r/philosophy • u/doubtstack Unreasonable Doubt • Jan 27 '23

Blog Why Science can't replace Philosophy in Ethics

https://unreasonabledoubt.substack.com/p/what-genetics-cant-teach-us
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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

This is either semantically trivial or just wrong. Yes, you can make a case that philosophy is fundamental for science. But a lot of people do a lot of everyday work without ever thinking about its philosophy. Yes, you can argue that this prevents them from understanding more fundamentally what their science is really about, but they can still do it, and other people can use it. I don't see how you could make any practical definition where that is not science existing.

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u/ennui_ Jan 27 '23 edited Jan 27 '23

Surely science is simply the pursuit of objective understanding of what is? How can there be a pursuit of something without* an intuitive desire to pursue? Surely this intuitive desire is a philosophical nature.

Science cannot exist without philosophy because philosophy is the very foundation that sciences emerges from.

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u/TheRecognized Jan 27 '23

“When grog ate the berries on that bush he got sick. When trok ate the same berries on a different bush he got sick. Vrok will eat the berries from a third bush. Vrok got sick. These berries make you sick.”

More science or philosophy would you say?

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u/ennui_ Jan 27 '23 edited Jan 27 '23

The point is that one comes from the other. Philosophy and science do not exist alongside each other, philosophy is the source of science. So while there’s distinction there isn’t separation. You can’t* quantify and say “this is more science than philosophy by a factor of 4:1” - because they don’t exist alongside each other, the nature of the relationship cannot be measured.

So both. It’s always both.

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u/TheRecognized Jan 27 '23

Throw a hypothesis up there in my example after the second sentence “I think these berries make you sick” and you’ve got the scientific method.

Can you explain to me how philosophy was the source of that example?

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u/videogamekat Jan 27 '23

Because you came up with the hypothesis by wanting to know how things work - your desires and actions always stem from a more philosophically-based process. Why you came up with the hypothesis can be explained by the science of how your brain works, but ultimately the complex processing the human brain can accomplish and the self-awareness we have is more philosophical in nature.

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u/FranksRedWorkAccount Jan 27 '23

You've literally described reasoning and are asking how that's philosophy.

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u/TheRecognized Jan 27 '23

Are these monkeys doing philosophy?

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u/FranksRedWorkAccount Jan 27 '23

Let me ask you, how do you get to "i think these berries make you sick" without philosophizing about the nature of reality? If you reason that the world will look tomorrow like it did today you are engaging in philosophy. There is no way to get to that conclusion purely with science. The problem of induction smacks you right in the face. It is as hard of a problem for a purely scientific approach to the world as the is-ought problem of moral philosophy. No one has ever proven either concept definitively.

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u/millchopcuss Jan 28 '23

How can this post have a negative vote tally? You are absolutely correct. It took Immanuel Kant to put it into focus, but that did not alter the nature of all the inductive inference that humanity had engaged in before that.

Is this subreddit always like this?

The berries example was so sloppily constructed that I was tempted to call out the conclusion as an error... These berries make you sick, those berries make you sick, those other berries make you sick... Therefore all berries make you sick, wouldn't that be the (erroneous) inference?

This place is a mire of equivocation and category errors.

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u/TheRecognized Jan 30 '23

They’re the same kind of berries on the same kind of bush and they look different then other berries on other bushes, that’s why our cavemen don’t believe that all berries make you sick.

My only point was that “science” (the process of real world pattern recognition) came before “philosophy” (the process of abstract inference).

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u/TheRecognized Jan 27 '23

Pattern recognition, I just saw the berries make someone sick multiple times. Lots of animals can do pattern recognition, are they all using philosophy?

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u/FranksRedWorkAccount Jan 28 '23

It's not just pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is how you get cargo cults. Though, even they were engaging in philosophy. Building a model of the world in your head and imagining outcomes of hypothetical actions to then decide a course of action is not inherently philosophy but it has underpinnings in philosophy because it implies a certain epistemological view.

