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----
-title: Why scientists need philosophers
-description: This is a practice essay, OK? Don't shoot me if it's no good.
-pubDate: 2025-01-24
----
-
-I've recently been working at a
-[Philosophy of Science MOOC]([phil-sci-coursera]) on Coursera, the online
-courses website. Later on, they set you an exercise to write a short essay
-addressing how philosophy can contribute to science.
-
-So this is my punt. Life is too short to revise or, hell, even research this, so
-don't take any of this as my settled opinion or as my best work. Whatever. With
-that caveat in mind, it might still be entertaining at least, or maybe even
-spark some thoughts.
-
----
-
-Walk into a particular room in the Science Museum in Kensington, and you will
-find yourself enveloped in a cavern of ironmongery and miscellanea. The shelves
-droop under the weight of bolts, files, screws, bits, grinders, saws,
-protractors, clamps and pins. The inventory scrolls endlessly past you, voices
-reciting the lists of trinkets like an incantation.
-
-This is the workshop of James Watt, meticulously reconstructed from the
-original as it was left in his home in Birmingham after his death. This
-entrancing space invites you to imagine a tireless creative, endlessly
-tinkering away at his next contraption.
-
-And yet for all that - and for all his immense valorisation as the lynchpin of
-Britain's industrial revolution - Watt was reluctant to think of himself as the
-engineer everyone else loved. He aspired to be remembered not as an engineer
-but as a scientist.
-
-To understand why James Watt, one of the most admired engineers who ever lived,
-wished he were famed as a scientist instead, is to understand something
-essential about modern Western thought.
-
-In Watt's lifetime, scientists increasingly became the elite of society. In the
-nineteenth and twentieth century, this trend only gathered pace. We constructed
-our modern public health infrastructure on the advice of pathologists and made
-medicine scientific. We funded scientific expeditions to map the world, even to
-its remotest corners (in part to help us conquer it). We adopted radical new
-economic policies in response to scientific economic theories. We built vast
-infrastructure networks to communicate waves of invisible energy discovered by
-pioneering physicists, and built nuclear plants to generate more of the stuff
-by means of nuclear science. We even designed social programmes on the basis of
-scientific anthropology. By the end of the twentieth century, scientists were
-our prophets, priests and kings. Or so we thought.
-
-In the 1990s, at the so-called 'end of history', it was assumed that there
-would be no more need for social upheaval. Humanity had arrived at the ideal
-system of social organisation. And among other ideologies - secularism,
-libertarianism, democracy - an essential part of the package is that science
-was our ultimate and incontestible way of securing knowledge about the world.
-
-Yet now, that certainty is broken. Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian,
-Muslim, Hindu, or else besides, is politically empowered in many places,
-together with its rejection of science.
-
-At the same time, the myth of science is ever more punctured. The supposedly
-scientific West has increasingly come to appreciate that their scientific
-heritage also includes much we would rather ignore - phrenology, race science,
-systematic blindness to female bodies in medicine.
-
-Meanwhile, scientists themselves are noticing that their holy calling has
-turned out to be rather less holy than they had hoped. They find science
-pulled between the competing demands of truth and tenure. Scientific knowledge
-is locked behind the paywalls of exclusive journals, which even many academics
-struggle to access, never mind the general public.
-
-What then for science in the twenty-first century?
-
-Yet there is another story available. It starts with confessing that the old
-stories got things wrong in important ways. When we put ideology aside, science
-has not been on an uncontested march to universal acceptance since Galileo.
-There has been continual change, continual conflict, continual readjustment of
-our ideas to the changing demands of the age.
-
-In Galileo's day, it may have been a fight to establish that there was much to
-be seen by simply looking. As empirical observation started to prove its worth
-in the early modern period, thinkers wrestled with new problems: how to
-reconcile the evidence of Scripture with the evidence of the senses? How to
-understand how sensation can give us knowledge at all, granted that any
-observer may be vulnerable to illusions, tricks and dreams? And if that's how
-sense data work, what then for our mathematical or logical knowledge, which
-seems to already bind the world even before we start experiencing it?
-
-This centuries-long struggle culminated in the work of Kant, who in his 1786
-magnum opus, the _Critique of Pure Reason_, set out a masterful - if infamously
-obscure - system, which enabled thinkers to understand just how empirical
-knowledge might work.
-
-Yet two generations later, Charles Darwin lit the flame under new controversy
-about the relationship between scientific and religious knowledge. His bizarre
-and wildly imaginative theory of evolution by natural selection challenged the
-Genesis Creation accounts, and this was soon to be followed up with the theory
-of tectonic shift.
-
-Some said that where scientists contradicted the authority of Scripture, the
-word of God must always win. Others said that science alone had the keys to
-knowledge, and if what the Bible said couldn't be proven scientifically, then
-it couldn't be accepted. Some said that science and religion were two
-incommensurable attempts to study the same subject matter, while others said
-that they covered completely separate spheres.
-
-Gradually, all of these views moved to the extremes. Now, most people (though
-not all) agree that science and religion have overlapping spheres, and can
-inform one another, but neither the Book of Nature nor the Book of Scripture
-has the decisive final say.
-
-Now, in our post-Christendom Western context, it's more important than ever to
-understand how science and religion can talk to one another. Religious
-minorities - as all religions now are in the West - are vulnerable to the risk
-of becoming epistemic islands, cut off from the knowledge of the rest of the
-community, unless we can find ways that science can talk across creedal
-differences.
-
-We need, too, for scientifically marginalised communities, such as non-white
-people, whom science has ignored, or worse, to be more tightly integrated into
-science, both so that knowledge might increase, and so that the benefits
-knowledge gives might be fairly shared.
-
-In light of these urgent needs, today's philosophers are considering science
-not just as an epistemic problem, but as a social problem. As philosophers once
-established science as the bedrock of modern knowledge, so philosophers today
-have the task of figuring out how science can glue together our societies.
-
-Science has been at its most dangerous when it hasn't been questioned. At all
-times, as long as we practice science, we need to consider what it means, what
-it means to do science well, how it can generate knowledge, and how it ought to
-be used as a powerful instrument of change.
-
-And perhaps that might justify James Watt in his obsession to be seen as a
-scientist: since we can't get by just with practitioners. We need people who
-can see our practices from the outside and shine a mirror back on us. If we
-want science, then we need philosophers.
-
-[phil-sci-coursera]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy-physical-sciences