A scientist can do science while taking the methodology of her field for granted. But having to give a philosophical account of or a justification for that methodology deeper than "this is what we do and it works pretty well for the problems we want to solve" may render that methodology strange looking and hard to keep using. Then again, I'm told what Einstein did for physics had as much to do with proposing a philosophical reorganization of the theoretical territory as it did with new empirical data.
So perhaps the odd scientist can put some philosophical training to good scientific use. Watch the hashtag pubscience for more details.
Especially since we're leaving it to the scientists to tell us what the sciences are. It's quite possible that the sciences won't end up having a common core -- that there won't be any there there. But, as one of my labmates in graduate school used to put it, "One person's 'whoop-de-doo' is another person's life's work.
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Discover World-Changing Science. Liao, for example, argued recently in The Atlantic that we begin voluntarily bioengineering ourselves to lower our carbon footprints and to become generally more virtuous.
And Prof. For by this definition we might well brand every academic discipline as science. I hesitate to even mention such options lest enterprising deans get any ideas. Philosophy can too. The intellectual culture of scientism clouds our understanding of science itself. While science and philosophy do at times overlap, they are fundamentally different approaches to understanding. So philosophers should not add to the conceptual confusion that subsumes all knowledge into science.
Rather, we should underscore the fact that various disciplines we ordinarily treat as science are at least as — if not more —philosophical than scientific. Take for example mathematics, theoretical physics, psychology and economics.
These are predominately rational conceptual disciplines. That is, they are not chiefly reliant on empirical observation. For unlike science, they may be conducted while sitting in an armchair with eyes closed. Does this mean these fields do not yield objective knowledge? The question is frankly absurd. Indeed if any of their findings count as genuine knowledge, they may actually be more enduring. For unlike empirical observations, which may be mistaken or incomplete, philosophical findings depend primarily on rational and logical principles.
As such, whereas science tends to alter and update its findings day to day through trial and error, logical deductions are timeless.
Such experimental anomalies are confounding. However, 5 plus 7 will always equal No amount of further observation will change that. And while mathematics is empirically testable at such rudimentary levels, it stops being so in its purest forms, like analysis and number theory. Proofs in these areas are conducted entirely conceptually.
Similarly with logic, certain arguments are proven inexorably valid while others are inexorably invalid. To declare categorically the uselessness of philosophy for science is therefore to have complete knowledge of the goals, method, and subject matter of science.
But one can only argue about what those goals and subject matter should be by doing philosophy—more specifically, philosophy of science. Furthermore, we can only infer general statements about the usefulness of philosophy for science, from the study of a limited number of historical cases, by appending that study with a philosophical argument: hence by doing philosophy, in the way that historians and philosophers of science do it.
Does this debunk the argument about the death of philosophy? I submit that it does. For he who wants to insist on philosophy being useless for science must not try to rationally argue for this conviction, but must keep it as a matter of private opinion: for as soon as he starts to rationalize his view, he must start philosophizing.
Indeed, training in philosophy has at least this use, that it prevents us from being bad philosophers. But, when arguing for the usefulness of philosophy, a logical argument is not necessarily the most convincing one. It might lead us to the idea that perhaps there is some genuine value in philosophy which is useful or even necessary for science and for scientists after all.
I will defend the view that philosophy is useful to scientists, and that some amount of philosophical activity is necessary in order to construct a theoretical framework for doing science. The necessity of philosophy for science can easily be understood from a Kuhnian perspective on how science develops.
Thomas Kuhn explicates progress in science not as a linear process of theoretical formulation and experimental verification or refutation of scientific theories, but in terms of revolutions and changes of paradigm Kuhn A paradigm is for Kuhn not a cookbook recipe about the mathematical laws and mechanical workings of the universe or a set of equations and technical terms and procedures.
Paradigms include ways of looking at the world, practices of instrumentation, traditions of research, shared values and beliefs about which questions are considered to be scientific. Nowadays we might want to stretch this concept even further to include institutional conditions, governmental constraints and market stimuli that may be supportive of particular paradigms. Footnote 4 Scientists working in different paradigms view the world in different ways, Kuhn has emphasized.
