# An Apology for Philosophy **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 19, 2014, 11:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524 "2014-07-19T11:16:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2014, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/41 "2014-07-20T17:14:19Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > So then, why the widespread hostility against philosophy in the sciences? I think the main reason is that we all want to be able to, in a sense, survey, or comprehend the world; but all too often, this degenerates into mistaking our own horizon for its end. Thus, whenever somebody talks about something beyond that horizon, they must be talking nonsense. This, I find, is all too often the reason behind the flat out refusal to engage with certain topics, be they philosophy, modern art, or (even) science. Nobody can survey all of our increasingly complex world, but few are capable of admitting this. This results in an attitude that considers nonsense everything that another does that we aren’t able to understand. In our increasingly complex and pluralistic world, I think this is not just sad—since this outright denial closes us off to whole areas of the world full of their own wonders—but even dangerous. This must certainly be a huge sticking point for scientists. Postulating something beyond the bounds of current understanding—well as the cliché goes, you sound like some spaced-out pothead spewing nonsense. Even the more rigorous philosophic notions seems to get criticized as such drivel. It’s a shame really, because by now, it’s all too clear we live in a very strange universe and even the most current empirical scientific evidence sounds just as asinine if you were to try and explain it using any rhetorical form outside of mathematics. But we have the math, so that somehow makes all the difference? ETA: Wonderful essay, BTW. Good to hear a scientists feelings on this particular subject. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2014, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/42 "2014-07-20T21:15:06Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > But we have the math, so that somehow makes all the difference? Yes, it does. Most of the really profound concepts about the nature of the universe are derived from math, like Hawking’s eternal Euclidian space-time and “imaginary time”, black holes and neutron stars, or the idea that beyond the event horizon, time and the radial dimension of space may be reversed. This makes them qualitatively different from random speculation. It’s in fact precisely that attribute that makes cosmological work like that of Hawking science and not philosophy. It’s not so much the math _per se_ as the fact that the math gives the work a theoretical grounding. Otherwise it’s intrinsically no better than two friends who know little about the subject shooting the breeze on their front porch about the nature of the universe. > [@cmyk](#): > > ETA: Wonderful essay, BTW. Good to hear a scientists feelings on this particular subject. I agree. Though I remain unpersuaded by the value of pure philosophy. I think **Itself** made a very astute point when he said that in cases where philosophy appears relevant, it’s a case of scientists engaging in philosophy and not philosophers contributing to science. My Dreyfus example was an illustration of a philosopher trying to contribute to science and doing a very poor job of it. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2014, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/43 "2014-07-20T22:20:15Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > I don’t have half a clue what to do about any of this. To be honest I don’t see what I’m missing by not having a deep reading comprehension of a philosophy tome or a math journal paper. If it’s important somebody who understands will act on it, and maybe provide a simplified version somewhere along the line. If not, then it adds to the 129 million books that have been published that I’m already not reading. I think I agree with most of what you wrote, but I want to pick on this a little, since it’s tangentially related to a point I tried to make earlier. There may be, indeed, nothing one’s missing with not reading any philosophy, or getting too deep into maths, or climbing mountains, or any other area of human endeavour, really—quite simply, preciously little of what we do, we do out of necessity. We climb mountains ultimately because they’re there, just like we do most other things—some people get some enjoyment out of them. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of mountain climbing, but neither me nor any other flatlanders tend to rail against the practise because, e.g., it doesn’t produce anything useful. It’s something some people enjoy doing, and I’m fine with that, even though I don’t share the taste. None of this means, however, that it’s not—for whatever reason—a worthwhile thing to do; but in the case of philosophy, that’s the usual conclusion (not saying it’s one you draw). People seem to find themselves forced to justify their disinterest, and typically do it by denying the thing they’re disinterested in any value, so that it’s only right to be disinterested. I’d like to advocate a stance of benevolent disinterest: there’s things that are not for me, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing. > [@wolfpup](#): > > It’s on that basis that Lawrence Krauss argues that physics [has rendered both religion and philosophy obsolete](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/): Krauss is one of my usual examples of scientists embarrassing themselves on philosophical topics; I just didn’t want to bloat my post even more with touching on this issue, too. But basically, regarding: > [@Itself](#): > > So what has, to take one specific example, metaphysical cosmology produced? (Of course, I’m just looking for rigorous results here, not concrete applications.) I know what cosmology has produced, and I know that scientists often wax philosophical about the “deeper implications” of their work, but what has metaphysical cosmology actually done? It has cleared up issues regarding ideas like cosmogenesis and creation from nothing that, if Lawrence Krauss had invested the time to study them, would have saved him the trouble of writing a book. As for the issue of philosophers contributing to science, David Albert (mentioned by **wolfpup** ) has written one of the best introductions to interpretive issues in Quantum Mechanics, Jeffrey Bub has done important work on clarifying the structure of QM (most notably with the Clifton-Bub-Halvorson theorem that tells us that quantum mechanics is characterized among C\*-algebras by just assuming that you don’t have superluminal signalling, can’t copy information perfectly, and can’t do secure bit commitment, but also with the Clifton-Bub uniqueness theorem, and several other results), and others—but really, that’s completely besides the point, and I would label such contributions as mainly incidental. It’s true that most such contributions come, as you said (and I did in my OP), from scientists ‘waxing philosophically’, but this just shows that philosophy should not be a dirty word in the sciences—as I showed, by the four examples I gave, such philosophical thinking can be a concrete engine of progress in science. So this: > [@Itself](#): > > II do have a problem with the idea that philosophy has something to offer science, because I haven’t seen anything like that. (If you wanted to claim that, say mathematics has something to offer physics, or archaeology has something to offer linguistics, that would be trivial to support. I see no evidence along those lines for philosophy.) Science has gone well past the point where non-rigorous, non-mathematical, non-technical thinking about a subject can contribute anything of significance. Strikes me as somewhat odd, since I’ve given examples of just this in my OP. Also, I think your assertion of philosophy as ‘non-rigorous’ is debatable at best. But the thing is, it’s not the philosopher’s intention to contribute to science—they’re philosophers, after all. Criticizing them for this (alleged) failure is a bit like criticizing an architect for their lack of contributions to carpetry—it’s exactly the category error I mention in my post. Philosophical inquiry into the nature of the world created the tools that we today label ‘science’, but is not exhausted by them. So when you say: > [@Itself](#): > > I don’t think you’ll run into much opposition in the sciences to political science, history, linguistics, ethics, or other areas that were or are currently considered philosophy. Rather, scientists and