The Philosophy of Science: An Idiosyncratic Primer
The meandering path followed by the philosophy of science can be seen to begin with history’s first scientist:
“No one in the history of civilization has shaped our understanding of science and natural philosophy more than the great Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), who exerted a profound and pervasive influence for more than two thousand years […].”
In 1620, Francis Bacon improved on Aristotle’s ideas, paving the way for a new understanding of scientific inquiry, resting on a reductionist approach and the focus on inductive reasoning. During the same time, Robert Boyle, a philosopher, physicist, and inventor, was instrumental in establishing experiments as the cornerstone of physical sciences. He is also viewed as one of the founders of modern chemistry.
In the early 20th Century, the philosophical school of logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, attempted to formalize the notions that science is grounded in mathematical logic and empirical inquiry. The Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians regularly convening from 1924 to 1936, was of central influence. The defining idea of logical positivism was that science follows a clear pattern of discovery, instructed by inductive reasoning. Observations inspire empirical concepts and inform formal notions, which uncover abstract laws. However, regarding the overall merit of philosophy:
“Logical positivism sought to put an end to what it regarded to be irresolvable metaphysical pseudo-disputes […].”
Surprisingly, the movement’s main philosophical aim was hard to attain:
“What started off as a well-founded and legitimate inquiry into the workings of nature soon faced serious difficulties and the opposition of influential scholars, some even from within the movement.”
Finally, in 1967, the philosopher John Passmore declared:
“Logical positivism, then, is dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes.”
David Hume, who strongly influenced Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, was a strong proponent of the empiricist notion that knowledge must stem from experience. He also pointed out the critical flaw of induction. To infer the future from the past assumes an implicit belief that the laws of nature do not suddenly change. The theoretical physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder observes:
“Let me begin by noting that we don’t know whether the laws of nature will remain the same even tomorrow.”
The string theorist Brian Greene gives us a concrete example. The elusive Higgs boson quantum field is responsible for the elementary particles of the standard model gaining mass. It currently has a vacuum expectation value of 246.22 GeV. Now:
“Just as quantum mechanics allows an electron occasionally to tunnel out of a trap, so too does it allow for the value of the Higgs field to tunnel through a barrier. […] One moment it would be life as usual. The next moment we would cease to be.”
Back to Hossenfelder:
“When I first learned about Hume’s problem of induction, as an undergrad, I was stumped. I felt that someone had pulled the carpet of reality out from under me, to reveal a big gaping void.”
In contrast to Hume, thinkers like René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that knowledge could very well have non-empirical aspects. They asserted the importance of rationality, essentially assigning an epistemological role to the immanent reality of the human mind.
The critical rationalists would follow in the footsteps of the logical positivists. Karl Popper was the key figure advancing this epistemological philosophy. His influential insight was that scientific theories can never be validated but only falsified. Essentially, critical rationalists employed a top-down logic, which moves from the abstract to the empirical. In other words, deduction. Overall, science is now understood as a construct that is assembled by practitioners who continually test and adapt its contents. Scientific progression is thus seen as an evolutionary and organic process.
But, alas, such a clean-cut conception of the enterprise of science would also fail. How can formal concepts be derived from experience without the help of induction? Critically, deduction suffers from its own pitfalls:
“Intuition and deduction can provide us with knowledge of necessary truths such as those found in mathematics and logic, but such knowledge is not substantive knowledge of the external world. It is only knowledge of the relations of our own ideas.”
Moreover, as the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos pointed out, by following Popper’s method of falsification:
“[…] we may well end up by eliminating a true, and accepting a false, theory.”
Science appears to be a messy affair. This was realized by Thomas Kuhn. His enormously influential work on the history and philosophy of science is called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Kuhn boldly overthrew the idealized notion that science is a linear process of knowledge generation. He outlined how science evolves with discrete jumps:
1. An established paradigm dominates, and there is a consensus in the scientific community on what the fundamental questions and main methods are.
2. A crisis emerges as anomalies continue to appear, questioning and challenging the established rules. Crack-papering becomes ever more ineffective.
3. A new paradigm gives birth to a novel worldview addressing the anomalies.
An example of such a paradigm shift is given by the influential theoretical physicist Sidney Coleman:
“There is a popular model of a breakthrough in theoretical physics. A field of physics is afflicted with a serious contradiction. Many attempts are made to resolve the contradiction; finally, one succeeds. The solution involves deep insights and concepts previously thought to have little or nothing to do with the problem. It unifies old phenomena and predicts unexpected (but eventually observed) new ones. Finally, it generates new physics: the methods used are successfully extended beyond their original domain.”
A central tenet of this philosophy is that of incommensurability, a concept Kuhn and, independently, the radical philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend introduced. The term refers to echo chambers in which scientists are trapped, deeply invested in a specific conceptual framework, worldview, paradigm, or belief. As a result, two scientists not sharing the same echo chamber will find it challenging to understand each other’s reasoning and motivation. One is starkly reminded of the current state of the philosophy of mind, where scholars are faced with competing metaphysical stances they find patently absurd.
