Is philosophy a requirement of modern science ?

[Royston]

I hope the mods don't mind, but I split this from another thread, where religion was being discussed, and as this topic has nothing to do with religion, I thought it would be ok to continue.

 

I've just posted an assignment, and currently enjoying a beer, so I'll address the points ajb raised later. However if anyone else would like to comment, especially somebody more grounded in philosophy than I am, it would be very interesting to hear some viewpoints. Here's the discussion so far...

 

Yeah, but then math is just a branch of philosophy

 

Not sure what I think of that!

 

How come ? I've noticed similar comments about philosophy on here, where people seem to think that it's somehow a separate entity from science, when really it's an intrinsic part of science. Philosophy seems to some, like fluffy pondering, so I'm not sure what books on philosophy people are reading, not that I'm very well read in the subject, but what I have read, it's thoroughly grounded in logic, and vice versa, in fact modern logic has it's roots from philosophy.

 

Separating philosophy from science is like, separating math from science, i.e you can't...so I don't understand this distain with philosophy that people have, I guess it has this stigma of pacing around, mentally masturbating yourself ? Thoughts ?

 

I too know very little about philosophy' date=' but mathematics is a bit more than just sitting down and thinking hard enough till you get the answers you want. You have to do a bit more than that. For example, I may think after some pondering and reflection that "a = b" or that some theorem should hold. However good the ethos is here, I still need to offer a proof. Sometimes this can be the harder part, or sometimes it can be easier than the original idea.

 

I would agree that a lot of logic and modern philosophy have common roots. However, logic generally is outside of mathematics. There is "mathematical logic", which includes model theory, proof theory, predicate calculus etc. All things I know very little about and as such I cannot really say how they relate to modern philosophy.

 

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, validity, mind and language. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

 

Does this mean the "hows" and/or the "whys"?

 

To me science is much more about the "hows" rather than the "whys". It is difficult to put "meaning" to things, as far as I am concerned if you can measure it then that is all I need to know. You don't need to worry "why" you can just measure or observer it.

 

The same thing really applies more specifically in theoretical physics. Having some interpretation (a philosophy?) of what is going on is good and can be useful. But in reality, all that matters is that the calculation you have preformed agrees with nature. Everything "in between" need not bother us.

 

Maybe my views on Philosophy are a bit skewed. I don't know. I am sure people on this forum have thought more about this that I. I have a very "fluffy" understanding of philosophy and it might be nice to know a little more.[/quote']

[Sisyphus]

Part of the trouble is that "philosophy" is an extremely broad term, and includes a number of subjects that really (I think) would be better off considered separately, since calling it all "philosophy" can lead to confusion, especially among "scientifically-minded" people. So yeah, there's a lot of "fluffiness" that rightly or wrongly calls itself philosophy, but that's not all there is.

 

Really, though, it is very much inseparable. Basically, philosophy just deals with fundamental questions. It's not so much "why questions," as certain people like to say, but more "what questions." What is existence, what is rationality, what is necessary, what is contradiction, etc. Science is a tool, grounded in a great many philosophical assumptions, for coaxing empirical data out of existence. It is philosophy which provides and then continually reevaluates those assumptions, and "analyzes" the data. It's a difficult process to really explain without going very, very deeply into it, but science is highly dependent on epistemology, ontology, logic, and various inquiries of metaphysics, and historically the greatest scientific shifts have been rooted in philosophical hypotheses, and in broadening "scientific" inquiry into what previously had been considered mere fluffy old philosophy.

 

Now, that's not to say that scientists need to study philosophy in order to do their jobs. They can (and usually do) only have a grasp of certain concepts, without even necessarily being aware how much more there is to it. Analogously, medical doctors don't need to know about advanced physics to cure patients and do effective research, even though their subjects (human bodies) are ultimately physical objects being physically manipulated.

[ajb]

If philosophy is about deciding what questions to ask then it can be part of science, if you ask scientific questions!

 

The "philosophy of physics" is to understand the natural world. In deciding what this means we have used philosophy I guess. I mean, we have to sit down and decide what questions we could/should/will ask.

[Sisyphus]

If philosophy is about deciding what questions to ask then it can be part of science, if you ask scientific questions!

 

If physics is about deciding how the physical body works, then it can be part of medicine!

 

I don't how long this analogy will hold up, but it's doing fine so far.

[ajb]

Or is medicine part of physics? Us humans are part of nature (i.e. the universe) and hence understanding the human body is part of physics.

 

Or maybe not. Maybe, physics is defined by its philosophy and not the subjects it studies? I mean, a Dr worries about how the human body works as he wants to look after it. His primary interest is not how the body works in its own right, but rather so he can develop technology or simply apply it, i.e. medical science.

