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