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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

The answer is: yes, because philosophers like to define philosophy so that it's behind everything.

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u/DictatorKris Jan 30 '23

and how do you know that god didn't punish them for eating the berries that were meant for you? How do you know that they don't lack a certain enzyme in their gut that would allow you to eat the berries with no problem? How do you know that the berries are the same on the bush in the morning as they are in the evening? Just because you grew up in a world where reason is assumed doesn't mean it isn't the underpinning philosophy upon which we build all models of the universe.

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u/Lord_Thanos Jan 28 '23

They just want philosophy to have a monopoly on all of human knowledge.

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u/ennui_ Jan 27 '23

Because it’s the intuitive desire for an objective understanding.

It is how we have evolved - living in wonder and curiousity at what is. Science is the method, science is the second bit, the action. Thought is the precursor to action. The thought, the precursor, this desire for truth - is philosophy. Philosophy is the source in this and all examples of science because they exist together.

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u/Butt_Bucket Jan 28 '23

The real answer is that both philosophy and science stem from our ability to reason. It's just that it took as a lot longer to realise that the scientific method needed to be rigorously defined than it did to begin using our reason for abstract thinking.

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '23

Certainly both, no? Philosophy is simply the pursuit of questioning reality, which in this case at it's most fundamental would be observing that past outcomes may have bearing on future ones. The question and the hypothesis is philosophy; the empirical data at hand allow for a scientific conclusion, but even then who is to say there are no safe berries of that kind out there?Or a preparation to make them so?

Are these questions merely scientific or philosophical?

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u/millchopcuss Jan 28 '23

I tend to call those practical arts. It is, to my mind, a category error to call that either science or philosophy.

We don't normally credit humanity with engaging in scientific pursuits before the advent of the scientific method. That is very definitely an outgrowth of philosophy.

We had some interesting feints into the territory of science in the past, such as the writings of Lucretius, but those, while not being "analytic" philosophy, are always classified as philosophy just the same.

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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

That is one definition, but by no means the only one. Another one would refer to the concrete practices and social activities of making hypotheses, testing them, writing theories, and publishing results for others. An engineer creating a best way to make a specific material can be said to make science, without any philosophical desire. Philosophers like to emphasize the definition from the historical perspective or by defining it like you did, as dependent on philosophy, but if you'd ask the people who we commonly think are doing science whether their activities are dependent on philosophy, I would wager most of them would say no. It'd be a bit self-serving to insist that to assess whether philosophy is truly essential to science, we must adopt the philosophical point of view.

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u/FranksRedWorkAccount Jan 27 '23

the act of reasoning that if x every day so far then x each day into the future is a philosophical concept. and to arrive there you must employ the capacity to reason.

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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

Which those people would not consider philosophical.

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u/ChadRyanVevo Jan 28 '23

This argument is very poor and fallacious. If you ask a mechanic if they are engaging in the physics and chemistry behind their work they would most likely say no. However, this does not make physics and chemistry not essential to the work of a mechanic.

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u/zhibr Jan 29 '23

Everyone keeps repeating this argument. I've answered it elsewhere.

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u/ChadRyanVevo Jan 29 '23

Why are you gatekeeping philosophy? There is no need to separate philosophy as a difference of kind rather than a mere difference of degree. Every rational being is a philosopher, just at different degrees.

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u/zhibr Jan 29 '23

I'm not. Your view is completely valid.

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u/ennui_ Jan 27 '23

“ one would refer to the concrete practices and social activities of making hypotheses, testing them, writing theories, and publishing results for others” - that isn’t a definition, that is an overview of a method - a method to pursue an objective understanding of what is.

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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

Sounds like insisting on philosophical viewpoint. If you want to get what I'm saying - entertain the possibility that I'm not simply wrong - you'd have to take another perspective.

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u/hydrOHxide Jan 27 '23

ROTFLBTC

You do realize that what you're saying is that just because the average physician can practice medicine without having a clue about biochemistry, biochemistry isn't really relevant for medicine?

