If your goal is to understand the digestive system of some exotic bug, you may have no use at all for a subtle account of scientific theory change, let alone for a firm stand on the question of scientific anti-realism.
You have much more use for information about how to catch the bug, how to get to its digestive system, what sorts of things you could observe measure or manipulate that could give you useful information about its digestive system, how to collect good data, how to tell when you've collected enough data to draw useful conclusions, appropriate methods for processing the data and drawing conclusions, and so forth.
A philosophy of science course doesn't hand the entomologist any of those practical tools for studying the scientific problems around the bug's digestive system. But philosophy of science is aimed at answering different questions than the working scientist is trying to answer. The goal of philosophy of science is not to answer scientific questions, but to answer questions about science.
Does a working scientist need to have learned philosophy of science in order to get the scientific job done? Probably not. Neither does a scientist need to have studied Shakespeare or history to be a good scientist -- but these still might be worthwhile endeavors for the scientist as a person. Every now and then it's nice to be able to think about something besides your day job. Recreational thinking can be fun!
Now, there are some folks who will argue that studying philosophy of science could be detrimental to the practicing scientist. Reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions with its claim that shifts in scientific paradigm have an inescapable subjective component, or even Popper's view of the scientific method that's meant to get around the problem of induction, might blow the young scientist's mind and convince him that the goal of objective knowledge is unattainable. This would probably undermine his efforts to build objective knowledge in the lab.
However, I'd argue that reading Helen Longino's account of how we build objective knowledge -- another philosophical account -- might answer some of the worries raised by Popper, Kuhn, and that crowd, making the young scientist's knowledge-building endeavors seem more promising.
My graduate advisor in chemistry had a little story he told that was supposed to illustrate the dangers for scientists of falling in with the philosophers and historians and sociologists of science: A centipede is doing a beautiful and complicated dance.
An ant walks up to the centipede and says, "That dance is lovely! How do you coordinate all your feet so perfectly to do it? The centipede could do the dance without knowing precisely how each foot was supposed to move relative to the others. A scientist can do science while taking the methodology of her field for granted. But having to give a philosophical account of or a justification for that methodology deeper than "this is what we do and it works pretty well for the problems we want to solve" may render that methodology strange looking and hard to keep using.
Then again, I'm told what Einstein did for physics had as much to do with proposing a philosophical reorganization of the theoretical territory as it did with new empirical data.
So perhaps the odd scientist can put some philosophical training to good scientific use. Watch the hashtag pubscience for more details. Especially since we're leaving it to the scientists to tell us what the sciences are. It's quite possible that the sciences won't end up having a common core -- that there won't be any there there.
But, as one of my labmates in graduate school used to put it, "One person's 'whoop-de-doo' is another person's life's work.
The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Janet D. Thus metaphysics, once banned by the logical positivists in the heyday of their youthful excesses, now thrives happily in analytic philosophy in ways that would have made Carnap, and even Quine, frown. But never mind the old glories—philosophy will never obey all your commands and prohibitions, and it will use whatever tools it can get hold of.
I now get back to the response to the anti-philosophy arguments given in Sect. What can one answer to these arguments, which seem to echo our most endearing notions and intuitions about the nature of science? Can we really deny that science and philosophy are two different worlds; that their subject matters and methods differ? Can we deny that science seeks to explain brute matters that are quite independent of human life?
Can we deny the fact that unquestioned philosophical preconceptions have at times been hampering factors of scientific progress? As I will argue, the doctrine that philosophy is useless for science is not only false: it is also harmful for education, society, and ultimately science itself.
I will do this by advancing three arguments for the usefulness of philosophy for the natural sciences. These arguments include refutations of the misconceptions presented in Sect. They are neither wholly original nor exhaustive, but they should be a first step towards the development of a synergetic relationship between philosophy and the natural sciences. Given the tensions between science and philosophy, vividly expressed by physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss in recent works, trying to gain some clarity in this confused subject is by itself an important and urgent task.
