Thursday, 27 August 2015

Scientism and the death of philosophy

Speaking with a biologist I encountered a kind of scientism I feel is very typical for scientists here and there. That philosophy, while in school was useful in shaping thought later in life, is useless for finding new knowledge and is dying if not dead. As a pure mathematician by education my feet are in both camps, and this view makes me uneasy. I hope to give a clear perspective on why the idea that philosophy is useless is not only not actually an opinion, but more so factually wrong.

A big part of especially modern philosophy is working out good ways of thinking. Evolutionary perspectives on anything (including on psychology), e.g., thinking about anything in terms of expanding ramifying graphs is a way of thinking which models evolution (albeit poorly), this particular model not being the issue, but ways of thinking in general are investigated in much of modern philosophy. An evolutionary perspective on psychology is by its very nature philosophical. Further it is only an aspect of psychology, an insight which is manifestly philosophical (more precisely it's an insight from epistemology and produces often ethically problematic teleology). If you end up studying mathematics for fun, you'll see hosts of examples where we only study aspects of a thing with very specialized tools.

If you are doing science correctly, then you are also doing philosophy. We have an analytic dissection of reality into parameters or concepts and their proposed interactions and produce a corresponding explanatory model. The insight that this is what we do is a product of philosophy, and producing either is essentially an act of philosophy.

We study the proposed interactions between proposed parameters of the model and make predictions, produce instruments to provide measurements that are supposed to correspond to the parameters we posit, and we adjust the model based on experiment to align observation and the analytical and explanatory models. The insight that this is what we do is a product of philosophy.

Producing or adjusting our analytical or explanatory model is essentially an act of philosophy, as is the insight that this is what should be done to hopefully converge at an understanding of the world. It happens that our analytical dissection or explanatory model is completely wrong, which leads to entire paradigm changes, and even the word paradigm is a philosophical albeit incredibly useful concept.

In psychology, to see that an evolutionary explanation would be incomplete you need only consider emotions. That is not to say that a study of emotions and evolutionary psychology cannot be made compatible (we could talk about interactions between evolutionary explanations and emotional explanations), but by and large they are independently interesting studies.

The insight that emotions is something to study at all is a product of philosophy; the insight that emotions has implications for interpretations, for action, a phenomenological description (they are experienced in a certain way, a study which falls under philosophy), is a further analytical dissection and they all hinge on philosophical insights and further analytical and explanatory dissection.

Little or no deep biological study of emotions is made because we don't know how, which is a philosophical insight (more precisely an epistemic insight), and it's interesting because there should also be good biological explanations and models. Most things regarding humans, society, politics, the way we live, how it feels, what worries us, how and what we should and can do about it, follow the same pattern.

Indeed, to suggest that a study is scientific is itself hypothetical. Surely Freudian psychoanalysis was considered science at the time of its conception but is no longer. This far from means that it was a useless endeavor, the influence of its fruits (both sweet and sour) are felt today in almost everything we see or say or do.

In summary to say that philosophy, the provider of the conditions of possibility for science, is dead, is to me like saying that the main currents of what could possibly be interestingly investigated have now been produced by human history, and that it's now simply a matter of working out the facts, seems to me deeply unscientific. Further, it sounds like a good philosophical foundation for a miserable existence.

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