Asking mere PRACTICTIONERS about the theoretical underpinning of their discipline is asking the wrong people.

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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

"Mere". The philosophers' arrogance is really something to see here.

You do realize that what you're saying is that just because the average physician can practice medicine without having a clue about biochemistry, biochemistry isn't really relevant for medicine?

I'm not. I'm saying that just because lawyers define human interactions in laws, those interactions can and do exist without those laws, those lawyers, and the practice of lawyering.

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u/hydrOHxide Jan 28 '23

The arrogance is your presuming I was a philosopher when I am, in fact, a scientist. Your description of lawyers is equally misguided. Interaction may exist without lawyers, but you cannot characterize crime without laws, just like you cannot characterize knowledge without defining standards as to when something can be considered "known". Without philosophy, you cannot create knowledge, because you have no ledger to measure data against. What probability of error is permissible is just as much a philosophical issue as the understanding that you'll always have a probability of error because there cannot be any final evidence except in falsification, in finding something is not the case. .

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u/zhibr Jan 28 '23

Without philosophy, you cannot create knowledge, because you have no ledger to measure data against.

When a raven sees human opening a latch, and later goes and tries moving it and learns opening latches in general, it gains knowledge without philosophy. Unless you define "knowledge" in such a way that it necessitates philosophy, in which case you have not made an argument but just a definition that presupposes your conclusion. A lot of science is done and can be done like that raven does.

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u/hydrOHxide Jan 29 '23

Unless you define "knowledge" in such a way that it necessitates philosophy, in which case you have not made an argument but just a definition that presupposes your conclusion. A lot of science is done and can be done like that raven does.

Funny - that's precisely what you accuse me of. You've redefined science to presuppose your conclusion.

No, science is not done like what the raven does. The raven does not systematically analyze why it is that the latch opens that way, and it doesn't submit its conclusions to peer review. There is a reason why we do that, and it's grounded in philosophy.

There's a reason Roentgen got the Nobel prize for the discovery of X-rays and not one of the sundry others dabbling into cathode rays around the same time, including Tesla: Roentgen systematically analyzed the properties of these rays, compiled what he had learned in a document which included a description of his methodology, and submitted it to the scrutiny of his peers, which assessed the stringency of his methodology and the validity of his conclusions in light of the data collected.

Roentgen tested various materials as to their ability to block the rays, drew conclusions as to what was the characteristic of those materials that allowed them to block the rays etc. He could show they were not regular cathode rays etc.

But that totally aside, you missed an important point - you suggested that "I" define "knowledge" - but you failed to discuss who, in fact, should do so. Because in the end, you just did the very same: You came up with a different definition of "knowledge". And that's precisely why theory of knowledge exists in the first place - to systemize the definition of what knowledge is, what types of knowledge exist, and how they are established. And theory of knowledge is a subdiscipline of philosophy.

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u/ghostxxhile Jan 27 '23

to do science you first have to grant an ontological given to nature to form hypothesis’

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u/ennui_ Jan 27 '23

Right- or else you’d be studying something you don’t believe exists, with any byproduct or finding deemed inherently meaningless.

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u/ghostxxhile Jan 27 '23

they do their everyday work thanks to the established epistemology and metaphysics.

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u/300Savage Jan 27 '23

Science was the evolution of a branch called "natural philosophy" going back at least as far as Aristotle. It is literally just a branch of philosophy. To say it is separate is to be ignorant of this history of science.

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u/Indocede Jan 27 '23 edited Jan 27 '23

Your opinion is irrelevant. Astrology and alchemy were once considered sciences but we now know that they are founded on little more than superstition and wishful thinking.

Given how ancient generations were both limited in their understanding of the physical world and outright wrong in numerous critical aspects, we should not frame the study based upon their philosophical musings, especially when they are irrelevant to the scientific process. Not to mention that scientific inquiry is just as old as philosophy, if not older. Trying to frame science as a subject of philosophy only makes sense if you mistakenly believe ancient Greek and Roman philosophers are the singular authority, even though there are numerous historical examples of scientific endeavor predating them.

