Is Philosophy Obsolete Now? Will it Ever Be?

Lately, I was having some reflections on the earthquake that happened and claimed many lives, and while listening the philosophical reflections from our guest Prof. Cengiz Çakmak in a live session with Dr. C. Cengiz Çevik, I figured out something that I deem to be very interesting. As Cengiz Çakmak was talking about science and philosophy, he started talking about scientific thought then progressed into rational thought, before talking about beliefs in turn. While following the speech, I became aware of a thought. Could we roughly fit philosophy into a category of being still rational but not necessarily scientific? What kind of an information model would this draw? Let’s investigate. Having defined some borders for concepts, this article will also end up having an ability to give an answer to the question of “Is philosophy obsolete”? Because I think the obsoletion question has to be preceded by defining the responsibility area first.

Please bear in mind that this is only an investigation into only one perspective, not the full picture or a full formula which would entail many volumes of a very long book on what is philosophy. Also seeing the visuals, please don’t think that we are doing something constructivist here. We are inventing a symbolic language as a side path, and they are not necessary to be understood by the reader, at all. The shapes are only doodles that help iterating the whole possibilities in a very transparent way. The reader is not only dining, but also is in the kitchen. You are free to watch the process, but you can also just eat the food.

Variations and Combinations of Information Types

Let’s start with a very simple thought, then first variate the thought, then combinate the variations of thoughts to investigate further.

Formal science is very concrete and it has a high inclination not to change much. You don’t see mathematical formulas being falsified so frequently. To keep the investigation simple we will not distinguish formal science from the empirical science much, which specifies less certain sciences. It could be another article to investigate what is the gray area between empirical science and philosophy, and how the border could be drawn, if it can be drawn at all. Though here, we will treat all science equally to keep the flow of thought simple.

Now, let’s start. What happens when we connect scientific thought (concrete box) with scientific thought using scientific thought (concrete line)?

For example, if we take two mathematical formulas (which are scientific informations) and connect them using another mathematical formula to create a new information, the result still will be a scientific information because it will not be affected by an unfalsifiable and/or unreproducable thought. Of course unfalsifiability and unreproducability are not the only breaking forces for scientific thought, but we don’t want to reinvent the whole scientific thought here in this article. We will behave very evasive for side paths. We will only have brief examples, because details would be seeking to form a scientific classification method, which is not our intention. We are only exposing the paths that lead to important questions. We are not be answering all of the questions we pose, and most of the time we will only show the path and not even be asking the questions that the path leads to, at all.

Now, let’s try a variation of the connection; let’s connect two scientific thought with rational thought. — We are not going to investigate what is rationality here. That’s a very complex topic, but I think everybody has somewhat an agreement on what it is, at least in the abstract sense. Let’s leave that and chase one rabbit at a time.

I think the most obvious example for two scientific thought being connected by rationality would be philosophy of science. An investigation into “What is scientific”, “What is math”, “How it should be done”, these all are good examples for this.

Of course, we will need to add some disclaimer here. Not all rational thought is philosophy. Though, I think we can roughly say that condensed rational thought can be called as philosophy, in its light and heavy forms. “Condensed rational thought” tag will exclude most novels, and many blog articles that talk about usual information. One could claim that Platon’s books are also both novels and fictions, so let’s not go too strict with the filter. This article is not about telling what is philosophy anyways. Now let’s put the disclaimer here; for the rest, we will use “rational information” as an equivalent word to “philosophy” to reduce unnecessary repetitions regarding combinations, only under the context of this article, assuming that the reader will repeat this paragraph in their mind to expand the meaning to “condensed rational information” and “philosophy” when “rational information” is used.

Let’s try the next combination. What could happen if we connect two scientific thoughts with a belief? I think this one would need a proper thought since it is very important, and there are many confusions/arguments here.

