C Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science
Let's start with philosophy itself; obviously a vast enterprise, but what is it all about, really? Philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith attributes “The best one-sentence summary of what philosophy is up to”9 to the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, who had said that philosophy is concerned with “how things in the broadest possible sense of that term hang together in the broadest possible sense of that term”
What, we wonder, would the “broadest possible sense of things” be? Its an all-encompassing vision that covers, literally, anything you can name.
Within it, we find the philosophy of science, which studies the activity and products of science and is distinct from the philosophy of nature, which tries to work out what the data provided by science are telling us about the world. Sellars wants to find out how all the things “hang together,” which implies that things do hang together somehow. That there is a sort of unity to philosophy. A nonphilosopher may find the suggestion of unity (or maybe unities) of philosophical knowledge to be surprising since philosophers specialize in analytical dissections of terms and concepts that, judging by the erudite summary essays in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,10 for example, reveal more evidence of things hanging apart than hanging together. In fact, the philosopher's skill in analysis is probably the one that can benefit scientists the most.The aerial view of science, via the works of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,11 with its “paradigm shifts” and “normal science,” and the responses to Kuhn made by philosophers Imre Lakatos,12 Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend, might enrich your life, but it doesn't hold much in the way of practical utility for us. The philosophers generally want to account for “rational theory choice” and explain the scientist's state of mind; that is, why we adopt some ideas and resist others.
But Kuhn thinks that theory choice is not a purely rational process; it depends on several factors, including social influences. While social and other irrational forces are important, we don't know much about how they affect scientific decisions. Later, we'll touch on how our psychology affects our use of the hypothesis, although this is not what philosophers concern themselves with. In fact, where the philosopher's quest is heading is not very obvious. Indeed, one philosopher of science asks, “What kind of theory should the philosopher of science develop?”13 Perhaps scientists will benefit more from philosophy of science when this question is answered.To keep from fighting old battles, I suggest that we focus on a few philosophical ideas that might help us out, even if our treatment of them would not pass philosophical muster. We need a small, workaday collection of concepts and nuggets of philosophical wisdom, rather than the hyper-abstract perspective that philosophy of science tends to offer.
For instance, most scientists would accept Weinberg's common-sense notion of realism. The world (“world” means the entire physical universe, or “nature”; the three are synonymous here) does exist independently of our experience, although our perceptions (cognitive as well as sensory) can shape our experience and, therefore, our understanding of it. If you're a scientific realist, you accept the principles of empiricism: scientific knowledge is acquired by observations and experimental tests of the real world. The philosopher allows that it is reasonable for science to aim for “accurate descriptions (and other representations) of what reality is actually like.”14 However, scientists aspire to more than mere descriptions, which is what a tourist visiting a new city does for the folks back home. Scientists want to understand reality by finding and testing explanations, including theoretical mechanisms, hypotheses, predictions, and other explanatory devices.
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More on the topic C Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science:
- References
- References
- Introduction
- PREFACE
- Embodied, Situated, and Extended Cognition
- Solutions
- SYMBOLS, FORMULAS, AND WFFS