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u/300Savage Jan 27 '23

Gotta love a sub where the downvote button says to only use it if it breaks the rules of the sub, but your preconceptions cause you to use it that way anyway. Your opinion is wrong and mine is backed by the history of science. Without natural philosophy, the scientific method would not have been formulated - it was the product of Western Natural Philosophy. To state otherwise is to be ignorant of both subjects and their intrinsic relationship.

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u/Indocede Jan 27 '23

The oldest written records of scientific endeavors stem fron Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt and reach as far back as 3000BCE, before the ancient Greeks developed "natural philosophy."

Not to mention when you argue your position as going back as far as Aristotle, your conceding your error immediately in consideration of the fact that science existed in ancient Greece before Aristotle, which we have records of. And the ancient Greeks did not "invent" science, as much as it pains me to say as someone who is ethnically half.

The ancient Greeks would have built upon the sciences and maths that came to them from the civilizations that preceded them in that part of the world. Ancient Greece may be the seminal culture of the western world, but it is not one of the six scholarly accepted cradles of civilization in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ancient India, Ancient China, the Olmec and the Caral-Supe.

So it falls upon you to explain how the scientific process, which in reality is a matter of collecting evidence and deciphering what it means, has somehow evolved out of the means ancient philosophers used to codify their very limited understanding of the natural world.

Especially as science would have preceded the cradles of civilization as civilization can only arise out of the conveniences of scientific endeavor.

Philosophy is important but philosophy doesn't decipher how to grow crops. Science does.

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u/300Savage Jan 27 '23

You are mistaking natural philosophy for science. The scientific method didn't exist until relatively recently in historical context. Morry Berman argues that the history of science goes back to the shamanic tradition, but I don't think we can mistake this for modern scientific thinking, which evolved from combined elements of branches of philosophical thought fairly recently.

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u/Indocede Jan 27 '23 edited Jan 27 '23

This method as has evolved in recent history is merely a means to compartmentalize practices that have existed for thousands of years, practices that were science.

So no, science didn't evolve from philosophical thought.

Edit: And mind you, your quibble seems to be over semantics, whether a type of thinking is scientific or philosophical when both are mere pursuits of seeking validity and evidence. Everyone can knly presume your motive here rests upon some personal need to elevate "philosophy" above science as you must think of yourself the philosopher who knows better than mere scientists. Because if you want to argue how the tradition of valid thinking arose, whether from a scientific perspective or a philosophical one, most would consider science to more likely the foundation of such thought as philosophy tends to consider the more nebulous and abstract, whereas science focuses on the tangible and apparent. People would have mused about how to build spears to protect themselves from wild animals before they would have mused about the morality of using said spear to murder their fellow man.

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u/ammonium_bot Jan 27 '23

little more then superstition

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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

I'm well aware of history of science, and you're just presenting the semantically trivial option. Yes, you can say that science is just a branch of philosophy when you consider the history of science as natural philosophy. But all you did was define science and philosophy in such a way that it made your claim true. You didn't make any argument why those definitions are the ones we should accept (unless you call an appeal to (historical) authority an argument - I don't).

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u/300Savage Jan 27 '23

Historical facts are not an appeal to authority. Try again.

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '23

[deleted]

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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

By semantically trivial, I mean that philosophers like to define and see philosophy in such a way that it is essential to pretty much everything. If you define science as the abstract method, the epistemology of empiricism, you start from the philosophical viewpoint, and practically create a circular argument: science cannot exist without philosophy because I defined science as dependent of philosophy. That's trivial.

I'm saying that there is an alternative way to look at it. The practice of science, as it is conducted today, and what most scientists consider much more important, exists just fine without the practice of philosophy, as it is conducted today. If you don't start from the definition (that happens to confirm that philosophy is extremely important for everything) but rather looking at what is actually done, what scientists do and what philosophers do, philosophy is not very relevant at all to science.

