3 Reasons why Scientists and You Need Philosophy
Ayn Rand said it best, everyone needs a philosophy, but what happens when you don’t have one? The consequences are worse than you think.
Ayn Rand said it best, everyone needs a philosophy, but what happens when you don’t have one? The consequences are worse than you think.
Reports of the death of the philosophy of science are greatly exaggerated. Rather scientists and science philosophers have, in the last hundred years or so, been going through a separation that has been detrimental to both. Philosophy that has managed to break through to scientists like the simulation theory or many worlds interpretations of quantum physics have been grasped at like a food by a starving person. Make no mistake that science is starving for philosophy but rather than recognizing the problem has chosen a more breatharian path of publicly claiming no need for it while privately stuffing their faces with junk philosophy.
To prove my point, unscientifically, here are a selection of quotes from notable scientists about science philosophy:
Lawrence Krauss, cosmologist and author of A Universe from Nothing:
[T]he worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science.
Richard Feynman, physicist and Nobel Laureate:
The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
Niel deGrasse Tyson, who is more famous as a popularizer of science than as a scientist, expressed his views on philosophy in a 2014 interview. His ignorance was as painful as a creationist saying evolution is “just a theory”.
My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?
In a Q&A with an audience Tyson went on, which is reproduced in full below so as not to take him out of context:
Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would be scientist but without a laboratory, right? And so what happens is, the 1920s come in, we learn about the expanding universe in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientists was rendered essentially obsolete, and that point, and I have yet to see a contribution — this will get me in trouble with all manner of philosophers — but call me later and correct me if you think I’ve missed somebody here. But, philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, the word physicist didn’t even exist in any important way back then. So, I’m disappointed because there is a lot of brainpower there, that might have otherwise contributed mightily, but today simply does not. It’s not that there can’t be other philosophical subjects, there is religious philosophy, and ethical philosophy, and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosophers to do, but the frontier of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.
Stephen Hawking declared philosophy “dead”. Richard Dawkins styles himself a philosopher of religion despite an almost complete disregard for the field itself as if his status as a scientist confers on him a superior knowledge.
Whether these opinions represent the majority, the problem is real. Scientists need to know why they need philosophy so here are three reasons why they and you need to study it in humility:
1.) Free Ourselves from Prejudice
Albert Einstein not only one of the greatest scientists but one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived addressed this reason in a 1944 letter to Robert Thornton
I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today — and even professional scientists — seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
Scientists, like all human beings, are full of prejudices and these prejudices, Einstein suggests, distinguish those scientists who are simply performing experiments and publishing the results (or publishing popular books with little unique depth to them) and those who want to know the truth.
As Indy observed ironically in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,
Archaeology is the search for fact … not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.
I say ironically because the point of the movie is to show that he and his father are seeking a greater truth, one that they only find at the end. And in the end, aren’t we all seeking truth? We can’t take anything with us from this life, so we might as well try to figure out what it’s all for. If we simply latch onto certain prejudices, we will end up with a philosophy that is self-serving and far from truth.
As Ayn Rand observed in her her book “Philosophy, who needs it?”
Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
As controversial as her philosophy is, at least she put a lot of thought into it and decided that was what mattered to her.
2.) Clarify Ill-Defined Concepts and Critique Assumptions
In the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of scientists laid out their reasons why science needs philosophy and a plan for how science and philosophy could contribute to one another through shared conferences and colloquia. One of the reasons they mentioned was conceptual clarification;
[t]he definition of stem cells is a prime example. Philosophy has a long tradition of investigating properties, and the tools in use in this tradition have recently been applied to describe “stemness,” the property that defines stem cells.
Highlighting the work of Hans Clevers applying this philosophical analysis to oncology, they found that,
beyond conceptual clarification, this philosophical work has real-world applications as illustrated by the case of cancer stem cells in oncology. … [T]his philosophical framework recently has been applied to another field, the study of organoids.