mathematicians object to philosophers’ encroaching on scientific matters. It’s not a turf war; it’s that philosophers aren’t playing the same game, don’t know how to play the right game, and are contributing nothing to the subject. You’re missing that philosophers don’t (by and large) _intend_ to play the same game. Perhaps the difference is that you seem to hold a certain philosophical stance, namely that all the sensible questions about the world can be answered objectively, as when you say: > [@](#): > > We’ve figured out to how to get dependable, accurate knowledge about the universe: mathematical, precise theory and repeatable, controlled experiments. Philosophy doesn’t use either of those methods and therefore doesn’t contribute to the subject. You’re alleging that this sort of method suffices to get at all the knowledge we want to have about the universe. Most philosophers would probably disagree. First of all, of course, the position you’re asserting is a philosophical one, and not one that can be subject to repeatable, controlled experiments—that’s the sort of trap that contributed to the downfall of logical positivism: when your criterion of sensibility is that all knowledge must ultimately be empirical, it is self-refuting, since it is itself not empirical. Anyway, you’re holding a philosophical position that ultimately everything we can say about the universe must be subject to empirical testing, in order to arrive at objectively supported positions. I disagree: I don’t think that questions like ‘how should I live my life?’ do have objective, much less empirical, answers. Nevertheless, it is a question that I think can be meaningfully discussed—certainly, there are better and worse ways to live. But what makes life better or worse is not itself fixed, but similarly subject to debate. It’s much closer to the process in appreciating a work of art: the goal is not to find the artist’s intention; art is not a puzzle to be solved. Rather, the goal is to enter a dialogue, play with different meanings, consider different ways to interpret the piece of art, which then will change your appreciation, and so on. It’s not a race to the finish line, but a walk throught the woods with the intent of enjoying the scenery, if you’ll forgive my waxing poetic here. > [@wolfpup](#): > > That said, I have to say that your examples in Part III of philosophy aiding science wouldn’t convince a diehard skeptic like Krauss. I’m not sure I’m convinced myself. The first example could be considered logic, or more formally, mathematics. The next two could be argued to be just quantum mechanics, and the last one just physics or cosmology. Whether or not those argument are valid, and maybe I didn’t understand your examples well enough, it does seem to put philosophy in a quandary with respect to its modern relevance. Bell’s theorem is straightforward metaphysics, I’m not sure how one would dispute that; Zeh’s work was explicitly rejected for being ‘too philosophical’. The interpretation of quantum mechanics, which Deutsch (and Bell) were working on, is also a typical topic in the philosophy of science, and so too is the interpretation of relativity (though mostly today focusing on the more inclusive case of general relativity). Certainly, logical or mathematical means were used in these arguments (as they in fact often are in philosophy—most people would probably consider logic to be a sub-field of philosophy, in fact), but what they are about strike me as quintessentially philosophical topics. Certainly, a strict instrumentalist or empiricist account of science would have no use for any of these arguments. > [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#): > > Science is what scientists do. Philosophy is what philosopher’s do. Fine, but then you’d have to tell me how to tell who’s a scientist and who’s a philosopher. 😛 > [@](#): > > 1. " I think the relevance of philosophy—or at least past philosophical discourse—to the shape of our day to day life should be without question." Past discourse: yes. Current discourse: no. That’s probably what they said in the past, too… > [@Mijin](#): > > There are plenty of things I can deal with. However reading spectacularly long forum posts in the hope that they eventually would come to an original or profound point is not a good general policy. Well, then don’t, it’s your call. I knew upfront that I would loose some potential readership by not trying to condense my thoughts into tweets; for myself, length isn’t a key factor in determining whether or not I’ll read something, but rather, whether I think the topic is interesting, and whether what I’m then reading continues to hold my interest. > [@Itself](#): > > What does someone with, say, a PhD in philosophy pick up to help them attack questions better; why have those tools and ideas been so less effective than the ones scientists have; and why are they worth caring about at all, given that scientists seem to do perfectly well without them? Well, for one thing, philosophical inquiry is exactly what developed the tools of scientific inquiry; that these tools do well at their job is just a testament to the quality of philosophical thinking that went into creating them. > [@](#): > > Also, if you were told to just shut up and work the equations in a physics class, you should have found a better class. Science is not about dumbly plugging numbers into the equation and blindly following the answers, without considering any further implications. Maybe you’re not aware of this, but ‘shut up and calculate’ is basically a motto for those that advocate a ‘philosophy-free science’, or that advocate an instrumentalist approach. What I want to show with the examples I gave is that typically, it’s a bad one. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2014, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/44 "2014-07-20T23:16:56Z")
Taking another angle, what’s been the value added of philosophy as practiced by philosophers over the past 100 years? The question has 2 components: there are benefits but also costs. And the costs of a working philosopher are far lower than that of a natural scientist. The American Philosophical Association has about [11,000 members worldwide](http://www.apaonline.org/?page=mailing_list) of whom 9600 are in the US. In contrast Science magazine has a worldwide readership of [one million](http://www.sciencemag.org/site/help/about/about.xhtml). Ok, those aren’t exactly comparable figures. Still, they differ by two orders of magnitude. Philosophy is a pretty small industry. On the plus side of the ledger we have Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and a number of AI researchers. (Also see the OP.) I find the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy of some interest. **Empirical Investigation: Random Sample** But what of the median Ivy League philosopher, as it were? Halfway down the [Princeton list](http://philosophy.princeton.edu/people/faculty) we have Desmond Hogan and Mark Johnston. Over at the [University of Pennsylvania](http://philosophy.sas.upenn.edu/people/department-faculty) I see Charles Kahn and Errol Lloyd. What do these folks do? Hm. Not sure how to proceed from here. I mean their work sounds interesting to me: collectively they study ethics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, history of political theory, causation, freedom, God and death. And like I said, I find the compilation at [Stanford’s website](http://plato.stanford.edu/) diverting. I find it difficult to explain or measure the benefits of all this though. Well at least it’s cheap, relatively speaking. ---
