What benefits can philosophy bring to science?

[erislover]

@SentientMeat

The world is how it is. (This is of course not an assertion, but a tautology.) My initial reply (aimed at those who accept the existence of the physical, consider logic to be a valid epistemology here, speak English, and have access to a computer) stated that science is the method by which we test whether our mathemtical or linguistic descriptions of the world are how it is, or how it is not. I would suggest that this is accurate whether or not the world is physical.

Sure (last sentence). So, uh, why bring it in?

Now, if the world were not physical, we must ask ourselves whether science would still be the best tool for determining how it is. The notion of physicality has within it a crucial assumption: that the world doesn’t cheat.
That the how it is does not whimsically flit from one way to another like the thoughts of a scatterbrain.

Well, I would be hard pressed to find philosophers that feel that reality is subject only to the whim of someone’s mind. Idealism in general is a bit more thorough than that, I promise. The critical component of idealism, stated as generally as possible, is that all reality is mind-correlative, not that reality is independent of mind, and not necessarily that reality is caused by the mind. Some have suggested what you propose, but it is not all that common.

It might be possible to conceive of some scenario whereby the universe looked for all the world like it actually existed independent of some non-physical entity like “mind” but was actually non-physical.

You are taking the strongest possible form of idealism here (which, having adopted the strongest possible form of realism shouldn’t surprise me ;)). Let me throw a quick quote at you to help illustrate what might be amiss in our discussion here:

@Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy

idealism, the philosophical doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated – that the real objects constituting “the external world” are not independent of cognizing minds, but exist only as in some way correlated to mental operations…

…Idealism need certainly not go so far as to affirm that mind makes or constitutes matter; it is quite enough to maintain (e.g.) that all of the characterizing properties of physical existents resemble phenomenal sensory properties in representing dispositions to affect mind-endowed createures in a certain sort of way, so that these properties have no standing without reference to minds. Weaker still is an explanatory idealism which merely holds than an adequae explanation of the real always requires some recourse to the operations of the mind. [this last is particularly close to my own opinions. ~erl]

…Perhaps the strongest argument favoring idealism is that any characterization of the real that we can devise is bound to be a mind-constructed one: our only access to information about what is real is through the mediation of the mind.

(Any typos are mine, emphasis original.) I hope that helps to illustrate your nemesis.

We could not “trust” the world to be consistent, since the very notion of consistency might be nonsense fed to us by Descartes Deceiver.

Which goes nowhere anyway. If he is deceiving us, then we are investigating the bounds of deceit, which is our reality. Science should work just as well in a deceitful world as an honest one. In fact, to me, it should work in any frame of reference where people may share observations. But this is probably why I suggest that science doesn’t tell us answers to these kinds of questions: its power is limited to observable phenomena.

And so I would say that yes, our research is invalidated, because there I have no reason to trust either my memory or that the “true” nature of reality doesn’t change from moment to moment, making any science to date obsolete.

Hmm. That is a rather extreme case. Though it is not clear that it would make the data obsolete. Does not the scientific method come prepared to deal with unpredicted circumstances? Isn’t this its strength?

Science is, I contend, incompatible with solipsism and the like.

Oh, sure, solipsism is the ultimate trump card. It is the magic rug we can always sweep dust under.

Indeed, I have never understood how geology, neuroscience and quantum cosmology matter to one who does not accept the physical: surely they are like Greek myths to me - interesting, but ultimately irrelevant?

Would you still say this after the passage I quoted above?

The real power of science is in its bewilderingly accurate predictions.

Predictions of phenomena. Hee!

That Einstein could predict the previously inexplicable periheleon of Mercury to such absurd accuracy showed any reasonable person that General Relativity was not “as wrong as science had ever been”.

And Newton’s accuracy governed the way people thought about physical interaction for hundreds of years. It is still more than adequate for everyday work. Some day I’m sure GR will be trumped by something, and QM, and shit we probably haven’t even thought of. Maybe even in our lifetimes. If we lived for five hundred years, where would you place your bet, Sentient?

If such predictions are so easy, I would request anyone impugning the “wrongness” of science to make a few themselves.

Whoa. Who is saying science is wrong???

Well, we could start assuming that we need not speak in a commonly understood language - that would be one less again. We must ask what assumptions are useful.

Hey, watch that word, “useful”. It has a few tricks up its sleeve if you don’t handle it carefully.

Denying the physical and its associated consistency and “trust of our senses” is IMO as useful as the veritable chocolate teapot of philosophy, of which science is a part.

Now, see, there you go again, positing this mind-independent “matter” as the source of “consistency”. Why not just say, “hey, phenomena are more or less consistent”? :shrug: I dunno. Science doesn’t care.

