I think that’s a good analogy for philosophy, but in the opposite direction. The result that 0.999… = 1 is as trivial and uncontroversial as anything in math. There are several one- or two-line proofs, ranging from arithmetic to analysis to appealing to the very definition of real numbers. Yet we’ve had 30 pages of people avoiding that math to argue from philosophical notions or vague principles, passionately insisting that their wrong answer is perfectly valid.
I’m fine with philosophy per se. I don’t need a practical application of a result; I’m a theoretical mathematician, after all. I 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.
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.”
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.”
I hasten to add that not all philosophy is as blatantly dependent on analogy as this specific example, and there will certainly be exceptions. But much philosophic reasoning is based on comparing one idea to another and drawing conclusions from similarities.
It isn’t so much a bad idea (although in Tycho’s case it’s pretty awful) but that it isn’t dependable. You can conclude nearly anything. “Life is like a bowl of cherries…”
The scientific method is much closer to certain. “Let’s test it and see for sure.” If surety is what you want, what could be better?
They both beat the hell out of the “religious method” which is “Find someone to tell you what the gods want.”
No. Logos is the account, the interpretation, of reality. It is separate from reality itself. A description of an elephant is not an elephant, and elephant is an elephant.
Scientific method is the best analytic tool ever invented for explaining reality. But it is not a reality unto itself.
Scientific method is itself the subject of a major branch of modern philosophy.
Science is what scientists do. Philosophy is what philosopher’s do. Philosophy has passed its sell by date. (To be explicit, I don’t believe that last sentence).
" 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.
Philosophical content: “How should I live my life?” As I see it philosophy is that part of human investigation that is rigorous in logic and argumentation while setting aside direct observation and empirical data gathering. The only experimentation discussed is thought experimentation. “Bounded by the empirical” is a nice construction though.
“How should I live my life?” Isn’t that a little dated? I mean it’s not like philosophers interact with Deepok Chapkra that much. (Or do they?) But that misses the essay’s point: the author was emphasizing the sorts of deep and analytic followup questions that philosophers ask. But is that really the best way to get at the larger question? I’m guessing not, though personally I enjoy and admire the philosophical approach. For better methods of addressing those particular big questions, I might visit here, here or here (all of which are still on my to-do list). Note that all 3 websites are empirically informed.
The author scores a solid point as soon he mentions quantum mechanics. While undergrads need to shut up and work the equations, ultimately nobody wants to stop there, including their instructors. Even if philosophy departments disappear somebody will have to propose interpretations of these sorts of results: that’s what humans do. But does philosophic training provide enough value added? That’s, um, an empiric question, apparently answered in the affirmative in the OP.
David Deutsch: According to wikipedia he’s a physicist who was influenced by one physicist, one biologist, one computer scientist/logician/philosopher/mathematical biologist/cryptologist and one philosopher. Well that’s something, but hardly a resounding endorsement of philosophic training.
“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’.”
My take is that when a problem isn’t yielding sufficiently to one attack, sometimes hitting it from another angle helps. But if you want to get your ideas across, you have to have mastered the mainstream approach: otherwise you risk crackpottery.
“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.”
A little off topic. If you physicists are such masters of all domains, why did the Club of Rome make such a hash out of their chosen topic? (A: Because they essentially built a model of the economy that lacked the sort of things learned in any first year economics curriculum. Specifically substitution of inputs. )
Everything I’ve said so far has been supportive of your position. But I’m not sure those quoted statements are really accurate, so let me try to play devil’s advocate.
I think most philosophers might reject your argument that philosophy is non-rigorous. Philosophical fields like logic and epistemology are certainly rigorous within their domains, and indeed what’s interesting is that subject areas like the regress argument and formal symbolic logic blur the lines between philosophy and math, while metaphysical cosmology and ontology blur the lines between philosophy and physics.