**Author:** ![Itself](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d07c76/32.png) [@Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Itself)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2014, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/45 "2014-07-20T23:29:45Z")
Too much to respond to line-by-line before dinner, but: > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > You’re missing that philosophers don’t (by and large) _intend_ to play the same game. I’m aware of that; my point is that they should play their own game elsewhere, separately. If you want to talk about issues of morals and ethics and theology, that’s great, but we were (or at least I was) talking about the contributions of philosophy to science. I have no objection to (though not much interest) in philosophy on its own merits. Science is a game with its own rules. No one is forcing philosophy to play that game, but it it does, it has to follow the same rules. > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > It’s much closer to the process in appreciating a work of art: the goal is not to find the artist’s intention; art is not a puzzle to be solved. Rather, the goal is to enter a dialogue, play with different meanings, consider different ways to interpret the piece of art, which then will change your appreciation, and so on. It’s not a race to the finish line, but a walk throught the woods with the intent of enjoying the scenery, if you’ll forgive my waxing poetic here. Yes, well, science is not art appreciation. That isn’t to say that there’s nothing worth appreciating in it— quite the opposite, in fact. Are you trying to argue for a more humanities-based, interpretation-rather-than-deduction version of science? > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Maybe you’re not aware of this, but ‘shut up and calculate’ is basically a motto for those that advocate a ‘philosophy-free science’, or that advocate an instrumentalist approach. What I want to show with the examples I gave is that typically, it’s a bad one. Mentioning undergrads distracted me, then; I’ve run into the “shut up and calculate” motto more as an exhortation to go where the math tells you to go, rather than rejecting mathematically valid solutions because they don’t match physical intuition. See antiparticles, for example, or even the labored attempts to explain spinors without mentioning anything about covering spaces or topology in general. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/46 "2014-07-21T00:14:47Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > It’s much closer to the process in appreciating a work of art: the goal is not to find the artist’s intention; art is not a puzzle to be solved. Rather, the goal is to enter a dialogue, play with different meanings, consider different ways to interpret the piece of art, which then will change your appreciation, and so on. It’s not a race to the finish line, but a walk throught the woods with the intent of enjoying the scenery, if you’ll forgive my waxing poetic here. If you’re saying that this describes philosophy, I’m fine with that. If you’re saying that such an endeavor adds value to our lives, I agree. But it’s not science! I said earlier that “…the _logos_ is objective reality. Everything else is mythology and entertainment (like, for example, religion and poetry, respectively)”. I used the word “entertainment” slightly facetiously and with deliberate provocativeness because I was arguing with the other poster, but it’s essentially true: pure philosophy is more art than science, and art entertains us and fulfills us in intangible ways, but the knowledge that it gives us rarely escapes the domain of the purely metaphysical. Sometimes the sciences give us that metaphysical satisfaction, too, like discoveries about the nature of the cosmos or the reality of the Higgs boson, but the methods are entirely empirical. > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Fine, but then you’d have to tell me how to tell who’s a scientist and who’s a philosopher. 😛 Good question. I’m tempted to answer (per my comment below about the Aspect et al. paper) that you know you’re doing science when you’re into heavy-duty math by the time you get to the third sentence! 😃 More seriously, there are certainly gray areas, but science tends to be characterized by empiricism and quantitative methods. I would argue that math itself is a legitimate science (and not a branch of philosophy) because it’s actually empirical within its own domain – a mathematical result is, generally speaking, either right or wrong, and you can write a paper about it and have someone either corroborate it or refute it. You can write a paper about a philosophical question and philosophers will debate it until the cows come home, much as I’ve debated philosophical matters on my front porch with old friends until the sun came up. Nothing was accomplished but we had a good time. As you probably gathered from our previous conversation about quantum determinism, I know almost nothing about Bell’s Theorem, but the reference in what I gather to be an important paper on the subject – the Aspect et al. (1982) paper entitled “Experimental Realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm _Gedankenexperiment_: A New Violation of Bell’s Inequalities”, the reference to _Gedankenexperiment_ seems to support your claim. But it’s interesting that this paper itself is, as the title implies, an empirical verification of that _Gedankenexperiment_, and is therefore indisputably science. (One can tell this by the fact that by the third sentence, it has launched into serious math! :D) Whereas the referenced thought experiment, and perhaps Bell’s original assertions, could be considered philosophy or to inhabit a gray area between philosophy and science. BUT… and this is important… it was always a case of scientists venturing into philosophy and not the other way around. They may not have developed their hypotheses using math, as in my previous examples of black holes and many of Hawking’s hypotheses, but they did develop them from a sound knowledge of the subject matter – **scientists doing science**. I think **Itself** made a very astute observation here. As in my example of the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and the AI argument, he was outclassed by scientists who knew a lot more about AI than he did, and successfully battled him on his own philosophical turf. > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I knew upfront that I would loose some potential readership by not trying to condense my thoughts into tweets; for myself, length isn’t a key factor in determining whether or not I’ll read something, but rather, whether I think the topic is interesting, and whether what I’m then reading continues to hold my interest. Agreed. A post should be just as long as it needs to be, and no more or less. Yours was about the right length for the content. **Mijin** made two posts, and though they only contained a few sentences, they were too long by the same amount! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/47 "2014-07-21T06:00:15Z")
> [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#): > > Taking another angle, what’s been the value added of philosophy as practiced by philosophers over the past 100 years? The question has 2 components: there are benefits but also costs. And the costs of a working philosopher are far lower than that of a natural scientist. > > On the plus side of the ledger we have Karl Popper, Who would also be a good answer to the challenge raised by **Itself** , regarding what philosophy has contributed to science: Popper, in introducing falsifiability into modern science as a criterion for theory selection, basically made science the way we know it today (although personally, I think it’s gotten a bit too much of a mantra in recent years, but then again, that just underlines my general point: philosophy needs ongoing discussion, or it becomes stale). > [@](#): > > **Empirical Investigation: Random Sample** > But what of the median Ivy League philosopher, as it were? How would such a test pan out for, say, physicists or mathematicians? Or for other academics? > [@Itself](#): > > I’m aware of that; my point is that they should play their own game elsewhere, separately. There’s this feeling that I get from your post that at every other corner, there’s a philosopher meddling with the affairs of serious scientists. Personally, it’s not something I’ve ever really come across. Could you maybe give some examples? To be sure, there’s plenty of cases of philosophers getting the science wrong; and likewise, there’s cases of scientists getting the philosophy wrong. That’s at least in part why I would want a more open, less stay-off-my-turf exchange between the two disciplines, starting with the realization that both are valuable areas of human enquiry. I think science is hurting itself by discuraging philosophical approaches—as my examples show, they can be of great use to science, even evaluated by most scientists’ standards (as an example, there was a recent theorem on the ontology of the wavefunction that is, in its form, exactly equivalent to Bell’s; and the same people that praise Bell’s theorem, even today working out its implications, have been panning it for being ‘just philosophy’). > [@](#): > > Yes, well, science is not art appreciation. Well, that was my point—to show that philosophy differs from science, and hence, can’t be replaced by it. I shouldn’t overstretch the art appreciation metaphor, by the way: it could too easily be taken to imply a kind of relativism regarding philosophy, in the sense of ‘anything goes’. I don’t believe that to be the case at all (but I don’t really believe it in the case of art appreciation, either, but again