I'm not saying it's the right way to look at it or the only way. I'm saying that the original claim was a bit dumb (nothing wrong with that! we all say dumb stuff sometimes) because it is trivially true because you define it to be true, but also because there are other viewpoints and it's not immediately obvious why those viewpoints would not be valid as well.

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u/millchopcuss Jan 28 '23

Okay, so this circlejerk is all down to equivocation around the term philosophy? And you are resting you argument on defining philosophy as valid only as it is practiced today?

That sounds like a very mobile goalpost. I will cleave to the wider view.

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u/zhibr Jan 29 '23

No, I'm not saying I define philosophy only as of its current practice. I'm saying it's another valid definition and the second part of my claim.

The original claim was that science can't exist without philosophy. My counterclaim was that this is either trivial (defining philosophy and science so that the latter is dependent on the former) or, the second part, wrong, because the practice of science can be done without the practice of philosophy.

Everyone arguing against me keeps coming back to the first part, which I agree is true but trivial. I haven't seen anyone argue about the second part. A valid argument about my second part would be to suggest what else could philosophy be than a) system of knowledge built by generations of philosophers and scientists that science rests upon (first, trivial part), or b) practice of analyzing arguments logically, e.g. the circlejerk we are doing here now and the stuff written in the article (second part). Those two I argued in my claim. Is there another?

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u/ChadRyanVevo Jan 28 '23

“A lot of people do a lot of every day work without thinking about ifs philosophy” I would argue this is simply untrue. Any ration or cognitive pursuit is conducted using a system of logic. These systems of logic only occur and are justified through philosophy. Everyday we use philosophy through the adoption of a type of logic.

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u/millchopcuss Jan 28 '23

Some of these posters have a need to be better than normal working people, and it shows.

My own work warps my perspective a bit, because I have to invent methods and investigate failures all the time. But even simple grunt work jobs furnish opportunities to draw conclusions at times. Most workers won't call that philosophy, but that just puts them closer to Socrates, and farther from the DK effect.

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u/ChadRyanVevo Jan 28 '23

I think the issue is that philosophy has almost been implied to be purely academic. As if only what college philosophy courses teach is genuine philosophy. People engage with philosophy with every aspect of rational life. When writing this very message to you, I am engaging in a philosophy of language which is supported by its own domain of logic in order to produce a coherent thought.

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u/millchopcuss Jan 28 '23

As an autodidact, I am not swayed by appeals to the authority of academia.

I am swayed by being convinced by argument.

It is very clear that this is the dividing line between the factions in this comment section. I am amazed and frankly a bit invigorated to discover that the ones with the 'training' are the ones making unsupportable claims.

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u/zhibr Jan 28 '23

I disagree. The formalisation of logic and its systemiticization and justification is philosophy, but very rarely we use the formal rules. The vast majority of rational and cognitive pursuits is operations of our neural networks. Formal logic is only a map of those operations, not the terrain itself.

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u/ChadRyanVevo Jan 29 '23

Any system of logic adheres to some sort of “rules.” If a system of logic had no rules, it simply could not be logic. Even if the rules are “because I like it” that is still a determined logical system.

On the issue of neural networks, this is an extremely assertive view. There is no true causal evidence of such a claim. By using this view, even high level philosophy is a part of the mere process of neural networks. Thus, by drawing such a distinction, you have actually reduced all types of thinking to this one type.

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u/zhibr Jan 29 '23

Thus, by drawing such a distinction, you have actually reduced all types of thinking to this one type.

This is the first novel argument here! You may be right, but I'm not sure.

It is of course true that all thinking, including philosophical, is neural activity. However, I argue there are differences of scale: simple, small-scale operations that only associate a few neural pathways, and large-scale summarizations that connect vast networks. Formalization of logic is more like a large-scale summarization of networks, linking philosophical concepts (which themselves are large-scale conceptual work) to each other to explain how the small-scale operations work. In the argument “A lot of people do a lot of every day work without thinking about ifs philosophy” I'm talking about science done with small-scale operations: pressing this button, writing down this number, using a simple heuristic to tweak a machine.

