) These radical critics of science seem to be having little or no effect on the scientists themselves. I do not know of any working scientist who takes them seriously."

A delicious self-criticism article by Bruno Latour (worth full reading - a longer version is there), questioning the field of social studies he created himself, considering how it turned out to lead to conspirationism, denialism, and endangering our planet by the way it is used by political lobbies for denying scientific evidence on global warming:

"...I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact–as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past–but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we have now to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices?
..."

Economics

Economical and political sciences emerged out of philosophy, and made some way towards scientificity by taking some inspiration from mathematics and other applied sciences. They are not as flawed as philosophy, but still keep some of its flaws. For example, they keep fuzzy logic, can't work accurately enough to converge to the truth, as can be seen by their long-standing diversities of views on each subject. This is partly understandable as a difficulty, as its object depends on fuzzy human elements and irreducible complexities, so that the reductionist approaches of mathematics and physics cannot apply so well. However this is not a sufficient justification, since another scientific field (biology and the theory of evolution) could do a better job in spite of comparable difficulties.

Among people aware of the presence of large flaws in economical sciences, some analyze them as due to giving too much importance to mathematics (and mathematical modeling). However,  people coming from exact sciences (pure or applied mathematics, physics) and having a look at the mathematical modelling used in economics, would observe that the problem with economics is not about doing too much mathematics, but about misunderstanding mathematics.

Indeed, mathematics does not just consist in writing and solving equations. Instead, true mathematics is a way of thinking. It is the skill of thinking logically and accurately, in an elaborate way in coherence with the context, so as to ensure the reliability of the approximations made. Mathematical concepts, and other concepts developed by a mathematical way of thinking, can be expressed as well in formulas or in ordinary language, depending on subjects or convenience; while illogical nonsense can be written in the language of formulas just the same.
The art of finding out good approximations and relevant modelizations, is omnipresent in physics and other sciences; and the art of modelization itself, in the sense of developing concepts, diversifying and selecting relevant viewpoints on a given subject, is present in pure mathematics too.
Another scientific tool often used in hard sciences which did not enter the culture of economists, is computer simulations.

Example of an article presenting the current flaws of economics:

The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics

(More references would be welcome; already the Wikipedia article on Economics presents some criticism too).

Other important examples of the domination of nonsense in academic economics, have been the heavy presence of Marxism as well as Keynesianism, despite their lack of logical coherence. The disasters from Marxism are well-known. But Keynesianism also has a share of responsibility in nonsense politics too, by the misunderstanding it induced about the long "crisis" from 1973 to now (reduced growth and worsening unemployment without inflation), leading to a repetition of the fiscal and monetary measures (increased spendings) that worked to end the "overproduction" crisis of the 1930's (which can be analyzed as a monetary crisis) but cannot work now that the problem is different, and even worsens the situation : harming growth and running into more disasters (states going bankrupt) which can't be solved anymore.

How desperating it can have been for example in France during the 1980's, for someone who thinks logically, to hear on TV as well as by high school economics teachers, as if it was undeniably the only rational view, the perpetual repetition of the same nonsense, that overspending (by states as well as by people) would be the best solution to every problem and for social justice, while austerity would be the worst evil of the world that only big bad wolves (capitalists) might support for obscure reasons.

As with philosophy, the obligations to swallow tons of absurd theories for anyone who would consider officially studying economics, also contributed to turn away from the subject most skilled thinkers that could have corrected it. Sure, the rationality level there is better than in philosophy, but most of the really good thinkers rather go to hard sciences rather than economics.

Note also how usually unquestioned are the basic features of the "infrastructures" in terms of which democracy, national states, currencies, administrations and policies are defined.

The omnipresence of technologies and other remarkable efficiencies of science to change many things in our daily life (in contrast with the vanity of religion) as well as the presence of an economical science full of mathematical tools, has given many people the false impression that science somehow dominates the world, despite its much smaller number of effective members (scientists) than religions.

In reality, science has never been in power. It cannot do what nobody wants it to do. Scientists never received the mandate to rethink and reorganize our political and economic systems so as to more truly serve the general interest. Our core political structures, as well as the root of decision (some political class vaguely representing a rather irrational population through rudimentary voting processes) hardly has anything to do with the well-designed kind of sophistication such as science would know to develop.