If you are investigating etymology of a word which would also be doing science — as some would be surprised — , and if you want to see whether a word is coming from another language of the same family as the first step, this is somewhat a belief that one is following. Most of the time a belief might precede a scientific find, at least eventually. Science is extremely understanding and patient. It can wait for millennia. Going back to the etymology case we were discussing, the investigation that started with the belief could end up abruptly when you find a weak connection (a word that was actually borrowed outside the language family), discarding the rest of the trace. Because we are rejecting what is not coming from the prioritized source. You would not possibly be able to check and evaluate all languages and all their words, since that would need huge amount of information about all of them. In this specific sense, beliefs could be used as a prioritization mark, in case that an investigation into all possibilities of solutions is not feasible, and according to situation it could end up with correct or wrong result. The wrong result would still be scientific since it would supply a method of falsifiability, at least to an acceptable level.

We could also connect two scientific thoughts with beliefs to create a whole new science in the long run. Because this one will need a huge jump till it can reach a certain falsifiability. The string theory is in that state right now. There are many constructs that are “guessed”, and there are many missing connections. I think what is important here, is being able to admit what is guessed and what is proven, and being open to alternative solutions as they stay unfalsified.

Another way that scientific thoughts could be connected via beliefs could be the pseudoscientific thought, a thought type that is both faulty and hazardously close to science. You could connect statistical data with statistical data, using beliefs. This is the famous “correlation is not causation” case. A famous example could be stating that people with certain physical properties would have certain behaviors. This was called phrenology, and it was quite successful convincing even the academy for a couple of decades in the beginning of the nineteenth century, till the time that it was discredited and collapsed very fast, as fast as it appeared and diffused in the first place. At the end it remained only a tool for ignorant people that still want to make racist or sexist claims even in today’s world.

We could also connect two scientific thoughts using religious beliefs. An example could be the people using sacred texts to prove already proven scientific inventions, then connecting them further using numerology etc. These endeavours are generally like two sided blade. They excite totally unrelated people by showing twisted science and some might end up finding the truth, but these endeavours also have the possibility of contaminating the established way of doing science, diminishing the scaling speed of the quality in which it is produced, maybe even having the potential of just destroying the way it is done. Failure in production is a strong deterrent even for anti-intellectual governments against meddling with how science is produced, unless there is an illusionary replacement that will rot the whole thing on the long run.

Could we connect two rational thoughts with scientific thought? We actually could. There are many cases in philosophy, where philosophers did natural sciences using philosophical understanding without the tools they needed, and these informations ended up being used millennia later. As an example, when the book of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura was rediscovered in 1417, it was able to bring thousands of years old thoughts of atomists into the renaissance era, which excited scientists into going forward and finding out what is there. So yes, philosophy can pave the way into scientific information.

Connecting two rational thought with rational thought would most certainly end up with a philosophical result. I don’t think anybody would argue with that. Reach out to any philosophical book, and you will see this methodology.
Though, this could also end up with beliefs and even religions in the case that a cargo cult forms around the information, by people that don’t have the capacity to reevaluate the rational information under changing circumstances.

future predictions

Now, we are getting into a controversial area. Could we connect two beliefs with rational thought and call that philosophy? There are arguments in this area about some variations of the concept. Maybe we could call this as bound rational thought, since we are connecting the thoughts that are not rational using rational thought. Please note that not rational doesn’t mean irrational.

One of the conflict areas is theological philosophy. Some argue that this is just plain theology. I think we could investigate some breakdowns and ask some subquestions.

We could be arguing whether there is a god, and think about what the causal signs are. One could claim that, since there is no religious thought here, it could be called just pure philosophy, though it is also possible to claim that somebody without being exposed to any religion would not actually think about a god, contrary to the general belief of believers of a faith that has a single god. This would be of very low priority in the backlog of philosophy — as it already became in last century really fast — , and even if we were to investigate a maker, that wouldn’t necessarily be omnipotent and omnisapient, or having powers close to that (An alien child’s homework? Results of some cellular automata test?). So we can claim that existing religions have a huge affect on whether this question should get so much attention which means philosophy may not actually be interested in, but considering the two sides of the argument, it might be better to leave this without paving a way to a conclusion.