Husserl of the “Tripartite structure of consciousness”, I assume?

I don’t see this as exclusively the domain of Husserl, but yes. The phenomenologists can be a handful, they’re a wily bunch. If you do find a copy somewhere, take it slow and enjoy the exercize.

Science is just the epistemology whereby we extract “truth” (whatever that is) from reality. We could call the universe nonphysical, just as I could call mathematics, logic and aesthetics “science”. But we might as well speak different languages.

Well, hey, whatever floats your boat. I’ve just never seen a result in science that would change if we suddenly said, “Oops! No mind-independent reality exists.” And I cannot imagine one would be formulated. If such a theory existed, and could be tested… well, I would shut right the hell up.

For the record, I do not shy away from the word “physical”. I feel it plays an important conceptual role to distinguish certain phenomena and transcendental objects from others. But I know how you mean it, and I thoroughly disagree. Ain’t philosophy fun?

loopydude

If philosophy has had such a great impact on scientific thinking in a positive way, I must balance that assertion with this epistemic relativism which seems to go in about as negative a direction as I can imagine.

Well, epistemological relativism is probably for another thread. It isn’t as scary as it sounds, and I would pretty much bet you untold sums of money that most scientists would recognize its truth if they reflected on what happens to the explanation of data when competing theories exist surrounding that data. Like, say, describing electron behavior with string theory versus the standard model, or what an electron “is” or consists of with either of those.

Mostly when I read about philosophy and its relationship to science, I hear about how we abandoned Aristotilean approaches, say, or positivist approaches, in the course of making progress.

Ah, but guess what beat positivism down? It hinged on verification, and was finally trumped by… falsification!

Can philosophers provide help in solving that problem, or predict the solution any better than anyone else with an oppinion can?

Ohh, so you want philosophy to BE science, eh? Philosophy guides science. For example, in the EPR paper,

While we have thus shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible.

Do you suppose that bolded sentence can be said to influence science, if it influenced the scientists? And wouldn’t you admit that it definitely shows a certain philosophical bent?

What philosophy is not frought with peril if clung to too tightly or applied inappropriately?

What scientific theory is not frought with peril if clung to too tightly? Honestly, dogmatism is an enemy of investigation of all kinds, philosophical, scientific, and anything else you care to imagine.

Is it best to be philosophically agnostic so as to not become locked into an “ism”? Is that just another philosophy?

It sort of encapsulates my favorite philosopher, that’s for sure.

[erislover]

@tim314

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.

Oh, quite so. I’m just saying, the possibility of circular reasoning becomes quite great when philosophy outlines science which explains data. There is a pretty clear path. Many philosophers over time have, shall we politely say, overstepped their bounds (most easily: greek philosophers). Philosophy is, above all, an activity, and to the extent it touches empirical existence it will be affected by it. We should just use caution when doing so.

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.

Heh, just as, you know, a hypothetical.

So at least it seems clear (to me anyway) that scientific results must be allowed to at least affect philosophy.

Yessiree.

[Kimstu]

Loopydude: * I mean, when Galileo, for instance, decided doing experiments was a bit more useful than taking the Aristotlean approach to understanding things like acceleration and how unlike massive bodies fall, was he inventing “Galilean Philosophy”, or just breaking from philosophy entirely and doing something else?*

I think part of your problem with understanding science and philosophy may be that you have a very oversimplified view of the history of science. For example, it is way misleading to say that Galileo’s main contribution was to “do experiments” rather than “taking the Aristotelian approach”. Followers of Aristotelian philosophy had been performing experiments for centuries, if not millennia—think Claudius Ptolemy and his lunar observations and optical work, for example.

It would, I think, be more accurate (though not a lot more—the whole subject is indeed very complicated) to say that the key to Galileo’s contribution was a conviction of the essential “mathematizability” of all physical reality. That’s what enabled him to believe, for example, that the trajectory of a projectile would be a mathematically describable curve, and made it seem worthwhile to experiment with projectiles and to apply models to the resulting data that involved mathematically describable curves, including the ultimately successful candidate, the parabola.

And that initial belief that comprehensible geometry and physical reality are fundamentally linked is, of course, a philosophical concept: specifically, it’s part of the Renaissance Neoplatonism of his predecessors such as Nicholas Cusanus. Galileo’s famous remark about the book of the Universe being written in the language of mathematics is a classic example of that Neoplatonist exaltation of mathematical models.

