A lot of people I know have this perception that philosophy is an “airy-fairy” subject that brings no practical benefits to society as a whole. They see much of it as a discourse into subjects that don’t have any immediate impact on their surroundings. They follow this chain of reasoning to the idea that it certainly doesn’t “merge” well with the “certainties” of science. I’ve come across this same view from respected scientists as well as common folk. A lot of them don’t like taking a philosophical perspective on the work that they do.
Now I put “certainties” in quotes because I feel that there are not really “absolutes” in science. Just approximations. When you describe a new theory explaining how the world works, you are giving a description that is accurate to the best of your knowledge at that particular moment or period in time.
I always thought that the job of science was based on proving (or disproving) a hypothesis. For example, you may design an experiment to prove a particular statement. Now that doesn’t necessarily tell you that the statement is true. All it tells you is that under those particular experimental conditions and set-up, the statement is proved true.
Now personally, I’ve always seen philosophy as a way to think very carefully about things. It might not always deal in subject matter that I find interesting or practical, but it can always make me view things in a totally new light. I don’t see how I could understand the role of science and it’s limits without philosophical introspection.
So I think that philosophy has an important role in the development of science – not just a consideration of the ethical issues (such as those in stem cell research), but also in fully understanding what we use science for and even how we apply it. Some people (including those that study in scientific fields) don’t understand the principle of falsification in science. Personally, I don’t think I understand it that well without philosophical analysis.
So how important is philosophy in science? What can it add to science that science cannot obtain by itself? And what are the drawbacks/limitations when applying philosophy to science?
Science is philosophy. In particular, it is a type of epistemology concerned with testing (“falsifying”) hypotheses about physical entities.
Those unfamiliar with philosophy sometimes fall for the rather childish oversimplification of considering science to be the only epistemology (or, at least, the only one worth ahem knowing about). But there are many others: mathematics, logic, aesthetics, and so on - these are all systems of thought and knowledge which allow us humans to establish what is true (“truth”, of course, being a metaphysical entity for all intents and purposes outside of a very specific philosophical position called physicalism which attempt to describe it physically - tricky, but possible, and indeed the position which I myself take).
Science is an inductive epistemology: we use it to extrapolate “truth” from reality. Mathematics and logic are deductive epistemologies: we impress their truths onto reality. Science uses mathematics and logic rather like it uses language: the rules and internal consistencies of their grammar and semantics say precisely nothing about reality itself. The grammatical validity of the sentence “the cat sat on the mat” does not tell us anything about the actual feline and its sedentary history. This is neatly encapsulated by a very clever man from the 20th Century who said
Philosophy tells us what science, this incredibly powerful method which biological computers called humans use to determine what mathematical or linguistic descriptions of the physical universe are false, can and cannot do. It cannot tell us whether “1+1=2” is true. It cannot tell us whether “A and not A” is true. Aesthetics relates to the truths in our feelings and experiences. Science cannot tell us whether “I like this painting” is true. It cannot tell us whether “God exists” is true. Science has no preferred system of morality or aesthetics, nor does it help us decide what is and is not ethical, or beautiful, according to our chosen system.
Above all, science cannot test metaphysical claims, since it is only concerned with physical entities. One can, as I do, deny the metaphysical. But this is an extremely difficult journey in itself, requiring all kind of hoops to be jumped through in order to render truth, concepts, maths and qualia in solely physical terms. It ought not be undertaken lightly and those who appeal solely to science, dipping their toe in the comfortable shallows without venturing into such deep waters, are philosophical cowards.
Sentient’s post is so comprehensive that it’s hard to think of anything to add. I suppose I could at least give you a couple of concrete examples of broader philosophy’s many contributions to science.
