science and philosophy 2025-01-24

website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md

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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