that’s another thread). Instead, I think we can come to valuable insights using philosophical reasoning, even if those are not amenable to empirical testing. > [@](#): > > That isn’t to say that there’s nothing worth appreciating in it— quite the opposite, in fact. Are you trying to argue for a more humanities-based, interpretation-rather-than-deduction version of science? No, not at all, and I don’t see where you got this from. > [@](#): > > Mentioning undergrads distracted me, then; I’ve run into the “shut up and calculate” motto more as an exhortation to go where the math tells you to go, rather than rejecting mathematically valid solutions because they don’t match physical intuition. See antiparticles, for example, or even the labored attempts to explain spinors without mentioning anything about covering spaces or topology in general. The original source of the phrase is David Mermin, who used it to caricaturize a prevailing instrumentalist bent in the approach to quantum mechanics—the idea that you should treat the theory essentially as a black box, and all that the scientists concern themselves with doing is finding recipes to twiddle the knobs and push the buttons in order to find interesting things the box can do, without considering what goes on inside the box. > [@wolfpup](#): > > If you’re saying that this describes philosophy, I’m fine with that. If you’re saying that such an endeavor adds value to our lives, I agree. But it’s not science! And since that’s also what I said, I take it we agree. > [@](#): > > I said earlier that “…the _logos_ is objective reality. Everything else is mythology and entertainment (like, for example, religion and poetry, respectively)”. I used the word “entertainment” slightly facetiously and with deliberate provocativeness because I was arguing with the other poster, but it’s essentially true: pure philosophy is more art than science, and art entertains us and fulfills us in intangible ways, but the knowledge that it gives us rarely escapes the domain of the purely metaphysical. Well, here I would tend to disagree. We don’t (just) philosophize for the intellectual or aesthetic pleasure it brings, but rather, to learn things about ourselves and the world we live in, like how to act morally, how to create a just society, how to raise our children, in short (perhaps too short), how to live well. None of these question I see being decided by an experiment in a lab anytime soon. > [@](#): > > Good question. I’m tempted to answer (per my comment below about the Aspect et al. paper) that you know you’re doing science when you’re into heavy-duty math by the time you get to the third sentence! 😃 I know you’re being facetious, but of course there’s plenty of good science without a single line of math. Contrariwise, there’s plenty of math-heavy philosophy. > [@](#): > > You can write a paper about a philosophical question and philosophers will debate it until the cows come home, much as I’ve debated philosophical matters on my front porch with old friends until the sun came up. Nothing was accomplished but we had a good time. What I have a problem with here is the insinuation that just because debate continues, nothing has been accomplished. Debate continues about the best form of government; still, people feel the institution of widespread democracy is a distinct advance over earlier times. > [@](#): > > As you probably gathered from our previous conversation about quantum determinism, I know almost nothing about Bell’s Theorem, but the reference in what I gather to be an important paper on the subject – the Aspect et al. (1982) paper entitled “Experimental Realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm _Gedankenexperiment_: A New Violation of Bell’s Inequalities”, the reference to _Gedankenexperiment_ seems to support your claim. But it’s interesting that this paper itself is, as the title implies, an empirical verification of that _Gedankenexperiment_, and is therefore indisputably science. Aspect et al.'s papers are about Bell’s theorem in the sense of finding out whether it applies to nature, which is indeed a wholly scientific endeavour (as I outlined in my OP). The thing is, the core conclusion from Bell’s theorem is that the predictions of quantum mechanics are incompatible with a certain ontology that was believed to hold in classical mechanics—that of ‘local realism’. Apect et al.'s paper are important steps in checking, essentially, the predictions of quantum mechanics, but those experiments could have been carried out without joining their results to ontological, i.e. metaphysical, implications—that’s the work Bell’s theorem does. > [@](#): > > BUT… and this is important… it was always a case of scientists venturing into philosophy and not the other way around. Yes, and it’s exactly the fruitfulness of this that makes me lament the anti-philosophical stance in today’s science, because it inhibits just this sort of venture. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 8:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/48 "2014-07-21T08:02:41Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Excellent point. If an idea is inconsistent or contradictory, philosophical examination will likely expose its weaknesses. > > One problem is, when it comes to arriving at conclusions, the “philosophic method” is essentially one of analogy. It looks at similar cases and says, “See? This is similar in one way, so it is likely similar in another.” This is no more true of philosophy than it is of science. Scientists rely on analogies all the time too. If there is there is anything that can rightly be called _the_ philosophic method it is the careful, detailed logical analysis of arguments, including the uncovering of implicit assumptions. > [@Trinopus](#): > > Tycho Brahe said: “It is important to know that the seven planets in the heavens correspond to the seven metals on earth and the seven most important organs in man. All these things had been so finely and harmonically arranged in relation to each other, that they seemed almost to have the same function, type and nature.” This is a very odd example to choose support your argument; Tycho Brahe was much more of a scientist than a philosopher. He spent his career in careful, painstaking measurement. His work is all about empirical data and mathematical analysis, and the Copernican Revolution that inaugurated modern science could not have happened without him. You will not find his name mentioned in histories of philosophy (at least not more than passingly, and never as an actual philosopher), nor have I ever heard of his work being studied by any present-day philosopher, but he will figure prominently in any history of science with even the remotest pretensions to completeness. Inasmuch as it makes sense to demarcate science from philosophy in the 17th century, Tycho, more than almost anyone (far more than Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton…) falls firmly on the science side of the line. Perhaps you will say “Ah, well, but clearly, even if much of what he did was science, what he is doing in the passage I quoted is philosophy rather than science,” but all you are doing there (if that is truly your response) is retrospectively assigning the stuff you think is wrong or nonsensical to the category of philosophy and the stuff he said or did that you think is right, or at least useful or sensible, to the category of science. Of course “philosophy” is going to look bad and “science” is going to look good if you allow yourself to categorize claims and theories on that sort of basis. (Of course, that sort of criterion is used a lot in practice: essentially, those thinkers of the past whose work we think made a positive contribution to the development of what we now think is science, we call scientists, and those whose work now seems either wrong or irrelevant to modern science, we call philosophers. Back in their own time they were all called philosophers, and were proud to be.) I do not think that there is any doubt that (if human civilization survives, and science continues to advance) much of what is considered good scientific theory today will sound as nonsensical to people a few centuries in the future as Tycho’s claims about the sevenfoldness of planets, organs, and metals do to us today. I am also confident that much of the continuing advancement of science will depend (as it always has) not only on the patient gathering of more data, and the experimental testing of hypotheses, but, at least as much, on the uncovering of subtle logical flaws and implicit but false assumptions in theoretical reasoning, i.e., on “philosophical” thinking. Whether the people who do this get called “scientists” or “philosophers” will depend on two things, whether posterity thinks they “got it right” or not, and on which department of the university happens to provide their salary. Neither criterion is very meaningful or marks any important intellectual distinction. I can’t say much about physics, where I am a complete layman, but I am very familiar, at a professional level, with one area of modern science, cognitive science (including cognitive neuroscience and “consciousness studies”) where philosophers (in the sense of people employed by philosophy departments) and scientists (people with labs, who do experiments) interact extensively and fruitfully. I would venture to say that not only have philosophy and philosophers already contributed greatly to advances in these areas, but that there remains enormous potential for them to contribute further. Theory, in these fields, is still rife with questionable analogies and hidden, implicit, but dubious assumptions, sometimes at very fundamental levels, and these originate far more often from the scientists (of course, there are a lot more scientists) than from the philosophers, whose job is, or should be, to unmask them. If anything, one of the main problems I see in the field is that, due the due to the high prestige of science in the popular imagination, and the relatively low prestige of philosophy today, the philosophers are often too diffident, assuming far too often that if a scientist confidently asserts some theoretical position it must be right, and failing to look hard enough for the dubious analogies and hidden assumptions behind the claim. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/49 "2014-07-21T08:14:05Z")
> [@Novelty\_Bobble](#): > > I think your post is a good example of why too often philosophy fails to engage me. It is long, complicated and doesn’t seem to be asking any questions or making any points that I can respond to. Whereas science is quick, simple, and easy, huh, and any layman with two brain-cells to rub together can make a useful contribution to the discussion of scientific issues? :rolleyes: All your comment shows it that you do not have the intellectual stamina to engage with either philosophy or science, and thus have nothing to contribute to a discussion of the relationship between them. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/50 "2014-07-21T16:11:00Z")
As I was hoping was the case, **njtt** confirms: Philosophy is a necessary part of bleeding edge science. When the ancient Greeks and Indians first argued about the nature of matter and proposed the atom, it was a philosophical question that wasn’t resolved until Dalton came through in the 1800s. This extends to almost every branch of science we have. Look at the Copenhagen Interpretation for QM for yet another example. It could be argued that the interpretation is not what matters, only that our models provide answers based on the evidence. Yet all interpretations, I’d argue, are largely philosophical and can lead to new insights into physics when leads have gone cold and the field stagnates. So it is with more fundamental and novel philosophy. Perhaps philosophy argues the right questions and science argues the right answers. Each informing the other to make progress. ---
**Author:** ![ouryL](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ouryl/32/6067_2.png) [@ouryL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ouryL)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/51 "2014-07-21T20:00:04Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > As is usual for my Great Debates threads, this has gotten rather more lengthy than intended; as a result, I’ve tried to break it down into different sub-headings for better legibility. That way, anybody who’s interested in the topic, but finds it a bit much to digest in one sitting, can maybe pick up where they left off another time, or perhaps skip some sections completely. If it’s still TLDR, well, I don’t think I can help that. > > **I. Introduction** > > I frequently encounter the notion—on this board, but also in the popular media/among other scientists—that philosophy is, in some sense, a thing of the past: that it has outlived its usefulness (if it is even admitted that it ever was useful in the first place), that it has been superseded by other methods of knowledge acquisition (typically, science), or that it’s really just all a vain pasttime of idle navel-gazers. The main proponents of such notions seem to be scientists, and most often, my fellow physicists: Steven Weinberg’s book _Dreams of a Final Theory_ contained an entire chapter ‘Against Philosophy’, Stephen Hawking has been vocal about the “death of philosophy” (while calling himself a proponent of a—widely considered to be refuted—philosophy of science called ‘logical positivism’), Feynman was vocally anti-philosophy (calling philosophy of science ‘as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds’—of course, one may debate if it’s the intent of philosophy of science to be of any use to scientists), and the list goes on. > > Chief reasons for this alleged failure of philosophy seem to be that it doesn’t produce results, or at any rate, that science produces better results, that it’s arbitrary, and basically just word-mincing. Additionally, there is a widespread feeling of the irrelevancy of philosophical discourse, both for everyday life and for scientific endeavours. > > In this post, I mainly want to examine the relation between science and philosophy, and in particular, whether it’s justified to claim that ‘science supersedes philosophical enquiry’; but first, a few words on philosophy’s relevance in the modern world. I must admit that I’m a bit flummoxed by those who claim that philosophy has no bearing on our everyday dealings—when I look around, I find that our world is absolutely steeped in philosophy: our political system is the result of hundreds of years of discourse, as are our judicial and educational systems. And they are what governs virtually everything we do, day in and day out: our education, influenced e.g. by Locke’s _Some Thoughts concerning Education_, or Rousseau’s _Emile_, largely dictates what we are capable of doing; the political system, which has, of course, been an object of philosophical discourse at least since Plato, shapes the society in which we are able to do it; and the judicial system, in the last century subject to prominent discussion by John Rawls and others, dictates if what we do is allowed or not (I’m obviously speaking very superficially on every count here). I can only imagine that, like the air we breathe, the philosophy that shapes our daily lives is simply so ubiquitous as to be nearly impossible to detect. In any case, I think the relevance of philosophy—or at least past philosophical discourse—to the shape of our day to day life should be without question. > > **II. The Relationship of Science and Philosophy** > > Now for something a little more meaty. Scientists often allege that their results show the obsolescence of philosophy, which has allegedly never produced anything comparable. I think this statement is wrong along several lines: first, I don’t believe that a naive comparison between scientific and philosophical results is appropriate, i.e. both disciplines aren’t necessarily after the same kind of insights, and scientists holding philosophical discourse to their (empirical and deductive-nomological) standard of ‘meaningfulness’ are simply committing a category error; second, I don’t think there is a strict separation between philosophy and science, in the sense that is alleged here; and third, I do believe that there are many examples of cases in which philosophical inquiry has been instrumental in scientific progress. > > The first and second points concern the relation between science and philosophy, and thus, I’ll tackle them together. Basically, my position is that even in this day and age, scientific inquiry is still best seen as a subset of natural philosophy, so a subset of philosophy proper. The reasons for this are both historical and with regards to content. Historically, it is of course no great secret that science has developed out of philosophical inquiry into nature, starting at least with Aristotle. It’s sometimes said that philosophy is what’s done to a problem until it’s sufficiently sharp to become the object of a more specialized science. There’s something right with that, but it’s too one-sided, because what is ‘done to the problem’ by philosophy is at least in part the development of special tools with which to attack it, and it is these tools that then ultimately evolve into a specialized science. > > For a metaphor, consider scientists as