Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy
preposterousuniverse.com
preposterousuniverse.com
"In a review of Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, in New York Review of Books, the British geneticist Steve Jones had the following comment to make: "To most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex. It is cheaper, easier and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it." Now that view is all too common, and I understand it from the depths of my soul. I appreciate why people think this, but I think it is also important to combat this stereotype in a friendly and constructive spirit, and no place better than in a center for research in cognitive science. What philosophers can be good at – there aren't many things we can be good at – is helping people figure out what the right questions are. When people ask me whether there's been any progress in philosophy I say, "Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."
To this I might add a rhetorical question: how would science have gone about discovering the scientific method? Indeed, in which discipline would that question fall even today?
The general problem of whether we can increase the probability that a theory is true by observing favorable evidence is the problem of induction, and there are no clear cut answers. A lot of philosophy focuses on situations like this: where all the proposed answers have flaws, but some have fewer flaws than others.
For example, one approach that's been gaining popularity is Bayesianism. Bayesianism is the idea that we have some prior belief in the probability of a hypothesis, and that we can update our confidence in that hypothesis by observing evidence and comparing the relative probabilities that evidence would hold in worlds where the hypothesis was true vs. worlds where the hypothesis was false. The key weakness of Bayesianism is the question of where priors come from, and how to formulate good priors. This is a glaring weakness, but all proposed solutions have glaring weaknesses–that's what makes Philosophy of Science hard.
Not every branch of science was scouted out ahead of time by philosophy, but some were. And in recent history, I think quantum computing is really the poster child here. It's fine to tell people to "Shut up and calculate," but the question is, what should they calculate? At least in quantum computing, which is my field, the sorts of things that we like to calculate — capacities of quantum channels, error probabilities of quantum algorithms — are things people would never have thought to calculate if not for philosophy.
For more: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ — it's been posted here a bunch of times, although without any comments.
The article states three example criticisms. I find the derision of the first two completely fair -- neither are very useful criticisms. The derision of the third is misguided. The criticism is completely fair -- which is why philosophy itself is the biggest voice of that criticism! Analytic philosophy is philosophy's answer to that entire criticism of (what is now called) continental philosophy.
The biggest problem with scientists is not their criticism, it's that their criticism is dated. Philosophy had this debate decades ago and has since changed as a result.
Philosophy gave us many of the things we consider science: the scientific method is the direct result of many of the enlightenment philosophers' quest to determine "what is real" versus "what is not real". Once you have an agreed upon, repeatable definition of a process to get to "real", you can move on from there.
Once the total knowledge of our species began to expand toward the middle of the 19th century, it was no longer sufficient for a scholar to be a "philosopher". You had to specialize in something. So philosophy became dominated by the left-over "soft" topics like ethics and personal philosophy, leaving many people working in "hard" disciplines to shun the label of "philosopher".
Interestingly enough, the classification problem is still one of the most hotly debated problems in philosophy. How much of our classification comes from a truly singular concept versus linguistic commonality? I don't have the answer, but we've been asking the question for a long time.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy#History
Now there are plenty of philosophers who came later who have tried instead - following in the shoes of Hume - to perform a materialist grounding of these faculties not in the brain but derived from sense experience itself - sense experience somehow constitutes the structures of the brain and changing external sense experiences can reshape or reconstitute these brain structures. For example, Gilles Deleuze seems to me to do something like this.
And while I'm not totally sure about the definition of K ( specifically the whether something can be shown part), I think this would be based just on definitions, without really any axioms?
Although I suppose it is possible that I included an axiom and just wrote "Define" before it.
(tangent: I suppose one could say "define a system with the following axioms" and then make a proof about that system, and claim that it was a proof by definition?)
Maybe I don't really understand what a priori really means (this seems fairly likely) but I don't think definitions are considered a priori?
But from a scientific perspective, both knowledge and experience arise from the physical properties of the universe; properties that predate humans and biological systems entirely. From that perspective, one could say that all knowledge is a priori.
But whether we say it's all priori or posteriori doesn't really matter. The point is that making the distinction privileges the human perspective in a way that we have no scientific evidence to support. The entire exercise begs the question by assuming that human experience is determinative, or distinct in any way from the rest of the universe.
EDIT: And this is the big one that the article leaves out: the main complaint by scientists against philosophy is that it's so often wrong, especially about science. Many scientists who get curious about philosophy dip into some "philosophy of science" for obvious reasons, and don't recognize there any of the descriptions of the science that they're familiar with. And when philosophers try to apply their general principles to instruct is about how the universe works, they're even more wrong. Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy is a good introduction to this wrongness. He devotes a good deal of it to showing how Kant derived so many wrong conclusions about physics that he thought must be true because of general principles.