People always decided that scientists should exclusively work at the service of this unquestioned "liberal" or "democratic" system, to provide technologies to do what consumers individually like, and what our institutions want them to do. These institutions are rather a conventional construction that emerged long ago and were preserved by inertia or slowly evolved for easy corrections and adaptation for the purpose of growing and keeping their power, in a world where most people have a passive mind. The only choice scientists had, was between serving these institutions or staying jobless and excluded from society.

Then, how can anyone hold science responsible for the flawed decisions (individually useful but collectively irresponsible or under control by specific interest groups) made by a system of businesses and institutions that decides everything and hires scientists, but that scientists cannot control in return (and most of them don't even care as they are just satisfied to build their ivory tower in a small corner there) ?

We shall review in Part IV some of the main economic concepts and features (either already known or not yet) that need to be understood, and new scientific tools to develop, for mankind to better solve its current (old or new) and upcoming problems.

Medicine and Psychiatry

Medicine benefited greatly of the development of biological sciences, but suffers the influence of the pharmaceutical industry's financial interests, that distorts the research results towards the highest possible social expenses it can take profit from; and there are so many substances and questions requiring lots of specific observations, that it is sometimes hard to check the truth on every question - and with laws set up by industrial lobbies, none else than this industry can "follow the procedures" to get the right to sell its products (no matter how far from a fair game of truth seeking are these procedures). While these aberrations are hardly a secret in general, this lobby's strong influence on political decisions makes it rather hopeless to try restoring a sane rational environment for the development of medicine as a science in the current system.

Also the relation with alternative medicine is not clear. Of course, a lot of caution is necessary in general as many charlatans prosper, but it is a pity to miss the tools to help select the possibly useful practices and practitioners. The lack of research in some methods may be due to the fact they do not sell any expensive chemicals, and therefore are not in the industry's interests.
For example, the effects of acupuncture are still controversial.

The situation is particularly disastrous in the field of psychiatry. While some serious research in psychiatry can exist, and some patients may indeed find help (healing some cases of depression or other troubles) in psychiatric treatments, much of the psychiatric practice fails to be scientific - and rather behaves as a totalitarian system instead.
Indeed, psychiatry is not falsifiable, with its easy game of interpreting any patient's disagreements with its diagnosis, as pathological (or sometimes, as a mere scientologist propaganda). This loophole (a general exaggerated belief in people's foolishness, that opens the door to unfalsifiable fanciful ideas) is more or less the same with psychiatry as with psychoanalysis.
Another example of an anti-scientific character of psychiatrists, is how fast, in a few minutes, they can make definitive judgements about whether their patient's views are justified or not. In the rest of science, it may take hours, years or decades of work by many scientists to debate a difficult question. Even many ordinary people can be lucid enough to not judge other people's life without taking some time to discuss and try to understand, or to acknowledge that they don't know. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, and just like religious fundamentalists, won't make any effort to try to understand anything in their patients' lives beyond how it sounds to them in a few minutes, but will give unlimited trust to their own arbitrary, definitive judgement without any discussion (that is, immediately dismissing as pathological any opinion different from theirs).

As anti-psychiatrist movements have shown, psychiatric institutional systems are naturally oriented (as a necessary means for their own preservation and promotion) to see fools everywhere and to heal none. Rather, they destroy through poison, many lives that would otherwise not have been so bad.

Some people would dismiss criticism by putting forward some cases of people who really benefited from psychiatric treatment. Another argument pushed on someone who had a bad experience suffering from a absurd treatment from mad psychiatrists who make nonsense diagnosis (mistaking, for example, any original thoughts away from political correctness, as madness, and ordering devastating pills for someone who was in fact sane, or anyway whose problem had nothing to do with what is assumed), is to justify this madness by :
  1. claiming that anyway the patient is free and responsible for having freely accepted the devastating treatment ordered by the psychiatrist (no matter the formal obligations of obedience could be set up by a brainless administration; and how the psychiatrist lied to the patient in the, refusing to discuss the diagnosis with the patient's agreement, nor telling the truth about the effects; assuming, disregarding any other assessment of the patient's intelligence or rationality than the psychiatrist's intimate conviction, that the patient would be too mad to understand his problem, supposedly making it necessary to tell any lies to make him accept the needed treatment; thus decidedly letting the patient no chance of an informed consent).
  2. that if a psychiatrist takes wrong decisions, the patient just need to search for another one, because, as is assumed, there must exist good ones - disregarding that this is but a way to condemn the patient to have his health damaged again and again by further mad psychiatrists, because there is no available direct means to know which psychiatrist would be sane.
In fact, this "logic" as well as many other details of how many psychiatrists think and behave, is but an expression of total madness and absence of common sense.