Their basic assumptions about the kinds of entities there are in the world differ, as do the kinds of primary properties they attribute to those entities. Scientists working in different paradigms may disagree, as did Einstein and Bohr, about what makes a good theory or a good explanation; or about what it means to understand a problem. In other words, there are a wide range of ontological, epistemic, and ethical presuppositions weaved into any given scientific paradigm for some examples of this, see Sect.
If it is the case that a paradigm cannot come to birth, gain support, defeat its competitors, consolidate, and eventually die without such a set of explicit or at least tacit presuppositions, then presuppositions must be an intrinsic and necessary part of science regarded as a pursuit of truth.
Such philosophical presuppositions are contributory to scientific theories, even if the theories are formally independent of them, because axioms cannot even be formulated without an agreement, taken from common and technical language, and justified within a wider paradigm, over what the terms mean and what kinds of entities they apply to; without implicit or explicit assumptions about how the terms relate to experimentally measurable quantities; without prescriptions for how the results of the theory can be verified or falsified.
Paradigms also suggest meaningful goals and open questions for the theory. Thus philosophy plays a heuristic role in the discovery of new scientific theories de Regt : paradigms can function as guides towards the formulation of theories that describe entities of one type or another. As de Regt has cogently argued see also the examples in the next Section , many great scientific innovators have at some point studied the works of philosophers and developed philosophical views of their own.
This did not always happen very systematically, but the interest in philosophy developed by these scientists was at least above average and in turn had an important heuristic function in the formulation of new scientific theories de Regt Implicit in the heuristic role of philosophy is also an important analytic function, as I stressed in Sect. Footnote 5 One task of philosophy is to scrutinize the concepts and presuppositions of scientific theories, to analyse and lay bare what is implicit in a particular scientific paradigm.
It is a philosophical task—one which is often carried out by physicists—to clarify the concepts of space, time, matter, energy, information, causality, etc. This analysis is philosophical in so far as it makes explicit the implicit assumptions in the uses of these concepts: assumptions that scientific theories do not themselves normally state.
Hence it moves beyond the point where the concepts appear as irreducible elements in the postulates of a theory. This analytic function should ultimately allow for a further step of integration, where the concepts of one science are related to the concepts of another. The analytic function of philosophy might not only feed back into science, but become a starting point for philosophy itself: discovering what entities science assumes there to be in the world can be a useful starting point for philosophical reflection on nature.
It seems key that philosophical stances on nature and science be compatible with the kinds of objects and relations that science finds. Footnote 6. To allow for, indeed to naturally incorporate into its own framework and build upon, the kinds of entities that science encounters in the world, and their properties and relations; Footnote 7.
To scrutinize the terms and presuppositions of science, i. To discover standards for what good theories, valid modes of explanation, and appropriate scientific methods are: to offer an epistemology that does not thwart, but stimulates scientific progress;. To point out and articulate the interrelations between concepts that are found in different domains of the natural sciences as well as the social sciences and the humanities;.
To explain how observations fit in the broader picture of the world, and to create a language where scientific results and broader human experience can complement and mutually enrich each other. This list is neither exhaustive nor unique. Some of these general ideas will be instantiated in the two examples given in the next section.
The above points to a necessary relationship between science and philosophy. Science needs philosophy, as we have seen, in its two functions: heuristic, and analytic.
Especially during changes of paradigm, philosophical debate will be part of the activities of science. None of this is to say that scientists need to be philosophers: most of them are not. So, philosophers may be drawn in at that point.
But it is also not to say that professional philosophers should be doing all of the above tasks. Part of those tasks—surely 1 to 4—are often performed by scientists. Thus what I envisage here is a collaboration between scientists and philosophers. Indeed, I think we should be careful in distinguishing the disciplinary differences from the professional or individual ones.
Saying that science, as a systematic theoretical and experimental study of the natural world, needs philosophy—which I have defined, in the analytic tradition, as the study of all the results of the sciences and humanities using the method of conceptual analysis—is not to say that each scientist requires philosophy. Philosophy may be merely a useful tool for scientists. In this section, I give two examples where philosophical discussion has been genuinely contributory to science, along the lines discussed in 4a ii.