So no, you cannot in fact do science without philosophy. Whether you’re aware of it or not, your ideas about what reality is like, how you’re able to know things, and so forth are always influenced by the concepts that philosophical reasoning has shaped. To say that science is “breaking from philosophy entirely and doing something else” is basically nonsense. What they do is different from what students of philosophy do in many respects, but it’s still saturated with concepts and mindsets originating in philosophy. Of course you can do science without knowing anything about philosophy as an academic subject, just as you can use a computer without having any idea about how it works electronically; but that doesn’t mean that the way a computer works doesn’t have a significant influence on how you can use it.

[Loopydude]

@Kimstu

I think part of your problem with understanding science and philosophy may be that you have a very oversimplified view of the history of science. For example, it is way misleading to say that Galileo’s main contribution was to “do experiments” rather than “taking the Aristotelian approach”. Followers of Aristotelian philosophy had been performing experiments for centuries, if not millennia—

Have to be quick…elections…

If there is anything I have learned about Aristotlean “science” it was that it was devoid of experiment. Aristotle emphasized the importance of observation, but believed that one can then use those observations to deduce the laws of the world through pure reason. The difference between Aristotlean philosphy and experimentation surely is not as simple as qualitative vs. quantitative observation, because simply observing something is not experimentation.

I fail to see how an experimenter could be characterized as an “Aristotlean”. Aren’t the two terms rather antithetical?

[Kimstu]

Loopydude: If there is anything I have learned about [Aristotelian] “science” it was that it was devoid of experiment.

But as you learn more about pre-modern science (if you bother), I think you’ll realize that that isn’t strictly true. Certainly, Aristotelians didn’t advocate the type of ubiquitous physical experimentation that Galileo and other early modern scientists advocated (although even they depended much less on actual hands-on experiments than some of today’s scientists realize). That’s because they didn’t believe that terrestrial phenomena of motion and the like were necessarily representable by testable geometrical models. But the phenomena that they did consider “mathematizable” they were often willing to test experimentally.

Aristotle emphasized the importance of observation, but believed that one can then use those observations to deduce the laws of the world through pure reason.

This doesn’t rule out doing experiments, though. After all, an experiment is just a form of carefully controlled observation, where you change one of the conditions and see if you get a different result. Many scientists who based their world-view on Aristotelian philosophy did exactly that: for example, Ptolemy in modeling the anomalies of lunar motion, or ibn al-Haytham in experimenting with optical illusions, or al-Farisi in testing his explanation of rainbows with a sphere filled with water.

It’s true that a lot of Aristotelians didn’t conduct experiments, and that a lot of them clung to some traditional ideas about the natural world that could easily have been shown false experimentally. But there were also followers of Aristotelian philosophy who did think that “observation” included “observing the results of experiments”.

Loopydude: * fail to see how an experimenter could be characterized as an “[Aristotelian]”. Aren’t the two terms rather antithetical?*

You’re using a simplistic distinction between “Aristotelian” and “experimental” that goes all the way back to Galileo’s own rhetoric. In his Dialogues he deliberately tried to make Aristotelians look stupid, unoriginal, and resistant to testing traditional explanations, in order to undermine support for the Aristotelian geocentric worldview. And certainly, there were doubtless plenty of Aristotelians who were as hidebound and anti-experimental as Galileo’s Simplicius caricature.

But Aristotelian philosophy in the course of its extremely long and widespread influence also included the world-views of scientists who did perform experiments, such as the three I mentioned above. In other words, saying that Aristotelian science was “devoid of experiment” is, as I said, way oversimplified.

[SentientMeat]

Well, erl, I’ve given you my reasons for why I, personally, consider science to be a physicalist epistemology, and admitted the possibility that science could be largely unchanged if reality was, as you put it, “mind-correlative” (even though the needle of my offal-based Belief-O-Meter points strongly away from such a possibility). If I have misrepresented idealism at all then I apologise, so let me pick your brains (literally, from a physicalist perspective!) about which exact form of idealism you are advocating.

The physical either exists or it does not. The non-physical either exists, or it does not. Science says that, for 13.7 billion years, no brains capable of conceptualisation existed in this region of the galaxy. What does your formulation of idealism say about the nature of reality for those 13.7 billion years?

I guess the yes/no question I should be asking you, erl is:

“if a tree falls in the forest, does a longitudinal variation in pressure propagate, through the mainly-nitrogen medium, capable of being transduced by a human cochlea into an action potential and transmitted via the auditory nerve to the thalamus and on to the primary auditory cortex in the temporal lobe?”

Science’s answer is yes. What’s yours?

Science should work just as well in a deceitful world as an honest one…Does not the scientific method come prepared to deal with unpredicted circumstances?

