B Science Versus Philosophy?
In a chapter entitled “Against Philosophy,”3 physics Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg posits that, apart from protecting physicists from the misconceptions of philosophers, philosophy is generally harmful to science.
Its rare good ideas outlive their usefulness and hold back progress. In the 1800s, for example, the doctrine of positivism encouraged scientists to base their thinking concretely on observable entities and to shun unobservable ones. Einstein credited the positivist thinking of the physicist Ernst Mach for encouraging him to question the reality of Newtonian space and time, which led to Einstein’s radical conception of space-time in the Special Theory of Relativity. But eventually positivism became a drag on the imagination, ultimately preventing Mach himself from ever accepting the reality of atoms.What exactly is it that Weinberg rejects? Philosophy? All of it? It’s a big subject. He makes the revealing comment that “In our hunt for the final theory, physicists are more like hounds than hawks; we have become good at sniffing around on the ground for traces of the beauty we expect in the laws of nature, but we do not seem to be able to see the path to the truth from the heights of philosophy.”
Setting aside the fascinating issue of natural laws having beauty (not to mention an odor), Weinberg’s main complaint is that the lofty philosophical outlook is disconnected from the gritty world of science. He is bemused by those who “think that there are things that can be said about space and time on the basis of pure thought.” Weinberg has read a lot of philosophy and, in mulling over the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”4 he gets in a dig about the “unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy” for science. Richard Feynman, another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was more succinct and less subtle: “Philosophers are always on the outside making stupid remarks.”5 Feynman has no patience with the grand but endless “why” questions that philosophers tend to ask. In the grand scheme of things, the only answer is: nobody knows.
So let’s forget about why and get on with figuring nature out.On the other hand, neither Weinberg nor Feynman is entirely innocent of philosophy. Weinberg admits to a “rough and ready realism” (a belief that an objective reality exists outside of our brains) and says we need a “tentative worldview to make progress.” He accepts that science “must ultimately test its theories against observation”; all of these are bona fide philosophical topics. And Feynman took to heart the significance of a number of philosophical problems and wrestled publicly with them: for example, what is the nature of explanation.6 It appears that there are philosophical threads that these scientists tacitly admit are important and beneficial.
For their part, philosophers have not always helped build bridges. The philosopher W V. O. Quine once declared that “for scientific or philosophical purposes,
the best we can do is to give up on the notion of knowledge as a bad job.”7 Yet scientists are in the business of finding (or creating) knowledge that, despite its uncertainties, mostly works well enough—sometimes spectacularly well. And, indeed, some philosophers see the interactions between philosophy and science in a way that scientists would find more to their liking. According to philosopher of science Larry Laudan,8 “New or innovative methodological ideas have generally not emerged, nor have old ones been abandoned, as the result of internal, dialectical counterpoint between rival philosophical positions or schools..........................................................................
Rather, it is shifting scientific beliefs which have been chiefly responsible for the major doctrinal shifts within the philosophy of science” In other words, science leads philosophy, not the other way around. In any case, although science grew out of philosophy, there is now a rift between them.
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