Indeed, it would be a matter of common sense to realize that the claims of existence of people who benefited psychiatry, or existence of psychiatrist that made good orderings, should never been acceptable as a sufficient reason to "advise" depressed people to visit one and to follow treatments, because:
What if happy patients with a positive experience, were taking the responsibility for their testimony and advice for others to visit psychiatrists, by providing financial insurance from their personal funds, to give reparation to anyone that their advise would harm ? Such an insurance economy would help restoring justice, as well as comparing the harm with the benefits of psychiatry, and finding out which weights more.

I know that many politically correct people would discard such requirements as foolish, unrealistic or uncivilized.
But those who would discard such requirements are the mad ones. There could be no possible civilization without a form of law or practical means forcing people to take the full and real responsibility for what they claim expertise in. There would be no possible civilization if hungry people were routinely invited to restaurants, some of whom serve good food while many others routinely serve deadly poison, with no available means to make the difference or to complain afterwards.
In the present world, it turns out that even the right of speech inside hospitals, by patients who suffered wrong treatments, is denied.
This is but a character of totalitarian systems. In fact, it is known that psychiatrists were happy under the Nazi and soviet regimes, to get any political prisoner to make experiments on; and this is a general intrinsic character of the psychiatric methods and mentality rather than a specific accident from the dominating political ideologies of the respective places and times, as this blind and barbarian behavior can still be observed in our present Western "civilization" just the same : today's behavior of psychiatrists is a result of a perverse training of psychiatrists oriented by misinformation from pharmaceutical industries into barbarian behavior, only hidden under a "soft appearance" (many psychiatrists can't just treat their patients like animals by force but they still think the same and try to do it by other means anyway).

In a sane and civilized world, it should be a matter of common sense that even a psychiatrist that would be "wise" with his own patients, not harming their lives, should rather be stopped as a fool and condemned as a criminal whenever he would tolerate the testimonies of his wise actions by his own patients, to serve as an argument to lead by "nice advice" some other unfortunate depressed people to follow damaging treatments of his unwise colleagues.

There are currently laws against defamation, that forbid any public accusation of some sorts against someone, no matter how true such accusation may be (without unrealistic obligations of judicial procedures, unaffordable lawyer expenses and so on, and that have no decent chance for the truth to be officially recognized anyway).
But precisely, this anti-defamation law lets no reasonable chance for any positive quality of a wise and reliable person, to be known and trusted either by contrast.

Skepticism

To face the gaps between science and society and the proliferation of pseudo-sciences, some efforts are made in ordinary terms of teaching and popularization; but also, a special effort at explanation and promotion of science and criticism of pseudo-science, was developed by the "Scientific skepticism" movement.
In some ways, they did a number of good works.
 However, while this movement claims to represent science, and indeed has includes a number of scientists, this representation of science is not always faithful, their efforts often go to the wrong targets, and they sometimes deviate from scientific thought and practice too.
Most of their claimed principles of skepticism are usually correct; but the main problem is that they often fail to apply these principles correctly in practice, on effective issue of the paranormal. Or, they prefer to focus on the most ridiculous claims of paranormal in order to correctly dismiss them, while ignoring the more genuine, defensible ones.

Such a trouble is expectable, because, as we said, the normal scientific practice is normally based on dedication and isolation in the ivory tower of science. So, the lobbying and communication work done by skeptics, in an environment full of nonsense, and on subjects where scientific knowledge is not so developed yet, sometimes happens to deteriorate the rationality level of their claims and practices.
This eventually leads them to some absurd results, associating science with indefensible attitudes, making their efforts often counter-productive with respect to their goal of explaining and promoting science and rationality.

While rationality is indeed the right self-sufficient root of all credibility, how ironical it is to see it discredited by clumsy defenders trying to promote it as a religion, by irrational methods.

We already mentioned the scientific illiteracy of some of them. More aspects of their irrationality, incompetence and similarities with what they claim to oppose (religions, sects and pseudo-sciences), will be developed in Part III.

A debate on rationalism

One site (in French) was developed to criticize the skeptic movement identified with rationalism itself (since skeptics are the loudest people claiming themselves rationalists). I had an email discussion with the author for trying to explain how to avoid this confusion. Here is a translation. (My messages are in black, his are in blue.)

