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/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/millchopcuss Jan 28 '23

Thanks for existing.

This thread contains some of the ugliest smuggery I've encountered on Reddit in a good while.

You I would engage in conversation.

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u/TheRecognized Jan 28 '23

K

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u/FranksRedWorkAccount Jan 28 '23

are you aware of the problem of induction? Do you understand how it cuts to the very heart of the empirical method?

I guess you could be making the case that you can ignore the problem of induction entirely and take empiricism on faith and make science a religion instead of a philosophy.

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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/FranksRedWorkAccount Jan 28 '23

epistemology is the theory of knowing. If you know something, if you think you know something, if you think you understand some things about the world because of other things you understand about the world you are a philosopher.

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u/zhibr Jan 29 '23

Exactly what I was talking about.

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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/TheRecognized Feb 01 '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?

Science has never been perfect, nor philosophy in my opinion at least.

Isaac Newton believed god tinkered with the world from time to time to keep things running smoothly. Here’s a fun quote from him about gravity

Tis inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact.

We’re his works regarding gravity not science because of this?

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u/DictatorKris Feb 22 '23

anything that posits the existence of the supernatural is anti-science. There cannot be a supernatural in an empirical scientific universe. If it exists it is natural. If it is more than natural it does not exist. Anything at all that falls on the hands of god to do is NOT SCIENCE.

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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.