I found the article vague and unconvincing. If philosophy is useful for physics research, where is the evidence? What new thing did philosophy contribute to physics in the last 100 years?
I am a physicist who cares deeply about the foundational issues mentioned in the article. And yet I honestly don't see any meaningful input about these issues coming from philosophers.
If it weren't for philosophy, you wouldn't have the scientific method in the first place. I'd consider that to be astoundingly useful for physics research. A simple example: ever make a hypothesis? Congratulations, you've just done some philosophy. Tested for or against that hypothesis? Now you're using methods developed by philosophy.
The whole idea of what is robust investigation and what is weak is philosophy. It doesn't come naturally - quite the opposite. Doing science 'right' is hard and counter-intuitive, but it was philosophy that figured out how to do it in a robust fashion.
If you don't see how philosophy is entwined with physics (or other sciences), then the fault is your misunderstanding of philosophy, not philosophy itself (philosophy is not another name for religion or the supernatural). And any time someone says "Before we test for X, we have to first define what we mean by X" is doing the fundamental function of philosophy. Given that physics has done a lot of defining and solidifying of terms over the last century, philosophy has definitely had a hand.
It used to be that philosophers/scientists/mathematicians etc. had a lot of overlap. That is why I constrained my question to the last 100 years. I agree with you that philosophy had useful input for scientific research in the distant past. Can you offer more recent examples? It seems to me philosophy has not been relevant for a long time.
One example is falsifiability. As of today, statements which are unfalsifiable are seen as pseudoscience and not science. This distinction was largely promoted by Karl Popper, a philosopher. And widespread adoption of falsifiability happened mostly in the 60s and 70s IIRC.
Prior to that point, theories were often accepted as true if they had a lot of explanatory power, in other words, if they seemed to explain a large set of observations. This made it very difficult to rigorously argue that, e.g., Astrology should not be considered scientific, because it seemed to have a lot of confirming evidence.
This is one of those things that seems really obvious in hindsight, but was a surprisingly big advance in how science was conducted in several fields. A more concrete example is how it affected social sciences like Psychology. Prior to Popper there were a lot of widely held theories that made no falsifiable predictions, today theories that seem to explain everything are generally seen as substantially less rigorous and scientific than ones that are falsifiable.
Interesting. Let me stick to physics because that is the field I am most familiar with. If the idea of falsifiability was not well understood before the 60s, then how did physics manage to progress after Newton? I mean well before the 60s physicists had discovered mechanics, electrodynamics, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, etc. There were many other proposed theories, but these were the theories that survived empirical tests. Theories that made no testable predictions did not survive. So, based on the history of physics, it seems to me that physicists understood this idea well before Popper came along. Do you agree?
If you agree, then perhaps Popper was responsible for spreading this idea to the social sciences, but he was not the one who introduced it to science.
Now, falsifiability is in fact an outdated notion, and this too was appreciated well before the 60s. As a first example, consider quantum mechanics which was formulated in the beginning of the 20th century. It postulates that the state of a system is described by a wave function, but only certain aspects of the wave function can be observed. The theory makes many testable predictions, but not all aspects of it can be tested (and therefore falsified). Popper argued against this theory (along with Einstein), but it turns out he was wrong. So it seems to me that, not only did physicists understand falsifiability before Popper, but they actually understood more than Popper did (or at least some of them did, like Schrodinger).
A second point about falsifiability is that it is in fact quite a naive and unproductive idea, even without the complexities of quantum mechanics. It is true that theories cannot be proven, but it is also true that they generally cannot be falsified, except in very simple cases. If I have a theory that the sun rises every day, this theory can be falsified. But most theories rely heavily on statistical measurements, which are inherently uncertain. Therefore we can only assign a probability to whether the theory agrees with measurements or not. If we start thinking that we actually 'falsified' some theories, this can actually damage the progression of science. If you like Bayesian statistics, for each theory we can assign a probability of it being correct, based on our measurements, but the probability is rarely 0 or 1. This, again, is well understood by physicists, and I don't think this idea was introduced to physics by philosophers.
People worked during the day and not at night for ages before astronomers came along and described how the sun and the earth relate to each other. So, based on the history of human work, humans understood the solar system well before astronomers came along, otherwise no work would have been achieved. Do you agree?
The entire arena of String Theory was a clearly philosophical detour in physics. It captured the hearts and minds of the physics world for years... yet it was pretty much entirely conjectural.
No. I am a string theorist. String theory was created by physicists to solve concrete theoretical challenges -- first the description the strong force (this did not work as intended), and later quantum gravity. These were longstanding open questions in physics. I am familiar with the history of string theory, and as far as I know no philosophers had any influence on it.
