Has philosophy been replaced by science?
Is the quote from Hawking above correct? Has science taken over completely from philosophy?
To be sure, even those who would agree with Hawking would allow that philosophy remains relevant for certain necessarily subjective areas of inquiry: ethics, aesthetics, perhaps even the philosophy of language. But what about the questions:
How do we know what we know?
What actually exists?
What is fundamental?
What is subjective experience?
To my mind, these seem like inherently philosophical questions. They are questions whose answers must be informed by the natural sciences, but not the sort of questions that can be answered by the empirical sciences.
Yet it is also clear that scientists often do try to answer these questions. Indeed, in the world of popular science books, I would argue that perhaps most of what is addressed are questions of philosophy— i.e., questions that are not empirically falsifiable or verifiable, questions whose answers make metaphysical claims.
The books above are either written by practicing scientists or journalists who specialize in the natural sciences. However, they are filled to the brim with hypotheses about metaphysics.
For just one example, take the popular claim in many works of popular physics: “eternalism is true.” That is, “all times, past, present, and future, exist, and exist in the same sense.” It is not clear if it is even possible to test such a hypothesis empirically. Indeed, I would argue that evidence from physics itself actually cautions against such a view. But in any event, in every case I can recall, the case for eternalism has relied heavily on philosophical arguments and analogies to mathematics (I may do an article on this issue in the future).
Metaphysics: Not So Dead After All?
Metaphysics is alive and well. Every big-name physicist appears to be advancing their own metaphysics these days.
- Carlo Rovelli has set forth a relational ontology of interaction that is similar to that advocated by second century Buddhist philosopher Lu-Trub Nāgārjuna.
- Max Tegmark has his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, the idea that the universe is an abstract, mathematical object — a sort of ontic structural realism cum mathematical Platonism.
- John Wheeler and the many scientists he has inspired have advanced a new sort of immaterialism in the form of “It From Bit,” — the hypothesis that the universe is fundamentally composed of information.
- David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd , Vlatko Vedral, Paul Davies, etc. take this “informational” view in new directions, but all have advanced conceptions of a “computational universe.”
- Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, advances his Cognitive Realism, an idealist ontology, based on an empirical argument.
- Complexity studies is often built around metaphysical claims about emergence.
- Information theory and complexity studies both tend to make claims about the ontological existence of incorporeal entities across a number of fields, e.g. that things like economic recession, turbulence, etc. actually exist and are not reducible to fundamental particles.
- The move to explain things in terms of processes instead of substances is a metaphysical move. E.g., the move from understanding fire in terms of phlogiston (a substance) to understanding fire in terms of combustion (a process); heat as the substance caloric, to heat existing in terms of random kinetic motion; life in terms of vital substance to life being understood in terms of certain kinds of far from thermodynamic equilibrium processes.
- Quantum field theory tells us the “fundamental” part(icle) can only be explained in terms of the whole, which is a mariological claim.
- Claims about computation being analogous to causality are also metaphysics.
Black Hole Cosmology or multiverse theories (Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics or those stemming from Eternal Cosmic Inflation) necessarily have to make metaphysical claims about what exists. Likewise, eternalism, the claim that “all points in time have equal reality” or opposed models of “local becoming,” are both metaphysical theories. Similarly, string theory makes a set of ontological claims about “what exists” at a “fundamental” level.
That these ontological claims can be vetted using empirical evidence does not make them uniquely different from past metaphysics. As Carlo Rovelli points out, Aristotle’s physics held up for so long precisely because it jives with empirical observations. That is, Galileo’s findings were not intuitive, it requires very precise experimental conditions to confirm that a feather and a cannon ball will fall at the same rate in a vacuum.
Metaphysics is Dead: Long Live Metaphysics!
The point of this article is not to condemn scientists for doing metaphysics. Far from it! I read so many of these texts because I love this sort of thing. Rather, it’s to point out that:
- Metaphysics is not dead.
- Arguably, scientists cannot do science without making metaphysical claims. Theorizing requires doing philosophy.
- The deflationary version of science advanced by Popper and the logical positivists is: A. not how science is actually done; and B. is not how science should be done.
My point is that popular science and “big idea,” theory often actually involves a great deal of philosophy. Sometimes it is quite bad philosophy, and part of this stems from the fact that there was a misguided move in the mid-20th century to make philosophy and science totally separate. This is despite the fact that the two working closely together (with pure mathematics) is what got us relativity and the quantum revolution (GR/SR didn’t from Einstein’s head fully formed, but involved Mach, a philosopher, Robb, a mathematician, etc.).
Those who try to banish philosophy from science just end following one particular brand of philosophy. “People who thought they were avoiding metaphysics were actually “just dogmatically accepting Carnap’s.”
Many scientists seem to understand this. With the retirement of those who grew up at the peak of logical positivism, there seems to be a move towards being more accepting of philosophy. Indeed, scientists co-publishing in scientific journals with philosophers seems to be getting more common, a process helped along by the fact that many philosophers of science hold dual degrees.
Based on what is popular in physics right now, I think it’s possible that we shall soon see an even harder “ontological turn,” in science and philosophy.
Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I can well imagine a world where philosophy is… *gasp*… relevant. No longer a subject mainly known for chronological slogs through the “great names,” we might see all science majors get a class in epistemology, and maybe one in the philosophy of probability theory. For biologists, there could be a core course in the philosophy of biology, for physicists, a core course in the philosophy of physics. Of course, for this to work, these specialized types of philosophy need to stop being largely taught only at the graduate level (or mistaken for science…)
For now, I’ll leave you all with this cherry picked, biased, and maybe slightly slanderous meme that nonetheless sort of follows my point:
