The last few years have seen a number of prominent scientists step up to microphones and belittle the value of philosophy. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are well-known examples. To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.
Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing.
- “Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”
This is the totally dopey criticism. Yes, most philosophers do not actually go out and collect data (although there are exceptions). But it makes no sense to jump right from there to the accusation that philosophy completely ignores the empirical information we have collected about the world. When science (or common-sense observation) reveals something interesting and important about the world, philosophers obviously take it into account. (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.)
Philosophers do, indeed, tend to think a lot. This is not a bad thing. All of scientific practice involves some degree of “pure thought.” Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be to a model-building phenomenologist. But at its best, the practice of philosophy of physics is continuous with the practice of physics itself. Many of the best philosophers of physics were trained as physicists, and eventually realized that the problems they cared most about weren’t valued in physics departments, so they switched to philosophy. But those problems — the basic nature of the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels — are just physics problems, really. And some amount of rigorous thought is necessary to make any progress on them. Shutting up and calculating isn’t good enough.
- “Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.”
Now we have the frustratingly annoying critique. Because: duh. If your criterion for “being interesting or important” comes down to “is useful to me in my work,” you’re going to be leading a fairly intellectually impoverished existence. Nobody denies that the vast majority of physics gets by perfectly well without any input from philosophy at all. (“We need to calculate this loop integral! Quick, get me a philosopher!”) But it also gets by without input from biology, and history, and literature. Philosophy is interesting because of its intrinsic interest, not because it’s a handmaiden to physics. I think that philosophers themselves sometimes get too defensive about this, trying to come up with reasons why philosophy is useful to physics. Who cares?
Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes.
- “Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”
Finally, the deeply depressing critique. Here we see the unfortunate consequence of a lifetime spent in an academic/educational system that is focused on taking ambitious dreams and crushing them into easily-quantified units of productive work. The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time. I suspect that a substantial majority of physicists who use quantum mechanics in their everyday work are uninterested in or downright hostile to attempts to understand the quantum measurement problem.
This makes me sad. I don’t know about all those other folks, but personally I did not fall in love with science as a kid because I was swept up in the romance of finding slightly more efficient calculational techniques. Don’t get me wrong — finding more efficient calculational techniques is crucially important, and I cheerfully do it myself when I think I might have something to contribute. But it’s not the point — it’s a step along the way to the point.
The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works. Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway. And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things. It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest. The universe is much bigger than we are and stranger than we tend to imagine, and I for one welcome all the help we can get in trying to figure it out.
Natural science is predicated on philosophical assumptions.Correspondence theories of truth, positivist epistemology and and realist ontology. For natural scientists to tilt at philosophy is ludicrous because it pervades the things they do. See Sayer (2010) – everything is theory laden. Furthermore philosophical issues are germane because of ethics too. Typically scientists use abductive as much as analytically inductive thinking. They draw from both objective (the conventional image they wish to portray) discourse and subjective discourse to explain their practice – see Potter and Wetherill. Critical Realism is probably a more appropriate ontological philosophical position for most because of the idea of unseen ‘generative mechanisms’ viz super string theory.
Scientists could not commence empirical study without philosophically engaging in setting out ‘the problem’. The fact that they don’t see their assumptions doesn’t mean they don’t exist. 🙂
I’d like Neil deGrasse Tysen to explain what a law of nature IS. The moment he tries, he will have become a philosopher of science.
Baron Ludwig von Nichts, first I would have to ask what kind of Nihilism you are talking about? Also, why do you think that Nihilism has to be refuted in order for Philosophy to be able to progress or to be valid, or useful and so on?
Some forms of nihilism just hold that there isn’t any ‘universal objective moral truth’, (the idea there are moral truths that exist externally in the universe somehow that are not mind or value dependent) other kinds of nihilism just hold that your life doesn’t have any ‘objective meaning’, basically meaning that you just have to choose what meaning your life has for yourself. Other kinds of nihilism hold that we cannot have absolute certainty with regard to specific kinds of claims or areas of inquiry.
Most of the academic philosophers I know today work, in my opinion, constructively and usefully, within the assumption that many of these kinds of nihilism are true and don’t really see them being true as causing a big problem.