Working from 4a ii we can now easily see that these examples in fact become a case in point: they illustrate the importance of philosophy for science.
They make clear the need for having the right philosophical framework when doing science. If a conceptual enterprise such as philosophy were completely neutral, or indeed useless, to science, it could not be harmful to it in any important way either. But the fact is that: A some philosophical doctrines have been harmful for science while others have been productive; B it is impossible to have no philosophy at all as I argued in 4a ; C the reason philosophy was harmful in some cases is because it was used in a positive way, according to its heuristic function from 4a ii.
And this heuristic function can indeed also be used positively. It follows from A to C that philosophy must be relevant to science in its own specific way, even if it is only in the manner of setting necessary intellectual preconditions of freedom of mind, of trust in the power of reason and of experimental observation, etc. History shows that it is hard for scientists to free themselves from outdated philosophical modes of thought.
This highlights the importance of investing in having a philosophical framework that allows for the kinds of entities that science encounters in the world.
Specific tasks for philosophy are as listed in 4a ii. Next we will study positive historical examples where 4a ii is at work, thereby refuting the historical argument formulated in 2b.
To refute the historical argument, it suffices to show one example where philosophy has been genuinely contributory to the progress of science. The example will be interesting in so far as it also sheds light on why it was that philosophy contributed to science, thus instantiating elements of 4a ii. There are many such examples. Kepler Footnote 8 and Sommerfeld were both inspired by Pythagorean philosophical ideas when working out their models of the harmonies of the solar system and of the atom, respectively.
Let me here concentrate on another, more recent, example. It concerns the current revolution in quantum information technology. In the past ten years we have seen the first commercialization of quantum randomness: the first bank transaction built on the basis of a code encrypted not by the usual algorithms of classical cryptography which rely on unproven mathematical assumptions such as the difficulty in factorizing large prime numbers , but based on the new field of quantum cryptography: a technique for encoding messages based on the notion of entanglement between particles at long distances.
Quantum cryptography has been successfully developed and commercialized by several groups over the past twenty years or so. As it turns out, the quantum information revolution is rooted in the efforts of scientists who saw philosophical enquiry as a necessary step in their quest for knowledge.
There are two key moments in the history of quantum mechanics when physical progress crucially depended on asking the right philosophical questions. In , conflicting views on quantum physics started to crystallize. In doing so, Heisenberg was voicing the shared feelings of his colleagues Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac, also present at the conference.
Among those properties was the lack of determinacy in physical quantities and events. Also, Heisenberg and co. A few years later, in , Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen made the nature of their discomfort with quantum theory explicit in a famous article that came to be known as the EPR thought experiment. They considered pairs of correlated particles separated at long distances. The possibility to measure a property for example, the momentum of the first particle automatically gives information about the value of that property for the second particle, without measuring that property for the second particle, since the particles are in a state of correlation.
And the possibility to measure the complementary property for example, the position of the first particle would as well determine the value of that quantity for the second particle. But because of the assumption that measurements done on the first particle cannot affect the properties of the second particle after all, the particles are well-separated , the second particle must have had the values of its position and momentum determined before any measurements were done on the first particle since, according to the formalism of quantum mechanics, a measurement of the first particle determines the value of that property for the other particle, in both cases.
Since, according to standard quantum mechanics, a particle cannot simultaneously have determinate values for both its position and its momentum, this means that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory: for it does not predict properties for the second particle that, according to the argument, it can clearly have.
The EPR argument is philosophical in the sense explained earlier, in Sect. But it also contains two substantive ontological assumptions. This led EPR to push the physical arguments farther than anybody had ever done before. The study of paradoxes borne out by thought experiments such as EPR has always played a major role in physics; but the resolution of such paradoxical situations almost invariably requires a philosophical stance about the principles and methods that are valued and deemed legitimate.
The EPR paper was truly philosophical in so far at it analysed and questioned the conceptual foundations of quantum theory.
Does this mean that Einstein was being professional philosophers while he worked on that paper? Of course not. Einstein was doing the philosophy that physics required at that point in time—and it was philosophy because he was reflecting on, and critically and constructively engaging with, the conceptual foundations of quantum theory.