Let me start with a simple contention that responds to a small, logical, part of the previous arguments: what I have called the fallacy of anti-philosophicalism and its refutation. To declare categorically the uselessness of philosophy for science is therefore to have complete knowledge of the goals, method, and subject matter of science. But one can only argue about what those goals and subject matter should be by doing philosophy—more specifically, philosophy of science.
Furthermore, we can only infer general statements about the usefulness of philosophy for science, from the study of a limited number of historical cases, by appending that study with a philosophical argument: hence by doing philosophy, in the way that historians and philosophers of science do it. Does this debunk the argument about the death of philosophy?
I submit that it does. For he who wants to insist on philosophy being useless for science must not try to rationally argue for this conviction, but must keep it as a matter of private opinion: for as soon as he starts to rationalize his view, he must start philosophizing. Indeed, training in philosophy has at least this use, that it prevents us from being bad philosophers.
But, when arguing for the usefulness of philosophy, a logical argument is not necessarily the most convincing one. It might lead us to the idea that perhaps there is some genuine value in philosophy which is useful or even necessary for science and for scientists after all.
I will defend the view that philosophy is useful to scientists, and that some amount of philosophical activity is necessary in order to construct a theoretical framework for doing science. The necessity of philosophy for science can easily be understood from a Kuhnian perspective on how science develops.
Thomas Kuhn explicates progress in science not as a linear process of theoretical formulation and experimental verification or refutation of scientific theories, but in terms of revolutions and changes of paradigm Kuhn A paradigm is for Kuhn not a cookbook recipe about the mathematical laws and mechanical workings of the universe or a set of equations and technical terms and procedures.
Paradigms include ways of looking at the world, practices of instrumentation, traditions of research, shared values and beliefs about which questions are considered to be scientific. Nowadays we might want to stretch this concept even further to include institutional conditions, governmental constraints and market stimuli that may be supportive of particular paradigms.
Footnote 4 Scientists working in different paradigms view the world in different ways, Kuhn has emphasized. Their basic assumptions about the kinds of entities there are in the world differ, as do the kinds of primary properties they attribute to those entities.
Scientists working in different paradigms may disagree, as did Einstein and Bohr, about what makes a good theory or a good explanation; or about what it means to understand a problem. In other words, there are a wide range of ontological, epistemic, and ethical presuppositions weaved into any given scientific paradigm for some examples of this, see Sect. If it is the case that a paradigm cannot come to birth, gain support, defeat its competitors, consolidate, and eventually die without such a set of explicit or at least tacit presuppositions, then presuppositions must be an intrinsic and necessary part of science regarded as a pursuit of truth.
Such philosophical presuppositions are contributory to scientific theories, even if the theories are formally independent of them, because axioms cannot even be formulated without an agreement, taken from common and technical language, and justified within a wider paradigm, over what the terms mean and what kinds of entities they apply to; without implicit or explicit assumptions about how the terms relate to experimentally measurable quantities; without prescriptions for how the results of the theory can be verified or falsified.
Paradigms also suggest meaningful goals and open questions for the theory. Thus philosophy plays a heuristic role in the discovery of new scientific theories de Regt : paradigms can function as guides towards the formulation of theories that describe entities of one type or another. As de Regt has cogently argued see also the examples in the next Section , many great scientific innovators have at some point studied the works of philosophers and developed philosophical views of their own.
This did not always happen very systematically, but the interest in philosophy developed by these scientists was at least above average and in turn had an important heuristic function in the formulation of new scientific theories de Regt Implicit in the heuristic role of philosophy is also an important analytic function, as I stressed in Sect. Footnote 5 One task of philosophy is to scrutinize the concepts and presuppositions of scientific theories, to analyse and lay bare what is implicit in a particular scientific paradigm.
It is a philosophical task—one which is often carried out by physicists—to clarify the concepts of space, time, matter, energy, information, causality, etc. This analysis is philosophical in so far as it makes explicit the implicit assumptions in the uses of these concepts: assumptions that scientific theories do not themselves normally state.
Hence it moves beyond the point where the concepts appear as irreducible elements in the postulates of a theory. This analytic function should ultimately allow for a further step of integration, where the concepts of one science are related to the concepts of another.