Philosophy is much more fragmented than what this debate makes it to be. There are many philosophers who might side with Hawking, Krauss, et al. Not their tone, not all their points, but the main ones. Many philosophers have tried to kill philosophy. Specially the ambitious, metaphysical kind. Others want to restrict philosophy to explorations of our common sense conceptual scheme, something that may share a boundary with anthropology, psychology or sociology, but not with physics. That does not deny that some work in philosophy can be useful for science, but it seems to me that such work could also be done outside a philosophy department and can be safely decoupled from purely philosophical questions. That would not mean that philosophy is a wast of time. It is just a waste of time for physicists that are not interested in philosophy.
If value of philosophy can no longer be determined by it’s direct contribution to science and technology (just guessing), then it’s probably more about one’s subjective feelings. I personally find the philosophy of physics extremely boring, while allowing the possibility that someone else might find it interesting and fulfilling.
So many comments, but almost no real/specific examples of useful philosophy are given.
But it is quite easy, to point to bad philosophy: (Nagel: Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.). Derrida, Foucolt, Lacan,…
You’ve missed the point entirely. Here, let me grab that bit where you didn’t RTFA. I’ve even italicized the helpful part.
I’d like to know what you think “bad philosophy” is, because just accusing a handful of people for doing the work they do, as doing it badly over the course of a lifetime’s career presumes you can identify what “good philosophy” is and where it’s gone wrong.
Even if we accept that these are “bad philosophers” (John Searle would probably agree with you on Derrida), finding a few isn’t much of a critique of the field– it’s not like “science”, taken broadly, has been wholly devoid of its own quacks or charlatans. (See: Amit Goswani, Joseph Nicolosi, or Andrew Wakefield). Yes, often anyone who’s too ridiculous or dangerous or unethical gets quashed, but sometimes their professional chops are strong enough that we ignore their little social peccadilloes or any weird speculations they might spout. See, for instance, Francis Crick’s panspermia theory, or Watson’s opinions on racial and sexual equality– just to get you started.
Ryder Dain – James Watson made some off-hand comments about the low IQ’s of Sub-Saharan Africans for which he was demonized. The factual evidence completely supports his assertion that Sub-Saharan Africans are in the low end of the range of IQ in human populations.
There is no reason whatsoever to expect that the highly complex process of human biological evolution would result in equal average IQ’s for different human populations any more than it leads to equal average heights.
The total range of average IQ in human populations is about 4 standard deviations. There is nothing surprising about this. The total range in average height amoung human populations is about 6 standard deviations.
Miroslav Hundek – The question as to what is the difference between objectivity and subjectivity is itself a very interesting philosophical question.
Amateur – It is pretty much a tautology to say that philosophy is a waste of time for physicists who are not interested in it. Cosmology or studying the Higgs Boson is a waste of time for people who are not interested in these topics which is probably most of humanity.
Blah says: “So many comments, but almost no real/specific examples of useful philosophy are given.”
While I don’t think that to be useful philosophy has to contribute specifically to science (as Carroll’s original post says), there are several examples one could give I think.
Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature, 1985. (Detailed critique of sociobiology; Coyne says saved him from several mistakes)
Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism, 1982. (Early attack on creationism and intelligent design)
David Albert, Quantum Mechanics and Experience, 1994. (Physicist who left for philosophy; Carroll has referenced this already)
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. 1996. (Physicist who left for philosophy)
Michael Ruse, E. O. Wilson, “Moral Philosophy as Applied Science” 1985. (Biologist and philosopher whove co-written several pieces together on biological ethics)
Alex Rosenberg, Daneil McShea, Philosophy of Biology, 2008. (Duke biologist and philosopher co-authored book on philosophical issues in biology)
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 1997. (Widely read by sociologists on social theorizing)
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1996. (Widely read by scientists on Darwin)
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 2007. (NYT’s best seller on science and religion)
Again, these are books related to science, but not all philosophy is orientied this way nor should it be in my view.