To do that, he needed philosophical tools. But he was of course also doing physics. So, by bringing philosophical methods into physics, he was advancing physics. I believe it is artificial, at such interdisciplinary intersections, to attempt to make too fixed a demarcation between physics and philosophy.
Einstein was simply doing ground-breaking work that required methods from both fields. The next episode in this story of physics and philosophy took place many years later. After the publication of EPR, physicists continued to philosophize about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but eventually the discussion died out. During the cold war, science and in particular physics gained much prestige. As class sizes grew, increasingly less time was spent on big questions and philosophical debates in the classrooms.
While part of the reason for this decrease of attention on philosophical issues may have been pragmatic—philosophical discussions with large groups of students are hard to manage, and grading essay questions in exams is significantly more time consuming than computational questions—a vision was certainly at play about what education in science and technology should prepare students for. The interpretation of quantum mechanics was unlikely to prepare students who could provide societies with new gadgets or governments with new powerful weapons, whereas technical mastery of the formulas actually might.
Making gadgets was the new goal of physics. When we asked about the foundational issues in quantum theory, we were told that no one fully understood them but that concern with them was no longer part of science. The job was to take quantum mechanics as given and apply it to new problems. But instrumentalism had to give way to other kinds of motivation for doing physics. Economic recession, budget cuts, and the decrease in the number of physics jobs made class sizes decrease again.
Physicists once again had the time to think about the meaning of what they were doing. Additional money came from NASA. Soon Puthoff would be associated with a third strand of events around the Bay Area.
A dubious consortium of hippie physicists and quasi-crackpots formed an unlikely discussion group. They alternated their musings about all things quantum and the meaning of life with drinking parties and psychedelic drug use. They came to be known as the Fundamental Fysiks Group and eventually found a generous patron in self-help industry forerunner and multi-millionaire guru Werner Erhard.
One goal of the hippie scientists was to use quantum mechanics for superluminal faster-than-light communication. This would include communication with their deceased colleagues. Needless to say, many of their arguments were misguided, but their contribution to physics was of lasting endurance. They not only put the interpretation of quantum mechanics on the research and teaching agenda; they analysed the EPR arguments and the important contributions to this discussion made by John Bell, David Bohm, and others, which had escaped the attention of scientists until then; they helped clarify the issues at stake, developed new thought experiments of their own, and raised awareness that quantum nonlocality might be useful in long-distance communication.
Save the crucial wrong conclusion that superluminal communication was possible, several set-ups and techniques the hippies considered did not differ significantly from the ones that quantum communication uses nowadays. As David Kaiser has argued Kaiser , p. And in a few critical instances, their work instigated major breakthroughs that—with hindsight—we may now recognize as laying crucial groundwork for quantum information science. Like Einstein, the Fundamental Fysiks Group worked at the intersection of physics and philosophy.
They brought philosophical methods and literature to bear on problems in physics, and as such they did the kind of work that I argue physics periodically needs—regardless of who does that work, whether it is the physicists themselves or the professional philosophers. The two examples illustrate some of the tasks of philosophy for science listed in Sect. Progress not driven by such philosophical questions is hard to imagine in this case; the philosophical debate that actually took place acted as a positive, guiding force that pushed science further; fuelled by the posing of legitimate and relevant philosophical questions in their quest for new physics, by their being insistent on philosophical clarity and coherence rather than content with just technical mastery of the formulas, which was the trend of the day.
There are two sides to the objection regarding the difference between science and philosophy as forms of scholarship: subject matters on the one hand, methodology on the other. I will be brief about the distinction in subject matter. The universe, possible universes other than our own, elementary particles, life, are all subjects of concern for both natural science and philosophy.
Therefore, on those overlaps science and philosophy cannot be distinguished on the basis of their subject matters alone. But I also submit that any such division cannot be made once and for all—the division is both vague at any point in time, as well as dynamical.
But, as I am suggesting, the mantra is as comfortable as it is lacking in accuracy in fully reflecting the nature of the relationship between science and philosophy.
Agreed: science and philosophy are in principle different forms of scholarship. For established fields of science such as classical mechanics or electromagnetism, there may be much truth in the statement that science is practically interested in how-questions, defined by the framework of the particular paradigm one is working in.
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