... I wondered what you meant by "Considering rationalism as an equally reprehensible dogma ..." and looked at your explanation [= defining "rationalism" as the belief in a fixed and universal criteria of scientificity, may it be inductivism or falsificationism, and always dogmatically classifying any phenomenon as explainable in materialistic ways...]. But this use of the word "rationalism" does not suit me. I think that although it can be seen as mainly a problem of terminology, this problem is deeply linked to core issues, that might be seen as details but they are important too. It is very important to put everything clear and position oneself correctly, first to better approach the truth, then to avoid being wrongly attacked. For if you want to oppose people who are in error, it is essential not to be misled by their mistakes in a way that would play their game, even if meanwhile you are less mistaken than them.

First, for the vocabulary problem: how to make sense of the word "rationalism" and on what basis to motivate this choice of definition? Your use seems based on sociological considerations, namely: to accept that the meaning of a word is defined by the majority or dominant use of the word in today's world (what is done in its name, the practices of those who use it).
Problem: is the current use of the word authentic or abusive? Does the usual practice of the word really fit with its original meaning, the one meant, claimed ?
Is there another interesting possibility or even effective practice already implemented, more consistent with what the word was supposed to mean, than the way this word is often officially used ?

Consider the battle over the use of the title of "blog zététique" that took place(*) I don't want to give away the label "rationalist" to the official skeptical movement, for the following reasons: Claiming oneself rationalist, is definitely not the same as being rational. There is a huge reality of rational practice, which is science, and whose actual process is usually very different, even opposite, from what I read from you. But the best description of science is the developed practice of reason in the form of scientific progress. So why not define "rationalism" as the promotion and / or participation in the progress of science and knowledge, as already done and can go further? Would not this be a quite different and more authentic meaning of this word, than the usual practice of so-called "rationalist" activist movements ? Furthermore, I explained in my site how important aspects of the zetetic movement are similar to postmodernism, thus opposite to the normal scientific rationality.

Otherwise, sorry if it sounds personal, but I can only classify my worldview as rationalist, even if I do not put this name forward. But it is quite different from the skeptics view, so I must disagree with the skeptics'picture of rationalism, that I see as caricatural.
(...)
[Also, the reference to philosophers (Popper as the "rationalist" vs. Feyerabend as the "irrationalist") is irrelevant, as philosophers are quite disconnected from the true understanding of rationality.]
(...)
Regards.

(*) the word "zetetic" was first introduced by Marcelo Truzzi, founder of CSICOP which was initially a more open-minded movement; but then this movement and thus the use of the word "zetetic" deviated from Truzzi's original intents towards more sectarian attitudes and materialistic dogmas, forcing Truzzi to leave the movement and abandon the word "Zetetic" to the copyright of SCICOP's new pseudo-scientific practices and interpretation. The French skeptic movement followed this trend calling themselves "zététique", and did not tolerate the use this word according to Truzzi's original sense by the group criticizing them. I wrote a quick review of the situation of the French skeptic movement here 
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Thank you for your letter, and references to your site I found very interesting.

First I must tell you that you're the first one I see condemning the "zetetic" approach while proclaiming rationalism (or so I understand your position) . For me rationalism indeed corresponds to extremism of the "zetetic" method that you condemn in the "skeptics" (what a mixture of words, moreover misused in my opinion). For you it just seems to be a good way to do science, that French "zetetician" are not doing. In a word, I think we tend to agree, and condemn the same things, but not with the same words.

Indeed, I think, perhaps like you, that most of the French "zeteticians" (except a few...) absolutely do not practice as they claim "the art of doubt" because their own method (what I call rationalism and you disagree) does not let them doubt: by claiming to use universal arguments/protocols (whatever they are, falsificationism, induction, the famous and so subjective "Ockham's razor "...) able to ruthlessly sort, precisely with no doubt, theories, explanations between "good" and "bad" and between "scientific" and "unscientific". It is often said that there is "a" scientific method (without ever specifying it, without ever really describing it), but I notice that there are several. They have been several over time, there will be others, because science is built, improved, refined, corrects itself, is constantly evolving. And there are also several at a given moment, because there is not really one better than another. Some are more or less suited to the study / discovery of a particular phenomenon. It's as you know what Feyerabend defended, and it's hard not to join this quite... realistic vision, arguing that we are far from the myth of science with its universally objective method as French "zeteticians" defend.

