Science and Philosophy
They need each other. Here’s why.
This is the first in a new series of articles on “Science and Philosophy”.
“A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”
- Albert Einstein, Letter to Robert Thornton, 1944
Originally published at https://www.psychologytoday.com
With this quote, a group of philosophers and scientists (Laplane et al. 2019) recently opened a joined article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in which they were arguing that scientists are wrong to think that philosophy has no role to play in science. To the contrary, they are outlining “Why science needs philosophy”, inspiring the very creation of this blog.
As universities and academia are increasingly faced with budget cuts, even famous scientists have started to bash philosophy, the supposed king among the humanities. Now, philosophy is a quite diverse discipline so the philosopher and cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett, is right to point out that much philosophy is, in fact, pretty embarrassing, but this is by no means unique to philosophy. The same claim could easily be made for much of science. Good philosophy and good science often distinguish themselves by being hardly distinguishable from each other. Both Einstein and Newton were very concerned with philosophical issues, and the most successful philosophers were quite concerned with the scientific work of their time (from Aristotle to Descartes and Hume to W.V.O. Quine).
Nowadays science and philosophy are often defined with strict boundaries, scientists engaging in philosophical questions get accused of overstepping the boundaries of their discipline and philosophers talking about scientific issues are largely ignored, sometimes justifiably for a lack of insight into the scientific work that has been done already. This, however, is a mistake. What we call science has historically been called natural philosophy. This is something we should not forget as psychology has only recently detached itself from philosophy. Instead, philosophy should be seen as a form of highly abstract science. This is similar to Wilfried Sellars (1962) definition of philosophy as the striving for an understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Science without philosophy, then, would really just be a restricted, stale and instrumental form of science, lacking a fundamental part of what it means to understand the world we live in.
I can here only join Laplane et al. call to:
“see philosophy and science as located on a continuum. Philosophy and science share the tools of logic, conceptual analysis, and rigorous argumentation. Yet philosophers can operate these tools with degrees of thoroughness, freedom, and theoretical abstraction that practising researchers often cannot afford in their daily activities. Philosophers with the relevant scientific knowledge can then contribute significantly to the advancement of science at all levels of the scientific enterprise from theory to experiment as the above examples show.”
The goal of this blog is then twofold:
- Clear up misconceptions of philosophy and how science works
- Show the strength of science AND philosophy to answer life’s persistent questions and bridge the supposed boundaries between the two
The upcoming articles by a diverse range of authors will hopefully manage to illustrate and convince the reader that science without philosophy and philosophy without science are stale.
Stay tuned!
Originally published at https://www.psychologytoday.com