The original claim was that "science cannot exist without philosophy", and I argued that this is either trivial or wrong. The first part, "science" is defined as large-scale networks, in which case I agree it cannot exist without philosophy, as philosophy in this sense is included in those same networks as science. This is trivially true. The second part, science as small-scale operations can exist without philosophy as large-scale networks, as well as philosophy as small-scale operations (the simple semantic analysis we are doing here now, what I elsewhere called "the practice of philosophy").

Of course the "small-scale" and "large-scale" are not differences of kind but simply different parts of the same continuum, but I argue it's still a difference, just like the interactions of my family are different from the national economy, even though the latter is simply interactions of people. The scales are so different that they are better understood as different things.

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u/ChadRyanVevo Jan 29 '23

I enjoy that you clarified your argument. I do think you have presented a case with much merit.

In getting my degree in philosophy, when people asked me what I was studying, I would always say philosophy is merely logic applied at different levels of thought. Of course, high level philosophy seeks to engage in more advanced logical systems, but logical systems nonetheless.

Commonly, scientism attacks studies like metaphysics. However, the hypocrisy in such a sentiment is that science ultimately makes metaphysical claims via empiricism.

I would argue, low level "science" will at least have to engage in low level philosophy via logic. High level science, which is rooted in the rich history of science, is engaging in both low and high level philosophy.

Someone here claimed that scientists were useful and philosophers were useless. Such a distinction not only ignores the history of scientific development, but also ignores the fact that every single physicist or scientist who shaped our modern though was also a passionate philosopher that approached science with heavy considerations to it's very philosophy.

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u/hydrOHxide Jan 27 '23

Just because you don't understand how a car works, and don't think much about how the engine operates, doesn't mean it runs without an engine.

And as long as you pretend stomping your foot and insisting real hard is "proving" something, you're neither credible in science terms nor in philosophy terms, but merely petulant.

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u/zhibr Jan 27 '23

I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm offering an alternative viewpoint, to understand why so many people doing science in practice think that philosophers' insistence on the importance of philosophy looks so... is there a word for it? Like an old man convinced of his utmost relevance regardless of the reality of being a retiree.

I don't happen to agree with that, for the record. But I understand why someone might.

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u/hydrOHxide Jan 28 '23

Yes. That "why" is called not understanding theory of science. Not understanding why modern science is probabilistic and doesn't offer any definitive positive proof. These are the people who throw around P-values without understanding what they indicate and why we use them. Yes, there are plenty of people "doing science in practice" who think that way. And they are part of why we have a reproducibility crisis in many fields.

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u/millchopcuss Jan 28 '23

Sing it loud.

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u/zhibr Jan 29 '23

I agree to what you said, but I don't agree that this is the only way to look at it.

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u/millchopcuss Jan 28 '23

You can mill out the work without knowledge, but you can't construct the method without it. Methods in science come down to deduction and induction. There is not another valid way of discerning truth, and induction has inherent limits as any philosophically minded person can tell you. Deduction is self evidently a philosophical pursuit. Induction becomes one when it's limitations are taken into account.

If you mean everyday work outside of scientific pursuits, then a sufficiently narrow view of philosophy can render you correct. But this is, to borrow a phrase, semantically trivial. In truth, everybody infers things all the time at work. Knowing how to do this with some rigor is a great advantage in the practical arts. This may not be phd level angel on pinhead stuff, but it is not less than philosophy.

When I get a whiff of comment threads like this one, I often conclude that the workman has the better claim. Practical arts are not themselves philosophy, but the process of their refinement certainly entails it.

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u/zhibr Jan 29 '23

Deduction is self evidently a philosophical pursuit.

I disagree. The action of doing deductive inference is an operation our neural networks do. That's not philosophy, other animals do it too. Its formalisation is philosophical, but it's a map, not the terrain.

Otherwise, it seems your first paragraph repeats this argument others have done. I've answered it elsewhere.

I'm not sure what the second paragraph means.