(I will use here one last time the term in quotation marks, recalling that zetetic (in the field of the paranormal) is the creation of Marcello Truzzi, a true American skeptic, in the right sense of the term, who really knew to doubt and abstain from deciding when missing an argument one way or another. French Zeteticians considerably usurp the term popularized by Truzzi (in his Zetetician Scholar) in the United States, and the American Rationalist (CSI, formerly CSICOP for example) rather describe themselves as "skeptics" (but do not doubt any further in their majority). Zetetics "taught in ancient times" was a philosophical school which advocated the permanent doubt, which French zeteticians are far from.

I even think that in your mention of a contradiction [skeptics'claim for democracy in scientific judgement, in contradiction with their absolute undebatable certainty and value judgement against the paranormal], you miss another contradiction: claiming that the study of the paranormal would aim to keep crowds in ignorance and thus under control. Obviously, on the contrary, the study of something aims to understand it, and by disseminating this knowledge (whether or not a new phenomenon), to free these crowds from mere beliefs, prejudices, etc.. They simply do not understand "study" when they read it, but "proselytizing" or "propaganda" for a given belief, without valid scientific vehicle.

To come back to the term "rationalism" that is the subject of your post, I did not invent the interpretation. It is a term that has an adopted meaning since some time now, and I do not see myself deciding to invent another sense, as French zeteticians corrupt today those of "zetetic" or even "skeptic" (I claim myself skeptical in Truzzi's sense and feel far from their thoughts). I recommend for example, if you have not already done so, to read the excellent book by Alan F. Extension Chalmers: What is this Thing Called Science? (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend), Discovery, 1976. The idea is indeed that of the existence of universal / timeless criteria for judging theories. One can understand this ideal, or even say that the French zetetician misapply it and that you (or others) could do it better but you understood, for me it is not a matter of practice or modalities, but a principle in which I do not believe. Again Feyerabend provides many examples in Against Method. Indeed as you say the idea of applying "reason" is not the prerogative of rationalism / scientism, but of any scientific method and, if I may speak bluntly, for me just a mat (cream pie) debate on the application of good scientific method.

I'll stop there (...) But I think for the moment that what makes you claim "rationalist" must typically depend on your position relative to the existence of test(s) of universal judgement of a theory. It may be that you are (and apply it better than French zeteticians for example) or otherwise you are simply a good "skeptic" in the true sense.(...)
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I see the "scientific method" as a style of spirit and research, which must be developed into multiple forms to adapt to multiple situations, and can not be reduced to a specific algorithm.
For me, the notion of "really best method" has no universal meaning, but should not be dismissed either, but must be understood as something vague, depending on the specificity of each studied problem and provisional understanding, and must therefore be reconsidered continuously from one situation to another.

In other words, the recognition of hyper-complexity and multifaceted nature of the world, should not be mistaken for relativism (a bland uniformity of values).
Well, again we are in substantial agreement with different words.

> what makes you claim "rationalist" must typically depend on your position relative to the existence of test(s) of universal judgement of a theory

No. Reason for me is a multifaceted general discipline, but nevertheless differs significantly from a certain practice of non-reason or intellectual laziness, in fact widespread in some areas ("spiritual" teachings in particular).
A bit like the distinction between human thought and animal thought, that does not need a clean break in the evolutionary history to be something real.
The fact that there is no clean and precise wall (recognizable by an idiot) separating what is rational from what is not, is not inconsistent with the clear superiority of the practice of reason (intelligence) over non-reason (stupidity). See also the beginning of the introductory text ("Rationality and Realism, What is at Stake ? by John R. Searle) on the issue of discernibility between what is rational and what is not.

I hope I was clearer this time ...
Sincerely.
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I think the misunderstanding is on the idea that "rationalism" is a general term for simply strive for reason, what is rational or not. It is not. What I am saying is that it is a well-defined school of philosophy of science, and therefore we can not use it for something else. If you want to define your approach as a search of the rational, and if you want to avoid confusion with this school, you should use another term.

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I still see no reason to let to some specific school of philosophy of science (which I did not care to study), the copyright on the use of the word "rationalism", and the right to fix there a pathological meaning, especially as it does not seem at all to stick with the use of that word in that text by John R. Searle.