those that sit on the outer branches of an apple tree, where they’re naturally those able to get to the fruits best. Now, the prevailing attitude in science about philosophy is one of prasing the apples at the cost of the tree—essentially, that now that we can get at the apples, we’ve got no use for the tree anymore. Indeed, some sitting on those outermost branches seem to be just about ready to get out their saws… > > As regards content, the question is: how do we differentiate between that which is a proper object of philosophy, and that which is an object of science? Those making the strongest claim in favour of science superseding philosophy typically allege that eventually, all philosophical content will be made the object of some science, leaving thus philosophy itself empty (or, in some cases, showing that it has always been empty). I don’t believe this is going to happen, at least not with the way we currently understand science (and those making the argument certainly do). The reason for this is a difference in kind in the contents of philosophy and science. > > This is best seen, I think, using a ‘pseudo-historical’ reconstruction of how scientific inquiry _might have_ developed from philosophical grounds. The reason I’m speaking counterfactually here is that in the real world, things are far more messy and less clear; nevertheless, I think a carefully examined fantasy can shed some light on these relationships. > > First, we need to clarify what, exactly, we mean by ‘philosophical content’. This is, of course, an object of ongoing philosophical discourse itself, discourse which indeed has often been the cause for alleging philosophy’s impotence (philosophers can’t even get clear about what philosophy is!). I’ll suavely ignore all of that, and submit that it’s at least a useful fantasy to say that the central question of philosophy is ‘how should I live my life?’. It’s in the attempt to answer this question that at least a plausible story can be told about how philosophical discourse evolved: we are immediately presented with further questions, such as, ‘what is this thing called ‘life’?’ or, ‘what is this thing called ‘I’?’, ‘what tells me what I should or shouldn’t do?’, ‘what is the world I live in?’, ‘what can I know about that world?’, and so on. I think that most of the traditional arenas of inquiry of philosophy can be brought in relation with that question—moral philosophy and ethics attempts to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do, perhaps in relation to others, ontology concerns the question of what the world is made of, which must delimit what we can do within it, epistemology concerns the question of what we can know of the world, and so on. > > But I think the most important aspect of that question is that we should not imagine it to have an objective answer. There is no one, uniquely right way to live your life. It is in this failure to have an objective answer that philosophy, and the aim of philosophical inquiry, differs from science: there can be no philosophical method in the sense that there is a scientific method, that is, there is no ‘royal road’ to philosophical truth. Philosophy thus can’t be, as science is, exhausted by the empirical, deductive-nomological method that just chips away at falsehood until what’s left is true; rather, it is mainly _discoursive_, because with every culture, with every society, answers to its key questions change, and in result to the discussion of these questions, cultural and societal changes are produced. It’s a reciprocal process: the environment changes the discussion, and the discussion changes the environment. Science, on the other hand, works from the assumption (itself of course philosophical!) that there is an empirical truth to discover, and thus, follows essentially an algorithm that ultimately converges on this truth, which is (again, assumed to be) independent of the context in which it is arrived at. > > Philosophy is in some sense closer to textual analysis: Heidegger has proposed the notion of ‘hermeneutical circle’, in which the analysis of parts of the text change the reception of the whole, while the reception of the whole in turn influences the analysis of the parts. This is not a process of converging on capital-T ‘what did the author want to say’-Truth, but a continuing examination of the text in relation to its recipient, and of the recipient by virtue of their reception of the text. This is what has led to such at first cryptic (some would say, nonsensical) remarks as Derrida’s “there is nothing outside of the text”. > > But this nonobjectiveness and ever-continuing dialogue does not make philosophy arbitrary. Both text and context, so to speak, at any point are definite, if fluent objects; and besides, as I have heard it expressed, “while philosophy is not itself empirical, it is bounded by the empirical”. And just for this reason, philosophy has given rise to science; but science, by its very constitution, will never usurp philosophy, which will continue as meaningful dialogue as long as there is (some version of) humanity trying to come to grips with its place in the universe. > > **III. Philosophy aiding Science** > > Finally, despite the claims of its detractors, there is ample historical precedent for philosophy being important to scientific discovery. I’ll just briefly note four relatively recent examples, three from my own speciality (quantum information theory), and one from the development of relativity theory. In order to not get too abstract, I’ll keep the discussion minimal; if anybody’s interested in hearing more, I’ll gladly elaborate. > > First, quantum information theory basically starts with Bell’s theorem: in proving that classical theories as they are widely understood can’t account for quantum mechanical predictions, the door was opened to finding cases in which things become possible using quantum mechanics that aren’t possible using classical resources. A chief example is, for instance, perfectly secure cryptography. > > This is a result that is of a classically philosophical form: it tells you, you can believe A, but then, you have to believe B; you can’t believe both A and not-B. Here, A is realism—roughly, the idea that everything you can observe always has a definite value independent of observation—and B is the existence of non-local influences. Now, the unique characteristic of this theorem is that it gives you an empirical criterion for its applicability to the real world, that is, it tells you that if you make one observation, then it’s applicable, and if you make another, then it’s not. This is a prime example of the empirical boundedness of philosophy. It turned out that it does, in fact, apply to the world—and thus, has become an object of scientific discourse (it was one of philosophical discourse independently of this empirical corroboration). Nowadays, its consequences are a prime research area. > > The second example is likewise related to things you can do quantum-mechanically that you can’t do classically. The culprit here is David Deutsch, who wanted to find corroboration for a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the so-called ‘Many Worlds’-interpretation. In doing so, he was engaged in a philosophical inquiry: he wanted to know what, really, is behind the phenomena, how the world works deep down. Indeed, the interpretation of quantum mechanics is an important sub-field in the philosophy of science to this day. What he ultimately discovered was quantum computation (specifically, the first algorithm leading to a speed up above classical performance, known as the Deutsch-Josza algorithm). I need not tell anyone how big an area of research this has become. > > For the third example, I want to submit Dieter Zeh’s work on decoherence. Now this is a bit of a hairy topic to introduce, but basically, it’s about how a definite value is brought about in the course of a measurement—a notorious philosophical problem in quantum mechanics known simply as the ‘measurement problem’. His works were dismissed by several journals as being ‘too philosophical’—and, I suppose, by extension either of no interest or contentless. Today, decoherence is one of the most important areas of quantummechanical research, mainly in order to bring quantum computing to maturity. > > It’s examples like these that make me sad every time I see somebody dismissing a result as being ‘just philosophy’; even if you don’t have any interest in philosophy itself (which I can understand), you should realize that it’s often just those ‘philosophical’ results that have driven concrete applied science. > > Finally, as an example of how the interpretation of a physical theory can bring about