“You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It’s all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we’re all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is…”
Henry Miller
My two cents
http://andersonbrownphilosophy.blogspot.com/2013/03/lawrence-krauss-david-alpert-jim-holt.html
Rick J, everything I’ve posted in this thread I’ve repeatedly posted over on Jerry’s site. And I’m far from the only person over there who sees no utility in philosophy. (And, again again, there are many who call themselves “philosophers” who do solid scientific work — just as Francis Collins and Ken Miller do outstanding biology despite their religious beliefs.)
I’ll also note that only two other posts have received more up-votes than I have on this thread. To all those who think I’m merely trolling, take that as empirical evidence that, though those of us who dismiss philosophy may well be a minority, it’s not the radical fringe minority all y’all’re making us out to be. Maybe we’re crazy. But, if not, that’s at least a very strong indication that philosophy has failed to justify its academic credentials the way the sciences and the (non-PoMo-infested) humanities have.
Cheers,
b&
Ben Goren,
“And yet you yourself, in this very thread, have insisted that safety procedures for the rail industry should be informed by people’s responses to the Trolley Problem.”
Only to get around your utterly inane insistence that only experts on trains could judge what a specific action might do, coupled with a claim that those experts would follow the procedures. And even then I only asked about the MORALITY of the procedures. Surely you are not so naive as to think that only the rail industry could possibly be qualified to judge the morality of their own procedures? And surely you’d agree that even a layman should be able to judge in many cases whether the procedure — assuming all the technical details are worked out — is moral or not. For example, if a rail safety procedure said that if a train came across a car stalled on the tracks that had people still inside, the engineer was not to apply the brakes as emergency stops wore down the brakes and increased maintenance costs, I don’t think you’d need ANY knowledge about trains to say that that would be an immoral policy. Now, no rail company would ever put that in, but you can see the point: railway engineers have special knowledge with regards to railway technology, but not with respect to morality.
Which, then, leads to a reasonable question that hopefully you will not dodge, which is that if you think that the moral intuitions of most people are not at all relevant or useful to consider in determining the morality of a policy or procedure, what WILL you use to determine that? Since railway engineers are not necessarily moral experts — even as they are rail experts — they are not more qualified to consider or understand the specifically moral factors than anyone else. Taking into account your other comments, we can assume that you might claim that “Ethicists” would be required to determine this. But from where would they get their training and expertise? As it has already been pointed out, most of them get that from moral philosophy, which you want to denigrate. But if that’s the case, then we’d want some kind of objective determination of what is and isn’t moral in such cases. How would we explore that? You don’t want to appeal to psychology because we know that humans can indeed often have cognitive structures that promote actions that we think horrible, so we can’t just rely on those to determine what is or isn’t moral. So what we’d want to explore it through various cases to determine what our intuitions are, at least, and then determine why those intuitions are what they are and resolve any apparent conflicts.
Which is exactly what Trolley Cases aim at: trying to explore if our moral intuitions always choose in favour of saving the most lives — even if we have to take an action that costs a life to do it — and if there is a conflict — as there is in the Trolley Cases — trying to figrue out what it is. It boggles my mind that your prime example of the failings of moral philosophy is precisely the case where it actually tries to be more empirical and indeed run a psychological experiment to get at what people think it is, as opposed to, say, running a thought experiment like “Would it be moral to kill one person and harvest their organs to save five others?” where there pretty much is an answer and that’s the whole point of the thought experiment.
And this, then, gets us down to brass tacks: for someone who insists that we don’t need philosophy to answer moral questions and claims that we have better, more scientific examples, your entire contribution to the discussion of morality in at least the thread with me has been to misrepresent Trolley Cases and invent more and more excuses for not ever giving any answer to any question that asks you if an action is moral or not. CAN you even answer the case of whether it would be morally right or morally wrong to not save that drowning person if you knew that you were likely to succeed?
“Philosophy in a nutshell, and everything that’s worng with it.
Drop the presumptions in favor of observations, and the reality-based community will welcome you with open arms.”
First, that was me taking YOUR presumption, that the rail expert would be the only one to know what the conditions were really like, and which you have now dropped because it rather inconveniently removes your excuse for not answering the question.
