Science is Philosophy

Scientists answer and inform philosophical questions

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Philosophy got preggers and popped out a bunch of science babies

In 585 BC, Thales of Miletus became the first recorded person to predict a solar eclipse in advance. This marked a momentous vindication of his use of mathematics and reasoning to understand the world rather than relying on mythology, and launched the Western tradition of philosophy and science.

Well, maybe.

That's the story I got in my ancient philosophy class back in undergrad. It turns out there's debate about whether Thales actually predicted an eclipse. There aren't cycles he could have used to predict the eclipse so it's unclear what he would have based such a prediction on. If he did accurately predict the eclipse, luck may have played a substantial role. There's some uncertainty about the whole event.

History is hard.

But regardless, Thales was emblematic of early Greek philosophy, influencing others like Anaximander who continued the tradition of using observations and math to understand the world.

A couple of centuries later, a dude you might have heard of by the name of Aristotle hit the scene. He wrote on basically every topic ever: logic, physics, politics, psychology, biology, ethics, metaphysics, and how cabbage is a great hangover cure.

The point is, natural philosophy, the study of the natural world, was part of philosophy. Thales, Anaximander, Aristotle, and many other contemporaries and philosophers that followed considered the natural world the domain of philosophy.

A couple of millenia later, this shifted, with natural philosophers like Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo, and Newton ushering in what's become known as the scientific revolution. Galileo showed the power of experimentation in studying the natural world, as opposed to passive observation. Some of the new scientific findings contradicted ancient wisdom. Copernicus's discovery that the Earth goes around the sun put new theories in direct conflict with the prevailing views of the world—and the prevailing authorities.

Modern science was born.

Ironically, much of this revolution was really about opening up the possibility of questioning and replacing the authority of Aristotle. Aristotle's writings had become so influential that his philosophy was taken as an unquestionable authority on a huge range of topics.

Aristotelian physics was replaced by Newtonian mechanics, Robert Boyle's rejection of Aristotelian views of matter led to modern day chemistry, Carl Linnaeus's taxonomy replacing the Aristotelian classifications of animals set the stage for biology.

Gradually, physics, chemistry, and biology departments were formed in universities. Even the study of the mind became its own discipline, with the philosopher William James often seen as the founding figure of modern psychology.

So in a historical sense, science is philosophy sort of in the same way birds are dinosaurs: technically true since birds evolved from dinos and are therefore part of the clade Theropoda, but this is a superficial relationship in the sense that my three-year-old son would be pissed if I told him there was a dinosaur outside and it was a pigeon.

I think the relationship is much deeper than the historical relationship. Science often tackles problems we think of as philosophical, and even when it isn't, the progress of science often influences philosophical inquiry by changing our conceptions of things. Scientists regularly engage in conceptual inquiry like philosophers do. There are differences between science and philosophy, but I think there's a deep connection, and the ancient philosophers were right to be interested in both.

Scientists Regularly Engage in Philosophy

One of the primary roles of analytic philosophy is sharpening our concepts and seeing what their implications are.

What I don't think non-scientists often appreciate is just how much conceptual sharpening scientists engage in. Science isn't just about running experiments—you have to figure out what experiments to run.

In many sciences, there is a distinction between the experimentalists and theoreticians (with lots of people and projects combining both). Experimentalists are the ones who design and run experiments to collect data, and the theoreticians come up with theories. I guess that was obvious given their names.

What this often looks like in practice is theoreticians coming up with mathematical or computational models of a concept or phenomenon and suggesting new experiments to run. For example, statistical models of language acquisition describe what statistical properties a system would have to track to learn language. This leads to predictions about what language acquisition should look like at different stages of learning. These predictions can be tested in the lab with artificial languages and/or children who are just learning their primary language.

If the mathematical models are well-validated, a further question is how the brain might implement those statistical learning techniques, which leads to further modeling and predictions.

But the statistical learning of language isn't just a neat fact about developmental psychology. It gets at a deep question about nature or nurture: to what extent is our learning of language a specialized ability specific to language versus part of a general pattern-matching ability?