Essentially, Kuhn ignited a paradigm shift demystifying a romantic view of science by rendering it a normal human enterprise plagued by irrationality and shortcomings. The discoverer of quantum physics, Max Planck, fatalistically exclaimed:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg agrees:
“Kuhn made the shift from one paradigm to another seem more like a religious conversion than an exercise in reason.”
Adding to the dilemma, the practitioners of science are dependent on funding which follows its own logic. In the words of the historian Yuval Noah Harari:
“Scientists themselves are not always aware of the political, economic and religious interests that control the flow of money; many scientists do, in fact, act out of pure intellectual curiosity. However, only rarely do scientists dictate the scientific agenda.”
In an unexpected turn of events, unsuspecting and commonsensical attempts to find a sound, solid, and objective basis for scientific progress failed. Here now, the murky mires of philosophy appear, namely postmodernism, poststructuralism’s cousin. The developments of Western industrialized society since the beginning of the 19th Century are described by modernism. Central ideas were the existence of objective true beliefs and that progression is always linear, steadily improving the status quo. Like poststructuralism, postmodernism rejects monolithic and systematic knowledge by acknowledging ambiguity, uncertainty, and diversity in meaning and truth. While simple definitions fail to capture the multifaceted essence of this philosophy, some authors have been able to convey its characteristics eloquently. For instance, the cultural historian Richard Tarnas dedicated a chapter, called “The Postmodern Mind,” to this topic in his epic book “The Passion of the Western Mind,” an intellectual journey covering the last two and a half millennia that have shaped our modern worldview. Therein we can read:
“What is called postmodern varies considerably according to context, but in its most general and widespread form, the postmodern mind may be viewed as an open-ended, indeterminate set of attitudes that has been shaped by a great diversity of intellectual and cultural currents. […] There is an appreciation of the plasticity and constant change of reality and knowledge, a stress on the priority of concrete experience over fixed abstract principles, and a conviction that no single a priori thought system should govern belief or investigation. It is recognized that human knowledge is subjectively determined by a multitude of factors; that objective essences, or things-in-themselves, are neither accessible nor possible; and that the value of all truths and assumptions must be continually subjected to direct testing. The critical search for truth is constrained to be tolerant of ambiguity and pluralism, and its outcome will necessarily be knowledge that is relative and fallible rather than absolute or certain.
[…] Reality is not a solid, self-contained given but a fluid, unfolding process, an ‘open universe,’ continually affected and molded by one’s actions and beliefs. […] Reality is in some sense constructed by the mind, not simply perceived by it, and many such constructions are possible, none necessarily sovereign.
[…] The prevalence of the Kuhnian concept of ‘paradigms’ in current discourse is highly characteristic of postmodern thought, reflecting a critical awareness of the mind’s fundamentally interpretive nature.
[…] Hence all meaning is ultimately undecidable, and there is no ‘true’ meaning. No underlying primal reality can be said to provide the foundation for human attempts to represent truth. […]. The multiplicity of incommensurable human truths exposes and defeats the conventional assumption that the mind can progress ever forward to a nearer grasp of reality.”
This sympathetic reading of postmodernism seems to address the many existential challenges posed by any knowledge generation system conceived by humans. Viewed in a positive light, postmodern claims to knowledge are personally experienceable in the following way. Someone will always be able to introduce you to:
1. novel ideas you were unaware of;
2. a new way of thinking about a subject you thought you knew everything about.
However, the idiosyncratic, incomplete, contingent, and provisional nature of truth in postmodern thought has alienated many scientists. Existentially threatening, postmodernism opens the doors to the Scylla and Charybdis of constructivism and relativism. This triad of philosophical currents was at the root of the mentioned science wars. In 2003, Weinberg published a book addressing these perceived anti-science threats and attacks, called “Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries.” He sees Kuhn as an enabler of “philosophers, historians, sociologists, and cultural critics who question the objective character of scientific knowledge.” Indeed, troublingly:
“If the transition from one paradigm to another cannot be judged by any external standard, then perhaps it is culture rather than nature that dictates the content of scientific theories.”
This implies that knowledge is effectively constructed. Constructivist epistemology is a branch of the philosophy of science arguing that science is the product of mental constructs resulting from personal and subjective sensory experiences of, and interactions with, the external world. Ernst von Glasersfeld introduced the notion of radical constructivism. He was a philosopher and also instrumental in formulating cybernetics. Radical constructivism questions the validity of all external sensory input. We are thrown back to Plato’s cave and Kant’s noumenon. However, neuroscience tells us how our sober waking perception of reality is essentially a hallucination, a construct. Radical constructivism helped the field of cybernetics evolve, making it a better tool for taming complexity. The physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster introduced the idea of second-order cybernetics:
“During the second wave of cybernetics between 1960 and 1985, reflexivity becomes central. Cybernetic systems were redefined so that the observer was fundamentally part of the system being studied, and is sometimes referred to as a cybernetics of cybernetics.”