Second, Trolley Cases ARE actually observing, observing what people’s intuitions actually say. You are dismissing one of the most empirical examples in moral philosophy, and doing so without advancing even a shred of an alternative approach.
Third, if you want to continue this line, I suggest you read my essay on morality on my blog called “Fearlessly Amoral”. It was written for a graduate level course on empirically-minded moral philosophy and did quite well. It is a valid philosophical essay. If you want to claim that there’s too much presumption and not enough observation, put your money where your mouth is and tell me what’s wrong with that essay (there, please, since that would be a bit off-topic for here).
Re, allan J:
“I can’t see why the violation of fundamental physical concepts is a philosophical problem. It may just be that the concepts hold in some domains but don’t hold in others. As Krauss has said : ‘The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.'”
Thank you for your response to my second post in this lengthy comment stream on the topic of philosophy vis-à-vis physics. I would agree that the violation of physical laws/ principles is not necessarily a “philosophical” problem, but it IS a PROBLEM; a procedural problem; a methodological problem, but still a PROBLEM. How much of the established foundation of contemporary physics does one want to ignore in pursuing what Ryder Dane in his morning post (June 25, 2014 at 8:13AM) refers to as “weird speculations?”
The central idea of the “nothing theorists” i.e., cosmic genesis from from the state of “absolute nothingness,” is, it seems to me, not a SCIENTIFIC conjecture, but rather a METAPHYSICAL conjecture, “an a priori decision which has no empirical basis,” to quote Dr. Krauss himself in the context of those claiming cosmic genesis from “something”; this entire “nothing” argument devolving, additionally, into a semantic dispute about the meaning of “absolute nothing.” If I am correct here, this theoretical situation. according to Dr. Krauss’s OWN stated criteria, renders his “nothing” conjecture IRRELEVANT to science! (see the Tam Hunt “comment” June 24, 2014, 1:46 PM and the contained link to his interview with Dr. Krauss on August 1, 2013).
Yes, we can always speculate about the randomness of physical laws vis-à-vis different PHYSICAL domains, but this is my point:
1). Physical laws are information.
2). Information is contained in a PHYSICAL system, expressed in bits or qubits (see: Seth Lloyd MIT).
3). Information is PHYSICAL (see: Rolf Landauer “The physical nature of information,” Physics Letters A 217, 9 May 1996 188-193).
4). Therefore, the laws of physics can only exist and operate in a PHYSICAL system.
5). “Absolute nothing” is NOT a physical system BY DEFINITION.
6). THEREFORE: “Absolute nothing” cannot “transition,” according to any quantum mechanical laws, into ANYTHING, including our cosmos.
The idea of “absolute clarity of description” and “rigorous conceptual analysis,” as Dr. Carroll characterizes the best philosophical thinking, and, I might also add, the best of physical scientific theorizing, seems to me ironically missing in the speculations of the philosophy “bashing” Dr. Krauss; the danger is that one may wander, in this conceptual jungle, in the theoretical justification of an idea, from science into science fiction.
T.E. Oakley
Sent from my iPhone
I thought Tyson’s underlying point of why he criticized philosophy is if you have a very talented young person, they are better off going into physics or any basic science first because the philsophical problems can be studied later. Cases in point are of course yourself Sean and Massimo Piglucci who took the science route first.
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VicP:
Yes, I think this was a large part of Tyson’s assertion. He generally disparaged philosophy practitioners for being obsessed with non-problems, for being so distracted they might wander into traffic, and for refusing to join the scramble for artifacts and codified knowledge that governs the contemporary first-world experience.
In this, he is in lock-step with the technocrat-capitalist’s frame of mind: that all human activity should be valued solely for its contributions to material productivity and knowledge-accumulation, that there is no value except what is measurable. This is one of the root problems, I find, with certain conceptual frameworks that are so active in this conversation.
This frame denies the value of centuries of human culture, whose value generally eludes quantification.
It denies the variety of individual experience, i.e. that a person can be extremely intelligent, but not have the aptitude or instrumental attitude required for scientific work.
It sort of reduces folks to their processing power, and assumes that the only worthy application of this power is to the project of scientific productivity.