The analytic function of philosophy might not only feed back into science, but become a starting point for philosophy itself: discovering what entities science assumes there to be in the world can be a useful starting point for philosophical reflection on nature.
It seems key that philosophical stances on nature and science be compatible with the kinds of objects and relations that science finds. Footnote 6. To allow for, indeed to naturally incorporate into its own framework and build upon, the kinds of entities that science encounters in the world, and their properties and relations; Footnote 7. To scrutinize the terms and presuppositions of science, i.
To discover standards for what good theories, valid modes of explanation, and appropriate scientific methods are: to offer an epistemology that does not thwart, but stimulates scientific progress;. To point out and articulate the interrelations between concepts that are found in different domains of the natural sciences as well as the social sciences and the humanities;.
To explain how observations fit in the broader picture of the world, and to create a language where scientific results and broader human experience can complement and mutually enrich each other. This list is neither exhaustive nor unique. Some of these general ideas will be instantiated in the two examples given in the next section.
The above points to a necessary relationship between science and philosophy. Science needs philosophy, as we have seen, in its two functions: heuristic, and analytic. Especially during changes of paradigm, philosophical debate will be part of the activities of science.
None of this is to say that scientists need to be philosophers: most of them are not. So, philosophers may be drawn in at that point. But it is also not to say that professional philosophers should be doing all of the above tasks. Part of those tasks—surely 1 to 4—are often performed by scientists. Thus what I envisage here is a collaboration between scientists and philosophers.
Indeed, I think we should be careful in distinguishing the disciplinary differences from the professional or individual ones. Saying that science, as a systematic theoretical and experimental study of the natural world, needs philosophy—which I have defined, in the analytic tradition, as the study of all the results of the sciences and humanities using the method of conceptual analysis—is not to say that each scientist requires philosophy.
Philosophy may be merely a useful tool for scientists. In this section, I give two examples where philosophical discussion has been genuinely contributory to science, along the lines discussed in 4a ii. Working from 4a ii we can now easily see that these examples in fact become a case in point: they illustrate the importance of philosophy for science.
They make clear the need for having the right philosophical framework when doing science. If a conceptual enterprise such as philosophy were completely neutral, or indeed useless, to science, it could not be harmful to it in any important way either.
But the fact is that: A some philosophical doctrines have been harmful for science while others have been productive; B it is impossible to have no philosophy at all as I argued in 4a ; C the reason philosophy was harmful in some cases is because it was used in a positive way, according to its heuristic function from 4a ii.
And this heuristic function can indeed also be used positively. It follows from A to C that philosophy must be relevant to science in its own specific way, even if it is only in the manner of setting necessary intellectual preconditions of freedom of mind, of trust in the power of reason and of experimental observation, etc. History shows that it is hard for scientists to free themselves from outdated philosophical modes of thought.
This highlights the importance of investing in having a philosophical framework that allows for the kinds of entities that science encounters in the world. Specific tasks for philosophy are as listed in 4a ii. Next we will study positive historical examples where 4a ii is at work, thereby refuting the historical argument formulated in 2b. To refute the historical argument, it suffices to show one example where philosophy has been genuinely contributory to the progress of science.
The example will be interesting in so far as it also sheds light on why it was that philosophy contributed to science, thus instantiating elements of 4a ii.
There are many such examples. Kepler Footnote 8 and Sommerfeld were both inspired by Pythagorean philosophical ideas when working out their models of the harmonies of the solar system and of the atom, respectively.
Let me here concentrate on another, more recent, example. It concerns the current revolution in quantum information technology. In the past ten years we have seen the first commercialization of quantum randomness: the first bank transaction built on the basis of a code encrypted not by the usual algorithms of classical cryptography which rely on unproven mathematical assumptions such as the difficulty in factorizing large prime numbers , but based on the new field of quantum cryptography: a technique for encoding messages based on the notion of entanglement between particles at long distances.