Science also depends on numerous assumptions, many of which are unspoken. For example, in the present crisis, many agent-based and mathematical models of coronavirus do not take into account how the behavior of people changes during a pandemic. They simply measure the effect of government policy. Thus, they overestimate infection rates as the pandemic goes on because they assume that people will not voluntarily take precautions. Moreover, they underestimate the potential for future waves when infection rates have declined to the point where people start to behave normally again. With pandemics such as the 1918 Flu, which occurred in three infection waves, behavior has a huge impact on the way disease spreads. As a group of McMaster researchers published in 2013, their disease
model showed that the three waves could only be explained if people reduced infectious contact rates when recent influenza mortality was high. Possible mechanisms include avoiding large gatherings, keeping distance from other people, and handwashing.
Of all contributing factors,
behavioural responses had the largest effect, says David Earn, an investigator with the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, and a professor in McMasters Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
Thus, not examining assumptions can have deadly consequences. It is when mortality rates are low that science has the greatest to contribute to public awareness.
3.) Understand the Limits of Science
David Bentley Hart, theologian and science philosopher, points out,
Physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical.
Many physicists and those who worship at the alter of physics who are dismissive of philosophy are of the mystical persuasion.
Indeed, we know that science must have limits because the basic assumption of science is that it exists. Science cannot prove its own existence. This is a philosophical belief that extends to the belief in rationality, i.e., that logic exists. We cannot prove logically that logic exists. We have to assume it does. Hart argues that it comes from a universal consciousness we call God that gives being to all things. You may think it comes from somewhere else or like some materialist philosophers you may believe that it is a figment of evolution.
On the one side are the mystics and on the other are the “realists” like Hawking. Stephen Hawking often talked about how he was a logical positivist, one who only believes in what can be measured and makes no assumptions about the truth of anything. That was his truth, but such a position invalidates all rational thought including itself. Thus, it is self-defeating. Nevertheless, his position points out just how difficult it is to understand what science really tells us about the world. The answer may be somewhere in between the two positions.
There are limits to science. As Karl Popper showed, science cannot prove affirmative statements. We cannot prove that Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is true. We can only show that it is false and not even that much. True and false, when it comes to science, indeed, are erroneous statements. Newton’s theory is not “false” because it is superseded by Einstein’s. Nor is Einstein’s theory “true” because we haven’t found anything better.
Rather, scientific theories can be better categorized as being “worse” or “better”. No other principle shows this more than Ockham’s razor, attributed to English philosopher Willem of Ockham in the 13th century. Ockham’s razor simply states that we shouldn’t add things to theories that do not serve any purpose and that the simplest explanation is the best. Ockham’s razor, however, does not tell us that a theory is “true”. How would we know that Ockham’s own principle is true? We can’t demonstrate that scientifically. Rather, Ockham’s razor shows us which theory is “best”. Right now, Einstein’s theory is our “best” theory of gravity and space and time. Newton’s theory is “worse” except in those circumstances, like most rocket science, where it is perfectly sufficient. Then Newton’s theory is “best” because it is simpler. Thus, Ockham’s razor not only does not distinguish true and false, it is also contextual. And science is likewise a contextual enterprise.
Thus, science is limited to proposing and demonstrating the “best” theories about life, the universe, and everything. It cannot serve as the ultimate truth. If you choose to shroud truth in mystery, that is your prerogative but you cannot cut it off. It exists outside of scientific inquiry.
Conclusion
These are only some of the reasons why scientists and philosophers need philosophy. Other reasons I haven’t gone into are ethics and the need for science to clarify its positions in the face of power. Also, a lot more can be said about what constitutes a scientific fact, a far more nebulous concept than it appears. The biggest take away here is that scientists ignore philosophy at their peril. Making statements that philosophy is “useless” or “dead” aren’t intelligent and prescient statements from geniuses but ignorant statements from human beings who are venturing outside their areas of expertise.
Einstein, A. “Letter to RA Thornton, 7 December 1944.” Einstein Archive, EA (1944): 61–574.
Rand, Ayn. Philosophy: Who needs it. Vol. 1. Penguin, 1984.
Laplane, Lucie, et al. “Opinion: Why science needs philosophy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.10 (2019): 3948–3952.
Hart, David Bentley. The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. United Kingdom, Yale University Press, 2013.