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Philosophy and Science
Can Philosophy be replaced with Science?

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Philosophy and Science
HamishMacSporran
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Posted 10/30/09 - 07:31 AM:
quote post
#11
MarchHare wrote:

There is always a danger of getting stuck in a restrictive research paradigm (particularly one that generates a lot of awkardly testable null hypotheses) but one of the best attributes of science is its self-correcting nature. A flawed research paradigm, operating in an environment of open empirical scientific research, will not last forever. What is important in science is not so much having the right premises, but having the right methodology; put a bit poetically, it's not a question of being in the right place to find where you want to go, but being able to read the map.


Neuroscientist Christof Koch seems to advocate avoiding analysing premises in too much detail before starting.

He recommends the 'principle of limited sloppiness' in forming working hypotheses for the purpose of experiment:
From Quest for Consciousness:

In order to make progress on these difficult questions without getting bogged down in diversionary skirmishes, I will have to make some assumptions without justifying them in too much detail. These provisional working hypotheses might well need to be revised or even rejected later on. The physicist turned molecular biologist Max Delbruck advocated “The Principle of Limited Sloppiness” when it comes to experiments. He recommended trying things in a rough and ready manner to see whether they might work out. I apply this principle to the realm of ideas about the brain.


He cites historical instances where progress has not required formal clarity:
From Quest for Consciousness:

Historically, significant scientific progress has commonly been achieved in the absence of formal definitions. For instance, the phenomenological laws of electrical current ?ow were formulated by Ohm, Ampere, and Volta well before the discovery of the electron in 1892 by Thompson. For the time being, therefore, I adopt the above working definition of consciousness and will see how far I can get with it.


He criticises the methods of philosophy in answering real world questions:
From Quest for Consciousness:

Philosophical arguments, based on logical analysis coupled to introspection, are not powerful enough to deal with the real world with all of its subtleties in a decisive manner. The philosophical method is at its best when formulating questions, but does not have much of a track record at answering them.


And he suggests that formal definitions can be inhibitive:
From Quest for Consciousness:

Until the problem is better understood, a more formal definition of consciousness is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both.


Steven Weinberg takes a similarly critical view of the influence of philosophical doctrines on scientific progress:
From Against Philosophy:

Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than ever they were of use. Take, for example, the venerable doctrine of "mechanism,"
the idea that nature operates through pushes and pulls of material particles or fluids.
...
In science as in politics or economics we are in great danger from heroic ideas that have outlived their usefulness. The heroic past of mechanism gave it such prestige that the followers of Descartes had trouble
accepting Newton's theory of the solar system.
...
It was not until well into the eighteenth century that Continental philosophers began to feel comfortable with the idea of action at a distance.


The lesson to be learned is that philosophical speculation should be avoided, because it can act as a brake on genuine scientific progress. The ideal situation is where theorising is constrained to questions about observable phenomena.

MarchHare wrote:

Why this constraint on theorisation? By building models that lay out the consequences of our intuitive thoughts about the subject, we can potentially get to experiments that actually test our models.


Let's be clear, when I talked about features being shoe-horned into models, I wasn't talking about features which are proposed in relation to experimental data. I'm talking about people claiming that my models would be better if they included some philosophical characteristic or property, without reference to the data I have gathered, or even any future experiments. This is exactly the sort of problem that Weinberg identifies in relation to mechanistic philosophy.

Experiment, in science, isn't just a means of testing our theories, it is also a means of inhibiting our tendency to fanciful speculation. Wherever that tendency arises, even if it is in science, it acts to obscure real progress.

From The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon:

For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence, nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.
Simple Occam
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Posted 11/03/09 - 02:23 PM:
quote post
#12
John Searle wrote:


What is the cause of cancer?, is a scientific and not a philosophical question. The question, What is the nature of causation?, is a philosophical question.


Professor Searle,

It would seem from this that science has, first, to have an answer to a philosophical question about the nature of causation before it can give a scientific answer about the cause of cancer. If we say that radition or smoking is a cause of cancer, scientifically, doesn't the scientist have to mean something specific by "cause" such that it employs some philosophical explanation as to the nature of causation? This explanation is not a matter of science at all.

And, since philosophy is not at all unanimous about the nature of causation, how is it that we can be so certain about the science which is based on it? Indeed the OP recognizes, "that philosophy is failing to make meaningful headway and needs to be rebuilt on empirical foundations." If philosophy is to contribue something meaningful to the understanding of the nature of causation or other distinctly philosophical questions, it can no longer try to do so by rationalistic, deductive methods.