One with which you are no doubt familiar (and on which Sentient touched) is the concept of falsification, introduced by philosopher Karl Popper in the early twentieth century, as a result of examining differences in the theories proposed by the likes of Karl Marx, and those proposed by the likes of Albert Einstein. Popper noticed that almost anything could be interpreted to support the economic theories of Marx, making them practically unassailable. On the other hand, he noticed that tests could be constructed to show whether Einstein’s theories were false. Popper defined the difference between science and what he called “pseudoscience” based on whether its theories could be falsified. A scientific theory, he proposed, must predict something. It must take risks. It must be testable, and the tests must be independently repeatable. Thus, Popper said that any economic news of the day could be interpreted to support either communism or its opposite, capitalism. But Einstein’s (then) new theories made specific predictions about the universe and its behavior that scientists could test. Falsification is itself a philosophical principle, and interestingly is not itself falsifiable.
Zaitseva, Petrenko, and others have contributed to the modern Theory of Experiments, that aids scientists by “purifying” their experimental methods. Statistical analysis can reveal how likely it is that an experiment was or will be contaminated by some outside factor or interference. This is a great benefit, particularly in circumstances where time is money and in experiments that are very complex.
Aside from those sorts of contributions, scientists routinely draw on epistemologies other than science — like math for interpreting results, logic for constructing tests, and even revelation for conceiving hypotheses and ideas. I would say that, in general, the scientist who has an understanding and appreciation for broader philosophy is better informed in his craft and prepared to execute it properly than the scientist who does not.
Actually, 200-250 years ago, people who experimented in science were called “natural philosophers.” The term “science” didn’t completely supplant “natural philosophy” until well into the nineteenth century.
Had you asked someone in Newton’s day what benefits philosophy could bring to science, he would not have understood what you were asking. It would have been like asking someone today what benefits mathematics could bring to calculus.
I would pretty much disagree with SentientMeat because, as ever, he brings quite a few metaphysical assumptions to the table that science does not and never has required.
I would simply suggest that science is the study quantifiable phenomena. It does not require anything beyond this. The more we attempt to interpret these phenomena, the more we will bring certain metaphysical assumptions with us. In this way, science and philosophy are quite linked. What an experiment “means” or “tells us” depends not upon experiment design but what we think “is really happening”. Science, as a methodology, doesn’t care; we, as conscious entities seeking truth and meaning, do.
We tread on particularly thin ice when we then use results of scientific analysis to affect our philosophy. Tails wag dogs and reasoning becomes viciously circular.
I agree that science is the study of quantifiable phenomena. If we were to imagine a world in which the our rules of mathematics has no basis, we could still identify the study of phenomena there as “science”.
Same thing goes for metaphysics and ontology… which is not to say that those fields of study wouldn’t “exist” in those other worlds, just that denizens of those worlds would not find as much of a use for them in those worlds, since they were discovered to not be appropriate in explaining the world.
So, in my view, the state of received philosophy, not just science, is dependent on this world. If the study, for instance, of essences and spirits and elements would lead to a better understanding of our world, you can bet those would rank up there with the best of other philosophical realms.
Again, not to say all current philosophical realms would not exist as much as they do in our world as in those (i.e. inasmuch as a concept can be said to exist,) it’s just that they wouldn’t be as appropriate.
I don’t doubt a lot of people feel that way, but they don’t necessarily have a very good idea of what philosophy is.
I think that philosophy as an academic pursuit helps to foster this notion… outside of ethics, few “professional” philosophers write about things that are meaningful to the layperson – either in the sense of being relevent or in the sense of being comprehensible.
I’m not sure I entirely understand what you mean by this. Are you suggesting that philosophers are better off ignoring the results of science? If so, I have to disagree. Of course when using scientific results to influence philosophy, one must consider the philosophical assumptions underlying those results. One can’t look at an experiment and say that it disproves a certain philosophical proposition – but one can look at an experiment in light of other assumptions and say that it disproves a philosophical proposition.
For instance, suppose a philosopher were to claim that we have a priori knowledge that the physical world in which we live obeys the laws of Euclidean geometry. A physicist might come along and say “Not so fast – the theory of relativity suggest that the world is non-Euclidean, and I have conducted an experiment the result of which confirms this theory.” The philosopher could just say “Well, I guess I was wrong,” or he could respond in many other ways, such as rejecting the theory of relativity in favor of another theory that is also compatible with the experimental result, rejecting the claim that the experiment provides convincing proof for the theory, rejecting the claim that experimental observations correspond to the physical world (although in that case I don’t know why he’d think the world is Euclidean), etc. But he has to respond somehow – some other assumptions (or at least the rejection of some assumptions) are required to make the experimental evidence compatible with his philosophical viewpoint. So at least it seems clear (to me anyway) that scientific results must be allowed to at least affect philosophy.