They were naive realists and that's ok- it seemed helpful for getting data, interpreting results, keeping the wheels of science moving forward.
Aside from being interesting in its own right, this keeps you from making the mistake that philosophy is simply a precursor to science, and that it can be reliably judged based on how much ended up in the realm of empiricism.
I think he could have made his point better by noting that pretty much any thinking about why we study physics leads directly to philosophy. What is the point of doing science? What is knowledge, and why should we be interested in it? These are just the sort of questions philosophy as a discipline is intended to answer.
Any physicist who is interested in any 'meta' questions about his/her work is necessarily interested in philosophy. One can disagree with the particular methodologies of modern academic philosophy, but it is hard to see how any intellectually curious person can dismiss the field entirely.
It seems to me that this is a stronger argument for the relevance of philosophy to science.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Great
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.
"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."
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).
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.
Priceless!
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?".
> 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.
Yes, by scientists.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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... :)
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
"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 interests overlap at times with mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, physicists. Sometimes they have valuable things to say to each other. E.g. Experimental philosophy is a trend in philosophy, and people who have never done scientific experiments before could learn how to do them better from scientists who have that experience and knowledge. I support people that find common ground and work together to help each other tackle the puzzles they're working on.
The impression that most physicists I know is that the percentage of bad philosophers or bad philosophy papers is much high then in chemistry, physics, biology and several others.
I could not take the arguments here and convince those friends/peers otherwise.
> 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.
The problem is that philosophers have so little data to work with. The problems they are pointed at often need tremendous amounts of data or very hard to collect data. Instead of making an incremental improvement on collecting that data or analyzing existing data it seems to often be the case that philosophers decided to work with guess work instead.
>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.
A theoretical paper that examines the various quantum calculation techniques through the lens of information theory and attempts to make rigorous claims on which methods or fundamentally more simple(form an information theory definition) sounds like solid science and an interesting read. "trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality" - does not sound like something I would want to fund or read.
>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.
I would want an example of an issue where calculation plays no role. Being able to communicate the ideas to fellow humans might be thought to involve not calculation, I would argue that starting with the simplest mathematical models then isomorphically(or at least minimize information lose) tweaking for human understanding would be the non-practical ideal method and use considerable calculation.
Regardless of whether anything "means" anything, I really don't get why it should.
Uncovering actionable (and often very surprising) laws of nature sound much more exciting to me than pondering about "meaning", especially when done by people who don't have a deep understanding of physics.
The only people who should be philosophizing are the physicists, but they'd rather do physics instead, and I think that's a good thing.
For the science-trained reader it can be painful to read. For example a popular rhetorical technique in this area is to take a well-defined scientific idea and use it as if it was a metaphor, then use the metaphor to imply some claim, then claim that the scientific idea entailed the claim.
Also, explaining things in an elliptical and opaque way is often considered OK, since it provides a certain kind of experience for the reader. In the Anglo-American tradition, clarity is an objective, rather than giving off a vibe where you kind of get the idea.
These guys point out some howling examples where technical terms are abused to the point of meaninglessness:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861971249/o/qid=97...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
There is not a divide between Philosophy and Physics. Their axioms are merely different. Physics has axioms. Philosophy is about life, and therefore examines it with NO precepts. In order to discover the truth about the universe, one must make no assumptions. One must simply understand the level of truth each thought holds. This is the 'golden key.'
Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle mean we have free will? Can free will exist? What sort of (theoretical) evidence would we need to disprove free will?
Is that line of questioning philosophy or science? I'm really not sure. I think you take a headlong leap into science when you start running tests, but I'm not sure at what point talk turns from philosophy to science.
In the end, everyone is just trying to make a more accurate map, right?
Nevertheless the belief in free will is very important for human happiness; or at least, happy and/or successful people tend to believe in free will, or just that their will is free and they're the master of their fates and the captain of their souls.
That is often the motive behind free will arguments, which generally have a very powerful smell of rationalization about them, but a thing is not necessarily true because human happiness (or even life) requires believing it is true or leads to the feeling it must be true.
Pretty much... which is why philosophy and science are not mutually exclusive. If they were, there wouldn't be an area of philosophy called the 'philosophy of science', which concerns itself with the best ways to acquire knowledge. :)
Young physicists also seem unusually biased towards mathematical forms of expression, as opposed to "mere" human language.
But at least it was a good grounding for becoming a functional programmer!