The real question is how can philosophy be empirical in a way that is not just reiterative of empirical science? You still seem to regard philosophy as "very general" and tending "to concern matters that are in some broad sense conceptual or logical." To be general, conceptual and logical is to be rather devoid of meaningful empirical content. Again, as the OP points out, this is the path to ungrounded speculation in the rationalist and, these days, the analytical traditions.
MarchHare
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Posted 11/04/09 - 02:48 AM:
quote post
#13
HamishMacSporran wrote:

Neuroscientist Christof Koch seems to advocate avoiding analysing premises in too much detail before starting.


Do you know anyone who DOESN'T advocate avoiding analysing premises in too much detail?

HMS wrote:
He recommends the 'principle of limited sloppiness' in forming working hypotheses for the purpose of experiment:
From Quest for Consciousness:

In order to make progress on these difficult questions without getting bogged down in diversionary skirmishes, I will have to make some assumptions without justifying them in too much detail. These provisional working hypotheses might well need to be revised or even rejected later on. The physicist turned molecular biologist Max Delbruck advocated “The Principle of Limited Sloppiness” when it comes to experiments. He recommended trying things in a rough and ready manner to see whether they might work out. I apply this principle to the realm of ideas about the brain.


Sounds rather fallibilist, but this principle isn't falisifiable, so...

"HMS" wrote:
He cites historical instances where progress has not required formal clarity:
From Quest for Consciousness:

Historically, significant scientific progress has commonly been achieved in the absence of formal definitions. For instance, the phenomenological laws of electrical current ?ow were formulated by Ohm, Ampere, and Volta well before the discovery of the electron in 1892 by Thompson. For the time being, therefore, I adopt the above working definition of consciousness and will see how far I can get with it.


That's one example and even that is an irrelevant example to the point; that is an example of a discovery at one level without a full understanding of the supervenience relations of the subject of the inquiry. I suppose by "formal definition" he might mean "an alterable definition that does not make a claim to completeness", but in that case he's not saying anything controversial at all. It seems like waste paper to me, anyway.

"HMS" wrote:
He criticises the methods of philosophy in answering real world questions:
From Quest for Consciousness:

Philosophical arguments, based on logical analysis coupled to introspection, are not powerful enough to deal with the real world with all of its subtleties in a decisive manner. The philosophical method is at its best when formulating questions, but does not have much of a track record at answering them.


I quite agree with him here. Speculative metaphysics can at best be a process of question-forming and is never an adequate method for answering questions. This is a good point in itself, but is a non-sequitur with regard to the viability of philosophy, which of course is much more than just speculative metaphysics.

"HMS" wrote:
And he suggests that formal definitions can be inhibitive:
From Quest for Consciousness:

Until the problem is better understood, a more formal definition of consciousness is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both.


I'm inclined to agree. While the philosophy of mind is not my field, I'm sceptical of the search for necessary and/or sufficient conditions and much of post-Quinian conceptual analysis. If you don't think that the meaning of words comes from ideas, the entire enterprise of this kind of conceptual analysis is, frankly, bizarre.

"HMS" wrote:
Steven Weinberg takes a similarly critical view of the influence of philosophical doctrines on scientific progress:
From Against Philosophy:

Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than ever they were of use. Take, for example, the venerable doctrine of "mechanism,"
the idea that nature operates through pushes and pulls of material particles or fluids.
...
In science as in politics or economics we are in great danger from heroic ideas that have outlived their usefulness. The heroic past of mechanism gave it such prestige that the followers of Descartes had trouble
accepting Newton's theory of the solar system.
...
It was not until well into the eighteenth century that Continental philosophers began to feel comfortable with the idea of action at a distance.


Far too weasly to engage with.

"HMS" wrote:
The lesson to be learned is that philosophical speculation should be avoided, because it can act as a brake on genuine scientific progress. The ideal situation is where theorising is constrained to questions about observable phenomena.


Are you saying no-one should theorise about non-observables? That WOULD be a radical idea.

"HMS" wrote:
Let's be clear, when I talked about features being shoe-horned into models, I wasn't talking about features which are proposed in relation to experimental data. I'm talking about people claiming that my models would be better if they included some philosophical characteristic or property, without reference to the data I have gathered, or even any future experiments. This is exactly the sort of problem that Weinberg identifies in relation to mechanistic philosophy.