Getting back to the OP, I think it’s important in principle for scientists to understand the philosophical underpinnings of science. I suspect that most scientists aren’t motivated by a desire to understand what experiments will appear to tell us about the world – they want to know what the world really is and how it really works. But in order to say they know anything about the world, they need to assume that our observations in some way correspond to physical reality. This is a philosophical assumption. But imagine a scientist who is unaware of the need to make such an assumption, and would be unwilling to make such an assumption if the question were raised to him. And moreover suppose he wouldn’t find the study of science meaningful if it couldn’t be thought to be in some way connected to the search for truths pertaining to the physical world. Such a person might still be a productive member of the scientific community, but he’d be wasting his time because his study of science is motivated soley by a belief that he himself doesn’t truly believe.
In all practical matters, I get by pretty well without any philosophy at all. Stephen Weinberg once wrote that the main value of philosphers to scientists was to protect them from other philosphers, and that philosphy had contributed little or nothing to our understanding of objective reality. I would say it’s worse than that: They want us to stop and ponder over the “fact” that “reality” cannot be defined. Well, I’ll leave them to their navel-gazing and try to generate some data. If that’s not good enough for some people, they’re welcome to their irrelevance, but I wish they’d butt out of the field and stop trying to cloud people’s minds with postmodernist b.s. about epistemic relativism and other such fancy nonsense. I see the appeal to anti- or meta- (or whatever suffix is trendy this year) realism often as a rather desperate attempt by the philosphers of science to demonstrate to the curious public that they still matter. I’m thoroughly convinced they don’t; not to the practice of science. Does philosphy have it’s uses in any arena? I don’t know. That seems to be more of an aesthetic judgement than a practical one. I get all the other intellectual stimulation I need out of art, music, and literature, so for those with tastes for the writings of philosophy, they will have value in the same way, perhaps, that poetry or painting might have value. I’ve never understood why that’s not enough.
I think we agree. The universe is so - it is how it is, not how it is not. Science is the method whereby we test whether we are describing the universe how it is, or how it is not. Where do you think we disagree?
Interesting. Let’s see whether you get through this post “without any philosophy at all”.
Setting aside that “objective reality” is itself a construct of philosophy (especially in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy), Weinberg himself is a radical reductionist, and an outspoken proponent of the philosophy of reductionism: “The reductionism worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.” — Dreams of a Final Theory, Stephen Weinberg. And as it happened, Weinberg was unable to prove his own hypothesis that his weak force theories would eliminate the problem of infinities showing up in his equations, and instead depended on the work of George 't Hooft, a proponent of classical determinism, a philosophy that dates back to Heraclitus in ancient Greece, who proved it in 1971. (See 't Hooft’s Quantum Gravity as a Dissipative Deterministic System for an example of how he applies his philosophy to his research.)
Well, some do. Some don’t. Metaphysics (especially ontology), as a branch of philosophy, rivals both epistemology and ethics in its rich history and variety. But even though definitions of reality might vary greatly, ambiguity of terms is not strictly limited to broader philosophy. Biology has yet to define life, even thought that’s the very thing it studies. Sometimes, definitions need to be malleable. Consider Fa-tsang’s essay on the Gold Lion. The 7th century eastern philosopher used the example the gold lion in the imperial palace. What, essentially, IS the thing? Is goldness or lionness its essence?
I hope not. I don’t want a person who holds philosophy in contempt generating data. In the first place, you can’t interpret them. In the second place, you can’t formulate a sufficiently rational model for qualifying the good data from the bad. And finally, your data are contextless and unbounded. That is to say that they have no correspondence with reality.