One might argue that the great thing about science is that it’s not just rigorous and objective but evidence-based, whereas philosophy isn’t, even if its practitioners can justifiably claim that it’s equally as rigorous. It’s the difference between empiricism and classic rationalism: science needs a lab of some kind, but to practice philosophy you just need the ability to think. But isn’t exactly the same thing true for mathematics? I would submit that perhaps mathematics and philosophy have a great deal in common. The major difference is that the role of math in supporting the other sciences is foundational and indisputable, whereas the role of philosophy in doing so is more abstract and elusive.
The trouble is that I’m having a hard time coming up with any good examples. One thing that comes to mind turns out to be a counterexample that exactly proves your point, when you said that the OP examples aren’t philosophy assisting science but scientists venturing into philosophy. What came to mind is the old (and to some degree still ongoing) war between the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and AI researchers about the nature and capabilities of machine intelligence. This might at first glance be deemed an area where philosophy was making a valuable contribution to science, but alas, it turns out to be just the opposite. The arguments in the literature often ranged over philosophical grounds, all right, but the persuasive winning arguments were those advanced by AI researchers essentially saying that Dreyfus didn’t understand the subject matter he was talking about, as indeed he largely did not – it was scientists venturing into philosophy just as you said, and using their subject matter expertise to take down a philosopher on his own turf.
Bah! This is why I said I’m on the fence on this whole issue.
Sorry to be brief but I have yet to be able to hold forth on this topic at any length.
I think philosophy (as it is today, when it’s at its best) is about figuring out what we should do about what we know. It’s not anything-goes. Our knowledge and our values commit us to plans of action, and philosophy teases out those commitments.
I will probably be accused of overextending the term, but in my view a scientist figuring out what research program to follow for the next few years is engaged in philosophy. It’s all about figuring out where our values should take us next.
When logicians attempt to model the world with a logical language etc., they’re taking what we know and trying to figure out how best to model it–ultimately so we can figure out what to do with the knowledge.
(When logicians (and mathematicians btw) do the stuff that seems completely disconnected from the real world and seems to be like playing a kind of game with symbols, even this is an attempt to take what we know (about how logical systems work) and figure out what we can do with it given our values. Here the values involved are differing conceptions of implication, consistency etc.)
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?
Well, that’s the thing. Mathematics is as rigorous as anything ever gets, and we’ve managed to go from solving systems of linear equations to classifying 3-manifolds with Thurston’s geometrization conjecture in a century or two. I know what I do as a mathematician, and it looks nothing like what philosophers do. If math and philosophy are so similar— and I don’t think that they are— why hasn’t philosophy been as successful?
Yeah. For all the talk about philosophers’ assisting with science, I really haven’t seen any of their specific contributions. It’s nice that they want to help out, but I really don’t know what someone who isn’t a qualified scientist and isn’t working with the scientific method and mathematical rigor can add to the subject. The opposite is well-attested, though; see, for example, the influence on neuroscience in psychology and linguistics.
I’ve only yet read through your intro and part of section II, but so far I’m with you. I’ve always felt philosophy is about asking (or seeking) the “right” questions for our time; let the answers come when they may. It certainly does seem largely underestimated by the scientific field (from this outsider).
Philosophy helps to digest thoughts, forge new insights on questions that may or may not be within reach of science to answer. There’s an organic nature to it that science seems to distill away, and remains a natural passion for many, many people so I can’t imagine it ever fully disappearing from any branch or discipline in human thought or logic.
There’ll always be a fuzzy horizon beyond what science can tell us, and that, I believe, will always be the domain of philosophy.
“In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For thirteen days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition such as was never before heard of in this region was made manifest. At the beginning of the fourteenth day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straightway, to the wonderment of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sore vexed, he beseeched them to unbend in a manner coarse and unheard-of and to look in the open mouth of a horse and find answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceeding wroth; and, joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him, hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth, contrary to all the teachings of the fathers. After many days more of grievous strife, the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they as one man declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a grievous dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down.”