advances in the formulation of further theories, consider Hermann Minkowsky’s interpretation of special relativity as being about the causal structure of spacetime. Although today it is often seen as such, it is by no means evident that this is the ‘correct’ way to think about SR; alternatively, you could just as well postulate the existence of a Lorentz ether, meaning that spacetime is just a container filled with stuff that makes material objects behave in a certain way[sup]1[/sup]. But in doing away with this picture, Minkowski arguably enabled the development of Einstein’s next stroke of genius, general relativity, in which the very causal structure of spacetime now becomes dynamical—it is much harder to see how this could have come about under a Lorentzian interpretation. > > I think this last example shows most clearly the importance of philosophical groundwork in physical theory—and, if you permit me some speculation, I think it’s no coincidence that the current ‘rut’ in fundamental physics ever since roughly the inception of the standard model in the 60s neatly coincides with the rise of the generation of ‘savages’ (according to Paul Feyerabend), the Feynmans and Weinbergs, who lacked the philosophical sophistication of their predecessors—Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and so on. Indeed, if we consider the model of Kuhnian revolutions in science, it may well be the case that revolutions need a philosophical impetus, or at least some reexamination, while you can only do away with it during the periods of ‘normal science’. But that’s a topic for another thread. > > Regarding my examples above, you may object that all of the protagonists were scientists, rather than philosophers; this is the case for two reasons: first of all, I’m a scientist myself, and thus, am more familiar with their biographies and contributions; and second, philosophy is not a label on a person, but on what that person does, and every one of those scientists were certainly engaging in philosophical inquiry in regard of their discoveries. > > **IV. Concluding Remarks** > > I’ve argued that the notion that philosophy is either irrelevant to or superseded by science is utterly wrongheaded: science is not, ultimately, after the same sorts of knowledge as philosophy, and furthermore, is properly considered as the (current) end-point of a chain of inquiry that starts from philosophical roots—it grew out of the tools philosophers developed to bound their inquiry into the natural world. Additionally, the idea that it’s useless to science is simply not borne out historically; rather, development of both disciplines has always been most fertile in an atmosphere of mutual dialogue, not of (misplaced) competition. > > So then, why the widespread hostility against philosophy in the sciences? I think the main reason is that we all want to be able to, in a sense, survey, or comprehend the world; but all too often, this degenerates into mistaking our own horizon for its end. Thus, whenever somebody talks about something beyond that horizon, they must be talking nonsense. This, I find, is all too often the reason behind the flat out refusal to engage with certain topics, be they philosophy, modern art, or (even) science. Nobody can survey all of our increasingly complex world, but few are capable of admitting this. This results in an attitude that considers nonsense everything that another does that we aren’t able to understand. In our increasingly complex and pluralistic world, I think this is not just sad—since this outright denial closes us off to whole areas of the world full of their own wonders—but even dangerous. > > Finally, a word to the philosophers: I’m not a philosopher myself, and in fact, have had little training in philosophy. I hope to not have mangled it too much in my (necessary) simplifications, but if you feel I did, I hope you’ll let me know. > > [sup]1[/sup]Oh god, there’s footnotes, too? Well, just the one. Ironically, the Lorentzian interpretation is lately starting to come to the fore again, in order to come to grips with the problem of quantizing gravity. The idea is that gravity may be emergent from the right kind of medium, and that thus quanitizing gravity directly might be as wrong-headed as trying to quantize water waves in order to get at the microscopic description of water. This bolsters, rather than contradicts, my point: the right interpretation may determine what physical theory ultimately proves successful. Apology: Not accepted. Thanks for the nap.:rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/52 "2014-07-21T20:36:02Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > As I was hoping was the case, **njtt** confirms: Philosophy is a necessary part of bleeding edge science. When the ancient Greeks and Indians first argued about the nature of matter and proposed the atom, it was a philosophical question that wasn’t resolved until Dalton came through in the 1800s. > > Perhaps philosophy argues the right questions and science argues the right answers. Each informing the other to make progress. But some of the ancients proposed the atom, and some did not, and if you read the arguments the arguments for the atom were really no better than the arguments against. The question of what makes up matter is a simple one even if the answer is far from simple. The atom is just one example of how natural philosophy did not converge on answers for about 2,000 years (or it converged on wrong answers.) Dreyfus is a good example of philosophy failing at saying what science will find or won’t find. More useful is when it gives us pointers on how we think about problems. Whether or not Popper is right about the crucial nature of falsifiability, it is a good discussion to have and might even be helpful to some. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/53 "2014-07-21T20:45:57Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > It has cleared up issues regarding ideas like cosmogenesis and creation from nothing that, if Lawrence Krauss had invested the time to study them, would have saved him the trouble of writing a book. > > As for the issue of philosophers contributing to science, David Albert (mentioned by **wolfpup** ) has written one of the best introductions to interpretive issues in Quantum Mechanics, Jeffrey Bub has done important work on clarifying the structure of QM (most notably with the Clifton-Bub-Halvorson theorem that tells us that quantum mechanics is characterized among C\*-algebras by just assuming that you don’t have superluminal signalling, can’t copy information perfectly, and can’t do secure bit commitment, but also with the Clifton-Bub uniqueness theorem, and several other results), and others—but really, that’s completely besides the point, and I would label such contributions as mainly incidental. > > It’s true that most such contributions come, as you said (and I did in my OP), from scientists ‘waxing philosophically’, but this just shows that philosophy should not be a dirty word in the sciences—as I showed, by the four examples I gave, such philosophical thinking can be a concrete engine of progress in science. There’s way too much in this thread to respond to but this point seems to be a core of your claim, so I want to ask more about it. My layman’s reading of popular science indicates to me that the most basic issues of cosmology have \*not \*been cleared up; in fact they are more highly disputed in more ways than ever before. Any clearing up of them, moreover, will stem from deeper mathematics that will more precisely state how and why these issues emerge. For most people, this would appear to be the opposite of philosophy. Philosophers would seem to have nothing to say about it before hand. Perhaps some scientists “waxing philosophically” might, but that again is the point: only the tiniest handful of scientists are capable of understanding the math in the first place. Are there any philosophers qua philosophers in the world who do? I remember a few decades back when philosophers were writing papers about the meaning of time travel, which were demolished by scientists who showed that mathematically they didn’t have a clue as to the actual physics they were purportedly using. How is that different from today? It’s possible that assigning breakthroughs in advanced scientific understanding to philosophers is the worst possible claim you can make. Or maybe not. I haven’t a clue about the Clifton-Bub uniqueness theorem or who said what about it. You might make a valid claim based upon it, but you certainly haven’t done so as yet. Worse, such a claim appears to invalidate all previous philosophy since it manifestly had nothing to say about any advanced science since the dawn of the quantum and probably far before. Philosophy is far wider and deeper than the tiny few who are dabbling in advanced quantum mechanics. Can anything you say be extended to the huge bulk of the profession and what their current intellectual achievements are? ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/54 "2014-07-21T21:10:55Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > . . . Perhaps you will say “Ah, well, but clearly, even if much of what he did was science, what he is doing in the passage I quoted is philosophy rather than science,” but all you are doing there (if that is truly your response) is retrospectively assigning the stuff you think is wrong or nonsensical to the category of philosophy . . . You seem to be trying to cast this into a form of circular reasoning, or some other rhetorical error. But you don’t exactly specify where the problem is here. I do hold that, in his analogy of the planets and the metals, Tycho was engaging in philosophical reasoning, not scientific. His idea is not testable nor falsifiable, and it involves analogical reasoning that is beyond testing. At other times, he engaged in more scientific procedures, making pure observations and collecting data. Newton, too, practiced both science and non-science (astrology.) It isn’t circular reasoning for me to say that his science was pretty scientific, but his astrology was not. That’s pretty much how the terms have fallen out in the centuries since. We can test Newton’s laws of motion. (They got us to the Moon.) All tests of astrology have failed miserably. (Astrology is, bless it’s little buttons, falsifiable. It’s also massively falsified.) Philosophy, as a process of examining ideas critically and trying to probe for weaknesses, is perfectly valid. In this, it very closely resembles its early offshoot, Logic. It even has validity as a generator of some new ideas, usually by compiling ideas together, stacking A on top of B and seeing if it topples. It just doesn’t do it by observing factual data. Philosophy proceeds a priori. Things are declared true or false on the basis of linguistic reasoning, a process more rhetorical than anything else. Hell, I’m engaging in it right now! 😉 ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/55 "2014-07-21T21:13:24Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > But some of the ancients proposed the atom, and some did not, and if you read the arguments the arguments for the atom were really no better than the arguments against. The question of what makes up matter is a simple one even if the answer is far from simple. > > The atom is just one example of how natural philosophy did not converge on answers for about 2,000 years (or it converged on wrong answers.) > Dreyfus is a good example of philosophy failing at saying what science will find or won’t find. > More useful is when it gives us pointers on how we think about problems. Whether or not Popper is right about the crucial nature of falsifiability, it is a good discussion to have and might even be helpful to some. Not so fast, I would say. The question (questions, really) “what makes up matter?” has been deceptively simple. And just as the arguments for or against the atom did not converge into something useful for science to suss out for well over 2,000 years, science and mathematics finds answers in the same trial and error fashion as well. There’ll be good philosophy and bad, just as there’ll be good science and bad. And yes, I understand science has a way to test against the bad science, but science is about finding answers, philosophy is not. Again, I stress philosophy not be about finding answers, but arguing out the questions and let answers come however they may—if ever. Philosophy should probably be looked upon as a qualitative practice, as its quantity is no indication of its usefulness, but useful is exactly what it can be. Disregarding it is to ignore the subtleties of all scientific history and human thought that has brought us this far. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/56 "2014-07-21T21:20:46Z")
Indeed, how can science get to the bottom of “What is self-awareness?” without the help of philosophy on cognition and its nature? The questions might seem simple, but there’s much discourse to be had on that question with both philosophers and scientists until an answer can be found. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/57 "2014-07-21T22:35:33Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > Not so fast, I would say. > > The question (questions, really) “what makes up matter?” has been deceptively simple. And just as the arguments for or against the atom did not converge into something useful for science to suss out for well over 2,000 years, science and mathematics finds answers in the same trial and error fashion as well. There’ll be good philosophy and bad, just as there’ll be good science and bad. And yes, I understand science has a way to test against the bad science, but science is about finding answers, philosophy is not. Again, I stress philosophy not be about finding answers, but arguing out the questions and let answers come however they may—if ever. Converging on a solution often does not involve going directly to it. Look at genetic algorithms. I’d hardly dispute that there is lots of trial and error. And I’m not talking about bad science, I’m talking about incorrect science - which might seem perfectly correct given the knowledge available. > [@](#): > > Philosophy should probably be looked upon as a qualitative practice, as its quantity is no indication of its usefulness, but useful is exactly what it can be. Disregarding it is to ignore the subtleties of all scientific history and human thought that has brought us this far. Some philosophy begins with facts also. Arguments about the rights of animals is dependent in some part on scientific studies about the intelligence of animals and whether animals feel pain, for example. Translating scientific findings into the moral realm is another good use of philosophy. MIT has a quite good philosophy department. When I took course there, I never felt any flack from my fellow engineers and scientists. And my Theory of Knowledge professor had a PDP-8 manual on the bookcase in his office. ---
**Author:** ![Reno\_Nevada](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Reno\_Nevada](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reno_Nevada)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/58 "2014-07-21T23:09:04Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Bell’s theorem is straightforward metaphysics, I’m not sure how one would dispute that; . I don’t know anything at all about the rest of your examples; they were not covered in my Quantum Mechanics class. I will argue that Bell’s theorem is physics, not metaphysics. First of all, John Bell was trained as a physicist, not a philosopher. Second of all, Bell’s theorem made specific predictions that could be tested by experiment; it was, in fact, falsifiable. On your larger point, I think that it is obviously true that science as a field of study arose out of philosophy. If we apply the principles of cladistics to the question, we conclude that all scientists \*are \*philosophers. Of course, Aristotle would caution us that that allows the possibility that some philosophers are not scientists, and empirically we find this is true. Empirically, since about the start of the 20th century, we find that the non-scientist philosophers have not contributed significantly to the progress of science; however, Aristotle would again point out that this is true by definition–any philosopher who contributes to science is a scientist. Thus, by applying both philosophy and science to the question, we can come to a conclusion that satisfies (me). Quod erat demonstrandum. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2014, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/59 "2014-07-21T23:34:58Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > An Apology for Philosophy I would accept your apology, but it’s the other philosophers, the ones I’ve tried to read, who should apologize. However, you made a good start on having something to be sorry for when you wrote a post so long it needed CHAPTERS. Oh, you meant that OTHER definition of apology? No problem. Those guys usually write long, incoherent stuff that they should apologize for. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2014, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524/60 "2014-07-22T00:51:18Z")
Hell, I would’ve titled it “An Appeal for Philosophy.” 😉 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/an-apology-for-philosophy/693524.md?page=4)