Notice that you’ve been invoking philosophy to condemn philosophy throughout your whole post. Epistemological relativism is merely the application of a mathematical function to human thought. Rather than simply dismiss it as bullshit, maybe you should study it so you would know how properly to challenge it. All you need to do is challenge the cognative relativist to state his principle in a relativist way. In other words, is “For all X-judgements, some feature, F, of an X-judgement is relative to Y” itself relative or absolute? You yourself seem to be a conceptual relativst, assigning relevance to science as a concept.
Actually, those are prefixes. But frankly, the way you discuss philosophy belies your knowledge of it. I mean, you’re just tossing out terms (“anti”, “meta”) as though they have some particular application in philosophy as opposed to other disciplines, when they don’t. Science studies antiprotons and examines metadata. Are these just trendy prefixes? Furthermore, it would be nice if you understood that there is a very large portion of the public to whom science has yet to demonstrate much usefulness. It’s cool that you’ve split an atom into component particles, but that’s not much help to Sudanese slavery refugees or Ethiopians who are starving. While you gaze at your navel, contemplating how it evolved, large segments of humanity are embroiled in human things: war, terrorism, disease, starvation, political repression, homelessness, and poverty.
Speaking only for myself, I like to know about things before I decide what I’m convinced of. Were it not for Popper, Freudianism, Marxism, and Adlerism would still be sciences. He has done you the favor of weeding out the pseudoscience. He has given you the very criteria for determining what is and is not scientific. If you don’t find that useful, then I am greatly concerned that you are practicing science at all.
Is it any wonder? What I don’t understand is how it is at all possible for science to benefit from your Archie-Bunkerist approach to it. You spent your whole post waxing philosophically about science and philosophy. You even cited a scientist who understands his own philosophy and champions it. You have not given the first clue that you know anything about what you are condemning. Frankly, I believe that you would do the world a favor if you would turn off the light in your lab, close the door, and just abandon it.
I recommend “The Tao of Physics” by Frijtof Capra and it’s sequels as an excellent introduction to the way modern physics such as quantum mechanics has analogies in eastern mysticism and philosophy.
Science is predominately concerned with creating models that enable us to predict how things work in the physical universe.
Philosophy seems to me to be concerned with why.
As a physicist myself I think we can only benefit from an interaction between the two.
That physical things are what science concerns itself with.
That science is that method, or does that. At what point in history would you say science said how the world is? Just recently? Always? Since a certain date?
As an example of where philosophy and science can complement one another, I submit the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. The volume of papers generated by Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument or the “Turing Test”, on either side of the (ficticious) divide, is immense. In my experience, philosophy can often define a problem that scientists/engineers then go about solving.
The problem, it seems to me, is that many philosophy people have no technical grounding; conversely, many science people have no…I don’t know what word to use…philosophical grounding. Brought to you by someone with degrees in both Philosophy and Computer Science.
I said that science is an epistemology concerned with testing hypotheses about physical entities.
If you contend that science is not concerned with testing hypotheses, I can only disagree: we can collect data ad infinitum, but sooner or later we must apply it to a given null hypothesis.
If you accept that science is concerned with testing hypotheses, but disagree that those hypotheses are only about physical entities, I would ask for an example of a testable hypothesis about a non-physical entity. Which particular branches of science study things which aren’t physical? Geology? Biology? Quantum cosmology? Neuroscience? Be careful - were you appeal to psychology, economics or social “science”, you might well fall foul of Popper’s criterion. I would suggest that the only hypotheses thereof which were testable were still about entities which clearly supervened on the physical, such as quantity of money (ie. “number of accessible dollar bills”) or perceptual response (ie. “button pressed after 21.4 seconds”).
Every time anyone suggests a hypothesis which can be falsified by data. So, all the time.
I’m trying to remember the number of times Karl Popper came up in my discussions, either while being educated, or doing work, in terms of anything practical, e.g. interpretation of data. Or off the number of times Popper, or any other philospher of science, was ever evoked to help me understand the data I have sought to understand, and successfully published.
I think the number is zero.
I imagine the fact that having blithe ignorance of the field renders them incapable of interpreting data would surprise many of my colleagues as well, some of them authors of scientific papers published in the world’s top journals (Science and Cell to name a few).