This I cannot agree with - perhaps I did not impress upon you the scale of the deceit I consider all too possible under an idealist paradigm: it is that, every hour, reality undergoes an Orwellian rewriting of history in its entirety, such that science is the punishment of Sisyphus, doomed for eternity to push a boulder up a hill only to see it roll down again. A physical universe at least necessitates “honesty” at some level, even if the reality we are experiencing is deceptive: the simulation machines in the Matrix were still made of atoms. Idealism, to me, has no such safety catch at any level.

If we lived for five hundred years, where would you place your bet, Sentient?

Einstein still explained things Newton could not. The Theory of Everything will explain things Einstein could not. The explanatory and predictive power of science grows ever greater, to the point where there will be a feasible and logically consistent explanation for the entire universe and everything in it, including the human mind. Once that point is reached (and I believe that this will be in our lifetime), it may still be that the whole shebang is “as wrong as it has ever been”. We can only set our Meter needles any which way.

[SentientMeat]

Actually, erl, having read through the thread again I note that it is the introduction of the word “reality” which causes confusion, not the word “physical”. I can (and do) define the physical to be that described by physics. Physics is a science. That science refers solely to the physical is thus a tautology.

[Loopydude]

@Kimstu

…as I said, way oversimplified.

Well, I can’t argue with that, since my formal education on the subject amounted pretty much to “Greek philosophers saw no need for experiment”, and what I’ve read (and certainly not committed entirely to memeory) from Dava Sobel.

I don’t seem to be the only one getting fed this simplistic history. At the University of Virginia, for instance, Astronomy students are apparently being taught that Galileo’s experiments “flatly contradict the principles of Aristotlean physics, which, owing to Greek disdain for experiment, had never been subjected to empirical tests.”

I must concede scientists might do well to listen more to philosophers, if for no other reason, to avoid teaching an oversimplified history of scientific progress.

[Kimstu]

Loopydude: *I don’t seem to be the only one getting fed this simplistic history. *

Too true! I’m a historian of science, and it just drives me batshit to see the kind of naive blather (usually from out-of-date tertiary sources, no less) that gets fed to students in the name of history of science, even at very prestigious universities.

I have to say that the worst offenders are usually in science departments. Scientists tend to be very intellectually courageous, which is great, but it also means (and I was a math major and worked in engineering and astronomy before going to grad school, so I don’t think I’m being unfair to scientists here, not out of ignorance at least) that they sometimes think non-scientific subjects are very easy to understand, even if they don’t know much about them.

Certainly many of the scientists who produce undergraduate course materials on the history of physics and astronomy seem to have no problem summarizing it along the lines of “Aristotle did not believe in experiments. He believed in logical deduction. This was bad for science. Galileo thought Aristotelian principles should be tested. He did experiments. This was good for science.” and thinking that they’re actually teaching something meaningful.

When faced with more probing, knowledgeable questions about, say, Hellenistic astronomical modeling, or different forms of Aristotelianism among the falsafa and mutakallamun in Islamic science, or the development of thought experiments among late-medieval Oxford Scholastics, they have no idea what to think, because the authors of their simple little textbooks thought it was adequate to say “Aristotle bad, Galileo good”, and leave it at that.

Sorry, rant city here. I tend to get carried away on this subject. Anyway, if you’d like to see a brief and very readable discussion of various scientific currents, including criticism and experiment, within pre-Galilean Aristotelian natural philosophy, you might try this lecture by the philosopher Timothy McGrew.

So howza baby, then?

[Kimstu]

Oh sorry 'dude, I think I got you mixed up with a poster in another recent discussion who dropped out temporarily on account of an imminent baby.

[erislover]

@SentientMeat

Actually, erl, having read through the thread again I note that it is the introduction of the word “reality” which causes confusion, not the word “physical”.

No, it was the word ‘physical’ which bothered me and only because I know precisely how you mean it.

I can (and do) define the physical to be that described by physics. Physics is a science. That science refers solely to the physical is thus a tautology.

I wouldn’t argue with this in that I would say the same thing, but we aren’t using “physical” the same way. That’s the problem, I think.

More detailed response later, I need to get drunk now and pretend Kerry won.

[Loopydude]

@Kimstu

Oh sorry 'dude, I think I got you mixed up with a poster in another recent discussion who dropped out temporarily on account of an imminent baby.

No prob! The wife an I are trying, so I’ll take this as an advance ;).

Also, thanks for the link. I will read with interest.

[Lamia]

If I remember my history properly (and I may not; I was never that interested in Aristotle, I was more of a Plato gal), the problem with some later Aristotelians wasn’t so much that they thought Aristotle actually forbid/discouraged experimentation. It was that they didn’t consider it necessary to test Aristotle’s claims. They believed he was correct about everything, so why bother? This was unfortunate, but when a thinker is held in such high esteem their work sometimes becomes accepted as dogma. That’s not a peculiar shortcoming of Artistotle.