Now with the Wikipedia articles: the French one indeed seems to go in your way, or perhaps even a third meaning.
However, the introductory paragraph of the English article on rationalism fits with the interpretation I said.
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I don't forget our discussion. Maybe we are finally talking about the same thing but highlighting different aspects: while you insist on the virtuous use of "reason" as the only way to get to the truth, I insist on the fact that this doctrine can be both fuzzy (most people, whatever their theories about mysterious phenomena will agree with it) and very restrictive (the English Wikipedia cites, for example a definition by Bourke advocating deductive reasoning (which, strictly applied, is very unfortunate and even inapplicable, because the deduction requires the prior development of theories, usually based on observations - induction - etc. Of course deduction can be replaced by any other methods or tools of reasoning called "universal" but each have their flaws). And that is a characteristic of rationalism that I do not defend: the idea of a method / a universal tool to compare theories. This is also the paradox of rationalism to advocate a universal method of reasoning without describing which one it is (or only a very blurred one such as the application of " reason" so we can not, as you do during your battles with "skeptics", say who is more rational if not by an arbitrary opinion - a good way to maintain eternal discussions). For this, rationalism is to me rather a doctrine (there is a universal reasoning always valid, but I can not say which one) than a specific method (practice / technique).

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Have you read my texts ? (...).
I feel not.

I would describe reason as admittedly somehow fuzzy, but rather hypercomplex.
Namely, for me, because:  reason = intelligence.

Restrictive ???????????????
If you are only looking for simplistic definitions of reason, of course you will only find simplistic definitions.
It is absurd to require stupid definitions of intelligence.
For the reason is the same.

Of course, a Wikipedia article is simplifying by encyclopedic necessity.
For me, reason is not something to be defined, but something to be lived.
From the Wikipedia article I only pointed out the introduction, with which I agree: the primacy of reason over any other approach.
I did not see there the idea that rationalism would be the belief that reason would be reducible to a simplistic definition by the automated application of a tiny single method, I know not where you take that from, and I do not expect many people to interpet it so either. Of course there may be some small definition proposals in the air, to describe one aspect or another, but I do not see these as banners of simplicism that would claim to completely formalize and end what reason is.

To be honest, this is for me the first time I find someone who makes such an amalgam between rationalism and simplicism. I've never seen it elsewhere.

Even zeteticians, who develop a simplistic and degenerate version of reason, do not conceive reason as simplistic. For them too, reason is to deploy their thinking as far as they can. The only problem is that this deployment of reason which they carry out as much as they can according to the extent of their abilities, is limited by the narrow size their own brain.
Please do not blame rationalism for the narrow brain of its loudest defenders. This is just unrelated.

OK, a definition, if one is necessary:

Rationalism = claim that scientific-like research (involving intelligence, with all its rich subtleties such as deployed in many sciences, not excluding other subtleties yet to be added to fit with more issues) is generally more likely to lead to the right discernment of the truth on most truth issues, than traditional religious ways like praying, singing, faith in Jesus or in Islam, nirvana or other "spiritual" meditation practices, the obsession of humility, or this or other feelings, reading the Bible or any other traditional sacred text, or the popular simplistic, fuzzy, immature sort of thought.

This is my definition of rationalism, which, as far as I know, does not seem any way at odds with its most common interpretations.

Need I remind you that this position of rationalism, is far from obvious for many people.
Indeed right now in the world, it seems most people are opposed to rationalism as I just defined. They firmly believe that the only way to truth is faith in Jesus and baptism of the Holy Spirit, or the Buddhist meditation, or the like. So if you do not agree with them that religious practices lead more surely to the truth than scientific research, then you're part of the small minority of rationalists on this earth, whether you like it or not.

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I have not read your texts more than last time, sorry.
It seems to me that there are misunderstandings of my position in what you say in your answers:
When I say fuzzy, I mean it is not at all accurate, it is too general (and thus a doctrine rather than a method). You can tell at length what is the application of science rather than non-science, but you still do not specify the idea. For me your definition boils down to "the application of reason is better" without saying why, how, etc. .. Because ultimately you cannot really define what means "scientific" apart through its results ("you see, it works better than the rest" - but why? And is this always true?). Because the border between science and non-science is not always obvious, and it is better defined by its methods (absent from a definition of reason) than by a general idea. This is not the application of the use of reason (say, doing science) that I find simplistic, but its definition (non-existent or vague / general / subjective). That is why, even if I consider like you, scientific explanations as more convincing than mystical explanations of the world, I do not claim any rationalism. For me what is important is to produce shareable things, in the sense of verifiable by everyone (so, the opposite of subjectivity), whether it be in a box "science" or not.