I think we are presently living with a very significant example of philosophy standing heads and shoulders over science yet everyone is waiting for science to make the first move. The philosophy has spent at least 3,000 years developing. Science is doing a good job working on it.
I am talking about manipulation of our nurons, receptors, chemicals etc. produced within our own body. The philosophy is well established in this area and many who understand it silently use it effectively. Science is looking too closely to ever be really effective or not for a long time anyway.
Too good not to track down. I’m afraid it’s still “Alleged”.
An Introduction to the History of Psychology (2014) By B. Hergenhahn, Tracy Henley
provides the quote and cites
Bernard Baars: The cognitive revolution in psychology, NY: Guilford Press, 1986. p. 19
who provides the quote and cites Meese, C.E.K (1934) “Scientific Thought and Social Reconstruction.” Sigma Xi Quarterly, p 13.-24. Vol 22 . C.E. Kenneth Mees was the Director in charge of research and development at the Eastman Kodak Company. His work was also published in a monograph as well as Electrical Engineering, Vol 53, Issue 3 and Transactions of American Institute of Electrical Engineers, both in March 1934.
Mees says on page 17 of the 1934 Sigma Xi article, "Francis Bacon, nobleman, politician and lawyer, while himself not practiced in experimental methods and while ignorant apparently of the great work of his contemporaries, had a wonderful gift with his trenchant pen and his facility of expression, and he carried the popular imagination with him in his emphasis on observation and experiment as against blind acceptance of the written word. The following passage accredited to him illustrates admirably the irony and sarcasm he could use to emphasize his contentions:
“In the year of our Lord 1432, etc. etc.”
Mees provides no citation and explicitly says, “Accredited to Bacon.” A bit of a disappointment, if not exactly a surprise.
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. I would learn little and have no time for anything else.
If you can’t condense your ideas down to the key arguments and reasoning, as I did, then this isn’t the right place to publish your ideas IMO.
The author scores a solid point as soon he mentions quantum mechanics. While undergrads need to shut up and work the equations, ultimately nobody wants to stop there, including their instructors. Even if philosophy departments disappear somebody will have to propose interpretations of these sorts of results: that’s what humans do. But does philosophic training provide enough value added? That’s, um, an empiric question, apparently answered in the affirmative in the OP.
Does philosophic training provide any added value? Physicists seem to do perfectly well at the subject on their own; and even if they didn’t, what have philosophers contributed? If anything, the examples in the OP shows that scientists can wax philosophical if necessary; but I’ve yet to see anything in the opposite direction, with philosophers making significant contributions to physics. If you’re going to classify any sort of thinking beyond performing lab experiments and writing down numbers in a lab notebook as ‘philosophy’, the term is meaningless. 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?
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. There’s a huge difference between using science and doing science. When a student solves a standard elastic collision problem in an introductory mechanics class, he’s using physics. When a scientists proves that energy is conserved (rather than taking it as a given), constructs a workable model of the hydrogen atom, or designs and runs an experiment to detect a new, hypothetical particle, he’s doing physics.
Quantum Choprology! Ultimately, scientists have to answer to experimental results. While I don’t think that Chopra is representative of philosophers at all, there isn’t the same sort of automatic quality control in philosophy as in math or science. How am I supposed to decide between the works of, say, Hume and Descartes? If there’s no objective means of testing a notion (experiment in experimental physics, math and experiment in theoretical physics, rigorous definitions and proof in math), then it’s all just eloquent but meaningless guessing. More to the point, how is a subject that lacks those objective means supposed to contribute to a field that’s based on them?
Being fascinated by the natural sciences and philosophy, I can’t help but think of an area where these two domains can’t help but overlap: The nature of consciousness.
It’s been a while since I’ve read GED, but I’ve just begun I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, and his philosophy on the nature of self-awareness and work in cognitive science may be a good example on how philosophy can shape the paths science takes when on the bleeding edge.
