A debate between the philosophy students and science students

[needimprovement]

Prompted by posts on another thread ("Can there be any intelligent science pursued without any philosophy?"), I'd like to pose the following:

 

 

One thing I'd like to imagine is a debate between the philosophy students and science students. Each would be required to stay within their own discipline and argue for the value of each.

 

Any science students using philosophy to defend science would be disqualified (or would lose). They could only prove the value of science using scientific and non-philosophical arguments.

 

The philosophy students would use philosophical arguments to defend the value of philosophy.

[Edtharan]

Science was called Natural Philosop[hy, so science is actually a branch of philosophy. Because of this, either science can use any philosophy, or not be able to use any argument.

 

ALso, by not allowing one side to argue using the other side's framework, it is then possible to construct an argument that predictates the only counter argument as being wihtin that side's domain, thus negating the ability of either side to counter argume. As both sides can do this, it ends up being a deadlock and the debate is utterly pointless as ther can be no resolution.

[Sisyphus]

I was a philosophy student and a science student, and I don't see how this could be a coherent "debate."

[needimprovement]

....science is actually a branch of philosophy.

In order to engage in the argument you have to concede this point, as you've done.

[Mr Skeptic]

The scientist: a scientific experiment showing the power of science at finding scientific truth.

 

The philosopher: pointing out that philosophy is the discipline dealing with finding absolute truth, as opposed to scientific truth which depends on some assumptions and yet is still probabilistic. (But they epic fail at finding any of these absolute truths.)

 

But there really isn't any conflict between the two: the philosophers are more anal about proof, the scientists get more done, both use the other in their regular doings.

 

Usually what is more interesting is for people to use a different discipline other than their own, to argue in favor of their own. This would actually convince others rather than show your own system self-consistent. For science and philosophy this would not be any problem. The more noisy one is the conflict between religion and science. Quite often we have religious people using religious arguments to try to convince amused scientists, and scientists using scientific arguments to try to convince the religious who for some reason just don't accept those arguments.

[lemur]

There's no way to discuss a disciplinary distinctions or similarities between science and philosophy using physical science. You have to resort to philosophy. Science relies on empirical observation and disciplinary distinctions and similarities are not empirical but discursive. So this debate would necessarily be philosophy of science by virtue of its content, regardless of the approach the discussants would take to make their points.

Edited October 19, 2010 by lemur

[pioneer]

The philosopher tries to use logic almost exclusively. Science also uses logic, but not all the time, since it also uses empirical. However, the premises of any given philosophy can get subjective, with subjective premises then manipulated via reason. Science tends to do better at proving its premises, with hard experiment, but does not always extrapolate these premise using only logic, since it may then extrapolate based on further empirical data. With the two acting as a team, they take all the necessary steps, but acting alone, each sort of falls short of the ideal of using only logic and objective premises.

 

For example, we can have a philosophical debate between capitalism and socialism. But once you narrow to one side of the argument, your premises don't take into consideration the data in the other POV, thereby making the debate between logicians with subjective premises. With empirical science, we can show all the data in the same place, requiring the philosopher use reason to think deeper about their premises, so their logic can use objective premises.

[lemur]

For example, we can have a philosophical debate between capitalism and socialism. But once you narrow to one side of the argument, your premises don't take into consideration the data in the other POV, thereby making the debate between logicians with subjective premises. With empirical science, we can show all the data in the same place, requiring the philosopher use reason to think deeper about their premises, so their logic can use objective premises.

 

I think it is misleading to assume that science and philosophy are mutually exclusive practices, or even nearly so; just as it is false to assume that socialism and capitalism are oppositional. Capitalism is the basis for socialism insofar as money is the medium of economic exchange. Likewise, while science is accountable to empirical data, everything that is done with that data enters into the realm of philosophical "processing." Logic, reason, extrapolation, methodology, theory, research design, data-interpretation, and so forth all require philosophical-synthetic reasoning. Science cannot engage its data without philosophically-based procedures. Even measurement involves philosophy. Too many scientists wish to bypass philosophy by believing that there is a transparent approach to data that escapes philosophical rigor. They do this, imo, simply because they don't feel like they master philosophy so they think if they can exclude philosophy from science, they can dominate the field. In reality, they already dominate for the most part the philosophy of their research but they want to territorialize what they do as being exclusively their own domain, so they attribute mutual exclusion to disciplinary classifications. In reality, all disciplines/fields overlap the same way that all species overlap.

[Darwinsbulldog]

IMHO, science confines itself to to asking falsifiable questions and determining the answers [which are always tentative] by a differential diagnosis of the evidence for and against an idea. A natural selection of sorts, where the "fittest idea" has the most evidence to back it up, and little or ideally no evidence which contradicts it. [if such contrary evidence does come to light, the theory is thrown out or modified according to the severity of the anomaly.

 

As others have said, to some extent science is natural philosophy, but only in the limited sense I have outlined above.

 

Philosophy explores ideas which are not constrained by reality, only by logic. Because philosophy can ignore evidence, it can sometimes build magnificent logical structures that may bear little or no relation to reality [whatever reality is].

Philosophy, or at least the philosophy of science is of great value to science by pointing out possible problems in induction, evidence, falsification and so on. Some very good cautionary tales have come from philosophy and good scientists take these to heart. However, some philosophers can become irrationally overcritical about scientific "truths". That science is limited and can have it's problems does not detract from the fact that it is about the best methodology around for discovering "truth" about nature. other systems, especially religious attempts to explain nature have consistently and abjectly failed, and yet the religious are those that do claim to absolute truth and yet have the least basis for asserting those 'truths".

[pioneer]

Science is the best at defining the external world. But the inner world of human nature is not one of science's strongest suits. Philosophy often uses common sense observation of human nature, motivations and manipulations to help science target these humanistic phenomena. Why do we have two main political parties? This not be something science can address, other that tell the proportions within each party. The principles of human nature that results in this situation, requires a slightly different approach. Once you know that, one can extrapolate this to other polarizing effects, even within science, for why more than one theory for any given physical situation can exist side-by-side.

 

For example, in cosmology we have many theories some of which are mutually exclusive, meaning they all can't be right at the same time. Most can be supported by data and math, but since they all can't be right, how is it they all have a place in science? You have to go back to human nature, so one can understand human nature special effects that allow this. It could be political, which implies prestige and subjective inductions that cloud fully rational judgements in favor of math logic, even when mutually exclusive.

[the tree]

They could only prove the value of science using scientific and non-philosophical arguments.

It's really fairly glaring to obvious, to anyone from any discipline, that science does not argue normative values. This all seems rather pointless.

[Marat]

Don't be misled by the early term 'natural philosophy.' What speakers using that phrase in the 18th century actually meant was people doing studies of what we would today call 'science,' not philosophy. The only reason the term 'natural science' was used was that 'science' and 'scientist' didn't come into vogue until the 19th century.

 

It is not correct to say that philosophy is only concerned with logic rather than empirical reality. Branches of philosophy such as action theory, existentialism, phenomenology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of law, ethics, philosophy of science, aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, and cosmology all study empirical data for its deeper conceptual implications. You can find a lot of philosophy of science texts which are loaded with extensive discussions of the conceptual implications of cutting-edge research in science, so there is really not much of a gulf between disciplines. You might say that philosophy is any use of the material generated by an academic discipline, whether empirical or not, with the intention of developing its implications for the most fundamental conceptual questions or for the logical foundations of that discipline.