 

A physicist would want to answer basic questions about the human body as he feels it is important to understand the body. He may see things as "fundamental questions", thus his philosophy.

 

The same idea applies to engineering, applied physics, industrial chemistry etc...

 

Almost by the definition of physics "understanding nature", just about everything is physics. The only real difference is the philosophy of why we ask such questions and this will then feed into what questions we ask next.

 

As for philosophy in a more general setting I have never thought to deeply about it.

[Sisyphus]

The point I was trying to make is that medicine is (or is not) part of physics in the same way that science as a whole is or is not part of philosophy, depending on how you look at it. The physicist and the doctor deal with different questions, but they're different just because the physicist's are more fundamental - the doctor relies on physics and deals with a specialized physical situation (albeit one with a great deal of specialized knowledge, and its own many conventions and methods) even if he doesn't think of it that way on a daily basis. In the same way, the philosopher deals with different questions than the scientist, not because they're separate, but because one is more fundamental.

[iNow]

This thread serves as a pretty decent example of why I personally prefer science over philosophy (which tends to annoy the crap out of me ):

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=34411

 

 

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I've noticed similar comments about philosophy on here, where people seem to think that it's somehow a separate entity from science, when really it's an intrinsic part of science. Philosophy seems to some, like fluffy pondering, so I'm not sure what books on philosophy people are reading, not that I'm very well read in the subject, but what I have read, it's thoroughly grounded in logic, and vice versa, in fact modern logic has it's roots from philosophy.

 

Logic is great, but it requires starting premises. In philosophy, your opening premises do not have to be rooted in reality, they must just be self-consistent.

 

You can logically deduce all manner of things, but it's only when those things are an accurate representation of reality that it begins to make any difference.

Edited August 1, 2008 by iNow
multiple post merged

[Mr Skeptic]

Oh, oh. Look what I started.

 

In a sense, philosophy encompasses all formal thinking. It in itself makes no assumptions nor has a specific goal, making philosophy extremely broad, but also allowing it to include ridiculous ramblings. Logic is one of the primary things taught in philosophy. However, philosophy also includes things that are almost certainly impossible, such as proving the existence or non-existence of God.

 

To go from philosophy in general to mathematics, for example, you need only restrict yourself to numbers.

 

To go from philosophy to science:

1) Assume the universe is observable, objective, repeatable, and consistent.

2) Set goal to learning more about the universe.

 

In this way, all formal thought seems to be based on philosophy.

[fredrik]

I for one, have no problems whatsoever with combining science, philosophy, mathematics and physics. On the contrary to I think that many real problems, can benefit from an multiangle analysis.

 

As far as I know, historically many of these things linked, and there is no contradiction.

 

...so I don't understand this distain with philosophy that people have, I guess it has this stigma of pacing around, mentally masturbating yourself ? Thoughts ?

 

Possibly.

 

Take science itself. Which many who think of philosophy as fruitless mental masturbation probably hold high.

 

What is science?

 

I'd have hard to take seriously, a "scienctist" who refuses to reflect over what science is. Yes this just the type of question asked in the philosophy of science.

 

I think according to most people, modern science, typically refers to the search for knowledge of nature (if we consider here for simplicity the natural sciences - connecting to natural philosophy), as per the scientific method.

 

So what is the scientific method? It's somehow supposedly a rational and systematic methodology to search for knowledge.

 

Ok, what is knowledge? This has been extensively discussed in the history of philosophy, and is btw still today discussed - compare to the QM debated and "what is "information".

 

An obvious problem, is how to distinguish opinion from knowledge. And how do we konw that a given procedure of questioning, leads to knowledge and not opinion. Or do we?

 

There is also the famous problem of induction in philosophy, which asks how to infer knowledge from observations. It asks wether inductive reasoning is "valid".

 

This is a very relevant problem to the foundation of natural science. Science ideally should infer from limited experience and observations, that laws of nature. But how on earth is this process secured from ambiougity and how is effiency secured?

 

As we know, there is so called deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning.

 

Deduction takes place by starting from premises, axioms and the liek and the by means of an argument generates a conclusion. If the premises are true, so is the conclusion. This is the type of logic taking place in orginary deductive logic, mathematics and the like. And also in application of theories which have been given axiomatic structure.

 

Induction however, is when it is not possible to make and valid conclusions. Inductive reasoning is risky, it is a kind of guessing. Or reasoning under uncertainty.

 

From experiment and observations, we can induce "probable" patters and laws of the universe.

 

Probably one of the founders of the solution to this, that is closest to the current view of the scientific method is I think Karl Popper.