Well, I don't know these people or their arguments, so I can hardly speak for them.

"HMS" wrote:
Experiment, in science, isn't just a means of testing our theories, it is also a means of inhibiting our tendency to fanciful speculation. Wherever that tendency arises, even if it is in science, it acts to obscure real progress.


I don't know anyone who has defended "fanciful speculation".
Doubt requires a reason to doubt.

Nothing is immune from potential doubt.

The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.
Ghosthack
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Posted 11/04/09 - 11:50 PM:
quote post
#14
In reply to some posts of Hamish.

The early Wittgenstein idea that in order for something to have sense it must be possible to construct a picture of the it being the case or not being the case, the implication being that if no such picture can be constructed that it is nonsense, is a very strange theory of meaning. Of course Wittgenstein later abandoned it but one wonders why it took someone who was supposedly so brilliant a decade to change his thoughts on language.

Had Wittgenstein never read poetry before or heard a person say "Ouch!" to indicate they were in pain? Perhaps Wittgenstein's residence in England shielded him from all sorts of artistic movements occuring in post-WWI continental Europe that communicated through abstract methods. Perhaps if he had read some dadaist or surrealist writings he would have abandoned the whole idea of a picture theory of meaning. Or maybe if he had asked himself what the picture was of a man cupping his hand and flicking it beneath his chin was.

In reply to the OP and Professor Searle.

I believe that answering the demarcation is approached differently within the so-called analytic and continental traditions.

The analytic tradition seems to take two views on the relationship between philosophy and science. One is that philosophy is separate from science and the situation is similar to Gould's idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria except that philosophy takes the place of religion. The other view is that philosophy operates within science and is conducive to scientific inquiry. This is a 'passive' philosophy defanged to that it can do no real damage. It is the philosophy of a Wittgenstein, meant to elucidate, clear up confusions, and serve as a type of colonic or emetic, a scalpel meant to dispose of any bad science or bad logic within science. Above all it is not meant to substantially interfere with science. In both views, science is superior to philosophy, either implicitly or explicitly.

The analytical philosopher will say "We will search for sense datum, eliminate theoretical terms, condemn pseudoscience, and rid ourselves of outdated metaphysical propositions. "

The continental tradition inverts this formula. Philosophy is to come before science. This philosophy is to be a philosophy of man. It is clear from the analytic tradition what they make of man. Man is some type of computing machine, into which go sense data and out of which come scientific propositions. I will give three examples of this focus on man within continental philosophy.

The first is Nietszche. In Beyond Good and Evil he calls psychology the 'queen of all the sciences' and seeks to place psychology in its rightful place before the other sciences. His meaning is that to understand the sciences first we must understand ourselves. This is a common theme when Nietszche writes about the sciences and the concepts we use in the sciences.

The second was Husserl. He probably made the most systematic attempt at placing man before the sciences. The phenomenology of experience, how our consciousness works, such questions and answers are meant to lay a foundation for the sciences.

The third was Heidegger. Heidegger wrote often about the sciences and how man and his Existence and being-in-the-world made science possible and made a philosophy of man before a philosophy of science necessary.

So it seems that the question of a demarcation depends on the question of the dignity that we assign philosophy, i.e. whether it is to be master or slave of the sciences. For a Nietszche, Husserl, or Heidegger all scientific statements are also philosophical statements and in principle there can be no strict demarcation. Science for them is largely what we call by the name 'science'. That we call this and not that science reveals more about our thinking than about science.

In the view of the continental tradition we try to demarcate science because we are forgetting its origins within philosophy. I am not talking about its historical origins which are well known. We forget the origins because we forget the admonition of the great Sophist Protagoras that 'man is the measure of all things'. We forget that the world only 'exists' for man and that to account for science first we must account for man. And this is precisely what philosophy does, it is always accounting for man.

I feel like I've written too much for one post so I'll stop here.



Edited by Ghosthack on 11/05/09 - 12:14 AM
Simple Occam
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Posted 11/08/09 - 02:49 PM:
quote post
#15
Ghosthack wrote:


We forget the origins because we forget the admonition of the great Sophist Protagoras that 'man is the measure of all things'. We forget that the world only 'exists' for man and that to account for science first we must account for man. And this is precisely what philosophy does, it is always accounting for man.