Perhaps my question wasn't clear, so let me rephrase. What contribution did philosophers make to science in the last 100 years?
There's a significant fault in your reasoning, that 'philosophy' is only performed by people who are socially recognised as being 'philosophers'. It's like saying that the only people who cook food are chefs - professionals recognised as food cookers. People who are professionally recognised as 'philosphers' are a miniscule fraction of the people who use and engage in philosophy, just like chefs are a miniscule fraction of the people who cook.
What you describe about string theory is philosophy. It's just not your personal definition of philosophy, which is based on a faulty stereotype. The funny thing is that it's only because you assign philosophy a stigma that you want to distance yourself from it.
I'm not sure if it's faulty reason, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.
It seems to me he's asking the equivalent of "what value do chefs have nowadays in the area of food preparation," which is a fair question independent of whether many people cook, and independent of whether cooks have in the past been immensely useful.
One answer I can think of is that keeping the 'profession' of philosophy alive encourages non-philosophers to ask important questions too, and even if it's nothing more than that, that might be good enough.
That said, while I think the profession of philosophy is much more than just that, I would also like to hear some answers to his (or otherwise just my) question.
Well, the chef analogy breaks down a little because much of what a chef does has a time limit measured in hours.
Modern-day philosophers don't have a lot to offer modern-day physicists I guess... because most of the relevant philosophical problems have largely been solved, especially in the area of experimental design.
I'm not a philosopher, and I don't bill myself as one. I was trained in science, have done a partial PhD on the visual system, and worked as a medical scientist. I have had zero formal classroom training in philosophy. I have one article published in a second-tier peer-reviewed journal. I see myself as a scientist and spent a quarter of my career working as one. I started out with the same ridiculous prejudices against philosophy as the naysayers here in this thread.
Then I started looking in a bit more detail about how and why we do experiments the way we do. The stuff we take for granted - things like minimising independent variables, or the null hypothesis, or peer review, or ethics in research, or the importance of being very specific in your starting definitions, or knowing how to ask a robust, testable question - all these kinds of things were reasoned about and a path(s) was found to the best way to do things to get robust results. And these things aren't inherent to the physical world - they're issues around reasoning. Not physics or biology or chemistry. It was eye-opening just how much ridiculous stigma and bad stereotypes are promoted by a certain kind of scientist.
Thing is, the two fields are not in conflict. For the most part, they are looking for truth in different areas - hence why doing physics and doing philosophy aren't mutually exclusive. They're not in competition, for the most part, and one field isn't 'better' than the other field. It's a silly, childish thing to suggest that these fields are competing; that there has to be a 'winner'. Does psychology 'win' over chemistry? Who 'wins' in the competition between music and mathematics? These fields aren't seen as being in competition (and there's some synergy between maths and music, just like I'm saying there is between physics and philosophy).
Asking "so, what have philosophers given physicists lately"(the occupations) is really a meaningless question, and implies that philosophy (the field) is only valid if it's constantly giving new insights to physics (the field). One could just as easily say "what have physicists given philosophers lately? Are philosophers of consciousness better able to discuss their topic because of the work of physicists?". Put that way, it's clear how silly it is to make these fields compete. Yes, there may be some conflict on the fringes ('what is the nature of existence' type stuff), but for the most part, they're harmonious entities, not enemies.
In short, the two fields are not dichotomous. You are in fact a significantly better scientist if you understand the reasons underlying why you conduct experiments the way you do. It allows you to modify your experimental procedures in a robust way. It's amusing to see people so stigmatising philosophy that they demand that their own philosophical utterances are due to a different field - as if it somehow hurts to say "this part of what I do is philosophy, that part is physics, and the other part is chef work". Elsewhere in this thread you'll see a lovely example, where someone uses Occam's Razor against philosophy... :)
Great, I think I now understand your biases, and I think you understand mine, and currently I do not spot any disagreement between us. So please allow me to refocus the discussion to the context of the original article. The article said:
> 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.
So in the context of the original article, 'philosophers' are clearly those individuals who hold philosophy degrees, have offices in the philosophy department, etc. You know, those individuals that people usually think about as philosophers. This is the context I was answering in.
You argue that a good scientist should think about philosophical questions that have to do with the nature of his research, and not just about concrete scientific problems. I completely agree. I also agree that when a scientist engages in this activity he is doing philosophy and not science. Therefore, I agree that doing philosophy is important (and in fact necessary) for doing good science.
I do not think that science and philosophy are competing in any way, and I apologize if I gave this impression. My question of "what have philosophers given physicists" is entirely in the context of the original article, which tried to claim that it is a good idea for physicists to talk to philosophers (the official ones, yes?). I am simply asking for evidence that it is indeed a good idea for these two groups of people to communicate.