Philosophy is an imaginative and speculative endeavor, like art or literature. For some of us, it’s a tool-set… for others, it’s intrinsically compelling. It often tries to engage with science, and occasionally fails. Whatever its issues, it doesn’t deserve Tyson’s ire, which seems to be the potent by-product of his limited frame of reference.
The key point here is #1, and I don’t think the author’s addressed the point well. I disagree with the author.
Philosophers may not ignore all scientific data, but I have never met a philosopher who is more broadly versed in relevant science than scientists.
This is damning, in my eyes, however–since scientists do two things (collect data and make theories) and the philosopher does one (make theories), they should *always* be more well-versed about relevant empirical data.
This is why I look down on almost all philosophers. Dr. Patricia Churchland and Dr. Alex Levine are notable exceptions, and I am sure there are others I’m less familiar with.
The hostility goes both ways (deservedly or not). In fact try to think of any two (sub)fields that don’t constantly butt heads.
The main issue I have with this blogpost is the notion that foundational issues, such as the nature of wavefunctions etc., are somehow an exclusively philosophical enterprise. What makes it any more a philosophical question than a scientific one? What is ADDED?
As an aside, I constantly see comments like: “Physics is but Natural Philosophy”, “everything emerged from Philosophy therefore every question is a Philosophical one”. Can we agree to just stop this non-sense? It’s quite irritating…. every instance of thought/thinking isn’t owed to Philosophy.
OPINION: My problem with *some* aspects of Philosophy (primarily Metaphysics) is that it comes off as “speculations without bound/ direction”… a dangerously wasteful pursuit. Foundational questions which are *guided* by Science seems to me a more tractable/ fruitful endeavour.
Does philosophy help predict of “future” observations better than not including philosophy? -If it does make better predictions/models, there is no problem using philosophy in physics, if not it can and maybe should be excluded using the famous Occam’s razor (OR is philosophical argument, not necessarily based on predicting future observations)
The same can be argued about fairies, and demons , as they often are part of physics thought examples (e. g. Maxwell’s demon), if they help make better prediction of observations, include them as a predictive factor, if they don’t help predict observations they do not need to be included. I guess that would the way to prove the existence of fairies and demons in physics.
Personally, I enjoy pondering good philosophical puzzles, such as the measurement problem, and the arrow of time, but to me *observations* are the final arbitrators, independent of how interesting the philosophy is.
To paraphrase Wittgenstein
Anything not yet discovered is not the case
Let’s not forget that philosophers (good ones) can also facilitate scientific discussion and discovery in other ways aside from big-picture thinking. Critical thinking, formal and informal logic, conceptual clarity, and historical connections all play important roles in furthering our understanding of cause and effect relationships of the natural world.
Re: colnago80/Feynman’s quote on ornithology.
The way I recall it was: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” That’s also what I get via Google. It makes more sense to me that way – more of a parallel comparison.
(New topic:)
Some have claimed here, or come close to claiming, that everyone who thinks is doing philosophy. Personally, I think everyone who thinks is doing math, including philosophers. But no one does math correctly at all times, including philosophers.
Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Physics is the study of mass and energy.
Truly, what can they learn from each other?
Poor physicists, for life has no meaning. Poor philosophers, you are ignorant of physics.
Why don’t we build a bomb and wax philosophically about it later?
The physics of philosophy may describe how bundles of enzymes randomly came together to give rise to a consciousness capable of perceiving the universe.
The philosophy of physics is “we are the wise experts, love us.”
“Thinking themselves wise they become as fools.”
Experts are proficient in their own fields, an expert’s opinion given outside a specific field is popularly thought to be valid, such drivel perceived as wisdom.
We’ll probably have a completed, validated unified field theory before the current crop of know-it-alls who don’t are able to recognize one another’s merits.
I can understand why Hawking hates god. I can even understand why in the light of adoration Tyson insults his fan base as having no imagination. Krauss, he should get back to the “shut-up and calculate” ethic, but he’s way behind the curve and too old and stupid to catch up. I would express these thoughts in differential equations but I find the language of physics limiting and the expressions would have no discernible meaning to most.