Quantum cryptography has been successfully developed and commercialized by several groups over the past twenty years or so. As it turns out, the quantum information revolution is rooted in the efforts of scientists who saw philosophical enquiry as a necessary step in their quest for knowledge. There are two key moments in the history of quantum mechanics when physical progress crucially depended on asking the right philosophical questions. In , conflicting views on quantum physics started to crystallize.
In doing so, Heisenberg was voicing the shared feelings of his colleagues Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac, also present at the conference. Among those properties was the lack of determinacy in physical quantities and events. Also, Heisenberg and co. A few years later, in , Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen made the nature of their discomfort with quantum theory explicit in a famous article that came to be known as the EPR thought experiment.
They considered pairs of correlated particles separated at long distances. The possibility to measure a property for example, the momentum of the first particle automatically gives information about the value of that property for the second particle, without measuring that property for the second particle, since the particles are in a state of correlation.
And the possibility to measure the complementary property for example, the position of the first particle would as well determine the value of that quantity for the second particle. But because of the assumption that measurements done on the first particle cannot affect the properties of the second particle after all, the particles are well-separated , the second particle must have had the values of its position and momentum determined before any measurements were done on the first particle since, according to the formalism of quantum mechanics, a measurement of the first particle determines the value of that property for the other particle, in both cases.
Since, according to standard quantum mechanics, a particle cannot simultaneously have determinate values for both its position and its momentum, this means that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory: for it does not predict properties for the second particle that, according to the argument, it can clearly have.
The EPR argument is philosophical in the sense explained earlier, in Sect. But it also contains two substantive ontological assumptions. This led EPR to push the physical arguments farther than anybody had ever done before.
The study of paradoxes borne out by thought experiments such as EPR has always played a major role in physics; but the resolution of such paradoxical situations almost invariably requires a philosophical stance about the principles and methods that are valued and deemed legitimate. The EPR paper was truly philosophical in so far at it analysed and questioned the conceptual foundations of quantum theory.
Does this mean that Einstein was being professional philosophers while he worked on that paper? Of course not.
Einstein was doing the philosophy that physics required at that point in time—and it was philosophy because he was reflecting on, and critically and constructively engaging with, the conceptual foundations of quantum theory. To do that, he needed philosophical tools. But he was of course also doing physics. So, by bringing philosophical methods into physics, he was advancing physics.
I believe it is artificial, at such interdisciplinary intersections, to attempt to make too fixed a demarcation between physics and philosophy. Einstein was simply doing ground-breaking work that required methods from both fields. The next episode in this story of physics and philosophy took place many years later. After the publication of EPR, physicists continued to philosophize about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but eventually the discussion died out.
During the cold war, science and in particular physics gained much prestige. As class sizes grew, increasingly less time was spent on big questions and philosophical debates in the classrooms. While part of the reason for this decrease of attention on philosophical issues may have been pragmatic—philosophical discussions with large groups of students are hard to manage, and grading essay questions in exams is significantly more time consuming than computational questions—a vision was certainly at play about what education in science and technology should prepare students for.
The interpretation of quantum mechanics was unlikely to prepare students who could provide societies with new gadgets or governments with new powerful weapons, whereas technical mastery of the formulas actually might. Making gadgets was the new goal of physics. When we asked about the foundational issues in quantum theory, we were told that no one fully understood them but that concern with them was no longer part of science.
The job was to take quantum mechanics as given and apply it to new problems. But instrumentalism had to give way to other kinds of motivation for doing physics.
Economic recession, budget cuts, and the decrease in the number of physics jobs made class sizes decrease again. Physicists once again had the time to think about the meaning of what they were doing. Additional money came from NASA. Soon Puthoff would be associated with a third strand of events around the Bay Area. A dubious consortium of hippie physicists and quasi-crackpots formed an unlikely discussion group.
They alternated their musings about all things quantum and the meaning of life with drinking parties and psychedelic drug use. They came to be known as the Fundamental Fysiks Group and eventually found a generous patron in self-help industry forerunner and multi-millionaire guru Werner Erhard.
One goal of the hippie scientists was to use quantum mechanics for superluminal faster-than-light communication. This would include communication with their deceased colleagues. Needless to say, many of their arguments were misguided, but their contribution to physics was of lasting endurance.