 

Popper didn't like the induction, he wanted to solve this problem in a deductive manner. So he invented his poppian scientific method building on hypothesis testing by falsification.

 

IE. We can never by deduction prove something, but poppian thinks that we can by deduction disprove theories.

 

We make a hypothesis, that is put to test.

 

So the truth of the current theories are not deduced, but instead the absence of they beeing falsified by deduction is indirect support.

 

Of course this IS a kind of indirect induction. Which is a critic thta people have fired onto popper.

 

Also popper leaves open the rationality of hypothesis choice. How do you choose new hypothesis for testing? Well IMO it's induction.

 

So popper has not been able to stay away from induction.

 

These are philosophical question of science, and IMO Poppers papers are most certainly not the last paper on the scientific method.

 

I see some of the questions in modernt physics as probably related to the scientific method of popper.

 

My point is that the favour of deductive logic over induction is somewhat deceptive. Deductive logic works from axioms. By how are new axioms induced?? Most probably not by deduction right?

 

This leaves the question of deductive strategies, one of the ambigous choice of hypothesis or axioms.

 

The question of effiency is not address in the current scientific method as I see it.

 

This is also related IMO to the question of modern physics, say smolings questioning of string theory is science. I'm not saying it's not (I think thread at least) by indeed the question is motivated, and I think the question is if our current poppian model is good enough?

 

I am in doubt.

 

/Fredrik

[foodchain]

 

I am in doubt.

 

/Fredrik

 

I would like to insert positivism here, or really empirical standards. ON the basis you would accept having to learn or live which could bring about some ordered line of questioning like science; then what would you accept as proof that something in a platonic sense is some way?

 

I can in truth say that a human is susceptible to frostbite, however you want to word it what is there is that such can happen in reality regardless of human interpretation. So I think science has proved in some fashion we can make such statements of reality.

 

Falsification I think reduces modern theory to having to deal with its contemporary self constantly. I think it does not allow for you to go from A to C with no care for B, which is god of the gaps argument if you want.

 

Lastly if you took empirical testing from science you would ruin it really. Could you imagine a physics where only math and theoretical models based only on math existed, no testing of any of it at all ever?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

[fredrik]

I should say I didn't mean to start a discussion on the philosophy of science per see here I mainly wanted to respond to the original topic questioning the relevance of philosophy to science.

 

I think it is relevant. My example was to suggest that to think that the philosophy of science is irrelevant to a scientists is almost silly.

 

But of course a physicists might choose care less about say the philosophy of art, in the same way a physicist care about the mathematical model of physics, but not necessarily the mathematical models of finance. Yet from the point of view of a pure mathematician, he might be unable to distinguish between the two. He doesn't care wether it's physics of finance, he cares about the formal system of pure mathmatics.

 

Lastly if you took empirical testing from science you would ruin it really. Could you imagine a physics where only math and theoretical models based only on math existed, no testing of any of it at all ever?

 

If you think I in any way tries to suggest that empirical testing is bad I might have been unclear.

 

To me personally, it's the one an only source of information. Experience/interactions/experiments is the communication channel though which knowledge/opinion/information takes form.

 

I don't question that.

 

What is less clear though, is what conclusion to induce from emprical observations? One can imagine that each observational evidence is a "fact", but I think to think of science as "collecting or recording facts" is a serious mistake what misses many points.

 

One easy thing to see is that it is not possible to store all information, empirical observations needs to be processed/interpreted and compiled into some sort of memory strucuture. Often I think a decision has to be made here, howto structure the data, and what parts of the data to dismiss when memory is full. I think it's this self-organisation that is the interesting part.

 

And even if we could store all data, the question still remains howto predict tomorrow from yesterday? It's not hard to see that there is many ways to do that. Somehow the basis is that in the data, there is patterns or possibly laws observed, that are conserved, and thus allows us to induce predictions for tomorrow. But there may be many POSSIBLE competing patterns in a limited part of history, and which one is likely to be conserved?

 

/Fredrik

 

To add another point here and if I may suggest a distinction between a scientist and and application engineer, where a scientist is one who has built the tools used by the engineer.

 

> to think that the philosophy of science is irrelevant to a scientists is almost silly.

 

OTOH, I think an engineer using physical theories might afford to care less about philosophy of physics - it's somehow not his problem.

 

Similarly, one can imagine that a scientist is someone who is using the tool/method we call the scientific method, and that if he wants, to a certain extent can simply accept a choice of such a method, and work on. But his behaviour then rests upon a choice.

 

So who made the tool the scientific method? I guess it can be said to be philosophers of science, which I like to see as a possible "science of science". If a certain method of research leads to skewed results, or inefficient progress (slow learning) the scientist of science should improve the methodology.

