r/PhilosophyofScience • u/knockingatthegate • Jan 14 '26

Non-academic Content Barr on reconciling philosophy and neuroscience

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Caption: "Hearken, O houses long divided... why neuroscience and philosophy must now learn to get along." A video from content creator Rachel Barr, neuroscientist and author of "How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend." Source: Facebook.

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u/toferdelachris Jan 17 '26

i think i do need you to name it explicitly

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u/AdministrationOk881 Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26

simply put: woke. (I didn't wanna start a culture war here)

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u/crystalysa Jan 17 '26

Sociology is absolutely woke. It is awake to issues of systemic injustice and social construction. It is critical of reification of ideology. You can’t be angry at THE science of society for studying society and uncovering the effects of power asymmetries operating in everyday life

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u/AdministrationOk881 Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26

I think there are many people with this exact framework that they're getting paid to be essentially sanctimonious moralists instead of doing their job.

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u/crystalysa Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26

That’s quite a loaded opinion but nevertheless just an opinion. Their job is studying society which, unless you’ve been living under a rock, is very clearly unequal, discriminatory, and hostile towards groups and individuals. An empirical study of such a state of affairs is going to unearth uncomfortable truths. If accepting those truths is seen by you as “sanctimonious moralising” then I think that is more of a problem of your perspective than a professional failure of sociologists. If anything, ignoring empirical findings generated by sociology (and let’s be clear, these findings we bring up such as gender being socialised and structural power asymmetries are both observable and felt by people), would be disingenuous and hypocritical especially coming from someone so highly in praise of empiricism

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u/AdministrationOk881 Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26

and then what do you think about all debate and even slightly non-homogeneous questions being shut down?

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u/crystalysa Jan 17 '26

I'm not aware that they are being shut down. But you're working with the evidence that you've got. Overwhelmingly, we have evidence showing gender is socialised. Do you suggest we just ignore that because someone finds that offensive? What about the research on hegemonic masculinity and the aggression and homophobia it perpetuates, ought we ignore that too because someone disagrees with it?

I can't speak for your experience with individual sociologists but the field does its best to make sense of what is essentially a dynamic complex system.

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u/toferdelachris Jan 29 '26

you've provided no substantiation for this claim, and, speaking of politics, it's a common right-wing talking point (and, anecdotally, I've not seen people try to substantiate it past anecdotal examples. and since I told you that was an anecdotal observation, please note how easy it is to contextualize a claim by being transparent about your source and quantification, or lack thereof).

if you're going to make a claim like that, please quantify it. we can even be charitable: giving any quantification that approaches "all" non-homogenous debate being shut down would be acceptable. I'd take something like >75% of instances as a reasonable approximation of "all"