[SentientMeat]

Kimstu: fascinating lecture. Could you recommend which, if any, of those references provides the best in-depth overview of medieval natural philosophy?

[Kimstu]

Well, Marshall Clagett’s Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages is a good book IMO, although it’s not really an overview of medieval natural philosophy. If I think of a better reference I’ll get back to you…

[ambushed]

As long as there are bleeding edges in science, science will need philosophy, at least to provide a challenge to it’s reasoning. Scientists are often held as exemplars of reason, but there are times when they’re just not up to working through the logic of their positions.

Though that sounds like typical postmodernist drivel, I hope to convince you it’s not. Let me use an actual example:

Consider the recent popular science book, How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker. It’s a good read that argues (among other things) for the massive modularity hypothesis of consciousness and behavior by stringing together what seems like convincing premises and arguments in persuasive ways. His skill as a scientists and writer makes the logic seem scientifically sound.

It’s not.

It took analytical philosopher Jerry Fodor to illustrate the serious flaws in Pinker’s logic (and those who share his computational, MM view), which he did quite masterfully in his own book, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way. Fodor demonstrates with his powerful logical analysis that, as strong as evolutionary cognitive psychology seems when viewed from just the right angle, it cannot be correct, at least as currently envisioned. It’s a blind alley. Thus, philosophy has shown that Pinker, Cosmides, Tooby, et al will just have to go back to the drawing board, and that’s a damned valuable service to science.

Science will need philosophy as long as doubt exists.

[SentientMeat]

Having read both of those books, ambushed, I’d balk a little at that characterisation of Pinker’s approach as a “blind alley”. Of course the human brain is not literally like a silicon-based computer, and any attempt to describe it as such is bound to be explanatorily deficient for some phenomena. And it’s also a little oversimplistic to represent Pinker vs. Fodor as a scientist vs. a philosopher; Fodor himself is well respected in cognitive science, and I’d say he was pointing out inconsistencies as a scientist just as much as a philosopher.

In fact, Fodor and Pinker largely agree on most of cognitive science’s working conclusions to date. If anything, this is merely two different interpretations of the same facts in a particular scientific field - after all, different interpretations of the iridium layer and the Chixulub crater regarding the extinction of the dinosaurs doesn’t render archaeology in toto a blind alley; that’s rather a Creationist trick. There are disagreements over details in any field, from climatology to cosmology. Disagreement is what science is all about, ultimately.

But your overall point is entirely correct. Science relies on falsification. It doesn’t matter who does the falsifying.

[tim314]

@erislover

Oh, quite so. I’m just saying, the possibility of circular reasoning becomes quite great when philosophy outlines science which explains data. There is a pretty clear path. Many philosophers over time have, shall we politely say, overstepped their bounds (most easily: greek philosophers). Philosophy is, above all, an activity, and to the extent it touches empirical existence it will be affected by it. We should just use caution when doing so.

Oh, OK, we agree then.

@erislover

@tim314

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.

Heh, just as, you know, a hypothetical.

You mean some philosopher has actually made such a claim? I certainly Kant recall it ever happening.

[ambushed]

@SentientMeat

Having read both of those books, ambushed, I’d balk a little at that characterisation of Pinker’s approach as a “blind alley”. Of course the human brain is not literally like a silicon-based computer, and any attempt to describe it as such is bound to be explanatorily deficient for some phenomena.

With respect, Fodor’s argument – revealing the absence or impossibility of abduction in the context of Pinker’s massively modular computational theory – is the central thesis and criticism of Fodor’s book, and shows that Pinker’s theory is simply insupportable. This is no minor matter! Fodor’s reasoning makes plain that MM cannot survive even as a preliminary theory without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And even though Fodor agrees that the computational theory is the best cognitive theory we have (and I well realize that’s never been meant to be taken as literally computerlike), he nevertheless thinks it’s profoundly flawed and probably must be replaced if we are to advance.

@SentientMeat

And it’s also a little oversimplistic to represent Pinker vs. Fodor as a scientist vs. a philosopher; Fodor himself is well respected in cognitive science, and I’d say he was pointing out inconsistencies as a scientist just as much as a philosopher.

I do not share your opinion. The overwhelming majority of Fodor’s book is his powerful logical analysis. His work represents exactly what analytic philosophers do. But please don’t think I’m trying to place philosophy “ahead” of science (whatever that might mean). I’m just illustrating that not all scientists are as good at analytical logic as professional analytical philosophers like Fodor.