This is a serious debate, with Noam Chomsky being staunchly on team "specialized" (the nature side), and seemingly every linguist I've ever met being on team "generalized" (the nurture side).

I don't want to adjudicate this debate here, but just point out that this is a deeply philosophical question. This innate versus acquired knowledge debate was a recurring question for Plato. His dialogues Phaedo and Meno were centered on the question. Language acquisition is one battleground in this overall epistemological question, but it's one that scientists clearly can and should contribute to.

Fuzzy Theorizing

The picture I painted above of the interplay between theory and experiment is idealized. In the real world, science is messy, and theoretical work comes on a continuum. It's common for scientists to write "review" or "perspective" articles (or even more commonly, "discussion" sections of papers), where they try to make a high-level argument for a particular viewpoint or theory without detailing it in a computational or statistical framework.

Within science, there's a continuum from fuzzy conceptual viewpoints, to more concrete and specific, to vague models, to hyper-specific mathematical models. We want the sharp mathematical models because they are specific about the predictions they make. It's much easier to see when they are wrong, as opposed to fuzzy theories made up of words that can often be retrofitted to accommodate any experimental finding. 

But we need extremely sharp, specific conceptions of what we're talking about to develop hyper-specific mathematical models, and there's often a lot of debate and refinement of ideas before we get those.

For example, see this review paper on curiosity. The nature of curiosity sounds like an interesting philosophical one. The paper goes through the psychology and neuroscience literature on the topic to tie together what we know about curiosity. It suggests future directions to further our understanding of the concept (literally ending with a long list of questions). There isn't a model proposed, but a tying together of different results to help shape and direct our understanding of the concept.

Review papers like this are common, and are much more similar to the prototypical philosophy paper than a naïve view of science where everything is directly empirical. 

I would say science can't progress without doing philosophy. To understand a phenomenon, someone needs to step back and see the forest for the trees. Someone needs to combine empirical results to see what general trends pop out, see the gaps in those results, and see the implications of them. To know what experiments are worth doing, scientists do philosophy.

Science Directly Tackles Philosophical Questions

It's not just that scientists do conceptual reasoning like philosophers. They often directly ask questions that are traditionally seen as philosophical.

The ancient Greek philosophers asked questions about how to live a good life. What contributes to flourishing or eudaimonia? These days, questions about what factors are related to living a meaningful and happy life are seen as questions the field of psychology can investigate (specifically Positive Psychology). It seems obvious to the modern thinker that figuring out how to lead a meaningful life should involve systematic studies of people who see their lives as meaningful (and those that don't).

Of course, such empirical work leads to conceptual questions, which psychologists can and do tackle—in the usual scientific way of conceptual analysis and model-building.

As another example, various philosophers have considered the nature of space, trying to tease out what truly empty space would mean. Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant all had some conception of an ether, a substance that filled the seemingly empty space and underpinned aspects of their view of the physical world. They argued for the existence of the ether using philosophical arguments. For physicists, the ether explained how light could travel as a wave.

In 1887, Michelson and Morley performed their famous experiment comparing the speed of light between perpendicular directions. The equivalence of the speed of light in these two directions showed the lack of an ether. If the Earth (and solar system) is moving through such a substance, and light is a wave propagating through that substance, you would expect the Earth's movement relative to the ether to affect the measured speed of light in two different directions.

Showing this was not the case paved the way for Einstein's Special Relativity and the elimination of the ether as a concept.

Despite all their reasoning, the pro-ether philosophers were wrong. Space can be truly empty.

These are just two examples, but of course it isn't hard to find more: neuroscience tackling questions of free will or consciousness, computer science tackling the nature of intelligence, or psychology and neuroscience tackling ethics. 

The point is, science doesn't deal with just "scientific" questions.

Science often informs the conceptual landscape

It's not just that the sciences often tackle questions that were once considered the domain of philosophy. They also shape our conceptual landscape, informing our view of the world and shifting the concepts philosophers discuss.