So I agree with the idea that rationalism mainly includes the idea of "every reason is good," but it does not bring much in itself (i.e. it is vague), and the real content that follows is a sort of "soft dictatorship" that imposes a /several universal method(s) * (which non-science would not have) without really defining them (no method specified). What is all this vagueness for ? I think, for rejecting what a priori scares rationalists (the mystical, etc..), so as to maintain this "great divide" between science and non-science (formerly non-science = popular culture, but it is reducing now), between "serious" people and others. Rationalists want to mark their acquired territory.

* Where do I take this from ? I've already said, the book is a source of Chalmers, "What is science?".

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(Not reading, deprives the discussion of chances to progress).

I remember the comparison:
It is impossible to define humans versus animals, but can one deny the ability of man to know the world better than animals ?

It would be wrong to require a stupid definition of intelligence, and to conclude that intelligence does not exist by lack of a stupid satisfying definition.

So, reason is fundamentally different from non-reason, insofar as the adjective "fundamental" is understood to mean something practical and contextual, that has NOTHING TO DO with that of "essential" = separate by profound nature, binary or things like that.

See more I wrote on essentialism

On the next remarks: I'm not sure what to answer specifically, or how it could change my previous statements, except to specify the following very important point:

In reply to:

"Because ultimately you cannot really define what means "scientific" apart through its results ("you see, it works better than the rest" - but why? And is this always true?). Because the border between science and non-science is not always obvious"

Sorry but I must contradict you there:
Indeed, what brings me to discuss science, is indeed that I am basically much involved in math and theoretical physics, and theoretical reflections on various topics from childhood, and I thus reached important achievements in these areas. One of my experiences, was my fervent evangelical faith that lasted a number of years, followed by a complete deconversion, after which I have done a tremendous work of restoring order to my understanding of this whole religious adventure.

All this gives me some very extensive and intimate knowledge of science and reason.

So for me, talking about reason is the opposite of something vague, but it's a gigantic universe that I know well, and it is only as an intimate knower of this universe, that I dare to talk about it.
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I do not doubt that you have an opinion on what is reasonable or meaningful ("scientific" say some, while there are a lot of scientific results or even methods that are wrong) and what is not (or worse, if we take the reference of your evangelical experience). I do not doubt that this opinion is based on considerable experience in these areas, and you speak knowingly.
However (and unfortunately), it brings nothing as long as it cannot be shared (hence the importance of publishing works in science, for example). Saying "I know very well to discern good from bad", the rational from the irrational or the unscientific from the scientific, is good for you, but it is incommunicable to others as such. There is no other scientific knowledge than a shared knowledge. To make it communicable requires to communicate something repeatable by others (typically via a description of a method to reproduce the knowledge you claim to have discovered). And this communicable, shareable description, still lacks in your speech that remains paradoxically subjective on science (from what I've read so far in our discussion).
Understand me well, I do not blame you for not providing such a universal description of what science is, or what method should be applied systematically to arrive at scientific truth, because I think it is not possible. To say that it is possible, is rationalism.
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Let's go further:
Indeed I can not verbally communicate intelligence itself, the source of insights that I developed.
Nevertheless, there are still very significant things I can produce and communicate verbally, especially some actual understanding of a number of specific topics. So I can communicate something of my reason in the form of examples, a lot of discussions and explanations on specific things.
And more specifically, on issues among the most important I could find.
Texts I wrote on the foundations of mathematics, on religion, on a number of myths that dominate the world, economy, etc..
And I think that, even though it will ever be the magic potion to discern for sure what is most rational from what is at fault among all movements and all teachings of the present or future world, at least it can make significant progress.

For even if reason itself is not transmissible, a good overview of a number of rational thoughts that can give some knowledge and serve as examples while refuting a number of currently widespread mistakes, pitfalls and obstacles to reason, can help inspire people in the right direction.

My own progress in the exercise of reason, came by practicing it and seeing what helps to go further and what does not, so that a success can inspire further success...
Thus, examples of well-conducted reflections can inspire others to think well.

To come back to the initial subject:
Yes, reason exists, it is a very real thing, even if, precisely the same way as many other subtle realities studied by science (dark matter, etc. etc.), it can be very difficult to capture or characterize.
And it's not because something is difficult to discern or understand, that it does not exist.