They not only put the interpretation of quantum mechanics on the research and teaching agenda; they analysed the EPR arguments and the important contributions to this discussion made by John Bell, David Bohm, and others, which had escaped the attention of scientists until then; they helped clarify the issues at stake, developed new thought experiments of their own, and raised awareness that quantum nonlocality might be useful in long-distance communication.
Save the crucial wrong conclusion that superluminal communication was possible, several set-ups and techniques the hippies considered did not differ significantly from the ones that quantum communication uses nowadays. As David Kaiser has argued Kaiser , p. And in a few critical instances, their work instigated major breakthroughs that—with hindsight—we may now recognize as laying crucial groundwork for quantum information science.
Like Einstein, the Fundamental Fysiks Group worked at the intersection of physics and philosophy. They brought philosophical methods and literature to bear on problems in physics, and as such they did the kind of work that I argue physics periodically needs—regardless of who does that work, whether it is the physicists themselves or the professional philosophers.
The two examples illustrate some of the tasks of philosophy for science listed in Sect. Progress not driven by such philosophical questions is hard to imagine in this case; the philosophical debate that actually took place acted as a positive, guiding force that pushed science further; fuelled by the posing of legitimate and relevant philosophical questions in their quest for new physics, by their being insistent on philosophical clarity and coherence rather than content with just technical mastery of the formulas, which was the trend of the day.
There are two sides to the objection regarding the difference between science and philosophy as forms of scholarship: subject matters on the one hand, methodology on the other. I will be brief about the distinction in subject matter. The universe, possible universes other than our own, elementary particles, life, are all subjects of concern for both natural science and philosophy.
Therefore, on those overlaps science and philosophy cannot be distinguished on the basis of their subject matters alone. But I also submit that any such division cannot be made once and for all—the division is both vague at any point in time, as well as dynamical. But, as I am suggesting, the mantra is as comfortable as it is lacking in accuracy in fully reflecting the nature of the relationship between science and philosophy.
Agreed: science and philosophy are in principle different forms of scholarship. For established fields of science such as classical mechanics or electromagnetism, there may be much truth in the statement that science is practically interested in how-questions, defined by the framework of the particular paradigm one is working in.
But that is so only because a number of why-questions have been answered within the wider paradigm and are not being questioned any further. When paradigms are in the making, there is no clear-cut distinction between the scholar asking the how-questions and the scholar asking the why-questions.
Any how-question may lead us to a why-question, and any answer to a why-question may lead us to answers to multiple how-questions. When placed in front of a why-question in the quest for a new theory, the scientist cannot retreat into the shell of specialism. He or she must struggle with the question using whichever intellectual means are available. He or she may need to establish, as the founding fathers of quantum mechanics attempted to do, what a measurement is before they can convincingly argue that there is such a thing as uncertainty in the microscopic world.
The scientific quest presupposes having a number of philosophical issues settled first: or, at least, it presupposes engaging with the various conceptual options, and taking a stance on them. In so doing, the subject matters and methods of philosophers and of scientists become entangled: the relationship between science and philosophy becomes dynamical.
This is particularly true in our time, when science has expanded into realms—from far-away galaxies to the multiverse to neuroscience to molecular engineering—that were unknown territory just a number of decades before.
Science is aimed at truth about the natural world, and although methodological distinctions can be made formally, one must be aware of their limitations: in particular, it would be wrong to conclude that a methodological distinction allows us to dismiss philosophy for the sake of science.
This brings us to another point: if science needs philosophy, scientific results should also be the starting point of philosophical reflection about nature. There is another reason why science needs philosophy. Scientific knowledge is not technical specialism cut off from the rest of human knowledge.
The moment this happens would signal the forthcoming death of science. Scientific results constitute knowledge to be integrated into the broader human quest for answers about ourselves and about the universe. Philosophy helps the scientist articulate her findings in a kind of knowledge that can be shared with others, not experts in her field; it will help her discuss with other intellectuals and contribute to the general human task of getting to know the world and ourselves better.
