Philosophy and Science: Common Misconceptions
Is there really a dichotomy between science and philosophy? Is the claim ‘philosophy is bullshit’ – bullshit? What are philosophers? Indeed, what is Philosophy? Is Science special, or better? Do we need a new word?
Definitions of Philosophy and Science
Oxford dictionary defines philosophy as: The love, study, or pursuit of wisdom, or of knowledge of things and their causes, whether theoretical or practical; and Science as: A branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought under general laws, and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth within its own domain.
These definitions do not do justice to the complexity of phenomena we call Philosophy and Science. The true definition of both is something much more general, such as: a pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, using empirical observation, reason, and other cognitive or computational tools such as pattern recognition. In effect, I am asserting that there is no real difference between Philosophy and Science. This essay is largely about why the distinction is false and how it came to be.
Genealogy
Since the dawn of ages, people have tried to figure out the world around them. At first everything was completely mysterious and unknown. People had a natural tendency for coming up with explanations. At first the explanations were not very useful, and often relied on some time of wizardry, as well as beliefs in gods. These primitive people wanted to make progress but they didn’t know how. Eventually a new tool was developed – logic. This was a start of what we now call philosophy. Reason had made a lot of progress but still there seemed to be a lot of ground to cover. Finally, reason had brought us Empiricism. This was a radical change in thought, which we now take for granted. Empiricism was one of the first successful attempts to find limitations of certain types of reasoning as well as methods for solving these limitations. Soon we developed the Scientific Method that accelerated progress exponentially. Amongst other important developments were such tools as Math, and Computers.
In some ways all our knowledge is a result of development of ways to explain phenomena, and methods for explaining as well as making use of it. The main advancement was in discovering the different attributes of a successful explanation, and their importance. Some example of these developments include: Occom’z Razor, Falsifibility, Invariance, Problem of Induction, Instrumentalism, Reductionism, etc…
Freud is a good example of early empiricism, lacking the concept of falsifibility. He had plenty of “support” for his theories but he didn’t recognize that he could not have possibly falsified them, as one physicist commented on Freud: “he is not wrong, he can’t even BE wrong.” In other ways the explanation was bad because of its general nature, which could easily be varied ad hoc to save the theory. It also arguably lacked any meaningful predictive power by predicting everything and nothing at the same time.
Misconceptions
The main misconception is that Science is somehow separate or better then philosophy. A much more accurate description would be that Science is Philosophy after discovery of Empiricism. It doesn’t make sense to reject Philosophy simply because in retrospect we now realize much of reasoning and attempts to explain phenomena was simply wrong. Philosophy is an ever evolving entity, and Science is one of its major steps. Surgery also had questionable start, but it had evolved. Then why do we expect Philosophy to be perfect right away?
As long as we need to use reason, we are doing philosophy. Some people think that Science is somehow a pure empirical entity. This is a common misconception. Darwin didn’t read “the Origin of Species” by looking at animals. He had to use reason. Einstein didn’t discover theory of relativity by throwing a baseball at the speed of light. He had to use reason. Science and Observation is theory-laden. We didn’t prove curvature of space by peeking into the world independent of the mind – that is impossible. What we did was observed two dots on a picture during an eclipse; the rest was theory and reason. Yes, we now know that we must test our hypothesis, but the hypothesis have to first be thought of!
Yes scientific method was a breakthrough, but people forget that it was evolving ever since it was introduced and will continue to evolve as we perfect the art of making explanations and testing them.
Philosophy
Philosophers are simply people who have more background in pre-empirical thinkers, as well as primarily use and excel in logic as a method for solving problems, just like chemists are simply people that use primarily the principles of chemistry. Notice that neither one is limited to solely using their tools; it is only a matter of specialization. Philosophers are not anti-empirical, they are not impractical, and they are not ignorant of science. We are all in search of Truth and Wisdom; we are all in the same boat. So please stop your prejudice to philosophers. Yes Indeed, pre-science philosophers are outdated, but what about post –science philosophers such as Popper and Daniel Dennett? I am convinced that people who call philosophy nonsense, simply judge it by its past.