As another variation of connecting two beliefs with rationality, we could also have a look at the discussion of trinity using philosophical arguments. Using philosophical arguments would of course bring some good quality bound rational discussion to the area, but the discussion would seem very esoteric from outside. Also it is not so certain how dense the rational argumentation would be. Beliefs interwoven with rationality might be hard to follow for those that don’t share the belief as their fundamentals, creating a black holes interwoven with informations that can’t follow each other, and not so interesting as outsiders’ daily lives are not affected by the conclusions, and not so useful as the methodology won’t be easy to extract and use somewhere else since it is interwoven with some vacuums. The god example at least, had a few belief axioms that bound rationality can arise from. And since we are already here, we could step a little bit further without getting totally lost, and ask this extra question; should philosophical information be interesting universally among diverse populations? Would Platon still be interesting if what he discusses was irrelevant to us? Is an information abstract enough to be accepted as condensed rational thought, if it is applicable only for a specific time and culture? Let’s only ask the question and instead of finding an answer, try to classify whether the type of information we are discussing about is universal, or not, so that whether the question is applicable for what we are talking about. We can easily guess that nobody except the believers of the specific religion would be interested in that discussion truly, regarding they are only into condensed rational thought. Let’s try to help increase the value of the information with some arguments which could make the discussion interesting to everybody: Historical results could make the theological philosophy interesting. “What do people do when they believe in certain things?”, we could be after the answer of this question. Though, now we have another problem. We abstracted the motivation so much, that we are as objective as an anthropologist would be, and we are not doing theological philosophy anymore. The result is science, and it is not adding the two beliefs into itself, but it is only acting on the beliefs.

Could we scientifically connect two beliefs? An example, I think, could be anthropology. We could take two tribes from totally different parts of the world and investigate their belief systems, then compare them to see what are common, what are different, if those have anything to do with their environmental conditions, and call it science securely. Though, I think we need to be very careful about one thing. Scientifically processing an information should produce science, otherwise what we are doing will not be science, but only imitating to do it.

I think we had enough variations and combinations to have an idea about why we thought condensed rationality could be thought as philosophy. But they were still abstract.

Without explaining and leaving it to the reader to think about, we can tell that it might be a good practice to think about philosophical works and think whether condensed rationality that is not necessarily scientific category actually distinguishes them from other types of works. Like news that are a collection of facts (no thoughts), like blog articles that are a collection of thoughts (not condensed), beliefs (not rational), science (not condense), fictions (not condensed and not rational most of the time) etc.

One could also imagine some very abstract mathematics as condensed rationality and think that our definition is having some problem. Though, there are many people that think, for example, category theory, which explains maths in very very abstract sense, can also be thought as philosophy. Though, let’s make up another requirement and ask, does philosophy need to have some wiggling room to have some authenticity, depending on its producer? Maths doesn’t have much of that room. We don’t have an answer here. Enough with this one, let’s leave an open door here and move on.

Considering these, I think condensed rationality that is not necessarily scientific could be a good place to start. Not a good place to start this article, which we are nearly finishing, but a good place to try to define what is philosophy.

Let’s go back the the question of the article. Is Philosophy Obsolete Now? Will it Ever Be? As now you might guess after seeing playground of the foundational idea of this article, the answer is no. As science expands and expands, there will always be a rational cloud around it, since there will be always borders to what we can actually prove.

One could ask that our conclusion assumes science will also never stop, and I think we owe an explanation for that. Intangible information always has the capacity to create other intangible information on top of that. Excuse me for a minute to give an example from somewhere totally unexpected. Once you create Lord of The Rings, you have the capacity to add things infinitely into it. Coming back to science, as many don’t notice, mathematics is expanding into type theory and category theory nowadays in a very fast speed, and it finds lots of application areas in computing which speeds the endeavour up even more. So even formal science is not as static nowadays, as one might suppose. There are many things that are being built on top of the fundamentals, and abstract will always let more combinations and variations on top of it. We have finite words in languages in a specific time, though it is possible to create infinite amount of books. You can even make up your own words and grammar. There is no end. Therefore, science can’t stop. Therefore, philosophy can’t stop, so it is not, and will not ever be, obsolete.

Farewell.