I hope these comments put us on common ground. We both agree that good things happen when scientists engage in philosophy, today. My question is what good comes of philosophers engaging in philosophy, today. If you like, we can broaden this question well beyond science, and ask -- what concrete positive things have philosophers (the official ones!) contributed to humanity in the last 100 years?
To be fair, the 'competing' angle was mostly from my interaction with snowwrestler below, but there's elements of it wherever philosophy is given a stigma. I've seen similar positions from other scientists. The odd thing is that if there's a scientist who's of the opinion that their science is the only one that's important or true, it's usually a physicist. I haven't seen a biologist or chemist or the like take this position. Strangely, I have seen it from a psychologist.
I found the context of the article to be more talking about philosophy the field with occasional mentions of philosopher the occupation. In any case, I haven't read a lot of stuff from 20th C occupational philosophers - but it was talking to a philosopher that opened my eyes to the seeds of questioning my own stigma of the field. That lead me to more investigation of the methods and histories and reasoning of why we do science the way we do, and realising that understanding the process means you know why you're doing it that way, and where you can appropriately modify your methods
For example, I've butted heads here on HN before with people who think that the only way to 'do science' is with a null hypothesis and a double-blind trial. For some cases in medicine, this isn't possible (usually due to both low n and ethics), so case studies are used. Case studies are recognised as not being as robust and subject to a number of caveats, but they still give us knowledge that can be used to make predictions and repeatable actions. Keep in mind the caveats, and you're drawing from a valuable pool of knowledge. The difference here is understanding what you're trying to get (robust, repeatable data, preferably published), rather than having a golden method that is the One True Thing and any departure from it is straying from the right path.
But back to the question of what occupational philosophers have given to society recently, I don't know. But philosophy has given us astounding amounts, including most of the egalitarian and civil rights advances we've seen. I get the impression that occupational philosophers 'keep the flame alive', and that their work infiltrates other fields via philosophy fans in those fields. Certainly for physics and science in general, most of the philosophical problems have been solved, though there are still some hanging about, like how do we define consciousness? In order to study it, we need good definitions, and this one eludes us with great agility - philosophical discussions on this at least help nail down what it isn't.
I find this argument to be condescending and wholly unconvincing. Scientists know what the scientific method is; they don't need philosophers to tell them. And certainly no living philosopher can claim to have defined or invented the scientific method.
If you want to play epistemological parent trap, then before philosophy there were other attempts to understand things. Should we argue that all philosophy is actually just a subset of whatever that was? Does philosophy get priority just because we happen to have a word for it today?
Scientists know what the scientific method is; they don't need philosophers to tell them.
Whoah. And you say my statement is condescending. The scientific method is not natural or intuitive. It is hard and counter-intuitive. People don't 'just know it'. They have to be trained in it, in logic, in fallacies, in null hypothesis and so forth.
The mistake you're making is that scientists and philosophers are separate and distinct creatures. They're not.
Should we argue that all philosophy is actually just a subset of whatever that was?
I'd like to hear you articulate what it is you're talking about here, rather than just appeal to a mysterious authority.
Does philosophy get priority just because we happen to have a word for it today?
By 'today', do you mean 'pretty much all of recorded history'?
These word games you're playing to denigrate philosophy in favour of science... are philosophy. If you think philosophy is so useless, then why engage in arguments around semantics?
They are, today, separate and distinct. Little proto-scientists are trained in the scientific method in science classes. You can go to any school in the U.S. and science is taught by scientists in science classes in the science department. They are not in the philosophy department. At my college, philosophy was housed in the humanities department.
Philosophers love love love to relive the history of philosophy, but it's history, not present fact. Newton called himself a "natural philosopher"--true. But today most folks call him a scientist.
The question is not "where did science come from," the question is what does philosophy do for scientists today. The structure of that question assumes the very division that you are trying to erase.
I happen to think that there are actual answers to that question; but "all of science is actually philosophy" is not one of them.
Philosophers love love love to relive the history of philosophy, but it's history, not present fact.
Please read back over our discussion - you were the one who brought in ancient history. The things I have mentioned are all aspects of philosophy that are relevant in the current day.
Newton called himself a "natural philosopher"--true. But today most folks call him a scientist.
There is no dichotomy. Being a scientist and doing philosophy are not only not mutually exclusive, but you can't do good science without engaging in philosophy to some degree. This is not the same as 'all of science is actually philosophy', but a comment that the methods of good science require philosophy.
the question is what does philosophy do for scientists today
Why does philosophy need to find factoids or bring something fresh every year in order to be valid?