I am relatively ignorant of the current state of the philosophy of science, and if my writing reveals that ignorance, I’m not ashamed. Most of what I’ve attempted to read is so filled with opaque jargon (designed at times, it’s clear, to disguise meaningless obscurity with profundity), it’s proven not worth the effort. I’ve learned a few very interesting things from Weinberg and other folks like Alan Sokal (“Science and Its Cultural Adversaries” and “Intellectual Impostures” are among my faves…Dawkins is another mind-clearer…all “philosophers” of a kind, I suppose, for those who want to claim them as such).
At any rate “reductionism” strikes me less “philosophical” as simply a fact-based approach, guided by the observation, that seemingly disparate and complex phenomena often have simpler and unifying principles underlying them. I’ll take it from the guy that helped formulate the electroweak theory (quite rigorously supported by experiment), that the quest for unified theories is a good direction to go, based on what we’ve learned thus far. If that approach proves fruitless, I expect reasonable folks will abandon it, like they may have abandoned positivism when it led the likes of Ernst Mach to deny the reality of the atom. Those who cling to notions about how to approach science based purlely on philosophical objections tend to fall into such traps. I think they may be persuaded to deny their senses when they learn such amazing “truths” as “it is impossible to prove anything”.
Fine. In all my experience, the scientists I have worked with have carelessly gone about not proving anything their entire lives, blissfully untroubled by their limited understanding of reality. They would be unconcerned with accusations that they are incapable of interpretation, since they have proven otherwise to themselves and their peers. It seems the heart of your objections Liberal is a flowery ad hominem (you’d probably accuse me of an obtusely simplistic one). “Ignorance of the relevance of philosphy renders you incapable; so you are unqualified to study. Here are the philosphers who say so.” Really? As always, learning this is a renewed surprise, soon to be dismissed by simple, untrustworthy observation, of the results we have produced, and the thoughts they’ve provoked.
And I suggest that the existence of physical entities is not necessary for science. I both love science, and do not believe in “physical” reality (whatever that means).
That is the methodology of science, yes.
Well, for me, they’re all non-physical entities. But that’s no matter. What I am trying to indicate is that science does bring some assumptions to the table, but “there are physical objects” isn’t one of them (or doesn’t have to be).
All of them, to me. But I’m less interested in exposing my own metaphysical views than I am in suggesting that science doesn’t require any particular metaphysic at all, other than probably a bare-bones phenomenology.
I do not feel Popper was successful in what he set out to do with The Logic of Scientific Discovery, so I don’t care whether I fall foul of his baseline or not. Mostly, it is a decent work, and I don’t mean to suggest it isn’t very important. It was quite a good read, but I recall finding more than a few problems with it. I’d elaborate more, but I haven’t read the follow-up work yet (the price is prohibitive for reading someone I disagree with).
Hmm. Well, here’s my induction: science continually proves itself wrong, so science is probably just as wrong now as it ever was, and so it doesn’t describe anything. Oooh, now every time a scientist presents a new theory to overturn an old one and make science better, he proves my theory at the same time and describes science as just as bad. What a dilemma! How can we get around it, SentientMeat?
Ah, so we are formulating hypotheses about this dreamworld of yours which I find myself trapped in? I’m afraid my initial reply took the liberty of assuming that the universe exists, just like any other debate I contribute to, from Iraq to the Irrational. I apologise for accidentally knocking your brain-filled jar on the way past.
There are an infinite number of hypotheses. The number of hypotheses which have been demonstrably falsified grows ever greater. Any fraction of infinity is still infinity, but one can still say that science is making us less wrong.
I’m not sure it is such a dilemma, really. These biological computers in our skulls (or in your jar) output decisions based on accrued data, which ultimately result in new ways of increasing the lifespan and further output of those computers. This is just how it is. I make every effort to understand criticism of science, or indeed my entire worldview, but such interesting examples of philosophical wordplay do not, to me, represent any kind of fundamental crisis.
In fact, I positively enjoy them, which is why I value your participation in these threads so highly.