To try to re-explain things:

For me (and I think, for many others too), reason makes sense only insofar as it is actually useful to advance the understanding of reality. Therefore, what for should one claim to define and communicate reason in a pure form ? Indeed, reason truly becomes reason, only by its effective work on reality. It would not make sense to transmit reason separately from what it can be here for. The problem of skeptics, who uses the paranormal as an example, is that, while admittedly, somehow it would be good to present reason as applied to something, it is also necessary to do truly and sincerely, appropriately to the reality of the object at stakes. Because the real goal should be the object, reality, and not reason for itself. For, a reason that would be reduced to itself or seeked for its own purpose, disconnected from the reality that it is here to discover, even if some bits of reality would be used as an exercise, would simply not be reason anymore. (This remark does not diminish the rationality of pure mathematics, which is an effective knowledge of the existing world of mathematics, even if different from the usual world, rather than an empty methodology).

To use anything as an excuse or support to communicate reason, is already a diversion from reason. The real reason can exist and be transmitted only by being taken neither as an object in itself, nor even a priority, but by treating it fully and honestly as it should always have remained: a discipline subordinated to the study to its true goal which is knowledge of reality.

I therefore believe that the true rationalism must renounce trying to define reason as a definable object, in favor of its development as a reality, as a kind of sport that exists only through its practice.

So my main approach is to develop my own exercise of reason, and work to make it succeed in something. It would be absurd to try out a characterization of reason without having prior "evidence", experience of how this can effectively help the progress of knowledge. Finally, this "reason" by which I could finally discover reality, turns out to be neither simpler, more fundamental or transmissible than its fruits (knowledge). Thus it is just natural to me, in my rationalism (= desire of contributing to the development of rational understanding in the world) to attach as much importance and care to first exercise reason in myself and then share the fruit obtained, than models of reasoning that led me there.

Is this clearer?

Some further ideas that came to me afterwards:

One could say that the method is to science what means of transport are to travel.
Means of transport are required to travel, but they are not the travel.

Putting forward some scientific methods, may be useful to people who might currently have no method to progress but say still and only dream of traveling rather than really travel in the world of knowledge; who dream of knowledge but have none true and reliable. Or maybe, who develop some partial knowledge, but mixed with errors, and remain unable to sort them. Unfortunately, this is precisely a very common situation across currently widespread religions and spiritualities.

But the presence of some possible means of transport, does not exclude other useful ones. Some are genuine, others illusory. How do we know? Well that's a big problem, the answer is not always given in advance ... however, the point is that, fantasy and actual travel are two separate things, and the abundance of people who seriously imagine themselves on the moon while they are only there in dream, is a major problem. And the presence of a serious problem, does not mean that the mistaken ones would necessarily be "at fault" in any sense whatsoever, nor that any readily available solution must always be here under hand - but some possibilities of a few significant steps forward do exist, and need to be used.

Also, normally the high-level rational discussions are debates in which many specific questions can be addressed, but where the qualifiers of "rational" and other variations of this word, has no place because it lacks the necessary meaningfulness for the issues involved (it would sound like the battles of insults among children, away from the real debate). But there are also hopeless cases, where one debater is unable of reason; this lack of rationality turns out to be a major obstacle to any attempt at dialogue, letting no other option for the other, but to express this observation of failure in terms of irrationality ... while the other may have a similar impression in the other way round. Who is really right? Well, hard to say...

Also, I do not see the issue of rationality as a matter of "criterion for comparing theories". Reason is a dynamic for the constitution and development of any theory. Some theories are rationally developed, others less. There is no on the one hand, theories enjoying an independent reality in the world of ideas, then on the other hand, a rationality criterion falling from the sky that would give them good or bad marks. Reason was there in the first place to build theories presented, then it can come back and rework them, review them and modify the old ideas into new, clarified ideas (that may or may not be rigorously equivalent to the former version).


But, while a good form of skepticism is part of rationality, we cannot reduce rationality to it.
Genuinely rational skepticism insists on either rejecting or avoiding judgement for claims or phenomena where no evidence is present yet. While it is indeed necessary to not pretend to know something that cannot be checked, and we have no "right" to systematically demand or pretend having all the needed evidence for the truth on all questions we "need to know", this is not a satisfactory end of the story.
And, just as science's acknowledgement of its incompleteness did not prevent it from discovering a very good deal of knowledge, there are indeed many answers readily available to reason about the sense of life, which shall be presented in the next parts.



Part I - Part II - Part III

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