"And philosophy is not the only discipline that engages in studying the workings of science. So do history and sociology of science, and yet I never heard you dismiss those fields on the grounds that they haven't discovered the Higgs boson." - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/massimo-pigliucci/neil-degrass...
That quote comes from an interesting article, well worth reading. The author is countering Tyson's public misrepresentation of philosophy - with the postscript that Tyson apparently accepts these criticisms.
The philosophy of science is similar to mathematics in what it offers science - you find a new technique that gives good results, so you use it in future. "What does philosophy do for scientists today?" is like saying "What does calculus do for scientists today?".
> guygurari: What new thing did philosophy contribute to physics in the last 100 years?
> vacri: If it weren't for philosophy, you wouldn't have the scientific method in the first place.
That's arguing from history.
> There is no dichotomy.
Not in your mind there isn't, but obviously there is in the minds of a lot of scientists, including for example the author of the linked article, every scientist he mentions by name, and guygurari, the person to whom you responded. You can keep asserting it over and over but that doesn't mean it's true from all perspectives.
If you think that the way science is performed hasn't been significantly changed and refined in the past 100 years, the original timeframe suggested... I don't know what to say. Much of what we call the scientific method has been defined, refined, and expanded in this last 100 years.
dichotomy stuff
The things you're referring to are occupations. 'Philosophers' and 'physicists'. Not 'philosophy' and 'physics'.
The article author quite clearly states that physicists (the occupation) can make good use of philosophy(the realm of knowledge). The realms of physics and philosophy are not mutually exclusive - they are not two wholly separate things; not a dichotomy. And the scientists the article author is mentioning by name are people he's saying have this problem with the faulty perception of philosophy - it's the point of the article.
In any case, like I said at the end of my last comment - philosophy gives us robust techniques for doing science, just like maths does. How do these become 'stale', 'not valid', or 'not useful', just because there hasn't been a recent breakthrough? We don't demand the same of techniques from the realm of mathematics.
> If you think that the way science is performed hasn't been significantly changed and refined in the past 100 years, the original timeframe suggested... I don't know what to say. Much of what we call the scientific method has been defined, refined, and expanded in this last 100 years.
I'm not trolling; I would encourage you to come back to this exchange later and consider it from a different angle. You're committed to the primacy of philosophy, but that is not the only way to view the situation on the ground today.
Trolling or not, you're talking in short, low-context sentences, while avoiding responding to many of the points I raise. It's not really worth talking to someone doing that.
You're committed to the primacy of philosophy
Eh? Where did I say that philosophy is better than anything else? The whole idea that these things are in competition - or that one is 'better' than the other - is entirely within your head, not mine. Read my reply to mercer above.
I had a lecturer in AI who use to do exactly this: he would rail at the uselessness of Philosophy and then present his own theory of AI which was just so much bad philosophy.
"One central question in the philosophy of physics is how we should understand quantum mechanics (QM). We may want to know what we should take QM to be about. It’s worth noting that, in some (but not all) cases, this is no longer an empirical question: for instance, the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of QM is empirically equivalent to the Everett "many worlds" interpretation of QM. So, if we can’t do an experiment to settle the issue, we need to resort to some other method, which is where philosophers of physics come in."
If we can't do an experiment to settle the issue, then maybe the two are equivalent, and Occam's Razor says don't get all theoretical about many universes without good reason?
On the other hand, sooner or later, someone may figure out how to do an experiment that can tell the difference (unless it's provable that the two interpretations always give the same physical results).
I'm currently reading Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...). A common point he makes is that most scientists operate under an informal paradigm. A paradigm, to Kuhn, are the set of shared understandings and interpretations that are not themselves formal theories.
The importance of such paradigms is that they seem to determine what scientists investigate, and what they're primed to even see. An example Kuhn gives are X-rays. Their discovery caused some consternation, even though their existence did not need a full theoretical overhaul. The consternation was that they were completely unexpected, but they also must have been present in many prior experiments, yet never directly reported.
To directly address your point, scientists are human, and will probably lean one way or another on understanding quantum mechanics. How they lean will influence what sort of questions they investigate, how they investigate it, and what sort of outcomes they will look for.
Occam's Razor is a philosophical tool. It's strange to see the argument "This philosophy says don't use philosophy". It's a bit like a sign that says "don't read this sign".
The scientific method is philosophy, falsificationism is philosophy. This is the irony: scientists failing to see that they're using the tools of philosophy to claim philosophy is useless. I wonder what the experiment was that observed Occam's Razor?
I am a physicist who cares deeply about the foundational issues mentioned in the article. And yet I honestly don't see any meaningful input about these issues coming from philosophers.