The most obvious case of this is Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Darwin didn't plan to displace our common understanding of humanity's place in the universe when he boarded the HMS Beagle. He was just going to collect some cool specimens. But the observations he made led him to his theory of evolution. His theory has been so well validated and is so central to understanding our origins that philosophers have to grapple with the implications.

By introducing a process (natural selection) that gives rise to seeming design without a designer, Darwin's theory radically changed reasoning by teleology—the "purpose" of things. It opened the door to a new conceptual landscape—it was suddenly possible that life itself didn't exist because of a purpose it fulfills, but because of mechanistic processes.

Humans were no longer the pinnacle of a great chain of being, but creatures that evolved, gradually. Any philosophy talking about our nature as beings now has to grapple with this, either inferring humanity's metaphysical exceptionalism despite our evolved status, or explore the implications of us being a natural phenomenon and part of nature.

Combined with Wöhler's demonstration that it was possible to synthesize an organic molecule (urea) from inorganic ingredients, the once-solid distinction between life and non-life was broken down. These once very distinct categories were now blurrier, our world got messier, and philosophers have had to account for this ever since.

Other examples abound. Quantum effects and the reversible nature of the laws of physics challenge our classical notions of causality, opening the possibility that cause and effect aren't fundamental but due to macroscopic phenomena like entropy. Similarly, a robust philosophical account of consciousness needs to explain surprising scientific findings about our awareness like blindsight and hemispatial neglect. And so on.

As we learn about the natural world, the empirical observations we make inform our theories, and our theories change our concepts. The evolution of our concepts shifts the very ground that philosophy stands on.

The modern relationship between science and philosophy

The above examples are all science influencing philosophy and not the other way around. This is simply because the point I am trying to make is that science isn't just stamp collecting, it's figuring out the nature of our world, and that inevitably changes the conceptual landscape and helps us answer the big questions that are sometimes seen as the exclusive domain of philosophy.

Philosophy also influences science. Ernst Mach's conceptual arguments against the ether were an influence on Einstein, helping clear the way for general relativity. Daniel Dennett's work on the intentional stance directly influenced psychologists studying what is now known as theory of mind (our ability to understand that the beliefs and intentions of others may differ from our own). Philosophers of various sciences often work directly with scientists.

Philosophers and scientists have different backgrounds and training—scientists need to have expertise in experimental design, statistics, and a host of other domain-specific techniques. Philosophers have training in conceptual methods and argumentation. These differences in expertise naturally lead to complementary skill sets.

These distinct perspectives are a strength rather than a weakness—I'm a believer in epistemic diversity being important for driving our understanding. Coming at the same problems from multiple angles is more likely to give a robust understanding.

The interests of science and philosophy are frequently overlapping, but with different emphases. The fields have been detached for long enough that their unique histories have informed the kinds of questions that are discussed in their respective literatures. 

Philosophy has a tradition going back to the ancients that influences the topics discussed and tends towards questions that are more conceptual rather than strictly empirical.

The sciences are often biased towards practical applications due to the need for large funding grants to perform experiments. For example, most research for neuroscience in the USA comes from the National Institutes for Health rather than the National Science Foundation, because there is more funding for health research than basic science. Neuroscientists therefore bias their research towards potential health implications rather than basic understanding because that's what will get their research funded. Some basic research still gets done, which gets at those deeper conceptual questions, often informed by the findings of the research done for more practical purposes.

So I'm not claiming that science supersedes philosophy. Philosophy and philosophers have a lot to add with their unique skills and perspectives, and become even more powerful when combined with empirical fields. But science isn't some superficial collection of facts that occasionally get used in philosophical debates. By better understanding our world, many of our concepts change, and this causes the conceptual tangles philosophy has been dealing with to dissolve. We progress in our understanding of the world through improving our concepts, which involves a mix of better understanding the implications of our concepts and testing those implications. Both empirical methods and conceptual methods have their complementary places here, and the fact of the matter is that scientists regularly engage in both. And they do so on questions of philosophical relevance.

In that way, the sciences (parts of them sometimes, at least) are philosophy.

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