How can a Continental philosopher, or any educated person in the 21st Century, believe that you can "account for man" without, first, identifying "man" as the species homo sapiens sapiens that evolved through natural selection on planet Earth? To introduce such scientific terms into one's account of man is to presuppose that you have already accounted for the science that uses them.If by "man" you mean "an object of reflection" or "self'awareness", then this, too, must be the same "reflecting thing" that evolved on Earth as this animal species.

But if, in the Analytical tradition, one either separates the two discipline, per Gould, or relegate philosophy to Wittgensteinian tasks of clarification and logical analysis "not meant to substantially interfere with science. In both views, science is superior to philosophy, either implicitly or explicitly."
Ghosthack
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Posted 11/08/09 - 04:56 PM:
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#16
Simple Occam wrote:

How can a Continental philosopher, or any educated person in the 21st Century, believe that you can "account for man" without, first, identifying "man" as the species homo sapiens sapiens that evolved through natural selection on planet Earth? To introduce such scientific terms into one's account of man is to presuppose that you have already accounted for the science that uses them.If by "man" you mean "an object of reflection" or "self'awareness", then this, too, must be the same "reflecting thing" that evolved on Earth as this animal species.


This is a strange view that I find to be without merit. Let's do a thought experiment. Say I were to point out to you a man standing over there. He looks like any ordinary man and I ask you 'Is that a man?'. You answer 'Yes of course it's a man'. Then I tell you 'He has not evolved though'. Would you then say 'He is not a man then'. Of course not. No one defines man by his evolution. But if I said 'He does not intend' or 'He has no world' then you would be reticent to call him a man.

Continental philosophy defines man in terms of existential structures that do not require any prior scientific theorizing or experiment.
Simple Occam
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Posted 11/09/09 - 03:05 AM:
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#17
Ghosthack wrote:


Continental philosophy defines man in terms of existential structures that do not require any prior scientific theorizing or experiment.


Not even a continental philosoher can't define an existential structure into existence. Maybe if your thought experiment used clearer thoughts, it would be a better experiment. For example, if you told me that the fellow over there did not evolve, I'd ask how he got here then. Depending on your answer, I could decide if he was a man or not.
  • Maybe he was cloned from a man that did evolve; this presents an interesting moral perspective but, generally, I'd say a clone is a man.
  • If you said he was formed by special creation, I would ask for some evidence of the Creator. Depending how that worked out I might toss the theory of evolution entirely.
  • If you said he had no parents or DNA molocules, I'd say he was not a man. If you say that the thing you are pointing to "intends or "has a world", I still would not think it was a man but some other very strange kind of reflective subject, perhaps a robot.

But I'd say anyone with an education would use an empirical natural science, like biology, or social science like psychology, to understand themselves and other people at least as much as they used "existential structures" which, I assume, you just make up in your head because they are devoid of scientific theorizing or experiment. Define things however you want but don't assume that because you can promulgate a certain definition that you have proven the existence of anything.
HamishMacSporran
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Posted 11/09/09 - 04:24 AM:
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#18
Simple Occam wrote:
The real question is how can philosophy be empirical in a way that is not just reiterative of empirical science?

Perhaps the new experimental philosophy is the answer?
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html

Appropriately enough, its chosen symbol is a burning armchair. The point seems to be to investigate just how intuitive the so called 'intuitions' that philosophers appeal to really are. In this sense it provides a model of man, as Ghosthack suggested was necessary, but an empirical model rather than a philosophical model. A reasonable question is how different any of it is to psychology or cognitive science.
Simple Occam
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Posted 11/09/09 - 08:34 AM:
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#19
Thanks, Harnish. I will check that out.

But before I do, I'll note that I'm not talking about rational intuitions one could just dream up in an armchair. I'm thinking of modeling the universe as existing of matter/energy and space only. Anything you can imagine existing as an object in space could exist So, I'm not looking for self-evident truths, metaphysical speculations, wise sayings, premonitions, or prophesies. This kind of empirical approach to ontology would postulate and reason only about things that can be imagined or "intuited" as objects in space.

But I will check your link before I comment further.
Ghosthack
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Posted 11/09/09 - 12:53 PM:
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#20
Experimental philosophy doesn't seem like a good idea, particularly when it comes to asking people questions. Often people will not give truthful answers but do not know they are doing so. This effect was well known by Wittgenstein and he called it retro-rationalizing or something like that. You ask a person what they were thinking or doing during some time and they give you some answer that society has inculcated on them. They rationalize something that they were doing instinctively. All our actions are being interpreted even by ourselves.

A purely empirical ontology isn't possible. Our ontologies are a function of the culture we live in.
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