To summarize my main argument so far: the relationship between science and philosophy may be in bad shape, and philosophy may be in bad shape, but it cannot be dead as long as we are trying to understand the universe around us. Historically, philosophy has been very influential for science, as has science been for philosophy.
Any instances where philosophy had a negative effect on science in fact contribute to highlighting the importance of thinking carefully about the relation between philosophy and science. Science cannot do without philosophy because there are philosophical stances implicit in the presuppositions and goals of any scientific paradigm and in how theories are connected to reality: and it is the task of philosophy of science to critically engage with those presuppositions.
Thus science needs philosophy to scrutinize those presuppositions, stances, and goals. And philosophical tools are sometimes required to make progress—as the EPR and quantum information revolution illustrate. Finally, science requires philosophy to connect its findings to the rest of human knowledge.
Philosophy can act as a language connecting disciplines that are far away from each other. Since the subject matters of science and of philosophy are partially overlapping, formal or methodological distinctions between science and philosophy only have limited ranges of applicability and certainly do not imply independence of the two disciplines. In other words, the boundaries between science and philosophy are not water-tight, nor should they be.
Having argued, at the end of the previous section, that science as such needs philosophy, I will now look at the implications of this statement for education.
That is, I would like to add a few reflections about how scient ists need philosophy, and how this is to be reflected in education. Let me start by examining what does and does not follow from what we have established so far. From the assertion that science needs philosophy in some way it does not follow that each individual scientist should be a skilled philosopher, or in fact should have any kind of developed skill in philosophy.
A scientist faced with a philosophical question in the course of her research might choose to neglect it and still do a relatively good job at her research, at least for some time. Also, despite the fact that every scientist has a philosophy that is at least weaved into the presuppositions and goals of the given theory or paradigm that the scientist works in, perhaps appended with her own private reflections, it is true that science can be done for the sake of science with neglect of the philosophical presuppositions and for exclusively utilitarian goals.
Obviously, utilitarian values do not offer a sustainable basis for science as a whole and for maintaining public trust in the meaningfulness of fundamental research.
But for the individual scientist, they might just suffice. Furthermore, even in the case that the scientist has her own philosophical views, she is free to keep them private and not let them interfere with the research she is doing.
In fact, scientists may work together on the same scientific problem while sustaining different ontological or epistemic presuppositions. Philosophy may be even less relevant for the applied scientist although, especially for her, ethical issues will be important!
So, for all practical purposes, the individual scientist might get away with neglecting philosophy. What use, one might cynically enquire, will the laser physicist have in formal training in philosophy? Even taking the point that every scientist in fact makes use of philosophical thought of one kind or another—a set of ideas about the scientific practice, about the nature of the objects and relations that constitute her subject matter, etc.
There is no need for receiving specific training in philosophical matters. Thus philosophy courses of the kind I have in mind cannot be seen as necessary prerequisites for any single scientist. But I argue that they are useful for them, and that scientists would benefit from them: and so, that science programmes ought to have such courses —again, without going into details, which would require a separate paper.
So, this suggests the following question. Indeed, particularly in the context of liberal arts and sciences, it is key that education reflects that connection. Science students in modern liberal arts and sciences programs should receive training in philosophy specific to their particular sciences. The kind of training I am arguing for here goes beyond general courses such as logic and philosophy of science, which are very important and are already part of some liberal arts and sciences curricula, as electives at least.
It also goes beyond ethics, which is obviously an important training for scientists—although here one should go beyond the theoretical cocktail-party way in which some of these courses are taught, since their relevance often escapes the student. Perhaps such courses should be based more on actual scientific episodes and practices. But ethics is in itself a very large subject, and I have something else in mind here that more directly relates to my case studies: namely, philosophical reflection specific to each of the sciences, in fact specific to each particular science course a student takes.
And I would argue that such materials could also be part of every science course, rather than separate courses, and so are best taught by scientists. If one is intrepid, one might wish to add a course on theory construction: but I admit, this will not be easy, though it could be very beneficial at the graduate level.
Historically, it has been a goal of liberal arts and sciences education to educate the social, political, and intellectual elites.
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