From c9f6c53a0d9617e3d3a6862b3998322c2a1470c8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Joe Carstairs Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 21:59:13 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] science and philosophy 2025-01-24 --- .../blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md | 139 ++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 139 insertions(+) create mode 100644 website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e906062 --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md @@ -0,0 +1,139 @@ +--- +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