Von Glasersfeld’s philosophical influence was crucial:
“Cybernetics for Heinz von Foerster involves observing systems, a notion that came to be consistent with the philosophy of radical constructivism (which takes a pragmatic position on reality, truth, and human understanding), and which was a major shift from more traditional positivist thinking about cybernetics. As a result, a perspective arose that cybernetics could be distinguished locally into distinct orders each with their own rationality that conform to given local paradigms. Therefore, for instance, its 1st order conforms to the positivist paradigm, and 2nd order essentially conforms to the constructivist paradigm.”
Yet again, the challenge of understanding complex systems inspires thinkers to go beyond simple and naïve metaphysical assumptions and critically question the very nature of understanding, observing, and self-referencing. Von Foerster notes:
“Objectivity is the illusion that observations are made without an observer.”
Constructivism opens the door to relativism. This philosophical doctrine agitates not only scientists but also theologians. As an example, Joseph Ratzinger warned in a homily given at the beginning of the conclave in 2005 from which he would emerge as Pope Benedict XVI:
“We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate standard consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”
If knowledge is constructed and contingent, then it can be rational for one group to believe a particular thesis, while at the same time, it is rational for a different group to believe in its antithesis. Again, in the words of Weinberg:
“If scientific theories can be judged only within the context of a particular paradigm, then in this respect the scientific theories of any one paradigm are not privileged over other ways of looking at the world, such as shamanism and creationism.”
This observation goes to the core of what constitutes a knowledge generation system. Science’s claim is that it holds a privileged status and that other means of knowing are insufficient or even delusional. However, in the context of the recalcitrant existential challenges encountered in science, especially when confronted with the ultimate nature of things, Weinberg’s statement needs reassessing. Indeed, most religious systems are dogmatic and static, and their explanatory power is reduced to the volition of a supreme being. Moreover, as Weinberg observes:
“If you believe God is the creator, well, why is God that way? The religious person is left with a mystery which is no less than the mystery with which science leaves us.”
The situation regarding shamanism is not so clear, however, especially in the context of altered states of consciousness ritually induced by the consumption of psychedelic organisms. This question of unorthodox modes of knowledge generation is addressed in a later chapter.
A name inexorably linked to the philosophy of relativism is that of Paul Feyerabend. He was a controversial philosopher of science, famously dubbed “the worst enemy of science.” Feyerabend insisted that science is inherently anarchistic in its epistemology, a position presented in 1975 in the book “Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge.” Other titles of his publications include “Farewell to Reason” and “Tyranny of Science.” In summary:
“The history of science is so complex that if we insist on a general methodology which will not inhibit progress the only ‘rule’ it will contain will be the useless suggestion: ‘anything goes.’ In particular, logical empiricist methodologies and Popper’s Critical Rationalism would inhibit scientific progress by enforcing restrictive conditions on new theories.”
Especially Feyerabend’s “Anything goes!” rallying cry drew the wrath of scientists. However, he was firmly committed to open-mindedness and often changed his philosophical ideas:
“I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously, and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up.”
To Feyerabend, both relativism and absolutism were problematic concepts, and he called the two notions “cantankerous twins.” Despite his questionable notoriety, Feyerabend spent the 1980s teaching the philosophy of science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, a famous stronghold of science. This was also the institution Albert Einstein failed the entry exam to join but would later go on to teach theoretical physics at. Feyerabend died in the year 1994.
Interestingly, some contemporary assessments of Feyerabend’s philosophy include a more sympathetic understanding:
“‘The Tyranny of Science’ should therefore be interpreted as Feyerabend’s attempts to dissolve conflicts and establish harmony between science, society, and philosophy, on the one hand, and between scientists, philosophers, and the public, on the other.”
Indeed, it has not escaped some scientists that something strange is happening in the knowledge-generating system called science. For instance, the physicist David Deutsch who made seminal contributions to quantum computation and who criticized postmodernism as “bad philosophy.” He acknowledges the fractal-like nature of scientific knowledge and that it is an approximate and open-ended enterprise:
“The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates. That must be so, if only because there can be no such thing as an ultimate explanation: just as ‘the gods did it’ is always a bad explanation, so any other purported foundation of all explanations must be bad too.”
Popper agrees with colorful words:
“I think there is only one way to science — or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part — unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children.”
Recall that Einstein had exclaimed that “only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach” the universal elementary laws of nature, echoing a very postmodern sentiment.
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The above is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of a book on the fundamental nature of reality and consciousness, which I am currently writing. See this post for more information. There are 38 references omitted from the text which the interested (and patient) reader will find in the finished book.
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