 

/Fredrik

 

If a certain method of research leads to skewed results, or inefficient progress (slow learning) the scientist of science should improve the methodology.

 

In conclusion this is the perspecive I personally see the history of science. Matters of belief and opinion and perhaps random speculation, has evolves into slightly better notions of knowledge and rational methods. But I would for myself not even think the thought that the current state of the scientific method is perfected.

 

In particular when we are reaching very subtle stuff, like unification of forces and the quest for the holy grail of physics, I think our very method and state of understanding of science and knowledge itself is put to test.

 

/Fredrik

[Royston]

Good responses so far, I'm sure I stated in my OP that philosophy is a broad term/subject, but I must have edited at the last minute. So concentrating on the use of philosophy within the field of science, is what the topic is focused on.

 

To get to the crux of the matter, I'm wondering if science is now self sustaining in it's foundations and methods, without the need for philosophy, that is the filling of the gaps when we have say, a number of interpretations surrounding a certain field of science, e.g QM. Do we really need to sit around and logically deduce which interpretation is more satisfactory over another, or do we just shrug and go with what the math, and the data throws out...it works, who cares about the implications of it all. I personally don't like that, perhaps I enjoy mentally masturbating myself over implications.

 

As Sisyphus pointed out, and I agree the two are inseparable, and depending on the branch of philosophy, indistinct, however in a lot of instances philosophy has built the foundations, and is now no longer required for certain aspects. I really don't see much point in redefining an axiom for example. I really see no point in redefining the scientific method, it works, why waste time trying to refine something when there's really no room for improvement...or maybe there is, it's working fine so far.

 

I personally think, that as we get into the territory of GUT's, and other major advancements, as Fredrik mentioned, that philosophy will (maybe) come into it's own, whittling down the questions, so we can really build a complete picture of reality. I'm sure there will be branches of math et.c still yet to be realized, that will open new avenues of our understanding of nature, but it will require philosophy to be the seeds of these types of advancements.

 

Or maybe I'm talking nonsense, and science will progress (as it has done) without further chin stroking.

Edited August 1, 2008 by Snail

[Kyrisch]

I've heard over and over the distinction that science deals in the "how"s and philosophy/religion deals in the "why"s. But, essentially, these two words mean the same thing.

 

Why? -- for what reason, cause, or purpose?

 

How? -- by what means?

 

Few people grasp the fact that purpose and reason to something do not always have to do with a higher power. Why do things fall? Why is the sky blue? Why does light refract? These are all questions that can be answered scientifically and which can be phrased equally using the two words "why" and "how". As such, since philosophy does mainly focus on "why", and science focuses mainly on "how", and since it has been shown that sometimes these two usages overlap, it can be said that while philosophy may not be the core driving principle of science, it is definitely related. I believe that philosophers evolved into scientists over time, and philosophy evolved into the scientific method.

[Royston]

This thread serves as a pretty decent example of why I personally prefer science over philosophy

 

But that's an example of philosilly, closely related to philosophy, but with added sillyness.

[fredrik]

I think occasional reflections on what are doing, and wether it's the best way are sound. I don't see why a someone scientifically inclined should be ashamed to be caught doing mental masturbation, I think we all do it, the difference is that some live in denial

 

I really don't see much point in redefining an axiom for example. I really see no point in redefining the scientific method, it works, why waste time trying to refine something when there's really no room for improvement...or maybe there is, it's working fine so far.

 

Yes, that's what I told the teacher in computer science - my linear search method works just fine! it's just a little slower than the others

 

Or maybe I'm talking nonsense, and science will progress (as it has done) without further chin stroking.

 

I don't think it's nonsense. While we don't need to overdo anything and suggest that everyone replaces 50% of their physics course with philosophy courses.

 

The point is more I think to acknowledge that an openminded attitude is I think healthy and useful. Philosophy in science can be just something as simple as self-reflections and questioning of our current direction.

 

/Fredrik

 

But that's an example of philosilly, closely related to philosophy, but with added sillyness.

 

Agreed.

 

/Fredrik

[Royston]

I've heard over and over the distinction that science deals in the "how"s and philosophy/religion deals in the "why"s. But, essentially, these two words mean the same thing.

 

Only to a point though, (we had a very similar discussion on this a while ago) I'll try and dig it out. e.g

 

Why do things fall ? Because, of gravity.

 

But why gravity ? Why not ?

 

How does gravity make things fall ? Well, give me a couple of hours, and I'll run you through Newtons theory of gravity, through to General Relativity. (I can't run you through GR, because I'm yet to study it fully, but you get the point.)

 

The why questions, are the starting point, but these break down very quickly e.g Why gravity ? So they only overlap to a small degree.